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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Marcella, by Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Marcella
+
+Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2004  [eBook #13728]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCELLA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+MARCELLA
+
+by
+
+MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
+
+Author of _Robert Elsmere_, _The History Of David Grieve_, etc.
+
+In Two Volumes
+
+1894
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Portrait of Mary A. Ward]
+
+
+
+TO MY FATHER I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE
+
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+
+"If nature put not forth her power
+About the opening of the flower,
+Who is it that could live an hour?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"The mists--and the sun--and the first streaks of yellow in the
+beeches--beautiful!--_beautiful_!"
+
+
+And with a long breath of delight Marcella Boyce threw herself on her
+knees by the window she had just opened, and, propping her face upon her
+hands, devoured the scene, before her with that passionate intensity of
+pleasure which had been her gift and heritage through life.
+
+She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care of
+centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some Scotch
+firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow selective hand
+of time had been at work for generations, developing here the delightful
+roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there the bold caprice of bare
+fir trunks and ragged branches, standing black against the sky. Beyond
+the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye
+indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn
+onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid
+maturity, ending at last in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate
+of some importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of
+the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
+avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
+steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
+lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with
+them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity.
+Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at the same
+moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the
+avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the
+lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace
+beneath her window.
+
+"It _is_ a heavenly place, all said and done," she protested to herself
+with a little frown. "But no doubt it would have been better still if
+Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden
+decent. Still--"
+
+She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped
+themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the
+former look of glowing content--that content of youth which is never
+merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous
+eagerness.
+
+It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr. Richard
+Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the
+Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had
+received her summons home from the students' boarding-house in
+Kensington, where she had been lately living. She had ardently wished
+to assist in the June "settling-in," having not been able to apply her
+mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor
+indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their
+inheritance had reached her. But her mother in a dry little note had let
+it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself. Marcella
+had better go on with her studies as long as possible.
+
+Yet Marcella was here at last. And as she looked round her large bare
+room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods
+and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her
+childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out--atoned for by
+this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so
+deplorably!--since no one could have reasonably expected that an
+apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the
+sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted
+successfully a score of times before.
+
+Her great desire now was to put the past--the greater part of it at any
+rate--behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with,
+poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present
+position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid
+for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money,
+and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or
+fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these
+past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity
+of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible
+figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was
+Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the
+only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one
+of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a
+life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest
+possible degree of interest and novelty.
+
+Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only
+succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.
+
+For against her will, she fell straightway--in this quiet of the autumn
+morning--into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her
+present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after
+scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or
+disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the
+fine plastic face turned to the September woods.
+
+She had been at school since she was nine years old--there was the
+dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in
+her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so
+impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a
+dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a
+large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice
+of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to
+the complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical
+phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet
+adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in
+the background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory
+was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague--the image of a
+tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces
+behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to
+fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one,
+she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and
+stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.
+
+When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall
+for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed
+with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and
+tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her
+nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life
+she had been an average child of the quick and clever type, with average
+faults. But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the discipline, the
+teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff House School for
+Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for the time being,
+into a demon. She hated her lessons, though, when she chose, she could
+do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions; she
+hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold ablutions with some
+dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated the meals in the
+long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was forbidden and twice
+pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and
+scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself
+out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her own thwarted appetite as she sat
+black-browed and brooding in her place. She was not a favourite with her
+companions, and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her
+perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress. The whole of her first year
+was one continual series of sulks, quarrels, and revolts.
+
+Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed,
+when Miss Frederick, at her wit's end, would take advantage of one of
+the child's perpetual colds to try the effects of a day's seclusion and
+solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her
+charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good. "For I do believe a
+great part of it's liver or nerves! No child in her right senses could
+behave so," she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who had
+been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend and
+excuse Marcella than any one else in the house--no one exactly knew why.
+
+Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold
+was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the
+bedclothes--for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed
+you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in
+the early morning with a cup of senna-tea, and at long and regular
+intervals throughout the day with beef-tea and gruel; and that no one
+should come to see and talk with her, unless, indeed, it were the
+doctor, quiet being in all cases of sickness the first condition of
+recovery, and the natural schoolgirl in Miss Frederick's persuasion
+being more or less inclined to complain without cause if illness were
+made agreeable.
+
+For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella
+was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and
+a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the
+bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her--a pitiable morsel,
+in truth, of rather forlorn humanity. For though she had her movements
+of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing the senna-tea
+in Martha's face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown to denounce
+Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom, something
+generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or any wish
+"to be good," but only an aching, inmost sense of childish loneliness
+and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried everybody's
+patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented crises
+which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.
+
+So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to
+amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming
+awake. Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was
+always the heroine. Before the annoyance of her afternoon gruel, which
+she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full fairy-land again,
+figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess
+of Wales--of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and model of English
+society whose portrait in the window of the little stationer's shop at
+Marswell--the small country town near Cliff House--had attracted the
+child's attention once, on a dreary walk, and had ever since governed
+her dreams. Marcella had no fairy-tales, but she spun a whole cycle for
+herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long
+her own particular property. She had only to shut her eyes and she had
+caught her idol's attention--either by some look or act of passionate
+yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the
+street--or by throwing herself in front of the divinity's runaway
+horses--or by a series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative
+child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old
+family and had aristocratic relations. Then, when the Princess had held
+out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight! Marcella grew up on the
+instant: she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the
+"Boyce eyes and hair;" she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin
+with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess,
+laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land,
+her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the
+time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate
+flatteries and attentions.
+
+Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest
+summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening
+her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare
+white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper
+opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet
+stretching away on either hand. The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the
+depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of
+the Princess's maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty
+child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in
+contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party
+frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb
+day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold
+was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a
+page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom,
+at seven.
+
+Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie
+of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of
+amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily
+miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social
+difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the
+girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three
+neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal
+on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her
+establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt
+themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs
+which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like
+Marcella Boyce. Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she
+was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a
+famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of this great-uncle
+had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed
+so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the
+child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish
+eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired
+gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called
+"Grandpapa." Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory
+of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.
+There they were now--the glory and the dignity--a feverish leaven,
+driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks,
+which could lead to nothing but humiliation.
+
+"I wish my great-uncle were here! _He'd_ make you remember--you
+great--you great--big bully you!"--she shrieked on one occasion when she
+had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl--the stout
+and comely daughter of a local ironmonger--had been successfully
+asserting herself.
+
+The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.
+
+"_Your_ great-uncle! Upon my word! And who may he be, miss? If it comes
+to that, I'd like to show _my_ great-uncle David how you've scratched my
+wrist. He'd give it you. He's almost as strong as father, though he is
+so old. You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don't talk
+stuff to me."
+
+Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed
+out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her. She rushed up to the
+top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden
+niche of the wall, shaking and crying,--now planning vengeance on her
+conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own
+ill-bred and impotent folly.
+
+No--during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory
+declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday--Marcella
+sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and
+small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and
+self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly
+allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the
+top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Rénier, Miss
+Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small
+sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged "the little wild-cat,"
+as the school generally dubbed the Speaker's great-niece, whenever she
+could.
+
+But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.
+Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections. In the first
+place, a taste for reading had rooted itself--reading of the adventurous
+and poetical kind. There were two or three books which Marcella had
+absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember. For at twenty-one
+people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry to have
+opinions, must skim and "turn over" books rather than read them, must
+use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind, and suffer
+occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders. But at thirteen--what
+concentration! what devotion! what joy! One of these precious volumes
+was Bulwer's "Rienzi"; another was Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs"; a
+third was a little red volume of "Marmion" which an aunt had given her.
+She probably never read any of them through--she had not a particle of
+industry or method in her composition--but she lived in them. The parts
+which it bored her to read she easily invented for herself, but the
+scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no
+gift for verse-making, but she laboriously wrote a long poem on the
+death of Rienzi, and she tried again and again with a not inapt hand to
+illustrate for herself in pen and ink the execution of Wallace.
+
+But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in
+comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.
+
+To take the adoration first. When Marcella came to Cliff House she was
+recommended by the same relation who gave her "Marmion" to the kind
+offices of the clergyman of the parish, who happened to be known to some
+of the Boyce family. He and his wife--they had no children--did their
+duty amply by the odd undisciplined child. They asked her to tea once or
+twice; they invited her to the school-treat, where she was only
+self-conscious and miserably shy; and Mr. Ellerton had at least one
+friendly and pastoral talk with Miss Frederick as to the difficulties of
+her pupil's character. For a long time little came of it. Marcella was
+hard to tame, and when she went to tea at the Rectory Mrs. Ellerton, who
+was refined and sensible, did not know what to make of her, though in
+some unaccountable way she was drawn to and interested by the child. But
+with the expansion of her thirteenth year there suddenly developed in
+Marcie's stormy breast an overmastering absorbing passion for these two
+persons. She did not show it to them much, but for herself it raised
+her to another plane of existence, gave her new objects and new
+standards. She who had hated going to church now counted time entirely
+by Sundays. To see the pulpit occupied by any other form and face than
+those of the rector was a calamity hardly to be borne; if the exit of
+the school party were delayed by any accident so that Mr. and Mrs.
+Ellerton overtook them in the churchyard, Marcella would walk home on
+air, quivering with a passionate delight, and in the dreary afternoon of
+the school Sunday she would spend her time happily in trying to write
+down the heads of Mr. Ellerton's sermon. In the natural course of things
+she would, at this time, have taken no interest in such things at all,
+but whatever had been spoken by him had grace, thrill, meaning.
+
+Nor was the week quite barren of similar delights. She was generally
+sent to practise on an old square piano in one of the top rooms. The
+window in front of her overlooked the long white drive and the distant
+high road into which it ran. Three times a week on an average Mrs.
+Ellerton's pony carriage might be expected to pass along that road.
+Every day Marcella watched for it, alive with expectation, her fingers
+strumming as they pleased. Then with the first gleam of the white pony
+in the distance, over would go the music stool, and the child leapt to
+the window, remaining fixed there, breathing quick and eagerly till the
+trees on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs.
+Ellerton. Then her moment of Paradise was over; but the afterglow of it
+lasted for the day.
+
+So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can
+know them, full of kindling charm and mystery. Her friendship had been
+of course different, but it also left deep mark. A tall, consumptive
+girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a
+clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick's, had for some time taken notice of
+Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance,
+than a remarkable gift for story-telling. She was a parlour-boarder, had
+a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold. She was
+not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food
+were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite
+maternal solicitude. When winter came she developed a troublesome cough,
+and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south
+and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up
+to her. There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a
+little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door
+opening upon it.
+
+Here Mary Lant spent week after week. Whenever lesson hours were done
+she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to
+her. She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door,
+run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof
+nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room.
+Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her
+friend, she was entirely happy. The tiny room was built on the edge of
+the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window
+commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and
+hedges, and scattered wood. Marcella, looking back upon that room,
+seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle
+boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the
+warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind,
+beating against the terrace door.
+
+But what a story-teller was Mary Lant! She was the inventor of a story
+called "John and Julia," which went on for weeks and months without ever
+producing the smallest satiety in Marcella. Unlike her books of
+adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was
+extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively
+religious author for Marcie's correction and improvement. There was in
+it a sublime hero, who set everybody's faults to rights and lectured the
+heroine. In real life Marcella would probably before long have been
+found trying to kick his shins--a mode of warfare of which in her demon
+moods she was past mistress. But as Mary Lant described him, she not
+only bore with and trembled before him--she adored him. The taste for
+him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself--a girl of a
+tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist
+faith, and already prescient of death--grew upon her. Soon her absorbing
+desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at
+practising times. For this purpose she gave herself the worst cold she
+could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to
+be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only
+threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former,
+whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and
+gave up the cough in despair. It was her first sorrow and cost her some
+days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears,
+when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother
+announced the sudden death of Mary Lant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Friendship and love are humanising things, and by her fourteenth year
+Marcella was no longer a clever little imp, but a fast-maturing and in
+some ways remarkable girl, with much of the woman in her already. She
+had begun even to feel an interest in her dress, to speculate
+occasionally on her appearance. At the fourth breaking-up party after
+her arrival at Cliff House, Marcella, who had usually figured on these
+occasions in a linsey-woolsey high to the throat, amid the frilled and
+sashed splendours of her companions, found lying on her bed, when she
+went up with the others to dress, a plain white muslin dress with blue
+ribbons. It was the gift of old Mademoiselle Rénier, who affectionately
+wished her queer, neglected favourite to look well. Marcella examined it
+and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings. First of all there
+was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to
+the kindness of the French governess, whereas finery for the occasion
+had been freely sent to all the other girls from "home." She very nearly
+turned her back upon the bed and its pretty burden. But then the mere
+snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the
+burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature
+which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by
+a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness. Marcella
+wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Rénier for it
+at night with an effusion, nay, some tears, which no one at Cliff House
+had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage
+and fury.
+
+A little later her father came to see her, the first and only visit he
+paid to her at school. Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a
+stranger, received him demurely, making no confidences, and took him
+over the house and gardens. When he was about to leave her a sudden
+upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she was happy and if
+she wanted anything.
+
+"Yes!" said Marcella, her large eyes gleaming; "tell mamma I want a
+'fringe.' Every other girl in the school has got one."
+
+And she pointed disdainfully to her plainly parted hair. Her father,
+astonished by her unexpected vehemence, put up his eyeglass and studied
+the child's appearance. Three days later, by her mother's permission,
+Marcella was taken to the hairdresser at Marswell by Mademoiselle
+Rénier, returned in all the glories of a "fringe," and, in
+acknowledgment thereof, wrote her mother a letter which for the first
+time had something else than formal news in it.
+
+Meanwhile new destinies were preparing for her. For a variety of small
+reasons Mr. Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter
+from a distance, was not, upon personal inspection, very favourably
+struck with his daughter's surroundings. His wife remarked shortly, when
+he complained to her, that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the
+daughter of persons of their means could expect to be. But Mr. Boyce
+stuck to his point. He had just learnt that Harold, the only son of his
+widowed brother Robert, of Mellor Park, had recently developed a deadly
+disease, which might be long, but must in the end be sure. If the young
+man died and he outlived Robert, Mellor Park would be his; they would
+and must return, in spite of certain obstacles, to their natural rank in
+society, and Marcella must of course be produced as his daughter and
+heiress. When his wife repulsed him, he went to his eldest sister, an
+old maid with a small income of her own, who happened to be staying with
+them, and was the only member of his family with whom he was now on
+terms. She was struck with his remarks, which bore on family pride, a
+commodity not always to be reckoned on in the Boyces, but which she
+herself possessed in abundance; and when he paused she slowly said that
+if an ideal school of another type could be found for Marcella, she
+would be responsible for what it might cost over and above the present
+arrangement. Marcella's manners were certainly rough; it was difficult
+to say what she was learning, or with whom she was associating;
+accomplishments she appeared to have none. Something should certainly be
+done for her--considering the family contingencies. But being a strong
+evangelical, the aunt stipulated for "religious influences," and said
+she would write to a friend.
+
+The result was that a month or two later Marcella, now close on her
+fourteenth birthday, was transferred from Cliff House to the charge of a
+lady who managed a small but much-sought-after school for young ladies
+at Solesby, a watering place on the east coast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But when in the course of reminiscence Marcella found herself once more
+at Solesby, memory began to halt and wander, to choose another tone and
+method. At Solesby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of
+Cliff House, together with her own burning sense of inferiority and
+disadvantage, had troubled her no more. She was well taught there, and
+developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly
+broken in to all social proprieties. But it was not her lessons or her
+dancing masters that she remembered. She had made for herself agitations
+at Cliff House, but what were they as compared to the agitations of
+Solesby! Life there had been one long Wertherish romance in which there
+were few incidents, only feelings, which were themselves events. It
+contained humiliations and pleasures, but they had been all matters of
+spiritual relation, connected with one figure only--the figure of her
+schoolmistress, Miss Pemberton; and with one emotion only--a passion, an
+adoration, akin to that she had lavished on the Ellertons, but now much
+more expressive and mature. A tall slender woman with brown,
+grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our
+grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot
+behind--the face of a saint, an enthusiast--eyes overflowing with
+feeling above a thin firm mouth--the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet
+sweet also: this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella's
+heart. What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in
+connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself
+through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a
+figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?--for Miss
+Pemberton, who slept little and read late, never went to rest without
+softly going the rounds of her pupils' rooms. What storms of contest,
+mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions, first of
+combat, then of reconciliation to which they led! What a strange
+development on the pupil's side of a certain histrionic gift, a turn for
+imaginative intrigue, for endless small contrivances such as might rouse
+or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling! What agitated moments
+of religious talk! What golden days in the holidays, when
+long-looked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition, letters
+which were carried about and wept over till they fell to pieces under
+the stress of such a worship--what terrors and agonies of a stimulated
+conscience--what remorse for sins committed at school--what zeal to
+confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence--and what indifference
+meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home!
+
+Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart's blood
+from their very cradles! Marcella could hardly look back now, in the
+quiet of thought, to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver
+of agitation. Yet now she never saw her. It was two years since they
+parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to join a
+widowed brother. It was all over--for ever. Those precious letters had
+worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella's religious feelings; she
+was once more another being.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her
+school days? Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and
+its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of all
+that it had opened to her, and meant for her. Fresh agitations!--fresh
+passions!--but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and
+sympathies.
+
+At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it
+was apparently not convenient that she should join them. Marcella,
+looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired at
+home. No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays;
+but she suspected--nay, was certain--that there had been other and more
+permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with them a burden.
+At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave Miss Pemberton, her
+mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of late shown decided
+aptitude both for music and painting, it would be well that she should
+cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than would be possible
+at home. Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries, and was quite willing that her
+daughter should go, for a time, to a lady whose address she enclosed,
+and to whom she herself had written--a lady who received girl-students
+working at the South Kensington art classes.
+
+So began an experience, as novel as it was strenuous. Marcella soon
+developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two
+professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her
+gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and
+confident critic of the art of other people--which is much. But though
+art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it
+was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and
+motive-power of her new life--not in art, but in the birth of social and
+philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.
+
+One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London,
+both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister.
+The three were orphans. They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and
+Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so much
+living into the twenty-four hours. The two brothers, both of them
+skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all
+day, were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their
+evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist
+propaganda. They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere and
+quite unworldly. They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and the
+charities of the rich were equally odious to them. That there could be
+any "right" in private property or private wealth had become incredible
+to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from
+the existing state of London; and though one was humorous and handsome,
+the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither could discuss the
+Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked without anger.
+And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more artistic gift
+than either of them, was like unto them.
+
+Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their
+friends. She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public
+evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged. Edie,
+the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the
+books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and
+dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the
+herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall
+enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason,
+brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle,
+together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they
+flattered her with technical talk; they were full of the importance of
+women to the new doctrine and the new era.
+
+The handsome brother was certainly in love with her; the other,
+probably. Marcella was not in love with either of them, but she was
+deeply interested in all three, and for the sickly brother she felt at
+that time a profound admiration--nay, reverence--which influenced her
+vitally at a critical moment of life. "Blessed are the poor"--"Woe unto
+you, rich men"--these were the only articles of his scanty creed, but
+they were held with a fervour, and acted upon with a conviction, which
+our modern religion seldom commands. His influence made Marcella a
+rent-collector under a lady friend of his in the East End; because of
+it, she worked herself beyond her strength in a joint attempt made by
+some members of the Venturist Society to organise a Tailoresses' Union;
+and, to please him, she read articles and blue-books on Sweating and
+Overcrowding. It was all very moving and very dramatic; so, too, was the
+persuasion Marcella divined in her friends, that she was destined in
+time, with work and experience, to great things and high place in the
+movement.
+
+The wholly unexpected news of Mr. Boyce's accession to Mellor had very
+various effects upon this little band of comrades. It revived in
+Marcella ambitions, instincts and tastes wholly different from those of
+her companions, but natural to her by temperament and inheritance. The
+elder brother, Anthony Craven, always melancholy and suspicious, divined
+her immediately.
+
+"How glad you are to be done with Bohemia!" he said to her ironically
+one day, when he had just discovered her with the photographs of Mellor
+about her. "And how rapidly it works!"
+
+"What works?" she asked him angrily.
+
+"The poison of possession. And what a mean end it puts to things! A week
+ago you were all given to causes not your own; now, how long will it
+take you to think of us as 'poor fanatics!'--and to be ashamed you ever
+knew us?"
+
+"You mean to say that I am a mean hypocrite!" she cried. "Do you think
+that because I delight in--in pretty things and old associations, I must
+give up all my convictions? Shall I find no poor at Mellor--no work to
+do? It is unkind--unfair. It is the way all reform breaks down--through
+mutual distrust!"
+
+He looked at her with a cold smile in his dark, sunken eyes, and she
+turned from him indignantly.
+
+When they bade her good-bye at the station, she begged them to write to
+her.
+
+"No, no!" said Louis, the handsome younger brother. "If ever you want
+us, we are there. If you write, we will answer. But you won't need to
+think about us yet awhile. Good-bye!"
+
+And he pressed her hand with a smile.
+
+The good fellow had put all his own dreams and hopes out of sight with a
+firm hand since the arrival of her great news. Indeed, Marcella realised
+in them all that she was renounced. Louis and Edith spoke with affection
+and regret. As to Anthony, from the moment that he set eyes upon the
+maid sent to escort her to Mellor, and the first-class ticket that had
+been purchased for her, Marcella perfectly understood that she had
+become to him as an enemy.
+
+"They shall see--I will show them!" she said to herself with angry
+energy, as the train whirled her away. And her sense of their
+unwarrantable injustice kept her tense and silent till she was roused to
+a childish and passionate pleasure by a first sight of the wide lawns
+and time-stained front of Mellor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of such elements, such memories of persons, things, and events, was
+Marcella's reverie by the window made up. One thing, however, which,
+clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of
+energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her
+musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and
+loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of
+many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations
+all through--and were not the great passion of her Solesby days,
+together with the interest and novelty of her London experience, enough
+to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect? Ah! but it will be
+observed that in this sketch of Marcella's schooldays nothing has been
+said of Marcella's holidays. In this omission the narrative has but
+followed the hasty, half-conscious gaps and slurs of the girl's own
+thought. For Marcella never thought of those holidays and all that was
+connected with them _in detail_, if she could possibly avoid it. But it
+was with them, in truth, and with what they implied, that she was so
+irritably anxious to be done when she first began to be reflective by
+the window; and it was to them she returned with vague, but still
+intense consciousness when the rush of active reminiscence died away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That surely was the breakfast bell ringing, and with the dignified
+ancestral sound which was still so novel and attractive to Marcella's
+ear. Recalled to Mellor Park and its circumstances, she went
+thoughtfully downstairs, pondering a little on the shallow steps of the
+beautiful Jacobean staircase. _Could_ she ever turn her back upon those
+holidays? Was she not rather, so to speak, just embarked upon their
+sequel, or second volume?
+
+But let us go downstairs also.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part of
+the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the house
+in the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. The
+decorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed by
+their eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at any
+rate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the worn
+and discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, and
+petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760,
+besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed on
+them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately
+carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a
+miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian
+carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely
+Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the
+purposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, which
+disturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, and
+its modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one.
+Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of her
+tall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till
+now, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.
+
+Her father and mother were already at table, together with Mrs. Boyce's
+brown spaniel Lynn.
+
+Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn and
+greasy livery coat, who represented the men-service of the
+establishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of her
+eyebrows, and the twitching of her thin lips, it was plain to Marcella
+that her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behaving
+foolishly.
+
+"There, for goodness' sake, cut some bread on the sideboard," said the
+angry master, "and hand it round instead of staring about you like a
+stuck pig. What they taught you at Sir William Jute's I can't conceive.
+_I_ didn't undertake to make a man-servant of you, sir."
+
+The pale, harassed lad flew at the bread, cut it with a vast scattering
+of crumbs, handed it clumsily round, and then took glad advantage of a
+short supply of coffee to bolt from the room to order more.
+
+"Idiot!" said Mr. Boyce, with an angry frown, as he disappeared.
+
+"If you would allow Ann to do her proper parlour work again," said his
+wife blandly, "you would, I think, be less annoyed. And as I believe
+William was boot boy at the Jutes', it is not surprising that he did not
+learn waiting."
+
+"I tell you, Evelyn, that our position _demands_ a man-servant!" was the
+hot reply. "None of my family have ever attempted to run this house with
+women only. It would be unseemly--unfitting--incon--"
+
+"Oh, I am no judge of course of what a Boyce may do!" said his wife
+carelessly. "I leave that to you and the neighbourhood."
+
+Mr. Boyce looked uncomfortable, cooled down, and presently when the
+coffee came back asked his wife for a fresh supply in tones from which
+all bellicosity had for the time departed. He was a small and singularly
+thin man, with blue wandering eyes under the blackest possible eyebrows
+and hair. The cheeks were hollow, the complexion as yellow as that of
+the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden
+by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between
+irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were
+as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and
+self-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce,
+of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect with
+the pride of old family; his dress was careful and correct to the last
+detail; and his hands with their long fingers were of an excessive
+delicacy, though marred as to beauty by a thinness which nearly amounted
+to emaciation.
+
+"The servants say they must leave unless the ghost does, Marcella," said
+Mrs. Boyce, suddenly, laying a morsel of toast as she spoke on Lynn's
+nose. "Someone from the village of course has been talking--the cook
+says she heard _something_ last night, though she will not condescend to
+particulars--and in general it seems to me that you and I may be left
+before long to do the house work."
+
+"What do they say in the village?" asked Marcella eagerly.
+
+"Oh! they say there was a Boyce two hundred years ago who fled down
+here from London after doing something he shouldn't--I really forget
+what. The sheriff's officers were advancing on the house. Their approach
+displeased him, and he put an end to himself at the head of the little
+staircase leading from the tapestry-room down to my sitting-room. Why
+did he choose the _staircase_?" said Mrs. Boyce with light
+reflectiveness.
+
+"It won't do," said Marcella, shaking her head. "I know the Boyce they
+mean. He was a ruffian, but he shot himself in London; and, any way, he
+was dead long before that staircase was built."
+
+"Dear me, how well up you are!" said her mother. "Suppose you give a
+little lecture on the family in the servants' hall. Though I never knew
+a ghost yet that was undone by dates."
+
+There was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply with
+Marcella's amused but sympathetic interest. _Detachment_ was perhaps the
+characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner,--a curious separateness, as
+it were, from all the things and human beings immediately about her.
+
+Marcella pondered.
+
+"I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently. "He will
+have heard them in the village. I am going to the church this morning."
+
+Her mother looked at her--a look of quiet examination--and smiled. The
+Lady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already assumed during the six
+weeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly.
+
+"Harden!" said Mr. Boyce, catching the name. "I wish that man would
+leave me alone. What have I got to do with a water-supply for the
+village? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a water-tight
+roof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert has
+behaved."
+
+Marcella's cheek flushed.
+
+"The village water-supply is a _disgrace_," she said with low emphasis.
+"I never saw such a crew of unhealthy, wretched-looking children in my
+life as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought to
+look after them. I believe you could be _forced_ to do something,
+papa--if the local authority were of any use."
+
+She looked at him defiantly.
+
+"Nonsense," said Mr. Boyce testily. "They got along in your Uncle
+Robert's days, and they can get along now. Charity, indeed! Why, the
+state of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, I
+should think, to take a man's mind. Don't you go talking to Mr. Harden
+in the way you do, Marcella. I don't like it, and I won't have it. You
+have the interests of your family and your home to think of first."
+
+"Poor starved things!" said Marcella sarcastically--"living in such a
+_den_!"
+
+And she swept her white hand round, as though calling to witness the
+room in which they sat.
+
+"I tell you," said Mr. Boyce, rising and standing before the fire,
+whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth so
+little known to him, and whose nature and aims during the close contact
+of the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity and
+disturbance to him,--"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all,
+must be to keep up the family position!--_our_ position. Look at that
+library, and its condition; look at the state of these wall-papers; look
+at the garden; look at the estate books if it comes to that. Why, it
+will be years before, even with all my knowledge of affairs, I can pull
+the thing through--years!"
+
+Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough--she had pushed back her chair, and was
+alternately studying her husband and daughter. They might have been
+actors performing for her amusement. And yet, amusement is not precisely
+the word. For that hazel eye, with its frequent smile, had not a spark
+of geniality. After a time those about her found something scathing in
+its dry light.
+
+Now, as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him, his
+look wavered, and his mood collapsed. He threw her a curious furtive
+glance, and fell silent.
+
+"I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London Socialist
+friends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the pause that
+followed. "You have, I see, taken a great liking for them."
+
+"Oh! well--I don't know," said Marcella, with a shrug, and something of
+a proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very kind--but--he doesn't seem to
+have thought much about things."
+
+She never talked about her London friends to her mother, if she could
+help it. The sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they
+could. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was constantly her
+mother's victim, do what she would. But in her quiet moments she stood
+on the defensive.
+
+"So the Socialists are the only people who think?" said Mrs. Boyce, who
+was now standing by the window, pressing her dog's head against her
+dress as he pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens.
+They tell me they give all their substance away--already--and every one
+says it is going to be a particularly bad winter. The living, I hear, is
+worth nothing. All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful.
+It is the first duty of martyrs."
+
+Marcella looked at her mother indignantly. It seemed to her often that
+she said the most heartless things imaginable.
+
+"Cheerful!" she said--"in a village like this--with all the young men
+drifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters--no one
+to stand by him--no money and no helpers--the people always ill--wages
+eleven and twelve shillings a week--and only the old wrecks of men left
+to do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in _this_ house to
+back him up a little. All he asks is that papa should go and satisfy
+himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and
+Lord Maxwell's--"
+
+"Lord Maxwell's!" cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state of
+half-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away his
+cigarette--"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousand
+a year, if he has a penny. By the way, I wish he would just have the
+civility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!"
+
+He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the
+footman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and a
+note.
+
+"The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?"
+
+"Well, that's odd!" said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening. "Here _is_
+Lord Maxwell's answer, just as I was talking of it."
+
+His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, a
+strange expectancy in her whole attitude. He tore it open, read it, and
+then threw it angrily under the grate.
+
+"No answer. Shut the door." The lad retreated. Mr. Boyce sat down and
+began carefully to put the fire together. His thin left hand shook upon
+his knee.
+
+There was a moment's pause of complete silence. Mrs. Boyce's face might
+have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she
+stood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in her
+sweeping black. But she said not a word, and presently left the room.
+
+Marcella watched her father.
+
+"Papa--_was_ that a note from Lord Maxwell?"
+
+Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any one
+was still there. It struck Marcella that he looked yellow and
+shrunken--years older than her mother. An impulse of tenderness, joined
+with anger and a sudden sick depression--she was conscious of them all
+as she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out. Her
+parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; but
+her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes
+the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might
+have had. She had no habitual deference to break through, and the
+hindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strong
+than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year
+by year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing
+at them, as was now so often the case with her.
+
+"Papa, is Lord Maxwell's note an uncivil one?"
+
+Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over the
+blaze.
+
+"Why, that man's only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket
+together from morning till night when we were boys. Henry Raeburn was a
+bit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first
+rabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the
+two estates join. After that we were always companions--we used to go
+out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow
+watching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the inner
+hall door, in the Windmill Hill fields--at least I did--I was a better
+shot than he by that time. He didn't like Robert--he always wanted me."
+
+"Well, papa, but what does he say?" asked Marcella, impatiently. She
+laid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father's shoulder.
+
+Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her. He and her mother had originally
+sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily
+worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming
+to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her. But the sight
+of her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanly
+compassion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.
+
+"He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refers
+me to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who had
+just bought the place. Oh, it is quite evident what he means. They were
+here without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeks
+at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a
+card nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the
+Levens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I did
+think--I was fool enough to think--that when I came back to the old
+place, my father's old friends would let bygones be bygones. I never did
+_them_ any harm. Let them 'gang their gait,' confound them!"--the little
+dark man straightened himself fiercely--"I can get my pleasure out of
+the land; and as for your mother, she'd not lift a finger to propitiate
+one of them!"
+
+In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic
+pride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.
+
+Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither with
+lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks--now
+over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second
+volume beginning--the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories
+of shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?
+
+"What was it you wanted about those coverts, papa?" she asked presently,
+with a quick decision.
+
+"What the deuce does it matter? If you want to know, I proposed to him
+to exchange my coverts over by the Scrubs, which work in with his
+shooting, for the wood down by the Home Farm. It was an exchange made
+year after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found
+it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack and
+ruin after Harold's death. It gave me something to write about, and I
+was determined to know where I stood--Well! the old Pharisee can go his
+way: I'll go mine."
+
+And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his native
+heath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height,
+and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns--a picturesque and
+elegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.
+
+"I shall ask Mr. Aldous Raeburn about it, if I see him in the village
+to-day," said Marcella, quietly.
+
+Her father started, and looked at her with some attention.
+
+"What have you seen of Aldous Raeburn?" he inquired. "I remember hearing
+that you had come across him."
+
+"Certainly I have come across him. I have met him once or twice at the
+Vicarage--and--oh! on one or two other occasions," said Marcella,
+carelessly. "He has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says his
+grandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away from
+home. He does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now: writes for him, and
+helps to manage the estate; and next year, when the Tories come back and
+Lord Maxwell is in office again--"
+
+"Why, of course, there'll be plums for the grandson," said Mr. Boyce
+with a sneer. "That goes without saying--though we are such a virtuous
+lot."
+
+"Oh yes, he'll get on--everybody says so. And he'll deserve it too!" she
+added, her eye kindling combatively as she surveyed her father. "He
+takes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board of
+guardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very much, but he is not
+exactly popular, according to them. His manners are sometimes shy and
+awkward, and the poor people think he's proud."
+
+"Ah! a prig I dare say--like some of his uncles before him," said Mr.
+Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, you say?"
+
+And again he turned a quick considering eye on his daughter.
+
+"Oh dear! yes," said Marcella, with a little proud smile. There was a
+pause; then she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardens
+have hard work just now with the harvest festival, and I promised to
+take them some flowers."
+
+"Well"--said her father, grudgingly, "so long as you don't promise
+anything on my account! I tell you, I haven't got sixpence to spend on
+subscriptions to anything or anybody. By the way, if you see Reynolds
+anywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are going
+round the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what the
+coverts look like. The stock has all run down, and the place has been
+poached to death. But he thinks if we take on an extra man in the
+spring, and spend a little on rearing, we shall do pretty decently next
+year."
+
+The colour leapt to Marcella's cheek as she tied on her hat.
+
+"You will set up another keeper, and you won't do anything for the
+village?" she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another word
+she opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace,
+leaving her father both angered and amazed.
+
+A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a
+good deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhood
+are expected to join. His wife had long since consented to play the
+game, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no
+dupe. As to what Marcella's part in the affair might be going to be, her
+father was as yet uneasily in the dark. What constantly astonished him,
+as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl's beauty. Surely she
+had been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not only
+beauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by the
+possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was very
+accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a
+father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by
+misfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would have
+lovers--friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell
+was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the
+daughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie,
+wherein the Raeburns' behaviour and Marcella's unexpected gifts played
+about equal parts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the most
+adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey,
+mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "garden
+front," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny
+and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers
+grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though
+conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeed
+wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it;
+the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of two
+gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases,
+and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.
+
+As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by
+the ragged charm of the old place.
+
+On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for
+beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if
+house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the
+neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply,
+shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,--in short, the general
+self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,--where would have been
+that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely,
+which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend
+even upon _her_, the latest born of all its children--to ask for
+tendance and cherishing even from _her_. She was always planning
+how--with a minimum of money to spend--it could be comforted and healed,
+and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though
+she had been bred there.
+
+But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and
+depression of spirit. What _was_ this past which in these new
+surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?
+She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the
+truth. Yet, of whom? Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to
+any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her
+power. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tell
+me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you."
+All the same, it _was_ due to them all, due to herself especially, now
+that she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in the
+dark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of the
+facts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, as
+untowardly in their, in _her_ way, as they had done in the shabby school
+and lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.
+
+Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and could
+not, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to be
+insurmountable. Her instinct told her as she looked back that their
+relation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts and
+humiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts. Their poverty and
+the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the
+disrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends of
+their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool
+distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget the
+existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, and
+laid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of the
+world. Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw no
+personal advantage and distinction in the Boyces' acquaintance, but
+rather the contrary.
+
+As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that the
+breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or
+his oldest friends. A little shiver passed through her as she reflected
+that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the
+feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be
+strongest. Well, it _was_ hard upon them!--hard upon her mother--hard
+upon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the
+dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these
+things! And there they were all the time--dogging and thwarting.
+
+She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel
+path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little
+church. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the
+Park, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, of
+the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south
+sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been
+already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit
+of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.
+
+It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble
+graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any
+rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various
+styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the
+name of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in
+the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who
+fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field,
+lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his
+later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then
+with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful
+idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family
+of any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal,
+upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, on
+the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had
+given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the
+making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the
+terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried
+on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate
+justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them
+intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's
+education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections--a
+tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but
+on the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, and
+still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.
+
+Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--a
+break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a
+moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into
+brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of
+poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went
+abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend of
+Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever
+doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the
+leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly
+acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an
+Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home
+to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its
+fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted,
+pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected
+whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined
+names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks
+mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.
+
+The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle life
+she died--much loved and passionately mourned. Her tomb bore no
+long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace--for
+she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for
+it--the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's
+_Vita Nuova_.
+
+The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her
+music-books survived,--a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but
+the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own
+physique and her father's were to be traced to its original, as well, no
+doubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both--aptitudes not hitherto
+conspicuous in her respectable race.
+
+In reality, however, she loved every one of them--these Jacobean and
+Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood in
+the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled
+heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable
+pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great
+lifting wave. The depression of her father's repentances and
+trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter
+of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their
+guild of honour.
+
+There were difficulties in her path, no doubt--but she had her
+vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others.
+_She_ had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed
+individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and
+wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two
+years had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knew
+perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age
+could never venture--that she had fascination, resource, brain.
+
+Already, in these few weeks--Smiles played about her lips as she thought
+of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the
+Hardens'. His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alter
+the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one
+of the _partis_ most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the
+neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce's
+daughter--all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which
+it had to contend.
+
+No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and
+her parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman's
+charm, a woman's energy should do it all.
+
+Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, her
+mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust.
+Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--of
+mission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her was
+the Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched
+bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when
+it came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought
+face to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism,
+but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and
+upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had
+worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their
+generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the
+workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive,
+resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy
+misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid
+unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse,
+or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanched
+and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of
+insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food--these figures and
+types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. In
+London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been
+to her as a pawn in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh;
+and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk about
+him. Under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was very
+clear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, and had always depended,
+the labourer of Mellor.
+
+Well, she had tried to live with them ever since she came--had gone in
+and out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and their
+lives and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by their
+cringing; now enjoying her position among them with the natural
+aristocratic instinct of women, now grinding her teeth over her father's
+and uncle's behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doing
+for her new subjects.
+
+What, _their_ friend and champion, and ultimately their redeemer too?
+Well, and why not? Weak women have done greater things in the world. As
+she stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, she
+was conscious of a dramatic moment--would not have been sorry,
+perhaps, if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her.
+
+But there was a saving sincerity at the root of her, and her strained
+mood sank naturally into a girlish excitement.
+
+"We shall see!--We shall see!" she said aloud, and was startled to hear
+her words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she stooped
+to separate her flowers and see what quantities she had of each.
+
+But while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herself
+again. She walked down the church and stood at the open south door,
+looking and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leading
+across the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were coming
+along it towards the church, both flower-laden, and beside walked a tall
+man in a brown shooting suit, with his gun in his hand and his dog
+beside him.
+
+The excitement in Marcella's eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as she
+saw the group, and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow. She
+waited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signals
+of the vicar's sister; but inwardly she was not quiet at all. For the
+tall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Raeburn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+"How kind of you!" said the rector's sister, enthusiastically; "but I
+thought you would come and help us."
+
+And as Marcella took some of her burdens from her, Miss Harden kissed
+Marcella's cheek with a sort of timid eagerness. She had fallen in love
+with Miss Boyce from the beginning, was now just advanced to this
+privilege of kissing, and being entirely convinced that her new friend
+possessed all virtues and all knowledge, found it not difficult to hold
+that she had been divinely sent to sustain her brother and herself in
+the disheartening task of civilising Mellor. Mary Harden was naturally a
+short, roundly made girl, neither pretty nor plain, with grey-blue eyes,
+a shy manner, and a heart all goodness. Her brother was like unto
+her--also short, round, and full-faced, with the same attractive eyes.
+Both were singularly young in aspect--a boy and girl pair. Both had the
+worn, pinched look which Mrs. Boyce complained of, and which, indeed,
+went oddly with their whole physique. It was as though creatures built
+for a normal life of easy give and take with their fellows had fallen
+upon some unfitting and jarring experience. One striking difference,
+indeed, there was between them, for amid the brother's timidity and
+sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of
+the priest--nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic.
+
+Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure
+at the sight of Marcella Boyce. Aldous Raeburn was clearly embarrassed
+thereby. Indeed, as he laid down his gun outside the low churchyard
+wall, while Marcella and the Hardens were greeting, that generally
+self-possessed though modest person was conscious of a quite disabling
+perturbation of mind. Why in the name of all good manners and decency
+had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting trim, on that
+particular morning, by Mr. Boyce's daughter on her father's land, and
+within a stone's throw of her father's house? Was he not perfectly well
+aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning despatched
+to the new owner of Mellor? Had he not ineffectually tried to delay
+execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his
+grandfather? Had not the incident weighed on him ever since, wounding an
+admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the
+dark, during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce's
+acquaintance, so strong and startling did he all in a moment feel them
+to be?
+
+And then to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer
+moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public
+property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male
+to help her. But why in this neighbourhood at all?--why not rather on
+the other side of the county? He could have scourged himself on the
+spot for an unpardonable breach of manners and feeling.
+
+However, Miss Boyce certainly made no sign. She received him without any
+_empressement_, but also without the smallest symptom of offence. They
+all moved into the church together, Mr. Raeburn carrying a vast bundle
+of ivy and fern, the rector and his sister laden with closely-packed
+baskets of cut flowers. Everything was laid down on the chancel steps
+beside Marcella's contribution, and then the Hardens began to plan out
+operations. Miss Harden ran over on her fingers the contributions which
+had been sent in to the rectory, or were presently coming over to the
+church in a hand-cart. "Lord Maxwell has sent the most _beautiful_ pots
+for the chancel," she said, with a grateful look at young Raeburn. "It
+will be quite a show." To which the young rector assented warmly. It was
+very good, indeed, of Lord Maxwell to remember them always so liberally
+at times like these, when they had so little direct claim upon him. They
+were not his church or his parish, but he never forgot them all the
+same, and Mellor was grateful. The rector had all his sister's gentle
+effusiveness, but a professional dignity besides, even in his thanks,
+which made itself felt.
+
+Marcella flushed as he was speaking.
+
+"I went to see what I could get in the way of greenhouse things," she
+said in a sudden proud voice. "But we have nothing. There are the
+houses, but there is nothing in them. But you shall have all our
+out-of-door flowers, and I think a good deal might be done with autumn
+leaves and wild things if you will let me try."
+
+A speech, which brought a flush to Mr. Raeburn's cheek as he stood in
+the background, and led Mary Harden into an eager asking of Marcella's
+counsels, and an eager praising of her flowers.
+
+Aldous Raeburn said nothing, but his discomfort increased with every
+moment. Why had his grandfather been so officious in this matter of the
+flowers? All very well when Mellor was empty, or in the days of a miser
+and eccentric, without womankind, like Robert Boyce. But now--the act
+began to seem to him offensive, a fresh affront offered to an
+unprotected girl, whose quivering sensitive look as she stood talking to
+the Hardens touched him profoundly. Mellor church might almost be
+regarded as the Boyces' private chapel, so bound up was it with the
+family and the house. He realised painfully that he ought to be
+gone--yet could not tear himself away. Her passionate willingness to
+spend herself for the place and people she had made her own at first
+sight, checked every now and then by a proud and sore reserve--it was
+too pretty, too sad. It stung and spurred him as he watched her; one
+moment his foot moved for departure, the next he was resolving that
+somehow or other he must make speech with her--excuse--explain.
+Ridiculous! How was it possible that he should do either!
+
+He had met her--perhaps had tried to meet her--tolerably often since
+their first chance encounter weeks ago in the vicarage drawing-room. All
+through there had been on his side the uncomfortable knowledge of his
+grandfather's antipathy to Richard Boyce, and of the social steps to
+which that antipathy would inevitably lead. But Miss Boyce had never
+shown the smallest consciousness, so far, of anything untoward or
+unusual in her position. She had been clearly taken up with the interest
+and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered. The old
+house, its associations, its history, the beautiful country in which it
+lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with
+that of the town,--he had heard her talk of all these things with a
+freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no
+doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention.
+The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical
+discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The
+girl's vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special
+fulness of life. So that in his new preoccupation with herself, and by
+contact with her frank self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her
+position, and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that
+unlucky note from Mellor; his grandfather's prompt reply to it; his own
+ineffective protest; and now this tongue-tiedness--this clumsy
+intrusion--which she must feel to be an indelicacy--an outrage.
+
+Suddenly he heard Miss Harden saying, with penitent emphasis, "I _am_
+stupid! I have left the scissors and the wire on the table at home; we
+can't get on without them; it is really too bad of me."
+
+"I will go for them," said Marcella promptly. "Here is the hand-cart
+just arrived and some people come to help; you can't be spared. I will
+be back directly."
+
+And, gathering up her black skirt in a slim white hand, she sped down
+the church, and was out of the south door before the Hardens had time to
+protest, or Aldous Raeburn understood what she was doing.
+
+A vexed word from Miss Harden enlightened him, and he went after the
+fugitive, overtaking her just where his gun and dog lay, outside the
+churchyard.
+
+"Let me go, Miss Boyce," he said, as he caught her up. "My dog and I
+will run there and back."
+
+But Marcella hardly looked at him, or paused.
+
+"Oh no!" she said quickly, "I should like the walk."
+
+He hesitated; then, with a flush which altered his usually quiet,
+self-contained expression, he moved on beside her.
+
+"Allow me to go with you then. You are sure to find fresh loads to bring
+back. If it's like our harvest festival, the things keep dropping in all
+day."
+
+Marcella's eyes were still on the ground.
+
+"I thought you were on your way to shoot, Mr. Raeburn?"
+
+"So I was, but there is no hurry; if I can be useful. Both the birds and
+the keeper can wait."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To some outlying fields of ours on the Windmill Hill. There is a tenant
+there who wants to see me. He is a prosy person with a host of
+grievances. I took my gun as a possible means of escape from him."
+
+"Windmill Hill? I know the name. Oh! I remember: it was there--my father
+has just been telling me--that your father and he shot the pair of
+kestrels, when they were boys together."
+
+Her tone was quite light, but somehow it had an accent, an emphasis,
+which made Aldous Raeburn supremely uncomfortable. In his disquiet, he
+thought of various things to say; but he was not ready, nor naturally
+effusive; the turn of them did not please him; and he remained silent.
+
+Meantime Marcella's heart was beating fast. She was meditating a _coup_.
+
+"Mr. Raeburn!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Will you think me a very extraordinary person if I ask you a question?
+Your father and mine were great friends, weren't they, as boys?--your
+family and mine were friends, altogether?"
+
+"I believe so--I have always heard so," said her companion, flushing
+still redder.
+
+"You knew Uncle Robert--Lord Maxwell did?"
+
+"Yes--as much as anybody knew him--but--"
+
+"Oh, I know: he shut himself up and hated his neighbours. Still you knew
+him, and papa and your father were boys together. Well then, if you
+won't mind telling me--I know it's bold to ask, but I have reasons--why
+does Lord Maxwell write to papa in the third person, and why has your
+aunt, Miss Raeburn, never found time in all these weeks to call on
+mamma?"
+
+She turned and faced him, her splendid eyes one challenge. The glow and
+fire of the whole gesture--the daring of it, and yet the suggestion of
+womanish weakness in the hand which trembled against her dress and in
+the twitching lip--if it had been fine acting, it could not have been
+more complete. And, in a sense, acting there was in it. Marcella's
+emotions were real, but her mind seldom deserted her. One half of her
+was impulsive and passionate; the other half looked on and put in
+finishing touches.
+
+Acting or no, the surprise of her outburst swept the man beside her off
+his feet. He found himself floundering in a sea of excuses--not for his
+relations, but for himself. He ought never to have intruded; it was
+odious, unpardonable; he had no business whatever to put himself in her
+way! Would she please understand that it was an accident? It should not
+happen again. He quite understood that she could not regard him with
+friendliness. And so on. He had never so lost his self-possession.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella's brows contracted. She took his excuses as a fresh
+offence.
+
+"You mean, I suppose, that I have no right to ask such questions!" she
+cried; "that I am not behaving like a lady--as one of your relations
+would? Well, I dare say! I was not brought up like that. I was not
+brought up at all; I have had to make myself. So you must avoid me if
+you like. Of course you will. But I resolved there--in the church--that
+I would make just one effort, before everything crystallises, to break
+through. If we must live on here hating our neighbours and being cut by
+them, I thought I would just ask you why, first. There is no one else to
+ask. Hardly anybody has called, except the Hardens, and a few new people
+that don't matter. And _I_ have nothing to be ashamed of," said the girl
+passionately, "nor has mamma. Papa, I suppose, did some bad things long
+ago. I have never known--I don't know now--what they were. But I should
+like to understand. Is everybody going to cut us because of that?"
+
+With a great effort Aldous Raeburn pulled himself together, certain fine
+instincts both of race and conduct coming to his help. He met her
+excited look by one which had both dignity and friendliness.
+
+"I will tell you what I can, Miss Boyce. If you ask me, it is right I
+should. You must forgive me if I say anything that hurts you. I will try
+not--I will try not!" he repeated earnestly. "In the first place, I know
+hardly anything in detail. I do not remember that I have ever wished to
+know. But I gather that some years ago--when I was still a
+lad--something in Mr. Boyce's life--some financial matters, I
+believe--during the time that he was member of Parliament, made a
+scandal, and especially among his family and old friends. It was the
+effect upon his old father, I think, who, as you know, died soon
+afterwards--"
+
+Marcella started.
+
+"I didn't know," she said quickly.
+
+Aldous Raeburn's distress grew.
+
+"I really oughtn't to speak of these things," he said, "for I don't know
+them accurately. But I want to answer what you said--I do indeed. It was
+that, I think, chiefly. Everybody here respected and loved your
+grandfather--my grandfather did--and there was great feeling for him--"
+
+"I see! I see!" said Marcella, her chest heaving; "and against papa."
+
+She walked on quickly, hardly seeing where she was going, her eyes dim
+with tears. There was a wretched pause. Then Aldous Raeburn broke out--
+
+"But after all it is very long ago. And there may have been some harsh
+judgment. My grandfather may have been misinformed as to some of the
+facts. And I--"
+
+He hesitated, struck with the awkwardness of what he was going to say.
+But Marcella understood him.
+
+"And you will try and make him alter his mind?" she said, not
+ungratefully, but still with a touch of sarcasm in her tone. "No, Mr.
+Raeburn, I don't think that will succeed."
+
+They walked on in silence for a little while. At last he said, turning
+upon her a face in which she could not but see the true feeling of a
+just and kindly man--
+
+"I meant that if my grandfather could be led to express himself in a way
+which Mr. Boyce could accept, even if there were no great friendship as
+there used to be, there might be something better than this--this,
+which--which--is so painful. And any way, Miss Boyce, whatever happens,
+will you let me say this once, that there is no word, no feeling in this
+neighbourhood--how could there be?--towards you and your mother, but one
+of respect and admiration? Do believe that, even if you feel that you
+can never be friendly towards me and mine again--or forget the things I
+have said!"
+
+"Respect and admiration!" said Marcella, wondering, and still scornful.
+"Pity, perhaps. There might be that. But any way mamma goes with papa.
+She always has done. She always will. So shall I, of course. But I am
+sorry--_horribly_ sore and sorry! I was so delighted to come here. I
+have been very little at home, and understood hardly anything about
+this worry--not how serious it was, nor what it meant. Oh! I _am_
+sorry--there was so much I wanted to do here--if anybody could only
+understand what it means to me to come to this place!"
+
+They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them,
+beyond a stubble field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners,
+lay the small scattered Tillage, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls
+of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning
+against a great belt of distant beechwood which begirt the hamlet and
+the common along which it lay. The stubble field was a feast of shade
+and tint, of apricots and golds shot with the subtlest purples and
+browns; the flame of the wild-cherry leaf and the deeper crimson of the
+haws made every hedge a wonder; the apples gleamed in the cottage
+garden; and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the
+half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers
+which made the village.
+
+Instinctively both stopped. Marcella locked her hands behind her in a
+gesture familiar to her in moments of excitement; the light wind blew
+back her dress in soft, eddying folds; for the moment, in her tall
+grace, she had the air of some young Victory poised upon a height, till
+you looked at her face, which was, indeed, not exultant at all, but
+tragic, extravagantly tragic, as Aldous Raeburn, in his English reserve,
+would perhaps have thought in the case of any woman with tamer eyes and
+a less winning mouth.
+
+"I don't want to talk about myself," she began. "But you know, Mr.
+Raeburn--you must know--what a state of things there is here--you know
+what a _disgrace_ that village is. Oh! one reads books, but I never
+thought people could actually _live_ like that--here in the wide
+country, with room for all. It makes me lie awake at night. We are not
+rich--we are very poor--the house is all out of repair, and the estate,
+as of course you know, is in a wretched condition. But when I see these
+cottages, and the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to
+anything we get. I had some friends in London who were Socialists, and I
+followed and agreed with them, but here one _sees_! Yes, indeed!--it
+_is_ too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives
+depend upon him. Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser; and look at
+the death-rate of the village--look at the children; you can see how it
+has crushed the Hardens already. No, we have no right to it!--it ought
+to be taken from us; some day it will be taken from us!"
+
+Aldous Raeburn smiled, and was himself again. A woman's speculations
+were easier to deal with than a woman's distress.
+
+"It is not so hopeless as that, I think," he said kindly. "The Mellor
+cottages are in a bad state certainly. But you have no idea how soon a
+little energy and money and thought sets things to rights."
+
+"But we have no money!" cried Marcella. "And if he is miserable here, my
+father will have no energy to do anything. He will not care what
+happens. He will defy everybody, and just spend what he has on himself.
+And it will make me wretched--_wretched_. Look at that cottage to the
+right, Mr. Raeburn. It is Jim Hurd's--a man who works mainly on the
+Church Farm, when he is in work. But he is deformed, and not so strong
+as others. The farmers too seem to be cutting down labour everywhere--of
+course I don't understand--I am so new to it. Hurd and his family had an
+_awful_ winter, last winter--hardly kept body and soul together. And now
+he is out of work already--the man at the Church Farm turned him off
+directly after harvest. He sees no prospect of getting work by the
+winter. He spends his days tramping to look for it; but nothing turns
+up. Last winter they parted with all they could sell. This winter it
+must be the workhouse! It's _heart-breaking_. And he has a mind; he can
+_feel_! I lend him the Labour paper I take in, and get him to talk. He
+has more education than most, and oh! the _bitterness_ at the bottom of
+him. But not against persons--individuals. It is like a sort of blind
+patience when you come to that--they make excuses even for Uncle Robert,
+to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a
+crime--yes, a _crime_! The woman must have been such a pretty
+creature--and refined too. She is consumptive, of course--what else
+could you expect with that cottage and that food? So is the eldest
+boy--a little white atomy! And the other children. Talk of London--I
+never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village. Twelve
+shillings a week, and work about half the year! Oh! they _ought_ to hate
+us!--I try to make them," cried Marcella, her eyes gleaming. "They ought
+to hate all of us landowners, and the whole wicked system. It keeps them
+from the land which they ought to be sharing with us; it makes one man
+master, instead of all men brothers. And who is fit to be master? Which
+of us? Everybody is so ready to take the charge of other people's lives,
+and then look at the result!"
+
+"Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad," said
+Aldous Raeburn, smiling a little, but more coldly. Marcella, glancing at
+him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and
+class pride in him--a pride which was not going to assert itself, but
+none the less implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and
+him. In an instant her quick imagination realised herself as the
+daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class. When she
+attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her--any man in
+similar circumstances--must naturally think: "Ah, well, poor girl--Dick
+Boyce's daughter--what can you expect?" Whereas--Aldous Raeburn!--she
+thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell
+possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for
+honourable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or
+towards their neighbours and dependents. A shiver of passionate vanity,
+wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frame stiffened.
+
+"There are model squires, of course," she said slowly, striving at least
+for a personal dignity which should match his. "There are plenty of
+landowners who do their duty as they understand it--no one denies that.
+But that does not affect the system; the grandson of the best man may be
+the worst, but his one-man power remains the same. No! the time has come
+for a wider basis. Paternal government and charity were very well in
+their way--democratic self-government will manage to do without them!"
+
+She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look. It delighted her to pit
+these wide and threatening generalisations against the Maxwell power--to
+show the heir of it that she at least--father or no father--was no
+hereditary subject of his, and bound to no blind admiration of the
+Maxwell methods and position.
+
+Aldous Raeburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at
+her indeed all the time. Miss Boyce's opinions could hardly matter to
+him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her
+talk. This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class
+went, as it happened, very deep with him--too deep for chance
+discussion. What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself,
+seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal
+history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous
+type pick up from newspapers and magazines. She had touched his family
+pride for an instant; but only for an instant. What he was abidingly
+conscious of, was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with
+difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of
+which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more
+determined--absurdly determined--to help her.
+
+"Oh! no doubt the world will do very well without us some day," he said
+lightly, in answer to her tirade; "no one is indispensable. But are you
+so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had
+observed--pardon me for saying it--on the two or three occasions we have
+met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the
+old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your
+ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor
+people out of the mire in your own way. No! I don't feel that you are
+thorough-going!"
+
+Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful
+laugh--a laugh of humorous confession, which changed her whole look and
+mood.
+
+"Is that all you have noticed? If you wish to know, Mr. Raeburn, I love
+the labourers for touching their hats to me. I love the school children
+for bobbing to me. I love my very self--ridiculous as _you_ may think
+it--for being Miss Boyce of Mellor!"
+
+"Don't say things like that, please!" he interrupted; "I think I have
+not deserved them."
+
+His tone made her repent her gibe. "No, indeed, you have been most kind
+to me," she cried. "I don't know how it is. I am bitter and personal in
+a moment--when I don't mean to be. Yes! you are quite right. I am proud
+of it all. If nobody comes to see us, and we are left all alone out in
+the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in--proud of the
+old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the
+beeches! How absurd it would seem to other people, who have so much
+more! But I have had so little--so _little_!" Her voice had a hungry
+lingering note. "And as for the people, yes, I am proud too that they
+like me, and that already I can influence them. Oh, I will do my best
+for them, my _very best_! But it will be hard, very hard, if there is
+no one to help me!"
+
+She heaved a long sigh. In spite of the words, what she had said did not
+seem to be an appeal for his pity. Rather there was in it a sweet
+self-dedicating note as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a
+note which once more left Aldous Raeburn's self-restraint tottering. She
+was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over
+the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside
+him--after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must
+surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat!
+
+He bent over to her.
+
+"Don't talk of there being no one to help! There may be many ways out of
+present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be
+large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?"
+
+She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller--she liked that;
+she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and
+bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no
+thrill. But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already
+constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her,
+and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own
+power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, "I
+_am_ large-minded enough! You have been very kind, and I have been very
+wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret: I am sure, if you can help me,
+you will."
+
+There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before
+the miry village road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage.
+Aldous Raeburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of
+travellers'-joy out of the hedge beside him.
+
+"That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it," he said, and
+with a smile put the cluster of white seed-tufts and green leaves into
+one of the pockets of his shooting jacket.
+
+"Oh, don't tie me down!" said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also.
+"And don't you think, Mr. Raeburn, that you might open that gate? At
+least, we can't get the scissors and the wire unless you do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day's
+shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home. He
+glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a
+glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long
+eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light
+streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing
+black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards
+in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both
+desires and dreads.
+
+He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of
+him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined. His dog, a
+black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat
+weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous
+Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two
+miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.
+
+About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland.
+After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its
+three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of
+arable--representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by
+the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern
+uplands--the beech woods closed thickly round him. Beech woods of all
+kinds--from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring
+pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the
+dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished
+bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings
+crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of
+leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green
+heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and
+far-receding path. Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far
+within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner's wheel, which told
+him he was passing one of the wood-cutter's huts that in the hilly parts
+of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking
+industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous
+valleys. And two or three times also he passed a string of the great
+timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown
+horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks
+rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters' pipes rising
+slowly into the damp sunset air. But for the most part the road along
+which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind. Nor were there any
+signs of habitation--no cottages, no farms. He was scarcely more than
+thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have
+been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that
+through which he was passing.
+
+And presently the solitude took a grander note. He was nearing the edge
+of the high upland along which he had been walking. In front of him the
+long road with its gleaming pools bent sharply to the left, showing pale
+and distinct against a darkening heaven and the wide grey fields which
+had now, on one side of his path, replaced the serried growth of young
+plantations. Night was fast advancing from south and east over the
+upland. But straight in front of him and on his right, the forest trees,
+still flooded with sunset, fell in sharp steeps towards the plain.
+Through their straight stems glowed the blues and purples of that lower
+world; and when the slopes broke and opened here and there, above the
+rounded masses of their red and golden leaf the level distances of the
+plain could be seen stretching away, illimitable in the evening dusk, to
+a west of glory, just vacant of the sun. The golden ball had sunk into
+the mists awaiting it, but the splendour of its last rays was still on
+all the western front of the hills, bathing the beech woods as they rose
+and fell with the large undulations of the ground.
+
+Insensibly Raeburn, filled as he was with a new and surging emotion,
+drew the solemnity of the forest glades and of the rolling distances
+into his heart. When he reached the point where the road diverged to the
+left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, whence he commanded the whole
+sweep of the hill rampart from north to west, and the whole expanse of
+the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost
+in many thoughts, while the night fell.
+
+He looked over the central plain of England--the plain which stretches
+westward to the Thames and the Berkshire hills, and northward through
+the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent.
+An historic plain--symbolic, all of it, to an English eye. There in the
+western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford; in front of
+him was the site of Chalgrove Field, where Hampden got his clumsy death
+wound, and Thame, where he died; and far away, to his right, where the
+hills swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the
+face of the down, the vast scoured cross, whereby a Saxon king had
+blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath.
+
+Aldous Raeburn was a man to feel these things. He had seldom stood on
+this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him
+of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous. If it had not
+been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul. For the
+great view had an interest for him personally it could hardly have
+possessed to the same degree for any other man. On his left hand Maxwell
+Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill--a splendid pile
+which some day would be his. Behind him; through all the upland he had
+just traversed; beneath the point where he stood; along the sides of the
+hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land which also would be
+his--which, indeed, practically was already his--for his grandfather was
+an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections
+and hopes were centred. The dim churches scattered over the immediate
+plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers
+in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages
+showing here and there on the fringes of the wood--all the equipment and
+organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English
+midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated,
+under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him--upon his one
+man's brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.
+
+In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's
+tremulous elation and sense of romance. Since his Cambridge days, and of
+late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot
+in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight
+than of inspiration. Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed
+by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers. During
+his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had
+drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation which, as it
+happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men. The
+responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the
+relation of the State to the individual--of the old Radical dogma of
+free contract to the thwarting facts of social inequality; the Tory
+ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the Liberal
+ideal of self-government by the many: these commonplaces of economical
+and political discussion had very early become living and often sore
+realities in Aldous Raeburn's mind, because of the long conflict in him,
+dating from his Cambridge life, between the influences of birth and
+early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection
+which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world.
+
+Towards the close of his first year at Trinity, & young man joined the
+college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages,
+a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows. He was poor and held
+a small scholarship; but it was soon plain that his health was not equal
+to the Tripos routine, and that the prizes of the place, brilliant as
+was his intellectual endowment, were not for him. After an inward
+struggle, of which none perhaps but Aldous Raeburn had any exact
+knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to
+another career. A couple of hours' serious brainwork in the day was all
+that was ever possible to him henceforward. He spent it, as well as the
+thoughts and conversation of his less strenuous moments, on the study of
+history and sociology, with a view to joining the staff of lecturers for
+the manufacturing and country towns which the two great Universities,
+touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organise.
+He came of a stock which promised well for such a pioneer's task. His
+father had been an able factory inspector, well-known for his share in
+the inauguration and revision of certain important factory reforms; the
+son inherited a passionate humanity of soul; and added to it a magnetic
+and personal charm which soon made him a remarkable power, not only in
+his own college, but among the finer spirits of the University
+generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after
+dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way
+imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour--the river, the dons,
+the schools--to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that
+search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the
+utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative
+opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a pose, without a false
+note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish intensity and
+simplicity. To many a Trinity man in after life the memory of his slight
+figure and fair head, of the eager slightly parted mouth, of the eyes
+glowing with some inward vision, and of the gesture with which he would
+spring up at some critical point to deliver himself, standing amid his
+seated and often dissentient auditors, came back vivid and ineffaceable
+as only youth can make the image of its prophets.
+
+Upon Aldous Raeburn, Edward Hallin produced from the first a deep
+impression. The interests to which Hallin's mind soon became exclusively
+devoted--such as the systematic study of English poverty, or of the
+relation of religion to social life, reforms of the land and of the
+Church--overflowed upon Raeburn with a kindling and disturbing force.
+Edward Hallin was his gad-fly; and he had no resource, because he loved
+his tormentor.
+
+Fundamentally, the two men were widely different. Raeburn was a true son
+of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts
+of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob-reason and all
+the vulgarities of popular rhetoric; steeped, too, in a number of subtle
+prejudices, and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler
+sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and
+conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge
+discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar; his mind
+worked slowly, yet with a delicate precision; and his generally cold
+manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet,
+except in the case of his friendship with Edward Hallin, led him to much
+personal happiness.
+
+Hallin left Cambridge after a pass degree to become lecturer on
+industrial and economical questions in the northern English towns.
+Raeburn stayed on a year longer, found himself third classic and the
+winner of a Greek verse prize, and then, sacrificing the idea of a
+fellowship, returned to Maxwell Court to be his grandfather's companion
+and helper in the work of the estate, his family proposing that, after a
+few years' practical experience of the life and occupations of a country
+gentleman, he should enter Parliament and make a career in politics.
+Since then five or six years had passed, during which he had learned to
+know the estate thoroughly, and to take his normal share in the business
+and pleasures of the neighbourhood. For the last two years he had been
+his grandfather's sole agent, a poor-law guardian and magistrate
+besides, and a member of most of the various committees for social and
+educational purposes in the county. He was a sufficiently keen sportsman
+to save appearances with his class; enjoyed a walk after the partridges
+indeed, with a friend or two, as much as most men; and played the host
+at the two or three great battues of the year with a propriety which his
+grandfather however no longer mistook for enthusiasm. There was nothing
+much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank. His
+neighbours felt him to be a personality, but thought him reserved and
+difficult; he was respected, but he was not popular like his
+grandfather; people speculated as to how he would get on in Parliament,
+or whom he was to marry; but, except to the dwellers in Maxwell Court
+itself, or of late to the farmers and labourers on the estate, it would
+not have mattered much to anybody if he had not been there. Nobody ever
+connected any romantic thought with him. There was something in his
+strong build, pale but healthy aquiline face, his inconspicuous brown
+eyes and hair, which seemed from the beginning to mark him out as the
+ordinary earthy dweller in an earthy world.
+
+Nevertheless, these years had been to Aldous Raeburn years marked by an
+expansion and deepening of the whole man, such as few are capable of.
+Edward Hallin's visits to the Court, the walking tours which brought the
+two friends together almost every year in Switzerland or the Highlands,
+the course of a full and intimate correspondence, and the various calls
+made for public purposes by the enthusiast and pioneer upon the pocket
+and social power of the rich man--these things and influences, together,
+of course, with the pressure of an environing world, ever more real,
+and, on the whole, ever more oppressive, as it was better understood,
+had confronted Aldous Raeburn before now with a good many teasing
+problems of conduct and experience. His tastes, his sympathies, his
+affinities were all with the old order; but the old faiths--economical,
+social, religious--were fermenting within him in different stages of
+disintegration and reconstruction; and his reserved habit and often
+solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over-refinement. His future
+career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him. One
+thing only was clear to him--that to dogmatise about any subject under
+heaven, at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion
+absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot.
+
+So that Aldous Raeburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed
+with struggle of different kinds. And the particular point of view where
+he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his
+memory with flashes of self-realisation which were, on the whole, more
+of a torment to him than a joy. If he had not been Aldous Raeburn, or
+any other person, tied to a particular individuality, with a particular
+place and label in the world, the task of the analytic mind, in face of
+the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one!--so it
+had often seemed to him.
+
+But to-night all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made
+doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A
+transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot--a man once more
+young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at
+last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long missed,
+long hungered for.
+
+Six weeks was it since he had first seen her--this tall, straight,
+Marcella Boyce? He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing
+golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had
+walked beside him across the church fields, in that thin black dress,
+with, the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes--the small white
+teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its
+gesture, so restless, so alive! What a presence--how absorbing,
+troubling, preoccupying! No one in her company could forget her--nay,
+could fail to observe her. What ease and daring, and yet no hardness
+with it--rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion,
+beneath it all!
+
+How straight she had flung her questions at him!--her most awkward
+embarrassing questions. What other woman would have dared such
+candour--unless perhaps as a stroke of fine art--he had known women
+indeed who could have done it so. But where could be the art, the
+policy, he asked himself indignantly, in the sudden outburst of a young
+girl pleading with her companion's sense of truth and good feeling in
+behalf of those nearest to her?
+
+As to her dilemma itself, in his excitement he thought of it with
+nothing but the purest pleasure! She had let him see that she did not
+expect him to be able to do much for her, though she was ready to
+believe him her friend. Ah well--he drew a long breath. For once,
+Raeburn, strange compound that he was of the man of rank and the
+philosopher, remembered his own social power and position with an
+exultant satisfaction. No doubt Dick Boyce had misbehaved himself
+badly--the strength of Lord Maxwell's feeling was sufficient proof
+thereof. No doubt the "county," as Raeburn himself knew, in some detail,
+were disposed to leave Mellor Park severely alone. What of that? Was it
+for nothing that the Maxwells had been for generations at the head of
+the "county," i.e. of that circle of neighbouring families connected by
+the ties of ancestral friendship, or of intermarriage, on whom in this
+purely agricultural and rural district the social pleasure and comfort
+of Miss Boyce and her mother must depend?
+
+He, like Marcella, did not believe that Richard Boyce's offences were of
+the quite unpardonable order; although, owing to a certain absent and
+preoccupied temper, he had never yet taken the trouble to enquire into
+them in detail. As to any real restoration of cordiality between the
+owner of Mellor and his father's old friends and connections, that of
+course was not to be looked for; but there should be decent social
+recognition, and--in the case of Mrs. Boyce and her daughter--there
+should be homage and warm welcome, simply because she wished it, and it
+was absurd she should not have it! Raeburn, whose mind was ordinarily
+destitute of the most elementary capacity for social intrigue, began to
+plot in detail how it should be done. He relied first upon winning his
+grandfather--his popular distinguished grandfather, whose lightest word
+had weight in Brookshire. And then, he himself had two or three women
+friends in the county--not more, for women had not occupied much place
+in his thoughts till now. But they were good friends, and, from the
+social point of view, important. He would set them to work at once.
+These things should be chiefly managed by women.
+
+But no patronage! She would never bear that, the glancing proud
+creature. She must guess, indeed, let him tread as delicately as he
+might, that he and others were at work for her. But oh! she should be
+softly handled; as far as he could achieve it, she should, in a very
+little while, live and breathe compassed with warm airs of good-will and
+consideration.
+
+He felt himself happy, amazingly happy, that at the very beginning of
+his love, it should thus be open to him, in these trivial, foolish ways,
+to please and befriend her. Her social dilemma and discomfort one
+moment, indeed, made him sore for her; the next, they were a kind of
+joy, since it was they gave him this opportunity to put out a strong
+right arm.
+
+Everything about her at this moment was divine and lovely to him; all
+the qualities of her rich uneven youth which she had shown in their
+short intercourse--her rashness, her impulsiveness, her generosity. Let
+her but trust herself to him, and she should try her social experiments
+as she pleased--she should plan Utopias, and he would be her hodman to
+build them. The man perplexed with too much thinking remembered the
+girl's innocent, ignorant readiness to stamp the world's stuff anew
+after the forms of her own pitying thought, with a positive thirst of
+sympathy. The deep poetry and ideality at the root of him under all the
+weight of intellectual and critical debate leapt towards her. He thought
+of the rapid talk she had poured out upon him, after their compact of
+friendship, in their walk back to the church, of her enthusiasm for her
+Socialist friends and their ideals,--with a momentary madness of
+self-suppression and tender humility. In reality, a man like Aldous
+Raeburn is born to be the judge and touchstone of natures like Marcella
+Boyce. But the illusion of passion may deal as disturbingly with moral
+rank as with social.
+
+It was his first love. Years before, in the vacation before he went to
+college, his boyish mind had been crossed, by a fancy for a pretty
+cousin a little older than himself, who had been very kind indeed to
+Lord Maxwell's heir. But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental
+life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral
+storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to
+her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick
+of parrot phrases. She, on her part, thought him detestable; she married
+shortly afterwards, and often spoke to her husband in private of her
+"escape" from that queer fellow Aldous Raeburn.
+
+Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women, both in
+London and in the country, and had made friends with some of them in his
+quiet serious way. But none of them had roused in him even a passing
+thrill of passion. He had despised himself for it; had told himself
+again and again that he was but half a man--
+
+Ah! he had done himself injustice--he had done himself injustice!
+
+His heart was light as air. When at last the sound of a clock striking
+in the plain roused him with a start, and he sprang up from the heap of
+stones where he had been sitting in the dusk, he bent down a moment to
+give a gay caress to his dog, and then trudged off briskly home,
+whistling under the emerging stars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+By the time, however, that Aldous Raeburn came within sight of the
+windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down. The
+lover had fallen, for the time, into the background, and the capable,
+serious man of thirty, with a considerable experience of the world
+behind him, was perfectly conscious that there were many difficulties in
+his path. He could not induce his grandfather to move in the matter of
+Richard Boyce without a statement of his own feelings and aims. Nor
+would he have avoided frankness if he could. On every ground it was his
+grandfather's due. The Raeburns were reserved towards the rest of the
+world, but amongst themselves there had always been a fine tradition of
+mutual trust; and Lord Maxwell amply deserved that at this particular
+moment his grandson should maintain it.
+
+But Raeburn could not and did not flatter himself that his grandfather
+would, to begin with, receive his news even with toleration. The grim
+satisfaction with which that note about the shooting had been
+despatched, was very clear in the grandson's memory. At the same time it
+said much for the history of those long years during which the old man
+and his heir had been left to console each other for the terrible
+bereavements which had thrown them together, that Aldous Raeburn never
+for an instant feared the kind of violent outburst and opposition that
+other men in similar circumstances might have looked forward to. The
+just living of a life-time makes a man incapable of any mere selfish
+handling of another's interests--a fact on which the bystander may
+reckon.
+
+It was quite dark by the time he entered the large open-roofed hall of
+the Court.
+
+"Is his lordship in?" he asked of a passing footman.
+
+"Yes, sir--in the library. He has been asking for you, sir."
+
+Aldous turned to the right along the fine corridor lighted with Tudor
+windows to an inner quadrangle, and filled with Graeco-Roman statuary
+and sarcophagi, which made one of the principal features of the Court.
+The great house was warm and scented, and the various open doors which
+he passed on his way to the library disclosed large fire-lit rooms, with
+panelling, tapestry, pictures, books everywhere. The colour of the whole
+was dim and rich; antiquity, refinement reigned, together with an
+exquisite quiet and order. No one was to be seen, and not a voice was to
+be heard; but there was no impression of solitude. These warm,
+darkly-glowing rooms seemed to be waiting for the return of guests just
+gone out of them; not one of them but had an air of cheerful company.
+For once, as he walked through it, Aldous Raeburn spared the old house
+an affectionate possessive thought. Its size and wealth, with all that
+both implied, had often weighed upon him. To-night his breath quickened
+as he passed the range of family portraits leading to the library door.
+There was a vacant space here and there--"room for your missus, too, my
+boy, when you get her!" as his grandfather had once put it.
+
+"Why, you've had a long day, Aldous, all by yourself," said Lord
+Maxwell, turning sharply round at the sound of the opening door. "What's
+kept you so late?"
+
+His spectacles fell forward as he spoke, and the old man shut them in
+his hand, peering at his grandson through the shadows of the room. He
+was sitting by a huge fire, an "Edinburgh Review" open on his knee. Lamp
+and fire-light showed a finely-carried head, with a high wave of snowy
+hair thrown back, a long face delicately sharp in the lines, and an
+attitude instinct with the alertness of an unimpaired bodily vigour.
+
+"The birds were scarce, and we followed them a good way," said Aldous,
+as he came up to the fire. "Rickman kept me on the farm, too, a good
+while, with interminable screeds about the things he wants done for
+him."
+
+"Oh, there is no end to Rickman," said Lord Maxwell, good-humouredly.
+"He pays his rent for the amusement of getting it back again. Landowning
+will soon be the most disinterested form of philanthropy known to
+mankind. But I have some news for you! Here is a letter from Barton by
+the second post"--he named an old friend of his own, and a Cabinet
+Minister of the day. "Look at it. You will see he says they can't
+possibly carry on beyond January. Half their men are becoming
+unmanageable, and S----'s bill, to which they are committed, will
+certainly dish them. Parliament will meet in January, and he thinks an
+amendment to the Address will finish it. All this confidential, of
+course; but he saw no harm in letting me know. So now, my boy, you will
+have your work cut out for you this winter! Two or three evenings a
+week--you'll not get off with less. Nobody's plum drops into his mouth
+nowadays. Barton tells me, too, that he hears young Wharton will
+certainly stand for the Durnford division, and will be down upon us
+directly. He will make himself as disagreeable to us and the Levens as
+he can--that we may be sure of. We may be thankful for one small mercy,
+that his mother has departed this life! otherwise you and I would have
+known _furens quid femina posset_!"
+
+The old man looked up at his grandson with a humorous eye. Aldous was
+standing absently before the fire, and did not reply immediately.
+
+"Come, come, Aldous!" said Lord Maxwell with a touch of impatience,
+"don't overdo the philosopher. Though I am getting old, the next
+Government can't deny me a finger in the pie. You and I between us will
+be able to pull through two or three of the things we care about in the
+next House, with ordinary luck. It is my firm belief that the next
+election will give our side the best chance we have had for half a
+generation. Throw up your cap, sir! The world may be made of green
+cheese, but we have got to live in it!"
+
+Aldous smiled suddenly--uncontrollably--with a look which left his
+grandfather staring. He had been appealing to the man of maturity
+standing on the threshold of a possibly considerable career, and, as he
+did so, it was as though he saw the boy of eighteen reappear!
+
+"_Je ne demands pas mieux_!" said Aldous with a quick lift of the voice
+above its ordinary key. "The fact is, grandfather, I have come home with
+something in my mind very different from politics--and you must give me
+time to change the focus. I did not come home as straight as I
+might--for I wanted to be sure of myself before I spoke to you. During
+the last few weeks--"
+
+"Go on!" cried Lord Maxwell.
+
+But Aldous did not find it easy to go on. It suddenly struck him that it
+was after all absurd that he should be confiding in any one at such a
+stage, and his tongue stumbled.
+
+But he had gone too far for retreat. Lord Maxwell sprang up and seized
+him by the arms.
+
+"You are in love, sir! Out with it!"
+
+"I have seen the only woman in the world I have ever wished to marry,"
+said Aldous, flushing, but with deliberation. "Whether she will ever
+have me, I have no idea. But I can conceive no greater happiness than to
+win her. And as I want _you_, grandfather, to do something for her and
+for me, it seemed to me I had no right to keep my feelings to myself.
+Besides, I am not accustomed to--to--" His voice wavered a little. "You
+have treated me as more than a son!"
+
+Lord Maxwell pressed his arm affectionately.
+
+"My dear boy! But don't keep me on tenterhooks like this--tell me the
+name!--the name!"
+
+And two or three long meditated possibilities flashed through the old
+man's mind.
+
+Aldous replied with a certain slow stiffness--
+
+"Marcella Boyce!--Richard Boyce's daughter. I saw her first six weeks
+ago."
+
+"God bless my soul!" exclaimed Lord Maxwell, falling back a step or two,
+and staring at his companion. Aldous watched him with anxiety.
+
+"You know that fellow's history, Aldous?"
+
+"Richard Boyce? Not in detail. If you will tell me now all you know, it
+will be a help. Of course, I see that you and the neighbourhood mean to
+cut him,--and--for the sake of--of Miss Boyce and her mother, I should
+be glad to find a way out."
+
+"Good heavens!" said Lord Maxwell, beginning to pace the room, hands
+pressed behind him, head bent. "Good heavens! what a business! what an
+extraordinary business!"
+
+He stopped short in front of Aldous. "Where have you been meeting
+her--this young lady?"
+
+"At the Hardens'--sometimes in Mellor village. She goes about among the
+cottages a great deal."
+
+"You have not proposed to her?"
+
+"I was not certain of myself till to-day. Besides it would have been
+presumption so far. She has shown me nothing but the merest
+friendliness."
+
+"What, you can suppose she would refuse you!" cried Lord Maxwell, and
+could not for the life of him keep the sarcastic intonation out of his
+voice.
+
+Aldous's look showed distress. "You have not seen her, grandfather," he
+said quietly.
+
+Lord Maxwell began to pace again, trying to restrain the painful emotion
+that filled him. Of course, Aldous had been entrapped; the girl had
+played upon his pity, his chivalry--for obvious reasons.
+
+Aldous tried to soothe him, to explain, but Lord Maxwell hardly
+listened. At last he threw himself into his chair again with a long
+breath.
+
+"Give me time, Aldous--give me time. The thought of marrying my heir to
+that man's daughter knocks me over a little."
+
+There was silence again. Then Lord Maxwell looked at his watch with
+old-fashioned precision.
+
+"There is half an hour before dinner. Sit down, and let us talk this
+thing out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The conversation thus started, however, was only begun by dinner-time;
+was resumed after Miss Raeburn--the small, shrewd, bright-eyed person
+who governed Lord Maxwell's household--had withdrawn; and was continued
+in the library some time beyond his lordship's usual retiring hour. It
+was for the most part a monologue on the part of the grandfather, broken
+by occasional words from his companion; and for some time Marcella Boyce
+herself--the woman whom Aldous desired to marry--was hardly mentioned in
+it. Oppressed and tormented by a surprise which struck, or seemed to
+strike, at some of his most cherished ideals and just resentments, Lord
+Maxwell was bent upon letting his grandson know, in all their fulness,
+the reasons why no daughter of Richard Boyce could ever be, in the true
+sense, fit wife for a Raeburn.
+
+Aldous was, of course, perfectly familiar with the creed implied in it
+all. A Maxwell should give himself no airs whatever, should indeed feel
+no pride whatever, towards "men of goodwill," whether peasant,
+professional, or noble. Such airs or such feeling would be both vulgar
+and unchristian. But when it came to _marriage_, then it behoved him to
+see that "the family"--that carefully grafted and selected stock to
+which he owed so much--should suffer no loss or deterioration through
+him. Marriage with the fit woman meant for a Raeburn the preservation of
+a pure blood, of a dignified and honourable family habit, and moreover
+the securing to his children such an atmosphere of self-respect within,
+and of consideration from without, as he had himself grown up in. And a
+woman could not be fit, in this sense, who came either of an
+insignificant stock, untrained to large uses and opportunities, or of a
+stock which had degenerated, and lost its right of equal mating with the
+vigorous owners of unblemished names. Money was of course important and
+not to be despised, but the present Lord Maxwell, at any rate,
+large-minded and conscious of wealth he could never spend, laid
+comparatively little stress upon it; whereas, in his old age, the other
+instinct had but grown the stronger with him, as the world waxed more
+democratic, and the influence of the great families waned.
+
+Nor could Aldous pretend to be insensible to such feelings and beliefs.
+Supposing the daughter could be won, there was no doubt whatever that
+Richard Boyce would be a cross and burden to a Raeburn son-in-law. But
+then! After all! Love for once made philosophy easy--made class
+tradition sit light. Impatience grew; a readiness to believe Richard
+Boyce as black as Erebus and be done with it,--so that one might get to
+the point--the real point.
+
+As to the story, it came to this. In his youth, Richard Boyce had been
+the younger and favourite son of his father. He possessed some ability,
+some good looks, some manners, all of which were wanting in his loutish
+elder brother. Sacrifices were accordingly made for him. He was sent to
+the bar. When he stood for Parliament his election expenses were
+jubilantly paid, and his father afterwards maintained him with as
+generous a hand as the estate could possibly bear, often in the teeth of
+the grudging resentment of Robert his firstborn. Richard showed signs of
+making a rapid success, at any rate on the political platform. He spoke
+with facility, and grappled with the drudgery of committees during his
+first two years at Westminster in a way to win him the favourable
+attention of the Tory whips. He had a gift for modern languages, and
+spoke chiefly on foreign affairs, so that when an important Eastern
+Commission had to be appointed, in connection with some troubles in the
+Balkan States, his merits and his father's exertions with certain old
+family friends sufficed to place him upon it.
+
+The Commission was headed by a remarkable man, and was able to do
+valuable work at a moment of great public interest, under the eyes of
+Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much
+fęted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to
+see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's
+face and white head might have been observed at many a London party
+beside the small Italianate physique of his son.
+
+And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune. A certain fresh
+west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty
+at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr.
+Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world,
+and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as
+unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her
+character--a character of much complexity and stoical strength--was
+little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce
+through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him,
+and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.
+
+Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then--a crash. It
+was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife,
+and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities
+of Dick Boyce himself. First, the desire to maintain a "position," to
+make play in society with a pretty wife, and, in the City, with a
+marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more
+doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful
+than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public,
+filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours. Nor was
+this all. A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going
+badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the
+East had been elected by acclamation a member of several fashionable
+clubs, tried to retrieve himself at the gaming-table. Lastly, when money
+matters at home and abroad, when the anxieties of his wife and the
+altered manners of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons
+grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came
+upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even
+than they were before. No story could be more commonplace or more
+detestable.
+
+"Ah, how well I remember that poor old fellow--old John Boyce," said
+Lord Maxwell, slowly, shaking his stately white head over it, as he
+leant talking and musing against the mantelpiece. "I saw him the day he
+came back from the attempt to hush up the company business. I met him in
+the road, and could not help pulling up to speak to him. I was so sorry
+for him. We had been friends for many years, he and I. 'Oh, good God!'
+he said, when he saw me. 'Don't stop me--don't speak to me!' And he
+lashed his horse up--as white as a sheet--fat, fresh-coloured man that
+he was in general--and was off. I never saw him again till after his
+death. First came the trial, and Dick Boyce got three months'
+imprisonment, on a minor count, while several others of the precious lot
+he was mixed up with came in for penal servitude. There was some
+technical flaw in the evidence with regard to him, and the clever
+lawyers they put on made the most of it; but we all thought, and society
+thought, that Dick was morally as bad as any of them. Then the papers
+got hold of the gambling debts and the woman. She made a disturbance at
+his club, I believe, during the trial, while he was out on bail--anyway
+it all came out. Two or three other people were implicated in the
+gambling business--men of good family. Altogether it was one of the
+biggest scandals I remember in my time."
+
+The old man paused, the long frowning face sternly set. Aldous gazed at
+him in silence. It was certainly pretty bad--worse than he had thought.
+
+"And the wife and child?" he said presently.
+
+"Oh, poor things!"--said Lord Maxwell, forgetting everything for the
+moment but his story--"when Boyce's imprisonment was up they disappeared
+with him. His constituents held indignation meetings, of course. He gave
+up his seat, and his father allowed him a small fixed income--she had
+besides some little money of her own--which was secured him afterwards,
+I believe, on the estate during his brother's lifetime. Some of her
+people would have gladly persuaded her to leave him, for his behaviour
+towards her had been particularly odious,--and they were afraid, too, I
+think, that he might come to worse grief yet and make her life
+unbearable. But she wouldn't. And she would have no sympathy and no
+talk. I never saw her after the first year of their marriage, when she
+was a most radiant and beautiful creature. But, by all accounts of her
+behaviour at the time, she must be a remarkable woman. One of her family
+told me that she broke with all of them. She would know nobody who would
+not know him. Nor would she take money, though they were wretchedly
+poor; and Dick Boyce was not squeamish. She went off to little lodgings
+in the country or abroad with him without a word. At the same time, it
+was plain that her life was withered. She could make one great effort;
+but, according to my informant, she had no energy left for anything
+else--not even to take interest in her little girl--"
+
+Aldous made a movement.
+
+"Suppose we talk about her?" he said rather shortly.
+
+Lord Maxwell started and recollected himself. After a pause he said,
+looking down under his spectacles at his grandson with an expression in
+which discomfort strove with humour--
+
+"I see. You think we are beating about the bush. Perhaps we are. It is
+the difference between being old and being young, Aldous, my boy.
+Well--now then--for Miss Boyce. How much have you seen of her?--how deep
+has it gone? You can't wonder that I am knocked over. To bring that man
+amongst us! Why, the hound!" cried the old man, suddenly, "we could not
+even get him to come and see his father when he was dying. John had lost
+his memory mostly--had forgotten, anyway, to be angry--and just _craved_
+for Dick, for the only creature he had ever loved. With great difficulty
+I traced the man, and tried my utmost. No good! He came when his father
+no longer knew him, an hour before the end. His nerves, I understood,
+were delicate--not so delicate, however, as to prevent his being present
+at the reading of the will! I have never forgiven him that cruelty to
+the old man, and never will!"
+
+And Lord Maxwell began to pace the library again, by way of working off
+memory and indignation.
+
+Aldous watched him rather gloomily. They had now been discussing Boyce's
+criminalities in great detail for a considerable time, and nothing else
+seemed to have any power to touch--or, at any rate, to hold--Lord
+Maxwell's attention. A certain deep pride in Aldous--the pride of
+intimate affection--felt itself wounded.
+
+"I see that you have grave cause to think badly of her father," he said
+at last, rising as he spoke. "I must think how it concerns me. And
+to-morrow you must let me tell you something about her. After all, she
+has done none of these things. But I ought not to keep you up like this.
+You will remember Clarke was very emphatic about your not exhausting
+yourself at night, last time he was here."
+
+Lord Maxwell turned and stared.
+
+"Why--why, what is the matter with you, Aldous? Offended?
+Well--well--There--I _am_ an old fool!"
+
+And, walking up to his grandson, he laid an affectionate and rather
+shaking hand on the younger's shoulder.
+
+"You have a great charge upon you, Aldous--a charge for the future. It
+has upset me--I shall be calmer to-morrow. But as to any quarrel between
+us! Are you a youth, or am I a three-tailed bashaw? As to money, you
+know, I care nothing. But it goes against me, my boy, it goes against
+me, that _your_ wife should bring such a story as that with her into
+this house!"
+
+"I understand," said Aldous, wincing. "But you must see her,
+grandfather. Only, let me say it again--don't for one moment take it for
+granted that she will marry me. I never saw any one so free, so
+unspoilt, so unconventional."
+
+His eyes glowed with the pleasure of remembering her looks, her tones.
+
+Lord Maxwell withdrew his hand and shook his head slowly.
+
+"You have a great deal to offer. No woman, unless she were either
+foolish or totally unexperienced, could overlook that. Is she about
+twenty?"
+
+"About twenty."
+
+Lord Maxwell waited a moment, then, bending over the fire, shrugged his
+shoulders in mock despair.
+
+"It is evident you are out of love with me, Aldous. Why, I don't know
+yet whether she is dark or fair!"
+
+The conversation jarred on both sides. Aldous made an effort.
+
+"She is very dark," he said; "like her mother in many ways, only quite
+different in colour. To me she seems the most beautiful--the only
+beautiful woman I have ever seen. I should think she was very clever in
+some ways--and very unformed--childish almost--in others. The Hardens
+say she has done everything she could--of course it isn't much--for that
+miserable village in the time she has been there. Oh! by the way, she is
+a Socialist. She thinks that all we landowners should be done away
+with."
+
+Aldous looked round at his grandfather, so soon probably to be one of
+the lights of a Tory Cabinet, and laughed. So, to his relief, did Lord
+Maxwell.
+
+"Well, don't let her fall into young Wharton's clutches, Aldous, or he
+will be setting her to canvas. So, she is beautiful and she is
+clever--and _good_, my boy? If she comes here, she will have to fill
+your mother's and your grandmother's place."
+
+Aldous tried to reply once or twice, but failed.
+
+"If I did not feel that she were everything in herself to be loved and
+respected"--he said at last with some formality--"I should not long, as
+I do, to bring you and her together."
+
+Silence fell again. But instinctively Aldous felt that his grandfather's
+mood had grown gentler--his own task easier. He seized on the moment at
+once.
+
+"In the whole business," he said, half smiling, "there is only one thing
+clear, grandfather, and that is, that, if you will, you can do me a
+great service with Miss Boyce."
+
+Lord Maxwell turned quickly and was all sharp attention, the keen
+commanding eyes under their fine brows absorbing, as it were, expression
+and life from the rest of the blanched and wrinkled face.
+
+"You could, if you would, make matters easy for her and her mother in
+the county," said Aldous, anxious to carry it off lightly. "You could,
+if you would, without committing yourself to any personal contact with
+Boyce himself, make it possible for me to bring her here, so that you
+and my aunt might see her and judge."
+
+The old man's expression darkened.
+
+"What, take back that note, Aldous! I never wrote anything with greater
+satisfaction in my life!"
+
+"Well,--more or less," said Aldous, quietly. "A very little would do it.
+A man in Richard Boyce's position will naturally not claim very
+much--will take what he can get."
+
+"And you mean besides," said his grandfather, interrupting him, "that I
+must send your aunt to call?"
+
+"It will hardly be possible to ask Miss Boyce here unless she does!"
+said Aldous.
+
+"And you reckon that I am not likely to go to Mellor, even to see her?
+And you want me to say a word to other people--to the Winterbournes and
+the Levens, for instance?"
+
+"Precisely," said Aldous.
+
+Lord Maxwell meditated; then rose.
+
+"Let me now appease the memory of Clarke by going to bed!" (Clarke was
+his lordship's medical attendant and autocrat.) "I must sleep upon this,
+Aldous."
+
+"I only hope I shall not have tired you out."
+
+Aldous moved to extinguish a lamp standing on a table near.
+
+Suddenly his grandfather called him.
+
+"Aldous!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+But, as no words followed, Aldous turned. He saw his grandfather
+standing erect before the fire, and was startled by the emotion he
+instantly perceived in eye and mouth.
+
+"You understand, Aldous, that for twenty years--it is twenty years last
+month since your father died--you have been the blessing of my life? Oh!
+don't say anything, my boy; I don't want any more agitation. I have
+spoken strongly; it was hardly possible but that on such a matter I
+should feel strongly. But don't go away misunderstanding me--don't
+imagine for one instant that there is anything in the world that really
+matters to me in comparison with your happiness and your future!"
+
+The venerable old man wrung the hand he held, walked quickly to the
+door, and shut it behind him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later, Aldous was writing in his own sitting-room, a room on the
+first floor, at the western corner of the house, and commanding by
+daylight the falling slopes of wood below the Court, and all the wide
+expanses of the plain. To-night, too, the blinds were up, and the great
+view drawn in black and pearl, streaked with white mists in the ground
+hollows and overarched by a wide sky holding a haloed moon, lay spread
+before the windows. On a clear night Aldous felt himself stifled by
+blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with
+a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not
+interfering with the full range of his eye over the night-world without.
+He secretly believed that human beings see far too little of the night,
+and so lose a host of august or beautiful impressions, which might be
+honestly theirs if they pleased, without borrowing or stealing from
+anybody, poet or painter.
+
+The room was lined with books, partly temporary visitors from the great
+library downstairs, partly his old college books and prizes, and partly
+representing small collections for special studies. Here were a large
+number of volumes, blue books, and pamphlets, bearing on the condition
+of agriculture and the rural poor in England and abroad; there were some
+shelves devoted to general economics, and on a little table by the fire
+lay the recent numbers of various economic journals, English and
+foreign. Between the windows stood a small philosophical bookcase, the
+volumes of it full of small reference slips, and marked from end to end;
+and on the other side of the room was a revolving book-table crowded
+with miscellaneous volumes of poets, critics, and novelists--mainly,
+however, with the first two. Aldous Raeburn read few novels, and those
+with a certain impatience. His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle
+with difficult and unmanageable fact; and for that transformation and
+illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes
+take refuge and comfort, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to
+natural beauty. Hardly any novel writing, or reading, seemed to him
+worth while. A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in
+doing either.
+
+Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture--the picture of a young
+woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of
+art, yet linked in Aldous's mind with a hundred touching recollections,
+buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve. She had died
+in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her
+husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two
+years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which
+come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of
+helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.
+
+Aldous remembered his mother's death; still more his father's, that
+father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb
+upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the
+hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and
+trembling hand of the son. His boyhood had been spent under the shadow
+of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early
+realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left
+to affection and to ambition. This premature development, amid the most
+melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance--not in any
+egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact--had robbed a nervous
+and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity
+which it could ill do without. Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought
+for and too painfully loved. But for Edward Hallin he might well have
+acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's
+range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties.
+
+It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir
+of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his
+grandfather's outburst, seemed to put sleep far off. On the table before
+him stood a photograph of Hallin, besides a miniature of his mother as a
+girl. He had drawn the miniature closer to him, finding sympathy and joy
+in its youth, in the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it
+were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight.
+
+To Hallin he had already spoken of Miss Boyce, drawing her in light,
+casual, and yet sympathetic strokes as the pretty girl in a difficult
+position whom one would watch with curiosity and some pity. To-night his
+letter, which should have discussed a home colonisation scheme of
+Hallin's, had but one topic, and his pen flew.
+
+"Would you call her beautiful? I ask myself again and again, trying to
+put myself behind your eyes. She has nothing, at any rate, in common
+with the beauties we have down here, or with those my aunt bade me
+admire in London last May. The face has a strong Italian look, but not
+Italian of to-day. Do you remember the Ghirlandajo frescoes in Santa
+Maria Novella, or the side groups in Andrea's frescoes at the
+Annunziata? Among them, among the beautiful tall women of them, there
+are, I am sure, noble, freely-poised, suggestive heads like hers--hair,
+black wavy hair, folded like hers in large simple lines, and faces
+with the same long, subtle curves. It is a face of the Renaissance,
+extraordinarily beautiful, as it seems to me, in colour and expression;
+imperfect in line, as the beauty which marks the meeting point
+between antique perfection and modern character must always be. It
+has _morbidezza_--unquiet melancholy charm, then passionate
+gaiety--everything that is most modern grafted on things Greek and old.
+I am told that Burne Jones drew her several times while she was in
+London, with delight. It is the most _artistic_ beauty, having both the
+harmonies and the dissonances that a full-grown art loves.
+
+"She may be twenty or rather more. The mind has all sorts of ability;
+comes to the right conclusion by a divine instinct, ignoring the how and
+why. What does such a being want with the drudgery of learning? to such
+keenness life will be master enough. Yet she has evidently read a good
+deal--much poetry, some scattered political economy, some modern
+socialistic books, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle. She takes everything
+dramatically, imaginatively, goes straight from it to life, and back
+again. Among the young people with whom she made acquaintance while she
+was boarding in London and working at South Kensington, there seem to
+have been two brothers, both artists, and both Socialists; ardent young
+fellows, giving all their spare time to good works, who must have
+influenced her a great deal. She is full of angers and revolts, which
+you would delight in. And first of all, she is applying herself to her
+father's wretched village, which will keep her hands full. A large and
+passionate humanity plays about her. What she says often seems to me
+foolish--in the ear; but the inner sense, the heart of it, command me.
+
+"Stare as you please, Ned! Only write to me, and come down here as soon
+as you can. I can and will hide nothing from you, so you will believe me
+when I say that all is uncertain, that I know nothing, and, though I
+hope everything, may just as well fear everything too. But somehow I am
+another man, and the world shines and glows for me by day and night."
+
+Aldous Raeburn rose from his chair and, going to the window, stood
+looking out at the splendour of the autumn moon. Marcella moved across
+the whiteness of the grass; her voice was still speaking to his inward
+ear. His lips smiled; his heart was in a wild whirl of happiness.
+
+Then he walked to the table, took up his letter, read it, tore it
+across, and locked the fragments in a drawer.
+
+"Not yet, Ned--not yet, dear old fellow, even to you," he said to
+himself, as he put out his lamp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Three days passed. On the fourth Marcella returned late in the afternoon
+from a round of parish visits with Mary Harden. As she opened the oak
+doors which shut off the central hall of Mellor from the outer
+vestibule, she saw something white lying on the old cut and disused
+billiard table, which still occupied the middle of the floor till
+Richard Boyce, in the course of his economies and improvements, could
+replace it by a new one.
+
+She ran forward and took up a sheaf of cards, turning them over in a
+smiling excitement. "Viscount Maxwell," "Mr. Raeburn," "Miss Raeburn,"
+"Lady Winterbourne and the Misses Winterbourne," two cards of Lord
+Winterbourne's--all perfectly in form.
+
+Then a thought flashed upon her. "Of course it is his doing--and I asked
+him!"
+
+The cards dropped from her hand on the billiard table, and she stood
+looking at them, her pride fighting with her pleasure. There was
+something else in her feeling too--the exultation of proved power over a
+person not, as she guessed, easily influenced, especially by women.
+
+"Marcella, is that you?"
+
+It was her mother's voice. Mrs. Boyce had come in from the garden
+through the drawing-room, and was standing at the inner door of the
+hall, trying with shortsighted eyes to distinguish her daughter among
+the shadows of the great bare place. A dark day was drawing to its
+close, and there was little light left in the hall, except in one corner
+where a rainy sunset gleam struck a grim contemporary portrait of Mary
+Tudor, bringing out the obstinate mouth and the white hand holding a
+jewelled glove.
+
+Marcella turned, and by the same gleam her mother saw her flushed and
+animated look.
+
+"Any letters?" she asked.
+
+"No; but there are some cards. Oh yes, there is a note," and she pounced
+upon an envelope she had overlooked. "It is for you, mother--from the
+Court."
+
+Mrs. Boyce came up and took note and cards from her daughter's hand.
+Marcella watched her with quick breath.
+
+Her mother looked through the cards, slowly putting them down one by one
+without remark.
+
+"Oh, mother! do read the note!" Marcella could not help entreating.
+
+Mrs. Boyce drew herself together with a quick movement as though her
+daughter jarred upon her, and opened the note. Marcella dared not look
+over her. There was a dignity about her mother's lightest action, about
+every movement of her slender fingers and fine fair head, which had
+always held the daughter in check, even while she rebelled.
+
+Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.
+
+"I must go and make the tea," she said, in a light, cold tone, and
+turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had
+just been carried.
+
+Marcella followed, reading. The note was from Miss Raeburn, and it
+contained an invitation to Mrs. Boyce and her daughter to take luncheon
+at the Court on the following Friday. The note was courteously and
+kindly worded. "We should be so glad," said the writer, "to show you and
+Miss Boyce our beautiful woods while they are still at their best, in
+the way of autumn colour."
+
+"How will mamma take it?" thought Marcella anxiously. "There is not a
+word of papa!"
+
+When she entered the drawing-room, she caught her mother standing
+absently at the tea-table. The little silver caddy was still in her hand
+as though she had forgotten to put it down; and her eyes, which
+evidently saw nothing, were turned to the window, the brows frowning.
+The look of suffering for an instant was unmistakable; then she started
+at the sound of Marcella's step, and put down the caddy amid the
+delicate china crowded on the tray, with all the quiet precision of her
+ordinary manner.
+
+"You will have to wait for your tea," she said, "the water doesn't
+nearly boil."
+
+Marcella went up to the fire and, kneeling before it, put the logs with
+which it was piled together. But she could not contain herself for long.
+
+"Will you go to the Court, mamma?" she asked quickly, without turning
+round.
+
+There was a pause. Then Mrs. Boyce said drily--
+
+"Miss Raeburn's proceedings are a little unexpected. We have been here
+four months, within two miles of her, and it has never occurred to her
+to call. Now she calls and asks us to luncheon in the same afternoon.
+Either she took too little notice of us before, or she takes too much
+now--don't you think so?"
+
+Marcella was silent a moment. Should she confess? It began to occur to
+her for the first time that in her wild independence she had been taking
+liberties with her mother.
+
+"Mamma!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I asked Mr. Aldous Raeburn the other day whether everybody here was
+going to cut us! Papa told me that Lord Maxwell had written him an
+uncivil letter and--"
+
+"You--asked--Mr. Raeburn--" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly. "What do you
+mean?"
+
+Marcella turned round and met the flash of her mother's eyes.
+
+"I couldn't help it," she said in a low hurried voice. "It seemed so
+horrid to feel everybody standing aloof--we were walking together--he
+was very kind and friendly--and I asked him to explain."
+
+"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce. "And he went to his aunt--and she went to Lady
+Winterbourne--they were compassionate--and there are the cards. You have
+certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"
+
+Marcella felt an instant's fear--fear of the ironic power in the
+sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before
+the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother's fragile
+imperious beauty. Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.
+
+"You have got used to it, mamma! I feel as if it would kill me to live
+here, shut off from everybody--joining with nobody--with no friendly
+feelings or society. It was bad enough in the old lodging-house days;
+but here--why _should_ we?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.
+
+"I supposed you would ask sooner or later," she said in a low determined
+voice, with what to Marcella was a quite new note of reality in it.
+"Probably Mr. Raeburn told you--but you must of course have guessed it
+long ago--that society does not look kindly on us--and has its reasons.
+I do not deny in the least that it has its reasons. I do not accuse
+anybody, and resent nothing. But the question with me has always been,
+Shall I accept pity? I have always been able to meet it with a No! You
+are very different from me--but for you also I believe it would be the
+happiest answer."
+
+The eyes of both met--the mother's full of an indomitable fire which had
+for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter's
+troubled and miserable.
+
+"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly. "There are so many things I
+want to do here, and one can do nothing if every one is against you.
+People would be friends with you and me--and with papa too,--through us.
+Some of them wish to be kind"--she added insistently, thinking of Aldous
+Raeburn's words and expression as he bent to her at the gate--"I know
+they do. And if we can't hold our heads high because--because of things
+in the past--ought we to be so proud that we won't take their hands when
+they stretch them out--when they write so kindly and nicely as this?"
+
+And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.
+
+Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot. Then with
+a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a
+spoon near her.
+
+"You shall go," she said presently--"you wish it--then go--go by all
+means. I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage.
+One can put a great deal on health--mine is quite serviceable in the way
+of excuses. I will try and do you no harm, Marcella. If you have chosen
+your line and wish to make friends here--very well--I will do what I can
+for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life--for which, my
+dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."
+
+Marcella looked at her with dismay and a yearning she had never felt
+before.
+
+"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"
+
+There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which
+for once suggested the normal filial relation. But Mrs. Boyce did not
+waver. She had long learnt perhaps to regard Marcella as a girl
+singularly well able to take care of herself; and had recognised the
+fact with relief.
+
+"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping
+her tea--"in your interests as well as mine. You will make all the
+greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave.
+Those cards shall be properly returned, of course. For the rest--let no
+one disturb themselves till they must. And if I were you, Marcella, I
+would hardly discuss the family affairs any more--with Mr. Raeburn or
+anybody else."
+
+And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose
+power over the world about her had never extended to her mother.
+Marcella flushed and played with the fire.
+
+"You see, mamma," she said after a moment, still looking at the logs and
+the shower of sparks they made as she moved them about, "you never let
+me discuss them with you."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly; then, after a pause: "You
+will find your own line in a little while, Marcella, and you will see,
+if you so choose it, that there will be nothing unsurmountable in your
+way. One piece of advice let me give you. Don't be too _grateful_ to
+Miss Raeburn, or anybody else! You take great interest in your Boyce
+belongings, I perceive. You may remember too, perhaps, that there is
+other blood in you--and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to
+either patronage or pity."
+
+Marcella started. Her mother had never named her own kindred to her
+before that she could remember. She had known for many years that there
+was a breach between the Merritts and themselves. The newspapers had
+told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were
+fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the
+Boyces' threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could
+still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even
+a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother's
+mother. The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her
+first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was
+almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the
+Merritts.
+
+And now this note of intense personal and family pride, under which Mrs.
+Boyce's voice had for the first time quivered a little! Marcella had
+never heard it before, and it thrilled her. She sat on by the fire,
+drinking her tea and every now and then watching her companion with a
+new and painful curiosity. The tacit assumption of many years with her
+had been that her mother was a dry limited person, clever and determined
+in small ways, that affected her own family, but on the whole
+characterless as compared with other people of strong feelings and
+responsive susceptibilities. But her own character had been rapidly
+maturing of late, and her insight sharpening. During these recent weeks
+of close contact, her mother's singularity had risen in her mind to the
+dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.
+
+Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.
+
+"Your father will be in, I suppose. Yes, I hear the front door."
+
+As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a
+sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her
+dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in
+mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a
+good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and
+velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks,
+generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various
+fanciful and distinguished trifles--rings, an old chatelaine, a diamond
+brooch--which Marcella remembered, the same, and worn in the same way,
+since her childhood. Mrs. Boyce, however, wore her clothes so daintily,
+and took such scrupulous and ingenious care of them, that her dress
+cost, in truth, extremely little--certainly less than Marcella's.
+
+There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding
+of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from
+shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.
+
+"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife
+abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry
+by the fire. He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to
+trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.
+
+"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her
+silver kettle.
+
+"_I_ don't want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They
+should have done their calling long ago. There's no grace in it now; I
+don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion."
+
+But the women were silent. Marcella's attention was diverted from her
+mother to the father's small dark head and thin face. There was a great
+repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against
+circumstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural
+affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and
+silenced her. He stood in her way--terribly in her way--and yet it
+strangely seemed to her, that never before till these last few weeks had
+she felt herself a daughter.
+
+"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she took his cup; "don't
+you think you had better go at once and change?"
+
+"I'm all right," he said shortly--"as right as I'm likely to be, anyway.
+As for the shooting, it's nothing but waste of time and shoe leather. I
+shan't go out any more. The place has been clean swept by some of those
+brutes in the village--your friends, Marcella. By the way, Evelyn, I
+came across young Wharton in the road just now."
+
+"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively. "I don't remember--ought I?"
+
+"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said
+testily. "I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on. He is
+working like a horse, he tells me. Dodgson, the Raeburns' candidate, has
+got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him
+up. I like him. I won't vote for him; but I'll see fair play. I've asked
+him to come to tea here on Saturday, Evelyn. He'll be back again by the
+end of the week. He stays at Dell's farm when he comes--pretty bad
+accommodation, I should think. We must show him some civility."
+
+He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening
+under his nervous determination to assert himself--to hold up his head
+physically and morally against those who would repress him.
+
+Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly. He had passed his first
+weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and
+country friends should recognise him again and condone his
+"irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through
+his head. He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour
+if they would give him the chance--not like that miserly fool, his
+brother Robert. The past was so much past; who now was more respectable
+or more well intentioned than he? He was an impressionable imaginative
+man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he
+pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts,
+partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and
+daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store
+of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past
+catastrophe. Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after
+such a lapse? He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither
+drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child. These things, if
+the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of
+physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in him, than to
+self-conquest; but he was no doubt entitled to make the most of them.
+There were signs indeed that his forecast had been not at all
+unreasonable. His womenkind _were_ making their way. At the very moment
+when Lord Maxwell had written him a quelling letter, he had become aware
+that Marcella was on good terms with Lord Maxwell's heir. Had he not
+also been stopped that morning in a remote lane by Lord Winterbourne and
+Lord Maxwell on their way back from the meet, and had not both
+recognised and shaken hands with him? And now there were these cards.
+
+Unfortunately, in spite of Raeburn's opinion to the contrary, no man in
+such a position and with such a temperament ever gets something without
+claiming more--and more than he can conceivably or possibly get.
+Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and
+his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his
+afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So
+these were the terms he was to be on with them--the deuce take them and
+their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look
+foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men,
+soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished
+he had not answered them; he would show them in the future that he would
+eat no dirt for them or anybody else.
+
+So on the way home there had been a particular zest in his chance
+encounter with the young man who was likely to give the Raeburns and
+their candidate--so all the world said--a very great deal of trouble.
+The seat had been held to be an entirely safe one for the Maxwell
+nominee. Young Wharton, on the contrary, was making way every day, and,
+what with securing Aldous's own seat in the next division, and helping
+old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full.
+Dick Boyce was glad of it. He was a Tory; but all the same he wished
+every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential
+manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.
+
+The three sat on together for a little while in silence. Marcella kept
+her seat by the fire on the old gilt fenderstool, conscious in a
+dreamlike way of the room in front of her--the stately room with its
+stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind
+the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red
+twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to
+the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert
+Boyce--conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her
+own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on
+the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had
+he said to Lord Maxwell?--and to the Winterbournes? She wished she could
+know. She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again
+quickly. Yet it would be awkward too.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently she got up and went away to take off her things. As the door
+closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn's note, which
+Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.
+
+"They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said. "I am not going,
+but I shall send her."
+
+He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most
+contradictory effects upon him.
+
+"Why don't you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a
+moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.
+
+"I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old
+to begin again."
+
+"What! you mean to say," he asked her angrily, raising his voice, "that
+you have never _meant_ to do your duties here--the duties of your
+position?"
+
+"I did not foresee many, outside this house and land. Why should we
+change our ways? We have done very well of late. I have no mind to risk
+what I have got."
+
+He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back
+again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some
+respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on.
+His anger sank into moroseness.
+
+"Then why do you let Marcella go? What good will it do her to go about
+without her parents? People will only despise her for a girl of no
+spirit--as they ought."
+
+"It depends upon how it is done. I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs.
+Boyce. "A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of
+health. She need never give offence if she has decent wits. It will be
+understood that I do not go out, and then someone--Miss Raeburn or Lady
+Winterbourne--will take up Marcella and mother her."
+
+She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.
+
+"If you were to talk of _my_ health, it would be more to the purpose,"
+he said, with grim inconsequence. And raising his heavy lids he looked
+at her full.
+
+She got up and went over to him.
+
+"Do you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly
+you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"
+
+She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in
+their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost
+touched him. A passionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and
+kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did
+not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give
+him again.
+
+Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.
+
+"Clarke does me no good--not an atom," he said, rising. "There--don't
+you come. I Can look after myself."
+
+He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She
+put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so
+stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from
+the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more
+nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor
+God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late
+that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety
+dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."
+
+A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart--pain, new-born and
+insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous
+Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden
+invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with
+her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.
+
+But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence
+not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon
+impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.
+
+"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be
+all true what Mr. Raeburn said--probably a great deal more. Poor, poor
+mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty
+quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."
+
+Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white
+reflection in the old flawed glass.
+
+She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in
+her service. There could be no question but that he was specially
+interested in her.
+
+And he was not a man to be lightly played upon--nay, rather a singularly
+reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had been always held
+concerning him. Marcella was triumphantly conscious that he had not from
+the beginning given _her_ much trouble. But the common report of him
+made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more
+significant. Even the Hardens--so Marcella gathered from her friend and
+admirer Mary--unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the
+hastening of Christ's kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take
+note.
+
+It was not as though he were in the dark as to her antecedents. He knew
+all--at any rate, more than she did--and yet it might end in his asking
+her to marry him. What then?
+
+Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the glass! _Love_, at such a
+thought, must have sunk upon its knees and hid its face for tender
+humbleness and requital. Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty
+which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.
+
+What was stirring in her was really a passionate ambition--ambition to
+be the queen and arbitress of human lives--to be believed in by her
+friends, to make a mark for herself among women, and to make it in the
+most romantic and yet natural way, without what had always seemed to her
+the sordid and unpleasant drudgeries of the platform, of a tiresome
+co-operation with, or subordination to others who could not understand
+your ideas.
+
+Of course, if it happened, people would say that she had tried to
+capture Aldous Raeburn for his money and position's sake. Let them say
+it. People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it.
+Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what
+purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such
+a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her
+maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for
+something to carry her _deep_ into life; into the heart of its widest
+and most splendid opportunities!
+
+She threw up her hands, clasping them above her head amid her clouds of
+curly hair--a girlish excited gesture.
+
+"I could revive the straw-plaiting; give them better teaching and better
+models. The cottages should be rebuilt. Papa would willingly hand the
+village over to me if I found the money! We would have a parish
+committee to deal with the charities--oh! the Hardens would come in. The
+old people should have their pensions as of right. No hopeless old age,
+no cringing dependence! We would try co-operation on the land, and pull
+it through. And not in Mellor only. One might be the ruler, the
+regenerator of half a county!"
+
+Memory brought to mind in vivid sequence the figures and incidents of
+the afternoon, of her village round with Mary Harden.
+
+"_As the eyes of servants towards the hand of their mistress_"--the old
+words occurred to her as she thought of herself stepping in and out of
+the cottages. Then she was ashamed of herself and rejected the image
+with vehemence. Dependence was the curse of the poor. Her whole aim, of
+course, should be to teach them to stand on their own feet, to know
+themselves as men. But naturally they would be grateful, they would let
+themselves be led. Intelligence and enthusiasm give power, and ought to
+give it--power for good. No doubt, under Socialism, there will be less
+scope for either, because there will be less need. But Socialism, as a
+system, will not come in our generation. What we have to think for is
+the transition period. The Cravens had never seen that, but Marcella saw
+it. She began to feel herself a person of larger experience than they.
+
+As she undressed, it seemed to her as though she still felt the clinging
+hands of the Hurd children round her knees, and through them, symbolised
+by them, the suppliant touch of hundreds of other helpless creatures.
+
+She was just dropping to sleep when her own words to Aldous Raeburn
+flashed across her,--
+
+"Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people's lives, and look
+at the result!"
+
+She must needs laugh at herself, but it made little matter. She fell
+asleep cradled in dreams. Aldous Raeburn's final part in them was not
+great!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Mrs. Boyce wrote her note to Miss Raeburn, a note containing cold though
+civil excuses as to herself, while accepting the invitation for
+Marcella, who should be sent to the Court, either in the carriage or
+under the escort of a maid who could bring her back. Marcella found her
+mother inclined to insist punctiliously on conventions of this kind. It
+amused her, in submitting to them, to remember the free and easy ways of
+her London life. But she submitted--and not unwillingly.
+
+On the afternoon of the day which intervened between the Maxwells' call
+and her introduction to the Court, Marcella walked as usual down to the
+village. She was teeming with plans for her new kingdom, and could not
+keep herself out of it. And an entry in one of the local papers had
+suggested to her that Hurd might possibly find work in a parish some
+miles from Mellor. She must go and send him off there.
+
+When Mrs. Hurd opened the door to her, Marcella was astonished to
+perceive behind her the forms of several other persons filling up the
+narrow space of the usually solitary cottage--in fact, a tea-party.
+
+"Oh, come in, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, with some embarrassment, as though
+it occurred to her that her visitor might legitimately wonder to find a
+person of her penury entertaining company. Then, lowering her voice,
+she hurriedly explained: "There's Mrs. Brunt come in this afternoon to
+help me wi' the washin' while I finished my score of plait for the woman
+who takes 'em into town to-morrow. And there's old Patton an' his
+wife--you know 'em, miss?--them as lives in the parish houses top o' the
+common. He's walked out a few steps to-day. It's not often he's able,
+and when I see him through the door I said to 'em, 'if you'll come in
+an' take a cheer, I dessay them tea-leaves 'ull stan' another wettin'. I
+haven't got nothink else.' And there's Mrs. Jellison, she came in along
+o' the Pattons. You can't say her no, she's a queer one. Do you know
+her, miss?"
+
+"Oh, bless yer, yes, yes. She knows me!" said a high, jocular voice,
+making Mrs. Hurd start; "she couldn't be long hereabouts without makkin'
+eëaste to know me. You coom in, miss. We're not afraid o' you--Lor'
+bless you!"
+
+Mrs. Hurd stood aside for her visitor to pass in, looking round her the
+while, in some perplexity, to see whether there was a spare chair and
+room to place it. She was a delicate, willowy woman, still young in
+figure, with a fresh colour, belied by the grey circles under the eyes
+and the pinched sharpness of the features. The upper lip, which was
+pretty and childish, was raised a little over the teeth; the whole
+expression of the slightly open mouth was unusually soft and sensitive.
+On the whole, Minta Hurd was liked in the village, though she was
+thought a trifle "fine." The whole family, indeed, "kept theirsels to
+theirsels," and to find Mrs. Hurd with company was unusual. Her name,
+of course, was short for Araminta.
+
+Marcella laughed as she caught Mrs. Jellison's remarks, and made her way
+in, delighted. For the present, these village people affected her like
+figures in poetry or drama. She saw them with the eye of the imagination
+through a medium provided by Socialist discussion, or by certain phases
+of modern art; and the little scene of Mrs. Hurd's tea-party took for
+her in an instant the dramatic zest and glamour.
+
+"Look here, Mrs. Jellison," she said, going up to her; "I was just going
+to leave these apples for your grandson. Perhaps you'll take them, now
+you're here. They're quite sweet, though they look green. They're the
+best we've got, the gardener says."
+
+"Oh, they are, are they?" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly, looking up at
+her. "Well, put 'em down, miss. I dare say he'll eat 'em. He eats most
+things, and don't want no doctor's stuff nayther, though his mother do
+keep on at me for spoilin' his stummuck."
+
+"You are just fond of that boy, aren't you, Mrs. Jellison?" said
+Marcella, taking a wooden stool, the only piece of furniture left in the
+tiny cottage on which it was possible to sit, and squeezing herself into
+a corner by the fire, whence she commanded the whole group. "No! don't
+you turn Mr. Patton out of that chair, Mrs. Hurd, or I shall have to go
+away."
+
+For Mrs. Hurd, in her anxiety, was whispering in old Patton's ear that
+it might be well for him to give up her one wooden arm-chair, in which
+he was established, to Miss Boyce. But he, being old, deaf, and
+rheumatic, was slow to move, and Marcella's peremptory gesture bade her
+leave him in peace.
+
+"Well, it's you that's the young 'un, ain't it, miss?" said Mrs.
+Jellison, cheerfully. "Poor old Patton, he do get slow on his legs,
+don't you, Patton? But there, there's no helping it when you're turned
+of eighty."
+
+And she turned upon him a bright, philosophic eye, being herself a young
+thing not much over seventy, and energetic accordingly. Mrs. Jellison
+passed for the village wit, and was at least talkative and excitable
+beyond her fellows.
+
+"Well, _you_ don't seem to mind getting old, Mrs. Jellison," said
+Marcella, smiling at her.
+
+The eyes of all the old people round their tea-table were by now drawn
+irresistibly to Miss Boyce in the chimney corner, to her slim grace, and
+the splendour of her large black hat and feathers. The new squire's
+daughter had so far taken them by surprise. Some of them, however, were
+by now in the second stage of critical observation--none the less
+critical because furtive and inarticulate.
+
+"Ah?" said Mrs. Jellison, interrogatively, with a high, long-drawn note
+peculiar to her. "Well, I've never found you get forrarder wi' snarlin'
+over what you can't help. And there's mercies. When you've had a husband
+in his bed for fower year, miss, and he's took at last, you'll _know_."
+
+She nodded emphatically. Marcella laughed.
+
+"I know you were very fond of him, Mrs. Jellison, and looked after him
+very well, too."
+
+"Oh, I don't say nothin' about that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "But
+all the same you kin reckon it up, and see for yoursen. Fower year--an'
+fire upstairs, an' fire downstairs, an' fire all night, an' soomthin'
+allus wanted. An' he such an objeck afore he died! It do seem like a
+holiday now to sit a bit."
+
+And she crossed her hands on her lap with a long breath of content. A
+lock of grey hair had escaped from her bonnet, across her wrinkled
+forehead, and gave her a half-careless rakish air. Her youth of long
+ago--a youth of mad spirits, and of an extraordinary capacity for
+physical enjoyment, seemed at times to pierce to the surface again, even
+through her load of years. But in general she had a dreamy, sunny look,
+as of one fed with humorous fancies, but disinclined often to the
+trouble of communicating them.
+
+"Well, I missed my daughter, I kin tell you," said Mrs. Brunt, with a
+sigh, "though she took a deal more lookin' after nor your good man, Mrs.
+Jellison."
+
+Mrs. Brunt was a gentle, pretty old woman, who lived in another of the
+village almshouses, next door to the Pattons, and was always ready to
+help her neighbours in their domestic toils. Her last remaining
+daughter, the victim of a horrible spinal disease, had died some nine or
+ten months before the Boyces arrived at Mellor. Marcella had already
+heard the story several times, but it was part of her social gift that
+she was a good listener to such things even at the twentieth hearing.
+
+"You wouldn't have her back though," she said gently, turning towards
+the speaker.
+
+"No, I wouldn't have her back, miss," said Mrs. Brunt, raising her hand
+to brush away a tear, partly the result of feeling, partly of a
+long-established habit. "But I do miss her nights terrible! 'Mother,
+ain't it ten o'clock?--mother, look at the clock, do, mother--ain't it
+time for my stuff, mother--oh, I do _hope_ it is.' That was her stuff,
+miss, to make her sleep. And when she'd got it, she'd _groan_--you'd
+think she couldn't be asleep, and yet she was, dead-like--for two hours.
+I didn't get no rest with her, and now I don't seem to get no rest
+without her."
+
+And again Mrs. Brunt put her hand up to her eyes.
+
+"Ah, you were allus one for toilin' an' frettin'," said Mrs. Jellison,
+calmly. "A body must get through wi' it when it's there, but I don't
+hold wi' thinkin' about it when it's done."
+
+"I know one," said old Patton, slily, "that fretted about _her_ darter
+when it didn't do her no good."
+
+He had not spoken so far, but had sat with his hands on his stick, a
+spectator of the women's humours. He was a little hunched man, twisted
+and bent double with rheumatic gout, the fruit of seventy years of field
+work. His small face was almost lost, dog-like, under shaggy hair and
+overgrown eyebrows, both snow-white. He had a look of irritable
+eagerness, seldom, however, expressed in words. A sudden passion in the
+faded blue eyes; a quick spot of red in his old cheeks; these Marcella
+had often noticed in him, as though the flame of some inner furnace
+leapt. He had been a Radical and a rebel once in old rick-burning days,
+long before he lost the power in his limbs and came down to be thankful
+for one of the parish almshouses. To his social betters he was now a
+quiet and peaceable old man, well aware of the cakes and ale to be got
+by good manners; but in the depths of him there were reminiscences and
+the ghosts of passions, which were still stirred sometimes by causes not
+always intelligible to the bystander.
+
+He had rarely, however, physical energy enough to bring any
+emotion--even of mere worry at his physical ills--to the birth. The
+pathetic silence of age enwrapped him more and more. Still he could gibe
+the women sometimes, especially Mrs. Jellison, who was in general too
+clever for her company.
+
+"Oh, you may talk, Patton!" said Mrs. Jellison, with a little flash of
+excitement. "You do like to have your talk, don't you! Well, I dare say
+I _was_ orkard with Isabella. I won't go for to say I _wasn't_ orkard,
+for I _was_. She should ha' used me to 't before, if she wor took that
+way. She and I had just settled down comfortable after my old man went,
+and I didn't see no sense in it, an' I don't now. She might ha' let the
+men alone. She'd seen enough o' the worrit ov 'em."
+
+"Well, she did well for hersen," said Mrs. Brunt, with the same gentle
+melancholy. "She married a stiddy man as 'ull keep her well all her
+time, and never let her want for nothink."
+
+"A sour, wooden-faced chap as iver I knew," said Mrs. Jellison,
+grudgingly. "I don't have nothink to say to him, nor he to me. He thinks
+hissen the Grand Turk, he do, since they gi'en him his uniform, and made
+him full keeper. A nassty, domineerin' sort, I calls him. He's allus
+makin' bad blood wi' the yoong fellers when he don't need. It's the way
+he's got wi' 'im. But _I_ don't make no account of 'im, an' I let 'im
+see 't."
+
+All the tea-party grinned except Mrs. Hurd. The village was well
+acquainted with the feud between Mrs. Jellison and her son-in-law,
+George Westall, who had persuaded Isabella Jellison at the mature age of
+thirty-five to leave her mother and marry him, and was now one of Lord
+Maxwell's keepers, with good pay, and an excellent cottage some little
+way out of the village. Mrs. Jellison had never forgiven her daughter
+for deserting her, and was on lively terms of hostility with her
+son-in-law; but their only child, little Johnnie, had found the soft
+spot in his grandmother, and her favourite excitement in life, now that
+he was four years old, was to steal him from his parents and feed him on
+the things of which Isabella most vigorously disapproved.
+
+Mrs. Hurd, as has been said, did not smile. At the mention of Westall,
+she got up hastily, and began to put away the tea things.
+
+Marcella meanwhile had been sitting thoughtful.
+
+"You say Westall makes bad blood with the young men, Mrs. Jellison?" she
+said, looking up. "Is there much poaching in this village now, do you
+think?"
+
+There was a dead silence. Mrs. Hurd was at the other end of the cottage
+with her back to Marcella; at the question, her hands paused an instant
+in their work. The eyes of all the old people--of Patton and his wife,
+of Mrs. Jellison, and pretty Mrs. Brunt--were fixed on the speaker, but
+nobody said a word, not even Mrs. Jellison. Marcella coloured.
+
+"Oh, you needn't suppose--" she said, throwing her beautiful head back,
+"you needn't suppose that _I_ care about the game, or that I would ever
+be mean enough to tell anything that was told me. I know it _does_
+cause a great deal of quarrelling and bad blood. I believe it does
+here--and I should like to know more about it. I want to make up my mind
+what to think. Of course, my father has got his land and his own
+opinions. And Lord Maxwell has too. But I am not bound to think like
+either of them--I should like you to understand that. It seems to me
+right about all such things that people should enquire and find out for
+themselves."
+
+Still silence. Mrs. Jellison's mouth twitched, and she threw a sly
+provocative glance at old Patton, as though she would have liked to poke
+him in the ribs. But she was not going to help him out; and at last the
+one male in the company found himself obliged to clear his throat for
+reply.
+
+"We're old folks, most on us, miss, 'cept Mrs. Hurd. We don't hear talk
+o' things now like as we did when we were younger. If you ast Mr. Harden
+he'll tell you, I dessay."
+
+Patton allowed himself an inward chuckle. Even Mrs. Jellison, he
+thought, must admit that he knew a thing or two as to the best way of
+dealing with the gentry.
+
+But Marcella fixed him with her bright frank eyes.
+
+"I had rather ask in the village," she said. "If you don't know how it
+is now, Mr. Patton, tell me how it used to be when you were young. Was
+the preserving very strict about here? Were there often fights, with the
+keepers--long ago?--in my grandfather's days?--and do you think men
+poached because they were hungry, or because they wanted sport?"
+
+Patton looked at her fixedly a moment undecided, then her strong
+nervous youth seemed to exercise a kind of compulsion on him; perhaps,
+too, the pretty courtesy of her manner. He cleared his throat again, and
+tried to forget Mrs. Jellison, who would be sure to let him hear of it
+again, whatever he said.
+
+"Well, I can't answer for 'em, miss, I'm sure, but if you ast _me_, I
+b'lieve ther's a bit o' boath in it. Yer see it's not in human natur,
+when a man's young and 's got his blood up, as he shouldn't want ter
+have 'is sport with the wild creeturs. Perhaps he see 'em when ee's
+going to the wood with a wood cart--or he cooms across 'em in the
+turnips--wounded birds, you understan', miss, perhaps the day after the
+gentry 'as been bangin' at 'em all day. An' ee don't see, not for the
+life of 'im, why ee shouldn't have 'em. Ther's bin lots an' lots for the
+rich folks, an' he don't see why _ee_ shouldn't have a few arter they've
+enjoyed theirselves. And mebbe he's eleven shillin' a week--an'
+two-threy little chillen--you understan', miss?"
+
+"Of course I understand!" said Marcella, eagerly, her dark cheek
+flushing. "Of course I do! But there's a good deal of game given away in
+these parts, isn't there? I know Lord Maxwell does, and they say Lord
+Winterbourne gives all his labourers rabbits, almost as many as they
+want."
+
+Her questions wound old Patton up as though he had been a disused clock.
+He began to feel a whirr among his creaking wheels, a shaking of all his
+rusty mind.
+
+"Perhaps they do, miss," he said, and his wife saw that he was beginning
+to tremble. "I dessay they do--I don't say nothink agen it--though
+theer's none of it cooms my way. But that isn't all the rights on it
+nayther--no, that it ain't. The labourin' man ee's glad enough to get a
+hare or a rabbit for 'is eatin'--but there's more in it nor that, miss.
+Ee's allus in the fields, that's where it is--ee can't help seein' the
+hares and the rabbits a-comin' in and out o' the woods, if it were iver
+so. Ee knows ivery run ov ivery one on 'em; if a hare's started furthest
+corner o' t' field, he can tell yer whar she'll git in by, because he's
+allus there, you see, miss, an' it's the only thing he's got to take his
+mind off like. And then he sets a snare or two--an' ee gits very sharp
+at settin' on 'em--an' ee'll go out nights for the sport of it. Ther
+isn't many things _ee's_ got to liven him up; an' ee takes 'is chances
+o' goin' to jail--it's wuth it, ee thinks."
+
+The old man's hands on his stick shook more and more visibly. Bygones of
+his youth had come back to him.
+
+"Oh, I know! I know!" cried Marcella, with an accent half of
+indignation, half of despair. "It's the whole wretched system. It spoils
+those who've got, and those who haven't got. And there'll be no mending
+it till the _people_ get the land back again, and till the rights on it
+are common to all."
+
+"My! she do speak up, don't she?" said Mrs. Jellison, grinning again at
+her companions. Then, stooping forward with one of her wild movements,
+she caught Marcella's arm--"I'd like to hear yer tell that to Lord
+Maxwell, miss. I likes a roompus, I do."
+
+Marcella flushed and laughed.
+
+"I wouldn't mind saying that or anything else to Lord Maxwell," she said
+proudly. "I'm not ashamed of anything I think."
+
+"No, I'll bet you ain't," said Mrs. Jellison, withdrawing her hand. "Now
+then, Patton, you say what _you_ thinks. You ain't got no vote now
+you're in the parish houses--I minds that. The quality don't trouble
+_you_ at 'lection times. This yoong man, Muster Wharton, as is goin'
+round so free, promisin' yer the sun out o' the sky, iv yer'll only vote
+for 'im, so th' men say--_ee_ don't coom an' set down along o' you an'
+me, an' cocker of us up as ee do Joe Simmons or Jim Hurd here. But that
+don't matter. Yur thinkin's yur own, anyway."
+
+But she nudged him in vain. Patton had suddenly run down, and there was
+no more to be got out of him.
+
+Not only had nerves and speech failed him as they were wont, but in his
+cloudy soul there had risen, even while Marcella was speaking, the
+inevitable suspicion which dogs the relations of the poor towards the
+richer class. This young lady, with her strange talk, was the new
+squire's daughter. And the village had already made up its mind that
+Richard Boyce was "a poor sort," and "a hard sort" too, in his landlord
+capacity. He wasn't going to be any improvement on his brother--not a
+haporth! What was the good of this young woman talking, as she did, when
+there were three summonses as he, Patton, heard tell, just taken out by
+the sanitary inspector against Mr. Boyce for bad cottages? And not a
+farthing given away in the village neither, except perhaps the bits of
+food that the young lady herself brought down to the village now and
+then, for which no one, in truth, felt any cause to be particularly
+grateful. Besides, what did she mean by asking questions about the
+poaching? Old Patton knew as well as anybody else in the village, that
+during Robert Boyce's last days, and after the death of his sportsman
+son, the Mellor estate had become the haunt of poachers from far and
+near, and that the trouble had long since spread into the neighbouring
+properties, so that the Winterbourne and Maxwell keepers regarded it
+their most arduous business to keep watch on the men of Mellor. Of
+course the young woman knew it all, and she and her father wanted to
+know more. That was why she talked. Patton hardened himself against the
+creeping ways of the quality.
+
+"I don't think nought," he said roughly in answer to Mrs. Jellison.
+"Thinkin' won't come atwixt me and the parish coffin when I'm took. I've
+no call to think, I tell yer."
+
+Marcella's chest heaved with indignant feeling.
+
+"Oh, but, Mr. Patton!" she cried, leaning forward to him, "won't it
+comfort you a bit, even if you can't live to see it, to think there's a
+better time coming? There must be. People can't go on like this
+always--hating each other and trampling on each other. They're beginning
+to see it now, they are! When I was living in London, the persons I was
+with talked and thought of it all day. Some day, whenever the people
+choose--for they've got the power now they've got the vote--there'll be
+land for everybody, and in every village there'll be a council to
+manage things, and the labourer will count for just as much as the
+squire and the parson, and he'll be better educated and better fed, and
+care for many things he doesn't care for now. But all the same, if he
+wants sport and shooting, it will be there for him to get. For everybody
+will have a chance and a turn, and there'll be no bitterness between
+classes, and no hopeless pining and misery as there is now!"
+
+The girl broke off, catching her breath. It excited her to say these
+things to these people, to these poor tottering old things who had lived
+out their lives to the end under the pressure of an iron system, and had
+no lien on the future, whatever Paradise it might bring. Again the
+situation had something foreseen and dramatic in it. She saw herself, as
+the preacher, sitting on her stool beside the poor grate--she realised
+as a spectator the figures of the women and the old man played on by the
+firelight--the white, bare, damp-stained walls of the cottage, and in
+the background the fragile though still comely form of Minta Hurd, who
+was standing with her back to the dresser, and her head bent forward,
+listening to the talk while her fingers twisted the straw she plaited
+eternally from morning till night, for a wage of about 1s. 3d. a week:
+
+Her mind was all aflame with excitement and defiance--defiance of her
+father, Lord Maxwell, Aldous Raeburn. Let him come, her friend, and see
+for himself what she thought it right to do and say in this miserable
+village. Her soul challenged him, longed to provoke him! Well, she was
+soon to meet him, and in a new and more significant relation and
+environment. The fact made her perception of the whole situation the
+more rich and vibrant.
+
+Patton, while these broken thoughts and sensations were coursing through
+Marcella's head, was slowly revolving what she had been saying, and the
+others were waiting for him.
+
+At last he rolled his tongue round his dry lips and delivered himself by
+a final effort.
+
+"Them as likes, miss, may believe as how things are going to happen that
+way, but yer won't ketch me! Them as have got 'ull _keep_"--he let his
+stick sharply down on the floor--"an' them as 'aven't got 'ull 'ave to
+go without and _lump it_--as long as you're alive, miss, you mark my
+words!"
+
+"Oh, Lor', you wor allus one for makin' a poor mouth, Patton!" said Mrs.
+Jellison. She had been sitting with her arms folded across her chest,
+part absent, part amused, part malicious. "The young lady speaks
+beautiful, just like a book she do. An' she's likely to know a deal
+better nor poor persons like you and me. All _I_ kin say is,--if there's
+goin' to be dividin' up of other folks' property, when I'm gone, I hope
+George Westall won't get nothink ov it! He's bad enough as 'tis.
+Isabella 'ud have a fine time if _ee_ took to drivin' ov his carriage."
+
+The others laughed out, Marcella at their head, and Mrs. Jellison
+subsided, the corners of her mouth still twitching, and her eyes shining
+as though a host of entertaining notions were trooping through
+her--which, however, she preferred to amuse herself with rather than the
+public. Marcella looked at Patton thoughtfully.
+
+"You've been all your life in this village, haven't you, Mr. Patton?"
+she asked him.
+
+"Born top o' Witchett's Hill, miss. An' my wife here, she wor born just
+a house or two further along, an' we two bin married sixty-one year come
+next March."
+
+He had resumed his usual almshouse tone, civil and a little plaintive.
+His wife behind him smiled gently at being spoken of. She had a long
+fair face, and white hair surmounted by a battered black bonnet, a mouth
+set rather on one side, and a more observant and refined air than most
+of her neighbours. She sighed while she talked, and spoke in a delicate
+quaver.
+
+"D'ye know, miss," said Mrs. Jellison, pointing to Mrs. Patton, "as she
+kep' school when she was young?"
+
+"Did you, Mrs. Patton?" asked Marcella in her tone of sympathetic
+interest. "The school wasn't very big then, I suppose?"
+
+"About forty, miss," said Mrs. Patton, with a sigh. "There was eighteen
+the Rector paid for, and eighteen Mr. Boyce paid for, and the rest paid
+for themselves."
+
+Her voice dropped gently, and she sighed again like one weighted with an
+eternal fatigue.
+
+"And what did you teach them?"
+
+"Well, I taught them the plaitin', miss, and as much readin' and writin'
+as I knew myself. It wasn't as high as it is now, you see, miss," and a
+delicate flush dawned on the old cheek as Mrs. Patton threw a glance
+round her companions as though appealing to them not to tell stories of
+her.
+
+But Mrs. Jellison was implacable. "It wor she taught _me_," she said,
+nodding at Marcella and pointing sideways to Mrs. Patton. "She had a
+queer way wi' the hard words, I can tell yer, miss. When she couldn't
+tell 'em herself she'd never own up to it. 'Say Jerusalem, my dear, and
+pass on.' That's what she'd say, she would, sure's as you're alive! I've
+heard her do it times. An' when Isabella an' me used to read the Bible,
+nights, I'd allus rayther do 't than be beholden to me own darter. It
+gets yer through, anyway."
+
+"Well, it wor a good word," said Mrs. Patton, blushing and mildly
+defending herself. "It didn't do none of yer any harm."
+
+"Oh, an' before her, miss, I went to a school to another woman, as lived
+up Shepherd's Row. You remember her, Betsy Brunt?"
+
+Mrs. Brunt's worn eyes began already to gleam and sparkle.
+
+"Yis, I recolleck very well, Mrs. Jellison. She wor Mercy Moss, an' a
+goodish deal of trouble you'd use to get me into wi' Mercy Moss, all
+along o' your tricks."
+
+Mrs. Jellison, still with folded arms, began to rock herself gently up
+and down as though to stimulate memory.
+
+"My word, but Muster Maurice--he wor the clergyman here then, miss--wor
+set on Mercy Moss. He and his wife they flattered and cockered her up.
+Ther wor nobody like her for keepin' school, not in their eyes--till one
+midsummer--she--well she--I don't want to say nothink onpleasant--_but
+she transgressed_," said Mrs. Jellison, nodding mysteriously,
+triumphant however in the unimpeachable delicacy of her language, and
+looking round the circle for approval.
+
+"What do you say?" asked Marcella, innocently. "What did Mercy Moss do?"
+
+Mrs. Jellison's eyes danced with malice and mischief, but her mouth shut
+like a vice. Patton leaned forward on his stick, shaken with a sort of
+inward explosion; his plaintive wife laughed under her breath till she
+must needs sigh because laughter tired her old bones. Mrs. Brunt gurgled
+gently. And finally Mrs. Jellison was carried away.
+
+"Oh, my goodness me, don't you make me tell tales o' Mercy Moss!" she
+said at last, dashing the water out of her eyes with an excited
+tremulous hand. "She's bin dead and gone these forty year--married and
+buried mos' respeckable--it 'ud be a burning shame to bring up tales
+agen her now. Them as tittle-tattles about dead folks needn't look to
+lie quiet theirselves in their graves. I've said it times, and I'll say
+it again. What are you lookin' at me for, Betsy Brunt?"
+
+And Mrs. Jellison drew up suddenly with a fierce glance at Mrs. Brunt.
+
+"Why, Mrs. Jellison, I niver meant no offence," said Mrs. Brunt,
+hastily.
+
+"I won't stand no insinooating," said Mrs. Jellison, with energy. "If
+you've got soomthink agen me, you may out wi' 't an' niver mind the
+young lady."
+
+But Mrs. Brunt, much flurried, retreated amid a shower of excuses,
+pursued by her enemy, who was soon worrying the whole little company, as
+a dog worries a flock of sheep, snapping here and teasing there,
+chattering at the top of her voice in broad dialect, as she got more and
+more excited, and quite as ready to break her wit on Marcella as on
+anybody else. As for the others, most of them had known little else for
+weeks than alternations of toil and sickness; they were as much amused
+and excited to-night by Mrs. Jellison's audacities as a Londoner is by
+his favourite low comedian at his favourite music-hall. They played
+chorus to her, laughed, baited her; even old Patton was drawn against
+his will into a caustic sociability.
+
+Marcella meanwhile sat on her stool, her chin upon her hand, and her
+full glowing eyes turned upon the little spectacle, absorbing it all
+with a covetous curiosity.
+
+The light-heartedness, the power of enjoyment left in these old folk
+struck her dumb. Mrs. Brunt had an income of two-and-sixpence a week,
+_plus_ two loaves from the parish, and one of the parish or "charity"
+houses, a hovel, that is to say, of one room, scarcely fit for human
+habitation at all. She had lost five children, was allowed two shillings
+a week by two labourer sons, and earned sixpence a week--about--by
+continuous work at "the plait." Her husband had been run over by a farm
+cart and killed; up to the time of his death his earnings averaged about
+twenty-eight pounds a year. Much the same with the Pattons. They had
+lost eight children out of ten, and were now mainly supported by the
+wages of a daughter in service. Mrs. Patton had of late years suffered
+agonies and humiliations indescribable, from a terrible illness which
+the parish doctor was quite incompetent to treat, being all through a
+singularly sensitive woman, with a natural instinct for the decorous and
+the beautiful.
+
+Amazing! Starvation wages; hardships of sickness and pain; horrors of
+birth and horrors of death; wholesale losses of kindred and friends; the
+meanest surroundings; the most sordid cares--of this mingled cup of
+village fate every person in the room had drunk, and drunk deep. Yet
+here in this autumn twilight, they laughed and chattered, and
+joked--weird, wrinkled children, enjoying an hour's rough play in a
+clearing of the storm! Dependent from birth to death on squire, parson,
+parish, crushed often, and ill-treated, according to their own ideas,
+but bearing so little ill-will; amusing themselves with their own
+tragedies even, if they could but sit by a fire and drink a neighbour's
+cup of tea.
+
+Her heart swelled and burned within her. Yes, the old people were past
+hoping for; mere wreck and driftwood on the shore, the spring-tide of
+death would soon have swept them all into unremembered graves. But the
+young men and women, the children, were they too to grow up, and grow
+old like these--the same smiling, stunted, ignobly submissive creatures?
+One woman at least would do her best with her one poor life to rouse
+some of them to discontent and revolt!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The fire sank, and Mrs. Hurd made no haste to light her lamp. Soon the
+old people were dim chattering shapes in a red darkness. Mrs. Hurd still
+plaited, silent and upright, lifting her head every now and then at each
+sound upon the road.
+
+At last there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Hurd ran to open it.
+
+"Mother, I'm going your way," said a strident voice. "I'll help you home
+if you've a mind."
+
+On the threshold stood Mrs. Jellison's daughter, Mrs. Westall, with her
+little boy beside her, the woman's broad shoulders and harsh striking
+head standing out against the pale sky behind. Marcella noticed that she
+greeted none of the old people, nor they her. And as for Mrs. Hurd, as
+soon as she saw the keeper's wife, she turned her back abruptly on her
+visitor, and walked to the other end of the kitchen.
+
+"Are you comin', mother?" repeated Isabella.
+
+Mrs. Jellison grumbled, gibed at her, and made long leave-takings, while
+the daughter stood silent, waiting, and every now and then peering at
+Marcella, who had never seen her before.
+
+"I don' know where yur manners is," said Mrs. Jellison sharply to her,
+as though she had been a child of ten, "that you don't say good evenin'
+to the young lady."
+
+Mrs. Westall curtsied low, and hoped she might be excused, as it had
+grown so dark. Her tone was smooth and servile, and Marcella disliked
+her as she shook hands with her.
+
+The other old people, including Mrs. Brunt, departed a minute or two
+after the mother and daughter, and Marcella was left an instant with
+Mrs. Hurd.
+
+"Oh, thank you, thank you kindly, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, raising her
+apron to her eyes to staunch some irrepressible tears, as Marcella
+showed her the advertisement which it might possibly be worth Hurd's
+while to answer. "He'll try, you may be sure. But I can't think as how
+anythink 'ull come ov it."
+
+And then suddenly, as though something unexplained had upset her
+self-control, the poor patient creature utterly broke down. Leaning
+against the bare shelves which held their few pots and pans, she threw
+her apron over her head and burst into the forlornest weeping. "I wish I
+was dead; I wish I was dead, an' the chillen too!"
+
+Marcella hung over her, one flame of passionate pity, comforting,
+soothing, promising help. Mrs. Hurd presently recovered enough to tell
+her that Hurd had gone off that morning before it was light to a farm
+near Thame, where it had been told him he might possibly find a job.
+
+"But he'll not find it, miss, he'll not find it," she said, twisting her
+hands in a sort of restless misery; "there's nothing good happens to
+such as us. An' he wor allus a one to work if he could get it."
+
+There was a sound outside. Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short,
+deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly,
+splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long
+walking.
+
+He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the
+fire-lit gloom.
+
+"It's Miss Boyce, Jim," said his wife. "Did you hear of anythink?"
+
+"They're turnin' off hands instead of takin' ov 'em on," he said
+briefly, and fell into a chair by the grate.
+
+He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted.
+Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she
+had taken a warm interest in this man and his family. There was
+something about them which marked them out a bit from their
+fellows--whether it was the husband's strange but not repulsive
+deformity, contrasted with the touch of plaintive grace in the wife, or
+the charm of the elfish children, with their tiny stick-like arms and
+legs, and the glancing wildness of their blue eyes, under the frizzle of
+red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had
+begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant
+lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly
+because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal
+simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon
+discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours.
+At any rate, he would sit listening to her--and smoking, as she made him
+do--while she talked politics and socialism to him; and though he said
+little in return, she made the most of it, and was sure anyway that he
+was glad to see her come in, and must some time read the labour
+newspapers and Venturist leaflets she brought him, for they were always
+well thumbed before they came back to her.
+
+But to-night his sullen weariness would make no effort, and the hunted
+restless glances he threw from side to side as he sat crouching over the
+fire--the large mouth tight shut, the nostrils working--showed her that
+he would be glad when she went away.
+
+Her young exacting temper was piqued. She had been for some time trying
+to arrange their lives for them. So, in spite of his dumb resistance,
+she lingered on, questioning and suggesting. As to the advertisement she
+had brought down, he put it aside almost without looking at it. "There
+ud be a hun'erd men after it before ever he could get there," was all he
+would say to it. Then she inquired if he had been to ask the steward of
+the Maxwell Court estate for work. He did not answer, but Mrs. Hurd said
+timidly that she heard tell a new drive was to be made that winter for
+the sake of giving employment. But their own men on the estate would
+come first, and there were plenty of them out of work.
+
+"Well, but there is the game," persisted Marcella. "Isn't it possible
+they might want some extra men now the pheasant shooting has begun. I
+might go and inquire of Westall--I know him a little."
+
+The wife made a startled movement, and Hurd raised his misshapen form
+with a jerk.
+
+"Thank yer, miss, but I'll not trouble yer. I don't want nothing to do
+with Westall."
+
+And taking up a bit of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw
+it violently back into the grate. Marcella looked from one to the other
+with surprise. Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort,
+and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands.
+
+"Yes, I _shall_ tell, Jim!" she broke out. "I shall. I know Miss Boyce
+is one as ull understand--"
+
+Hurd turned round and looked at his wife full. But she persisted.
+
+"You see, miss, they don't speak, don't Jim and George Westall. When Jim
+was quite a lad he was employed at Mellor, under old Westall, George's
+father as was. Jim was 'watcher,' and young George he was assistant.
+That was in Mr. Robert's days, you understand, miss--when Master Harold
+was alive; and they took a deal o' trouble about the game. An' George
+Westall, he was allays leading the others a life--tale-bearing an'
+spyin', an' settin' his father against any of 'em as didn't give in to
+him. An', oh, he behaved _fearful_ to Jim! Jim ull tell you. Now, Jim,
+what's wrong with you--why shouldn't I tell?"
+
+For Hurd had risen, and as he and his wife looked at each other a sort
+of mute conversation seemed to pass between them. Then he turned
+angrily, and went out of the cottage by the back door into the garden.
+
+The wife sat in some agitation a moment, then she resumed. "He can't
+bear no talk about Westall--it seems to drive him silly. But I say as
+how people _should_ know."
+
+Her wavering eye seemed to interrogate her companion. Marcella was
+puzzled by her manner--it was so far from simple.
+
+"But that was long ago, surely," she said.
+
+"Yes, it wor long ago, but you don't forget them things, miss! An'
+Westall, he's just the same sort as he was then, so folks say," she
+added hurriedly. "You see Jim, miss, how he's made? His back was twisted
+that way when he was a little un. His father was a good old
+man--everybody spoke well of 'im--but his mother, she was a queer mad
+body, with red hair, just like Jim and the children, and a temper! my
+word. They do say she was an Irish girl, out of a gang as used to work
+near here--an' she let him drop one day when she was in liquor, an'
+never took no trouble about him afterwards. He was a poor sickly lad, he
+was! you'd wonder how he grew up at all. And oh! George Westall he
+treated him _cruel_. He'd kick and swear at him; then he'd dare him to
+fight, an' thrash him till the others came in, an' got him away. Then
+he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within
+an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im.
+The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was
+that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his
+hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his
+father, and next morning he told me, as he couldn't stand it no longer,
+an' he never went back no more."
+
+"And he told no one else?--he never complained?" asked Marcella,
+indignantly.
+
+"What ud ha been the good o' that, miss?" Mrs. Hurd said, wondering.
+"Nobody ud ha taken his word agen old Westall's. But he come and told
+me. I was housemaid at Lady Leven's then, an' he and his father were old
+friends of ourn. And I knew George Westall too. He used to walk out with
+me of a Sunday, just as civil as could be, and give my mother rabbits
+now and again, and do anything I'd ask him. An' I up and told him he was
+a brute to go ill-treatin' a sickly fellow as couldn't pay him back.
+That made him as cross as vinegar, an' when Jim began to be about with
+me ov a Sunday sometimes, instead of him, he got madder and madder. An'
+Jim asked me to marry him--he begged of me--an' I didn't know what to
+say. For Westall had asked me twice; an' I was afeard of Jim's health,
+an' the low wages he'd get, an' of not bein' strong myself. But one day
+I was going up a lane into Tudley End woods, an' I heard George Westall
+on tother side of the hedge with a young dog he was training. Somethin'
+crossed him, an' he flew into a passion with it. It turned me _sick_. I
+ran away and I took against him there and then. I was frightened of him.
+I duresn't trust myself, and I said to Jim I'd take him. So you can
+understan', miss, can't you, as Jim don't want to have nothing to do
+with Westall? Thank you kindly, all the same," she added, breaking off
+her narrative with the same uncertainty of manner, the same timid
+scrutiny of her visitor that Marcella had noticed before.
+
+Marcella replied that she could certainly understand.
+
+"But I suppose they've not got in each other's way of late years," she
+said as she rose to go.
+
+"Oh! no, miss, no," said Mrs. Hurd as she went hurriedly to fetch a fur
+tippet which her visitor had laid down on the dresser.
+
+"There is _one_ person I can speak to," said Marcella, as she put on the
+wrap. "And I will." Against her will she reddened a little; but she had
+not been able to help throwing out the promise. "And now, you won't
+despair, will you? You'll trust me? I could always do something."
+
+She took Mrs. Hurd's hand with a sweet look and gesture. Standing there
+in her tall vigorous youth, her furs wrapped about her, she had the air
+of protecting and guiding this poverty that could not help itself. The
+mother and wife felt herself shy, intimidated. The tears came back to
+her brown eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Miss Boyce had gone, Minta Hurd went to the fire and put it
+together, sighing all the time, her face still red and miserable.
+
+The door opened and her husband came in. He carried some potatoes in his
+great earth-stained hands.
+
+"You're goin' to put that bit of hare on? Well, mak' eëaste, do, for I'm
+starvin'. What did she want to stay all that time for? You go and get
+it. I'll blow the fire up--damn these sticks!--they're as wet as Dugnall
+pond."
+
+Nevertheless, as she sadly came and went, preparing the supper, she saw
+that he was appeased, in a better temper than before.
+
+"What did you tell 'er?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"What do you spose I'd tell her? I acted for the best. I'm always
+thinkin' for you!" she said as though with a little cry, "or we'd soon
+be in trouble--worse trouble than we are!" she added miserably.
+
+He stopped working the old bellows for a moment, and, holding his long
+chin, stared into the flames. With his deformity, his earth-stains, his
+blue eyes, his brown wrinkled skin, and his shock of red hair, he had
+the look of some strange gnome crouching there.
+
+"I don't know what you're at, I'll swear," he said after a pause. "I
+ain't in any pertickler trouble just now--if yer wouldn't send a fellow
+stumpin' the country for nothink. If you'll just let me alone I'll get a
+livin' for you and the chillen right enough. Don't you trouble
+yourself--an' hold your tongue!"
+
+She threw down her apron with a gesture of despair as she stood beside
+him, in front of the fire, watching the pan.
+
+"What am I to do, Jim, an' them chillen--when you're took to prison?"
+she asked him vehemently.
+
+"I shan't get took to prison, I tell yer. All the same, Westall got holt
+o' me this mornin'. I thought praps you'd better know."
+
+Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he
+had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them. His brutality was
+mostly assumed. He had adopted it as a mask for more than a year past,
+because he _must_ go his way, and she worried him.
+
+"Now look here," he said resolutely, "it don't matter. I'm not goin' to
+be took by Westall. I'd kill him or myself first. But he caught me
+lookin' at a snare this mornin'--it wor misty, and I didn't see no one
+comin'. It wor close to the footpath, and it worn't my snare."
+
+"'Jim, my chap,' says he, mockin', 'I'm sorry for it, but I'm going to
+search yer, so take it quietly,' says he. He had young Dynes with
+him--so I didn't say nought--I kep' as still as a mouse, an' sure enough
+he put his ugly han's into all my pockets. An' what do yer think he
+foun'?"
+
+"What?" she said breathlessly.
+
+"Nothink!" he laughed out. "Nary an end o' string, nor a kink o'
+wire--nothink. I'd hidden the two rabbits I got las' night, and all my
+bits o' things in a ditch far enough out o' his way. I just laughed at
+the look ov 'im. 'I'll have the law on yer for assault an' battery, yer
+damned miscalculatin' brute!' says I to him--'why don't yer get that boy
+there to teach yer your business?' An' off I walked. Don't you be
+afeared--'ee'll never lay hands on me!"
+
+But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she
+made the tea. He took little heed of her. He sat by the fire quivering
+and thinking. In a public-house two nights before this one, overtures
+had been made to him on behalf of a well-known gang of poachers with
+head-quarters in a neighbouring county town, who had their eyes on the
+pheasant preserves in Westall's particular beat--the Tudley End
+beat--and wanted a local watcher and accomplice. He had thought the
+matter at first too dangerous to touch. Moreover, he was at that moment
+in a period of transition, pestered by Minta to give up "the poachin',"
+and yet drawn back to it after his spring and summer of field work by
+instincts only recently revived, after long dormancy, but now hard to
+resist.
+
+Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta's wails which happened
+to reach him.
+
+"Look 'ere!" said he to her, "where ud you an' the chillen be this night
+if I 'adn't done it? 'Adn't we got rid of every stick o' stuff we iver
+'ad? 'Ere's a well-furnished place for a chap to sit in!"--he glanced
+bitterly round the bare kitchen, which had none of the little properties
+of the country poor, no chest, no set of mahogany drawers, no
+comfortable chair, nothing, but the dresser and the few rush chairs and
+the table, and a few odds and ends of crockery and household
+stuff--"wouldn't we all a bin on the parish, if we 'adn't starved
+fust--_wouldn't_ we?--jes' answer me that! _Didn't_ we sit here an'
+starve, till the bones was comin' through the chillen's skin?--didn't
+we?"
+
+That he could still argue the point with her showed the inner
+vulnerableness, the inner need of her affection and of peace with her,
+which he still felt, far as certain new habits were beginning to sweep
+him from her.
+
+"It's Westall or Jenkins (Jenkins was the village policeman) havin' the
+_law_ on yer, Jim," she said with emphasis, putting down a cup and
+looking at him--it's the thought of _that_ makes me cold in my back.
+None o' _my_ people was ever in prison--an' if it 'appened to you I
+should just die of shame!"
+
+"Then yer'd better take and read them papers there as _she_ brought," he
+said impatiently, first jerking his finger over his shoulder in the
+direction of Mellor to indicate Miss Boyce, and then pointing to a heap
+of newspapers which lay on the floor in a corner, "they'd tell yer
+summat about the shame o' _makin_' them game-laws--not o' breakin' ov
+'em. But I'm sick o' this! Where's them chillen? Why do yer let that boy
+out so late?"
+
+And opening the door he stood on the threshold looking up and down the
+village street, while Minta once more gave up the struggle, dried her
+eyes, and told herself to be cheerful. But it was hard. She was far
+better born and better educated than her husband. Her father had been a
+small master chair-maker in Wycombe, and her mother, a lackadaisical
+silly woman, had given her her "fine" name by way of additional proof
+that she and her children were something out of the common. Moreover,
+she had the conforming law-abiding instincts of the well-treated
+domestic servant, who has lived on kindly terms with the gentry and
+shared their standards. And for years after their marriage Hurd had
+allowed her to govern him. He had been so patient, so hard-working, such
+a kind husband and father, so full of a dumb wish to show her he was
+grateful to her for marrying such a fellow as he. The quarrel with
+Westall seemed to have sunk out of his mind. He never spoke to or of
+him. Low wages, the burden of quick-coming children, the bad sanitary
+conditions of their wretched cottage, and poor health, had made their
+lives one long and sordid struggle. But for years he had borne his load
+with extraordinary patience. He and his could just exist, and the man
+who had been in youth the lonely victim of his neighbours' scorn had
+found a woman to give him all herself and children to love. Hence years
+of submission, a hidden flowering time for both of them.
+
+Till that last awful winter!--the winter before Richard Boyce's
+succession to Mellor--when the farmers had been mostly ruined, and half
+the able-bodied men of Mellor had tramped "up into the smoke," as the
+village put it, in search of London work--then, out of actual sheer
+starvation--that very rare excuse of the poacher!--Hurd had gone one
+night and snared a hare on the Mellor land. Would the wife and mother
+ever forget the pure animal satisfaction of that meal, or the fearful
+joy of the next night, when he got three shillings from a local publican
+for a hare and two rabbits?
+
+But after the first relief Minta had gone in fear and trembling. For the
+old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and
+their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place
+had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying. He became
+excited, unmanageable. Very soon he was no longer content with Mellor,
+where, since the death of young Harold, the heir, the keepers had been
+dismissed, and what remained of a once numerous head of game lay open to
+the wiles of all the bold spirits of the neighbourhood. He must needs go
+on to those woods of Lord Maxwell's, which girdled the Mellor estate on
+three sides. And here he came once more across his enemy. For George
+Westall was now in the far better-paid service of the Court--and a very
+clever keeper, with designs on the head keeper's post whenever it might
+be vacant. In the case of a poacher he had the scent of one of his own
+hares. It was known to him in an incredibly short time that that "low
+caselty fellow Hurd" was attacking "his" game.
+
+Hurd, notwithstanding, was cunning itself, and Westall lay in wait for
+him in vain. Meanwhile, all the old hatred between the two men revived.
+Hurd drank this winter more than he had ever drunk yet. It was
+necessary to keep on good terms with one or two publicans who acted as
+"receivers" of the poached game of the neighbourhood. And it seemed to
+him that Westall pursued him into these low dens. The keeper--big,
+burly, prosperous--would speak to him with insolent patronage, watching
+him all the time, or with the old brutality, which Hurd dared not
+resent. Only in his excitable dwarf's sense hate grew and throve, very
+soon to monstrous proportions. Westall's menacing figure darkened all
+his sky for him. His poaching, besides a means of livelihood, became
+more and more a silent duel between him and his boyhood's tyrant.
+
+And now, after seven months of regular field-work and respectable
+living, it was all to begin again with the new winter! The same shudders
+and terrors, the same shames before the gentry and Mr. Harden!--the
+soft, timid woman with her conscience could not endure the prospect. For
+some weeks after the harvest was over she struggled. He had begun to go
+out again at nights. But she drove him to look for employment, and lived
+in tears when he failed.
+
+As for him, she knew that he was glad to fail; there was a certain ease
+and jauntiness in his air to-night as he stood calling the children:
+
+"Will!--you come in at once! Daisy!--Nellie!"
+
+Two little figures came pattering up the street in the moist October
+dusk, a third, panted behind. The girls ran in to their mother
+chattering and laughing. Hurd lifted the boy in his arm.
+
+"Where you bin, Will? What were yo out for in this nasty damp? I've
+brought yo a whole pocket full o' chestnuts, and summat else too."
+
+He carried him in to the fire and sat him on his knees. The little
+emaciated creature, flushed with the pleasure of his father's company,
+played contentedly in the intervals of coughing with the shining
+chestnuts, or ate his slice of the fine pear--the gift of a friend in
+Thame--which proved to be the "summat else" of promise. The curtains
+were close-drawn; the paraffin lamp flared on the table, and as the
+savoury smell of the hare and onions on the fire filled the kitchen, the
+whole family gathered round watching for the moment of eating. The fire
+played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's
+cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to
+smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the
+dwarf. Family affection--and the satisfaction of the simpler physical
+needs--these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour,
+to-night, the Hurds were happy.
+
+Meanwhile, in the lane outside, Marcella, as she walked home, passed a
+tall broad-shouldered man in a velveteen suit and gaiters, his gun over
+his shoulder and two dogs behind him, his pockets bulging on either
+side. He walked with a kind of military air, and touched his cap to her
+as he passed.
+
+Marcella barely nodded.
+
+"Tyrant and bully!" she thought to herself with Mrs. Hurd's story in her
+mind. "Yet no doubt he is a valuable keeper; Lord Maxwell would be sorry
+to lose him! It is the system makes such men--and must have them."
+
+The clatter of a pony carriage disturbed her thoughts. A small, elderly
+lady, in a very large mushroom hat, drove past her in the dusk and bowed
+stiffly. Marcella was so taken by surprise that she barely returned the
+bow. Then she looked after the carriage. That was Miss Raeburn.
+
+To-morrow!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+"Won't you sit nearer to the window? We are rather proud of our view at
+this time of year," said Miss Raeburn to Marcella, taking her visitor's
+jacket from her as she spoke, and laying it aside. "Lady Winterbourne is
+late, but she will come, I am sure. She is very precise about
+engagements."
+
+Marcella moved her chair nearer to the great bow-window, and looked out
+over the sloping gardens of the Court, and the autumn splendour of the
+woods girdling them in on all sides. She held her head nervously erect,
+was not apparently much inclined to talk, and Miss Raeburn, who had
+resumed her knitting within a few paces of her guest, said to herself
+presently after a few minutes' conversation on the weather and the walk
+from Mellor: "Difficult--decidedly difficult--and too much manner for a
+young girl. But the most picturesque creature I ever set eyes on!"
+
+Lord Maxwell's sister was an excellent woman, the inquisitive,
+benevolent despot of all the Maxwell villages; and one of the soundest
+Tories still left to a degenerate party and a changing time. Her brother
+and her great-nephew represented to her the flower of human kind; she
+had never been capable, and probably never would be capable, of
+quarrelling with either of them on any subject whatever. At the same
+time she had her rights with them. She was at any rate their natural
+guardian in those matters, relating to womankind, where men are
+confessedly given to folly. She had accordingly kept a shrewd eye in
+Aldous's interest on all the young ladies of the neighbourhood for many
+years past; knew perfectly well all that he might have done, and sighed
+over all that he had so far left undone.
+
+At the present moment, in spite of the even good-breeding with which she
+knitted and chattered beside Marcella, she was in truth consumed with
+curiosity, conjecture, and alarm on the subject of this Miss Boyce.
+Profoundly as they trusted each other, the Raeburns were not on the
+surface a communicative family. Neither her brother nor Aldous had so
+far bestowed any direct confidence upon her; but the course of affairs
+had, notwithstanding, aroused her very keenest attention. In the first
+place, as we know, the mistress of Maxwell Court had left Mellor and its
+new occupants unvisited; she had plainly understood it to be her
+brother's wish that she should do so. How, indeed, could you know the
+women without knowing Richard Boyce? which, according to Lord Maxwell,
+was impossible. And now it was Lord Maxwell who had suggested not only
+that after all it would be kind to call upon the poor things, who were
+heavily weighted enough already with Dick Boyce for husband and father,
+but that it would be a graceful act on his sister's part to ask the girl
+and her mother to luncheon. Dick Boyce of course must be made to keep
+his distance, but the resources of civilisation were perhaps not unequal
+to the task of discriminating, if it were prudently set about. At any
+rate Miss Raeburn gathered that she was expected to try, and instead of
+pressing her brother for explanations she held her tongue, paid her call
+forthwith, and wrote her note.
+
+But although Aldous, thinking no doubt that he had been already
+sufficiently premature, had said nothing at all as to his own feelings
+to his great-aunt, she knew perfectly well that he had said a great deal
+on the subject of Miss Boyce and her mother to Lady Winterbourne, the
+only woman in the neighbourhood with whom he was ever really
+confidential. No woman, of course, in Miss Raeburn's position, and with
+Miss Raeburn's general interest in her kind, could have been ignorant
+for any appreciable number of days after the Boyces' arrival at Mellor
+that they possessed a handsome daughter, of whom the Hardens in
+particular gave striking but, as Miss Raeburn privately thought, by no
+means wholly attractive accounts. And now, after all these somewhat
+agitating preliminaries, here was the girl established in the Court
+drawing-room, Aldous more nervous and preoccupied than she had ever seen
+him, and Lord Maxwell expressing a particular anxiety to return from his
+Board meeting in good time for luncheon, to which he had especially
+desired that Lady Winterbourne should be bidden, and no one else! It may
+well be supposed that Miss Raeburn was on the alert.
+
+As for Marcella, she was on her side keenly conscious of being observed,
+of having her way to make. Here she was alone among these formidable
+people, whose acquaintance she had in a manner compelled. Well--what
+blame? What was to prevent her from doing the same thing again
+to-morrow? Her conscience was absolutely clear. If they were not ready
+to meet her in the same spirit in which through Mr. Raeburn she had
+approached them, she would know perfectly well how to protect
+herself--above all, how to live out her life in the future without
+troubling them.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of her dignity and those inward propitiations it
+from time to time demanded, she was, in her human vivid way, full of an
+excitement and curiosity she could hardly conceal as perfectly as she
+desired--curiosity as to the great house and the life in it, especially
+as to Aldous Raeburn's part therein. She knew very little indeed of the
+class to which by birth she belonged; great houses and great people were
+strange to her. She brought her artist's and student's eyes to look at
+them with; she was determined not to be dazzled or taken in by them. At
+the same time, as she glanced every now and then round the splendid room
+in which they sat, with its Tudor ceiling, its fine pictures, its
+combination of every luxury with every refinement, she was distinctly
+conscious of a certain thrill, a romantic drawing towards the
+stateliness and power which it all implied, together with a proud and
+careless sense of equality, of kinship so to speak, which she made light
+of, but would not in reality have been without for the world.
+
+In birth and blood she had nothing to yield to the Raeburns--so her
+mother assured her. If things were to be vulgarly measured, this fact
+too must come in. But they should not be vulgarly measured. She did not
+believe in class or wealth--not at all. Only--as her mother had told
+her--she must hold her head up. An inward temper, which no doubt led to
+that excess of manner of which Miss Raeburn was meanwhile conscious.
+
+Where were the gentlemen? Marcella was beginning to resent and tire of
+the innumerable questions as to her likes and dislikes, her
+accomplishments, her friends, her opinions of Mellor and the
+neighbourhood, which this knitting lady beside her poured out upon her
+so briskly, when to her great relief the door opened and a footman
+announced "Lady Winterbourne."
+
+A very tall thin lady in black entered the room at the words. "My dear!"
+she said to Miss Raeburn, "I am very late, but the roads are abominable,
+and those horses Edward has just given me have to be taken such tiresome
+care of. I told the coachman next time he might wrap them in shawls and
+put them to bed, and _I_ should walk."
+
+"You are quite capable of it, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, kissing her.
+"We know you! Miss Boyce--Lady Winterbourne."
+
+Lady Winterbourne shook hands with a shy awkwardness which belied her
+height and stateliness. As she sat down beside Miss Raeburn the contrast
+between her and Lord Maxwell's sister was sufficiently striking. Miss
+Raeburn was short, inclined to be stout, and to a certain gay profusion
+in her attire. Her cap was made of a bright silk handkerchief edged with
+lace; round her neck were hung a number of small trinkets on various
+gold chains; she abounded too in bracelets, most of which were clearly
+old-fashioned mementos of departed relatives or friends. Her dress was
+a cheerful red verging on crimson; and her general air suggested energy,
+bustle, and a good-humoured common sense.
+
+Lady Winterbourne, on the other hand, was not only dressed from head to
+foot in severe black without an ornament; her head and face belonged
+also to the same impression, as of some strong and forcible study in
+black and white. The attitude was rigidly erect; the very dark eyes,
+under the snowy and abundant hair, had a trick of absent staring; in
+certain aspects the whole figure had a tragic, nay, formidable dignity,
+from which one expected, and sometimes got, the tone and gesture of
+tragic acting. Yet at the same time, mixed in therewith, a curious
+strain of womanish, nay childish, weakness, appealingness. Altogether, a
+great lady, and a personality--yet something else too--something
+ill-assured, timid, incongruous--hard to be defined.
+
+"I believe you have not been at Mellor long?" the new-comer asked, in a
+deep contralto voice which she dragged a little.
+
+"About seven weeks. My father and mother have been there since May."
+
+"You must of course think it a very interesting old place?"
+
+"Of course I do; I love it," said Marcella, disconcerted by the odd
+habit Lady Winterbourne had of fixing her eyes upon a person, and then,
+as it were, forgetting what she had done with them.
+
+"Oh, I haven't been there, Agneta," said the new-comer, turning after a
+pause to Miss Raeburn, "since that summer--_you_ remember that party
+when the Palmerstons came over--so long ago--twenty years!"
+
+Marcella sat stiffly upright. Lady Winterbourne grew a little nervous
+and flurried.
+
+"I don't think I ever saw your mother, Miss Boyce--I was much away from
+home about then. Oh, yes, I did once--"
+
+The speaker stopped, a sudden red suffusing her pale cheeks. She had
+felt certain somehow, at sight of Marcella, that she should say or do
+something untoward, and she had promptly justified her own prevision.
+The only time she had ever seen Mrs. Boyce had been in court, on the
+last day of the famous trial in which Richard Boyce was concerned, when
+she had made out the wife sitting closely veiled as near to her husband
+as possible, waiting for the verdict. As she had already confided this
+reminiscence to Miss Raeburn, and had forgotten she had done so, both
+ladies had a moment of embarrassment.
+
+"Mrs. Boyce, I am sorry to say, does not seem to be strong," said Miss
+Raeburn, bending over the heel of her stocking. "I wish we could have
+had the pleasure of seeing her to-day."
+
+There was a pause. Lady Winterbourne's tragic eyes were once more
+considering Marcella.
+
+"I hope you will come and see me," she said at last abruptly--"and Mrs.
+Boyce too."
+
+The voice was very soft and refined though so deep, and Marcella looking
+up was suddenly magnetised.
+
+"Yes, I will," she said, all her face melting into sensitive life.
+"Mamma won't go anywhere, but I will come, if you will ask me."
+
+"Will you come next Tuesday?" said Lady Winterbourne quickly--"come to
+tea, and I will drive you back. Mr. Raeburn told me about you. He
+says--you read a great deal."
+
+The solemnity of the last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, were
+not to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneously
+thought her extraordinarily radiant and handsome.
+
+"How can he know? Why, I have hardly talked about books to him at all."
+
+"Well! here he comes," said Lady Winterbourne, smiling suddenly; "so I
+can ask him. But I am sure he did say so."
+
+It was now Marcella's turn to colour. Aldous Raeburn crossed the room,
+greeted Lady Winterbourne, and next moment she felt her hand in his.
+
+"You did tell me, Aldous, didn't you," said Lady Winterbourne, "that
+Miss Boyce was a great reader?"
+
+The speaker had known Aldous Raeburn as a boy, and was, moreover, a sort
+of cousin, which explained the Christian name.
+
+Aldous smiled.
+
+"I said I thought Miss Boyce was like you and me, and had a weakness
+that way, Lady Winterbourne. But I won't be cross-examined!"
+
+"I don't think I am a great reader," said Marcella, bluntly--"at least I
+read a great deal, but I hardly ever read a book through. I haven't
+patience."
+
+"You want to get at everything so quickly?" said Miss Raeburn, looking
+up sharply.
+
+"I suppose so!" said Marcella. "There seems to be always a hundred
+things tearing one different ways, and no time for any of them."
+
+"Yes, when one is young one feels like that," said Lady Winterbourne,
+sighing. "When one is old one accepts one's limitations. When I was
+twenty I never thought that I should still be an ignorant and
+discontented woman at nearly seventy."
+
+"It is because you are so young still, Lady Winterbourne, that you feel
+so," said Aldous, laughing at her, as one does at an old friend. "Why,
+you are younger than any of us! I feel all brushed and stirred up--a boy
+at school again--after I have been to see you!"
+
+"Well, I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Lady Winterbourne,
+sighing again. Then she looked at the pair beside her--at the alert
+brightness in the man's strong and quiet face as he sat stooping
+forward, with his hands upon his knees, hardly able to keep his eyes for
+an instant from the dark apparition beside him--at the girl's evident
+shyness and pride.
+
+"My dear!" she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heard
+what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a
+baby? It was born with four teeth!"
+
+Miss Raeburn's astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two old
+friends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne's
+numerous family, which was clearly meant for a _tęte-ŕ-tęte_.
+
+"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour,
+after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her
+walk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my
+grandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier than
+this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept
+him an unconscionable time."
+
+Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room
+where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the
+wall from side to side.
+
+"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What a
+delicious thing to live with."
+
+And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints,
+suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in
+flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses.
+Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and
+pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled
+and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It
+was Italy at the great moment--subtle, rich, exuberant.
+
+Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.
+
+"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my special
+delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a
+garret. I am not sure that I don't in my heart prefer it to any of the
+pictures."
+
+"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it--"look at them--the irises,
+the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to have
+when one was small of what it would be like to have _flowers enough_. I
+was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always
+cheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, and
+I found one here and one there--but such a beggarly, wretched few, for
+all one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself
+by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this--yes, just like
+this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one's
+hands in and gather and gather till one was really _satisfied_! That is
+the worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough of
+anything. One day it's flowers--but the next day it is pudding--and the
+next frocks."
+
+Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant to
+feel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admiration
+and deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck,
+and vibrated happily.
+
+"Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will make
+up to you!" he said, smiling at her. "But now, I have been wondering to
+myself in my room upstairs what you would like to see. There are a good
+many treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because you
+are an artist. But you shall not be bored with them! You shall see what
+and as much as you like. You had about a quarter of an hour's talk with
+my aunt, did you not?" he asked, in a quite different tone.
+
+So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance,
+he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his own
+purposes! Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into her
+cheek.
+
+"Miss Raeburn was very kind," she said, with a return of shyness, which
+passed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring. "Yes,
+she was very kind!--but all the same she doesn't like me--I don't think
+she is going to like me--I am not her sort."
+
+"Have you been talking Socialism to her?" he asked her, smiling.
+
+"No, not yet--not yet," she said emphatically. "But I am dreadfully
+uncertain--I can't always hold my tongue--I am afraid you will be sorry
+you took me up."
+
+"Are you so aggressive? But Aunt Neta is so mild!--she wouldn't hurt a
+fly. She mothers every one in the house and out of it. The only people
+she is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will wear feathers in
+their hats!"
+
+"There!" cried Marcella, indignantly. "Why shouldn't they wear feathers
+in their hats? It is their form of beauty--their tapestry!"
+
+"But if one can't have both feathers and boots?" he asked her humbly, a
+twinkle in his grey eye. "If one hasn't boots, one may catch a cold and
+die of it--which is, after all, worse than going featherless."
+
+"But why _can't_ they have feathers and boots? It is because
+you--we--have got too much. You have the tapestry--and--and the
+pictures"--she turned and looked round the room--"and this wonderful
+house--and the park. Oh, no--I think it is Miss Raeburn has too many
+feathers!"
+
+"Perhaps it is," he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing and
+saddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled to
+him. "You see I am in a difficulty. I want to show you our feathers. I
+think they would please you--and you make me ashamed of them."
+
+"How absurd!" cried Marcella, "when I told you how I liked the school
+children bobbing to me!"
+
+They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start--"Ah, here is my
+grandfather!"
+
+Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, after
+greeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce. He saw the old man's
+somewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes which
+marked the first effect of Marcella's form and presence, the bow, the
+stately shake of the hand. The lover hearing his own heart beat,
+realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.
+
+"You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to your
+grandfather," said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch,
+Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne. "He was one of
+my dearest friends."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't know much about him," said Marcella, rather bluntly,
+"except what I have got out of old letters. I never saw him that I
+remember."
+
+Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a great
+wish to talk to her, and make her talk. He had pleasant things to say
+about Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and some
+conversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to a
+discussion of the part played by the different local families in the
+Civil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried in
+various shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease with
+herself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the local
+brotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he could
+not but divine.
+
+The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with an
+independence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life. She
+was not in the least abashed or shy. Yet it was clear that Lord
+Maxwell's first impressions were favourable. Aldous caught every now and
+then his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantly
+withdrawn--comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, and
+tone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn's wife should
+be. How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely
+real! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its
+Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding
+the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and
+silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving
+servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the
+dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive,
+extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterly
+unlike any other woman he had ever seen--every detail of it was charged
+to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.
+
+For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is,
+almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole
+nature, into the second stage--the stage of anxiety, incredulity.
+Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning,
+seemed to him not nearer, but further from him. She was terribly on her
+dignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown
+him on that walk, beside the gate? There had been a touch of it, a
+divine touch, before luncheon. How could he get her to himself again?
+
+Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic--the
+badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent
+depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.
+
+"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said Lord
+Maxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean. To give money is easy
+enough. Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and
+thought no more of it. We don't get through so easily."
+
+"No," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "It weighs one down. Last winter
+was a nightmare. The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!--though we
+seemed to be always giving. And in the middle of it Edward would buy me
+a new set of sables. I begged him not, but he laughed at me."
+
+"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, "if nobody bought
+sables, there'd be other poor people up in Russia, isn't it?--or
+Hudson's Bay?--badly off. One has, to think of that. Oh, you needn't
+talk, Aldous! I know you say it's a fallacy. _I_ call it common sense."
+
+She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago left
+his great-aunt to work out her own economics. And, anyway, she saw that
+he was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne in
+watching Miss Boyce.
+
+"It's precisely as Lord Maxwell says," replied Lady Winterbourne; "that
+kind of thing used to satisfy everybody. And our grandmothers were very
+good women. I don't know why we, who give ourselves so much more trouble
+than they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they went
+free."
+
+She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, looking
+round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.
+
+"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heard
+tales of Miss Boyce's opinions!" said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, with
+an old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.
+
+Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her
+head was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start.
+She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his
+native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a
+girl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.
+
+"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.
+
+"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "We
+can't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."
+
+Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which
+escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.
+
+"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We
+Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what
+we can get out of both."
+
+"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"
+
+Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a
+morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at
+luncheon.
+
+"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I
+ought to be--I am in my conscience."
+
+"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition
+of most of us?"
+
+"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm
+roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a
+Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries
+and precedences--the worst part of one--that makes me waver, makes me a
+traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor
+often, I know."
+
+"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and
+hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"
+
+"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after
+a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me
+worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty--such
+mutilation of mind and body--were meant to go on for ever!"
+
+Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous
+should find those eyes of hers superb?
+
+"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her mildly,
+"that if all property were divided to-morrow the force of natural
+inequality would not have undone all the work the day after, and given
+us back our poor?"
+
+The "newspaper cant" of this remark, as the Cravens would have put it,
+brought a contemptuous look for an instant into the girl's face. She
+began to talk eagerly and cleverly, showing a very fair training in the
+catch words of the school, and a good memory--as one uncomfortable
+person at the table soon perceived--for some of the leading arguments
+and illustrations of a book of Venturist Essays which had lately been
+much read and talked of in London.
+
+Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, and
+the interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged into
+history, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute of
+Labourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other great
+matters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, and
+all with the same utter oblivion--so it seemed to her stiff indignant
+hostess at the other end of the table--of the manners and modesty proper
+to a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce's
+daughter!
+
+Aldous struck in now and then, trying to soothe her by supporting her to
+a certain extent, and so divert the conversation. But Marcella was soon
+too excited to be managed; and she had her say; a very strong say often
+as far as language went: there could be no doubt of that.
+
+"Ah, well," said Lord Maxwell, wincing at last under some of her
+phrases, in spite of his courteous _savoir-faire_, "I see you are of the
+same opinion as a good man whose book I took up yesterday: 'The
+landlords of England have always shown a mean and malignant passion for
+profiting by the miseries of others?' Well, Aldous, my boy, we are
+judged, you and I--no help for it!"
+
+The man whose temper and rule had made the prosperity of a whole country
+side for nearly forty years, looked at his grandson with twinkling eyes.
+Miss Raeburn was speechless. Lady Winterbourne was absently staring at
+Marcella, a spot of red on each pale cheek.
+
+Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.
+
+"Of course, you think me very ridiculous," she said, with a tremulous
+change of tone. "I suppose I am. And I am as inconsistent as anybody--I
+hate myself for it. Very often when anybody talks to me on the other
+side, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists: they
+always told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker. But it
+can't make any difference to one's _feeling_: nothing touches that."
+
+She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing--
+
+"It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see the
+places the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, and
+one passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudging
+back from her work; when one realises that they have no _rights_ when
+they come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which _we_, who
+have everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that every
+one of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than I
+shall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state of
+things is _somehow_ wrong and topsy-turvy and _wicked_." Her voice rose
+a little, every emphasis grew more passionate. "And if I don't do
+something--the little such a person as I can--to alter it before I die,
+I might as well never have lived."
+
+Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his
+mouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was a
+forcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal
+conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?
+
+Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:
+
+"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with
+you. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."
+
+The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.
+
+"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath
+from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally
+characteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once,
+before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it--not at
+all. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should
+do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine.
+Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choose
+between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave
+nobody--not even the richest--more than four hundred a year."
+
+"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road,"
+said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have a
+maid."
+
+"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. But
+I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your _heart_ and
+_conscience_ have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with your
+class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My
+grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving
+home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer
+who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She
+stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and
+then--the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she
+drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with
+more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power
+of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"--and she laid her
+thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's
+arm--"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of
+_right_ in our place and position--at least I find I have. In the old
+days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down
+with a strong hand."
+
+"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were
+violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will
+see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will
+not be _we_--not the landowners or the capitalists--who will put it
+down. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to
+lose--a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built
+through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their
+own savings--it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friends
+down so far as they represent any real attack on property--and brutally,
+too, I fear, if need be."
+
+"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never can
+see how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one _rejoice_ in
+it? How can any one _wish_ that the present state of things should go
+on? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, and
+the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of
+course, the poaching--"
+
+Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brother
+was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let such
+talk go on? It was too unseemly.
+
+Lord Maxwell only laughed. "My dear young lady," he said, much amused,
+"are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher?
+Disillusion lies that way!--it does indeed. Why--Aldous!--I have been
+hearing such tales from Westall this morning. I stopped at Corbett's
+farm a minute or two on the way home, and met Westall at the gate coming
+out. He says he and his men are being harried to death round about
+Tudley End by a gang of men that come, he thinks, from Oxford, a driving
+gang with a gig, who come at night or in the early morning--the smartest
+rascals out, impossible to catch. But he says he thinks he will soon
+have his hand on the local accomplice--a Mellor man--a man named Hurd:
+not one of our labourers, I think."
+
+"Hurd!" cried Marcella, in dismay. "Oh no, it _can't_ be--impossible!"
+
+Lord Maxwell looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"Do you know any Hurds? I am afraid your father will find that Mellor is
+a bad place for poaching."
+
+"If it is, it is because they are so starved and miserable," said
+Marcella, trying hard to speak coolly, but excited almost beyond bounds
+by the conversation and all that it implied. "And the Hurds--I don't
+believe it a bit! But if it were true--oh! they have been in such
+straits--they were out of work most of last winter; they are out of work
+now, No one _could_ grudge them. I told you about them, didn't I?" she
+said, suddenly glancing at Aldous. "I was going to ask you to-day, if
+you could help them?" Her prophetess air had altogether left her. She
+felt ready to cry; and nothing could have been more womanish than her
+tone.
+
+He bent across to her. Miss Raeburn, invaded by a new and intolerable
+sense of calamity, could have beaten him for what she read in his
+shining eyes, and in the flush on his usually pale cheek.
+
+"Is he still out of work?" he said. "And you are unhappy about it? But I
+am sure we can find him work: I am just now planning improvements at the
+north end of the park. We can take him on; I am certain of it. You must
+give me his full name and address."
+
+"And let him beware of Westall," said Lord Maxwell, kindly. "Give him a
+hint, Miss Boyce, and nobody will rake up bygones. There is nothing I
+dislike so much as rows about the shooting. All the keepers know that."
+
+"And of course," said Miss Raeburn, coldly, "if the family are in real
+distress there are plenty of people at hand to assist them. The man need
+not steal."
+
+"Oh, charity!" cried Marcella, her lip curling.
+
+"A worse crime than poaching, you think," said Lord Maxwell, laughing.
+"Well, these are big subjects. I confess, after my morning with the
+lunatics, I am half inclined, like Horace Walpole, to think everything
+serious ridiculous. At any rate shall we see what light a cup of coffee
+throws upon it? Agneta, shall we adjourn?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Lord Maxwell closed the drawing-room door behind Aldous and Marcella.
+Aldous had proposed to take their guest to see the picture gallery,
+which was on the first floor, and had found her willing.
+
+The old man came back to the two other women, running his hand nervously
+through his shock of white hair--a gesture which Miss Raeburn well knew
+to show some disturbance of mind.
+
+"I should like to have your opinion of that young lady," he said
+deliberately, taking a chair immediately in front of them.
+
+"I like her," said Lady Winterbourne, instantly. "Of course she is crude
+and extravagant, and does not know quite what she may say. But all that
+will improve. I like her, and shall make friends with her."
+
+Miss Raeburn threw up her hands in angry amazement.
+
+"Most forward, conceited, and ill-mannered," she said with energy. "I am
+certain she has no proper principles, and as to what her religious views
+may be, I dread to think of them! If _that_ is a specimen of the girls
+of the present day--"
+
+"My dear," interrupted Lord Maxwell, laying a hand on her knee, "Lady
+Winterbourne is an old friend, a very old friend. I think we may be
+frank before her, and I don't wish you to say things you may regret.
+Aldous has made up his mind to get that girl to marry him, if he can."
+
+Lady Winterbourne was silent, having in fact been forewarned by that odd
+little interview with Aldous in her own drawing-room, when he had
+suddenly asked her to call on Mrs. Boyce. But she looked at Miss
+Raeburn. That lady took up her knitting, laid it down again, resumed it,
+then broke out--
+
+"How did it come about? Where have they been meeting?"
+
+"At the Hardens mostly. He seems to have been struck from the beginning,
+and now there is no question as to his determination. But she may not
+have him; he professes to be still entirely in the dark."
+
+"Oh!" cried Miss Raeburn, with a scornful shrug, meant to express all
+possible incredulity. Then she began to knit fast and furiously, and
+presently said in great agitation,--
+
+"What can he be thinking of? She is very handsome, of course, but--"
+then her words failed her. "When Aldous remembers his mother, how can
+he?--undisciplined! self-willed! Why, she laid down the law to _you_,
+Henry, as though you had nothing to do but to take your opinions from a
+chit of a girl like her. Oh! no, no; I really can't; you must give me
+time. And her father--the disgrace and trouble of it! I tell you, Henry,
+it will bring misfortune!"
+
+Lord Maxwell was much troubled. Certainly he should have talked to
+Agneta beforehand. But the fact was he had his cowardice, like other
+men, and he had been trusting to the girl herself, to this beauty he
+heard so much of, to soften the first shock of the matter to the present
+mistress of the Court.
+
+"We will hope not, Agneta," he said gravely. "We will hope not. But you
+must remember Aldous is no boy. I cannot coerce him. I see the
+difficulties, and I have put them before him. But I am more favourably
+struck with the girl than you are. And anyway, if it comes about, we
+must make the best of it."
+
+Miss Raeburn made no answer, but pretended to set her heel, her needles
+shaking. Lady Winterbourne was very sorry for her two old friends.
+
+"Wait a little," she said, laying her hand lightly on Miss Raeburn's.
+"No doubt with her opinions she felt specially drawn to assert herself
+to-day. One can imagine it very well of a girl, and a generous girl in
+her position. You will see other sides of her, I am sure you will. And
+you would never--you could never--make a breach with Aldous."
+
+"We must all remember," said Lord Maxwell, getting up and beginning to
+walk up and down beside them, "that Aldous is in no way dependent upon
+me. He has his own resources. He could leave us to-morrow. Dependent on
+me! It is the other way, I think, Agneta--don't you?"
+
+He stopped and looked at her, and she returned his look in spite of
+herself. A tear dropped on her stocking which she hastily brushed away.
+
+"Come, now," said Lord Maxwell, seating himself; "let us talk it over
+rationally. Don't go, Lady Winterbourne."
+
+"Why, they may be settling it at this moment," cried Miss Raeburn,
+half-choked, and feeling as though "the skies were impious not to fall."
+
+"No, no!" he said smiling. "Not yet, I think. But let us prepare
+ourselves."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile the cause of all this agitation was sitting languidly in a
+great Louis Quinze chair in the picture gallery upstairs, with Aldous
+beside her. She had taken off her big hat as though it oppressed her,
+and her black head lay against a corner of the chair in fine contrast to
+its mellowed golds and crimsons. Opposite to her were two famous Holbein
+portraits, at which she looked from time to time as though attracted to
+them in spite of herself, by some trained sense which could not be
+silenced. But she was not communicative, and Aldous was anxious.
+
+"Do you think I was rude to your grandfather?" she asked him at last
+abruptly, cutting dead short some information she had stiffly asked him
+for just before, as to the date of the gallery and its collection.
+
+"Rude!" he said startled. "Not at all. Not in the least. Do you suppose
+we are made of such brittle stuff, we poor landowners, that we can't
+stand an argument now and then?"
+
+"Your aunt thought I was rude," she said unheeding. "I think I was. But
+a house like this excites me." And with a little reckless gesture she
+turned her head over her shoulder and looked down the gallery. A
+Velasquez was beside her; a great Titian over the way; a priceless
+Rembrandt beside it. On her right hand stood a chair of carved steel,
+presented by a German town to a German emperor, which, had not its
+equal in Europe; the brocade draping the deep windows in front of her
+had been specially made to grace a state visit to the house of Charles
+II.
+
+"At Mellor," she went on, "we are old and tumble-down. The rain comes
+in; there are no shutters to the big hall, and we can't afford to put
+them--we can't afford even to have the pictures cleaned. I can pity the
+house and nurse it, as I do the village. But here--"
+
+And looking about her, she gave a significant shrug.
+
+"What--our feathers again!" he said laughing. "But consider. Even you
+allow that Socialism cannot begin to-morrow. There must be a transition
+time, and clearly till the State is ready to take over the historical
+houses and their contents, the present nominal owners of them are bound,
+if they can, to take care of them. Otherwise the State will be some day
+defrauded."
+
+She could not be insensible to the charm of his manner towards her.
+There was in it, no doubt, the natural force and weight of the man older
+and better informed than his companion, and amused every now and then by
+her extravagance. But even her irritable pride could not take offence.
+For the intellectual dissent she felt at bottom was tempered by a moral
+sympathy of which the gentleness and warmth touched and moved her in
+spite of herself. And now that they were alone he could express himself.
+So long as they had been in company he had seemed to her, as often
+before, shy, hesitating, and ineffective. But with the disappearance of
+spectators, who represented to him, no doubt, the harassing claim of
+the critical judgment, all was freer, more assured, more natural.
+
+She leant her chin on her hand, considering his plea.
+
+"Supposing you live long enough to see the State take it, shall you be
+able to reconcile yourself to it? Or shall you feel it a wrong, and go
+out a rebel?"
+
+A delightful smile was beginning to dance in the dark eyes. She was
+recovering the tension of her talk with Lord Maxwell.
+
+"All must depend, you see, on the conditions--on how you and your
+friends are going to manage the transition. You may persuade
+me--conceivably--or you may eject me with violence."
+
+"Oh, no!" she interposed quickly. "There will be no violence. Only we
+shall gradually reduce your wages. Of course, we can't do without
+leaders--we don't want to do away with the captains of any industry,
+agricultural or manufacturing. Only we think you overpaid. You must be
+content with less."
+
+"Don't linger out the process," he said laughing, "otherwise it will be
+painful. The people who are condemned to live in these houses before the
+Commune takes to them, while your graduated land and income taxes are
+slowly starving them out, will have a bad time of it."
+
+"Well, it will be your first bad time! Think of the labourer now, with
+five children, of school age, on twelve shillings a week--think of the
+sweated women in London."
+
+"Ah, think of them," he said in a different tone.
+
+There was a pause of silence.
+
+"No!" said Marcella, springing up. "Don't let's think of them. I get to
+believe the whole thing a _pose_ in myself and other people. Let's go
+back to the pictures. Do you think Titian 'sweated' his drapery
+men--paid them starvation rates, and grew rich on their labour? Very
+likely. All the same, that blue woman"--she pointed to a bending
+Magdalen--"will be a joy to all time."
+
+They wandered through the gallery, and she was now all curiosity,
+pleasure, and intelligent interest, as though she had thrown off an
+oppression. Then they emerged into the upper corridor answering to the
+corridor of the antiques below. This also was hung with pictures,
+principally family portraits of the second order, dating back to the
+Tudors--a fine series of berobed and bejewelled personages, wherein
+clothes pre-dominated and character was unimportant.
+
+Marcella's eye was glancing along the brilliant colour of the wall,
+taking rapid note of jewelled necks surmounting stiff embroidered
+dresses, of the whiteness of lace ruffs, or the love-locks and gleaming
+satin of the Caroline beauties, when it suddenly occurred to her,--
+
+"I shall be their successor. This is already potentially mine. In a few
+months, if I please, I shall be walking this house as mistress--its
+future mistress, at any rate!"
+
+She was conscious of a quickening in the blood, a momentary blurring of
+the vision. A whirlwind of fancies swept across her. She thought of
+herself as the young peeress--Lord Maxwell after all was over
+seventy--her own white neck blazing with diamonds, the historic jewels
+of a great family--her will making law in this splendid house--in the
+great domain surrounding it. What power--what a position--what a
+romance! She, the out-at-elbows Marcella, the Socialist, the friend of
+the people. What new lines of social action and endeavour she might
+strike out! Miss Raeburn should not stop her. She caressed the thought
+of the scandals in store for that lady. Only it annoyed her that her
+dream of large things should be constantly crossed by this foolish
+delight, making her feet dance--in this mere prospect of satin gowns and
+fine jewels--of young and fęted beauty holding its brilliant court. If
+she made such a marriage, it should be, it must be, on public grounds.
+Her friends must have no right to blame her.
+
+Then she stole a glance at the tall, quiet gentleman beside her. A man
+to be proud of from the beginning, and surely to be very fond of in
+time. "He would always be my friend," she thought. "I could lead him. He
+is very clever, one can see, and knows a great deal. But he admires what
+I like. His position hampers him--but I could help him to get beyond it.
+We might show the way to many!"
+
+"Will you come and see this room here?" he said, stopping suddenly, yet
+with a certain hesitation in the voice. "It is my own sitting-room.
+There are one or two portraits I should like to show you if you would
+let me."
+
+She followed him with a rosy cheek, and they were presently standing in
+front of the portrait of his mother. He spoke of his recollections of
+his parents, quietly and simply, yet she felt through every nerve that
+he was not the man to speak of such things to anybody in whom he did not
+feel a very strong and peculiar interest. As he was talking a rush of
+liking towards him came across her. How good he was--how affectionate
+beneath his reserve--a woman might securely trust him with her future.
+
+So with every minute she grew softer, her eye gentler, and with each
+step and word he seemed to himself to be carried deeper into the current
+of joy. Intoxication was mounting within him, as her slim, warm youth
+moved and breathed beside him; and it was natural that he should read
+her changing behaviour for something other than it was. A man of his
+type asks for no advance from the woman; the woman he loves does not
+make them; but at the same time he has a natural self-esteem, and
+believes readily in his power to win the return he is certain he will
+deserve.
+
+"And this?" she said, moving restlessly towards his table, and taking up
+the photograph of Edward Hallin.
+
+"Ah! that is the greatest friend I have in the world. But I am sure you
+know the name. Mr. Hallin--Edward Hallin."
+
+She paused bewildered.
+
+"What! _the_ Mr. Hallin--_that_ was Edward Hallin--who settled the
+Nottingham strike last month--who lectures so much in the East End, and
+in the north?"
+
+"The same. We are old college friends. I owe him much, and in all his
+excitements he does not forget old friends. There, you see--" and he
+opened a blotting book and pointed smiling to some closely written
+sheets lying within it--"is my last letter to him. I often write two of
+those in the week, and he to me. We don't agree on a number of things,
+but that doesn't matter."
+
+"What can you find to write about?" she said wondering. "I thought
+nobody wrote letters nowadays, only notes. Is it books, or people?"
+
+"Both, when it pleases us!" How soon, oh! ye favouring gods, might he
+reveal to her the part she herself played in those closely covered
+sheets? "But he writes to me on social matters chiefly. His whole heart,
+as you probably know, is in certain experiments and reforms in which he
+sometimes asks me to help him."
+
+Marcella opened her eyes. These were new lights. She began to recall all
+that she had heard of young Hallin's position in the Labour movement;
+his personal magnetism and prestige; his power as a speaker. Her
+Socialist friends, she remembered, thought him in the way--a force, but
+a dangerous one. He was for the follies of compromise--could not be got
+to disavow the principle of private property, while ready to go great
+lengths in certain directions towards collective action and corporate
+control. The "stalwarts" of _her_ sect would have none of him as a
+leader, while admitting his charm as a human being--a charm she
+remembered to have heard discussed with some anxiety among her Venturist
+friends. But for ordinary people he went far enough. Her father, she
+remembered, had dubbed him an "Anarchist" in connection with the terms
+he had been able to secure for the Nottingham strikers, as reported in
+the newspapers. It astonished her to come across the man again as Mr.
+Raeburn's friend.
+
+They talked about Hallin a little, and about Aldous's Cambridge
+acquaintance with him. Then Marcella, still nervous, went to look at the
+bookshelves, and found herself in front of that working collection of
+books on economics which Aldous kept in his own room under his hand, by
+way of guide to the very fine special collection he was gradually making
+in the library downstairs.
+
+Here again were surprises for her. Aldous had never made the smallest
+claim to special knowledge on all those subjects she had so often
+insisted on making him discuss. He had been always tentative and
+diffident, deferential even so far as her own opinions were concerned.
+And here already was the library of a student. All the books she had
+ever read or heard discussed were here--and as few among many. The
+condition of them, moreover, the signs of close and careful reading she
+noticed in them, as she took them out, abashed her: _she_ had never
+learnt to read in this way. It was her first contact with an exact and
+arduous culture. She thought of how she had instructed Lord Maxwell at
+luncheon. No doubt he shared his grandson's interests. Her cheek burned
+anew; this time because it seemed to her that she had been ridiculous.
+
+"I don't know why you never told me you took a particular interest in
+these subjects," she said suddenly, turning round upon him
+resentfully--she had just laid down, of all things, a volume of
+Venturist essays. "You must have thought I talked a great deal of
+nonsense at luncheon."
+
+"Why!--I have always been delighted to find you cared for such things
+and took an interest in them. How few women do!" he said quite simply,
+opening his eyes. "Do you know these three pamphlets? They were
+privately printed, and are very rare."
+
+He took out a book and showed it to her as one does to a comrade and
+equal--as he might have done to Edward Hallin. But something was jarred
+in her--conscience or self-esteem--and she could not recover her sense
+of heroineship. She answered absently, and when he returned the book to
+the shelf she said that it was time for her to go, and would he kindly
+ask for her maid, who was to walk with her?
+
+"I will ring for her directly," he said. "But you will let me take you
+home?" Then he added hurriedly, "I have some business this afternoon
+with a man who lives in your direction."
+
+She assented a little stiffly--but with an inward thrill. His words and
+manner seemed suddenly to make the situation unmistakable. Among the
+books it had been for the moment obscured.
+
+He rang for his own servant, and gave directions about the maid. Then
+they went downstairs that Marcella might say good-bye.
+
+Miss Raeburn bade her guest farewell, with a dignity which her small
+person could sometimes assume, not unbecomingly. Lady Winterbourne held
+the girl's hand a little, looked her out of countenance, and insisted on
+her promising again to come to Winterbourne Park the following Tuesday.
+Then Lord Maxwell, with old-fashioned politeness, made Marcella take his
+arm through the hall.
+
+"You must come and see us again," he said smiling; "though we are such
+belated old Tories, we are not so bad as we sound."
+
+And under cover of his mild banter he fixed a penetrating attentive look
+upon her. Flushed and embarrassed! Had it indeed been done already? or
+would Aldous settle it on this walk? To judge from his manner and hers,
+the thing was going with rapidity. Well, well, there was nothing for it
+but to hope for the best.
+
+On their way through the hall she stopped him, her hand still in his
+arm. Aldous was in front, at the door, looking for a light shawl she had
+brought with her.
+
+"I should like to thank you," she said shyly, "about the Hurds. It will
+be very kind of you and Mr. Raeburn to find them work."
+
+Lord Maxwell was pleased; and with the usual unfair advantage of beauty
+her eyes and curving lips gave her little advance a charm infinitely
+beyond what any plainer woman could have commanded.
+
+"Oh, don't thank me!" he said cheerily. "Thank Aldous. He does all that
+kind of thing. And if in your good works you want any help we can give,
+ask it, my dear young lady. My old comrade's grand-daughter will always
+find friends in this house."
+
+Lord Maxwell would have been very much astonished to hear himself making
+this speech six weeks before. As it was, he handed her over gallantly to
+Aldous, and stood on the steps looking after them in a stir of mind not
+unnoted by the confidential butler who held the door open behind him.
+Would Aldous insist on carrying his wife off to the dower house on the
+other side of the estate? or would they be content to stay in the old
+place with the old people? And if so, how were that girl and his sister
+to get on? As for himself, he was of a naturally optimist temper, and
+ever since the night of his first interview with Aldous on the subject,
+he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view. He liked to
+see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding
+opinions and lines of her own. It was infinitely better than mere
+nonentity. Of course, she was now extravagant and foolish, perhaps vain
+too. But that would mend with time--mend, above all, with her position
+as Aldous's wife. Aldous was a strong man--how strong, Lord Maxwell
+suspected that this impetuous young lady hardly knew. No, he thought the
+family might be trusted to cope with her when once they got her among
+them. And she would certainly be an ornament to the old house.
+
+Her father of course was, and would be, the real difficulty, and the
+blight which had descended on the once honoured name. But a man so
+conscious of many kinds of power as Lord Maxwell could not feel much
+doubt as to his own and his grandson's competence to keep so poor a
+specimen of humanity as Richard Boyce in his place. How wretchedly ill,
+how feeble, both in body and soul, the fellow had looked when he and
+Winterbourne met him!
+
+The white-haired owner of the Court walked back slowly to his library,
+his hands in his pockets, his head bent in cogitation. Impossible to
+settle to the various important political letters lying on his table,
+and bearing all of them on that approaching crisis in the spring which
+must put Lord Maxwell and his friends in power. He was over seventy, but
+his old blood quickened within him as he thought of those two on this
+golden afternoon, among the beech woods. How late Aldous had left all
+these experiences! His grandfather, by twenty, could have shown him the
+way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile the two in question were walking along the edge of the hill
+rampart overlooking the plain, with the road on one side of them, and
+the falling beech woods on the other. They were on a woodland path, just
+within the trees, sheltered, and to all intents and purposes alone. The
+maid, with leisurely discretion, was following far behind them on the
+high road.
+
+Marcella, who felt at moments as though she could hardly breathe, by
+reason of a certain tumult of nerve, was yet apparently bent on
+maintaining a conversation without breaks. As they diverged from the
+road into the wood-path, she plunged into the subject of her companion's
+election prospects. How many meetings did he find that he must hold in
+the month? What places did he regard as his principal strongholds? She
+was told that certain villages, which she named, were certain to go
+Radical, whatever might be the Tory promises. As to a well-known
+Conservative League, which was very strong in the country, and to which
+all the great ladies, including Lady Winterbourne, belonged, was he
+actually going to demean himself by accepting its support? How was it
+possible to defend the bribery, buns, and beer by which it won its
+corrupting way?
+
+Altogether, a quick fire of questions, remarks, and sallies, which
+Aldous met and parried as best he might, comforting himself all the time
+by thought of those deeper and lonelier parts of the wood which lay
+before them. At last she dropped out, half laughing, half defiant, words
+which arrested him,--
+
+"Well, I shall know what the other side think of their prospects very
+soon. Mr. Wharton is coming to lunch with us to-morrow."
+
+"Harry Wharton!" he said astonished. "But Mr. Boyce is not supporting
+him. Your father, I think, is Conservative?"
+
+One of Dick Boyce's first acts as owner of Mellor, when social
+rehabilitation had still looked probable to him, had been to send a
+contribution to the funds of the League aforesaid, so that Aldous had
+public and conspicuous grounds for his remark.
+
+"Need one measure everything by politics?" she asked him a little
+disdainfully. "Mayn't one even feed a Radical?"
+
+He winced visibly a moment, touched in his philosopher's pride.
+
+"You remind me," he said, laughing and reddening--"and justly--that an
+election perverts all one's standards and besmirches all one's morals.
+Then I suppose Mr. Wharton is an old friend?"
+
+"Papa never saw him before last week," she said carelessly. "Now he
+talks of asking him to stay some time, and says that, although he won't
+vote for him, he hopes that he will make a good fight."
+
+Raeburn's brow contracted in a puzzled frown.
+
+"He will make an excellent fight," he said rather shortly. "Dodgson
+hardly hopes to get in. Harry Wharton is a most taking speaker, a very
+clever fellow, and sticks at nothing in the way of promises. Ah, you
+will find him interesting, Miss Boyce! He has a co-operative farm on his
+Lincolnshire property. Last year he started a Labour paper--which I
+believe you read. I have heard you quote it. He believes in all that you
+hope for--great increase in local government and communal control--the
+land for the people--graduated income-tax--the extinction of landlord
+and capitalist as soon as may be--_e tutti quanti_. He talks with great
+eloquence and ability. In our villages I find he is making way every
+week. The people think his manners perfect. ''Ee 'as a way wi' un,' said
+an old labourer to me last week. 'If 'ee wor to coe the wild birds, I do
+believe, Muster Raeburn, they'd coom to un!'"
+
+"Yet you dislike him!" said Marcella, a daring smile dancing on the dark
+face she turned to him. "One can hear it in every word you say."
+
+He hesitated, trying, even at the moment that an impulse of jealous
+alarm which astonished himself had taken possession of him, to find the
+moderate and measured phrase.
+
+"I have known him from a boy," he said. "He is a connection of the
+Levens, and used to be always there in old days. He is very brilliant
+and very gifted--"
+
+"Your 'but' must be very bad," she threw in, "it is so long in coming."
+
+"Then I will say, whatever opening it gives you," he replied with
+spirit, "that I admire him without respecting him."
+
+"Who ever thought otherwise of a clever opponent?" she cried. "It is the
+stock formula."
+
+The remark stung, all the more because Aldous was perfectly conscious
+that there was much truth in her implied charge of prejudice. He had
+never been very capable of seeing this particular man in the dry light
+of reason, and was certainly less so than before, since it had been
+revealed to him that Wharton and Mr. Boyce's daughter were to be
+brought, before long, into close neighbourhood.
+
+"I am sorry that I seem to you such a Pharisee," he said, turning upon
+her a look which had both pain and excitement in it.
+
+She was silent, and they walked on a few yards without speaking. The
+wood had thickened around them: The high road was no longer visible. No
+sound of wheels or footsteps reached them. The sun struck freely through
+the beech-trees, already half bared, whitening the grey trunks at
+intervals to an arrowy distinctness and majesty, or kindling the slopes
+of red and freshly fallen leaves below into great patches of light and
+flame. Through the stems, as always, the girdling blues of the plain,
+and in their faces a gay and buoyant breeze, speaking rather of spring
+than autumn. Robins, "yellow autumn's nightingales," sang in the hedge
+to their right. In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their
+charm felt. Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging,
+wooing, defining. Aldous's heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve.
+
+Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and
+seeing his look she paled a little.
+
+"Do you guess at all why it hurts me to jar with you?" he said--finding
+his words in a rush, he did not know how--"Why every syllable of yours
+matters to me? It is because I have hopes--dreams--which have become my
+life! If you could accept this--this--feeling--this devotion--which has
+grown up in me--if you could trust yourself to me--you should have no
+cause, I think--ever--to think me hard or narrow towards any person, any
+enthusiasm for which you had sympathy. May I say to you all that is in
+my mind--or--or--am I presuming?"
+
+She looked away from him, crimson again. A great wave of
+exultation--boundless, intoxicating--swept through her. Then it was
+checked by a nobler feeling--a quick, penitent sense of his nobleness.
+
+"You don't know me," she said hurriedly: "you think you do. But I am all
+odds and ends. I should annoy--wound--disappoint you."
+
+His quiet grey eyes flamed.
+
+"Come and sit down here, on these dry roots," he said, taking already
+joyous command of her. "We shall be undisturbed. I have so much to say!"
+
+She obeyed trembling. She felt no passion, but the strong thrill of
+something momentous and irreparable, together with a swelling
+pride--pride in such homage from such a man.
+
+He led her a few steps down the slope, found a place for her against a
+sheltering trunk, and threw himself down beside her. As he looked up at
+the picture she made amid the autumn branches, at her bent head, her
+shy moved look, her white hand lying ungloved on her black dress,
+happiness overcame him. He took her hand, found she did not resist, drew
+it to him, and clasping it in both his, bent his brow, his lips upon it.
+It shook in his hold, but she was passive. The mixture of emotion and
+self-control she showed touched him deeply. In his chivalrous modesty he
+asked for nothing else, dreamt of nothing more.
+
+Half an hour later they were still in the same spot. There had been much
+talk between them, most of it earnest, but some of it quite gay, broken
+especially by her smiles. Her teasing mood, however, had passed away.
+She was instead composed and dignified, like one conscious that life had
+opened before her to great issues.
+
+Yet she had flinched often before that quiet tone of eager joy in which
+he had described his first impressions of her, his surprise at finding
+in her ideals, revolts, passions, quite unknown to him, so far, in the
+women of his own class. Naturally he suppressed, perhaps he had even
+forgotten, the critical amusement and irritation she had often excited
+in him. He remembered, he spoke only of sympathy, delight, pleasure--of
+his sense, as it were, of slaking some long-felt moral thirst at the
+well of her fresh feeling. So she had attracted him first,--by a certain
+strangeness and daring--by what she _said_--
+
+"Now--and above all by what you _are_!" he broke out suddenly, moved out
+of his even speech. "Oh! it is too much to believe--to dream of! Put
+your hand in mine, and say again that it is really _true_ that we two
+are to go forward together--that you will be always there to inspire--to
+help--"
+
+And as she gave him the hand, she must also let him--in this first
+tremor of a pure passion--take the kiss which was now his by right. That
+she should flush and draw away from him as she did, seemed to him the
+most natural thing in the world, and the most maidenly.
+
+Then, as their talk wandered on, bit by bit, he gave her all his
+confidence, and she had felt herself honoured in receiving it. She
+understood now at least something--a first fraction--of that inner life,
+masked so well beneath his quiet English capacity and unassuming manner.
+He had spoken of his Cambridge years, of his friend, of the desire of
+his heart to make his landowner's power and position contribute
+something towards that new and better social order, which he too, like
+Hallin--though more faintly and intermittently--believed to be
+approaching. The difficulties of any really new departure were
+tremendous; he saw them more plainly and more anxiously than Hallin. Yet
+he believed that he had thought his way to some effective reform on his
+grandfather's large estate, and to some useful work as one of a group of
+like-minded men in Parliament. She must have often thought him careless
+and apathetic towards his great trust. But he was not so--not
+careless--but paralysed often by intellectual difficulty, by the claims
+of conflicting truths.
+
+She, too, explained herself most freely, most frankly. She would have
+nothing on her conscience.
+
+"They will say, of course," she said with sudden nervous abruptness,
+"that I am marrying you for wealth and position. And in a sense I shall
+be. No! don't stop me! I should not marry you if--if--I did not like
+you. But you can give me--you have--great opportunities. I tell you
+frankly, I shall enjoy them and use them. Oh! do think well before you
+do it. I shall _never_ be a meek, dependent wife. A woman, to my mind,
+is bound to cherish her own individuality sacredly, married or not
+married. Have you thought that I may often think it right to do things
+you disagree with, that may scandalise your relations?"
+
+"You shall be free," he said steadily. "I have thought of it all."
+
+"Then there is my father," she said, turning her head away. "He is
+ill--he wants pity, affection. I will accept no bond that forces me to
+disown him."
+
+"Pity and affection are to me the most sacred things in the world," he
+said, kissing her hand gently. "Be content--be at rest--my beautiful
+lady!"
+
+There was again silence, full of thought on her side, of heavenly
+happiness on his. The sun had sunk almost to the verge of the plain, the
+wind had freshened.
+
+"We _must_ go home," she said, springing up. "Taylor must have got there
+an hour ago. Mother will be anxious, and I must--I must tell them."
+
+"I will leave you at the gate," he suggested as they walked briskly;
+"and you will ask your father, will you not, if I may see him to-night
+after dinner?"
+
+The trees thinned again in front of them, and the path curved inward to
+the front. Suddenly a man, walking on the road, diverged into the path
+and came towards them. He was swinging a stick and humming. His head was
+uncovered, and his light chestnut curls were blown about his forehead by
+the wind. Marcella, looking up at the sound of the steps, had a sudden
+impression of something young and radiant, and Aldous stopped with an
+exclamation.
+
+The new-comer perceived them, and at sight of Aldous smiled, and
+approached, holding out his hand.
+
+"Why, Raeburn, I seem to have missed you twenty times a day this last
+fortnight. We have been always on each other's tracks without meeting.
+Yet I think, if we had met, we could have kept our tempers."
+
+"Miss Boyce, I think you do not know Mr. Wharton," said Aldous, stiffly.
+"May I introduce you?"
+
+The young man's blue eyes, all alert and curious at the mention of
+Marcella's name, ran over the girl's face and form. Then he bowed with a
+certain charming exaggeration--like an eighteenth-century beau with his
+hand upon his heart--and turned back with them a step or two towards the
+road.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+"A woman has enough to govern wisely
+Her own demeanours, passions and divisions."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+On a certain night in the December following the engagement of Marcella
+Boyce to Aldous Raeburn, the woods and fields of Mellor, and all the
+bare rampart of chalk down which divides the Buckinghamshire plain from
+the forest upland of the Chilterns lay steeped in moonlight, and in the
+silence which belongs to intense frost.
+
+Winter had set in before the leaf had fallen from the last oaks; already
+there had been a fortnight or more of severe cold, with hardly any snow.
+The pastures were delicately white; the ditches and the wet furrows in
+the ploughed land, the ponds on Mellor common, and the stagnant pool in
+the midst of the village, whence it drew its main water supply, were
+frozen hard. But the ploughed chalk land itself lay a dull grey beside
+the glitter of the pastures, and the woods under the bright sun of the
+days dropped their rime only to pass once more with the deadly cold of
+the night under the fantastic empire of the frost. Every day the veil of
+morning mist rose lightly from the woods, uncurtaining the wintry
+spectacle, and melting into the brilliant azure of an unflecked sky;
+every night the moon rose without a breath of wind, without a cloud; and
+all the branch-work of the trees, where they stood in the open fields,
+lay reflected clean and sharp on the whitened ground. The bitter cold
+stole into the cottages, marking the old and feeble with the touch of
+Azrael; while without, in the field solitudes, bird and beast cowered
+benumbed and starving in hole and roosting place.
+
+How still it was--this midnight--on the fringe of the woods! Two men
+sitting concealed among some bushes at the edge of Mr. Boyce's largest
+cover, and bent upon a common errand, hardly spoke to each other, so
+strange and oppressive was the silence. One was Jim Hurd; the other was
+a labourer, a son of old Patton of the almshouses, himself a man of
+nearly sixty, with a small wizened face showing sharp and white to-night
+under his slouched hat.
+
+They looked out over a shallow cup of treeless land to a further bound
+of wooded hill, ending towards the north in a bare bluff of down shining
+steep under the moon. They were in shadow, and so was most of the wide
+dip of land before them; but through a gap to their right, beyond the
+wood, the moonbeams poured, and the farms nestling under the opposite
+ridge, the plantations ranging along it, and the bald beacon hill in
+which it broke to the plain, were all in radiant light.
+
+Not a stir of life anywhere. Hurd put up his hand to his ear, and
+leaning forward listened intently. Suddenly--a vibration, a dull
+thumping sound in the soil of the bank immediately beside him. He
+started, dropped his hand, and, stooping, laid his ear to the ground.
+
+"Gi' us the bag," he said to his companion, drawing himself upright.
+"You can hear 'em turnin' and creepin' as plain as anything. Now then,
+you take these and go t' other side."
+
+He handed over a bundle of rabbit nets. Patton, crawling on hands and
+knees, climbed over the low overgrown bank on which the hedge stood into
+the precincts of the wood itself. The state of the hedge, leaving the
+cover practically open and defenceless along its whole boundary, showed
+plainly enough that it belonged to the Mellor estate. But the field
+beyond was Lord Maxwell's.
+
+Hurd applied himself to netting the holes on his own side, pushing the
+brambles and undergrowth aside with the sure hand of one who had already
+reconnoitred the ground. Then he crept over to Patton to see that all
+was right on the other side, came back, and went for the ferrets, of
+whom he had four in a closely tied bag.
+
+A quarter of an hour of intense excitement followed. In all, five
+rabbits bolted--three on Hurd's side, two on Patton's. It was all the
+two men could do to secure their prey, manage the ferrets, and keep a
+watch on the holes. Hurd's great hands--now fixing the pegs that held
+the nets, now dealing death to the entangled rabbit, whose neck he broke
+in an instant by a turn of the thumb, now winding up the line that held
+the ferret--seemed to be everywhere.
+
+At last a ferret "laid up," the string attached to him having either
+slipped or broken, greatly to the disgust of the men, who did not want
+to be driven either to dig, which made a noise and took time, or to lose
+their animal. The rabbits made no more sign, and it was tolerably
+evident that they had got as much as they were likely to get out of
+that particular "bury."
+
+Hurd thrust his arm deep into the hole where he had put the ferret.
+"Ther's summat in the way," he declared at last. "Mos' likely a dead un.
+Gi' me the spade."
+
+He dug away the mouth of the hole, making as little noise as possible,
+and tried again.
+
+"'Ere ee be," he cried, clutching at something, drew it out, exclaimed
+in disgust, flung it away, and pounced upon a rabbit which on the
+removal of the obstacle followed like a flash, pursued by the lost
+ferret. Hurd caught the rabbit by the neck, held it by main force, and
+killed it; then put the ferret into his pocket. "Lord!" he said, wiping
+his brow, "they do come suddent."
+
+What he had pulled out was a dead cat; a wretched puss, who on some
+happy hunt had got itself wedged in the hole, and so perished there
+miserably. He and Patton stooped over it wondering; then Hurd walked
+some paces along the bank, looking warily out to the right of him across
+the open country all the time. He threw the poor malodorous thing far
+into the wood and returned.
+
+The two men lit their pipes under the shelter of the bushes, and rested
+a bit, well hidden, but able to see out through a break in the bit of
+thicket.
+
+"Six on 'em," said Hurd, looking at the stark creatures beside him. "I
+be too done to try another bury. I'll set a snare or two, an' be off
+home."
+
+Patton puffed silently. He was wondering whether Hurd would give him one
+rabbit or two. Hurd had both "plant" and skill, and Patton would have
+been glad enough to come for one. Still he was a plaintive man with a
+perpetual grievance, and had already made up his mind that Hurd would
+treat him shabbily to-night, in spite of many past demonstrations that
+his companion was on the whole of a liberal disposition.
+
+"You bin out workin' a day's work already, han't yer?" he said
+presently. He himself was out of work, like half the village, and had
+been presented by his wife with boiled swede for supper. But he knew
+that Hurd had been taken on at the works at the Court, where the new
+drive was being made, and a piece of ornamental water enlarged and
+improved--mainly for the sake of giving employment in bad times. He,
+Patton, and some of his mates, had tried to get a job there. But the
+steward had turned them back. The men off the estate had first claim,
+and there was not room for all of them. Yet Hurd had been taken on,
+which had set people talking.
+
+Hurd nodded, and said nothing. He was not disposed to be communicative
+on the subject of his employment at the Court.
+
+"An' it be true as _she_ be goin' to marry Muster Raeburn?"
+
+Patton jerked his head towards the right, where above a sloping hedge
+the chimneys of Mellor and the tops of the Mellor cedars, some two or
+three fields away, showed distinct against the deep night blue.
+
+Hurd nodded again, and smoked diligently. Patton, nettled by this
+parsimony of speech, made the inward comment that his companion was "a
+deep un." The village was perfectly aware of the particular friendship
+shown by Miss Boyce to the Hurds. He was goaded into trying a more
+stinging topic.
+
+"Westall wor braggin' last night at Bradsell's"--(Bradsell was the
+landlord of "The Green Man" at Mellor)--"ee said as how they'd taken you
+on at the Court--but that didn't prevent 'em knowin' as you was a bad
+lot. Ee said _ee_ 'ad 'is eye on yer--ee 'ad warned yer twoice last
+year--"
+
+"That's a lie!" said Hurd, removing his pipe an instant and putting it
+back again.
+
+Patton looked more cheerful.
+
+"Well, ee spoke cru'l. Ee was certain, ee said, as you could tell a
+thing or two about them coverts at Tudley End, if the treuth were known.
+You wor allus a loafer, an' a loafer you'd be. Yer might go snivellin'
+to Miss Boyce, ee said, but yer wouldn't do no honest work--ee said--not
+if yer could help it--that's what ee said."
+
+"Devil!" said Hurd between his teeth, with a quick lift of all his great
+misshapen chest. He took his pipe out of his mouth, rammed it down
+fiercely with his thumb, and put it in his pocket.
+
+"Look out!" exclaimed Patton with a start.
+
+A whistle!--clear and distinct--from the opposite side of the hollow.
+Then a man's figure, black and motionless an instant on the whitened
+down, with a black speck beside it; lastly, another figure higher up
+along the hill, in quick motion towards the first, with other specks
+behind it. The poachers instantly understood that it was Westall--whose
+particular beat lay in this part of the estate--signalling to his night
+watcher, Charlie Dynes, and that the two men would be on them in no
+time. It was the work of a few seconds to efface as far as possible the
+traces of their raid, to drag some thick and trailing brambles which
+hung near over the mouth of the hole where there had been digging, to
+catch up the ferrets and game, and to bid Hurd's lurcher to come to
+heel. The two men crawled up the ditch with their burdens as far away to
+leeward as they could get from the track by which the keepers would
+cross the field. The ditch was deeply overgrown, and when the
+approaching voices warned them to lie close, they crouched under a dense
+thicket of brambles and overhanging bushes, afraid of nothing but the
+noses of the keepers' dogs.
+
+Dogs and men, however, passed unsuspecting.
+
+"Hold still!" said Hurd, checking Patton's first attempt to move. "He'll
+be back again mos' like. It's 'is dodge."
+
+And sure enough in twenty minutes or so the men reappeared. They
+retraced their steps from the further corner of the field, where some
+preserves of Lord Maxwell's approached very closely to the big Mellor
+wood, and came back again along the diagonal path within fifty yards or
+so of the men in the ditch.
+
+In the stillness the poachers could hear Westall's harsh and peremptory
+voice giving some orders to his underling, or calling to the dogs, who
+had scattered a little in the stubble. Hurd's own dog quivered beside
+him once or twice.
+
+Then steps and voices faded into the distance and all was safe.
+
+The poachers crept out grinning, and watched the keepers' progress
+along the hill-face, till they disappeared into the Maxwell woods.
+
+"_Ee_ be sold again--blast 'im!" said Hurd, with a note of quite
+disproportionate exultation in his queer, cracked voice. "Now I'll set
+them snares. But you'd better git home."
+
+Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him
+two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his
+poacher's coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a
+way as possible.
+
+Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden
+crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three
+hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.
+
+Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor
+church. The cold was bitter, but his night's work was not over yet, and
+he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.
+
+Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of
+the hills in the frosty silence. Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over
+the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to
+climb the ascent of the wood. The outskirts of it were filled with a
+thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it
+was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon,
+now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid
+the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about
+their polished trunks. Such infinite grace and strength in the line work
+of the branches!--branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected
+fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable
+harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against
+the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as
+though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, were
+but one majestic conception of a master artist.
+
+But Hurd saw nothing of this as he plunged through the leaves. He was
+thinking that it was extremely likely a man would be on the look-out for
+him to-night under the big beeches--a man with some business to propose
+to him. A few words dropped in his ear at a certain public-house the
+night before had seemed to him to mean this, and he had accordingly sent
+Patton out of the way.
+
+But when he got to the top of the hill no one was to be seen or heard,
+and he sat him down on a fallen log to smoke and wait awhile.
+
+He had no sooner, however, taken his seat than he shifted it uneasily,
+turning himself round so as to look in the other direction. For in front
+of him, as he was first placed, there was a gap in the trees, and over
+the lower wood, plainly visible and challenging attention, rose the dark
+mass of Mellor House. And the sight of Mellor suggested reflections just
+now that were not particularly agreeable to Jim Hurd.
+
+He had just been poaching Mr. Boyce's rabbits without any sort of
+scruple. But the thought of _Miss_ Boyce was not pleasant to him when he
+was out on these nightly raids.
+
+Why had she meddled? He bore her a queer sort of grudge for it. He had
+just settled down to the bit of cobbling which, together with his wife's
+plait, served him for a blind, and was full of a secret excitement as to
+various plans he had in hand for "doing" Westall, combining a maximum of
+gain for the winter with a maximum of safety, when Miss Boyce walked in,
+radiant with the news that there was employment for him at the Court, on
+the new works, whenever he liked to go and ask for it.
+
+And then she had given him an odd look.
+
+"And I was to pass you on a message from Lord Maxwell, Hurd," she had
+said: "'You tell him to keep out of Westall's way for the future, and
+bygones shall be bygones.' Now, I'm not going to ask what that means. If
+you've been breaking some of our landlords' law, I'm not going to say
+I'm shocked. I'd alter the law to-morrow, if I could!--you know I would.
+But I do say you're a fool if you go on with it, now you've got good
+work for the winter; you must please remember your wife and children."
+
+And there he had sat like a log, staring at her--both he and Minta not
+knowing where to look, or how to speak. Then at last his wife had broken
+out, crying:
+
+"Oh, miss! we should ha starved--"
+
+And Miss Boyce had stopped her in a moment, catching her by the hand.
+Didn't she know it? Was she there to preach to them? Only Hurd must
+promise not to do it any more, for his wife's sake.
+
+And he--stammering--left without excuse or resource, either against her
+charge, or the work she offered him--had promised her, and promised her,
+moreover--in his trepidation--with more fervency than he at all liked
+to remember.
+
+For about a fortnight, perhaps, he had gone to the Court by day, and had
+kept indoors by night. Then, just as the vagabond passions, the Celtic
+instincts, so long repressed, so lately roused, were goading at him
+again, he met Westall in the road--Westall, who looked him over from top
+to toe with an insolent smile, as much as to say, "Well, my man, we've
+got the whip hand of you now!" That same night he crept out again in the
+dark and the early morning, in spite of all Minta's tears and scolding.
+
+Well, what matter? As towards the rich and the law, he had the morals of
+the slave, who does not feel that he has had any part in making the
+rules he is expected to keep, and breaks them when he can with glee. It
+made him uncomfortable, certainly, that Miss Boyce should come in and
+out of their place as she did, should be teaching Willie to read, and
+bringing her old dresses to make up for Daisy and Nellie, while he was
+making a fool of her in this way. Still he took it all as it came. One
+sensation wiped out another.
+
+Besides, Miss Boyce had, after all, much part in this double life of
+his. Whenever he was at home, sitting over the fire with a pipe, he read
+those papers and things she had brought him in the summer. He had not
+taken much notice of them at first. Now he spelled them out again and
+again. He had always thought "them rich people took advantage of yer."
+But he had never supposed, somehow, they were such thieves, such mean
+thieves, as it appeared, they were. A curious ferment filled his
+restless, inconsequent brain. The poor were downtrodden, but they were
+coming to their rights. The land and its creatures were for the people!
+not for the idle rich. Above all, Westall was a devil, and must be put
+down. For the rest, if he could have given words to experience, he would
+have said that since he began to go out poaching he had burst his prison
+and found himself. A life which was not merely endurance pulsed in him.
+The scent of the night woods, the keenness of the night air, the tracks
+and ways of the wild creatures, the wiles by which he slew them, the
+talents and charms of his dog Bruno--these things had developed in him
+new aptitudes both of mind and body, which were in themselves
+exhilaration. He carried his dwarf's frame more erect, breathed from an
+ampler chest. As for his work at the Court, he thought of it often with
+impatience and disgust. It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or
+he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.
+
+"Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!" He fell
+thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked. Two of Westall's
+best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in
+November!--and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say "Jack
+Robinson." Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds.
+There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the
+hollow--they had been kept for the last shoot in January. Hang him! why
+wasn't that fellow up to time?
+
+But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack
+across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the
+ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic
+melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found
+himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood.
+A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called
+overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle or fall of a branch
+that startled him. Yet he knew every track, every tree in that wood. Up
+and down that field outside he had followed his father at the plough, a
+little sickly object of a lad, yet seldom unhappy, so long as childhood
+lasted, and his mother's temper could be fled from, either at school or
+in the fields. Under that boundary hedge to the right he had lain
+stunned and bleeding all a summer afternoon, after old Westall had
+thrashed him, his heart scorched within him by the sense of wrong and
+the craving for revenge. On that dim path leading down the slope of the
+wood, George Westall had once knocked him down for disturbing a sitting
+pheasant. He could see himself falling--the tall, powerful lad standing
+over him with a grin.
+
+Then, inconsequently, he began to think of his father's death. He made a
+good end did the old man. "Jim, my lad, the Lord's verra merciful," or
+"Jim, you'll look after Ann." Ann was the only daughter. Then a sigh or
+two, and a bit of sleep, and it was done.
+
+And everybody must go the same way, must come to the same stopping of
+the breath, the same awfulness--in a life of blind habit--of a moment
+that never had been before and never could be again? He did not put it
+to these words, but the shudder that is in the thought for all of us,
+seized him. He was very apt to think of dying, to ponder in his secret
+heart _how_ it would be, and when. And always it made him very soft
+towards Minta and the children. Not only did the _life_ instinct cling
+to them, to the warm human hands and faces hemming him in and protecting
+him from that darkness beyond with its shapes of terror. But to think of
+himself as sick, and gasping to his end, like his father, was to put
+himself back in his old relation to his wife, when they were first
+married. He might cross Minta now, but if he came to lie sick, he could
+see himself there, in the future, following her about with his eyes, and
+thanking her, and doing all she told him, just as he'd used to do. He
+couldn't die without her to help him through. The very idea of her being
+taken first, roused in him a kind of spasm--a fierceness, a clenching of
+the hands. But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his
+way, and she must just get used to it.
+
+Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood. He replied, and was
+almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith's
+apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells' village, who had often brought him
+information before.
+
+The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log. Then they parted;
+Hurd went back to the ditch where he had left the game, put two rabbits
+into his pockets, left the other two to be removed in the morning when
+he came to look at his snares, and went off home, keeping as much as
+possible in the shelter of the hedges. On one occasion he braved the
+moonlight and the open field, rather than pass through a woody corner
+where an old farmer had been found dead some six years before. Then he
+reached a deep lane leading to the village, and was soon at his own
+door.
+
+As he climbed the wooden ladder leading to the one bedroom where he, his
+wife, and his four children slept, his wife sprang up in bed.
+
+"Jim, you must be perished--such a night as 't is. Oh, Jim--where ha'
+you bin?"
+
+She was a miserable figure in her coarse nightgown, with her grizzling
+hair wild about her, and her thin arms nervously outstretched along the
+bed. The room was freezing cold, and the moonlight stealing through the
+scanty bits of curtains brought into dismal clearness the squalid bed,
+the stained walls, and bare uneven floor. On an iron bedstead, at the
+foot of the large bed, lay Willie, restless and coughing, with the elder
+girl beside him fast asleep; the other girl lay beside her mother, and
+the wooden box with rockers, which held the baby, stood within reach of
+Mrs. Hurd's arm.
+
+He made her no answer, but went to look at the coughing boy, who had
+been in bed for a week with bronchitis.
+
+"You've never been and got in Westall's way again?" she said anxiously.
+"It's no good my tryin' to get a wink o' sleep when you're out like
+this."
+
+"Don't you worrit yourself," he said to her, not roughly, but decidedly.
+"I'm all right. This boy's bad, Minta."
+
+"Yes, an' I kep' up the fire an' put the spout on the kettle, too." She
+pointed to the grate and to the thin line of steam, which was doing its
+powerless best against the arctic cold of the room.
+
+Hurd bent over the boy and tried to put him comfortable. The child, weak
+and feverish, only began to cry--a hoarse bronchial crying, which
+threatened to wake the baby. He could not be stopped, so Hurd made haste
+to take off his own coat and boots, and then lifted the poor soul in his
+arms.
+
+"You'll be quiet, Will, and go sleep, won't yer, if daddy takes keer on
+you?"
+
+He wrapped his own coat round the little fellow, and lying down beside
+his wife, took him on his arm and drew the thin brown blankets over
+himself and his charge. He himself was warm with exercise, and in a
+little while the huddling creatures on either side of him were warm too.
+The quick, panting breath of the boy soon showed that he was asleep. His
+father, too, sank almost instantly into deep gulfs of sleep. Only the
+wife--nervous, overdone, and possessed by a thousand fears--lay tossing
+and wakeful hour after hour, while the still glory of the winter night
+passed by.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+"Well, Marcella, have you and Lady Winterbourne arranged your classes?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce was stooping over a piece of needlework beside a window in
+the Mellor drawing-room, trying to catch the rapidly failing light. It
+was one of the last days of December. Marcella had just come in from the
+village rather early, for they were expecting a visitor to arrive about
+tea time, and had thrown herself, tired, into a chair near her mother.
+
+"We have got about ten or eleven of the younger women to join; none of
+the old ones will come," said Marcella. "Lady Winterbourne has heard of
+a capital teacher from Dunstable, and we hope to get started next week.
+There is money enough to pay wages for three months."
+
+In spite of her fatigue, her eye was bright and restless. The energy of
+thought and action from which she had just emerged still breathed from
+every limb and feature.
+
+"Where have you got the money?"
+
+"Mr. Raeburn has managed it," said Marcella, briefly.
+
+Mrs. Boyce gave a slight shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"And afterwards--what is to become of your product?"
+
+"There is a London shop Lady Winterbourne knows will take what we make
+if it turns out well. Of course, we don't expect to pay our way."
+
+Marcella gave her explanations with a certain stiffness of self-defence.
+She and Lady Winterbourne had evolved a scheme for reviving and
+improving the local industry of straw-plaiting, which after years of
+decay seemed now on the brink of final disappearance. The village women
+who could at present earn a few pence a week by the coarser kinds of
+work were to be instructed, not only in the finer and better paid sorts,
+but also in the making up of the plait when done, and the "blocking" of
+hats and bonnets--processes hitherto carried on exclusively at one or
+two large local centres.
+
+"You don't expect to pay your way?" repeated Mrs. Boyce. "What, never?"
+
+"Well, we shall give twelve to fourteen shillings a week wages. We shall
+find the materials, and the room--and prices are very low, the whole
+trade depressed."
+
+Mrs. Boyce laughed.
+
+"I see. How many workers do you expect to get together?"
+
+"Oh! eventually, about two hundred in the three villages. It will
+regenerate the whole life!" said Marcella, a sudden ray from the inner
+warmth escaping her, against her will.
+
+Mrs. Boyce smiled again, and turned her work so as to see it better.
+
+"Does Aldous understand what you are letting him in for?"
+
+Marcella flushed.
+
+"Perfectly. It is 'ransom'--that's all."
+
+"And he is ready to take your view of it?"
+
+"Oh, he thinks us economically unsound, of course," said Marcella,
+impatiently. "So we are. All care for the human being under the present
+state of things is economically unsound. But he likes it no more than I
+do."
+
+"Well, lucky for you he has a long purse," said Mrs. Boyce, lightly.
+"But I gather, Marcella, you don't insist upon his spending it _all_ on
+straw-plaiting. He told me yesterday he had taken the Hertford Street
+house."
+
+"We shall live quite simply," said Marcella, quickly.
+
+"What, no carriage?"
+
+Marcella hesitated.
+
+"A carriage saves time. And if one goes about much, it does not cost so
+much more than cabs."
+
+"So you mean to go about much? Lady Winterbourne talks to me of
+presenting you in May."
+
+"That's Miss Raeburn," cried Marcella. "She says I must, and all the
+family would be scandalised if I didn't go. But you can't imagine--"
+
+She stopped and took off her hat, pushing the hair back from her
+forehead. A look of worry and excitement had replaced the radiant glow
+of her first resting moments.
+
+"That you like it?" said Mrs. Boyce, bluntly. "Well, I don't know. Most
+young women like pretty gowns, and great functions, and prominent
+positions. I don't call you an ascetic, Marcella."
+
+Marcella winced.
+
+"One has to fit oneself to circumstances," she said proudly. "One may
+hate the circumstances, but one can't escape them."
+
+"Oh, I don't think you will hate your circumstances, my dear! You would
+be very foolish if you did. Have you heard finally how much the
+settlement is to be?"
+
+"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I have not asked papa, nor anybody."
+
+"It was only settled this morning. Your father told me hurriedly as he
+went out. You are to have two thousand a year of your own."
+
+The tone was dry, and the speaker's look as she turned towards her
+daughter had in it a curious hostility; but Marcella did not notice her
+mother's manner.
+
+"It is too much," she said in a low voice.
+
+She had thrown back her head against the chair in which she sat, and her
+half-troubled eyes were wandering over the darkening expanse of lawn and
+avenue.
+
+"He said he wished you to feel perfectly free to live your own life, and
+to follow out your own projects. Oh, for a person of projects, my dear,
+it is not so much. You will do well to husband it. Keep it for yourself.
+Get what _you_ want out of it: not what other people want."
+
+Again Marcella's attention missed the note of agitation in her mother's
+sharp manner. A soft look--a look of compunction--passed across her
+face. Mrs. Boyce began to put her working things away, finding it too
+dark to do any more.
+
+"By the way," said the mother, suddenly, "I suppose you will be going
+over to help him in his canvassing this next few weeks? Your father says
+the election will be certainly in February."
+
+Marcella moved uneasily.
+
+"He knows," she said at last, "that I don't agree with him in so many
+things. He is so full of this Peasant Proprietors Bill. And I hate
+peasant properties. They are nothing but a step backwards."
+
+Mrs. Boyce lifted her eyebrows.
+
+"That's unlucky. He tells me it is likely to be his chief work in the
+new Parliament. Isn't it, on the whole, probable that he knows more
+about the country than you do, Marcella?"
+
+Marcella sat up with sudden energy and gathered her walking things
+together.
+
+"It isn't knowledge that's the question, mamma; it's the principle of
+the thing. I mayn't know anything, but the people whom I follow know.
+There are the two sides of thought--the two ways of looking at things. I
+warned Aldous when he asked me to marry him which I belonged to. And he
+accepted it."
+
+Mrs. Boyce's thin fine mouth curled a little.
+
+"So you suppose that Aldous had his wits about him on that great
+occasion as much as you had?"
+
+Marcella first started, then quivered with nervous indignation.
+
+"Mother," she said, "I can't bear it. It's not the first time that you
+have talked as though I had taken some unfair advantage--made an
+unworthy bargain. It is too hard too. Other people may think what they
+like, but that you--"
+
+Her voice failed her, and the tears came into her eyes. She was tired
+and over-excited, and the contrast between the atmosphere of flattery
+and consideration which surrounded her in Aldous's company, in the
+village, or at the Winterbournes, and this tone which her mother so
+often took with her when they were alone, was at the moment hardly to be
+endured.
+
+Mrs. Boyce looked up more gravely.
+
+"You misunderstand me, my dear," she said quietly. "I allow myself to
+wonder at you a little, but I think no hard things of you ever. I
+believe you like Aldous."
+
+"Really, mamma!" cried Marcella, half hysterically.
+
+Mrs. Boyce had by now rolled up her work and shut her workbasket.
+
+"If you are going to take off your things," she said, "please tell
+William that there will be six or seven at tea. You said, I think, that
+Mr. Raeburn was going to bring Mr. Hallin?"
+
+"Yes, and Frank Leven is coming. When will Mr. Wharton be here?"
+
+"Oh, in ten minutes or so, if his train is punctual. I hear your father
+just coming in."
+
+Marcella went away, and Mrs. Boyce was left a few minutes alone. Her
+thin hands lay idle a moment on her lap, and leaning towards the window
+beside her, she looked out an instant into the snowy twilight. Her mind
+was full of its usual calm scorn for those--her daughter included--who
+supposed that the human lot was to be mended by a rise in weekly wages,
+or that suffering has any necessary dependence on the amount of
+commodities of which a man disposes. What hardship is there in starving
+and scrubbing and toiling? Had she ever seen a labourer's wife scrubbing
+her cottage floor without envy, without moral thirst? Is it these things
+that kill, or any of the great simple griefs and burdens? Doth man live
+by bread alone? The whole language of social and charitable enthusiasm
+often raised in her a kind of exasperation.
+
+So Marcella would be rich, excessively rich, even now. Outside the
+amount settled upon her, the figures of Aldous Raeburn's present income,
+irrespective of the inheritance which would come to him on his
+grandfather's death, were a good deal beyond what even Mr. Boyce--upon
+whom the daily spectacle of the Maxwell wealth exercised a certain
+angering effect--had supposed.
+
+Mrs. Boyce had received the news of the engagement with astonishment,
+but her after-acceptance of the situation had been marked by all her
+usual philosophy. Probably behind the philosophy there was much secret
+relief. Marcella was provided for. Not the fondest or most contriving
+mother could have done more for her than she had at one stroke done for
+herself. During the early autumn Mrs. Boyce had experienced some moments
+of sharp prevision as to what her future relations might be towards this
+strong and restless daughter, so determined to conquer a world her
+mother had renounced. Now all was clear, and a very shrewd observer
+could allow her mind to play freely with the ironies of the situation.
+
+As to Aldous Raeburn, she had barely spoken to him before the day when
+Marcella announced the engagement, and the lover a few hours later had
+claimed her daughter at the mother's hands with an emotion to which Mrs.
+Boyce found her usual difficulty in responding. She had done her best,
+however, to be gracious and to mask her surprise that he should have
+proposed, that Lord Maxwell should have consented, and that Marcella
+should have so lightly fallen a victim. One surprise, however, had to be
+confessed, at least to herself. After her interview with her future
+son-in-law, Mrs. Boyce realised that for the first time for fifteen
+years she was likely to admit a new friend. The impression made upon him
+by her own singular personality had translated itself in feelings and
+language which, against her will as it were, established an
+understanding, an affinity. That she had involuntarily aroused in him
+the profoundest and most chivalrous pity was plain to her. Yet for the
+first time in her life she did not resent it; and Marcella watched her
+mother's attitude with a mixture of curiosity and relief.
+
+Then followed talk of an early wedding, communications from Lord Maxwell
+to Mr. Boyce of a civil and formal kind, a good deal more notice from
+the "county," and finally this definite statement from Aldous Raeburn as
+to the settlement he proposed to make upon his wife, and the joint
+income which he and she would have immediately at their disposal.
+
+Under all these growing and palpable evidences of Marcella's future
+wealth and position, Mrs. Boyce had shown her usual restless and ironic
+spirit. But of late, and especially to-day, restlessness had become
+oppression. While Marcella was so speedily to become the rich and
+independent woman, they themselves, Marcella's mother and father, were
+very poor, in difficulties even, and likely to remain so. She gathered
+from her husband's grumbling that the provision of a suitable trousseau
+for Marcella would tax his resources to their utmost. How long would it
+be before they were dipping in Marcella's purse? Mrs. Boyce's
+self-tormenting soul was possessed by one of those nightmares her pride
+had brought upon her in grim succession during these fifteen years. And
+this pride, strong towards all the world, was nowhere so strong or so
+indomitable, at this moment, as towards her own daughter. They were
+practically strangers to each other; and they jarred. To inquire where
+the fault lay would have seemed to Mrs. Boyce futile.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Darkness had come on fast, and Mrs. Boyce was in the act of ringing for
+lights when her husband entered.
+
+"Where's Marcella?" he asked as he threw himself into a chair with the
+air of irritable fatigue which was now habitual to him.
+
+"Only gone to take off her things and tell William about tea. She will
+be down directly."
+
+"Does she know about that settlement?"
+
+"Yes, I told her. She thought it generous, but not--I think--unsuitable.
+The world cannot be reformed on nothing."
+
+"Reformed!--fiddlesticks!" said Mr. Boyce, angrily. "I never saw a girl
+with a head so full of nonsense in my life. Where does she get it from?
+Why did you let her go about in London with those people? She may be
+spoilt for good. Ten to one she'll make a laughing stock of herself and
+everybody belonging to her, before she's done."
+
+"Well, that is Mr. Raeburn's affair. I think I should take him into
+account more than Marcella does, if I were she. But probably she knows
+best."
+
+"Of course she does. He has lost his head; any one can see that. While
+she is in the room, he is like a man possessed. It doesn't sit well on
+that kind of fellow. It makes him ridiculous. I told him half the
+settlement would be ample. She would only spend the rest on nonsense."
+
+"You told him that?"
+
+"Yes, I did. Oh!"--with an angry look at her--"I suppose you thought I
+should want to sponge upon her? I am as much obliged to you as usual!"
+
+A red spot rose in his wife's thin cheek. But she turned and answered
+him gently, so gently that he had the rare sensation of having triumphed
+over her. He allowed himself to be mollified, and she stood there over
+the fire, chatting with him for some time, a friendly natural note in
+her voice which was rare and, insensibly, soothed him like an opiate.
+She chatted about Marcella's trousseau gowns, detailing her own
+contrivances for economy; about the probable day of the wedding, the
+latest gossip of the election, and so on. He sat shading his eyes from
+the firelight, and now and then throwing in a word or two. The inmost
+soul of him was very piteous, harrowed often by a new dread--the dread
+of dying. The woman beside him held him in the hollow of her hand. In
+the long wrestle between her nature and his, she had conquered. His fear
+of her and his need of her had even come to supply the place of a dozen
+ethical instincts he was naturally without.
+
+Some discomfort, probably physical, seemed at last to break up his
+moment of rest.
+
+"Well, I tell you, I often wish it were the other man," he said, with
+some impatience. "Raeburn 's so d----d superior. I suppose I offended
+him by what I said of Marcella's whims, and the risk of letting her
+control so much money at her age, and with her ideas. You never saw such
+an air!--all very quiet, of course. He buttoned his coat and got up to
+go, as though I were no more worth considering than the table. Neither
+he nor his precious grandfather need alarm themselves: I shan't trouble
+them as a visitor. If I shock them, they bore me--so we're quits.
+Marcella'll have to come here if she wants to see her father. But owing
+to your charming system of keeping her away from us all her childhood,
+she's not likely to want."
+
+"You mean Mr. Wharton by the other man?" said Mrs. Boyce, not defending
+herself or Aldous.
+
+"Yes, of course. But he came on the scene just too late, worse luck! Why
+wouldn't he have done just as well? He's as mad as she--madder. He
+believes all the rubbish she does--talks such _rot_, the people tell me,
+in his meetings. But then he's good company--he amuses you--you don't
+need to be on your p's and q's with _him_. Why wouldn't she have taken
+up with him? As far as money goes they could have rubbed along. _He's_
+not the man to starve when there are game-pies going. It's just bad
+luck."
+
+Mrs. Boyce smiled a little.
+
+"What there is to make you suppose that she would have inclined to him,
+I don't exactly see. She has been taken up with Mr. Raeburn, really,
+from the first week of her arrival here."
+
+"Well, I dare say--there was no one else," said her husband, testily.
+"That's natural enough. It's just what I say. All I know is, Wharton
+shall be free to use this house just as he pleases during his
+canvassing, whatever the Raeburns may say."
+
+He bent forward and poked the somewhat sluggish fire with a violence
+which hindered rather than helped it. Mrs. Boyce's smile had quite
+vanished. She perfectly understood all that was implied, whether in his
+instinctive dislike of Aldous Raeburn, or in his cordiality towards
+young Wharton.
+
+After a minute's silence, he got up again and left the room, walking, as
+she observed, with difficulty. She stopped a minute or so in the same
+place after he had gone, turning her rings absently on her thin fingers.
+She was thinking of some remarks which Dr. Clarke, the excellent and
+experienced local doctor, had made to her on the occasion of his last
+visit. With all the force of her strong will she had set herself to
+disbelieve them. But they had had subtle effects already. Finally she
+too went upstairs, bidding Marcella, whom she met coming down, hurry
+William with the tea, as Mr. Wharton might arrive any moment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella saw the room shut up--the large, shabby, beautiful room--the
+lamps brought in, fresh wood thrown on the fire to make it blaze, and
+the tea-table set out. Then she sat herself down on a low chair by the
+fire, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped
+in front of her. Her black dress revealed her fine full throat and her
+white wrists, for she had an impatience of restraint anywhere, and wore
+frills and falls of black lace where other people would have followed
+the fashion in high collars and close wristbands. What must have struck
+any one with an observant eye, as she sat thus, thrown into beautiful
+light and shade by the blaze of the wood fire, was the massiveness of
+the head compared with the nervous delicacy of much of the face, the
+thinness of the wrist, and of the long and slender foot raised on the
+fender. It was perhaps the great thickness and full wave of the hair
+which gave the head its breadth; but the effect was singular, and would
+have been heavy but for the glow of the eyes, which balanced it.
+
+She was thinking, as a _fiancée_ should, of Aldous and their marriage,
+which had been fixed for the end of February. Yet not apparently with
+any rapturous absorption. There was a great deal to plan, and her mind
+was full of business. Who was to look after her various village schemes
+while she and Lady Winterbourne were away in London? Mary Harden had
+hardly brains enough, dear little thing as she was. They must find some
+capable woman and pay her. The Cravens would tell her, of course, that
+she was on the high road to the most degrading of _rôles_--the _rôle_ of
+Lady Bountiful. But there were Lady Bountifuls and Lady Bountifuls. And
+the _rôle_ itself was inevitable. It all depended upon how it was
+managed--in the interest of what ideas.
+
+She must somehow renew her relations with the Cravens in town. It would
+certainly be in her power now to help them and their projects forward a
+little. Of course they would distrust her, but that she would get over.
+
+All the time she was listening mechanically for the hall door bell,
+which, however, across the distances of the great rambling house it was
+not easy to hear. Their coming guest was not much in her mind. She
+tacitly assumed that her father would look after him. On the two or
+three occasions when they had met during the last three months,
+including his luncheon at Mellor on the day after her engagement, her
+thoughts had been too full to allow her to take much notice of
+him--picturesque and amusing as he seemed to be. Of late he had not been
+much in the neighbourhood. There had been a slack time for both
+candidates, which was now to give way to a fresh period of hard
+canvassing in view of the election which everybody expected at the end
+of February.
+
+But Aldous was to bring Edward Hallin! That interested her. She felt an
+intense curiosity to see and know Hallin, coupled with a certain
+nervousness. The impression she might be able to make on him would be in
+some sense an earnest of her future.
+
+Suddenly, something undefinable--a slight sound, a current of air--made
+her turn her head. To her amazement she saw a young man in the doorway
+looking at her with smiling eyes, and quietly drawing off his gloves.
+
+She sprang up with a feeling of annoyance.
+
+"Mr. Wharton!"
+
+"Oh!--must you?"--he said, with a movement of one hand, as though to
+stop her. "Couldn't you stay like that? At first I thought there was
+nobody in the room. Your servant is grappling with my bags, which are as
+the sand of the sea for multitude, so I wandered in by myself. Then I
+saw you--and the fire--and the room. It was like a bit of music. It was
+mere wanton waste to interrupt it."
+
+Marcella flushed, as she very stiffly shook hands with him.
+
+"I did not hear the front door," she said coldly. "My mother will be
+here directly. May I give you some tea?"
+
+"Thanks. No, I knew you did not hear me. That delighted me. It showed
+what charming things there are in the world that have no spectators!
+What a _delicious_ place this is!--what a heavenly old place--especially
+in these half lights! There was a raw sun when I was here before, but
+now--"
+
+He stood in front of the fire, looking round the great room, and at the
+few small lamps making their scanty light amid the flame-lit darkness.
+His hands were loosely crossed behind his back, and his boyish face, in
+its setting of curls, shone with content and self-possession.
+
+"Well," said Marcella, bluntly, "I should prefer a little more light to
+live by. Perhaps, when you have fallen downstairs here in the dark as
+often as I have, you may too."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"But how much better, after all--don't you think so?--to have too little
+of anything than too much!"
+
+He flung himself into a chair beside the tea-table, looking up with gay
+interrogation as Marcella handed him his cup. She was a good deal
+surprised by him. On the few occasions of their previous meetings, these
+bright eyes, and this pronounced manner, had been--at any rate as
+towards herself--much less free and evident. She began to recover the
+start he had given her, and to study him with a half-unwilling
+curiosity.
+
+"Then Mellor will please you," she said drily, in answer to his remark,
+carrying her own tea meanwhile to a chair on the other side of the fire.
+"My father never bought anything--my father can't. I believe we have
+chairs enough to sit down upon--but we have no curtains to half the
+windows. Can I give you anything?"
+
+For he had risen, and was looking over the tea-tray.
+
+"Oh! but I _must_," he said discontentedly. "I _must_ have enough sugar
+in my tea!"
+
+"I gave you more than the average," she said, with a sudden little leap
+of laughter, as she came to his aid. "Do all your principles break down
+like this? I was going to suggest that you might like some of that fire
+taken away?" And she pointed to the pile of blazing logs which now
+filled up the great chimney.
+
+"That fire!" he said, shivering, and moving up to it. "Have you any idea
+what sort of a wind you keep up here on these hills on a night like
+this? And to think that in this weather, with a barometer that laughs in
+your face when you try to move it, I have three meetings to-morrow
+night!"
+
+"When one loves the 'People,' with a large P," said Marcella, "one
+mustn't mind winds."
+
+He flashed a smile at her, answering to the sparkle of her look, then
+applied himself to his tea and toasted bun again, with the dainty
+deliberation of one enjoying every sip and bite.
+
+"No; but if only the People didn't live so far apart. Some murderous
+person wanted them to have only one neck. I want them to have only one
+ear. Only then unfortunately everybody would speak well--which would
+bring things round to dulness again. Does Mr. Raeburn make you think
+very bad things of me, Miss Boyce?"
+
+He bent forward to her as he spoke, his blue eyes all candour and mirth.
+
+Marcella started.
+
+"How can he?" she said abruptly. "I am not a Conservative."
+
+"Not a Conservative?" he said joyously. "Oh! but impossible! Does that
+mean that you ever read my poor little speeches?"
+
+He pointed to the local newspaper, freshly cut, which lay on a table at
+Marcella's elbow.
+
+"Sometimes--" said Marcella, embarrassed. "There is so little time."
+
+In truth she had hardly given his candidature a thought since the day
+Aldous proposed to her. She had been far too much taken up with her own
+prospects, with Lady Winterbourne's friendship, and her village schemes.
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Of course there is. When is the great event to be?"
+
+"I didn't mean that," said Marcella, stiffly. "Lady Winterbourne and I
+have been trying to start some village workshops. We have been working
+and talking, and writing, morning, noon, and night."
+
+"Oh! I know--yes, I heard of it. And you really think anything is going
+to come out of finicking little schemes of that sort?"
+
+His dry change of tone drew a quick look from her. The fresh-coloured
+face was transformed. In place of easy mirth and mischief, she read an
+acute and half contemptuous attention.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said slowly, after a pause. "Or
+rather--I do know quite well. You told papa--didn't you?--and Mr.
+Raeburn says that you are a Socialist--not half-and-half, as all the
+world is, but the real thing? And of course you want great changes: you
+don't like anything that might strengthen the upper class with the
+people. But that is nonsense. You can't get the changes for a long
+_long_ time. And, meanwhile, people must be clothed and fed and kept
+alive."
+
+She lay back in her high-backed chair and looked at him defiantly. His
+lip twitched, but he kept his gravity.
+
+"You would be much better employed in forming a branch of the
+Agricultural Union," he said decidedly. "What is the good of playing
+Lady Bountiful to a decayed industry? All that is childish; we want _the
+means of revolution_. The people who are for reform shouldn't waste
+money and time on fads."
+
+"I understand all that," she said scornfully, her quick breath rising
+and falling. "Perhaps you don't know that I was a member of the
+Venturist Society in London? What you say doesn't sound very new to me!"
+
+His seriousness disappeared in laughter. He hastily put down his cup
+and, stepping over to her, held out his hand.
+
+"You a Venturist? So am I. Joy! Won't you shake hands with me, as
+comrades should? We are a very mixed set of people, you know, and
+between ourselves I don't know that we are coming to much. But we can
+make an alderman dream of the guillotine--that is always something. Oh!
+but now we can talk on quite a new footing!"
+
+She had given him her hand for an instant, withdrawing it with shy
+rapidity, and he had thrown himself into a chair again, with his arms
+behind his head, and the air of one reflecting happily on a changed
+situation. "Quite a new footing," he repeated thoughtfully. "But it
+is--a little surprising. What does--what does Mr. Raeburn say to it?"
+
+"Nothing! He cares just as much about the poor as you or I, please
+understand! He doesn't choose my way--but he won't interfere with it."
+
+"Ah! that is like him--like Aldous."
+
+Marcella started.
+
+"You don't mind my calling him by his Christian name sometimes? It drops
+out. We used to meet as boys together at the Levens. The Levens are my
+cousins. He was a big boy, and I was a little one. But he didn't like
+me. You see--I was a little beast!"
+
+His air of appealing candour could not have been more engaging.
+
+"Yes, I fear I was a little beast. And he was, even then, and always,
+'the good and beautiful.' You don't understand Greek, do you, Miss
+Boyce? But he was very good to me. I got into an awful scrape once. I
+let out a pair of eagle owls that used to be kept in the courtyard--Sir
+Charles loved them a great deal more than his babies--I let them out at
+night for pure wickedness, and they came to fearful ends in the park. I
+was to have been sent home next day, in the most unnecessary and penal
+hurry. But Aldous interposed--said he would look after me for the rest
+of the holidays."
+
+"And then you tormented him?"
+
+"Oh no!" he said with gentle complacency. "Oh no! I never torment
+anybody. But one must enjoy oneself you know; what else can one do? Then
+afterwards, when we were older--somehow I don't know--but we didn't get
+on. It is very sad--I wish he thought better of me."
+
+The last words were said with a certain change of tone, and sitting up
+he laid the tips of his fingers together on his knees with a little
+plaintive air. Marcella's eyes danced with amusement, but she looked
+away from him to the fire, and would not answer.
+
+"You don't help me out. You don't console me. It's unkind of-you. Don't
+you think it a melancholy fate to be always admiring the people who
+detest you?"
+
+"Don't admire them!" she said merrily.
+
+His eyebrows lifted. "_That_," he said drily, "is disloyal. I call--I
+call your ancestor over the mantelpiece"--he waved his hand towards a
+blackened portrait in front of him--"to witness, that I am all for
+admiring Mr. Raeburn, and you discourage it. Well, but now--_now_"--he
+drew his chair eagerly towards hers, the pose of a minute before thrown
+to the winds--"do let us understand each other a little more before
+people come. You know I have a labour newspaper?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"You read it?"
+
+"Is it the _Labour Clarion_? I take it in."
+
+"Capital!" he cried. "Then I know now why I found a copy in the village
+here. You lent it to a man called Hurd?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Whose wife worships you?--whose good angel you have been? Do I know
+something about you, or do I not? Well, now, are you satisfied with that
+paper? Can you suggest to me means of improving it? It wants some fresh
+blood, I think--I must find it? I bought the thing last year, in a
+moribund condition, with the old staff. Oh! we will certainly take
+counsel together about it--most certainly! But first--I have been
+boasting of knowing something about you--but I should like to ask--do
+you know anything about me?"
+
+Both laughed. Then Marcella tried to be serious.
+
+"Well--I--I believe--you have some land?"
+
+"Eight!" he nodded--"I am a Lincolnshire landowner. I have about five
+thousand acres--enough to be tolerably poor on--and enough to play
+tricks with. I have a co-operative farm, for instance. At present I have
+lent them a goodish sum of money--and remitted them their first
+half-year's rent. Not so far a paying speculation. But it will do--some
+day. Meanwhile the estate wants money--and my plans and I want
+money--badly. I propose to make the _Labour Clarion_ pay--if I can.
+That will give me more time for speaking and organising, for what
+concerns _us_--as Venturists--than the Bar."
+
+"The Bar?" she said, a little mystified, but following every word with a
+fascinated attention.
+
+"I made myself a barrister three years ago, to please my mother. She
+thought I should do better in Parliament--if ever I got in. Did you ever
+hear of my mother?"
+
+There was no escaping these frank, smiling questions.
+
+"No," said Marcella, honestly.
+
+"Well, ask Lord Maxwell," he said, laughing. "He and she came across
+each other once or twice, when he was Home Secretary years ago, and she
+was wild about some woman's grievance or other. She always maintains
+that she got the better of him--no doubt he was left with a different
+impression. Well--my mother--most people thought her mad--perhaps she
+was--but then somehow--I loved her!"
+
+He was still smiling, but at the last words a charming vibration crept
+into the words, and his eyes sought her with a young open demand for
+sympathy.
+
+"Is that so rare?" she asked him, half laughing--instinctively defending
+her own feeling lest it should be snatched from her by any make-believe.
+
+"Yes--as we loved each other--it is rare. My father died when I was ten.
+She would not send me to school, and I was always in her pocket--I
+shared all her interests. She was a wild woman--but she _lived_, as not
+one person in twenty lives."
+
+Then he sighed. Marcella was too shy to imitate his readiness to ask
+questions. But she supposed that his mother must be dead--indeed, now
+vaguely remembered to have heard as much.
+
+There was a little silence.
+
+"Please tell me," she said suddenly, "why do you attack my
+straw-plaiting? Is a co-operative farm any less of a stopgap?"
+
+Instantly his face changed. He drew up his chair again beside her, as
+gay and keen-eyed as before.
+
+"I can't argue it out now. There is so much to say. But do listen! I
+have a meeting in the village here next week to preach land
+nationalisation. We mean to try and form a branch of the Labourers'
+Union. Will you come?"
+
+Marcella hesitated.
+
+"I think so," she said slowly.
+
+There was a pause. Then she raised her eyes and found his fixed upon
+her. A sudden sympathy--of youth, excitement, pleasure--seemed to rise
+between them. She had a quick impression of lightness, grace; of an open
+brow set in curls; of a look more intimate, inquisitive, commanding,
+than any she had yet met.
+
+"May I speak to you, miss?" said a voice at the door.
+
+Marcella rose hastily. Her mother's maid was standing there.
+
+She hurried across the room.
+
+"What is the matter, Deacon?"
+
+"Your mother says, miss," said the maid, retreating into the hall, "I am
+to tell you she can't come down. Your father is ill, and she has sent
+for Dr. Clarke. But you are please not to go up. Will you give the
+gentlemen their tea, and she will come down before they go, if she can."
+
+Marcella had turned pale.
+
+"Mayn't I go, Deacon? What is it?"
+
+"It's a bad fit of pain, your mother says, miss. Nothing can be done
+till the doctor comes. She begged _particular_ that you wouldn't go up,
+miss. She doesn't want any one put out."
+
+At the same moment there was a ring at the outer door.
+
+"Oh, there is Aldous," cried Marcella, with relief, and she ran out into
+the hall to meet him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Aldous advanced into the inner hall at sight of Marcella, leaving his
+companions behind in the vestibule taking off their coats. Marcella ran
+to him.
+
+"Papa is ill!" she said to him hastily. "Mamma has sent for Dr. Clarke.
+She won't let me go up, and wants us to take no notice and have tea
+without her."
+
+"I am so sorry! Can we do anything? The dogcart is here with a fast
+horse. If your messenger went on foot--"
+
+"Oh, no! they are sure to have sent the boy on the pony. I don't know
+why, but I have had a presentiment for a long time past that papa was
+going to be ill."
+
+She looked white and excited. She had turned back to the drawing-room,
+forgetting the other guests, he walking beside her. As they passed along
+the dim hall, Aldous had her hand close in his, and when they passed
+under an archway at the further end he stooped suddenly in the shadows
+and kissed the hand. Touch--kiss--had the clinging, the intensity of
+passion.
+
+They were the expression of all that had lain vibrating at the man's
+inmost heart during the dark drive, while he had been chatting with his
+two companions.
+
+"My darling! I hope not. Would you rather not see strangers? Shall I
+send Hallin and young Leven away? They would understand at once."
+
+"Oh, no! Mr. Wharton is here anyway--staying. Where is Mr. Hallin? I
+had forgotten him."
+
+Aldous turned and called. Mr. Hallin and young Frank Leven, divining
+something unusual, were looking at the pictures in the hall.
+
+Edward Hallin came up and took Marcella's offered hand. Each looked at
+the other with a special attention and interest. "She holds my friend's
+life in her hands--is she worthy of it?" was naturally the question
+hanging suspended in the man's judgment. The girl's manner was proud and
+shy, the manner of one anxious to please, yet already, perhaps, on the
+defensive.
+
+Aldous explained the position of affairs, and Hallin expressed his
+sympathy. He had a singularly attractive voice, the voice indeed of the
+orator, which can adapt itself with equal charm and strength to the most
+various needs and to any pitch. As he spoke, Marcella was conscious of a
+sudden impression that she already knew him and could be herself with
+him at once.
+
+"Oh, I say," broke in young Leven, who was standing behind; "don't you
+be bothered with us, Miss Boyce. Just send us back at once. I'm awfully
+sorry!"
+
+"No; you are to come in!" she said, smiling through her pallor, which
+was beginning to pass away, and putting out her hand to him--the young
+Eton and Oxford athlete, just home for his Christmas vacation, was a
+great favourite with her--"You must come and have tea and cheer me up by
+telling me all the things you have killed this week. Is there anything
+left alive? You had come down to the fieldfares, you know, last
+Tuesday."
+
+He followed her, laughing and protesting, and she led the way to the
+drawing-room. But as her fingers were on the handle she once more caught
+sight of the maid, Deacon, standing on the stairs, and ran to speak to
+her.
+
+"He is better," she said, coming back with a face of glad relief. "The
+attack seems to be passing off. Mamma can't come down, but she begs that
+we will all enjoy ourselves."
+
+"We'll endeavour," said young Leven, rubbing his hands, "by the help of
+tea. Miss Boyce, will you please tell Aldous and Mr. Hallin not to talk
+politics when they're taking me out to a party. They should fight a man
+of their own size. I'm all limp and trampled on, and want you to protect
+me."
+
+The group moved, laughing and talking, into the drawing-room.
+
+"Jiminy!" said Leven, stopping short behind Aldous, who was alone
+conscious of the lad's indignant astonishment; "what the deuce is _he_
+doing here?"
+
+For there on the rug, with his back to the fire, stood Wharton,
+surveying the party with his usual smiling _aplomb_.
+
+"Mr. Hallin, do you know Mr. Wharton?" said Marcella.
+
+"Mr. Wharton and I have met several times on public platforms," said
+Hallin, holding out his hand, which Wharton took with effusion. Aldous
+greeted him with the impassive manner, the "three finger" manner, which
+was with him an inheritance--though not from his grandfather--and did
+not contribute to his popularity in the neighbourhood. As for young
+Leven, he barely nodded to the Radical candidate, and threw himself into
+a chair as far from the fire as possible.
+
+"Frank and I have met before to-day!" said Wharton, laughing.
+
+"Yes, I've been trying to undo some of your mischief," said the boy,
+bluntly. "I found him, Miss Boyce, haranguing a lot of men at the
+dinner-hour at Tudley End--one of our villages, you know--cramming them
+like anything--all about the game laws, and our misdeeds--my father's,
+of course."
+
+Wharton raised a protesting hand.
+
+"Oh--all very well! Of course it was us you meant! Well, when he'd
+driven off, I got up on a cart and had _my_ say. I asked them whether
+they didn't all come out at our big shoots, and whether they didn't have
+almost as much fun as we did--why! the schoolmaster and the postman come
+to ask to carry cartridges, and everybody turns out, down to the
+cripples!--whether they didn't have rabbits given them all the year
+round; whether half of them hadn't brothers and sons employed somehow
+about the game, well-paid, and well-treated; whether any man-jack of
+them would be a ha'porth better off if there were no game; whether many
+of them wouldn't be worse off; and whether England wouldn't be a beastly
+dull place to live in, if people like him"--he pointed to Wharton--"had
+the governing of it! And I brought 'em all round too. I got them
+cheering and laughing. Oh! I can tell you old Dodgson'll have to take
+me on. He says he'll ask me to speak for him at several places. I'm not
+half bad, I declare I'm not."
+
+"I thought they gave you a holiday task at Eton," observed Wharton,
+blandly.
+
+The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself--radiant:--
+
+"I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well. But if it had
+only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn't I have scored--by
+Jove! They gave us a beastly _essay_ instead of a book. _Demagogues_!' I
+sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half. I'd have known
+something about it _now_."
+
+And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust
+some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to
+his candidate cousin.
+
+Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton. Then there was a general
+drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped
+by Aldous. Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant
+and apart.
+
+Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive,
+something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting,
+and glad to be silent. Yet all the time he was observing the girl
+presiding and the man beside her--his friend, her lover. The moment had
+a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him. So close had been the
+bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover's communication of his
+engagement had evoked in the friend that sense--poignant,
+inevitable--which in the realm of the affections always waits on
+something done and finished,--a leaf turned, a chapter closed. "That sad
+word, Joy!" Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn's letter reached him,
+and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor's
+phrase, long familiar and significant to him. His letter to his friend,
+and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost
+him an invalid's contribution of sleep and ease. The girl's answer had
+seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with
+a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken
+as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as
+Aldous was concerned.
+
+Her beauty, of which he had heard much, now that he was face to face
+with it, was certainly striking enough--all the more because of its
+immaturity, the subtlety and uncertainty of its promise.
+_Immaturity_--_uncertainty_--these words returned upon him as he
+observed her manner with its occasional awkwardness, the awkwardness
+which goes with power not yet fully explored or mastered by its
+possessor. How Aldous hung upon her, following every movement,
+anticipating every want! After a while Hallin found himself
+half-inclined to Mr. Boyce's view, that men of Raeburn's type are never
+seen to advantage in this stage--this queer topsy-turvy stage--of first
+passion. He felt a certain impatience, a certain jealousy for his
+friend's dignity. It seemed to him too, every now and then, that
+she--the girl--was teased by all this absorption, this deference. He was
+conscious of watching for something in her that did not appear; and a
+first prescience of things anxious or untoward stirred in his quick
+sense.
+
+"You may all say what you like," said Marcella, suddenly, putting down
+her cup, and letting her hand drop for emphasis on her knee; "but you
+will never persuade me that game-preserving doesn't make life in the
+country much more difficult, and the difference between classes much
+wider and bitterer, than they need be."
+
+The remark cut across some rattling talk of Frank Leven's, who was in
+the first flush of the sportsman's ardour, and, though by no means
+without parts, could at the present moment apply his mind to little else
+than killing of one kind or another, unless it were to the chances of
+keeping his odious cousin out of Parliament.
+
+Leven stared. Miss Boyce's speech seemed to him to have no sort of _ŕ
+propos_. Aldous looked down upon her as he stood beside her, smiling.
+
+"I wish you didn't trouble yourself so much about it," he said.
+
+"How can I help it?" she answered quickly; and then flushed, like one
+who has drawn attention indiscreetly to their own personal situation.
+
+"Trouble herself!" echoed young Leven. "Now, look here Miss Boyce, will
+you come for a walk with me? I'll convince you, as I convinced those
+fellows over there. I know I could, and you won't give me the chance;
+it's too bad."
+
+"Oh, you!" she said, with a little shrug; "what do you know about it?
+One might as well consult a gambler about gambling when he is in the
+middle of his first rush of luck. I have ten times more right to an
+opinion than you have. I can keep my head cool, and notice a hundred
+things that _you_ would never see. I come fresh into your country life,
+and the first thing that strikes me is that the whole machinery of law
+and order seems to exist for nothing in the world but to protect your
+pheasants! There are policemen--to catch poachers; there are
+magistrates--to try them. To judge from the newspapers, at least, they
+have nothing else to do. And if _you_ follow your sporting instincts,
+you are a very fine fellow, and everybody admires you. But if a
+shoemaker's son in Mellor follows his, he is a villain and a thief, and
+the policeman and the magistrate make for him at once."
+
+"But I don't steal his chickens!" cried the lad, choking with arguments
+and exasperation; "and why should he steal my pheasants? I paid for the
+eggs, I paid for the hens to sit on 'em, I paid for the coops to rear
+them in, I paid the men to watch them, I paid for the barley to feed
+them with: why is he to be allowed to take my property, and I am to be
+sent to jail if I take his?"
+
+"_Property_!" said Marcella, scornfully. "You can't settle everything
+nowadays by that big word. We are coming to put the public good before
+property. If the nation should decide to curtail your 'right,' as you
+call it, in the general interest, it will do it, and you will be left to
+scream."
+
+She had flung her arm round the back of her chair, and all her lithe
+young frame was tense with an eagerness, nay, an excitement, which drew
+Hallin's attention. It was more than was warranted by the conversation,
+he thought.
+
+"Well, if you think the abolition of game preserving would be popular in
+the country, Miss Boyce, I'm certain you make a precious mistake," cried
+Leven. "Why, even you don't think it would be, do you, Mr. Hallin?" he
+said, appealing at random in his disgust.
+
+"I don't know," said Hallin, with his quiet smile. "I rather think, on
+the whole, it would be. The farmers put up with it, but a great many of
+them don't like it. Things are mended since the Ground Game Act, but
+there are a good many grievances still left."
+
+"I should think there are!" said Marcella, eagerly, bending forward to
+him. "I was talking to one of our farmers the other day whose land goes
+up to the edge of Lord Winterbourne's woods. '_They_ don't keep their
+pheasants, miss,' he said. '_I_ do. I and my corn. If I didn't send a
+man up half-past five in the morning, when the ears begin to fill,
+there'd be nothing left for _us_.' 'Why don't you complain to the
+agent?' I said. 'Complain! Lor' bless you, miss, you may complain till
+you're black in the face. I've allus found--an' I've been here, man and
+boy, thirty-two year--as how _Winterbournes generally best it.'_ There
+you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It's a tyranny--a tyranny of the
+rich."
+
+Flushed and sarcastic, she looked at Frank Leven; but Hallin had an
+uncomfortable feeling that the sarcasm was not all meant for him. Aldous
+was sitting with his hands on his knees, and his head bent forward a
+little. Once, as the talk ran on, Hallin saw him raise his grey eyes to
+the girl beside him, who certainly did not notice it, and was not
+thinking of him. There was a curious pain and perplexity in the
+expression, but something else too--a hunger, a dependence, a yearning,
+that for an instant gripped the friend's heart.
+
+"Well, I know Aldous doesn't agree with you, Miss Boyce," cried Leven,
+looking about him in his indignation for some argument that should be
+final. "You don't, do you, Aldous? You don't think the country would be
+the better, if we could do away with game to-morrow?"
+
+"No more than I think it would be the better," said Aldous, quietly, "if
+we could do away with gold-plate and false hair to-morrow. There would
+be too many hungry goldsmiths and wig-makers on the streets."
+
+Marcella turned to him, half defiant, half softened.
+
+"Of course, your point lies in _to-morrow,"_ she said. "I accept that.
+We can't carry reform by starving innocent people. But the question is,
+what are we to work towards? Mayn't we regard the game laws as one of
+the obvious crying abuses to be attacked first--in the great
+campaign!--the campaign which is to bring liberty and self-respect back
+to the country districts, and make the labourer feel himself as much of
+a man as the squire?"
+
+"What a head! What an attitude!" thought Hallin, half repelled, half
+fascinated. "But a girl that can talk politics--hostile politics--to her
+lover, and mean them too--or am I inexperienced?--and is it merely that
+she is so much interested in him that she wants to be quarrelling with
+him?"
+
+Aldous looked up. "I am not _sure_," he said, answering her. "That is
+always my difficulty, you know," and he smiled at her. "Game preserving
+is not to me personally an attractive form of private property, but it
+seems to me bound up with other forms, and I want to see where the
+attack is going to lead me. But I would protect your farmer--mind!--as
+zealously as you."
+
+Hallin caught the impatient quiver of the girl's lip. The tea had just
+been taken away, and Marcella had gone to sit upon an old sofa near the
+fire, whither Aldous had followed her. Wharton, who had so far said
+nothing, had left his post of observation on the hearth-rug, and was
+sitting under the lamp balancing a paper-knife with great attention on
+two fingers. In the half light Hallin by chance saw a movement of
+Raeburn's hand towards Marcella's, which lay hidden among the folds of
+her dress--quick resistance on her part, then acquiescence. He felt a
+sudden pleasure in his friend's small triumph.
+
+"Aldous and I have worn these things threadbare many a time," he said,
+addressing his hostess. "You don't know how kind he is to my dreams. I
+am no sportsman and have no landowning relations, so he ought to bid me
+hold my tongue. But he lets me rave. To me the simple fact is that _game
+preserving creates crime_. Agricultural life is naturally simpler--might
+be, it always seems to me, so much more easily moralised and fraternised
+than the industrial form. And you split it up and poison it all by the
+emphasis laid on this class pleasure. It is a natural pleasure, you say.
+Perhaps it is--the survival, perhaps, of some primitive instinct in our
+northern blood--but, if so, why should it be impossible for the rich to
+share it with the poor? I have little plans--dreams. I throw them out
+sometimes to catch Aldous, but he hardly rises to them!"
+
+"Oh! I _say_," broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer.
+"Now look here, Miss Boyce,--what do you think Mr. Hallin wants? It is
+just sheer lunacy--it really is--though I know I'm impertinent, and he's
+a great man. But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common
+there is--oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain--on Lord
+Maxwell's estate, and make a _labourers'_ shoot of it! Now, I ask you!
+And he vows he doesn't see why they shouldn't rear pheasants if they
+choose to club and pay for it. Well, I will say that much for him,
+Aldous didn't see his way to _that_, though he isn't the kind of
+Conservative _I_ want to see in Parliament by a long way. Besides, it's
+such stuff! They say sport brutalises _us_, and then they want to go and
+contaminate the labourer. But we won't take the responsibility. We've
+got our own vices, and we'll stick to them; we're used to them; but we
+won't hand them on: we'd scorn the action."
+
+The flushed young barbarian, driven to bay, was not to be resisted.
+Marcella laughed heartily, and Hallin laid an affectionate hand on the
+boy's shoulder, patting him as though he were a restive horse.
+
+"Yes, I remember I was puzzled as to the details of Hallin's scheme,"
+said Aldous, his mouth twitching. "I wanted to know who was to pay for
+the licences; how game enough for the number of applicants was to be
+got without preserving; and how men earning twelve or fourteen shillings
+a week were to pay a keeper. Then I asked a clergyman who has a living
+near this common what he thought would be the end of it. 'Well,' he
+said, 'the first day they'd shoot every animal on the place; the second
+day they'd shoot each other. Universal carnage--I should say that would
+be about the end of it.' These were trifles, of course--details."
+
+Hallin shook his head serenely.
+
+"I still maintain," he said, "that a little practical ingenuity might
+have found a way."
+
+"And I will support you," said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and
+bending over to Hallin, "with good reason. For three years and a few
+months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own
+estate, and it has not worked badly at all."
+
+"There!" cried Marcella. "There! I knew something could be done, if
+there was a will. I have always felt it."
+
+She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening
+eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and
+eloquent.
+
+"Of course, there was nothing to shoot!" exclaimed Frank Leven.
+
+"On the contrary," said Wharton, smiling, "we are in the middle of a
+famous partridge country."
+
+"How your neighbours must dote on you!" cried the boy. But Wharton took
+no notice.
+
+"And my father preserved strictly," he went on. "It is quite a simple
+story. When I inherited, three years ago, I thought the whole thing
+detestable, and determined I wouldn't be responsible for keeping it up.
+So I called the estate together--farmers and labourers--and we worked
+out a plan. There are keepers, but they are the estate servants, not
+mine. Everybody has his turn according to the rules--I and my friends
+along with the rest. Not everybody can shoot every year, but everybody
+gets his chance, and, moreover, a certain percentage of all the game
+killed is public property, and is distributed every year according to a
+regular order."
+
+"Who pays the keepers?" interrupted Leven.
+
+"I do," said Wharton, smiling again. "Mayn't I--for the present--do what
+I will with mine own? I return in their wages some of my ill-gotten
+gains as a landowner. It is all makeshift, of course."
+
+"I understand!" exclaimed Marcella, nodding to him--"you could not be a
+Venturist and keep up game-preserving?"
+
+Wharton met her bright eye with a half deprecating, reserved air.
+
+"You are right, of course," he said drily. "For a Socialist to be
+letting his keepers run in a man earning twelve shillings a week for
+knocking over a rabbit would have been a little strong. No one can be
+consistent in my position--in any landowner's position--it is
+impossible; still, thank Heaven, one can deal with the most glaring
+matters. As Mr. Raeburn said, however, all this game business is, of
+course, a mere incident of the general land and property system, as you
+will hear me expound when you come to that meeting you promised me to
+honour."
+
+He stooped forward, scanning her with smiling deference. Marcella felt
+the man's hand that held her own suddenly tighten an instant. Then
+Aldous released her, and rising walked towards the fire.
+
+"You're _not_ going to one of his meetings, Miss Boyce!" cried Frank, in
+angry incredulity.
+
+Marcella hesitated an instant, half angry with Wharton. Then she
+reddened and threw back her dark head with the passionate gesture Hallin
+had already noticed as characteristic.
+
+"Mayn't I go where I belong?" she said--"where my convictions lead me?"
+
+There was a moment's awkward silence. Then Hallin got up.
+
+"Miss Boyce, may we see the house? Aldous has told me much of it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently, in the midst of their straggling progress through the
+half-furnished rooms of the garden front, preceded by the shy footman
+carrying a lamp, which served for little more than to make darkness
+visible, Marcella found herself left behind with Aldous. As soon as she
+felt that they were alone, she realised a jar between herself and him.
+His manner was much as usual, but there was an underlying effort and
+difficulty which her sensitiveness caught at once. A sudden wave of
+girlish trouble--remorse--swept over her. In her impulsiveness she moved
+close to him as they were passing through her mother's little
+sitting-room, and put her hand on his arm.
+
+"I don't think I was nice just now," she said, stammering. "I didn't
+mean it. I seem to be always driven into opposition--into a feeling of
+war--when you are so good to me--so much too good to me!"
+
+Aldous had turned at her first word. With a long breath, as it were of
+unspeakable relief, he caught her in his arms vehemently, passionately.
+So far she had been very shrinking and maidenly with him in their
+solitary moments, and he had been all delicate chivalry and respect,
+tasting to the full the exquisiteness of each fresh advance towards
+intimacy, towards lover's privilege, adoring her, perhaps, all the more
+for her reserve, her sudden flights, and stiffenings. But to-night he
+asked no leave, and in her astonishment she was almost passive.
+
+"Oh, do let me go!" she cried at last, trying to disengage herself
+completely.
+
+"No!" he said with emphasis, still holding her hand firmly. "Come and
+sit down here. They will look after themselves."
+
+He put her, whether she would or no, into an arm-chair and knelt beside
+her.
+
+"Did you think it was hardly kind," he said with a quiver of voice he
+could not repress, "to let me hear for the first time, in public, that
+you had promised to go to one of that man's meetings after refusing
+again and again to come to any of mine?"
+
+"Do you want to forbid me to go?" she said quickly. There was a feeling
+in her which would have been almost relieved, for the moment, if he had
+said yes.
+
+"By no means," he said steadily. "That was not our compact. But--guess
+for yourself what I want! Do you think"--he paused a moment--"do you
+think I put nothing of myself into my public life--into these meetings
+among the people who have known me from a boy? Do you think it is all a
+convention--that my feeling, my conscience, remain outside? You can't
+think that! But if not, how can I bear to live what is to be so large a
+part of my life out of your ken and sight? I know--I know--you warned me
+amply--you can't agree with me. But there is much besides intellectual
+agreement possible--much that would help and teach us both--if only we
+are together--not separated--not holding aloof--"
+
+He stopped, watching all the changes of her face. She was gulfed in a
+deep wave of half-repentant feeling, remembering all his generosity, his
+forbearance, his devotion.
+
+"When are you speaking next?" she half whispered. In the dim light her
+softened pose, the gentle sudden relaxation of every line, were an
+intoxication.
+
+"Next week--Friday--at Gairsly. Hallin and Aunt Neta are coming."
+
+"Will Miss Raeburn take me?"
+
+His grey eyes shone upon her, and he kissed her hand.
+
+"Mr. Hallin won't speak for you!" she said, after the silence, with a
+return of mischief.
+
+"Don't be so sure! He has given me untold help in the drafting of my
+Bill. If I didn't call myself a Conservative, he would vote for me
+to-morrow. That's the absurdity of it. Do you know, I hear them coming
+back?"
+
+"One thing," she said hastily, drawing him towards her, and then
+holding him back, as though shrinking always from the feeling she could
+so readily evoke. "I must say it; you oughtn't to give me so much money,
+it is too much. Suppose I use it for things you don't like?"
+
+"You won't," he said gaily.
+
+She tried to push the subject further, but he would not have it.
+
+"I am all for free discussion," he said in the same tone; "but sometimes
+debate must be stifled. I am going to stifle it!"
+
+And stooping, he kissed her, lightly, tremulously. His manner showed her
+once more what she was to him--how sacred, how beloved. First it touched
+and shook her; then she sprang up with a sudden disagreeable sense of
+moral disadvantage--inferiority--coming she knew not whence, and undoing
+for the moment all that buoyant consciousness of playing the
+magnanimous, disinterested part which had possessed her throughout the
+talk in the drawing-room.
+
+The others reappeared, headed by their lamp: Wharton first, scanning the
+two who had lingered behind, with his curious eyes, so blue and
+brilliant under the white forehead and the curls.
+
+"We have been making the wildest shots at your ancestors, Miss Boyce,"
+he said. "Frank professed to know everything about the pictures, and
+turned out to know nothing. I shall ask for some special coaching
+to-morrow morning. May I engage you--ten o'clock?"
+
+Marcella made some evasive answer, and they all sauntered back to the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Shall you be at work to-morrow, Raeburn?" said Wharton.
+
+"Probably," said Aldous drily. Marcella, struck by the tone, looked
+back, and caught an expression and bearing which were as yet new to her
+in the speaker. She supposed they represented the haughtiness natural in
+the man of birth and power towards the intruder, who is also the
+opponent.
+
+Instantly the combative critical mood returned upon her, and the impulse
+to assert herself by protecting Wharton. His manner throughout the talk
+in the drawing-room had been, she declared to herself, excellent--modest,
+and self-restrained, comparing curiously with the boyish egotism and
+self-abandonment he had shown in their _tęte-ŕ-tęte_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why, there is Mr. Boyce," exclaimed Wharton, hurrying forward as they
+entered the drawing-room.
+
+There, indeed, on the sofa was the master of the house, more ghastly
+black and white than ever, and prepared to claim to the utmost the
+tragic pre-eminence of illness. He shook hands coldly with Aldous, who
+asked after his health with the kindly brevity natural to the man who
+wants no effusions for himself in public or personal matters, and
+concludes therefore that other people desire none.
+
+"You _are_ better, papa?" said Marcella, taking his hand.
+
+"Certainly, my dear--better for morphia. Don't talk of me. I have got my
+death warrant, but I hope I can take it quietly. Evelyn, I _specially_
+asked to have that thin cushion brought down from my dressing-room. It
+is strange that no one pays any attention to my wants."
+
+Mrs. Boyce, almost as white, Marcella now saw, as her husband, moved
+forward from the fire, where she had been speaking to Hallin, took a
+cushion from a chair near, exactly similar to the one he missed, and
+changed his position a little.
+
+"It is just the feather's weight of change that makes the difference,
+isn't it?" said Wharton, softly, sitting down beside the invalid.
+
+Mr. Boyce turned a mollified countenance upon the speaker, and being now
+free from pain, gave himself up to the amusement of hearing his guest
+talk. Wharton devoted himself, employing all his best arts.
+
+"Dr. Clarke is not anxious about him," Mrs. Boyce said in a low voice to
+Marcella as they moved away. "He does not think the attack will return
+for a long while, and he has given me the means of stopping it if it
+does come back."
+
+"How tired you look!" said Aldous, coming up to them, and speaking in
+the same undertone. "Will you not let Marcella take you to rest?"
+
+He was always deeply, unreasonably touched by any sign of stoicism, of
+defied suffering in women. Mrs. Boyce had proved it many times already.
+On the present occasion she put his sympathy by, but she lingered to
+talk with him. Hallin from a distance noticed first of all her tall
+thinness and fairness, and her wonderful dignity of carriage; then the
+cordiality of her manner to her future son-in-law. Marcella stood by
+listening, her young shoulders somewhat stiffly set. Her consciousness
+of her mother's respect and admiration for the man she was to marry was,
+oddly enough, never altogether pleasant to her. It brought with it a
+certain discomfort, a certain wish to argue things out.
+
+Hallin and Aldous parted with Frank Leven at Mellor gate, and turned
+homeward together under a starry heaven already whitening to the coming
+moon.
+
+"Do you know that man Wharton is getting an extraordinary hold upon the
+London working men?" said Hallin. "I have heard him tell that story of
+the game-preserving before. He was speaking for one of the Radical
+candidates at Hackney, and I happened to be there. It brought down
+the house. The _rôle_ of your Socialist aristocrat, of your
+land-nationalising landlord, is a very telling one."
+
+"And comparatively easy," said Aldous, "when you know that neither
+Socialism nor land-nationalisation will come in your time!"
+
+"Oh! so you think him altogether a windbag?"
+
+Aldous hesitated and laughed.
+
+"I have certainly no reason to suspect him of principles. His conscience
+as a boy was of pretty elastic stuff."
+
+"You may be unfair to him," said Hallin, quickly. Then, after a pause:
+"How long is he staying at Mellor?"
+
+"About a week, I believe," said Aldous, shortly. "Mr. Boyce has taken a
+fancy to him."
+
+They walked on in silence, and then Aldous turned to his friend in
+distress.
+
+"You know, Hallin, this wind is much too cold for you. You are the most
+wilful of men. Why would you walk?"
+
+"Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me. I think your Marcella is
+beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!"
+
+Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.
+
+"You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint.
+
+"Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of
+among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you
+think, Aldous?"
+
+"No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully. "Her sympathies and convictions go with
+them."
+
+Then, as they passed through the village, he began to talk of quite
+other things--college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays,
+and so on. Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be
+the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not
+to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man's reserve. But
+his own mind was full of anxiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+"I _love_ this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with
+his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to
+take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or
+carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper classes are!
+Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save
+our lives."
+
+They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of
+the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had
+been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose
+money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to
+her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to
+match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the
+upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to
+eighteenth-century taste. But the old books in the old latticed shelves
+which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the
+Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that
+worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table
+at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old
+friend--on the wrong side--Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the
+worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay
+in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the
+laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there
+were rotten places in the carpetless floor.
+
+"I have tried my best," said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a
+hole in the floor. "I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to
+mend some of these places myself. But I only broke the rotten wood away;
+and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good. I did get a
+carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn't know where to
+begin. I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but--"
+
+She looked sadly round the musty, forlorn place.
+
+"But not so well, I am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's
+apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's
+maddening to think what duffers we gentlefolks are!"
+
+"Why do you harp on that?" said Marcella, quickly. She had been taking
+him over the house, and was in twenty minds again as to whether and how
+much she liked him.
+
+"Because I have been reading some Board of Trade reports before
+breakfast," said Wharton, "on one or two of the Birmingham industries in
+particular. Goodness! what an amount of knowledge and skill and resource
+these fellows have that I go about calling the 'lower orders.' I wonder
+how long they are going to let me rule over them!"
+
+"I suppose brain-power and education count for something still?" said
+Marcella, half scornfully.
+
+"I am greatly obliged to the world for thinking so," said Wharton with
+emphasis, "and for thinking so about the particular kind of brain-power
+I happen to possess, which is the point. The processes by which a
+Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to
+'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are,
+of course, mere imbecility--compared to my performances in Responsions.
+Lucky for _me_, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a
+good time of it--and the Birmingham jeweller calls me 'sir.'"
+
+"Oh! the skilled labour! that can take care of itself, and won't go on
+calling you 'sir' much longer. But what about the unskilled--the people
+here for instance--the villagers? We talk of their governing themselves;
+we wish it, and work for it. But which of us _really_ believes that they
+are fit for it, or that they are ever going to get along without _our_
+brain-power?"
+
+"No--poor souls!" said Wharton, with a peculiar vibrating emphasis.
+"'_By their stripes we are healed, by their death we have lived_.' Do
+you remember your Carlyle?"
+
+They had entered one of the bays formed by the bookcases which on either
+side of the room projected from the wall at regular intervals, and were
+standing by one of the windows which looked out on the great avenue.
+Beside the window on either side hung a small portrait--in the one case
+of an elderly man in a wig, in the other of a young, dark-haired woman.
+
+"Plenty in general, but nothing in particular," said Marcella, laughing.
+"Quote."
+
+He was leaning against the angle formed by the wall and the bookcase.
+The half-serious, half-provocative intensity of his blue eyes under the
+brow which drooped forward contrasted with the careless, well-appointed
+ease of his general attitude and dress.
+
+"'_Two men I honour, and no third_,'" he said, quoting in a slightly
+dragging, vibrating voice: "'_First, the toil-worn craftsman that with
+earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her
+man's.--Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us
+were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+marred_.' Heavens! how the words swing! But it is great nonsense, you
+know, for you and me--Venturists--to be maundering like this.
+Charity--benevolence--that is all Carlyle is leading up to. He merely
+wants the cash nexus supplemented by a few good offices. But we want
+something much more unpleasant! 'Keep your subscriptions--hand over your
+dividends--turn out of your land--and go to work!' Nowadays society is
+trying to get out of doing what _we_ want, by doing what Carlyle
+wanted."
+
+"_Do_ you want it?" said Marcella.
+
+"I don't know," he said, laughing. "It won't come in our time."
+
+Her lip showed her scorn.
+
+"That's what we all think. Meanwhile you will perhaps admit that a
+little charity greases the wheels."
+
+"_You_ must, because you are a woman; and women are made for
+charity--and aristocracy."
+
+"Do you suppose you know so much about women?" she asked him, rather
+hotly. "I notice it is always the assumption of the people who make most
+mistakes."
+
+"Oh! I know enough to steer by!" he said, smiling, with a little
+inclination of his curly head, as though to propitiate her. "How like
+you are to that portrait!"
+
+Marcella started, and saw that he was pointing to the woman's portrait
+beside the window--looking from it to his hostess with a close
+considering eye.
+
+"That was an ancestress of mine," she said coldly, "an Italian lady. She
+was rich and musical. Her money built these rooms along the garden, and
+these are her music books."
+
+She showed him that the shelves against which she was leaning were full
+of old music.
+
+"Italian!" he said, lifting his eyebrows. "Ah, that explains. Do you
+know--that you have all the qualities of a leader!"--and he moved away a
+yard from her, studying her--"mixed blood--one must always have that to
+fire and fuse the English paste--and then--but no! that won't do--I
+should offend you."
+
+Her first instinct was one of annoyance--a wish to send him about his
+business, or rather to return him to her mother who would certainly keep
+him in order. Instead, however, she found herself saying, as she looked
+carelessly out of window--
+
+"Oh! go on."
+
+"Well, then"--he drew himself up suddenly and wheeled round upon
+her--"you have the gift of compromise. That is invaluable--that will
+take you far."
+
+"Thank you!" she said. "Thank you! I know what that means--from a
+Venturist. You think me a mean insincere person!"
+
+He started, then recovered himself and came to lean against the
+bookshelves beside her.
+
+"I mean nothing of the sort," he said, in quite a different manner, with
+a sort of gentle and personal emphasis. "But--may I explain myself, Miss
+Boyce, in a room with a fire? I can see you shivering under your fur."
+
+For the frost still reigned supreme outside, and the white grass and
+trees threw chill reflected lights into the forsaken library. Marcella
+controlled a pulse of excitement that had begun to beat in her, admitted
+that it was certainly cold, and led the way through a side door to a
+little flagged parlour, belonging to the oldest portion of the house,
+where, however, a great log-fire was burning, and some chairs drawn up
+round it. She took one and let the fur wrap she had thrown about her for
+their promenade through the disused rooms drop from her shoulders. It
+lay about her in full brown folds, giving special dignity to her slim
+height and proud head. Wharton glancing about in his curious inquisitive
+way, now at the neglected pictures, now on the walls, now at the old oak
+chairs and chests, now at her, said to himself that she was a splendid
+and inspiring creature. She seemed to be on the verge of offence with
+him too, half the time, which was stimulating. She would have liked, he
+thought, to play the great lady with him already, as Aldous Raeburn's
+betrothed. But he had so far managed to keep her off that plane--and
+intended to go on doing so.
+
+"Well, I meant this," he said, leaning against the old stone chimney
+and looking down upon her; "only _don't_ be offended with me, please.
+You are a Socialist, and you are going--some day--to be Lady Maxwell.
+Those combinations are only possible to women. They can sustain them,
+because they are imaginative--not logical."
+
+She flushed.
+
+"And you," she said, breathing quickly, "are a Socialist and a landlord.
+What is the difference?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Ah! but I have no gift--I can't ride the two horses, as you will be
+able to--quite honestly. There's the difference. And the consequence is
+that with my own class I am an outcast--they all hate me. But you will
+have power as Lady Maxwell--and power as a Socialist--because you will
+give and take. Half your time you will act as Lady Maxwell should, the
+other half like a Venturist. And, as I said, it will give you power--a
+modified power. But men are less clever at that kind of thing."
+
+"Do you mean to say," she asked him abruptly, "that you have given up
+the luxuries and opportunities of your class?"
+
+He shifted his position a little.
+
+"That is a different matter," he said after a moment. "We Socialists are
+all agreed, I think, that no man can be a Socialist by himself.
+Luxuries, for the present, are something personal, individual. It is
+only a man's 'public form' that matters. And there, as I said before, I
+have no gift!--I have not a relation or an old friend in the world that
+has not turned his back upon me--as you might see for yourself
+yesterday! My class has renounced me already--which, after all, is a
+weakness."
+
+"So you pity yourself?" she said.
+
+"By no means! We all choose the part in life that amuses us--that brings
+us most _thrill_. I get most thrill out of throwing myself into the
+workmen's war--much more than I could ever get, you will admit, out of
+dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me
+to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the
+present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great
+tragi-comedy of the working-class movement. It stirs, pricks, interests
+me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental passions
+in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to
+some great outburst, to scenes and struggles at any rate that will make
+us all look alive. I am like a child with the best of its cake to come,
+but with plenty in hand already. Ah!--stay still a moment, Miss Boyce!"
+
+To her amazement he stooped suddenly towards her; and she, looking down,
+saw that a corner of her light, black dress, which had been overhanging
+the low stone fender, was in flames, and that he was putting it out with
+his hands. She made a movement to rise, alarmed lest the flames should
+leap to her face--her hair. But he, releasing one hand for an instant
+from its task of twisting and rolling the skirt upon itself, held her
+heavily down.
+
+"Don't move; I will have it out in a moment. You won't be burnt."
+
+And in a second more she was looking at a ragged brown hole in her
+dress; and at him, standing, smiling, before the fire, and wrapping a
+handkerchief round some of the fingers of his left hand.
+
+"You have burnt yourself, Mr. Wharton?"
+
+"A little."
+
+"I will go and get something--what would you like?"
+
+"A little olive oil if you have some, and a bit of lint--but don't
+trouble yourself."
+
+She flew to find her mother's maid, calling and searching on her way for
+Mrs. Boyce herself, but in vain. Mrs. Boyce had disappeared after
+breakfast, and was probably helping her husband to dress.
+
+In a minute or so Marcella ran downstairs again, bearing various
+medicaments. She sped to the Stone Parlour, her cheek and eye glowing.
+
+"Let me do it for you."
+
+"If you please," said Wharton, meekly.
+
+She did her best, but she was not skilful with her fingers, and this
+close contact with him somehow excited her.
+
+"There," she said, laughing and releasing him. "Of course, if I were a
+work-girl I should have done it better. They are not going to be very
+bad, I think."
+
+"What, the burns? Oh, no! They will have recovered, I am afraid, long
+before your dress."
+
+"Oh, my dress! yes, it is deplorable. I will go and change it."
+
+She turned to go, but she lingered instead, and said with an odd,
+introductory laugh:
+
+"I believe you saved my life!"
+
+"Well, I am glad I was here. You might have lost self-possession--even
+_you_ might, you know!--and then it would have been serious."
+
+"Anyway"--her voice was still uncertain--"I might have been
+disfigured--disfigured for life!"
+
+"I don't know why you should dwell upon it now it's done with," he
+declared, smiling.
+
+"It would be strange, wouldn't it, if I took it quite for granted--all
+in the day's work?" She held out her hand: "I am grateful--please."
+
+He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which
+might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.
+
+"May I exact a reward?"
+
+"Ask it."
+
+"Will you take me down with you to your village? I know you are going. I
+must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington. I have
+an appointment there at two o'clock. But perhaps you will introduce me
+to one or two of your poor people first?"
+
+Marcella assented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her
+walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother
+to go with them. She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a
+feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and
+indecorously towards whom?--towards Aldous? But how, or why? She did not
+know. But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity,
+combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the
+day. In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.
+
+By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella's uncomfortable
+feelings had all passed away. Without knowing it, she was becoming too
+much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were
+together. It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a
+few hundred yards that he was taking advantage--presuming on what had
+happened. He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred
+ways, she discovered. At the same time it was _she_ who was always on
+the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against
+the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave
+her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy's country. He put her
+through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations,
+the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what
+she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought
+it _possible_ to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her
+pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.
+But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had
+constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not
+mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was
+talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she
+had not even managed to _see_ these people, to interpret their lives
+under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.
+
+Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant
+so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner. He let
+her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still
+pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and
+irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other.
+All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of
+society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior"
+and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to
+these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the
+ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he
+did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so
+much the worse for you when the working class came to its own; if you
+did do them, the burden of debt was hardly diminished, and the rope was
+still left on your neck.
+
+Now Marcella herself had on one or two occasions taken a malicious
+pleasure in flaunting these doctrines, or some of them, under Miss
+Raeburn's eyes. But somehow, as applied to herself, they were
+disagreeable. Each of us is to himself a "special case"; and she saw the
+other side. Hence a constant soreness of feeling; a constant recalling
+of the argument to the personal point of view; and through it all a
+curious growth of intimacy, a rubbing away of barriers. She had felt
+herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we
+know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by
+that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty
+impulse in her to the noblest proportions! Under Wharton's Socratic
+method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish
+desires, worthy of her childhood--to cry, to go into a passion!--and
+when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young,
+dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have
+beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish
+pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his
+doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural
+relations of country life.
+
+They went first to Mrs. Jellison's, to whom Marcella wished to unfold
+her workshop scheme.
+
+"Don't let me keep you," she said to Wharton coldly, as they neared the
+cottage; "I know you have to catch your train."
+
+Wharton consulted his watch. He had to be at a local station some two
+miles off within an hour.
+
+"Oh! I have time," he said. "Do take me in, Miss Boyce. I have made
+acquaintance with these people so far, as my constituents--now show them
+to me as your subjects. Besides, I am an observer. I 'collect' peasants.
+They are my study."
+
+"They are not my subjects, but my friends," she said with the same
+stiffness.
+
+They found Mrs. Jellison having her dinner. The lively old woman was
+sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table
+which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window
+and window-sill whereon lay her coil of "plait" and the simple
+straw-splitting machine she had just been working. When Marcella had
+taken the only other chair the hovel contained, nothing else remained
+for Wharton but to flatten himself as closely against the door as he
+might.
+
+"I'm sorry I can't bid yer take a cheer," said Mrs. Jellison to him,
+"but what yer han't got yer can't give, so I don't trouble my head about
+nothink."
+
+Wharton applauded her with easy politeness, and then gave himself, with
+folded arms, to examining the cottage while Marcella talked. It might be
+ten feet broad, he thought, by six feet in one part and eight feet in
+another. The roof was within little more than an inch of his head. The
+stairway in the corner was falling to pieces; he wondered how the woman
+got up safely to her bed at night; custom, he supposed, can make even
+old bones agile.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella was unfolding the project of the straw-plaiting
+workshop that she and Lady Winterbourne were about to start. Mrs.
+Jellison put on her spectacles apparently that she might hear the
+better, pushed away her dinner in spite of her visitors' civilities, and
+listened with a bright and beady eye.
+
+"An' yer agoin' to pay me one a sixpence a score, where I now gets
+ninepence. And I'll not have to tramp it into town no more--you'll send
+a man round. And who is agoin' to pay me, miss, if you'll excuse me
+asking?"
+
+"Lady Winterbourne and I," said Marcella, smiling. "We're going to
+employ this village and two others, and make as good business of it as
+we can. But we're going to begin by giving the workers better wages, and
+in time we hope to teach them the higher kinds of work."
+
+"Lor'!" said Mrs. Jellison. "But I'm not one o' them as kin do with
+changes." She took up her plait and looked at it thoughtfully.
+"Eighteen-pence a score. It wor that rate when I wor a girl. An' it ha'
+been dibble--dibble--iver sense; a penny off here, an' a penny off
+there, an' a hard job to keep a bite ov anythink in your mouth."
+
+"Then I may put down your name among our workers, Mrs. Jellison?" said
+Marcella, rising and smiling down upon her.
+
+"Oh, lor', no; I niver said that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "I don't
+hold wi' shilly-shallyin' wi' yer means o' livin'. I've took my plait to
+Jimmy Gedge--'im an' 'is son, fust shop on yer right hand when yer git
+into town--twenty-five year, summer and winter--me an' three other
+women, as give me a penny a journey for takin' theirs. If I wor to go
+messin' about wi' Jimmy Gedge, Lor' bless yer, I should 'ear ov it--oh!
+I shoulden sleep o' nights for thinkin' o' how Jimmy ud serve me out
+when I wor least egspectin' ov it. He's a queer un. No, miss, thank yer
+kindly; but I think I'll bide."
+
+Marcella, amazed, began to argue a little, to expound the many
+attractions of the new scheme. Greatly to her annoyance, Wharton came
+forward to her help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new
+partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy
+suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm,
+embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but
+sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity
+but to talk of something else and go--above all, to talk of something
+else before going, lest the would-be benefactor should be thought a
+petty tyrant.
+
+"Oh, Johnnie?--thank yer, miss--'e's an owdacious young villain as iver
+I seed--but _clever_--lor', you'd need 'ave eyes in yer back to look
+after _'im_. An' _coaxin'_! ''Aven't yer brought me no sweeties,
+Gran'ma?' 'No, my dear,' says I. 'But if you was to _look_, Gran'ma--in
+both your pockets, Gran'ma--iv you was to let _me_ look?' It's a sharp
+un Isabella, she don't 'old wi' sweet-stuff, she says, sich a pack o'
+nonsense. She'd stuff herself sick when she wor 'is age. Why shouldn't
+_ee_ be happy, same as her? There ain't much to make a child 'appy in
+_that_ 'ouse. Westall, ee's that mad about them poachers over Tudley
+End; ee's like a wild bull at 'ome. I told Isabella ee'd come to
+knockin' ov her about _some_ day, though ee did speak so oily when ee
+wor a courtin'. Now she knows as I kin see a thing or two," said Mrs.
+Jellison, significantly. Her manner, Wharton noticed, kept always the
+same gay philosophy, whatever subject turned up.
+
+"Why, that's an old story--that Tudley End business--" said Marcella,
+rising. "I should have thought Westall might have got over it by now."
+
+"But bless yer, ee says it's goin' on as lively as iver. Ee says ee
+knows they're set on grabbin' the birds t'other side the estate, over
+beyond Mellor way--ee's got wind of it--an' ee's watchin' night an' day
+to see they don't do him no bad turn _this_ month, bekase o' the big
+shoot they allus has in January. An' lor', ee do speak drefful bad o'
+_soom_ folks," said Mrs. Jellison, with an amused expression. "You know
+some on 'em, miss, don't yer?" And the old woman, who had begun toying
+with her potatoes, slanted her fork over her shoulder so as to point
+towards the Hurds' cottage, whereof the snow-laden roof could be seen
+conspicuously through the little lattice beside her, making sly eyes the
+while at her visitor.
+
+"I don't believe a word of it," said Marcella, impatiently. "Hurd has
+been in good work since October, and has no need to poach. Westall has a
+down on him. You may tell him I think so, if you like."
+
+"That I will," said Mrs. Jellison, cheerfully, opening the door for
+them. "There's nobody makes 'im 'ear the trëuth, nobbut me. I _loves_
+naggin' ov 'im, ee's that masterful. But ee don't master _me_!"
+
+"A gay old thing," said Wharton as they shut the gate behind them. "How
+she does enjoy the human spectacle. And obstinate too. But you will find
+the younger ones more amenable."
+
+"Of course," said Marcella, with dignity. "I have a great many names
+already. The old people are always difficult. But Mrs. Jellison will
+come round."
+
+"Are you going in here?"
+
+"Please."
+
+Wharton knocked at the Hurds' door, and Mrs. Hurd opened.
+
+The cottage was thick with smoke. The chimney only drew when the door
+was left open. But the wind to-day was so bitter that mother and
+children preferred the smoke to the draught. Marcella soon made out the
+poor little bronchitic boy, sitting coughing by the fire, and Mrs. Hurd
+busied with some washing. She introduced Wharton, who, as before, stood
+for some time, hat in hand, studying the cottage. Marcella was perfectly
+conscious of it, and a blush rose to her cheek while she talked to Mrs.
+Hurd. For both this and Mrs. Jellison's hovel were her father's property
+and somewhat highly rented.
+
+Minta Hurd said eagerly that she would join the new straw-plaiting, and
+went on to throw out a number of hurried, half-coherent remarks about
+the state of the trade past and present, leaning meanwhile against the
+table and endlessly drying her hands on the towel she had taken up when
+her visitors came in.
+
+Her manner was often nervous and flighty in these days. She never looked
+happy; but Marcella put it down to health or natural querulousness of
+character. Yet both she and the children were clearly better nourished,
+except Willie, in whom the tubercular tendency was fast gaining on the
+child's strength.
+
+Altogether Marcella was proud of her work, and her eager interest in
+this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more
+possessive than ever. Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but
+she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of class
+differences, against which in her own way she was struggling. One thing
+delighted her--that he seemed to take more and more interest in the
+labour questions she discussed with him, and in that fervid, exuberant
+literature she provided him with. Moreover, he now went to all Mr.
+Wharton's meetings that were held within reasonable distance of Mellor;
+and, as she said to Aldous with a little laugh, which, however, was not
+unsweet, _he_ had found her man work--_she_ had robbed his candidate of
+a vote.
+
+Wharton listened a while to her talk with Minta, smiled a little,
+unperceived of Marcella, at the young mother's docilities of manner and
+phrase; then turned his attention to the little hunched and coughing
+object by the fire.
+
+"Are you very bad, little man?"
+
+The white-faced child looked up, a dreary look, revealing a patient,
+melancholy soul. He tried to answer, but coughed instead.
+
+Wharton, moving towards him, saw a bit of ragged white paper lying on
+the ground, which had been torn from a grocery parcel.
+
+"Would you like something to amuse you a bit--Ugh! this smoke! Come
+round here, it won't catch us so much. _Now_, then, what do you say to a
+doggie,--two doggies?"
+
+The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger's knee, and did
+his very utmost to stop coughing. But when he had succeeded his quick
+panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton's knee.
+
+"Hm--Give him two months or thereabouts!" thought Wharton. "What a
+beastly hole!--one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade
+larger. Damp, insanitary, cold--bad water, bad drainage, I'll be
+bound--bad everything. That girl may well try her little best. And I go
+making up to that man Boyce! What for? Old spites?--new
+spites?--which?--or both!"
+
+Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping;
+and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most
+enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears
+and stretching legs.
+
+The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched
+it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most
+exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.
+
+"What? did you like it, grasshopper?" cried Wharton, enchanted by the
+beauty of the look, his own colour mounting. "Then you shall have
+another."
+
+And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside
+the first, stood a second fairy animal--a greyhound this time, with
+arching neck and sharp long nose.
+
+"There's two on 'em at Westall's!" cried the child, hoarsely, clutching
+at his treasures in an ecstasy.
+
+Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the
+name. Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at
+once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court. She understood they
+were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.
+Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. "Oh! he
+didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed
+satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's
+annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm,
+turned his head an instant to listen.
+
+Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs.
+Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it. He had promised her, she thought
+to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the
+word of a working man as different from anybody else's.
+
+So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the
+stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and
+give a smile or two to the sick boy.
+
+But, as she did so, she stood amazed at the spectacle of Wharton and the
+child. Then, moving up to them, she perceived the menagerie--for it had
+grown to one--on Wharton's knee.
+
+"You didn't guess I had such tricks," he said, smiling.
+
+"But they are so good--so artistic!" She took up a little galloping
+horse he had just fashioned and wondered at it.
+
+"A great-aunt taught me--she was a genius--I follow her at a long
+distance. Will you let me go, young man? You may keep all of them."
+
+But the child, with a sudden contraction of the brow, flung a tiny
+stick-like arm round his neck, pressing hard, and looking at him. There
+was a red spot in each wasted cheek, and his eyes were wide and happy.
+Wharton returned the look with one of quiet scrutiny--the scrutiny of
+the doctor or the philosopher. On Marcella's quick sense the contrast of
+the two heads impressed itself--the delicate youth of Wharton's with its
+clustering curls--the sunken contours and the helpless suffering of the
+other. Then Wharton kissed the little fellow, put his animals carefully
+on to a chair beside him, and set him down.
+
+They walked along the snowy street again, in a different relation to
+each other. Marcella had been touched and charmed, and Wharton teased
+her no more. As they reached the door of the almshouse where the old
+Pattons lived, she said to him: "I think I had rather go in here by
+myself, please. I have some things to give them--old Patton has been
+very ill this last week--but I know what you think of doles--and I know
+too what you think, what you must think, of my father's cottages. It
+makes me feel a hypocrite; yet I must do these things; we are different,
+you and I--I am sure you will miss your train!"
+
+But there was no antagonism, only painful feeling in her softened look.
+
+Wharton put out his hand.
+
+"Yes, it is time for me to go. You say I make you feel a hypocrite! I
+wonder whether you have any idea what you make me feel? Do you imagine I
+should dare to say the things I have said except to one of the _élite_?
+Would it be worth my while, as a social reformer? Are you not vowed to
+great destinies? When one comes across one of the tools of the future,
+must one not try to sharpen it, out of one's poor resources, in spite of
+manners?"
+
+Marcella, stirred--abashed--fascinated--let him press her hand. Then he
+walked rapidly away towards the station, a faint smile twitching at his
+lip.
+
+"An inexperienced girl," he said to himself, composedly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Before she went home, Marcella turned into the little rectory garden to
+see if she could find Mary Harden for a minute or two. The intimacy
+between them was such that she generally found entrance to the house by
+going round to a garden door and knocking or calling. The house was very
+small, and Mary's little sitting-room was close to this door.
+
+Her knock brought Mary instantly.
+
+"Oh! come in. You won't mind. We were just at dinner. Charles is going
+away directly. Do stay and talk to me a bit."
+
+Marcella hesitated, but at last went in. The meals at the rectory
+distressed her--the brother and sister showed the marks of them. To-day
+she found their usual fare carefully and prettily arranged on a spotless
+table; some bread, cheese, and boiled rice--nothing else. Nor did they
+allow themselves any fire for meals. Marcella, sitting beside them in
+her fur, did not feel the cold, but Mary was clearly shivering under her
+shawl. They eat meat twice a week, and in the afternoon Mary lit the
+sitting-room fire. In the morning she contented herself with the
+kitchen, where, as she cooked for many sick folk, and had only a girl of
+fourteen whom she was training to help her with the housework, she had
+generally much to do.
+
+The Rector did not stay long after her arrival. He had a distant visit
+to pay to a dying child, and hurried off so as to be home, if possible,
+before dark. Marcella admired him, but did not feel that she understood
+him more as they were better acquainted. He was slight and young, and
+not very clever; but a certain inexpugnable dignity surrounded him,
+which, real as it was, sometimes irritated Marcella. It sat oddly on his
+round face--boyish still, in spite of its pinched and anxious look--but
+there it was, not to be ignored. Marcella thought him a Conservative,
+and very backward and ignorant in his political and social opinions. But
+she was perfectly conscious that she must also think him a saint; and
+that the deepest things in him were probably not for her.
+
+Mr. Harden said a few words to her now as to her straw-plaiting scheme,
+which had his warmest sympathy--Marcella contrasted his tone gratefully
+with that of Wharton, and once more fell happily in love with her own
+ideas--then he went off, leaving the two girls together.
+
+"Have you seen Mrs. Hurd this morning?" said Mary.
+
+"Yes, Willie seems very bad."
+
+Mary assented.
+
+"The doctor says he will hardly get through the winter, especially if
+this weather goes on. But the greatest excitement of the village just
+now--do you know?--is the quarrel between Hurd and Westall. Somebody
+told Charles yesterday that they never meet without threatening each
+other. Since the covers at Tudley End were raided, Westall seems to have
+quite lost his head. He declares Hurd knew all about that, and that he
+is hand and glove with the same gang still. He vows he will catch him
+out, and Hurd told the man who told Charles that if Westall bullies him
+any more he will put a knife into him. And Charles says that Hurd is not
+a bit like he was. He used to be such a patient, silent creature. Now--"
+
+"He has woke up to a few more ideas and a little more life than he had,
+that's all," said Marcella, impatiently. "He poached last winter, and
+small blame to him. But since he got work at the Court in November--is
+it likely? He knows that he was suspected; and what could be his
+interest now, after a hard day's work, to go out again at night, and run
+the risk of falling into Westall's clutches, when he doesn't want either
+the food or the money?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mary, shaking her head. "Charles says, if they once
+do it, they hardly ever leave it off altogether. It's the excitement and
+amusement of it."
+
+"He promised me," said Marcella, proudly.
+
+"They promise Charles all sorts of things," said Mary, slyly; "but they
+don't keep to them."
+
+Warmly grateful as both she and the Rector had been from the beginning
+to Marcella for the passionate interest she took in the place and the
+people, the sister was sometimes now a trifle jealous--divinely
+jealous--for her brother. Marcella's unbounded confidence in her own
+power and right over Mellor, her growing tendency to ignore anybody
+else's right or power, sometimes set Mary aflame, for Charles's sake,
+heartily and humbly as she admired her beautiful friend.
+
+"I shall speak to Mr. Raeburn about it," said Marcella.
+
+She never called him "Aldous" to anybody--a stiffness which jarred a
+little upon the gentle, sentimental Mary.
+
+"I saw you pass," she said, "from one of the top windows. He was with
+you, wasn't he?"
+
+A slight colour sprang to her sallow cheek, a light to her eyes. Most
+wonderful, most interesting was this engagement to Mary, who--strange to
+think!--had almost brought it about. Mr. Raeburn was to her one of the
+best and noblest of men, and she felt quite simply, and with a sort of
+Christian trembling for him, the romance of his great position. Was
+Marcella happy, was she proud of him, as she ought to be? Mary was often
+puzzled by her.
+
+"Oh no!" said Marcella, with a little laugh. "That wasn't Mr. Raeburn. I
+don't know where your eyes were, Mary. That was Mr. Wharton, who is
+staying with us. He has gone on to a meeting at Widrington."
+
+Mary's face fell.
+
+"Charles says Mr. Wharton's influence in the village is very bad," she
+said quickly. "He makes everybody discontented; sets everybody by the
+ears; and, after all, what can he do for anybody?"
+
+"But that's just what he wants to do--to make them discontented," cried
+Marcella. "Then, if they vote for him, that's the first practical step
+towards improving their life."
+
+"But it won't give them more wages or keep them out of the public
+house," said Mary, bewildered. She came of a homely middle-class stock,
+accustomed to a small range of thinking, and a high standard of doing.
+Marcella's political opinions were an amazement, and on the whole a
+scandal to her. She preferred generally to give them a wide berth.
+
+Marcella did not reply. It was not worth while to talk to Mary on these
+topics. But Mary stuck to the subject a moment longer.
+
+"You can't want him to get in, though?" she said in a puzzled voice, as
+she led the way to the little sitting-room across the passage, and took
+her workbasket out of the cupboard. "It was only the week before last
+Mr. Raeburn was speaking at the schoolroom for Mr. Dodgson. You weren't
+there, Marcella?"
+
+"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I thought you knew perfectly well, Mary,
+that Mr. Raeburn and I don't agree politically. Certainly, I hope Mr.
+Wharton will get in!"
+
+Mary opened her eyes in wonderment. She stared at Marcella, forgetting
+the sock she had just slipped over her left hand, and the darning needle
+in her right.
+
+Marcella laughed.
+
+"I know you think that two people who are going to be married ought to
+say ditto to each other in everything. Don't you--you dear old goose?"
+
+She came and stood beside Mary, a stately and beautiful creature in her
+loosened furs. She stroked Mary's straight sandy hair back from her
+forehead. Mary looked up at her with a thrill, nay, a passionate throb
+of envy--soon suppressed.
+
+"I think," she said steadily, "it is very strange--that love should
+oppose and disagree with what it loves."
+
+Marcella went restlessly towards the fire and began to examine the
+things on the mantelpiece.
+
+"Can't people agree to differ, you sentimentalist? Can't they respect
+each other, without echoing each other on every subject?"
+
+"Respect!" cried Mary, with a sudden scorn, which was startling from a
+creature so soft.
+
+"There, she could tear me in pieces!" said Marcella, laughing, though
+her lip was not steady. "I wonder what you would be like, Mary, if you
+were engaged."
+
+Mary ran her needle in and out with lightning speed for a second or two,
+then she said almost under her breath--
+
+"I shouldn't be engaged unless I were in love. And if I were in love,
+why, I would go anywhere--do anything--believe anything--if _he_ told
+me!"
+
+"Believe anything?--Mary--you wouldn't!"
+
+"I don't mean as to religion," said Mary, hastily. "But everything
+else--I would give it all up!--governing one's self, thinking for one's
+self. He should do it, and I would _bless_ him!"
+
+She looked up crimson, drawing a very long breath, as though from some
+deep centre of painful, passionate feeling. It was Marcella's turn to
+stare. Never had Mary so revealed herself before.
+
+"Did you ever love any one like that, Mary?" she asked quickly.
+
+Mary dropped her head again over her work and did not answer
+immediately.
+
+"Do you see--" she said at last, with a change of tone, "do you see
+that we have got our invitation?"
+
+Marcella, about to give the rein to an eager curiosity Mary's manner had
+excited in her, felt herself pulled up sharply. When she chose, this
+little meek creature could put on the same unapproachableness as her
+brother. Marcella submitted.
+
+"Yes, I see," she said, taking up a card on the mantelpiece. "It will be
+a great crush. I suppose you know. They have asked the whole county, it
+seems to me."
+
+The card bore an invitation in Miss Raeburn's name for the Rector and
+his sister to a dance at Maxwell Court--the date given was the
+twenty-fifth of January.
+
+"What fun!" said Mary, her eye sparkling. "You needn't suppose that I
+know enough of balls to be particular. I have only been to one before in
+my life--ever. That was at Cheltenham. An aunt took me--I didn't dance.
+There were hardly any men, but I enjoyed it."
+
+"Well, you shall dance this time," said Marcella, "for I will make Mr.
+Raeburn introduce you."
+
+"Nonsense, you won't have any time to think about me. You will be the
+queen--everybody will want to speak to you. I shall sit in a corner and
+look at you--that will be enough for me."
+
+Marcella went up to her quickly and kissed her, then she said, still
+holding her--
+
+"I know you think I ought to be very happy, Mary!"
+
+"I should think I do!" said Mary, with astonished emphasis, when the
+voice paused--"I should think I do!"
+
+"I _am_ happy--and I want to make him happy. But there are so many
+things, so many different aims and motives, that complicate life, that
+puzzle one. One doesn't know how much to give of one's self, to each--"
+
+She stood with her hand on Mary's shoulder, looking away towards the
+window and the snowy garden, her brow frowning and distressed.
+
+"Well, I don't understand," said Mary, after a pause. "As I said before,
+it seems to me so plain and easy--to be in love, and give one's self
+_all_--to that. But you are so much cleverer than I, Marcella, you know
+so much more. That makes the difference. I can't be like you. Perhaps I
+don't want to be!"--and she laughed. "But I can admire you and love you,
+and think about you. There, now, tell me what you are going to wear?"
+
+"White satin, and Mr. Raeburn wants me to wear some pearls he is going
+to give me, some old pearls of his mother's. I believe I shall find them
+at Mellor when I get back."
+
+There was little girlish pleasure in the tone. It was as though Marcella
+thought her friend would be more interested in her bit of news than she
+was herself, and was handing it on to her to please her.
+
+"Isn't there a superstition against doing that--before you're married?"
+said Mary, doubtfully.
+
+"As if I should mind if there was! But I don't believe there is, or Miss
+Raeburn would have heard of it. She's a mass of such things. Well! I
+hope I shall behave myself to please her at this function. There are
+not many things I do to her satisfaction; it's a mercy we're not going
+to live with her. Lord Maxwell is a dear; but she and I would never get
+on. Every way of thinking she has, rubs me up the wrong way; and as for
+her view of me, I am just a tare sown among her wheat. Perhaps she is
+right enough!"
+
+Marcella leant her cheek pensively on one hand, and with the other
+played with the things on the mantelpiece.
+
+Mary looked at her, and then half smiled, half sighed.
+
+"I think it is a very good thing you are to be married soon," she said,
+with her little air of wisdom, which offended nobody. "Then you'll know
+your own mind. When is it to be?"
+
+"The end of February--after the election."
+
+"Two months," mused Mary.
+
+"Time enough to throw it all up in, you think?" said Marcella,
+recklessly, putting on her gloves for departure. "Perhaps you'll be
+pleased to hear that I _am_ going to a meeting of Mr. Raeburn's next
+week?"
+
+"I _am_ glad. You ought to go to them all."
+
+"Really, Mary! How am I to lift you out of this squaw theory of
+matrimony? Allow me to inform you that the following evening I am going
+to one of Mr. Wharton's--here in the schoolroom!"
+
+She enjoyed her friend's disapproval.
+
+"By yourself, Marcella? It isn't seemly!"
+
+"I shall take a maid. Mr. Wharton is going to tell us how the people
+can--get the land, and how, when they have got it, all the money that
+used to go in rent will go in taking off taxes and making life
+comfortable for the poor." She looked at Mary with a teasing smile.
+
+"Oh! I dare say he will make his stealing sound very pretty," said Mary,
+with unwonted scorn, as she opened the front door for her friend.
+
+Marcella flashed out.
+
+"I know you are a saint, Mary," she said, turning back on the path
+outside to deliver her last shaft. "I am often not so sure whether you
+are a Christian!"
+
+Then she hurried off without another word, leaving the flushed and
+shaken Mary to ponder this strange dictum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella was just turning into the straight drive which led past the
+church on the left to Mellor House, when she heard footsteps behind her,
+and, looking round, she saw Edward Hallin.
+
+"Will you give me some lunch, Miss Boyce, in return for a message? I am
+here instead of Aldous, who is very sorry for himself, and will be over
+later. I am to tell you that he went down to the station to meet a
+certain box. The box did not come, but will come this afternoon; so he
+waits for it, and will bring it over."
+
+Marcella flushed, smiled, and said she understood. Hallin moved on
+beside her, evidently glad of the opportunity of a talk with her.
+
+"We are all going together to the Gairsley meeting next week, aren't we?
+I am so glad you are coming. Aldous will do his best."
+
+There was something very winning in his tone to her. It implied both
+his old and peculiar friendship for Aldous, and his eager wish to find a
+new friend in her--to adopt her into their comradeship. Something very
+winning, too, in his whole personality--in the loosely knit, nervous
+figure, the irregular charm of feature, the benignant eyes and
+brow--even in the suggestions of physical delicacy, cheerfully
+concealed, yet none the less evident. The whole balance of Marcella's
+temper changed in some sort as she talked to him. She found herself
+wanting to please, instead of wanting to conquer, to make an effect.
+
+"You have just come from the village, I think?" said Hallin. "Aldous
+tells me you take a great interest in the people?"
+
+He looked at her kindly, the look of one who saw all his
+fellow-creatures nobly, as it were, and to their best advantage.
+
+"One may take an interest," she said, in a dissatisfied voice, poking at
+the snow crystals on the road before her with the thorn-stick she
+carried, "but one can do so little. And I don't know anything; not even
+what I want myself."
+
+"No; one can do next to nothing. And systems and theories don't matter,
+or, at least, very little. Yet, when you and Aldous are together, there
+will be more chance of _doing_, for you than for most. You will be two
+happy and powerful people! His power will be doubled by happiness; I
+have always known that."
+
+Marcella was seized with shyness, looked away, and did not know what to
+answer. At last she said abruptly--her head still turned to the woods
+on her left--
+
+"Are you sure he is going to be happy?"
+
+"Shall I produce his letter to me?" he said, bantering--"or letters? For
+I knew a great deal about you before October 5" (their engagement-day),
+"and suspected what was going to happen long before Aldous did. No;
+after all, no! Those letters are my last bit of the old friendship. But
+the new began that same day," he hastened to add, smiling: "It may be
+richer than the old; I don't know. It depends on you."
+
+"I don't think--I am a very satisfactory friend," said Marcella, still
+awkward, and speaking with difficulty.
+
+"Well, let me find out, won't you? I don't think Aldous would call me
+exacting. I believe he would give me a decent character, though I tease
+him a good deal. You must let me tell you sometime what he did for
+me--what he was to me--at Cambridge? I shall always feel sorry for
+Aldous's wife that she did not know him at college."
+
+A shock went through Marcella at the word--that tremendous word--wife.
+As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made!
+
+"I should like you to tell me," she said faintly. Then she added, with
+more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, "But you really must
+come in and rest. Aldous told me he thought the walk from the Court was
+too much for you. Shall we take this short way?"
+
+And she opened a little gate leading to a door at the side of the house
+through the Cedar Garden. The narrow path only admitted of single file,
+and Hallin followed her, admiring her tall youth and the fine black and
+white of her head and cheek as she turned every now and then to speak to
+him. He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of
+her beauty, and the truth in Aldous's comparison of her to one of the
+tall women in a Florentine fresco. But he felt himself a good deal
+baffled by her, all the same. In some ways, so far as any man who is not
+the lover can understand such things, he understood why Aldous had
+fallen in love with her; in others, she bore no relation whatever to the
+woman his thoughts had been shaping all these years as his friend's fit
+and natural wife.
+
+Luncheon passed as easily as any meal could be expected to do, of which
+Mr. Boyce was partial president. During the preceding month or two he
+had definitely assumed the character of an invalid, although to
+inexperienced eyes like Marcella's there did not seem to be very much
+the matter. But, whatever the facts might be, Mr. Boyce's adroit use of
+them had made a great difference to his position in his own household.
+His wife's sarcastic freedom of manner was less apparent; and he was
+obviously less in awe of her. Meanwhile he was as sore as ever towards
+the Raeburns, and no more inclined to take any particular pleasure in
+Marcella's prospects, or to make himself agreeable towards his future
+son-in-law. He and Mrs. Boyce had been formally asked in Miss Raeburn's
+best hand to the Court ball, but he had at once snappishly announced his
+intention of staying at home. Marcella sometimes looked back with
+astonishment to his eagerness for social notice when they first came to
+Mellor. Clearly the rising irritability of illness had made it doubly
+unpleasant to him to owe all that he was likely to get on that score to
+his own daughter; and, moreover, he had learnt to occupy himself more
+continuously on his own land and with his own affairs.
+
+As to the state of the village, neither Marcella's entreaties nor
+reproaches had any effect upon him. When it appeared certain that he
+would be summoned for some specially flagrant piece of neglect he would
+spend a few shillings on repairs; otherwise not a farthing. All that
+filial softening towards him of which Marcella had been conscious in the
+early autumn had died away in her. She said to herself now plainly and
+bitterly that it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have
+pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the
+smallest expression of such a feeling. As it was, she was left to wonder
+and chafe at her mother's new-born mildness.
+
+In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a
+corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.
+
+"I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night,"
+he said. "He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that
+you would not agree with it. But I wanted you to see how he does these
+things. He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week. Each
+time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes
+out what he has to say. Then he speaks it entirely without notes. In
+this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself
+gradually an effective and practical speaker. The danger with him, of
+course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical--not simple
+and popular enough."
+
+Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.
+
+"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?" he said to her, but in a lower
+voice, and sitting down beside her.
+
+Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at
+the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder--wonder at
+Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like
+Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her. It was inevitable, of
+course--youth and beauty rule the world. But the mother, under no spell
+herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the
+lowering of standards involved.
+
+"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question,
+fidgeting the papers under her hand. Then his curious confessor's gift,
+his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all
+before him, told upon her.
+
+"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that
+must come," she added hurriedly. "This is all about details,
+palliatives. I want him to be more impatient."
+
+"Great political changes you mean?"
+
+She nodded; then added--
+
+"But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come
+after."
+
+He pondered a moment.
+
+"Aldous has never believed in _great_ changes coming suddenly. He
+constantly looks upon me as rash in the things _I_ adopt and believe in.
+But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part
+of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more
+equitably, I have never seen Aldous's equal--for the steady passion, the
+persistence, of it."
+
+She looked up. His pale face had taken to itself glow and fire; his eyes
+were full of strenuous, nay, severe expression. Her foolish pride
+rebelled a little.
+
+"Of course, I haven't seen much of that yet," she said slowly.
+
+His look for a moment was indignant, incredulous, then melted into a
+charming eagerness.
+
+"But you will! naturally you will!--see everything. I hug myself
+sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather
+and I will know what Aldous is and does. Oh! the people on the estate
+know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going
+into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high
+intelligence have the power I believe. But I am impatient! In the first
+place--I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!--I want Aldous to come out of
+that _manner_ of his to strangers, which is the only bit of the true
+Tory in him; _you_ can get rid of it, no one else can--How long shall I
+give you?--And in the next, I want the world not to be wasting itself on
+baser stuff when it might be praising Aldous!"
+
+"Does he mean Mr. Wharton?" thought Marcella, quickly. "But this
+world--our world--hates him and runs him down."
+
+But she had no time to answer, for the door opened to admit Aldous,
+flushed and bright-eyed, looking round the room immediately for her, and
+bearing a parcel in his left hand.
+
+"Does she love him at all?" thought Hallin, with a nervous stiffening of
+all his lithe frame, as he walked away to talk to Mrs. Boyce, "or, in
+spite of all her fine talk, is she just marrying him for his money and
+position!"
+
+Meanwhile, Aldous had drawn Marcella into the Stone Parlour and was
+standing by the fire with his arm covetously round her.
+
+"I have lost two hours with you I might have had, just because a
+tiresome man missed his train. Make up for it by liking these pretty
+things a little, for my sake and my mother's."
+
+He opened the jeweller's case, took out the fine old pearls--necklace
+and bracelets--it contained, and put them into her hand. They were his
+first considerable gift to her, and had been chosen for association's
+sake, seeing that his mother had also worn them before her marriage.
+
+She flushed first of all with a natural pleasure, the girl delighting in
+her gaud. Then she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed,
+inevitable. Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he
+began to be puzzled by her.
+
+"They are much too good for me. I don't know whether you ought to give
+me such precious things. I am dreadfully careless and forgetful. Mamma
+always says so."
+
+"I shall want you to wear them so often that you won't have a chance of
+forgetting them," he said gaily.
+
+"Will you? Will you want me to wear them so often?" she asked, in an odd
+voice. "Anyway, I should like to have just these, and nothing else. I am
+glad that we know nobody, and have no friends, and that I shall have so
+few presents. You won't give me many jewels, will you?" she said
+suddenly, insistently, turning to him. "I shouldn't know what to do with
+them. I used to have a magpie's wish for them; and now--I don't know,
+but they don't give me pleasure. Not these, of course--not these!" she
+added hurriedly, taking them up and beginning to fasten the bracelets on
+her wrists.
+
+Aldous looked perplexed.
+
+"My darling!" he said, half laughing, and in the tone of the apologist,
+"You know we _have_ such a lot of things. And I am afraid my grandfather
+will want to give them all to you. Need one think so much about it? It
+isn't as though they had to be bought fresh. They go with pretty gowns,
+don't they, and other people like to see them?"
+
+"No, but it's what they imply--the wealth--the _having_ so much while
+other people want so much. Things begin to oppress me so!" she broke
+out, instinctively moving away from him that she might express herself
+with more energy. "I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I
+seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an
+opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having. You must not
+let me like them--you must help me not to care about them!"
+
+Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself. He could of
+course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside. This question she
+had raised, this most thorny of all the personal questions of the
+present--the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and
+its vanities--was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and
+robustly real to him than it was to her. Every word in his few
+sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised
+ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.
+
+But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of
+another tune which she seemed to be perpetually trying to recall and
+piece together. Aldous's slow minor made her impatient.
+
+He turned presently to ask her what she had been doing with her
+morning--asking her with a certain precision, and observing her
+attentively. She replied that she had been showing Mr. Wharton the
+house, that he had walked down with her to the village, and was gone to
+a meeting at Widrington. Then she remarked that he was very good
+company, and very clever, but dreadfully sure of his own opinion.
+Finally she laughed, and said drily:
+
+"There will be no putting him down all the same. I haven't told anybody
+yet, but he saved my life this morning."
+
+Aldous caught her wrists.
+
+"Saved your life! Dear--What do you mean?"
+
+She explained, giving the little incident all--perhaps more than--its
+dramatic due. He listened with evident annoyance, and stood pondering
+when she came to an end.
+
+"So I shall be expected to take quite a different view of him
+henceforward?" he inquired at last, looking round at her, with a very
+forced smile.
+
+"I am sure I don't know that it matters to him what view anybody takes
+of him," she cried, flushing. "He certainly takes the frankest views of
+other people, and expresses them."
+
+And while she played with the pearls in their box she gave a vivid
+account of her morning's talk with the Radical candidate for West
+Brookshire, and of their village expedition.
+
+There was a certain relief in describing the scorn with which her acts
+and ideals had been treated; and, underneath, a woman's curiosity as to
+how Aldous would take it.
+
+"I don't know what business he had to express himself so frankly," said
+Aldous, turning to the fire and carefully putting it together. "He
+hardly knows you--it was, I think, an impertinence."
+
+He stood upright, with his back to the hearth, a strong, capable,
+frowning Englishman, very much on his dignity. Such a moment must surely
+have become him in the eyes of a girl that loved him. Marcella proved
+restive under it.
+
+"No; it's very natural," she protested quickly. "When people are so much
+in earnest they don't stop to think about impertinence! I never met any
+one who dug up one's thoughts by the roots as he does."
+
+Aldous was startled by her flush, her sudden attitude of opposition. His
+intermittent lack of readiness overtook him, and there was an awkward
+silence. Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the
+subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley
+meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said:
+
+"I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not
+liking Mr. Wharton?--other than politics, I mean?"
+
+Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.
+
+He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said:
+
+"I had rather not rake up old scores."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm
+round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.
+
+"Dearest," he said, "you shall put me in charity with all the world. But
+the worst of it is," he added, half laughing, "that I don't see how I am
+to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put
+that fire out instead of me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after
+years, passed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January.
+Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves
+confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by
+a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed
+immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active
+throughout the constituencies, were carried forward with redoubled
+energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a
+somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock--a former
+fag indeed of his at Eton--whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do.
+Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all
+his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most
+stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days
+went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was
+harassed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth
+was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and
+unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations;
+and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying
+there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to
+spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening
+an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him
+as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take
+into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to
+himself but to others.
+
+In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could snatch from
+a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal
+fortunes were all deeply interested. In vain--with a tardy instinct that
+it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for
+Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long
+stay at Mellor was largely owing--did Aldous subdue himself to
+propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long
+accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself
+not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least
+twice in Raeburn's hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as
+it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some
+of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce's
+indignation nor Marcella's discomfort and annoyance could restrain.
+Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions
+to the Radical candidate he was asserting his independence of the
+Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with
+him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns' heir.
+Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards
+with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had
+thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a
+sickly and disappointed man. Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took
+no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton. But it seemed to be
+no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once
+have taken to get rid of him.
+
+In vain, too, did Miss Raeburn do her best for the nephew to whom she
+was still devoted, in spite of his deplorable choice of a wife. She took
+in the situation as a whole probably sooner than anybody else, and she
+instantly made heroic efforts to see more of Marcella, to get her to
+come oftener to the Court, and in many various ways to procure the poor
+deluded Aldous more of his betrothed's society. She paid many chattering
+and fussy visits to Mellor--visits which chafed Marcella--and before
+long, indeed, roused a certain suspicion in the girl's wilful mind.
+Between Miss Raeburn and Mrs. Boyce there was a curious understanding.
+It was always tacit, and never amounted to friendship, still less to
+intimacy. But it often yielded a certain melancholy consolation to
+Aldous Raeburn's great-aunt. It was clear to her that this strange
+mother was just as much convinced as she was that Aldous was making a
+great mistake, and that Marcella was not worthy of him. But the
+engagement being there--a fact not apparently to be undone--both ladies
+showed themselves disposed to take pains with it, to protect it against
+aggression. Mrs. Boyce found herself becoming more of a _chaperon_ than
+she had ever yet professed to be; and Miss Raeburn, as we have said,
+made repeated efforts to capture Marcella and hold her for Aldous, her
+lawful master.
+
+But Marcella proved extremely difficult to manage. In the first place
+she was a young person of many engagements. Her village scheme absorbed
+a great deal of time. She was deep in a varied correspondence, in the
+engagement of teachers, the provision of work-rooms, the collecting and
+registering of workers, the organisation of local committees and so
+forth. New sides of the girl's character, new capacities and
+capabilities were coming out; new forms of her natural power over her
+fellows were developing every day; she was beginning, under the
+incessant stimulus of Wharton's talk, to read and think on social and
+economic subjects, with some system and coherence, and it was evident
+that she took a passionate mental pleasure in it all. And the more
+pleasure these activities gave her, the less she had to spare for those
+accompaniments of her engagement and her position that was to be, which
+once, as Mrs. Boyce's sharp eyes perceived, had been quite normally
+attractive to her.
+
+"Why do you take up her time so, with all these things?" said Miss
+Raeburn impatiently to Lady Winterbourne, who was now Marcella's
+obedient helper in everything she chose to initiate. "She doesn't care
+for anything she _ought_ to care about at this time, and Aldous sees
+nothing of her. As for her trousseau, Mrs. Boyce declares she has had to
+do it all. Marcella won't even go up to London to have her wedding-dress
+fitted!"
+
+Lady Winterbourne looked up bewildered.
+
+"But I can't make her go and have her wedding-dress fitted, Agneta! And
+I always feel you don't know what a fine creature she is. You don't
+really appreciate her. It's splendid the ideas she has about this work,
+and the way she throws herself into it."
+
+"I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, indignantly. "That's just what I object
+to. Why can't she throw herself into being in love with Aldous! That's
+her business, I imagine, just now--if she were a young woman like
+anybody else one had ever seen--instead of holding aloof from everything
+he does, and never being there when he wants her. Oh! I have no patience
+with her. But, of course, I must--" said Miss Raeburn, hastily
+correcting herself--"of course, I must have patience."
+
+"It will all come right, I am sure, when they are married," said Lady
+Winterbourne, rather helplessly.
+
+"That's just what my brother says," cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "He
+won't hear a word--declares she is odd and original, and that Aldous
+will soon know how to manage her. It's all very well; nowadays men
+_don't_ manage their wives; that's all gone with the rest. And I am
+sure, my dear, if she behaves after she is married as she is doing now,
+with that most objectionable person Mr. Wharton--walking, and talking,
+and taking up his ideas, and going to his meetings--she'll be a handful
+for any husband."
+
+"Mr. Wharton!" said Lady Winterbourne, astonished. Her absent black
+eyes, the eyes of the dreamer, of the person who lives by a few intense
+affections, saw little or nothing of what was going on immediately under
+them. "Oh! but that is because he is staying in the house, and he is a
+Socialist; she calls herself one--"
+
+"My _dear_," said Miss Raeburn, interrupting emphatically;
+"if--you--had--now--an unmarried daughter at home--engaged or not--would
+you care to have Harry Wharton hanging about after her?"
+
+"Harry Wharton?" said the other, pondering; "he is the Levens' cousin,
+isn't he? he used to stay with them. I don't think I have seen him since
+then. But yes, I do remember; there was something--something
+disagreeable?"
+
+She stopped with a hesitating, interrogative air. No one talked less
+scandal, no one put the uglinesses of life away from her with a hastier
+hand than Lady Winterbourne. She was one of the most consistent of moral
+epicures.
+
+"Yes, _extremely_ disagreeable," said Miss Raeburn, sitting bolt
+upright. "The man has no principles--never had any, since he was a child
+in petticoats. I know Aldous thinks him unscrupulous in politics and
+everything else. And then, just when you are worked to death, and have
+hardly a moment for your own affairs, to have a man of that type always
+at hand to spend odd times with your lady love--flattering her, engaging
+her in his ridiculous schemes, encouraging her in all the extravagances
+she has got her head twice too full of already, setting her against your
+own ideas and the life she will have to live--you will admit that it is
+not exactly soothing!"
+
+"Poor Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully, looking far ahead
+with her odd look of absent rigidity, which had in reality so little to
+do with a character essentially soft; "but you see he _did_ know all
+about her opinions. And I don't think--no, I really don't think--I could
+speak to her."
+
+In truth, this woman of nearly seventy--old in years, but wholly young
+in temperament--was altogether under Marcella's spell--more at ease with
+her already than with most of her own children, finding in her
+satisfaction for a hundred instincts, suppressed or starved by her own
+environment, fascinated by the girl's friendship, and eagerly grateful
+for her visits. Miss Raeburn thought it all both incomprehensible and
+silly.
+
+"Apparently no one can!" cried that lady in answer to her friend's
+demurrer; "is all the world afraid of her?"
+
+And she departed in wrath. But she knew, nevertheless, that she was just
+as much afraid of Marcella as anybody else. In her own sphere at the
+Court, or in points connected with what was due to the family, or to
+Lord Maxwell especially, as the head of it, this short, capable old lady
+could hold her own amply with Aldous's betrothed, could maintain,
+indeed, a sharp and caustic dignity, which kept Marcella very much in
+order. Miss Raeburn, on the defensive, was strong; but when it came to
+attacking Marcella's own ideas and proceedings, Lord Maxwell's sister
+became shrewdly conscious of her own weaknesses. She had no wish to
+measure her wits on any general field with Marcella's. She said to
+herself that the girl was too clever and would talk you down.
+
+Meanwhile, things went untowardly in various ways. Marcella disciplined
+herself before the Gairsley meeting, and went thither resolved to give
+Aldous as much sympathy as she could. But the performance only repelled
+a mind over which Wharton was every day gaining more influence. There
+was a portly baronet in the chair; there were various Primrose Dames on
+the platform and among the audience; there was a considerable
+representation of clergy; and the labourers present seemed to Marcella
+the most obsequious of their kind. Aldous spoke well--or so the audience
+seemed to think; but she could feel no enthusiasm for anything that he
+said. She gathered that he advocated a Government inspection of
+cottages, more stringent precautions against cattle disease, better
+technical instruction, a more abundant provision of allotments and small
+freeholds, &c.; and he said many cordial and wise-sounding things in
+praise of a progress which should go safely and wisely from step to
+step, and run no risks of dangerous reaction. But the assumptions on
+which, as she told herself rebelliously, it all went--that the rich and
+the educated must rule, and the poor obey; that existing classes and
+rights, the forces of individualism and competition, must and would go
+on pretty much as they were; that great houses and great people, the
+English land and game system, and all the rest of our odious class
+paraphernalia were in the order of the universe; these ideas, conceived
+as the furniture of Aldous's mind, threw her again into a ferment of
+passionate opposition. And when the noble baronet in the chair--to her
+eye, a pompous, frock-coated stick, sacrificing his after-dinner sleep
+for once, that he might the more effectually secure it in the
+future--proposed a vote of confidence in the Conservative candidate;
+when the vote was carried with much cheering and rattling of feet; when
+the Primrose Dames on the platform smiled graciously down upon the
+meeting as one smiles at good children in their moments of pretty
+behaviour; and when, finally, scores of toil-stained labourers, young
+and old, went up to have a word and a hand-shake with "Muster Raeburn,"
+Marcella held herself aloof and cold, with a look that threatened
+sarcasm should she be spoken to. Miss Raeburn, glancing furtively round
+at her, was outraged anew by her expression.
+
+"She will be a thorn in all our sides," thought that lady. "Aldous is a
+fool!--a poor dear noble misguided fool!"
+
+Then on the way home, she and Aldous drove together. Marcella tried to
+argue, grew vehement, and said bitter things for the sake of victory,
+till at last Aldous, tired, worried, and deeply wounded, could bear it
+no longer.
+
+"Let it be, dear, let it be!" he entreated, snatching at her hand as
+they rolled along through a stormy night. "We grope in a dark world--you
+see some points of light in it, I see others--won't you give me credit
+for doing what I can--seeing what I can? I am sure--_sure_--you will
+find it easier to bear with differences when we are quite together--when
+there are no longer all these hateful duties and engagements--and
+persons--between us."
+
+"Persons! I don't know what you mean!" said Marcella.
+
+Aldous only just restrained himself in time. Out of sheer fatigue and
+slackness of nerve he had been all but betrayed into some angry speech
+on the subject of Wharton, the echoes of whose fantastic talk, as it
+seemed to him, were always hanging about Mellor when he went there. But
+he did refrain, and was thankful. That he was indeed jealous and
+disturbed, that he had been jealous and disturbed from the moment Harry
+Wharton had set foot in Mellor, he himself knew quite well. But to play
+the jealous part in public was more than the Raeburn pride could bear.
+There was the dread, too, of defining the situation--of striking some
+vulgar irrevocable note.
+
+So he parried Marcella's exclamation by asking her whether she had any
+idea how many human hands a parliamentary candidate had to shake between
+breakfast and bed; and then, having so slipped into another tone, he
+tried to amuse himself and her by some of the daily humours of the
+contest. She lent herself to it and laughed, her look mostly turned away
+from him, as though she were following the light of the carriage lamps
+as it slipped along the snow-laden hedges, her hand lying limply in his.
+But neither were really gay. His soreness of mind grew as in the pauses
+of talk he came to realise more exactly the failure of the evening--of
+his very successful and encouraging meeting--from his own private point
+of view.
+
+"Didn't you like that last speech?" he broke out suddenly--"that
+labourer's speech? I thought you would. It was entirely his own
+idea--nobody asked him to do it."
+
+In reality Gairsley represented a corner of the estate which Aldous had
+specially made his own. He had spent much labour and thought on the
+improvement of what had been a backward district, and in particular he
+had tried a small profit-sharing experiment upon a farm there which he
+had taken into his own hands for the purpose. The experiment had met
+with fair success, and the labourer in question, who was one of the
+workers in it, had volunteered some approving remarks upon it at the
+meeting.
+
+"Oh! it was very proper and respectful!" said Marcella, hastily.
+
+The carriage rolled on some yards before Aldous replied. Then he spoke
+in a drier tone than he had ever yet used to her.
+
+"You do it injustice, I think. The man is perfectly independent, and an
+honest fellow. I was grateful to him for what he said."
+
+"Of course, I am no judge!" cried Marcella, quickly--repentantly. "Why
+did you ask me? I saw everything crooked, I suppose--it was your
+Primrose Dames--they got upon my nerves. Why did you have them? I didn't
+mean to vex and hurt you--I didn't indeed--it was all the other way--and
+now I have."
+
+She turned upon him laughing, but also half crying, as he could tell by
+the flutter of her breath.
+
+He vowed he was not hurt, and once more changed both talk and tone. They
+reached the drive's end without a word of Wharton. But Marcella went to
+bed hating herself, and Aldous, after his solitary drive home, sat up
+long and late, feverishly pacing and thinking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then next evening how differently things fell!
+
+Marcella, having spent the afternoon at the Court, hearing all the
+final arrangements for the ball, and bearing with Miss Raeburn in a way
+which astonished herself, came home full of a sense of duty done, and
+announced to her mother that she was going to Mr. Wharton's meeting in
+the Baptist chapel that evening.
+
+"Unnecessary, don't you think?" said Mrs. Boyce, lifting her eyebrows.
+"However, if you go, I shall go with you."
+
+Most mothers, dealing with a girl of twenty-one, under the
+circumstances, would have said, "I had rather you stayed at home." Mrs.
+Boyce never employed locutions of this kind. She recognised with perfect
+calmness that Marcella's bringing up, and especially her independent
+years in London, had made it impossible.
+
+Marcella fidgeted.
+
+"I don't know why you should, mamma. Papa will be sure to want you. Of
+course, I shall take Deacon."
+
+"Please order dinner a quarter of an hour earlier, and tell Deacon to
+bring down my walking things to the hall," was all Mrs. Boyce said in
+answer.
+
+Marcella walked upstairs with her head very stiff. So her mother, and
+Miss Raeburn too, thought it necessary to keep watch on her. How
+preposterous! She thought of her free and easy relations with her
+Kensington student-friends, and wondered when a more reasonable idea of
+the relations between men and women would begin to penetrate English
+country society.
+
+Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.
+
+"Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense," he said irritably
+to his wife, "but it's the fellow's power of talk that is so
+astonishing. _He_ isn't troubled with your Raeburn heaviness."
+
+Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.
+
+"If papa goes," she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed
+her, "it will spoil the meeting. The labourers will turn sulky. I
+shouldn't wonder if they did or said something unpleasant. As it is,
+_you_ had much better not come, mamma. They are sure to attack the
+cottages--and other things."
+
+Mrs. Boyce took no notice as far as she herself was concerned, but her
+quiet decision at last succeeded in leaving Mr. Boyce safely settled by
+the fire, provided as usual with a cigarette and a French novel.
+
+The meeting was held in a little iron Baptist chapel, erected some few
+years before on the outskirts of the village, to the grief and scandal
+of Mr. Harden. There were about a hundred and twenty labourers present,
+and at the back some boys and girls, come to giggle and make a
+noise--nobody else. The Baptist minister, a smooth-faced young man,
+possessed, as it turned out, of opinions little short of Wharton's own
+in point of vigour and rigour, was already in command. A few late
+comers, as they slouched in, stole side looks at Marcella and the veiled
+lady in black beside her, sitting in the corner of the last bench; and
+Marcella nodded to one or two of the audience, Jim Hurd amongst them.
+Otherwise no one took any notice of them. It was the first time that
+Mrs. Boyce had been inside any building belonging to the village.
+
+Wharton arrived late. He had been canvassing at a distance, and neither
+of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with
+a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he
+took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for
+half an hour and let them go. Did you ever see such a stolid set?"
+
+"You will rouse them," said Marcella.
+
+Her eyes were animated, her colour high, and she took no account at all
+of his plea of weariness.
+
+"You challenge me? I must rouse them--that was what you came to see? Is
+that it?"
+
+She laughed and made no answer. He left her and went up to the
+minister's desk, the men shuffling their feet a little, and rattling a
+stick here and there as he did so.
+
+The young minister took the chair and introduced the speaker. He had a
+strong Yorkshire accent, and his speech was divided between the most
+vehement attacks, couched in the most Scriptural language, upon capital
+and privilege--that is to say, on landlords and the land system, on
+State churches and the "idle rich," interspersed with quavering returns
+upon himself, as though he were scared by his own invective. "My
+brothers, let us be _calm_!" he would say after every burst of passion,
+with a long deep-voiced emphasis on the last word; "let us, above all
+things, be _calm_!"--and then bit by bit voice and denunciation would
+begin to mount again towards a fresh climax of loud-voiced attack, only
+to sink again to the same lamb-like refrain. Mrs. Boyce's thin lip
+twitched, and Marcella bore the good gentleman a grudge for providing
+her mother with so much unnecessary amusement.
+
+As for Wharton, at the opening of his speech he spoke both awkwardly and
+flatly; and Marcella had a momentary shock. He was, as he said, tired,
+and his wits were not at command. He began with the general political
+programme of the party to which--on its extreme left wing--he proclaimed
+himself to belong. This programme was, of course, by now a newspaper
+commonplace of the stalest sort. He himself recited it without
+enthusiasm, and it was received without a spark, so far as appeared, of
+interest or agreement. The minister gave an "hear, hear," of a loud
+official sort; the men made no sign.
+
+"They might be a set of Dutch cheeses!" thought Marcella, indignantly,
+after a while. "But, after all, why should they care for all this? I
+shall have to get up in a minute and stop those children romping."
+
+But through all this, as it were, Wharton was only waiting for his
+second wind. There came a moment when, dropping his quasi-official and
+high political tone, he said suddenly with another voice and emphasis:
+
+"Well now, my men, I'll be bound you're thinking, 'That's all pretty
+enough!--we haven't got anything against it--we dare say it's all right;
+but we don't care a brass ha'porth about any of it! If that's all you'd
+got to say to us, you might have let us bide at home. We don't have none
+too much time to rest our bones a bit by the fire, and talk to the
+missus and the kids. Why didn't you let us alone, instead of bringing us
+out in the cold?'
+
+"Well, but it _isn't_ all I've got to say--and you know it--because
+I've spoken to you before. What I've been talking about is all true, and
+all important, and you'll see it some day when you're fit. But what can
+men in your position know about it, or care about it? What do any of you
+want, but _bread_--"
+
+--He thundered on the desk--
+
+"--a bit of decent _comfort_--a bit of _freedom_--freedom from tyrants
+who call themselves your betters!--a bit of rest in your old age, a home
+that's something better than a dog-hole, a wage that's something better
+than starvation, an honest share in the wealth you are making every day
+and every hour for other people to gorge and plunder!"
+
+He stopped a moment to see how _that_ took. A knot of young men in a
+corner rattled their sticks vigorously. The older men had begun at any
+rate to look at the speaker. The boys on the back benches instinctively
+stopped scuffling.
+
+Then he threw himself into a sort of rapid question-and-answer. What
+were their wages?--eleven shillings a week?
+
+"Not they!" cried a man from the middle of the chapel. "Yer mus' reckon
+it wet an' dry. I wor turned back two days las' week, an' two days this,
+_fower_ shillin' lost each week--that's what I call skinnin' ov yer."
+
+Wharton nodded at him approvingly. By now he knew the majority of the
+men in each village by name, and never forgot a face or a biography.
+"You're right there, Watkins. Eleven shillings, then, when it isn't
+less, never more, and precious often less; and harvest money--the
+people that are kind enough to come round and ask you to vote Tory for
+them make a deal of that, don't they?--and a few odds and ends here and
+there--precious few of them! There! that's about it for wages, isn't it?
+Thirty pounds a year, somewhere about, to keep a wife and children
+on--and for ten hours a day work, not counting meal times--that's it, I
+think. Oh, you _are_ well off!--aren't you?"
+
+He dropped his arms, folded, on the desk in front of him, and paused to
+look at them, his bright kindling eye running over rank after rank. A
+chuckle of rough laughter, bitter and jeering, ran through the benches.
+Then they broke out and applauded him.
+
+Well, and about their cottages?
+
+His glance caught Marcella, passed to her mother sitting stiffly
+motionless under her veil. He drew himself up, thought a moment, then
+threw himself far forward again over the desk as though the better to
+launch what he had to say, his voice taking a grinding determined note.
+
+He had been in all parts of the division, he said; seen everything,
+inquired into everything. No doubt, on the great properties there had
+been a good deal done of late years--public opinion had effected
+something, the landlords had been forced to disgorge some of the gains
+wrested from labour, to pay for the decent housing of the labourer. But
+did anybody suppose that _enough_ had been done? Why, he had seen
+_dens_--aye, on the best properties--not fit for the pigs that the
+farmers wouldn't let the labourers keep, lest they should steal their
+straw for the littering of them!--where a man was bound to live the
+life of a beast, and his children after him--
+
+A tall thin man of about sixty rose in his place, and pointed a long
+quavering finger at the speaker.
+
+"What is it, Darwin? speak up!" said Wharton, dropping at once into the
+colloquial tone, and stooping forward to listen.
+
+"My sleepin' room's six foot nine by seven foot six. We have to shift
+our bed for the rain's comin' in, an' yer may see for yoursels ther
+ain't much room to shift it in. An' beyont us ther's a room for the
+chillen, same size as ourn, an' no window, nothin' but the door into us.
+Ov a summer night the chillen, three on 'em, is all of a sweat afore
+they're asleep. An' no garden, an' no chance o' decent ways nohow. An'
+if yer ask for a bit o' repairs yer get sworn at. An' that's all that
+most on us can get out of Squire Boyce!"
+
+There was a hasty whisper among some of the men round him, as they
+glanced over their shoulders at the two ladies on the back bench. One or
+two of them half rose, and tried to pull him down. Wharton looked at
+Marcella; it seemed to him he saw a sort of passionate satisfaction on
+her pale face, and in the erect carriage of her head. Then she stooped
+to the side and whispered to her mother. Mrs. Boyce shook her head and
+sat on, immovable. All this took but a second or two.
+
+"Ah, well," said Wharton, "we won't have names; that'll do us no good.
+It's not the _men_ you've got to go for so much--though we shall go for
+them too before long when we've got the law more on our side. It's the
+system. It's the whole way of dividing the wealth that _you_ made, you
+and your children--by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant
+work--between you and those who _don't_ work, who live on your labour
+and grow fat on your poverty! What we want is _a fair division_. There
+_ought_ to be wealth enough--there _is_ wealth enough for all in this
+blessed country. The earth gives it; the sun gives it: labour extracts
+and piles it up. Why should one class take three-fourths of it and leave
+you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which
+is all you have to starve and breed on? Why?--_why_? I say.
+Why!--because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited _cowards_,
+unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a
+pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and
+your class--there, _that's_ why it is, and I tell it you straight out!"
+
+He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at
+them--scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the
+blaze of his blue eye. A murmur ran through the room. Some of the men
+laughed excitedly. Darwin sprang up again.
+
+"You keep the perlice off us, an' gie us the cuttin' up o' their
+bloomin' parks an' we'll do it fast enough," he cried.
+
+"Much good that'll do you, just at present," said Wharton,
+contemptuously. "Now, you just listen to me."
+
+And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the
+room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the
+country districts--the transference of authority within the villages
+from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily
+during the transition time for the provision of house room, water,
+light, education and amusement for the labourer; and ultimately land and
+capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker
+on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and
+interest of the capitalist class relieves him of taxes, and the
+disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master
+in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all. And, as a first
+step to this new Jerusalem--_organisation_!--self-sacrifice enough to
+form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates
+in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.
+
+"Then I suppose you think you'd be turned out of your cottages,
+dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow. Just you try! There
+are people all over the country ready to back you, if you'd only back
+yourselves. But you _won't_. You won't fight--that's the worst of you;
+that's what makes all of us _sick_ when we come down to talk to you. You
+won't spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing--not you!--to
+subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling
+your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men. What's the good of
+your grumbling? I suppose you'll go on like that--grumbling and starving
+and cringing--and talking big of the things you could do if you
+would:--and all the time not one honest effort--not one!--to better
+yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks! By the Lord! I tell you
+it's a _damned_ sort of business talking to fellows like you!"
+
+Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal,
+emphasis. The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden
+movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it.
+Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil. Her
+eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.
+
+As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk
+to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered
+or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His
+blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them,
+his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his
+curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed
+into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even;
+laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the
+sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.
+
+Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these
+cottagers, she had never lived till now--under the blaze of these
+eyes--within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the
+power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the
+weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged,
+dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in
+the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a
+sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on
+his knee, against his breast. "Here," she thought, while her pulses
+leapt, "is the leader for me--for these. Let him call, I will follow."
+
+It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly,
+when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm
+of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement,
+hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate
+practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take
+towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for
+the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but
+put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed
+forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so--with some
+good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise
+instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the
+day of election--came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed,
+and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved
+herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken
+bodily from the _Labour Clarion_ of the preceding week. Then a
+resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was
+passed unanimously amid evident excitement. It was the first time that
+such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect,
+mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony. For one who knew
+her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a
+man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.
+
+As for Marcella, she said little or nothing. But Wharton, in the dark of
+the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that
+her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response
+would have been electric.
+
+When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the
+vestibule--Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall--he said to her,
+his voice hoarse with fatigue:
+
+"Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?"
+
+Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.
+
+"You rated them enough."
+
+"Well, did you disapprove?"
+
+"Oh, no! it seems to be your way."
+
+"My proof of friendship? Well, can there be a greater? Will you show me
+some to-morrow?"
+
+"How can I?"
+
+"Will you criticise?--tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night,
+or a hypocrite? Your mother would."
+
+"I dare say!" said Marcella, her breath quickening; "but don't expect it
+from me."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because--because I don't pretend. I don't know whether you roused them,
+but you roused _me_."
+
+She swept on before him into the dark hall, without giving him a moment
+for reply, took her candle, and disappeared.
+
+Wharton found his own staircase, and went up to bed. The light he
+carried showed his smiling eyes bent on the ground, his mouth still
+moving as though with some pleasant desire of speech.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Wharton was sitting alone in the big Mellor drawing-room, after dinner.
+He had drawn one of the few easy chairs the room possessed to the fire,
+and with his feet on the fender, and one of Mr. Boyce's French novels on
+his knee, he was intensely enjoying a moment of physical ease. The work
+of these weeks of canvassing and speaking had been arduous, and he was
+naturally indolent. Now, beside this fire and at a distance, it amazed
+him that any motive whatever, public or private, should ever have been
+strong enough to take him out through the mire on these winter nights to
+spout himself hoarse to a parcel of rustics. "What did I do it for?" he
+asked himself; "what am I going to do it for again to-morrow?"
+
+Ten o'clock. Mr. Boyce was gone to bed. No more entertaining of _him_ to
+be done; one might be thankful for that mercy. Miss Boyce and her mother
+would, he supposed, be down directly. They had gone up to dress at nine.
+It was the night of the Maxwell Court ball, and the carriage had been
+ordered for half-past ten. In a few minutes he would see Miss Boyce in
+her new dress, wearing Raeburn's pearls. He was extraordinarily
+observant, and a number of little incidents and domestic arrangements
+bearing on the feminine side of Marcella's life had been apparent to
+him from the beginning. He knew, for instance, that the trousseau was
+being made at home, and that during the last few weeks the lady for whom
+it was destined had shown an indifference to the progress of it which
+seemed to excite a dumb annoyance in her mother. Curious woman, Mrs.
+Boyce!
+
+He found himself listening to every opening door, and already, as it
+were, gazing at Marcella in her white array. He was not asked to this
+ball. As he had early explained to Miss Boyce, he and Miss Raeburn had
+been "cuts" for years, for what reason he had of course left Marcella to
+guess. As if Marcella found any difficulty in guessing--as if the
+preposterous bigotries and intolerances of the Ladies' League were not
+enough to account for any similar behaviour on the part of any similar
+high-bred spinster! As for this occasion, she was far too proud both on
+her own behalf and Wharton's to say anything either to Lord Maxwell or
+his sister on the subject of an invitation for her father's guest.
+
+It so happened, however, that Wharton was aware of certain other reasons
+for his social exclusion from Maxwell Court. There was no necessity, of
+course, for enlightening Miss Boyce on the point. But as he sat waiting
+for her, Wharton's mind went back to the past connected with those
+reasons. In that past Raeburn had had the whip-hand of him; Raeburn had
+been the moral superior dictating indignant terms to a young fellow
+detected in flagrant misconduct. Wharton did not know that he bore him
+any particular grudge. But he had never liked Aldous, as a boy, that he
+could remember; naturally he had liked him less since that old affair.
+The remembrance of it had made his position at Mellor particularly sweet
+to him from the beginning; he was not sure that it had not determined
+his original acceptance of the offer made to him by the Liberal
+Committee to contest old Dodgson's seat. And during the past few weeks
+the exhilaration and interest of the general position--considering all
+things--had been very great. Not only was he on the point of ousting the
+Maxwell candidate from a seat which he had held securely for
+years--Wharton was perfectly well aware by now that he was trespassing
+on Aldous Raeburn's preserves in ways far more important, and infinitely
+more irritating! He and Raeburn had not met often at Mellor during these
+weeks of fight. Each had been too busy. But whenever they had come
+across each other Wharton had clearly perceived that his presence in the
+house, his growing intimacy with Marcella Boyce, the free-masonry of
+opinion between them, the interest she took in his contest, the village
+friendships they had in common, were all intensely galling to Aldous
+Raeburn.
+
+The course of events, indeed, had lately produced in Wharton a certain
+excitement--recklessness even. He had come down into these parts to
+court "the joy of eventful living"--politically and personally. But the
+situation had proved to be actually far more poignant and personal than
+he had expected. This proud, crude, handsome girl--to her certainly it
+was largely due that the days had flown as they had. He was perfectly,
+one might almost say gleefully, aware that at the present moment it was
+he and not Aldous Raeburn who was intellectually her master. His mind
+flew back at first with amusement, then with a thrill of something else,
+over their talks and quarrels. He smiled gaily as he recalled her fits
+of anger with him, her remonstrances, appeals--and then her awkward
+inevitable submissions when he had crushed her with sarcasm or with
+facts. Ah! she would go to this ball to-night; Aldous Raeburn would
+parade her as his possession; but she would go with thoughts, ambitions,
+ideals, which, as they developed, would make her more and more difficult
+for a Raeburn to deal with. And in those thoughts and ambitions the man
+who had been her tormentor, teacher, and companion during six rushing
+weeks knew well that he already counted for much. He had cherished in
+her all those "divine discontents" which were already there when he
+first knew her; taught her to formulate them, given her better reasons
+for them; so that by now she was a person with a far more defined and
+stormy will than she had been to begin with. Wharton did not
+particularly know why he should exult; but he did exult. At any rate, he
+was prodigiously tickled--by the whole position.
+
+A step, a rustle outside--he hastily shut his book and listened.
+
+The door opened, and Marcella came in--a white vision against the heavy
+blue of the walls. With her came, too, a sudden strong scent of flowers,
+for she carried a marvellous bunch of hot-house roses, Aldous's gift,
+which had just arrived by special messenger.
+
+Wharton sprang up and placed a chair for her.
+
+"I had begun to believe the ball only existed in my own imagination!"
+he said gaily. "Surely you are very late."
+
+Then he saw that she looked disturbed.
+
+"It was papa," she said, coming to the fire, and looking down into it.
+"It has been another attack of pain--not serious, mamma says; she is
+coming down directly. But I wonder why they come, and why he thinks
+himself so ill--do you know?" she added abruptly, turning to her
+companion.
+
+Wharton hesitated, taken by surprise. During the past weeks, what with
+Mr. Boyce's confidence and his own acuteness, he had arrived at a very
+shrewd notion of what was wrong with his host. But he was not going to
+enlighten the daughter.
+
+"I should say your father wants a great deal of care--and is nervous
+about himself," he said quietly. "But he will get the care--and your
+mother knows the whole state of the case."
+
+"Yes, she knows," said Marcella. "I wish I did."
+
+And a sudden painful expression--of moral worry, remorse--passed across
+the girl's face. Wharton knew that she had often been impatient of late
+with her father, and incredulous of his complaints. He thought he
+understood.
+
+"One can often be of more use to a sick person if one is not too well
+acquainted with what ails them," he said. "Hope and cheerfulness are
+everything in a case like your father's. He will do well."
+
+"If he does he won't owe any of it--"
+
+She stopped as impulsively as she had begun. "To me," she meant to have
+said; then had retreated hastily, before her own sense of something
+unduly intimate and personal. Wharton stood quietly beside her, saying
+nothing, but receiving and soothing her self-reproach just as surely as
+though she had put it into words.
+
+"You are crushing your flowers, I think," he said suddenly.
+
+And indeed her roses were dangling against her dress, as if she had
+forgotten all about them.
+
+She raised them carelessly, but he bent to smell them, and she held them
+out.
+
+"Summer!" he said, plunging his face into them with a long breath of
+sensuous enjoyment. "How the year sweeps round in an instant! And all
+the effect of a little heat and a little money. Will you allow me a
+philosopher's remark?"
+
+He drew back from her. His quick inquisitive but still respectful eye
+took in every delightful detail.
+
+"If I don't give you leave, my experience is that you will take it!" she
+said, half laughing, half resentful, as though she had old aggressions
+in mind.
+
+"You admit the strength of the temptation? It is very simple, no one
+could help making it. To be spectator of the _height_ of anything--the
+best, the climax--makes any mortal's pulses run. Beauty, success,
+happiness, for instance?"
+
+He paused smiling. She leant a thin hand on the mantelpiece and looked
+away; Aldous's pearls slipped backwards along her white arm.
+
+"Do you suppose to-night will be the height of happiness?" she said at
+last with a little scorn. "These functions don't present themselves to
+_me_ in such a light."
+
+Wharton could have laughed out--her pedantry was so young and
+unconscious. But he restrained himself.
+
+"I shall be with the majority to-night," he said demurely. "I may as
+well warn you."
+
+Her colour rose. No other man had ever dared to speak to her with this
+assurance, this cool scrutinising air. She told herself to be indignant;
+the next moment she _was_ indignant, but with herself for remembering
+conventionalities.
+
+"Tell me one thing," said Wharton, changing his tone wholly. "I know you
+went down hurriedly to the village before dinner. Was anything wrong?"
+
+"Old Patton is very ill," she said, sighing. "I went to ask after him;
+he may die any moment. And the Hurds' boy too."
+
+He leant against the mantelpiece, talking to her about both cases with a
+quick incisive common-sense--not unkind, but without a touch of
+unnecessary sentiment, still less of the superior person--which
+represented one of the moods she liked best in him. In speaking of the
+poor he always took the tone of comradeship, of a plain equality, and
+the tone was, in fact, genuine.
+
+"Do you know," he said presently, "I did not tell you before, but I am
+certain that Hurd's wife is afraid of you, that she has a secret from
+you?"
+
+"From me! how could she? I know every detail of their affairs."
+
+"No matter. I listened to what she said that day in the cottage when I
+had the boy on my knee. I noticed her face, and I am quite certain. She
+has a secret, and above all a secret from you."
+
+Marcella looked disturbed for a moment, then she laughed.
+
+"Oh, no!" she said, with a little superior air. "I assure you I know her
+better than you."
+
+Wharton said no more.
+
+"Marcella!" called a distant voice from the hall.
+
+The girl gathered up her white skirts and her flowers in haste.
+
+"Good-night!"
+
+"Good-night! I shall hear you come home and wonder how you have sped.
+One word, if I may! Take your _rôle_ and play it. There is nothing
+subjects dislike so much as to see royalty decline its part."
+
+She laughed, blushed, a little proudly and uncertainly, and went without
+reply. As she shut the door behind her, a sudden flatness fell upon her.
+She walked through the dark Stone Parlour outside, seeing still the
+firmly-knit lightly-made figure--boyish, middle-sized, yet never
+insignificant--the tumbled waves of fair hair, the eyes so keenly blue,
+the face with its sharp mocking lines, its powers of sudden charm. Then
+self-reproach leapt, and possessed her. She quickened her pace, hurrying
+into the hall, as though from something she was ashamed or afraid of.
+
+In the hall a new sensation awaited her. Her mother, fully dressed,
+stood waiting by the old billiard-table for her maid, who had gone to
+fetch her a cloak.
+
+Marcella stopped an instant in surprise and delight, then ran up to her.
+"Mamma, how _lovely_ you look! I haven't seen you like that, not since I
+was a child. I remember you then once, in a low dress, a white dress,
+with flowers, coming into the nursery. But that black becomes you so
+well, and Deacon has done your hair beautifully!"
+
+She took her mother's hand and kissed her cheek, touched by an emotion
+which had many roots. There was infinite relief in this tender natural
+outlet; she seemed to recover possession of herself.
+
+Mrs. Boyce bore the kiss quietly. Her face was a little pinched and
+white. But the unusual display Deacon had been allowed to make of her
+pale golden hair, still long and abundant; the unveiling of the shapely
+shoulders and neck, little less beautiful than her daughter's; the
+elegant lines of the velvet dress, all these things, had very nobly
+transformed her. Marcella could not restrain her admiration and delight.
+Mrs. Boyce winced, and, looking upward to the gallery, which ran round
+the hall, called Deacon impatiently.
+
+"Only, mamma," said Marcella, discontentedly, "I don't like that little
+chain round your neck. It is not equal to the rest, not worthy of it."
+
+"I have nothing else, my dear," said Mrs. Boyce, drily. "Now, Deacon,
+don't be all night!"
+
+Nothing else? Yet, if she shut her eyes, Marcella could perfectly recall
+the diamonds on the neck and arms of that white figure of her
+childhood--could see herself as a baby playing with the treasures of her
+mother's jewel-box.
+
+Nowadays, Mrs. Boyce was very secretive and reserved about her personal
+possessions. Marcella never went into her room unless she was asked, and
+would never have thought of treating it or its contents with any
+freedom.
+
+The mean chain which went so ill with the costly hoarded dress--it
+recalled to Marcella all the inexorable silent miseries of her mother's
+past life, and all the sordid disadvantages and troubles of her own
+youth. She followed Mrs. Boyce out to the carriage in silence--once more
+in a tumult of sore pride and doubtful feeling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Four weeks to her wedding-day! The words dinned in her ears as they
+drove along. Yet they sounded strange to her, incredible almost. How
+much did she know of Aldous, of her life that was to be--above all, how
+much of herself? She was not happy--had not been happy or at ease for
+many days. Yet in her restlessness she could think nothing out.
+Moreover, the chain that galled and curbed her was a chain of character.
+In spite of her modernness, and the complexity of many of her motives,
+there was certain inherited simplicities of nature at the bottom of her.
+In her wild demonic childhood you could always trust Marcie Boyce, if
+she had given you her word--her schoolfellows knew that. If her passions
+were half-civilised and southern, her way of understanding the point of
+honour was curiously English, sober, tenacious. So now. Her sense of
+bond to Aldous had never been in the least touched by any of her
+dissatisfactions and revolts. Yet it rushed upon her to-night with
+amazement, and that in four weeks she was going to marry him! Why?
+how?--what would it really _mean_ for him and for her? It was as though
+in mid-stream, she were trying to pit herself for an instant against the
+current which had so far carried them all on, to see what it might be
+like to retrace a step, and could only realise with dismay the force
+and rapidity of the water.
+
+Yet all the time another side of her was well aware that she was at that
+moment the envy of half a county, that in another ten minutes hundreds
+of eager and critical eyes would be upon her; and her pride was rising
+to her part. The little incident of the chain had somehow for the moment
+made the ball and her place in it more attractive to her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had no sooner stepped from their carriage than Aldous, who was
+waiting in the outer hall, joyously discovered them. Till then he had
+been walking aimlessly amid the crowd of his own guests, wondering when
+she would come, how she would like it. This splendid function had been
+his grandfather's idea; it would never have entered his own head for a
+moment. Yet he understood his grandfather's wish to present his heir's
+promised bride in this public ceremonious way to the society of which
+she would some day be the natural leader. He understood, too, that there
+was more in the wish than met the ear; that the occasion meant to Lord
+Maxwell, whether Dick Boyce were there or no, the final condoning of
+things past and done with, a final throwing of the Maxwell shield over
+the Boyce weakness, and full adoption of Marcella into her new family.
+
+All this he understood and was grateful for. But how would _she_
+respond? How would she like it--this parade that was to be made of
+her--these people that must be introduced to her? He was full of
+anxieties.
+
+Yet in many ways his mind had been easier of late. During the last week
+she had been very gentle and good to him--even Miss Raeburn had been
+pleased with her. There had been no quoting of Wharton when they met;
+and he had done his philosopher's best to forget him. He trusted her
+proudly, intensely; and in four weeks she would be his wife.
+
+"Can you bear it?" he said to her in a laughing whisper as she and her
+mother emerged from the cloak-room.
+
+"Tell me what to do," she said, flushing. "I will do my best. What a
+crowd! Must we stay very long?"
+
+"Ah, my dear Mrs. Boyce," cried Lord Maxwell, meeting them on the steps
+of the inner quadrangular corridor--"Welcome indeed! Let me take you in.
+Marcella! with Aldous's permission!" he stooped his white head gallantly
+and kissed her on the cheek--"Remember I am an old man; if I choose to
+pay you compliments, you will have to put up with them!"
+
+Then he offered Mrs. Boyce his arm, a stately figure in his ribbon and
+cross of the Bath. A delicate red had risen to that lady's thin cheek in
+spite of her self-possession. "Poor thing," said Lord Maxwell to himself
+as he led her along--"poor thing!--how distinguished and charming still!
+One sees to-night what she was like as a girl."
+
+Aldous and Marcella followed. They had to pass along the great corridor
+which ran round the quadrangle of the house. The antique marbles which
+lined it were to-night masked in flowers, and seats covered in red had
+been fitted in wherever it was possible, and were now crowded with
+dancers "sitting out." From the ball-room ahead came waves of
+waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with
+the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the
+swaying rhythms of the band. Beyond the windows of the corridor, which
+had been left uncurtained because of the beauty of the night, the stiff
+Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was
+gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of
+lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls
+of the corridor--here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca--and
+the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in cold,
+whitish relief.
+
+Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were
+streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that
+every eye was fixed upon her and her mother. "Look, there she is," she
+heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library,
+now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest. "Come, quick! There--I
+told you she was lovely!"
+
+Every now and then some old friend, man or woman, rose smiling from the
+seats along the side, and Aldous introduced his bride.
+
+"On her dignity!" said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they
+had passed. "Shy, no doubt--very natural! But nowadays girls, when
+they're shy, don't giggle and blush as they used to in _my_ young days;
+they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren't going to
+allow it! Oh, very handsome--very handsome--of course. But you can see
+she's advanced--peculiar--or what d'ye call it?--woman's rights, I
+suppose, and all that kind of thing? Like to see you go in for it,
+Nettie, eh!"
+
+"She's _awfully_ handsome," sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant
+little daughter, still craning her neck to look--"very simply dressed
+too, except for those lovely pearls. She does her hair very oddly, so
+low down--in those plaits. Nobody does it like that nowadays."
+
+"That's because nobody has such a head," said her brother, a young
+Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship. "By
+George, she's ripping--she's the best-looking girl I've seen for a good
+long time. But she's a Tartar, I'll swear--looks it, anyway."
+
+"Every one says she has the most extraordinary opinions," said the girl,
+eagerly. "She'll manage him, don't you think? I'm sure he's very meek
+and mild."
+
+"Don't know that," said the young man, twisting his moustache with the
+air of exhaustive information. "Raeburn's a very good fellow--excellent
+fellow--see him shooting, you know--that kind of thing. I expect he's
+got a will when he wants it. The mother's handsome, too, and looks a
+lady. The father's kept out of the way, I see. Rather a blessing for the
+Raeburns. Can't be pleasant, you know, to get a man like that in the
+family. Look after your spoons--that kind of thing."
+
+Meanwhile Marcella was standing beside Miss Raeburn, at the head of the
+long ball-room, and doing her best to behave prettily. One after
+another she bowed to, or shook hands with, half the magnates of the
+county--the men in pink, the women in the new London dresses, for which
+this brilliant and long-expected ball had given so welcome an excuse.
+They knew little or nothing of her, except that she was clearly
+good-looking, that she was that fellow Dick Boyce's daughter and was
+reported to be "odd." Some, mostly men, who said their conventional few
+words to her, felt an amused admiration for the skill and rapidity with
+which she had captured the _parti_ of the county; some, mostly women,
+were already jealous of her. A few of the older people here and there,
+both men and women--but after all they shook hands like the rest!--knew
+perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were
+touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back
+at her with kind eyes.
+
+But of these last Marcella realised nothing. What she was saying to
+herself was that, if they knew little of her, she knew a great deal of
+many of them. In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton
+had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his
+division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the
+knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book--one
+of the numberless!--recently issued, on the state of the midland
+labourer. He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly
+on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the
+working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner.
+Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county
+before she met it in the flesh. She knew that a great many of these men
+who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their
+lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending. But
+there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly
+present to her than the improvements. In general, the people who
+thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members
+of a useless class. The nation would do away with them in time!
+Meanwhile it might at least be asked of them that they should practise
+their profession of landowning, such as it was, with greater conscience
+and intelligence--that they should not shirk its opportunities or idle
+them away. And she could point out those who did both--scandalously,
+intolerably. Once or twice she thought passionately of Minta Hurd,
+washing and mending all day, in her damp cottage; or of the Pattons in
+"the parish house," thankful after sixty years of toil for a hovel where
+the rain came through the thatch, and where the smoke choked you,
+unless, with the thermometer below freezing-point, you opened the door
+to the blast. Why should _these_ people have all the gay clothes, the
+flowers, the jewels, the delicate food--all the delight and all the
+leisure? And those, nothing! Her soul rose against what she saw as she
+stood there, going through her part. Wharton's very words, every
+inflection of his voice was in her ears, playing chorus to the scene.
+
+But when these first introductions, these little empty talks of three or
+four phrases apiece, and all of them alike, were nearly done with,
+Marcella looked eagerly round for Mary Harden. There she was, sitting
+quietly against the wall in a remote corner, her plain face all smiles,
+her little feet dancing under the white muslin frock which she had
+fashioned for herself with so much pain under Marcella's directions.
+Miss Raeburn was called away to find an arm-chair for some dowager of
+importance; Marcella took advantage of the break and of the end of a
+dance to hurry down the room to Mary. Aldous, who was talking to old Sir
+Charles Leven, Frank's father, a few steps off, nodded and smiled to her
+as he saw her move.
+
+"Have you been dancing, Mary?" she said severely.
+
+"I wouldn't for worlds! I never was so much amused in my life. Look at
+those girls--those sisters--in the huge velvet sleeves, like coloured
+balloons!--and that old lady in the pink tulle and diamonds.--I do so
+want to get her her cloak! _And_ those Lancers!--I never could have
+imagined people danced like that. They didn't dance them--they romped
+them! It wasn't beautiful--was it?"
+
+"Why do you expect an English crowd to do anything beautiful? If we
+could do it, we should be too ashamed."
+
+"But it _is_ beautiful, all the same, you scornful person!" cried Mary,
+dragging her friend down beside her. "How pretty the girls are! And as
+for the diamonds, I never saw anything so wonderful. I wish I could have
+made Charles come!"
+
+"Wouldn't he?"
+
+"No"--she looked a little troubled--"he couldn't think it would be
+quite right. But I don't know--a sight like this takes me off my feet,
+shakes me up, and does _me_ a world of good!"
+
+"You dear, simple thing!" said Marcella, slipping her hand into Mary's
+as it lay on the bench.
+
+"Oh, you needn't be so superior!" cried Mary,--"not for another year at
+least. I don't believe you are much more used to it than I am!"
+
+"If you mean," said Marcella, "that I was never at anything so big and
+splendid as this before, you are quite right."
+
+And she looked round the room with that curious, cold air of personal
+detachment from all she saw, which had often struck Mary, and to-night
+made her indignant.
+
+"Then enjoy it!" she said, laughing and frowning at the same time.
+"That's a much more plain duty for _you_ than it was for Charles to stay
+at home--there! Haven't you been dancing?"
+
+"No, Mr. Raeburn doesn't dance. But he thinks he can get through the
+next Lancers if I will steer him."
+
+"Then I shall find a seat where I can look at you," said Mary,
+decidedly. "Ah, there is Mr. Raeburn coming to introduce somebody to
+you. I knew they wouldn't let you sit here long."
+
+Aldous brought up a young Guardsman, who boldly asked Miss Boyce for the
+pleasure of a dance. Marcella consented; and off they swept into a room
+which was only just beginning to fill for the new dance, and where,
+therefore, for the moment the young grace of both had free play.
+Marcella had been an indefatigable dancer in the old London days at
+those students' parties, with their dyed gloves and lemonade suppers,
+which were running in her head now, as she swayed to the rhythm of this
+perfect band. The mere delight in movement came back to her; and while
+they danced, she danced with all her heart. Then in the pauses she would
+lean against the wall beside her partner, and rack her brain to find a
+word to say to him. As for anything that _he_ said, every word--whether
+of Ascot, or the last Academy, or the new plays, or the hunting and the
+elections--sounded to her more vapid than the last.
+
+Meanwhile Aldous stood near Mary Harden and watched the dancing figure.
+He had never seen her dance before. Mary shyly stole a look at him from
+time to time.
+
+"Well," he said at last, stooping to his neighbour, "what are you
+thinking of?"
+
+"I think she is a dream!" said Mary, flushing with the pleasure of being
+able to say it. They were great friends, he and she, and to-night
+somehow she was not a bit afraid of him.
+
+Aldous's eye sparkled a moment; then he looked down at her with a kind
+smile.
+
+"If you suppose I am going to let you sit here all night, you are very
+much mistaken. Marcella gave me precise instructions. I am going off
+this moment to find somebody."
+
+"Mr. Raeburn--don't!" cried Mary, catching at him. But he was gone, and
+she was left in trepidation, imagining the sort of formidable young man
+who was soon to be presented to her, and shaking at the thought of him.
+
+When the dance was over Marcella returned to Miss Raeburn, who was
+standing at the door into the corridor and had beckoned to her. She went
+through a number of new introductions, and declared to herself that she
+was doing all she could. Miss Raeburn was not so well satisfied.
+
+"Why can't she smile and chatter like other girls?" thought Aunt Neta,
+impatiently. "It's her 'ideas,' I suppose. What rubbish! There,
+now--just see the difference!"
+
+For at the moment Lady Winterbourne came up, and instantly Marcella was
+all smiles and talk, holding her friend by both hands, clinging to her
+almost.
+
+"Oh, do come here!" she said, leading her into a corner. "There's such a
+crowd, and I say all the wrong things. There!" with a sigh of relief.
+"Now I feel myself protected."
+
+"I mustn't keep you," said Lady Winterbourne, a little taken aback by
+her effusion. "Everybody is wanting to talk to you."
+
+"Oh, I know! There is Miss Raeburn looking at me severely already. But I
+must do as I like a little."
+
+"You ought to do as Aldous likes," said Lady Winterbourne, suddenly, in
+her deepest and most tragic voice. It seemed to her a moment had come
+for admonition, and she seized it hastily.
+
+Marcella stared at her in surprise. She knew by now that when Lady
+Winterbourne looked most forbidding she was in reality most shy. But
+still she was taken aback.
+
+"Why do you say that, I wonder?" she asked, half reproachfully. "I have
+been behaving myself quite nicely--I have indeed; at least, as nicely as
+I knew how."
+
+Lady Winterbourne's tragic air yielded to a slow smile.
+
+"You look very well, my dear. That white becomes you charmingly; so do
+the pearls. I don't wonder that Aldous always knows where you are."
+
+Marcella raised her eyes and caught those of Aldous fixed upon her from
+the other side of the room. She blushed, smiled slightly, and looked
+away.
+
+"Who is that tall man just gone up to speak to him?" she asked of her
+companion.
+
+"That is Lord Wandle," said Lady Winterbourne, "and his plain second
+wife behind him. Edward always scolds me for not admiring him. He says
+women know nothing at all about men's looks, and that Lard Wandle was
+the most splendid man of his time. But I always think it an unpleasant
+face."
+
+"Lord Wandle!" exclaimed Marcella, frowning. "Oh, _please_ come with me,
+dear Lady Winterbourne! I know he is asking Aldous to introduce him, and
+I won't--no I will _not_--be introduced to him."
+
+And laying hold of her astonished companion, she drew her hastily
+through a doorway near, walked quickly, still gripping her, through two
+connected rooms beyond, and finally landed her and herself on a sofa in
+Lord Maxwell's library, pursued meanwhile through all her hurried course
+by the curious looks of an observant throng.
+
+"That man!--no, that would really have been _too_ much!" said Marcella,
+using her large feather fan with stormy energy.
+
+"What _is_ the matter with you, my dear?" said Lady Winterbourne in her
+amazement; "and what is the matter with Lord Wandle?"
+
+"You must know!" said Marcella, indignantly. "Oh, you _must_ have seen
+that case in the paper last week--that _shocking_ case! A woman and two
+children died in one of his cottages of blood-poisoning--nothing in the
+world but his neglect--his _brutal_ neglect!" Her breast heaved; she
+seemed almost on the point of weeping. "The agent was appealed to--did
+nothing. Then the clergyman wrote to him direct, and got an answer. The
+answer was published. For cruel insolence I never saw anything like it!
+He ought to be in prison for manslaughter--and he comes _here_! And
+people laugh and talk with him!"
+
+She stopped, almost choked by her own passion. But the incident, after
+all, was only the spark to the mine.
+
+Lady Winterbourne stared at her helplessly.
+
+"Perhaps it isn't true," she suggested. "The newspapers put in so many
+lies, especially about _us_--the landlords. Edward says one ought never
+to believe them. Ah, here comes Aldous."
+
+Aldous, indeed, with some perplexity on his brow, was to be seen
+approaching, looking for his betrothed. Marcella dropped her fan and sat
+erect, her angry colour fading into whiteness.
+
+"My darling! I couldn't think what had become of you. May I bring Lord
+Wandle and introduce him to you? He is an old friend here, and my
+godfather. Not that I am particularly proud of the relationship," he
+said, dropping his voice as he stooped over her. "He is a soured,
+disagreeable fellow, and I hate many of the things he does. But it is an
+old tie, and my grandfather is tender of such things. Only a word or
+two; then I will get rid of him."
+
+"Aldous, I _can't_," said Marcella, looking up at him. "How could I? I
+saw that case. I must be rude to him."
+
+Aldous looked considerably disturbed.
+
+"It was very bad," he said slowly. "I didn't know you had seen it. What
+shall I do? I promised to go back for him."
+
+"Lord Wandle--Miss Boyce!" said Miss Raeburn's sharp little voice behind
+Aldous. Aldous, moving aside in hasty dismay, saw his aunt, looking very
+determined, presenting her tall neighbour, who bowed with old-fashioned
+deference to the girl on the sofa.
+
+Lady Winterbourne looked with trepidation at Marcella. But the social
+instinct held, to some extent. Ninety-nine women can threaten a scene of
+the kind Lady Winterbourne dreaded, for one that can carry it through.
+Marcella wavered; then, with her most forbidding air, she made a
+scarcely perceptible return of Lord Wandle's bow.
+
+"Did you escape in here out of the heat?" he asked her. "But I am afraid
+no one lets you escape to-night. The occasion is too interesting."
+
+Marcella made no reply. Lady Winterbourne threw in a nervous remark on
+the crowd.
+
+"Oh, yes, a great crush," said Lord Wandle. "Of course, we all come to
+see Aldous happy. How long is it, Miss Boyce, since you settled at
+Mellor?"
+
+"Six months."
+
+She looked straight before her and not at him as she answered, and her
+tone made Miss Raeburn's blood boil.
+
+Lord Wandle--a battered, coarsened, but still magnificent-looking man of
+sixty--examined the speaker an instant from half-shut eyes, then put up
+his hand to his moustache with a half-smile.
+
+"You like the country?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+As she spoke her reluctant monosyllable, the girl had really no
+conception of the degree of hostility expressed in her manner. Instead
+she was hating herself for her own pusillanimity.
+
+"And the people?"
+
+"Some of them."
+
+And straightway she raised her fierce black eyes to his, and the man
+before her understood, as plainly as any one need understand, that,
+whoever else Miss Boyce might like, she did not like Lord Wandle, and
+wished for no more conversation with him.
+
+Her interrogator turned to Aldous with smiling _aplomb_.
+
+"Thank you, my dear Aldous. Now let me retire. No one must _monopolise_
+your charming lady."
+
+And again he bowed low to her, this time with an ironical emphasis not
+to be mistaken, and walked away.
+
+Lady Winterbourne saw him go up to his wife, who had followed him at a
+distance, and speak to her roughly with a frown. They left the room, and
+presently, through the other door of the library which opened on the
+corridor, she saw them pass, as though they were going to their
+carriage.
+
+Marcella rose. She looked first at Miss Raeburn--then at Aldous.
+
+"Will you take me away?" she said, going up to him; "I am tired--take me
+to your room."
+
+He put her hand inside his arm, and they pushed their way through the
+crowd. Outside in the passage they met Hallin. He had not seen her
+before, and he put out his hand. But there was something distant in his
+gentle greeting which struck at this moment like a bruise on Marcella's
+quivering nerves. It came across her that for some time past he had made
+no further advances to her; that his first eager talk of friendship
+between himself and her had dropped; that his _acceptance_ of her into
+his world and Aldous's was somehow suspended--in abeyance. She bit her
+lip tightly and hurried Aldous along. Again the same lines of gay,
+chatting people along the corridor, and on either side of the wide
+staircase--greetings, introduction--a nightmare of publicity.
+
+"Rather pronounced--to carry him off like that," said a clergyman to his
+wife with a kindly smile, as the two tall figures disappeared along the
+upper gallery. "She will have him all to herself before long."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aldous shut the door of his sitting-room behind them. Marcella quickly
+drew her hand out of his arm, and going forward to the mantelpiece
+rested both elbows upon it and hid her face.
+
+He looked at her a moment in distress and astonishment, standing a
+little apart. Then he saw that she was crying. The colour flooded into
+his face, and going up to her he took her hand, which was all she would
+yield him, and, holding it to his lips, said in her ear every soothing
+tender word that love's tutoring could bring to mind. In his emotion he
+told himself and her that he admired and loved her the more for the
+incident downstairs, for the temper she had shown! She alone among them
+all had had the courage to strike the true stern Christian note. As to
+the annoyance such courage might bring upon him and her in the
+future--even as to the trouble it might cause his own dear folk--what
+real matter? In these things she should lead.
+
+What could love have asked better than such a moment? Yet Marcella's
+weeping was in truth the weeping of despair. This man's very sweetness
+to her, his very assumption of the right to comfort and approve her,
+roused in her a desperate stifled sense of bonds that should never have
+been made, and that now could not be broken. It was all plain to her at
+last. His touch had no thrill for her; his frown no terror. She had
+accepted him without loving him, coveting what he could give her. And
+now it seemed to her that she cared nothing for anything he could
+give!--that the life before her was to be one series of petty conflicts
+between her and a surrounding circumstance which must inevitably in the
+end be too strong for her, conflicts from which neither heart nor
+ambition could gain anything. She had desired a great position for what
+she might do with it. But could she do with it! She would be
+subdued--oh! very quickly!--to great houses and great people, and all
+the vapid pomp and idle toil of wealth. All that picture of herself,
+stooping from place and power, to bind up the wounds of the people, in
+which she had once delighted, was to her now a mere flimsy vulgarity.
+She had been shown other ideals--other ways--and her pulses were still
+swaying under the audacity--the virile inventive force of the showman.
+Everything she had once desired looked flat to her; everything she was
+not to have, glowed and shone. Poverty, adventure, passion, the joys of
+self-realisation--these she gave up. She would become Lady Maxwell, make
+friends with Miss Raeburn, and wear the family diamonds!
+
+Then, in the midst of her rage with herself and fate, she drew herself
+away, looked up, and caught full the eyes of Aldous Raeburn. Conscience
+stung and burned. What was this life she had dared to trifle with--this
+man she had dared to treat as a mere pawn in her own game? She gave way
+utterly, appalled at her own misdoing, and behaved like a penitent
+child. Aldous, astonished and alarmed by her emotions and by the wild
+incoherent things she said, won his way at last to some moments of
+divine happiness, when, leaving her trembling hand in his, she sat
+submissively beside him, gradually quieting down, summoning back her
+smiles and her beauty, and letting him call her all the fond names he
+would.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the
+drive home. Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella's imagination
+would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what
+spirit her mother had taken the evening--the first social festivity in
+which Richard Boyce's wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact,
+Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first public
+entry on Lord Maxwell's arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note
+of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several old
+acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first
+married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She had
+received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone
+away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to
+society by this great match that her daughter was making. Lady
+Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and
+both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in
+smoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watched
+Marcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did
+not see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to
+Hallin.
+
+Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxious
+to get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticing
+Marcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in the
+ball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done. Yet the mother
+_had_ observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhat
+different from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had been
+gentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken some
+pains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her. Lord
+Maxwell--ignorant of the Wandle incident--was charmed with her, and
+openly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his hearty
+old man's way. Only Miss Raeburn held indignantly aloof, and would not
+pretend, even to Mrs. Boyce.
+
+And now Marcella was tired--dead tired, she said to herself, both in
+mind and body. She lay back in the carriage, trying to sink herself in
+her own fatigue, to forget everything, to think of nothing. Outside the
+night was mild, and the moon clear. For some days past, after the break
+up of the long frost, there had been heavy rain. Now the rain had
+cleared away, and in the air there was already an early promise of
+spring. As she walked home from the village that afternoon she had felt
+the buds and the fields stirring.
+
+When they got home, Mrs. Boyce turned to her daughter at the head of the
+stairs, "Shall I unlace your dress, Marcella?"
+
+"Oh no, thank you. Can I help you?"
+
+"No. Good-night."
+
+"Mamma!" Marcella turned and ran after her. "I should like to know how
+papa is. I will wait here if you will tell me."
+
+Mrs. Boyce looked surprised. Then she went into her room and shut the
+door. Marcella waited outside, leaning against the old oak gallery which
+ran round the hall, her candle the one spot of light and life in the
+great dark house.
+
+"He seems to have slept well," said Mrs. Boyce, reappearing, and
+speaking under her breath. "He has not taken the opiate I left for him,
+so he cannot have been in pain. Good-night."
+
+Marcella kissed her and went. Somehow, in her depression of nerve and
+will, she was loth to go away by herself. The loneliness of the night,
+and of her wing of the house, weighed upon her; the noises made by the
+old boards under her steps, the rustling draughts from the dark passages
+to right and left startled and troubled her; she found herself
+childishly fearing lest her candle should go out.
+
+Yet, as she descended the two steps to the passage outside her door, she
+could have felt little practical need of it, for the moonlight was
+streaming in through its uncovered windows, not directly, but reflected
+from the Tudor front of the house which ran at right angles to this
+passage, and was to-night a shining silver palace, every battlement,
+window, and moulding in sharpest light and shade under the radiance of
+the night. Beneath her feet, as she looked out into the Cedar Garden,
+was a deep triangle of shadow, thrown by that part of the building in
+which she stood; and beyond the garden the barred black masses of the
+cedars closing up the view lent additional magic to the glittering
+unsubstantial fabric of the moonlit house, which was, as it were,
+embosomed and framed among them. She paused a moment, struck by the
+strangeness and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air of
+some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird
+gathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatiently
+longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and
+tumble into sleep.
+
+Yet she made no hurry. She fell on the first chair that offered. Her
+candle behind her had little power over the glooms of the dark
+tapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her own
+form, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straight
+in front of her. She sat with her hands round her knees, absently
+looking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of the
+darkness. But she was conscious of nothing save one mounting
+overwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.
+
+Mr. Wharton must go away--he _must_--or she could not bear it.
+
+Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender,
+rose and broke upon her. At last, physical weariness recalled her. She
+put up her hands to take off her pearls.
+
+As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head.
+Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her
+corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and
+opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.
+
+Steps surely--light steps--along the corridor outside, and on the
+staircase. Nor did they die away. She could still hear them,--as she
+sat, arrested, straining her ears,--pacing slowly along the lower
+passage.
+
+Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life. This room of
+hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that
+part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most
+persistently. Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor
+date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with
+some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century
+front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan.
+Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who
+was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least
+forty years before the staircase was made. None the less, no servant
+would go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark;
+and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep where
+she did. Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic,
+of steps, groans, lights in the library, and the rest. Marcella had
+consistently laughed at her.
+
+Yet all the same she had made in secret a very diligent pursuit of this
+ghost, settling in the end to a certain pique with him that he would not
+show himself to so ardent a daughter of the house. She had sat up
+waiting for him; she had lingered in the corridor outside, and on the
+stairs, expecting him. By the help of a favourite carpenter she had made
+researches into roofs, water-pipes, panelling, and old cupboards, in the
+hope of finding a practical clue to him. In vain.
+
+Yet here were the steps--regular, soft, unmistakable. The colour rushed
+back into her cheeks! Her eager healthy youth forgot its woes, flung off
+its weariness, and panted for an adventure, a discovery. Springing up,
+she threw her fur wrap round her again, and gently opened the door,
+listening.
+
+For a minute, nothing--then a few vague sounds as of something living
+and moving down below--surely in the library? Then the steps again.
+Impossible that it should be any one breaking in. No burglar would walk
+so leisurely. She closed her door behind her, and, gathering her white
+satin skirts about her, she descended the staircase.
+
+The corridor below was in radiant moonlight, chequered by the few pieces
+of old furniture it contained, and the black and white of the old
+portrait prints hanging on the walls. At first her seeking, excited eyes
+could make out nothing. Then in a flash they perceived the figure of
+Wharton at the further end near the garden door, leaning against one of
+the windows. He was apparently looking out at the moonlit house, and she
+caught the faint odour of a cigarette.
+
+Her first instinct was to turn and fly. But Wharton had seen her. As he
+looked about him at the sound of her approach, the moon, which was just
+rounding the corner of the house, struck on her full, amid the shadows
+of the staircase, and she heard his exclamation.
+
+Dignity--a natural pride--made her pause. She came forward slowly--he
+eagerly.
+
+"I heard footsteps," she said, with a coldness under which he plainly
+saw her embarrassment. "I could not suppose that anybody was still up,
+so I came down to see."
+
+He was silent a moment, scanning her with laughing eyes. Then he shook
+his head. "Confess you took me for the ghost?" he said.
+
+She hesitated; then must laugh too. She herself had told him the
+stories, so that his guess was natural.
+
+"Perhaps I did," she said. "One more disappointment! Good-night."
+
+He looked after her a quick undecided moment as she made a step in front
+of him, then at the half-burnt cigarette he held in his hand, threw the
+end away with a hasty gesture, overtook her and walked beside her along
+the corridor.
+
+"I heard you and your mother come in," he said, as though explaining
+himself. "Then I waited till I thought you must both be asleep, and came
+down here to look at that wonderful effect on the old house." He pointed
+to the silver palace outside. "I have a trick of being sleepless--a
+trick, too, of wandering at night. My own people know it, and bear with
+me, but I am abashed that you should have found me out. Just tell me--in
+one word--how the ball went?"
+
+He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenly
+wide-awake as though it were three o'clock in the afternoon instead of
+three in the morning.
+
+Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.
+
+"It went very well," she said perversely, putting her satin-slippered
+foot on the first step. "There were six hundred people upstairs, and
+four hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man.
+Everybody said it was splendid."
+
+His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her. As he had often frankly
+warned her, he was a man in quest of sensations. Certainly, in this
+strange meeting with Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, in the midst of the
+sleep-bound house, he had found one. Her eyes were heavy, her cheek
+pale. But in this soft vague light--white arms and neck now hidden, now
+revealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin--she was
+more enchanting than he had ever seen her. His breath quickened.
+
+He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him.
+What harm--to her or to Raeburn? Raeburn would have chances enough
+before long. Why admit his monopoly before the time? She was not in love
+with him! As to Mrs. Grundy--absurd! What in the true reasonableness of
+things was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well as
+by day?
+
+"One moment"--he said, delaying her. "You must be dead tired--too tired
+for romance. Else I should say to you, turn aside an instant and look at
+the library. It is a sight to remember."
+
+Inevitably she glanced behind her, and saw that the library door was
+ajar. He flung it open, and the great room showed wide, its high domed
+roof lost in shadow, while along the bare floor and up the latticed
+books crept, here streaks and fingers, and there wide breadths of light
+from the unshuttered and curtainless windows.
+
+"Isn't it the very poetry of night and solitude?" he said, looking in
+with her. "You love the place; but did you ever see it so lovable? The
+dead are here; you did right to come and seek them! Look at your
+namesake, in that ray. To-night she lives! She knows that is her husband
+opposite--those are her books beside her. And the rebel!"--he pointed
+smiling to the portrait of John Boyce. "When you are gone I shall shut
+myself up here--sit in his chair, invoke him--and put my speech
+together. I am nervous about to-morrow" (he was bound, as she knew, to a
+large Labour Congress in the Midlands, where he was to preside), "and
+sleep will make no terms with me. Ah!--how strange! Who can that be
+passing the avenue?"
+
+He made a step or two into the room, and put up his hand to his brow,
+looking intently. Involuntarily, yet with a thrill, Marcella followed.
+They walked to the window.
+
+"It is _Hurd_!" she cried in a tone of distress, pressing her face
+against the glass. "Out at this time, and with a gun! Oh, dear, dear!"
+
+There could be no question that it was Hurd. Wharton had seen him linger
+in the shadowy edge of the avenue, as though reconnoitring, and now, as
+he stealthily crossed the moonlit grass, his slouching dwarf's figure,
+his large head, and the short gun under his arm, were all plainly
+visible.
+
+"What do you suppose he is after?" said Wharton, still gazing, his hands
+in his pockets.
+
+"I don't know; he wouldn't poach on _our_ land; I'm sure he wouldn't!
+Besides, there is nothing to poach."--Wharton smiled.--"He must be
+going, after all, to Lord Maxwell's coverts! They are just beyond the
+avenue, on the side of the hill. Oh! it is too disappointing! Can we do
+anything?"
+
+She looked at her companion with troubled eyes. This incursion of
+something sadly and humanly real seemed suddenly to have made it natural
+to be standing beside him there at that strange hour. Her conscience was
+soothed.
+
+Wharton shook his head.
+
+"I don't see what we could do. How strong the instinct is! I told you
+that woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form--the squalid
+peasant's form--of the same instinct which sends the young fellows of
+our class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is the
+instinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one's
+innings against the powers that be--Nature, or the law, or convention."
+
+"I know all that--I never blame them!"--cried Marcella--"but just now it
+is so monstrous--so dangerous! Westall specially alert--and this gang
+about! Besides, I got him work from Lord Maxwell, and made him promise
+me--for the wife and children's sake."
+
+Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I should think Westall is right, and that the gang have got hold of
+him. It is what always happens. The local man is the catspaw.--So you
+are sorry for him--this man?" he said in another tone, facing round upon
+her.
+
+She looked astonished, and drew herself up nervously, turning at the
+same time to leave the room. But before she could reply he hurried on:
+
+"He--may escape his risk. Give your pity, Miss Boyce, rather to
+one--who has not escaped!"
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said, unconsciously laying a hand on
+one of the old chairs beside her to steady herself. "But it is too late
+to talk. Good-night, Mr. Wharton."
+
+"Good-bye," he said quietly, yet with a low emphasis, at the same time
+moving out of her path. She stopped, hesitating. Beneath the lace and
+faded flowers on her breast he could see how her heart beat.
+
+"Not good-bye? You are coming back after the meeting?"
+
+"I think not. I must not inflict myself--on Mrs. Boyce--any more. You
+will all be very busy during the next three weeks. It would be an
+intrusion if I were to come back at such a time--especially--considering
+the fact"--he spoke slowly--"that I am as distasteful as I now know
+myself to be, to your future husband. Since you all left to-night the
+house has been very quiet. I sat over the fire thinking. It grew clear
+to me. I must go, and go at once. Besides--a lonely man as I am must not
+risk his nerve. His task is set him, and there are none to stand by him
+if he fails."
+
+She trembled all over. Weariness and excitement made normal self-control
+almost impossible.
+
+"Well, then, I must say thank you," she said indistinctly, "for you have
+taught me a great deal."
+
+"You will unlearn it!" he said gaily, recovering his self-possession, so
+it seemed, as she lost hers. "Besides, before many weeks are over you
+will have heard hard things of me. I know that very well. I can say
+nothing to meet them. Nor should I attempt anything. It may sound
+brazen, but that past of mine, which I can see perpetually present in
+Aldous Raeburn's mind, for instance, and which means so much to his good
+aunt, means to me just nothing at all! The doctrine of identity must be
+true--I must be the same person I was then. But, all the same, what I
+did then does not matter a straw to me now. To all practical purposes I
+am another man. I was then a youth, idle, _désoeuvré_, playing with all
+the keys of life in turn. I have now unlocked the path that suits me.
+Its quest has transformed me--as I believe, ennobled me. I do not ask
+Raeburn or any one else to believe it. It is my own affair. Only, if we
+ever meet again in life, you and I, and you think you have reason to ask
+humiliation of me, do not ask it, do not expect it. The man you will
+have in your mind has nothing to do with me. I will not be answerable
+for his sins."
+
+As he said these things he was leaning lightly forward, looking up at
+her, his arms resting on the back of one of the old chairs, one foot
+crossed over the other. The attitude was easy calm itself. The
+tone--indomitable, analytic, reflective--matched it. Yet, all the same,
+her woman's instinct divined a hidden agitation, and, woman-like,
+responded to that and that only.
+
+"Mr. Raeburn will never tell me old stories about anybody," she said
+proudly. "I asked him once, out--out of curiosity--about you, and he
+would tell me nothing."
+
+"Generous!" said Wharton, drily. "I am grateful."
+
+"No!" cried Marcella, indignantly, rushing blindly at the outlet for
+emotion. "No!--you are not grateful; you are always judging him
+harshly--criticising, despising what he does."
+
+Wharton was silent a moment. Even in the moonlight she could see the
+reddening of his cheek.
+
+"So be it," he said at last. "I submit. You must know best. But you? are
+you always content? Does this _milieu_ into which you are passing always
+satisfy you? To-night, did your royalty please you? will it soon be
+enough for you?"
+
+"You know it is not enough," she broke out, hotly; "it is insulting that
+you should ask in that tone. It means that you think me a
+hypocrite!--and I have given you no cause--"
+
+"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed, interrupting her, and speaking in a
+low, hurried voice. "I had no motive, no reason for what I
+said--none--but this, that you are going--that we are parting. I spoke
+in gibes to make you speak--somehow to strike--to reach you. To-morrow
+it will be too late!"
+
+And before, almost, she knew that he had moved, he had stooped forward,
+caught a fold of her dress, pressed it to his lips, and dropped it.
+
+"Don't speak," he said brokenly, springing up, and standing before her
+in her path. "You shall forgive me--I will compel it! See! here we are
+on this moonlit space of floor, alone, in the night. Very probably we
+shall never meet again, except as strangers. Put off convention, and
+speak to me, soul to soul! You are not happy altogether in this
+marriage. I know it. You have as good as confessed it. Yet you will go
+through with it. You have given your word--your honour holds you. I
+recognise that it holds you. I say nothing, not a syllable, against your
+bond! But here, to-night, tell me, promise me that you will make this
+marriage of yours serve _our_ hopes and ends, the ends that you and I
+have foreseen together--that it shall be your instrument, not your
+chain. We have been six weeks together. You say you have learnt from me;
+you have! you have given me your mind, your heart to write on, and I
+have written. Henceforward you will never look at life as you might have
+done if I had not been here. Do you think I triumph, that I boast? Ah!"
+he drew in his breath--"What if in helping you, and teaching you--for I
+have helped and taught you!--I have undone myself? What if I came here
+the slave of impersonal causes, of ends not my own? What if I
+leave--maimed--in face of the battle? Not your fault? No, perhaps not!
+but, at least, you owe me some gentleness now, in these last words--some
+kindness in farewell."
+
+He came closer, held out his hands. With one of her own she put his
+back, and lifted the other dizzily to her forehead.
+
+"Don't come near me!" she said, tottering. "What is it? I cannot see.
+Go!"
+
+And guiding herself, as though blindfold, to a chair, she sank upon it,
+and her head dropped. It was the natural result of a moment of intense
+excitement coming upon nerves already strained and tried to their
+utmost. She fought desperately against her weakness; but there was a
+moment when all around her swam, and she knew nothing.
+
+Then came a strange awakening. What was this room, this weird light,
+these unfamiliar forms of things, this warm support against which her
+cheek lay? She opened her eyes languidly. They met Wharton's half in
+wonder. He was kneeling beside her, holding her. But for an instant she
+realised nothing except his look, to which her own helplessly replied.
+
+"Once!" she heard him whisper. "Once! Then nothing more--for ever."
+
+And stooping, slowly, deliberately, he kissed her.
+
+In a stinging flow, life, shame, returned upon her. She struggled to her
+feet, pushing him from her.
+
+"You dared," she said, "_dared_ such a thing!"
+
+She could say no more; but her attitude, fiercely instinct, through all
+her physical weakness, with her roused best self, was speech enough. He
+did not venture to approach her. She walked away. He heard the door
+close, hurrying steps on the little stairs, then silence.
+
+He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wall
+for some time. When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhair
+which had dropped from her dress.
+
+"That was a scene!" he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of his
+own hand. "It carries one back to the days of the Romantics. Was I
+Alfred de Musset?--and she George Sand? Did any of them ever taste a
+more poignant moment than I--when she--lay upon my breast? To be
+helpless--yet yield nothing--it challenged me! Yet I took no
+advantage--none. When she _looked_--when her eye, her _soul_, was, for
+that instant, mine, then!--Well!--the world has rushed with me since I
+saw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a quality
+again. What did I say?--how much did I mean? My God! how can I tell? I
+began as an actor, did I finish as a man?"
+
+He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron will
+quieting down each rebellious pulse.
+
+"That poacher fellow did me a good turn. _Dare_! the word galled. But,
+after all, what woman could say less? And what matter? I have held her
+in my arms, in a setting--under a moon--worthy of her. Is not life
+enriched thereby beyond robbery? And what harm? Raeburn is not injured.
+_She_ will never tell--and neither of us will ever forget. Ah!--what was
+that?"
+
+He walked quickly to the window. What he had heard had been a dull
+report coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of the
+avenue. As he reached the window it was followed by a second.
+
+"That poacher's gun?--no doubt!"--he strained his eyes in
+vain--"Collision perhaps--and mischief? No matter! I have nothing to do
+with it. The world is all lyric for me to-night. I can hear in it no
+other rhythm."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The night passed away. When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lying
+with wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it. Her candle still
+burnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallest
+desire for sleep. She had gone through shame and anguish. But she would
+have scorned to pity herself. Was it not her natural, inevitable
+portion?
+
+"I will tell Aldous everything--_everything_," she said to herself for
+the hundredth time, as the light penetrated. "Was _that_ only seven
+striking--_seven_--impossible!"
+
+She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the
+hours that must pass before she could see Aldous--put all to the touch.
+
+Suddenly she remembered Hurd--then old Patton.
+
+"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment--her
+passion to get away from herself. "Is he gone? This is the hour when old
+people die--the dawn. I will go and see--go at once."
+
+She sprang up. To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance,
+of social amends, however small, however futile--to propitiate herself,
+if but by a hairbreadth--this, no doubt, was the instinct at work. She
+dressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to make
+against the stiffness of her own young bones--glad of her hunger and
+faintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought and
+conquered.
+
+In a very short time she had passed quietly downstairs and through the
+hall, greatly to the amazement of William, who opened the front door for
+her. Once in the village road the damp raw air revived her greatly. She
+lifted her hot temples to it, welcoming the waves of wet mist that swept
+along the road, feeling her youth come back to her.
+
+Suddenly as she was nearing the end of a narrow bit of lane between
+high hedges, and the first houses of the village were in sight, she was
+stopped by a noise behind her--a strange unaccountable noise as of
+women's voices, calling and wailing. It startled and frightened her, and
+she stood in the middle of the road waiting.
+
+Then she saw coming towards her two women running at full speed, crying
+and shouting, their aprons up to their faces.
+
+"What is it? What is the matter?" she asked, going to meet them, and
+recognising two labourers' wives she knew.
+
+"Oh! miss--oh! miss!" said the foremost, too wrapt up in her news to be
+surprised at the sight of her. "They've just found him--they're bringin'
+ov 'im home; they've got a shutter from Muster Wellin! 'im at Disley
+Farm. It wor close by Disley wood they found 'em. And there's one ov 'is
+men they've sent off ridin' for the inspector--here he come, miss! Come
+out o' th' way!"
+
+They dragged her back, and a young labourer galloped past them on a farm
+colt, urging it on to its full pace, his face red and set.
+
+"Who is found?" cried Marcella--"What is it?"
+
+"Westall, miss--Lor' bless you--Shot him in the head they did--blowed
+his brains right out--and Charlie Dynes--oh! he's knocked about
+shamful--the doctor don't give no hopes of him. Oh deary--deary me! And
+we're goin' for Muster Harden--ee must tell the widder--or Miss
+Mary--none on us can!"
+
+"And who did it?" said Marcella, pale with horror, holding her.
+
+"Why the poachers, miss. Them as they've bin waitin' for all along--and
+they do say as Jim Hurd's in it. Oh Lord, oh Lord!"
+
+Marcella stood petrified, and let them hurry on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The lane was still again, save for the unwonted sounds coming from the
+groups which had gathered round the two women, and were now moving
+beside them along the village street a hundred yards ahead.
+
+Marcella stood in a horror of memory--seeing Hurd's figure cross the
+moonlit avenue from dark to dark. Where was he? Had he escaped? Suddenly
+she set off running, stung by the thought of what might have already
+happened under the eyes of that unhappy wife, those wretched children.
+
+As she entered the village, a young fellow ran up to her in breathless
+excitement. "They've got 'im, miss. He'd come straight home--'adn't made
+no attempt to run. As soon as Jenkins" (Jenkins was the policeman)
+"heared of it, ee went straight across to 'is house, an' caught 'im. Ee
+wor goin' to make off--'is wife 'ad been persuadin' ov 'im all night.
+But they've got him, miss, sure enough!"
+
+The lad's exultation was horrible. Marcella waved him aside and ran on.
+A man on horseback appeared on the road in front of her leading from
+Widrington to the village. She recognised Aldous Raeburn, who had
+checked his horse in sudden amazement as he saw her talking to the boy.
+
+"My darling! what are you here for? Oh! go home--go _home_!--out of
+this horrible business. They have sent for me as a magistrate. Dynes is
+alive--I _beg_ you!--go home!"
+
+She shook her head, out of breath and speechless with running. At the
+same moment she and he, looking to the right, caught sight of the crowd
+standing in front of Hurd's cottage.
+
+A man ran out from it, seeing the horse and its rider.
+
+"Muster Raeburn! Muster Raeburn! They've cotched 'im; Jenkins has got
+'im."
+
+"Ah!" said Aldous, drawing a long, stern breath; "he didn't try to get
+off then? Marcella!--you are not going there--to that house!"
+
+He spoke in a tone of the strongest remonstrance. Her soul rose in anger
+against it.
+
+"I am going to _her_" she said panting;--"don't wait."
+
+And she left him and hurried on.
+
+As soon as the crowd round the cottage saw her coming, they divided to
+let her pass.
+
+"She's quiet now, miss," said a woman to her significantly, nodding
+towards the hovel. "Just after Jenkins got in you could hear her crying
+out pitiful."
+
+"That was when they wor a-handcuffin' him," said a man beside her.
+
+Marcella shuddered.
+
+"Will they let me in?" she asked.
+
+"They won't let none ov _us_ in," said the man. "There's Hurd's sister,"
+and he pointed to a weeping woman supported by two others. "They've kep'
+her out. But here's the inspector, miss; you ask him."
+
+The inspector, a shrewd officer of long experience, fetched in haste
+from a mile's distance, galloped up, and gave his horse to a boy.
+
+Marcella went up to him.
+
+He looked at her with sharp interrogation. "You are Miss Boyce? Miss
+Boyce of Mellor?"
+
+"Yes, I want to go to the wife; I will promise not to get in your way."
+
+He nodded. The crowd let them pass. The inspector knocked at the door,
+which was cautiously unlocked by Jenkins, and the two went in together.
+
+"She's a queer one," said a thin, weasel-eyed man in the crowd to his
+neighbour. "To think o' her bein' in it--at this time o' day. You could
+see Muster Raeburn was a tellin' of her to go 'ome. But she's allus
+pampered them Hurds."
+
+The speaker was Ned Patton, old Patton's son, and Hurd's companion on
+many a profitable night-walk. It was barely a week since he had been out
+with Hurd on another ferreting expedition, some of the proceeds of which
+were still hidden in Patton's outhouse. But at the present moment he was
+one of the keenest of the crowd, watching eagerly for the moment when he
+should see his old comrade come out, trapped and checkmated, bound
+safely and surely to the gallows. The natural love of incident and
+change which keeps life healthy had been starved in him by his
+labourer's condition. This sudden excitement had made a brute of him.
+
+The man next him grimaced, and took his pipe out of his mouth a moment.
+
+"_She_ won't be able to do nothin' for 'im! There isn't a man nor boy
+in this 'ere place as didn't know as ee hated Westall like pison, and
+would be as like as not to do for 'im some day. That'll count agen 'im
+now terrible strong! Ee wor allus one to blab, ee wor."
+
+"Well, an' Westall said jus' as much!" struck in another voice; "theer
+wor sure to be a fight iv ever Westall got at 'im--on the job. You
+see--they may bring it in manslarter after all."
+
+"'Ow does any one know ee wor there at all? who seed him?" inquired a
+white-haired elderly man, raising a loud quavering voice from the middle
+of the crowd.
+
+"Charlie Dynes seed 'im," cried several together.
+
+"How do yer know ee seed 'im?"
+
+From the babel of voices which followed the white-haired man slowly
+gathered the beginnings of the matter. Charlie Dynes, Westall's
+assistant, had been first discovered by a horsekeeper in Farmer Wellin's
+employment as he was going to his work. The lad had been found under a
+hedge, bleeding and frightfully injured, but still alive. Close beside
+him was the dead body of Westall with shot-wounds in the head. On being
+taken to the farm and given brandy, Dynes was asked if he had recognised
+anybody. He had said there were five of them, "town chaps"; and then he
+had named Hurd quite plainly--whether anybody else, nobody knew. It was
+said he would die, and that Mr. Raeburn had gone to take his deposition.
+
+"An' them town chaps got off, eh?" said the elderly man.
+
+"Clean!" said Patton, refilling his pipe. "Trust them!"
+
+Meanwhile, inside this poor cottage Marcella was putting out all the
+powers of the soul. As the door closed behind her and the inspector, she
+saw Hurd sitting handcuffed in the middle of the kitchen, watched by a
+man whom Jenkins, the local policeman, had got in to help him, till some
+more police should arrive. Jenkins was now upstairs searching the
+bedroom. The little bronchitic boy sat on the fender, in front of the
+untidy fireless grate, shivering, his emaciated face like a yellowish
+white mask, his eyes fixed immovably on his father. Every now and then
+he was shaken with coughing, but still he looked--with the dumb devoted
+attention of some watching animal.
+
+Hurd, too, was sitting silent. His eyes, which seemed wider open and
+more brilliant than usual, wandered restlessly from thing to thing about
+the room; his great earth-stained hands in their fetters twitched every
+now and then on his knee. Haggard and dirty as he was, there was a
+certain aloofness, a dignity even, about the misshapen figure which
+struck Marcella strangely. Both criminal and victim may have it--this
+dignity. It means that a man feels himself set apart from his kind.
+
+Hurd started at sight of Marcella. "I want to speak to her," he said
+hoarsely, as the inspector approached him--"to that lady"--nodding
+towards her.
+
+"Very well," said the inspector; "only it is my duty to warn you that
+anything you say now will be taken down and used as evidence at the
+inquest."
+
+Marcella came near. As she stood in front of him, one trembling ungloved
+hand crossed over the other, the diamond in her engagement ring
+catching the light from the window sparkled brightly, diverting even for
+the moment the eyes of the little fellow against whom her skirts were
+brushing.
+
+"Ee might ha' killed me just as well as I killed 'im," said Hurd,
+bending over to her and speaking with difficulty from the dryness of his
+mouth. "I didn't mean nothink o' what happened. He and Charlie came on
+us round Disley Wood. He didn't take no notice o' them. It was they as
+beat Charlie. But he came straight on at me--all in a fury--a
+blackguardin' ov me, with his stick up. I thought he was for beatin' my
+brains out, an' I up with my gun and fired. He was so close--that was
+how he got it all in the head. But ee might 'a' killed me just as well."
+
+He paused, staring at her with a certain anguished intensity, as though
+he were watching to see how she took it--nay, trying its effect both on
+her and himself. He did not look afraid or cast down--nay, there was a
+curious buoyancy and steadiness about his manner for the moment which
+astonished her. She could almost have fancied that he was more alive,
+more of a _man_ than she had ever seen him--mind and body better fused,
+more at command.
+
+"Is there anything more you wish to say to me?" she asked him, after
+waiting.
+
+Then suddenly his manner changed. Their eyes met. Hers, with all their
+subtle inheritance of various expression, their realised character, as
+it were, searched his, tried to understand them--those peasant eyes, so
+piercing to her strained sense in their animal urgency and shame. _Why_
+had he done this awful thing?--deceived her--wrecked his wife?--that was
+what her look asked. It seemed to her too _childish_--too _stupid_ to be
+believed.
+
+"I haven't made nobbut a poor return to _you_, miss," he said in a
+shambling way, as though the words were dragged out of him. Then he
+threw up his head again. "But I didn't mean nothink o' what happened,"
+he repeated, doggedly going off again into a rapid yet, on the whole,
+vivid and consecutive account of Westall's attack, to which Marcella
+listened, trying to remember every word.
+
+"Keep that for your solicitor," the inspector said at last, interrupting
+him; "you are only giving pain to Miss Boyce. You had better let her go
+to your wife."
+
+Hurd looked steadily once more at Marcella. "It be a bad end I'm come
+to," he said, after a moment. "But I thank you kindly all the same.
+_They'll_ want seein' after." He jerked his head towards the boy, then
+towards the outhouse or scullery where his wife was. "She takes it
+terr'ble hard. She wanted me to run. But I said, 'No, I'll stan' it
+out.' Mr. Brown at the Court'll give you the bit wages he owes me. But
+they'll have to go on the Union. Everybody'll turn their backs on them
+now."
+
+"I will look after them," said Marcella, "and I will do the best I can
+for you. Now I will go to Mrs. Hurd."
+
+Minta Hurd was sitting in a corner of the outhouse on the clay floor,
+her head leaning against the wall. The face was turned upward, the eyes
+shut, the mouth helplessly open. When Marcella saw her, she knew that
+the unhappy woman had already wept so much in the hours since her
+husband came back to her that she could weep no more. The two little
+girls in the scantiest of clothing, half-fastened, sat on the floor
+beside her, shivering and begrimed--watching her. They had been crying
+at the tops of their voices, but were now only whimpering miserably, and
+trying at intervals to dry their tear-stained cheeks with the skirts of
+their frocks. The baby, wrapped in an old shawl, lay on its mother's
+knee, asleep and unheeded. The little lean-to place, full of odds and
+ends of rubbish, and darkened overhead by a string of damp clothes--was
+intolerably cold in the damp February dawn. The children were blue; the
+mother felt like ice as Marcella stooped to touch her. Outcast misery
+could go no further.
+
+The mother moaned as she felt Marcella's hand, then started wildly
+forward, straining her thin neck and swollen eyes that she might see
+through the two open doors of the kitchen and the outhouse.
+
+"They're not taking him away?" she said fiercely. "Jenkins swore to me
+they'd give me notice."
+
+"No, he's still there," said Marcella, her voice shaking. "The
+inspector's come. You shall have notice."
+
+Mrs. Hurd recognised her voice, and looked up at her in amazement.
+
+"You must put this on," said Marcella, taking off the short fur cape she
+wore. "You are perished. Give me the baby, and wrap yourself in it."
+
+But Mrs. Hurd put it away from her with a vehement hand.
+
+"I'm not cold, miss--I'm burning hot. He made me come in here. He said
+he'd do better if the children and I ud go away a bit. An' I couldn't go
+upstairs, because--because--" she hid her face on her knees.
+
+Marcella had a sudden sick vision of the horrors this poor creature must
+have gone through since her husband had appeared to her, splashed with
+the blood of his enemy, under that same marvellous moon which--
+
+Her mind repelled its own memories with haste. Moreover, she was aware
+of the inspector standing at the kitchen door and beckoning to her. She
+stole across to him so softly that Mrs. Hurd did not hear her.
+
+"We have found all we want," he said in his official tone, but under his
+breath--"the clothes anyway. We must now look for the gun. Jenkins is
+first going to take him off to Widrington. The inquest will be held
+to-morrow here, at 'The Green Man.' We shall bring him over." Then he
+added in another voice, touching his hat, "I don't like leaving you,
+miss, in this place. Shall Jenkins go and fetch somebody to look after
+that poor thing? They'll be all swarming in here as soon as we've gone."
+
+"No, I'll stay for a while. I'll look after her. They won't come in if
+I'm here. Except his sister--Mrs. Mullins--she may come in, of course,
+if she wants."
+
+The inspector hesitated.
+
+"I'm going now to meet Mr. Raeburn, miss. I'll tell him that you're
+here."
+
+"He knows," said Marcella, briefly. "Now are you ready?"
+
+He signed assent, and Marcella went back to the wife.
+
+"Mrs. Hurd," she said, kneeling on the ground beside her, "they're
+going."
+
+The wife sprang up with a cry and ran into the kitchen, where Hurd was
+already on his feet between Jenkins and another policeman, who were to
+convey him to the gaol at Widrington. But when she came face to face
+with her husband something--perhaps the nervous appeal in his strained
+eyes--checked her, and she controlled herself piteously. She did not
+even attempt to kiss him. With her eyes on the ground, she put her hand
+on his arm. "They'll let me come and see you, Jim?" she said, trembling.
+
+"Yes; you can find out the rules," he said shortly. "Don't let them
+children cry. They want their breakfast to warm them. There's plenty of
+coal. I brought a sack home from Jellaby's last night myself. Good-bye."
+
+"Now, march," said the inspector, sternly, pushing the wife back.
+
+Marcella put her arm round the shaking woman. The door opened; and
+beyond the three figures as they passed out, her eye passed to the
+waiting crowd, then to the misty expanse of common and the dark woods
+behind, still wrapped in fog.
+
+When Mrs. Hurd saw the rows of people waiting within a stone's throw of
+the door she shrank back. Perhaps it struck her, as it struck Marcella,
+that every face was the face of a foe. Marcella ran to the door as the
+inspector stepped out, and locked it after him. Mrs. Hurd, hiding
+herself behind a bit of baize curtain, watched the two policemen mount
+with Hurd into the fly that was waiting, and then followed it with her
+eyes along the bit of straight road, uttering sounds the while of low
+anguish, which wrung the heart in Marcella's breast. Looking back in
+after days it always seemed to her that for this poor soul the true
+parting, the true wrench between life and life, came at this moment.
+
+She went up to her, her own tears running over.
+
+"You must come and lie down," she said, recovering herself as quickly as
+possible. "You and the children are both starved, and you will want your
+strength if you are to help him. I will see to things."
+
+She put the helpless woman on the wooden settle by the fireplace,
+rolling up her cloak to make a pillow.
+
+"Now, Willie, you sit by your mother. Daisy, where's the cradle? Put the
+baby down and come and help me make the fire."
+
+The dazed children did exactly as they were told, and the mother lay
+like a log on the settle. Marcella found coal and wood under Daisy's
+guidance, and soon lit the fire, piling on the fuel with a lavish hand.
+Daisy brought her water, and she filled the kettle and set it on to
+boil, while the little girl, still sobbing at intervals like some little
+weeping automaton, laid the breakfast. Then the children all crouched
+round the warmth, while Marcella rubbed their cold hands and feet, and
+"mothered" them. Shaken as she was with emotion and horror, she was yet
+full of a passionate joy that this pity, this tendance was allowed to
+her. The crushing weight of self-contempt had lifted. She felt morally
+free and at ease.
+
+Already she was revolving what she could do for Hurd. It was as clear
+as daylight to her that there had been no murder but a free fight--an
+even chance between him and Westall. The violence of a hard and
+tyrannous man had provoked his own destruction--so it stood, for her
+passionate protesting sense. That at any rate must be the defence, and
+some able man must be found to press it. She thought she would write to
+the Cravens and consult them. Her thoughts carefully avoided the names
+both of Aldous Raeburn and of Wharton.
+
+She was about to make the tea when some one knocked at the door. It
+proved to be Hurd's sister, a helpless woman, with a face swollen by
+crying, who seemed to be afraid to come into the cottage, and afraid to
+go near her sister-in-law. Marcella gave her money, and sent her for
+some eggs to the neighbouring shop, then told her to come back in half
+an hour and take charge. She was an incapable, but there was nothing
+better to be done. "Where is Miss Harden?" she asked the woman. The
+answer was that ever since the news came to the village the rector and
+his sister had been with Mrs. Westall and Charlie Dyne's mother. Mrs.
+Westall had gone into fit after fit; it had taken two to hold her, and
+Charlie's mother, who was in bed recovering from pneumonia, had also
+been very bad.
+
+Again Marcella's heart contracted with rage rather than pity. Such wrack
+and waste of human life, moral and physical! for what? For the
+protection of a hateful sport which demoralised the rich and their
+agents, no less than it tempted and provoked the poor!
+
+When she had fed and physically comforted the children, she went and
+knelt down beside Mrs. Hurd, who still lay with closed eyes in
+heavy-breathing stupor.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Hurd," she said, "I want you to drink this tea and eat
+something."
+
+The half-stupefied woman signed refusal. But Marcella insisted.
+
+"You have got to fight for your husband's life," she said firmly, "and
+to look after your children. I must go in a very short time, and before
+I go you must tell me all that you can of this business. Hurd would tell
+you to do it. He knows and you know that I am to be trusted. I want to
+save him. I shall get a good lawyer to help him. But first you must take
+this--and then you must talk to me."
+
+The habit of obedience to a "lady," established long ago in years of
+domestic service, held. The miserable wife submitted to be fed, looked
+with forlorn wonder at the children round the fire, and then sank back
+with a groan. In her tension of feeling Marcella for an impatient moment
+thought her a poor creature. Then with quick remorse she put her arms
+tenderly round her, raised the dishevelled grey-streaked head on her
+shoulder, and stooping, kissed the marred face, her own lips quivering.
+
+"You are not alone," said the girl with her whole soul. "You shall never
+be alone while I live. Now tell me."
+
+She made the white and gasping woman sit up in a corner of the settle,
+and she herself got a stool and established herself a little way off,
+frowning, self-contained, and determined to make out the truth.
+
+"Shall I send the children upstairs?" she asked.
+
+"No!" said the boy, suddenly, in his husky voice, shaking his head with
+energy, "I'm not a-going."
+
+"Oh! he's safe--is Willie," said Mrs. Hurd, looking at him, but
+strangely, and as it were from a long distance, "and the others is too
+little."
+
+Then gradually Marcella got the story out of her--first, the misery of
+alarm and anxiety in which she had lived ever since the Tudley End raid,
+owing first to her knowledge of Hurd's connection with it, and with the
+gang that had carried it out; then to her appreciation of the quick and
+ghastly growth of the hatred between him and Westall; lastly, to her
+sense of ingratitude towards those who had been kind to them.
+
+"I knew we was acting bad towards you. I told Jim so. I couldn't hardly
+bear to see you come in. But there, miss,--I couldn't do anything. I
+tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried! There was never no happiness between
+us at last, I talked so. But I don't believe he could help himself--he's
+not made like other folks, isn't Jim--"
+
+Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech.
+Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and
+clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close. Gradually she
+made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his
+night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford
+gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over
+Westall's discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his
+restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth
+out of him by degrees. Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and
+estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his,
+lest affection should lose its miserable all.
+
+As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to
+Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had
+long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it
+than--suddenly--she would allow herself to say. For in the midst of her
+out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm
+herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell
+silent.
+
+"I don't know nothing about it, miss," she stubbornly declared at last,
+with an inconsequent absurdity which smote Marcella's pity afresh. "How
+am I to know? There was seven o' them Oxford fellows at Tudley End--that
+I know. Who's to say as Jim was with 'em at all last night? Who's to say
+as it wasn't them as--"
+
+She stopped, shivering. Marcella held her reluctant hand.
+
+"You don't know," she said quietly, "that I saw your husband in here for
+a minute before I came in to you, and that he told me, as he had already
+told Jenkins, that it was in a struggle with him that Westall was shot,
+but that he had fired in self-defence because Westall was attacking him.
+You don't know, too, that Charlie Dynes is alive, and says he saw
+Hurd--"
+
+"Charlie Dynes!" Mrs. Hurd gave a shriek, and then fell to weeping and
+trembling again, so that Marcella had need of patience.
+
+"If you can't help me more," she said at last in despair, "I don't know
+what we shall do. Listen to me. Your husband will be charged with
+Westall's murder. That I am sure of. He says it was not murder--that it
+happened in a fight. I believe it. I want to get a lawyer to prove it. I
+am your friend--you know I am. But if you are not going to help me by
+telling me what you know of last night I may as well go home--and get
+your sister-in-law to look after you and the children."
+
+She rose as she spoke. Mrs. Hurd clutched at her.
+
+"Oh, my God!" she said, looking straight before her vacantly at the
+children, who at once began to cry again. "_Oh, my God_! Look here,
+miss"--her voice dropped, her swollen eyes fixed themselves on
+Marcella--the words came out in a low, hurried stream--"It was just
+after four o'clock I heard that door turn; I got up in my nightgown and
+ran down, and there was Jim. 'Put that light out,' he says to me, sharp
+like. 'Oh, Jim,' says I, 'wherever have you been? You'll be the death o'
+me and them poor children!' 'You go to bed,' says he to me, 'and I'll
+come presently.' But I could see him, 'cos of the moon, almost as plain
+as day, an' I couldn't take my eyes off him. And he went about the
+kitchen so strange like, puttin' down his hat and takin' it up again,
+an' I saw he hadn't got his gun. So I went up and caught holt on him.
+An' he gave me a push back. 'Can't you let me alone?' he says; 'you'll
+know soon enough.' An' then I looked at my sleeve where I'd touched
+him--oh, my God! my God!"
+
+Marcella, white to the lips and shuddering too, held her tight. She had
+the _seeing_ faculty which goes with such quick, nervous natures, and
+she saw the scene as though she had been there--the moonlit cottage, the
+miserable husband and wife, the life-blood on the woman's sleeve.
+
+Mrs. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments
+of remembered talk. She told her husband's story of the encounter with
+the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and
+modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she
+described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide
+them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across
+country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business
+was known. But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of
+his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out.
+Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his
+deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so. But
+she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was
+coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he
+should go to bed and get some sleep. She would make a fool of him, and
+he should want all his wits. She followed him up the steep ladder to
+their room, weeping. And there was little Willie sitting up in bed,
+choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because
+of the voices below.
+
+"And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs
+and feet to warm them, an' I could hear him groanin'. And I says to him,
+'Jim, if you won't go for my sake, will you go for the boy's?' For you
+see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an' I thought he'd
+hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps,
+and off to the States. An' it seemed as though my head would burst with
+listening for people comin', and him taken up there like a rat in a
+trap, an' no way of provin' the truth, and everybody agen him, because
+of the things he'd said. And he burst out a-cryin', an' Willie cried.
+An' I came an' entreated of him. An' he kissed me; an' at last he said
+he'd go. An' I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an'
+just as he'd got to the foot of the stairs, an' I was holding little
+Willie in my arms an' saying good-bye to him--"
+
+She let her head sink against the settle. There was no more to say, and
+Marcella asked no more questions--she sat thinking. Willie stood, a
+wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoarse
+breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.
+
+Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door. She got up and looked
+through the casement window. The crowd had mostly dispersed, but a few
+people stood about on the green, and a policeman was stationed outside
+the cottage. On the steps stood Aldous Raeburn, his horse held behind
+him by a boy.
+
+She went and opened the door.
+
+"I will come," she said at once. "There--I see Mrs. Mullins crossing the
+common. Now I can leave her."
+
+Aldous, taking off his hat, closed the door behind him and stood with
+his hand on Marcella's arm, looking at the huddled woman on the settle,
+at the pale children. There was a solemnity in his expression, a mixture
+of judgment and pity which showed that the emotion of other scenes
+also--scenes through which he had just passed--was entering into it.
+
+"Poor unhappy souls," he said slowly, under his breath. "You say that
+you have got some one to see after her. She looks as though it might
+kill her, too."
+
+Marcella nodded. Now that her task, for the moment, was nearly over, she
+could hardly restrain herself nervously or keep herself from crying.
+Aldous observed her with disquiet as she put on her hat. His heart was
+deeply stirred. She had chosen more nobly for herself than he would have
+chosen for her, in thus daring an awful experience for the sake of
+mercy. His moral sense, exalted and awed by the sight of death,
+approved, worshipped her. His man's impatience pined to get her away, to
+cherish and comfort hen Why, she could hardly have slept three hours
+since they parted on the steps of the Court, amidst the crowd of
+carriages!
+
+Mrs. Mullins came in still scared and weeping, and dropping frightened
+curtseys to "Muster Raeburn." Marcella spoke to her a little in a
+whisper, gave some counsels which filled Aldous with admiration for the
+girl's practical sense and thoughtfulness, and promised to come again
+later. Mrs. Hurd neither moved nor opened her eyes.
+
+"Can you walk?" said Aldous, bending over her, as they stood outside the
+cottage. "I can see that you are worn out. Could you sit my horse if I
+led him?"
+
+"No, let us walk."
+
+They went on together, followed by the eyes of the village, the boy
+leading the horse some distance behind.
+
+"Where have you been?" said Marcella, when they had passed the village.
+"Oh, _please_ don't think of my being tired! I had so much rather know
+it all. I must know it all."
+
+She was deathly pale, but her black eyes flashed impatience and
+excitement. She even drew her hand out of the arm where Aldous was
+tenderly holding it, and walked on erect by herself.
+
+"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his
+deposition. He died while I was there."
+
+"He died?"
+
+"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he
+lived long enough, thank God, to give the information which will, I
+think, bring them to justice!"
+
+The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella's quivering
+nerves.
+
+"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in
+protecting your tame pheasants?"
+
+A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter
+sigh--the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as
+it were, one long scruple.
+
+"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not
+ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's
+bedside."
+
+They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep,
+inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack.
+At last he resumed:
+
+"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present
+case is surely clear--horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns
+among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition.
+They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing
+but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot
+dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and
+threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not
+brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"
+
+Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.
+
+"It was _not_ deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in
+Hurd's case. I have heard it all from his own mouth. It was a
+_struggle_--he might have been killed instead of Westall--Westall
+attacked, Hurd defended himself."
+
+Aldous shook his head.
+
+"Of course Hurd would tell you so," he said sadly, "and his poor wife.
+He is not a bad or vicious fellow, like the rest of the rascally pack.
+Probably when he came to himself, after the moment of rage, he could not
+simply believe what he had done. But that makes no difference. It was
+murder; no judge or jury could possibly take any other view. Dynes's
+evidence is clear, and the proof of motive is overwhelming."
+
+Then, as he saw her pallor and trembling, he broke off in deep distress.
+"My dear one, if I could but have kept you out of this!"
+
+They were alone in the misty road. The boy with the horse was out of
+sight. He would fain have put his arm round her, have consoled and
+supported her. But she would not let him.
+
+"Please understand," she said in a sort of gasp, as she drew herself
+away, "that I do _not_ believe Hurd is guilty--that I shall do my very
+utmost to defend him. He is to me the victim of unjust, abominable laws!
+If _you_ will not help me to protect him--then I must look to some one
+else."
+
+Aldous felt a sudden stab of suspicion--presentiment.
+
+"Of course he will be well defended; he will have every chance; that you
+may be sure of," he said slowly.
+
+Marcella controlled herself, and they walked on. As they entered the
+drive of Mellor, Aldous thought passionately of those divine moments in
+his sitting-room, hardly yet nine hours old. And now--_now_!--she walked
+beside him as an enemy.
+
+The sound of a step on the gravel in front of them made them look up.
+Past, present, and future met in the girl's bewildered and stormy sense
+as she recognised Wharton.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+The first sitting of the Birmingham Labour Congress was just over, and
+the streets about the hall in which it had been held were beginning to
+fill with the issuing delegates. Rain was pouring down and umbrellas
+were plentiful.
+
+Harry Wharton, accompanied by a group of men, left the main entrance of
+the hall,--releasing himself with difficulty from the friendly crowd
+about the doors--and crossed the street to his hotel.
+
+"Well, I'm glad you think I did decently," he said, as they mounted the
+hotel stairs. "What a beastly day, and how stuffy that hall was! Come in
+and have something to drink."
+
+He threw open the door of his sitting-room as he spoke. The four men
+with him followed him in.
+
+"I must go back to the hall to see two or three men before everybody
+disperses," said the one in front. "No refreshment for me, thank you,
+Mr. Wharton. But I want to ask a question--what arrangements have you
+made for the reporting of your speech?"
+
+The man who spoke was thin and dark, with a modest kindly eye. He wore a
+black frock coat, and had the air of a minister.
+
+"Oh, thank you, Bennett, it's all right. The _Post_, the _Chronicle_,
+and the _Northern Guardian_ will have full copies. I sent them off
+before the meeting. And my own paper, of course. As to the rest they may
+report it as they like. I don't care."
+
+"They'll all have it," said another man, bluntly. "It's the best speech
+you've ever made--the best president's speech we've had yet, I
+say,--don't you think so?"
+
+The speaker, a man called Casey, turned to the two men behind him. Both
+nodded.
+
+"Hallin's speech last year was first-rate," he continued, "but somehow
+Hallin damps you down, at least he did me last year; what you want just
+now is _fight_--and, my word! Mr. Wharton let 'em have it!"
+
+And standing with his hands on his sides, he glanced round from one to
+another. His own face was flushed, partly from the effects of a crowded
+hall and bad air, but mostly with excitement. All the men present
+indeed--though it was less evident in Bennett and Wharton than in the
+rest--had the bright nervous look which belongs to leaders keenly
+conscious of standing well with the led, and of having just emerged
+successfully from an agitating ordeal. As they stood together they went
+over the speech to which they had been listening, and the scene which
+had followed it, in a running stream of talk, laughter, and gossip.
+Wharton took little part, except to make a joke occasionally at his own
+expense, but the pleasure on his smiling lip, and in his roving,
+contented eye was not to be mistaken. The speech he had just delivered
+had been first thought out as he paced the moonlit library and corridor
+at Mellor. After Marcella had left him, and he was once more in his own
+room, he had had the extraordinary self-control to write it out, and
+make two or three machine-copies of it for the press. Neither its range
+nor its logical order had suffered for that intervening experience. The
+programme of labour for the next five years had never been better
+presented, more boldly planned, more eloquently justified. Hallin's
+presidential speech of the year before, as Casey said, rang flat in the
+memory when compared with it. Wharton knew that he had made a mark, and
+knew also that his speech had given him the whip-hand of some fellows
+who would otherwise have stood in his way.
+
+Casey was the first man to cease talking about the speech. He had
+already betrayed himself about it more than he meant. He belonged to the
+New Unionism, and affected a costume in character--fustian trousers,
+flannel shirt, a full red tie and work-man's coat, all well calculated
+to set off a fine lion-like head and broad shoulders. He had begun life
+as a bricklayer's labourer, and was now the secretary of a recently
+formed Union. His influence had been considerable, but was said to be
+already on the wane; though it was thought likely that he would win a
+seat in the coming Parliament.
+
+The other two men were Molloy, secretary to the congress, short,
+smooth-faced, and wiry, a man whose pleasant eye and manner were often
+misleading, since he was in truth one of the hottest fighting men of a
+fighting movement; and Wilkins, a friend of Casey's--ex-iron worker,
+Union official, and Labour candidate for a Yorkshire division--an
+uneducated, passionate fellow, speaking with a broad, Yorkshire accent,
+a bad man of affairs, but honest, and endowed with the influence which
+comes of sincerity, together with a gift for speaking and superhuman
+powers of physical endurance.
+
+"Well, I'm glad it's over," said Wharton, throwing himself into a chair
+with a long breath, and at the same time stretching out his hand to ring
+the bell. "Casey, some whisky? No? Nor you, Wilkins? nor Molloy? As for
+you, Bennett, I know it's no good asking you. By George! our
+grandfathers would have thought us a poor lot! Well, some coffee at any
+rate you must all of you have before you go back. Waiter! coffee. By the
+way, I have been seeing something of Hallin, Bennett, down in the
+country."
+
+He took out his cigarette case as he spoke, and offered it to the
+others. All refused except Molloy. Casey took his half-smoked pipe out
+of his pocket and lit up. He was not a teetotaler as the others were,
+but he would have scorned to drink his whisky and water at the expense
+of a "gentleman" like Wharton, or to smoke the "gentleman's" cigarettes.
+His class-pride was irritably strong. Molloy, who was by nature
+anybody's equal, took the cigarette with an easy good manners, which
+made Casey look at him askance.
+
+Mr. Bennett drew his chair close to Wharton's. The mention of Hallin had
+roused a look of anxiety in his quick dark eyes.
+
+"How is he, Mr. Wharton? The last letter I had from him he made light of
+his health. But you know he only just avoided a breakdown in that strike
+business. We only pulled him through by the skin of his teeth--Mr.
+Raeburn and I."
+
+"Oh, he's no constitution; never had, I suppose. But he seemed much as
+usual. He's staying with Raeburn, you know, and I've been staying with
+the father of the young lady whom Raeburn 's going to marry."
+
+"Ah! I've heard of that," said Bennett, with a look of interest. "Well,
+Mr. Raeburn isn't on our side, but for judgment and fair dealing there
+are very few men of his class and circumstances I would trust as I would
+him. The lady should be happy."
+
+"Of course," said Wharton, drily. "However, neither she nor Raeburn are
+very happy just at this moment. A horrible affair happened down there
+last night. One of Lord Maxwell's gamekeepers and a 'helper,' a lad of
+seventeen, were killed last night in a fight with poachers. I only just
+heard the outlines of it before I came away, but I got a telegram just
+before going into congress, asking me to defend the man charged with the
+murder."
+
+A quick expression of repulsion and disgust crossed Bennett's face.
+
+"There have been a whole crop of such cases lately," he said. "How shall
+we ever escape from the _curse_ of this game system?"
+
+"We shan't escape it," said Wharton, quietly, knocking the end off his
+cigarette, "not in your lifetime or mine. When we get more Radicals on
+the bench we shall lighten the sentences; but that will only exasperate
+the sporting class into finding new ways of protecting themselves. Oh!
+the man will be hung--that's quite clear to me. But it will be a good
+case--from the public point of view--will work up well--"
+
+He ran his hand through his curls, considering.
+
+"Will work up admirably," he added in a lower tone of voice, as though
+to himself, his eyes keen and brilliant as ever, in spite of the marks
+of sleeplessness and fatigue visible in the rest of the face, though
+only visible there since he had allowed himself the repose of his
+cigarette and arm-chair.
+
+"Are yo' comin' to dine at the 'Peterloo' to-night, Mr. Wharton?" said
+Wilkins, as Wharton handed him a cup of coffee; "but of coorse you
+are--part of yower duties, I suppose?"
+
+While Molloy and Casey were deep in animated discussion of the great
+meeting of the afternoon he had been sitting silent against the edge of
+the table--a short-bearded sombre figure, ready at any moment to make a
+grievance, to suspect a slight.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't," said Wharton, bending forward and speaking in a
+tone of concern; "that was just what I was going to ask you all--if you
+would make my excuses to-night? I have been explaining to Bennett. I
+have an important piece of business in the country--a labourer has been
+getting into trouble for shooting a keeper; they have asked me to defend
+him. The assizes come on in little more than a fortnight, worse luck! so
+that the time is short--"
+
+And he went on to explain that, by taking an evening train back to
+Widrington, he could get the following (Saturday) morning with the
+solicitor in charge of the case, and be back in Birmingham, thanks to
+the convenience of a new line lately opened, in time for the second
+meeting of the congress, which was fixed for the early afternoon.
+
+He spoke with great cordiality and persuasiveness. Among the men who
+surrounded him, his youth, good looks, and easy breeding shone out
+conspicuous. In the opinion of Wilkins, indeed, who followed his every
+word and gesture, he was far too well dressed and too well educated. A
+day would soon come when the labour movement would be able to show these
+young aristocrats the door. Not yet, however.
+
+"Well, I thowt you wouldn't dine with us," he said, turning away with a
+blunt laugh.
+
+Bennett's mild eye showed annoyance. "Mr. Wharton has explained himself
+very fully, I think," he said, turning to the others. "We shall miss him
+at dinner--but this matter seems to be one of life and death. And we
+mustn't forget anyway that Mr. Wharton is fulfilling this engagement at
+great inconvenience to himself. We none of us knew when we elected him
+last year that he would have to be fighting his election at the same
+time. Next Saturday, isn't it?"
+
+Bennett rose as he spoke and carefully buttoned his coat. It was curious
+to contrast his position among his fellows--one of marked ascendency and
+authority--with his small insignificant physique. He had a gentle
+deprecating eye, and the heart of a poet. He played the flute and
+possessed the gift of repeating verse--especially Ebenezer Eliot's Corn
+Law Rhymes--so as to stir a great audience to enthusiasm or tears. The
+Wesleyan community of his native Cheshire village owned no more
+successful class-leader, and no humbler Christian. At the same time he
+could hold a large business meeting sternly in check, was the secretary
+of one of the largest and oldest Unions in the country, had been in
+Parliament for years, and was generally looked upon even by the men who
+hated his "moderate" policy, as a power not to be ignored.
+
+"Next Saturday. Yes!" said Wharton, nodding in answer to his inquiry.
+
+"Well, are you going to do it?" said Casey, looking round at him.
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Wharton, cheerfully; "oh, yes! we shall do it. We shall
+settle old Dodgson, I think."
+
+"Are the Raeburns as strong as they were?" asked Molloy, who knew
+Brookshire.
+
+"What landlord is? Since '84 the ground is mined for them all--good and
+bad--and they know it."
+
+"The mine takes a long time blowing up--too long for my patience," said
+Wilkins, gruffly. "How the country can go on year after year paying its
+tribute to these plunderers passes my comprehension. But you may attack
+them as you please. You will never get any forrarder so long as
+Parliament and the Cabinet is made up of them and their hangers on."
+
+Wharton looked at him brightly, but silently, making a little assenting
+inclination of the head. He was not surprised that anything should pass
+Wilkins's comprehension, and he was determined to give him no opening
+for holding forth.
+
+"Well, we'll let you alone," said Bennett. "You'll have very little time
+to get off in. We'll make your excuses, Mr. Wharton. You may be sure
+everybody is so pleased with your speech we shall find them all in a
+good temper. It was grand!--let me congratulate you again. Good-night--I
+hope you'll get your poacher off!"
+
+The others followed suit, and they all took leave in character;--Molloy,
+with an eager business reference to the order of the day for
+Saturday,--"Give me your address at Widrington; I'll post you everything
+to-night, so that you may have it all under your eye"--Casey, with the
+off-hand patronage of the man who would not for the world have his
+benevolence mistaken for servility,--and Wilkins with as gruff a nod and
+as limp a shake of the hand as possible. It might perhaps have been read
+in the manner of the last two, that although this young man had just
+made a most remarkable impression, and was clearly destined to go far,
+they were determined not to yield themselves to him a moment before they
+must. In truth, both were already jealous of him; whereas Molloy,
+absorbed in the business of the congress, cared for nothing except to
+know whether in the next two days' debates Wharton would show himself as
+good a chairman as he was an orator; and Bennett, while saying no word
+that he did not mean, was fully conscious of an inner judgment, which
+pronounced five minutes of Edward Hallin's company to be worth more to
+him than anything which this brilliant young fellow could do or say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wharton saw them out, then came back and threw himself again into his
+chair by the window. The venetian blinds were not closed, and he looked
+out on a wide and handsome street of tall red-brick houses and shops,
+crowded with people and carriages, and lit with a lavishness of gas
+which overcame even the February dark and damp. But he noticed nothing,
+and even the sensation of his triumph was passing off. He was once more
+in the Mellor drive; Aldous Raeburn and Marcella stood in front of him;
+the thrill of the moment beat once more in his pulse.
+
+He buried his head in his hands and thought. The news of the murder had
+reached him from Mr. Boyce. The master of Mellor had heard the news from
+William, the man-servant, at half-past seven, and had instantly knocked
+up his guest, by way of sharing the excitement with which his own feeble
+frame was throbbing.
+
+"By Gad! I never heard such an _atrocious_ business," said the invalid,
+his thin hand shaking against his dressing-gown. "That's what your
+Radical notions bring us to! We shall have them plundering and burning
+the country houses next."
+
+"I don't think my Radical notions have much to do with it," said
+Wharton, composedly.
+
+But there was a red spot in his cheeks which belied his manner. So when
+he--_they_--saw Hurd cross the avenue he was on his way to this deed of
+blood. The shot that he, Wharton, had heard had been the shot which slew
+Westall? Probably. Well, what was the bearing of it? Could she keep her
+own counsel or would they find themselves in the witness box? The idea
+quickened his pulse amazingly.
+
+"Any clue? Any arrests?" he asked of his host. "Why, I told you," said
+Boyce, testily, though as a matter of fact he had said nothing. "They
+have got that man Hurd. The ruffian has been a marked man by the keepers
+and police, they tell me, for the last year or more. And there's my
+daughter has been pampering him and his wife all the time, and
+_preaching_ to me about them! She got Raeburn even to take him on at the
+Court. I trust it will be a lesson to her."
+
+Wharton drew a breath of relief. So the man was in custody, and there
+was other evidence. Good! There was no saying what a woman's conscience
+might be capable of, even against her friends and herself.
+
+When Mr. Boyce at last left him free to dress and make his preparations
+for the early train, by which the night before, after the ladies'
+departure for the ball, he had suddenly made up his mind to leave
+Mellor, it was some time before Wharton could rouse himself to action.
+The situation absorbed him. Miss Boyce's friend was now in imminent
+danger of his neck, and Miss Boyce's thoughts must be of necessity
+concentrated upon his plight and that of his family. He foresaw the
+passion, the _saeva indignatio_, that she must ultimately throw--the
+general situation being what it was--into the struggle for Hurd's life.
+Whatever the evidence might be, he would be to her either victim or
+champion--and Westall, of course, merely the Holofernes of the piece.
+
+How would Raeburn take it? Ah, well! the situation must develop. It
+occurred to him, however, that he would catch an earlier train to
+Widrington than the one he had fixed on, and have half an hour's talk
+with a solicitor who was a good friend of his before going on to
+Birmingham. Accordingly, he rang for William--who came, all staring and
+dishevelled, fresh from the agitation of the servants' hall--gave orders
+for his luggage to be sent after him, got as much fresh information as
+he could from the excited lad, plunged into his bath, and finally
+emerged, fresh and vigorous in every nerve, showing no trace whatever of
+the fact that two hours of broken sleep had been his sole portion for a
+night, in which he had gone through emotions and sustained a travail of
+brain either of which would have left their mark on most men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the meeting in the drive! How plainly he saw them both--Raeburn
+grave and pale, Marcella in her dark serge skirt and cap, with an eye
+all passion and a cheek white as her hand.
+
+"A tragic splendour enwrapped her!--a fierce heroic air. She was the
+embodiment of the moment--of the melancholy morning with its rain and
+leafless woods--of the human anguish throbbing in the little village.
+And I, who had seen her last in her festal dress, who had held her warm
+perfumed youth in my arms, who had watched in her white breast the
+heaving of the heart that I--_I_ had troubled!--how did I find it
+possible to stand and face her? But I did. It rushed through me at once
+_how_ I would make her forgive me--how I would regain possession of her.
+I had thought the play was closed: it was suddenly plain to me that the
+second act was but just beginning. She and Raeburn had already come to
+words--I knew it directly I saw them. This business will divide them
+more and more. His _conscience_ will come in--and a Raeburn's conscience
+is the devil!
+
+"By now he hates me; every word I speak to him--still more every word
+to her--galls him. But he controlled himself when I made him tell me the
+story--I had no reason to complain--though every now and then I could
+see him wince under the knowledge I must needs show of the persons and
+places concerned--a knowledge I could only have got from _her_. And she
+stood by meanwhile like a statue. Not a word, not a look, so far, though
+she had been forced to touch my hand. But my instinct saved me. I roused
+her--I played upon her! I took the line that I was morally certain
+_she_ had been taking in their _tęte-ŕ-tęte_. Why not a scuffle?--a
+general scrimmage?--in which it was matter of accident who fell? The man
+surely was inoffensive and gentle, incapable of deliberate murder. And
+as to the evidence of hatred, it told both ways. He stiffened and was
+silent. What a fine brow he has--a look sometimes, when he is moved, of
+antique power and probity! But she--she trembled--animation came back.
+She would almost have spoken to me--but I did well not to prolong it--to
+hurry on."
+
+Then he took the telegram out of his pocket which had been put into his
+hands as he reached the hotel, his mouth quivering again with the
+exultation which he had felt when he had received it. It recalled to his
+ranging memory all the details of his hurried interview with the little
+Widrington solicitor, who had already scented a job in the matter of
+Hurd's defence. This man--needy, shrewd, and well equipped with local
+knowledge--had done work for Wharton and the party, and asked nothing
+better than to stand well with the future member for the division.
+"There is a lady," Wharton had said, "the daughter of Mr. Boyce of
+Mellor, who is already very much interested in this fellow and his
+family. She takes this business greatly to heart. I have seen her this
+morning, but had no time to discuss the matter with her. She will, I
+have little doubt, try to help the relations in the arrangements for the
+defence. Go to her this morning--tell her that the case has my
+sympathy--that, as she knows, I am a barrister, and, if she wishes it, I
+will defend Hurd. I shall be hard put to it to get up the case with the
+election coming on, but I will do it--for the sake of the public
+interest involved. You understand? Her father is a Tory--and she is just
+about to marry Mr. Raeburn. Her position, therefore, is difficult.
+Nevertheless, she will feel strongly--she does feel strongly about this
+case, and about the whole game system--and I feel moved to support her.
+She will take her own line, whatever happens. See her--see the wife,
+too, who is entirely under Miss Boyce's influence--and wire to me at my
+hotel at Birmingham. If they wish to make other arrangements, well and
+good. I shall have all the more time to give to the election."
+
+Leaving this commission behind him, he had started on his journey. At
+the end of it a telegram had been handed to him on the stairs of his
+hotel:
+
+"Have seen the lady, also Mrs. Hurd. You are urgently asked to undertake
+defence."
+
+He spread it out before him now, and pondered it. The bit of flimsy
+paper contained for him the promise of all he most coveted,--influence,
+emotion, excitement. "She will have returns upon herself," he thought
+smiling, "when I see her again. She will be dignified, resentful; she
+will suspect everything I say or do--still more, she will suspect
+herself. No matter! The situation is in my hands. Whether I succeed or
+fail, she will be forced to work with me, to consult with me--she will
+owe me gratitude. What made her consent?--she must have felt it in some
+sort a humiliation. Is it that Raeburn has been driving her to strong
+measures--that she wants, woman-like, to win, and thought me after all
+her best chance, and put her pride in her pocket? Or is it?--ah! one
+should put _that_ out of one's head. It's like wine--it unsteadies one.
+And for a thing like this one must go into training. Shall I write to
+her--there is just time now, before I start--take the lofty tone, the
+equal masculine tone, which I have noticed she likes?--ask her pardon
+for an act of madness--before we go together to the rescue of a life? It
+might do--it might go down. But no, I think not! Let the situation
+develop itself. Action and reaction--the unexpected--I commit myself to
+that. _She_--marry Aldous Raeburn in a month? Well, she may--certainly
+she may. But there is no need for me, I think, to take it greatly into
+account. Curious! twenty-four hours ago I thought it all done with--dead
+and done with. 'So like Provvy,' as Bentham used to say, when he heard
+of anything particularly unseemly in the way of natural catastrophe. Now
+to dine, and be off! How little sleep can I do with in the next
+fortnight?"
+
+He rang, ordered his cab, and then went to the coffee-room for some
+hasty food. As he was passing one of the small tables with which the
+room was filled, a man who was dining there with a friend recognised him
+and gave him a cold nod. Wharton walked on to the further end of the
+room, and, while waiting for his meal, buried himself in the local
+evening paper, which already contained a report of his speech.
+
+"Did you see that man?" asked the stranger of his friend.
+
+"The small young fellow with the curly hair?"
+
+"Small young fellow, indeed! He is the wiriest athlete I
+know--extraordinary physical strength for his size--and one of the
+cleverest rascals out as a politician. I am a neighbour of his in the
+country. His property joins mine. I knew his father--a little, dried-up
+old chap of the old school--very elegant manners and very
+obstinate--worried to death by his wife--oh, my goodness! such a woman!"
+
+"What's the name?" said the friend, interrupting.
+
+"Wharton--H.S. Wharton. His mother was a daughter of Lord Westgate, and
+_her_ mother was an actress whom the old lord married in his dotage.
+Lady Mildred Wharton was like Garrick, only natural when she was acting,
+which she did on every possible occasion. A preposterous woman! Old
+Wharton ought to have beaten her for her handwriting, and murdered her
+for her gowns. Her signature took a sheet of note-paper, and as for her
+dress I never could get out of her way. Whatever part of the room I
+happened to be in I always found my feet tangled in her skirts.
+Somehow, I never could understand how she was able to find so much stuff
+of one pattern. But it was only to make you notice her, like all the
+rest. Every bit of her was a pose, and the maternal pose was the worst
+of all."
+
+"H.S. Wharton?" said the other. "Why, that's the man who has been
+speaking here to-day. I've just been reading the account of it in the
+_Evening Star_. A big meeting--called by a joint committee of the
+leading Birmingham trades to consider the Liberal election programme as
+it affects labour--that's the man--he's been at it hammer and
+tongs--red-hot--all the usual devices for harrying the employer out of
+existence, with a few trifles--graduated income-tax and land
+nationalisation--thrown in. Oh! that's the man, is it?--they say he had
+a great reception--spoke brilliantly--and is certainly going to get into
+Parliament next week."
+
+The speaker, who had the air of a shrewd and prosperous manufacturer,
+put up his eyeglass to look at this young Robespierre. His
+_vis-ŕ-vis_--a stout country gentleman who had been in the army and
+knocked about the world before coming into his estate--shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"So I hear--he daren't show his nose as a candidate in _our_ part of the
+world, though of course he does us all the harm he can. I remember a
+good story of his mother--she quarrelled with her husband and all her
+relations, his and hers, and then she took to speaking in public,
+accompanied by her dear boy. On one occasion she was speaking at a
+market town near us, and telling the farmers that as far as she was
+concerned she would like to see the big properties cut up to-morrow. The
+sooner her father's and husband's estates were made into small holdings
+stocked with public capital the better. After it was all over, a friend
+of mine, who was there, was coming home in a sort of omnibus that ran
+between the town and a neighbouring village. He found himself between
+two fat farmers, and this was the conversation--broad Lincolnshire, of
+course: 'Did tha hear Lady Mildred Wharton say them things, Willum?'
+'Aye, a did.' 'What did tha think, Willum?' 'What did _tha_ think,
+George?' 'Wal, _aa_ thowt Laady Mildred Wharton wor a graät fule,
+Willum, if tha asks me.' 'I'll uphowd tha, George! I'll uphowd tha!'
+said the other, and then they talked no more for the rest of the
+journey."
+
+The friend laughed.
+
+"So it was from the dear mamma that the young man got his opinions?"
+
+"Of course. She dragged him into every absurdity she could from the time
+he was fifteen. When the husband died she tried to get the servants to
+come in to meals, but the butler struck. So did Wharton himself, who,
+for a Socialist, has always showed a very pretty turn for comfort. I am
+bound to say he was cut up when she died. It was the only time I ever
+felt like being civil to him--in those months after she departed. I
+suppose she was devoted to him--which after all is something."
+
+"Good heavens!" said the other, still lazily turning over the pages of
+the newspaper as they sat waiting for their second course, "here is
+another poaching murder--in Brookshire--the third I have noticed within
+a month. On Lord Maxwell's property--you know them?"
+
+"I know the old man a little--fine old fellow! They'll make him
+President of the Council, I suppose. He can't have much work left in
+him; but it is such a popular, respectable name. Ah! I'm sorry; the sort
+of thing to distress him terribly."
+
+"I see the grandson is standing."
+
+"Oh yes; will get in too. A queer sort of man--great ability and high
+character. But you can't imagine him getting on in politics, unless it's
+by sheer weight of wealth and family influence. He'll find a scruple in
+every bush--never stand the rough work of the House, or get on with the
+_men_. My goodness! you have to pull with some queer customers nowadays.
+By the way, I hear he is making an unsatisfactory marriage--a girl very
+handsome, but with no manners, and like nobody else--the daughter, too,
+of an extremely shady father. It's surprising; you'd have thought a man
+like Aldous Raeburn would have looked for the pick of things."
+
+"Perhaps it was she looked for the pick of things!" said the other, with
+a blunt laugh. "Waiter, another bottle of champagne."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Marcella was lying on the sofa in the Mellor drawing-room. The February
+evening had just been shut out, but she had told William not to bring
+the lamps till they were rung for. Even the fire-light seemed more than
+she could bear. She was utterly exhausted both in body and mind; yet, as
+she lay there with shut eyes, and hands clasped under her cheek, a start
+went through her at every sound in the house, which showed that she was
+not resting, but listening. She had spent the morning in the Hurds'
+cottage, sitting by Mrs. Hurd and nursing the little boy. Minta Hurd,
+always delicate and consumptive, was now generally too ill from shock
+and misery to be anywhere but in her bed, and Willie was growing
+steadily weaker, though the child's spirit was such that he would insist
+on dressing, on hearing and knowing everything about his father, and on
+moving about the house as usual. Yet every movement of his wasted bones
+cost him the effort of a hero, and the dumb signs in him of longing for
+his father increased the general impression as of some patient creature
+driven by Nature to monstrous and disproportionate extremity.
+
+The plight of this handful of human beings worked in Marcella like some
+fevering torture. She was wholly out of gear physically and morally.
+Another practically sleepless night, peopled with images of horror, had
+decreased her stock of sane self-control, already lessened by long
+conflict of feeling and the pressure of self-contempt. Now, as she lay
+listening for Aldous Raeburn's ring and step, she hardly knew whether to
+be angry with him for coming so late, or miserable that he should come
+at all. That there was a long score to settle between herself and him
+she knew well. Shame for an experience which seemed to her maiden sense
+indelible--both a weakness and a treachery--lay like a dull weight on
+heart and conscience. But she would not realise it, she would not act
+upon it. She shook the moral debate from her impatiently. Aldous should
+have his due all in good time--should have ample opportunity of deciding
+whether he would, after all, marry such a girl as she. Meanwhile his
+attitude with regard to the murder exasperated her. Yet, in some strange
+way it relieved her to be angry and sore with him--to have a grievance
+she could avow, and on which she made it a merit to dwell. His gentle,
+yet firm difference of opinion with her on the subject struck her as
+something new in him. It gave her a kind of fierce pleasure to fight it.
+He seemed somehow to be providing her with excuses--to be coming down to
+her level--to be equalling wrong with wrong.
+
+The door handle turned. At last! She sprang up. But it was only William
+coming in with the evening post. Mrs. Boyce followed him. She took a
+quiet look at her daughter, and asked if her headache was better, and
+then sat down near her to some needlework. During these two days she
+had been unusually kind to Marcella. She had none of the little feminine
+arts of consolation. She was incapable of fussing, and she never
+caressed. But from the moment that Marcella had come home from the
+village that morning, a pale, hollow-eyed wreck, the mother had asserted
+her authority. She would not hear of the girl's crossing the threshold
+again; she had put her on the sofa and dosed her with sal-volatile. And
+Marcella was too exhausted to rebel. She had only stipulated that a note
+should be sent to Aldous, asking him to come on to Mellor with the news
+as soon as the verdict of the coroner's jury should be given. The jury
+had been sitting all day, and the verdict was expected in the evening.
+
+Marcella turned over her letters till she came to one from a London firm
+which contained a number of cloth patterns. As she touched it she threw
+it aside with a sudden gesture of impatience, and sat upright.
+
+"Mamma! I have something to say to you."
+
+"Yes, my dear."
+
+"Mamma, the wedding must be put off!--it _must_!--for some weeks. I have
+been thinking about it while I have been lying here. How _can_ I?--you
+can see for yourself. That miserable woman depends on me altogether. How
+can I spend my time on clothing and dressmakers? I feel as if I could
+think of nothing else--nothing else in the world--but her and her
+children." She spoke with difficulty, her voice high and strained. "The
+assizes may be held that very week--who knows?--the very day we are
+married."
+
+She stopped, looking at her mother almost threateningly. Mrs. Boyce
+showed no sign of surprise. She put her work down.
+
+"I had imagined you might say something of the kind," she said after a
+pause. "I don't know that, from your point of view, it is unreasonable.
+But, of course, you must understand that very few people will see it
+from your point of view. Aldous Raeburn may--you must know best. But his
+people certainly won't; and your father will think it--"
+
+"Madness," she was going to say, but with her usual instinct for the
+moderate fastidious word she corrected it to "foolish."
+
+Marcella's tired eyes were all wilfulness and defiance.
+
+"I can't help it. I couldn't do it. I will tell Aldous at once. It must
+be put off for a month. And even that," she added with a shudder, "will
+be bad enough."
+
+Mrs. Boyce could not help an unperceived shrug of the shoulders, and a
+movement of pity towards the future husband. Then she said drily,--
+
+"You must always consider whether it is just to Mr. Raeburn to let a
+matter of this kind interfere so considerably with his wishes and his
+plans. He must, I suppose, be in London for Parliament within six
+weeks."
+
+Marcella did not answer. She sat with her hands round her knees lost in
+perplexities. The wedding, as originally fixed, was now three weeks and
+three days off. After it, she and Aldous were to have spent a short
+fortnight's honeymoon at a famous house in the north, lent them for the
+occasion by a Duke who was a cousin of Aldous's on the mother's side,
+and had more houses than he knew what to do with. Then they were to go
+immediately up to London for the opening of Parliament. The furnishing
+of the Mayfair house was being pressed on. In her new-born impatience
+with such things, Marcella had hardly of late concerned herself with it
+at all, and Miss Raeburn, scandalised, yet not unwilling, had been doing
+the whole of it, subject to conscientious worryings of the bride,
+whenever she could be got hold of, on the subject of papers and
+curtains.
+
+As they sat silent, the unspoken idea in the mother's mind was--"Eight
+weeks more will carry us past the execution." Mrs. Boyce had already
+possessed herself very clearly of the facts of the case, and it was her
+perception that Marcella was throwing herself headlong into a hopeless
+struggle--together with something else--a confession perhaps of a touch
+of greatness in the girl's temper, passionate and violent as it was,
+that had led to this unwonted softness of manner, this absence of
+sarcasm.
+
+Very much the same thought--only treated as a nameless horror not to be
+recognised or admitted--was in Marcella's mind also, joined however with
+another, unsuspected even by Mrs. Boyce's acuteness. "Very likely--when
+I tell him--he will not want to marry me at all--and of course I shall
+tell him."
+
+But not yet--certainly not yet. She had the instinctive sense that
+during the next few weeks she should want all her dignity with Aldous,
+that she could not afford to put herself at a disadvantage with him. To
+be troubled about her own sins at such a moment would be like the
+meanness of the lazy and canting Christian, who whines about saving his
+soul while he ought to be rather occupied with feeding the bodies of his
+wife and children.
+
+A ring at the front door. Marcella rose, leaning one hand on the end of
+the sofa--a long slim figure in her black dress--haggard and pathetic.
+
+When Aldous entered, her face was one question. He went up to her and
+took her hand.
+
+"In the case of Westall the verdict is one of 'Wilful Murder' against
+Hurd. In that of poor Charlie Dynes the court is adjourned. Enough
+evidence has been taken to justify burial. But there is news to-night
+that one of the Widrington gang has turned informer, and the police say
+they will have their hands on them all within the next two or three
+days."
+
+Marcella withdrew herself from him and fell back into the corner of the
+sofa. Shading her eyes with her hand she tried to be very composed and
+business-like.
+
+"Was Hurd himself examined?"
+
+"Yes, under the new Act. He gave the account which he gave to you and to
+his wife. But the Court--"
+
+"Did not believe it?"
+
+"No. The evidence of motive was too strong. It was clear from his own
+account that he was out for poaching purposes, that he was leading the
+Oxford gang, and that he had a gun while Westall was unarmed. He
+admitted too that Westall called on him to give up the bag of pheasants
+he held, and the gun. He refused. Then he says Westall came at him, and
+he fired. Dick Patton and one or two others gave evidence as to the
+language he has habitually used about Westall for months past."
+
+"Cowards--curs!" cried Marcella, clenching both her hands, a kind of sob
+in her throat.
+
+Aldous, already white and careworn, showed, Mrs. Boyce thought, a ray of
+indignation for an instant. Then he resumed steadily--
+
+"And Brown, our steward, gave evidence as to his employment since
+October. The coroner summed up carefully, and I think fairly, and the
+verdict was given about half-past six."
+
+"They took him back to prison?"
+
+"Of course. He comes before the magistrates on Thursday."
+
+"And you will be one!"
+
+The girl's tone was indescribable.
+
+Aldous started. Mrs. Boyce reddened with anger, and checking her
+instinct to intervene began to put away her working materials that she
+might leave them together. While she was still busy Aldous said:
+
+"You forget; no magistrate ever tries a case in which he is personally
+concerned. I shall take no part in the trial. My grandfather, of course,
+must prosecute."
+
+"But it will be a bench of landlords," cried Marcella; "of men with whom
+a poacher is already condemned."
+
+"You are unjust to us, I think," said Aldous, slowly, after a pause,
+during which Mrs. Boyce left the room--"to some of us, at any rate.
+Besides, as of course you know, the case will be simply sent on for
+trial at the assizes. By the way "--his tone changed--"I hear to-night
+that Harry Wharton undertakes the defence."
+
+"Yes," said Marcella, defiantly. "Is there anything to say against it?
+You wouldn't wish Hurd not to be defended, I suppose?"
+
+"Marcella!"
+
+Even her bitter mood was pierced by the tone. She had never wounded him
+so deeply yet, and for a moment he felt the situation intolerable; the
+surging grievance and reproach, with which his heart was really full,
+all but found vent in an outburst which would have wholly swept away his
+ordinary measure and self-control. But then, as he looked at her, it
+struck his lover's sense painfully how pale and miserable she was. He
+could not scold! But it came home to him strongly that for her own sake
+and his it would be better there should be explanations. After all
+things had been going untowardly for many weeks. His nature moved slowly
+and with much self-doubt, but it was plain to him now that he must make
+a stand.
+
+After his cry, her first instinct was to apologise. Then the words stuck
+in her throat. To her, as to him, they seemed to be close on a trial of
+strength. If she could not influence him in this matter--so obvious, as
+it seemed to her, and so near to her heart--what was to become of that
+lead of hers in their married life, on which she had been reckoning from
+the beginning? All that was worst in her and all that was best rose to
+the struggle.
+
+But, as he did not speak, she looked up at last.
+
+"I was waiting," he said in a low voice.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Waiting till you should tell me you did not mean what you said."
+
+She saw that he was painfully moved; she also saw that he was
+introducing something into their relation, an element of proud
+self-assertion, which she had never felt in it before. Her own vanity
+instantly rebelled.
+
+"I ought not to have said exactly what I did," she said, almost stifled
+by her own excitement, and making great efforts not to play the mere
+wilful child; "that I admit. But it has been clear to me from the
+beginning that--that"--her words hurried, she took up a book and
+restlessly lifted it and let it fall--"you have never looked at this
+thing justly. You have looked at the crime as any one must who is a
+landowner; you have never allowed for the provocation; you have not let
+yourself feel pity--"
+
+He made an exclamation.
+
+"Do you know where I was before I went into the inquest?"
+
+"No," she said defiantly, determined not to be impressed, feeling a
+childish irritation at the interruption.
+
+"I was with Mrs. Westall. Harden and I went in to see her. She is a
+hard, silent woman. She is clearly not popular in the village, and no
+one comes in to her. Her"--he hesitated--"her baby is expected before
+long. She is in such a state of shock and excitement that Clarke thinks
+it quite possible she may go out of her mind. I saw her sitting by the
+fire, quite silent, not crying, but with a wild eye that means mischief.
+We have sent in a nurse to help Mrs. Jellison watch her. She seems to
+care nothing about her boy. Everything that that woman most desired in
+life has been struck from her at a blow. Why? That a man who was in no
+stress of poverty, who had friends and employment, should indulge
+himself in acts which he knew to be against the law, and had promised
+you and his wife to forego, and should at the same time satisfy a wild
+beast's hatred against the man, who was simply defending his master's
+property. Have _you_ no pity for Mrs. Westall or her child?"
+
+He spoke as calmly as he could, making his appeal to reason and moral
+sense; but, in reality, every word was charged with electric feeling.
+
+"I _am_ sorry for her!" cried Marcella, passionately. "But, after all,
+how can one feel for the oppressor, or those connected with him, as one
+does for the victim?" He shook his head, protesting against the word,
+but she rushed on. "You do know--for I told you yesterday--how under the
+shelter of this _hateful_ game system Westall made Kurd's life a burden
+to him when he was a young man--how he had begun to bully him again this
+past year. We had the same sort of dispute the other day about that
+murder in Ireland. You were shocked that I would not condemn the
+Moonlighters who had shot their landlord from behind a hedge, as you
+did. You said the man had tried to do his duty, and that the murder was
+brutal and unprovoked. But I thought of the _system_--of the _memories_
+in the minds of the murderers. There _were_ excuses--he suffered for his
+father--I am not going to judge that as I judge other murders. So, when
+a Czar of Russia is blown up, do you expect one to think only of his
+wife and children? No! I will think of the tyranny and the revolt; I
+will pray, yes, _pray_ that I might have courage to do as they did! You
+may think me wild and mad. I dare say. I am made so. I shall always feel
+so!"
+
+She flung out her words at him, every limb quivering under the emotion
+of them. His cool, penetrating eye, this manner she had never yet known
+in him, exasperated her.
+
+"Where was the tyranny in this case?" he asked her quietly. "I agree
+with you that there are murders and murders. But I thought your point
+was that here was neither murder nor attack, but only an act of
+self-defence. That is Hurd's plea."
+
+She hesitated and stumbled. "I know," she said, "I know. I believe it.
+But, even if the attack had been on Hurd's part, I should still find
+excuses, because of the system, and because of Westall's hatefulness."
+
+He shook his head again.
+
+"Because a man is harsh and masterful, and uses stinging language, is he
+to be shot down like a dog?"
+
+There was a silence. Marcella was lashing herself up by thoughts of the
+deformed man in his cell, looking forward after the wretched,
+unsatisfied life, which was all society had allowed him, to the violent
+death by which society would get rid of him--of the wife yearning her
+heart away--of the boy, whom other human beings, under the name of law,
+were about to separate from his father for ever. At last she broke out
+thickly and indistinctly:
+
+"The terrible thing is that I cannot count upon you--that now I cannot
+make you feel as I do--feel with me. And by-and-by, when I shall want
+your help desperately, when your help might be everything--I suppose it
+will be no good to ask it."
+
+He started, and bending forward he possessed himself of both her
+hands--her hot trembling hands--and kissed them with a passionate
+tenderness.
+
+"What help will you ask of me that I cannot give? That would be hard to
+bear!"
+
+Still held by him, she answered his question by another:
+
+"Give me your idea of what will happen. Tell me how you think it will
+end."
+
+"I shall only distress you, dear," he said sadly.
+
+"No; tell me. You think him guilty. You believe he will be convicted."
+
+"Unless some wholly fresh evidence is forthcoming," he said reluctantly,
+"I can see no other issue."
+
+"Very well; then he will be sentenced to death. But, after sentence--I
+know--that man from Widrington, that solicitor told me--if--if strong
+influence is brought to bear--if anybody whose word counts--if Lord
+Maxwell and you, were to join the movement to save him--There is sure to
+be a movement--the Radicals will take it up. Will you do it--will you
+promise me now--for my sake?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+She looked at him, all her heart burning in her eyes, conscious of her
+woman's power too, and pressing it.
+
+"If that man is hung," she said pleadingly, "it will leave a mark on my
+life nothing will ever smooth out. I shall feel myself somehow
+responsible. I shall say to myself, if I had not been thinking about my
+own selfish affairs--about getting married--about the straw-plaiting--I
+might have seen what was going on. I might have saved these people, who
+have been my friends--my _real_ friends--from this horror."
+
+She drew her hands away and fell back on the sofa, pressing her
+handkerchief to her eyes. "If you had seen her this morning!" she said
+in a strangled voice. "She was saying, 'Oh, miss, if they do find him
+guilty, they can't hang him--not my poor deformed Jim, that never had a
+chance of being like the others. Oh, we'll beg so hard. I know there's
+many people will speak for him. He was mad, miss, when he did it. He'd
+never been himself, not since last winter, when we all sat and starved,
+and he was driven out of his senses by thinking of me and the children.
+You'll get Mr. Raeburn to speak--won't you, miss?--and Lord Maxwell? It
+was their game. I know it was their game. But they'll forgive him.
+They're such great people, and so rich--and we--we've always had such a
+struggle. Oh, the bad times we've had, and no one know! They'll try and
+get him off, miss? Oh, I'll go and _beg_ of them.'"
+
+She stopped, unable to trust her voice any further. He stooped over her
+and kissed her brow. There was a certain solemnity in the moment for
+both of them. The pity of human fate overshadowed them. At last he said
+firmly, yet with great feeling:
+
+"I will not prejudge anything, that I promise you. I will keep my mind
+open to the last. But--I should like to say--it would not be any easier
+to me to throw myself into an agitation for reprieve because this man
+was tempted to crime by _my_ property--on _my_ land. I should think it
+right to look at it altogether from the public point of view. The
+satisfaction of my own private compunctions--of my own private
+feelings--is not what I ought to regard. My own share in the
+circumstances, in the conditions which made such an act possible does
+indeed concern me deeply. You cannot imagine but that the moral problem
+of it has possessed me ever since this dreadful thing happened. It
+troubled me much before. Now, it has become an oppression--a torture. I
+have never seen my grandfather so moved, so distressed, in all my
+remembrance of him. Yet he is a man of the old school, with the old
+standards. As for me, if ever I come to the estate I will change the
+whole system, I will run no risks of such human wreck and ruin as
+this--"
+
+His voice faltered.
+
+"But," he resumed, speaking steadily again, "I ought to warn you that
+such considerations as these will not affect my judgment of this
+particular case. In the first place, I have no quarrel with capital
+punishment as such. I do not believe we could rightly give it up. Your
+attitude properly means that wherever we can legitimately feel pity for
+a murderer, we should let him escape his penalty. I, on the other hand,
+believe that if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would
+himself _claim_ his own death, as his best chance, his only chance--in
+this mysterious universe!--of self-recovery. Then it comes to this--was
+the act murder? The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears
+to me to be substantially just, and guided by it--"
+
+"You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the
+world," she interrupted wildly; "as if law were not made and
+administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the
+lawbreaker!"
+
+He looked troubled.
+
+"Ah, but _law_ is something beyond laws or those who administer them,"
+he said in a lower tone; "and the law--the _obligation-sense_--of our
+own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because
+it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to
+what it is, out of our own best life--ours, yet not ours--the best proof
+we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in
+ourselves of some diviner power than our own will--our best clue to what
+that power may be!"
+
+He spoke at first, looking away--wrestling out his thought, as it were,
+by himself--then turning back to her, his eyes emphasised the appeal
+implied, though not expressed, in what he said--intense appeal to her
+for sympathy, forbearance, mutual respect, through all acuteness of
+difference. His look both promised and implored.
+
+He bad spoken to her but very rarely or indirectly as yet of his own
+religious or philosophical beliefs. She was in a stage when such things
+interested her but little, and reticence in personal matters was so much
+the law of his life that even to her expansion was difficult. So
+that--inevitably--she was arrested, for the moment, as any quick
+perception must be, by the things that unveil character.
+
+Then an upheaval of indignant feeling swept the impression away. All
+that he said might be ideally, profoundly true--_but_--the red blood of
+the common life was lacking in every word of it! He ought to be
+incapable of saying it _now_. Her passionate question was, how could he
+_argue_--how could he hold and mark the ethical balance--when a _woman_
+was suffering, when _children_ were to be left fatherless? Besides--the
+ethical balance itself--does it not alter according to the hands that
+hold it--poacher or landlord, rich or poor?
+
+But she was too exhausted to carry on the contest in words. Both felt it
+would have to be renewed. But she said to herself secretly that Mr.
+Wharton, when he got to work, would alter the whole aspect of affairs.
+And she knew well that her vantage-ground as towards Aldous was strong.
+
+Then at last he was free to turn his whole attention for a little to her
+and her physical state, which made him miserable. He had never imagined
+that any one, vigorous and healthy as she was, could look so worn out in
+so short a time. She let him talk to her--lament, entreat, advise--and
+at last she took advantage of his anxiety and her admissions to come to
+the point, to plead that the marriage should be put off.
+
+She used the same arguments that she had done to her mother.
+
+"How can I bear to be thinking of these things?"--she pointed a shaking
+finger at the dress patterns lying scattered on the table--"with this
+agony, this death, under my eyes?"
+
+It was a great blow to him, and the practical inconveniences involved
+were great. But the fibre of him--of which she had just felt the
+toughness--was delicate and sensitive as her own, and after a very short
+recoil he met her with great chivalry and sweetness, agreeing that
+everything should be put off for six weeks, till Easter in fact. She
+would have been very grateful to him but that something--some secret
+thought--checked the words she tried to say.
+
+"I must go home then," he said, rising and trying to smile. "I shall
+have to make things straight with Aunt Neta, and set a great many
+arrangements in train. Now, you will _try_ to think of something else?
+Let me leave you with a book that I can imagine you will read."
+
+She let herself be tended and thought for. At the last, just as he was
+going, he said:
+
+"Have you seen Mr. Wharton at all since this happened?"
+
+His manner was just as usual. She felt that her eye was guilty, but the
+darkness of the firelit room shielded her.
+
+"I have not seen him since we met him in the drive. I saw the solicitor
+who is working up the case for him yesterday. He came over to see Mrs.
+Hurd and me. I had not thought of asking him, but we agreed that, if he
+would undertake it, it would be the best chance."
+
+"It _is_ probably the best chance," said Aldous, thoughtfully. "I
+believe Wharton has not done much at the Bar since he was called, but
+that, no doubt, is because he has had so much on his hands in the way of
+journalism and politics. His ability is enough for anything, and he will
+throw himself into this. I do not think Hurd could do better."
+
+She did not answer. She felt that he was magnanimous, but felt it
+coldly, without emotion.
+
+He came and stooped over her.
+
+"Good-night--good-night--tired child--dear heart! When I saw you in that
+cottage this morning I thought of the words, 'Give, and it shall be
+given unto you.' All that my life can do to pour good measure, pressed
+down, running over, into yours, I vowed you then!"
+
+When the door closed upon him, Marcella, stretched in the darkness, shed
+the bitterest tears that had ever yet been hers--tears which transformed
+her youth--which baptised her, as it were, into the fulness of our
+tragic life.
+
+She was still weeping when she heard the door softly opened. She sprang
+up and dried her eyes, but the little figure that glided in was not one
+to shrink from. Mary Harden came and sat down beside her.
+
+"I knew you would be miserable. Let me come and cry too. I have been my
+round--have seen them all--and I came to bring you news."
+
+"How has she taken--the verdict?" asked Marcella, struggling with her
+sobs, and succeeding at last in composing herself.
+
+"She was prepared for it. Charlie told her when he saw her after you
+left this afternoon that she must expect it."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"I shall soon hear, I suppose," said Marcella, in a hardening voice, her
+hands round her knees, "what Mr. Wharton is doing for the defence. He
+will appear before the magistrates, I suppose."
+
+"Yes; but Charlie thinks the defence will be mainly reserved. Only a
+little more than a fortnight to the assizes! The time is so short. But
+now this man has turned informer, they say the case is quite
+straightforward. With all the other evidence the police have there will
+be no difficulty in trying them all. Marcella!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Had there been light enough to show it, Mary's face would have revealed
+her timidity.
+
+"Marcella, Charlie asked me to give you a message. He begs you not
+to--not to make Mrs. Hurd hope too much. He himself believes there is no
+hope, and it is not kind."
+
+"Are you and he like all the rest," cried Marcella, her passion breaking
+out again, "only eager to have blood for blood?"
+
+Mary waited an instant.
+
+"It has almost broken Charlie's heart," she said at last; "but he thinks
+it was murder, and that Hurd will pay the penalty; nay, more "--she
+spoke with a kind of religious awe in her gentle voice--"that he ought
+to be glad to pay it. He believes it to be God's will, and I have heard
+him say that he would even have executions in public again--under
+stricter regulations of course--that we may not escape, as we always do
+if we can--from all sight and thought of God's justice and God's
+punishments."
+
+Marcella shuddered and rose. She almost threw Mary's hand away from her.
+
+"Tell your brother from me, Mary," she said, "that his God is to _me_
+just a constable in the service of the English game-laws! If He _is_
+such a one, I at least will fling my Everlasting No at him while I
+live."
+
+And she swept from the room, leaving Mary aghast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile there was consternation and wrath at Maxwell Court, where
+Aldous, on his return from Mellor, had first of all given his great-aunt
+the news of the coroner's verdict, and had then gone on to break to her
+the putting-off of the marriage. His championship of Marcella in the
+matter, and his disavowal of all grievance were so quiet and decided,
+that Miss Raeburn had been only able to allow herself a very modified
+strain of comment and remonstrance, so long as he was still there to
+listen. But she was all the more outspoken when he was gone, and Lady
+Winterbourne was sitting with her. Lady Winterbourne, who was at home
+alone, while her husband was with a married daughter on the Riviera, had
+come over to dine _tęte-ŕ-tęte_ with her friend, finding it impossible
+to remain solitary while so much was happening.
+
+"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, shortly, as her guest entered the
+room, "I may as well tell you at once that Aldous's marriage is put
+off."
+
+"Put off!" exclaimed Lady Winterbourne, bewildered. "Why it was only
+Thursday that I was discussing it all with Marcella, and she told me
+everything was settled."
+
+"Thursday!--I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, stitching away with fiery
+energy, "but since then a poacher has murdered one of our gamekeepers,
+which makes all the difference."
+
+"What _do_ you mean, Agneta?"
+
+"What I say, my dear. The poacher was Marcella's friend, and she cannot
+now distract her mind from him sufficiently to marry Aldous, though
+every plan he has in the world will be upset by her proceedings. And as
+for his election, you may depend upon it she will never ask or know
+whether he gets in next Monday or no. That goes without saying. She is
+meanwhile absorbed with the poacher's defence, _Mr. Wharton_, of course,
+conducting it. This is your modern young woman, my dear--typical, I
+should think."
+
+Miss Raeburn turned her buttonhole in fine style, and at lightning
+speed, to show the coolness of her mind, then with a rattling of all her
+lockets, looked up and waited for Lady Winterbourne's reflections.
+
+"She has often talked to me of these people--the Hurds," said Lady
+Winterbourne, slowly. "She has always made special friends with them.
+Don't you remember she told us about them that day she first came back
+to lunch?"
+
+"Of course I remember! That day she lectured Maxwell, at first sight,
+on his duties. She began well. As for these people," said Miss Raeburn,
+more slowly, "one is, of course, sorry for the wife and children, though
+I am a good deal sorrier for Mrs. Westall, and poor, poor Mrs. Dynes.
+The whole affair has so upset Maxwell and me, we have hardly been able
+to eat or sleep since. I thought it made Maxwell look dreadfully old
+this morning, and with all that he has got before him too! I shall
+insist on sending for Clarke to-morrow morning if he does not have a
+better night. And now this postponement will be one more trouble--all
+the engagements to alter, and the invitations. _Really_! that girl."
+
+And Miss Raeburn broke off short, feeling simply that the words which
+were allowed to a well-bred person were wholly inadequate to her state
+of mind.
+
+"But if she feels it--as you or I might feel such a thing about some one
+we knew or cared for, Agneta?"
+
+"How can she feel it like that?" cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "How
+can she know any one of--of that class well enough? It is not seemly, I
+tell you, Adelaide, and I don't believe it is sincere. It's just done to
+make herself conspicuous, and show her power over Aldous. For other
+reasons too, if the truth were known!"
+
+Miss Raeburn turned over the shirt she was making for some charitable
+society and drew out some tacking threads with a loud noise which
+relieved her. Lady Winterbourne's old and delicate cheek had flushed.
+
+"I'm sure it's sincere," she said with emphasis. "Do you mean to say,
+Agneta, that one can't sympathise, in such an awful thing, with people
+of another class, as one would with one's own flesh and blood?"
+
+Miss Raeburn winced. She felt for a moment the pressure of a democratic
+world--a hated, formidable world--through her friend's question. Then
+she stood to her guns.
+
+"I dare say you'll think it sounds bad," she said stoutly; "but in my
+young days it would have been thought a piece of posing--of
+sentimentalism--something indecorous and unfitting--if a girl had put
+herself in such a position. Marcella _ought_ to be absorbed in her
+marriage; that is the natural thing. How Mrs. Boyce can allow her to mix
+herself with such things as this murder--to _live_ in that cottage, as I
+hear she has been doing, passes my comprehension."
+
+"You mean," said Lady Winterbourne, dreamily, "that if one had been very
+fond of one's maid, and she died, one wouldn't put on mourning for her.
+Marcella would."
+
+"I dare say," said Miss Raeburn, snappishly. "She is capable of anything
+far-fetched and theatrical."
+
+The door opened and Hallin came in. He had been suffering of late, and
+much confined to the house. But the news of the murder had made a deep
+and painful impression upon him, and he had been eagerly acquainting
+himself with the facts. Miss Raeburn, whose kindness ran with unceasing
+flow along the channels she allowed it, was greatly attached to him in
+spite of his views, and she now threw herself upon him for sympathy in
+the matter of the wedding. In any grievance that concerned Aldous she
+counted upon him, and her shrewd eyes had plainly perceived that he had
+made no great friendship with Marcella.
+
+"I am very sorry for Aldous," he said at once; "but I understand _her_
+perfectly. So does Aldous."
+
+Miss Raeburn was angrily silent. But when Lord Maxwell, who had been
+talking with Aldous, came in, he proved, to her final discomfiture, to
+be very much of the same opinion.
+
+"My dear," he said wearily as he dropped into his chair, his old face
+grey and pinched, "this thing is too terrible--the number of widows and
+orphans that night's work will make before the end breaks my heart to
+think of. It will be a relief not to have to consider festivities while
+these men are actually before the courts. What I am anxious about is
+that Marcella should not make herself ill with excitement. The man she
+is interested in will be hung, must be hung; and with her somewhat
+volatile, impulsive nature--"
+
+He spoke with old-fashioned discretion and measure. Then quickly he
+pulled himself up, and, with some trivial question or other, offered his
+arm to Lady Winterbourne, for Aldous had just come in, and dinner was
+ready.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Nearly three weeks passed--short flashing weeks, crowded with
+agitations, inward or outward, for all the persons of this story.
+
+After the inquiry before the magistrates--conducted, as she passionately
+thought, with the most marked animus on the part of the bench and police
+towards the prisoners--had resulted in the committal for trial of Hurd
+and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Raeburn a letter which
+hurt him sorely.
+
+"Don't come over to see me for a little while," it ran. "My mind is all
+given over to feelings which must seem to you--which, I know, do seem to
+you--unreasonable and unjust. But they are my life, and when they are
+criticised, or even treated coldly, I cannot bear it. When you are not
+there to argue with, I can believe, most sincerely, that you have a
+right to see this matter as you do, and that it is monstrous of me to
+expect you to yield to me entirely in a thing that concerns your sense
+of public duty. But don't come now--not before the trial. I will appeal
+to you if I think you can help me. I _know_ you will if you can. Mr.
+Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters,
+which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of
+the evidence."
+
+Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and difficulty.
+
+"I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a burden to
+you. You can hardly imagine that it is not grievous to me to think of
+any trouble of yours as being made worse by my being with you. But still
+I understand. One thing only I ask--that you should not imagine the
+difference between us greater than it is. The two letters you enclose
+have given me much to ponder. If only the course of the trial enables me
+with an honest heart to throw myself into your crusade of mercy, with
+what joy shall I come and ask you to lead me, and to forgive my own
+slower sense and pity!
+
+"I should like you to know that Hallin is very much inclined to agree
+with you, to think that the whole affair was a 'scrimmage,' and that
+Hurd at least ought to be reprieved. He would have come to talk it over
+with you himself, but that Clarke forbids him anything that interests or
+excites him for the present. He has been very ill and suffering for the
+last fortnight, and, as you know, when these attacks come on we try to
+keep everything from him that could pain or agitate him. But I see that
+this whole affair is very much on his mind, in spite of my efforts.
+
+"... Oh, my darling! I am writing late at night, with your letter open
+before me and your picture close to my hand. So many things rise in my
+mind to say to you. There will come a time--there _must!_--when I may
+pour them all out. Meanwhile, amid all jars and frets, remember this,
+that I have loved you better each day since first we met.
+
+"I will not come to Mellor then for a little while. My election, little
+heart as I have for it, will fill up the week. The nomination-day is
+fixed for Thursday and the polling for Monday."
+
+Marcella read the letter with a confusion of feeling so great as to be
+in itself monstrous and demoralising. Was she never to be simple, to see
+her way clearly again?
+
+As for him, as he rode about the lanes and beechwoods in the days that
+followed, alone often with that nature for which all such temperaments
+as Aldous Raeburn's have so secret and so observant an affection, he was
+perpetually occupied with this difficulty which had arisen between
+Marcella and himself, turning it over and over in the quiet of the
+morning, before the turmoil of the day began.
+
+He had followed the whole case before the magistrates with the most
+scrupulous care. And since then, he had twice run across the Widrington
+solicitor for the defence, who was now instructing Wharton. This man,
+although a strong Radical, and employed generally by his own side, saw
+no objection at all to letting Lord Maxwell's heir and representative
+understand how in his opinion the case was going. Aldous Raeburn was a
+person whom everybody respected; confidences were safe with him; and he
+was himself deeply interested in the affair. The Raeburns being the
+Raeburns, with all that that implied for smaller people in Brookshire,
+little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall's
+employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the
+defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was
+still his, Burridge's opinion, that everything that could be advanced
+would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came
+into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the
+only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can
+always be got up in a game-preserving case.
+
+"And is as a rule political and anti-landlord," thought Aldous, on one
+of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down. He foresaw
+exactly what would happen. As he envisaged the immediate future, he saw
+one figure as the centre of it--not Marcella, but Wharton! Wharton was
+defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for
+his own support and his grandfather's, through Marcella. To Wharton
+would belong not only the popular _kudos_ of the matter, but much more,
+and above all, Marcella's gratitude.
+
+Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the
+road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had
+asked Marcella to be his wife. The pale February sunlight was spreading
+from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant
+shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk
+plain. Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter
+birds from the branches round him. The place, the time, raised in him
+all the intensest powers of consciousness. He saw himself as the man
+_standing midway_ in everything--speculation, politics, sympathies--as
+the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the
+perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world. Wharton!
+He knew him--had read him long ago--read him afresh of late. Raeburn's
+lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not
+repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover. Here was he, banished
+from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and
+sympathies, busily forging a link--
+
+"It shall be _broken!_" said Raeburn to himself with a sudden fierce
+concentration of will. "So much I will claim--and enforce."
+
+But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence. He gathered
+himself together with a long breath, and went his way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in
+this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The
+moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane
+and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that
+they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like
+avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates crime"
+left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole
+rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had suffered
+all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he,
+more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was
+natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on
+Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and
+limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and
+responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.
+
+But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line
+between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life
+and action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers
+destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no
+difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the
+circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to
+be a murderer, no employer's interest, no landlord's desire for
+vengeance, would have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as
+he emphatically did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind
+more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would
+have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and
+compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere
+with a duty to justice and society.
+
+Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and
+compunctions.
+
+Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was
+conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of
+trouble of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment.
+Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal
+humility, and interfused with all--determining all--elements of
+judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which
+he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance
+and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the
+whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a
+strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed
+it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and
+distorted; none the less, _reality_ wins the day. So Hallin read it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a
+bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with,
+and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings,
+committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either
+man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything
+outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of
+intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a
+tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of
+anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.
+
+The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and
+jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after
+Easter--without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in
+village and county. And when the reason was known--that it was because
+Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that
+until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or
+reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there
+was curiously little sympathy with Marcella. Most of her own class
+thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss
+Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance
+anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive
+English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the
+bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.
+
+"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said
+old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his
+open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside.
+"_Not_ what I'd call lover-y. She don't want to run in harness, she
+don't, no sooner than, she need. She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."
+
+"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife, with her gentle
+sigh, "to hear summat o' that new straw-plaitin' she talk about. But
+nary a word. They do say as it's give up althegither."
+
+"No, she's took up wi' nursin' Minta Hurd--wonderful took up," said
+another woman. "They do say as Ann Mullins can't abear her. When she's
+there nobody can open their mouth. When that kind o' thing happens in
+the fambly it's bad enoof without havin' a lady trailin' about you all
+day long, so that you have to be mindin' yersel', an' thinkin' about
+givin' her a cheer, an' the like."
+
+One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella,
+coming from the Hurds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going
+home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.
+
+Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her
+relations, mainly, to do her justice, from fear lest she might somehow
+hurt or offend them. She had been to see Charlie Dynes's mother, but she
+had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary
+Harden to the keeper's widow.
+
+Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella
+came up with her.
+
+"Oh, she's _puddlin'_ along," she said in answer to Marcella's inquiry,
+using a word very familiar in the village. "She'll not do herself a
+mischief while there's Nurse Ellen an' me to watch her like a pair o'
+cats. She's dreadful upset, is Isabella--shouldn't ha' thought it of
+her. That fust day"--a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face--"no, I'm
+not a-goin' to think about that fust day, I'm not, 'tain't a ha'porth o'
+good," she added resolutely; "but she was all right when they'd let her
+get 'im 'ome, and wash an' settle 'im, an' put 'im comfortable like in
+his coffin. He wor a big man, miss, when he wor laid out! Searle, as
+made the coffin, told her as ee 'adn't made one such an extry size since
+old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen year ago. Ee'd soon a done for
+Jim Hurd if it 'ad been fists o' both sides. But guns is things as yer
+can't reckon on.".
+
+"Why didn't he let Hurd alone," said Marcella, sadly, "and prosecute him
+next day? It's attacking men when their blood is up that brings these
+awful hings about."
+
+"Wal, I don't see that," said Mrs. Jellison, pugnaciously; "he wor paid
+to do 't--an' he had the law on his side. 'Ow 's she?" she said,
+lowering her voice and jerking her thumb in the direction of the Hurds'
+cottage.
+
+"She's very ill," replied Marcella, with a contraction of the brow.
+"Dr. Clarke says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't."
+
+"They're a-goin' to try 'im Thursday?" said Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' Muster Wharton be a-goin' to defend 'im. Muster Wharton may be
+cliver, ee may--they do say as ee can see the grass growin', ee's that
+knowin'--but ee'll not get Jim Hurd off; there's nobody in the village
+as b'lieves for a moment as 'ow he will. They'll best 'im. Lor' bless
+yer, they'll best 'im. I was a-sayin' it to Isabella this
+afternoon--ee'll not save 'is neck, don't you be afeared."
+
+Marcella drew herself up with a shiver of repulsion.
+
+"Will it mend your daughter's grief to see another woman's heart broken?
+Don't you suppose it might bring her some comfort, Mrs. Jellison, if she
+were to try and forgive that poor wretch? She might remember that her
+husband gave him provocation, and that anyway, if his life is spared,
+his punishment and their misery will be heavy enough!"
+
+"Oh, lor' no!" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly. "She don't want to be
+forgivin' of 'im. Mr. Harden ee come talkin' to 'er, but she isn't one
+o' that sort, isn't Isabella. I'm sartin sure she'll be better in
+'erself when they've put 'im out o' the way. It makes her all ov a fever
+to think of Muster Wharton gettin' 'im off. _I_ don't bear Jim Hurd no
+pertickler malice. Isabella may talk herself black i' the face, but she
+and Johnnie'll have to come 'ome and live along o' me, whatever she may
+say. She can't stay in that cottage, cos they'll be wantin' it for
+another keeper. Lord Maxwell ee's givin' her a fine pension, my word ee
+is! an' says ee'll look after Johnnie. And what with my bit
+airnins--we'll do, yer know, miss--we'll do!"
+
+The old woman looked up with a nod, her green eyes sparkling with the
+queer inhuman light that belonged to them.
+
+Marcella could not bring herself to say good-night to her, and was
+hurrying on without a word, when Mrs. Jellison stopped her.
+
+"An' 'ow about that straw-plaitin', miss?" she said slyly.
+
+"I have had to put it on one side for a bit," said Marcella, coldly,
+hating the woman's society. "I have had my hands full and Lady
+Winterbourne has been away, but we shall, of course, take it up again
+later."
+
+She walked away quickly, and Mrs. Jellison hobbled after her, grinning
+to herself every now and then as she caught the straight, tall figure
+against the red evening sky.
+
+"I'll go in ter town termorrer," she thought, "an' have a crack wi'
+Jimmy Gedge; _ee_ needn't be afeard for 'is livin'. An' them great fules
+as ha' bin runnin' in a string arter 'er, an' cacklin' about their
+eighteen-pence a score, as I've told 'em times, I'll eat my apron the
+fust week as iver they get it. I don't hold wi' ladies--no, nor passons
+neither--not when it comes to meddlin' wi' your wittles, an' dictatin'
+to yer about forgivin' them as ha' got the better ov yer. That young
+lady there, what do she matter? That sort's allus gaddin' about? What'll
+she keer about us when she's got 'er fine husband? Here o' Saturday,
+gone o' Monday--that's what she is. Now Jimmy Gedge, yer kin allus count
+on '_im._ Thirty-six year ee ha' set there in that 'ere shop, and I
+guess ee'll set there till they call 'im ter kingdom come. Be's a
+cheatin', sweatin', greedy old skinflint is Jimmy Gedge; but when yer
+wants 'im yer _kin_ find 'im."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella hurried home, she was expecting a letter from Wharton, the
+third within a week. She had not set eyes on him since they had met that
+first morning in the drive, and it was plain to her that he was as
+unwilling as she was that there should be any meeting between them.
+Since the moment of his taking up the case, in spite of the pressure of
+innumerable engagements, he had found time to send her, almost daily,
+sheets covered with his small even writing, in which every detail and
+prospect of the legal situation, so far as it concerned James Hurd, were
+noted and criticised with a shrewdness and fulness which never wavered,
+and never lost for a moment the professional note.
+
+"Dear Miss Boyce"--the letters began--leading up to a "Yours
+faithfully," which Marcella read as carefully as the rest. Often, as she
+turned them over, she asked herself whether that scene in the library
+had not been a mere delusion of the brain, whether the man whose wild
+words and act had burnt themselves into her life could possibly be
+writing her these letters, in this key, without a reference, without an
+allusion. Every day, as she opened them, she looked them through quietly
+with a shaking pulse; every day she found herself proudly able to hand
+them on to her mother, with the satisfaction of one who has nothing to
+conceal, whatever the rest of the world may suspect. He was certainly
+doing his best to replace their friendship on that level of high
+comradeship in ideas and causes which, as she told herself, it had once
+occupied. His own wanton aggression and her weakness had toppled it down
+thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know
+him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He
+assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more
+be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!
+
+Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one
+long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted
+none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which
+she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
+Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and
+consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony,
+peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with
+the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse
+her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and
+body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to
+this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity
+in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards
+all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and
+sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and
+gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all
+comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when
+the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken
+his neck--and buried him"--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid
+pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in
+prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on
+Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they
+brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always
+thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings
+paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of
+a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a
+voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous
+things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of
+instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her
+to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would
+like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin'
+capital" for him; but she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he
+didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him;
+the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one
+can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming
+again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his
+chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a
+kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still
+survived. But it made _her_ life faint within her to talk of the
+murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's
+realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.
+When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was
+locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the
+bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this
+awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she
+left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once,
+and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann
+Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free
+heaven.
+
+As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the doctor
+said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an
+infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but
+always patient, always struggling to say his painful "thank you" when
+she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell
+Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and
+understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided
+from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his
+state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was
+strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.
+
+After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the
+February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole
+upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the
+swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and
+out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face
+kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.
+More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved
+upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its
+significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.
+Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion
+and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of
+all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid
+their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease;
+she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of
+soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the
+spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and
+tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or God? She would hardly let
+herself think of Aldous--though she _must_ think of him by-and-by! He
+and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in
+her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day,
+stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous
+would not help her--or not with any help worth having--in consoling this
+misery--binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a
+crime against him to confess--but she felt herself his superior none the
+less. If he cast her off--why then surely they would be quits, quits for
+good and all.
+
+As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled
+cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.
+
+Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and
+her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door
+William touched his cap to her.
+
+"Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss."
+
+She stopped sharply.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?"
+
+"In the drawing-room, miss."
+
+She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.
+Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent air
+Marcella knew so well.
+
+When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands,
+then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business
+errand and has no time to waste.
+
+"I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of spare
+hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going. You
+understand that the case comes on at the assizes next Thursday?"
+
+Marcella assented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the
+fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made
+Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her--but it was
+the only sign.
+
+"I should like to warn you," he said gravely, "that I entertain no hope
+whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best, but the verdict
+will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure to take a
+severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I believe it
+to be extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the judge,
+according to what I hear, will probably be against us. The prosecution
+have got together extremely strong evidence--as to Hurd's long
+connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness--as to his
+repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends
+were interrupted--and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and
+Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it."
+
+He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition
+and at some length; then he paused.
+
+"This being so," he resumed, "the question is, what can be done? There
+must be a petition. Amongst my own party I shall be, of course, able to
+do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without some at least
+of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one word--do you
+imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell to sign?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.
+
+"I will try," she said at last, with deliberation.
+
+"Then"--he took up his gloves--"there may be a chance for us. If you
+cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can
+be secured, others will easily follow. Their names--especially under all
+the circumstances--will carry a peculiar weight. I may say everything,
+in the first instance--the weight, the first effect of the
+petition--depends on them. Well, then, I leave it in your hands. No time
+should be lost after the sentence. As to the grounds of our plea, I
+shall, of course, lay them down in court to the best of my ability."
+
+"I shall be there," she interrupted.
+
+He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no
+comment.
+
+"Well, then," he resumed after a pause, "I need say no more for the
+present. How is the wife?"
+
+She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment
+passed between them.
+
+"And your election?" said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile
+eyes, as he got up to take leave.
+
+"To-morrow!" He threw up his hands with a little gesture of impatience.
+"That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the way, whatever
+happens. I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can carry me.
+Good-bye, Miss Boyce."
+
+Marcella went slowly upstairs. The scene which had just passed was
+unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering. Then the sound of the
+front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature. The first
+sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness. The next--her mind
+threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, "Can I, by any
+means, get my way with Aldous?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+"And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!" The deep-pitched words fell
+slowly on Marcella's ears, as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of
+the Widrington Assize Court. Women were sobbing beside and behind her.
+Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon against her sister-in-law,
+her face buried in Ann's black shawl. For an instant after Hurd's death
+sentence had been spoken Marcella's nerves ceased to throb--the long
+exhaustion of feeling stopped. The harsh light and shade of the ill-lit
+room; the gas-lamps in front of the judge, blanching the ranged faces of
+the jury; the long table of reporters below, some writing, but most
+looking intently towards the dock; the figure of Wharton opposite, in
+his barrister's gown and wig--that face of his, so small, nervous,
+delicate--the frowning eyebrows a dark bar under the white of the
+wig--his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon the judge; the heads and
+attitudes of the condemned men, especially the form of a fair-haired
+youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who stood a little in
+front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his dwarf's
+stature--these things Marcella saw indeed; for years after she could
+have described them point by point; but for some seconds or minutes her
+eyes stared at them without conscious reaction of the mind on the
+immediate spectacle.
+
+In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting
+there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the
+stream of impressions and images. The crushing accumulation of hostile
+evidence--witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning
+weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence--Wharton's irritation
+under it--the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his
+cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the
+personal success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical
+accomplishment of the manner, as one wrestling before his
+equals--nothing left here of the garrulous vigour and brutality of the
+labourers' meeting!--the masterly use of all that could avail, the few
+quiet words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by
+implication to the larger ethical sense of the community,--all this she
+thought of with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous
+voice rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity
+were alike weary; the brain asserted itself.
+
+The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and
+during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been
+largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the
+gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for
+East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer,
+sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only
+Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's
+murderer.
+
+On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh
+coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up
+sternly--"I cannot conceive why men and women--women especially--should
+come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but if I hear another
+laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose whole conscious nature
+was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw Aldous flush and shrink
+as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the court, she caught the
+eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county magistrate. At the
+judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where she and Aldous sat;
+then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly looked away again. She
+perfectly--passionately--understood that Brookshire was very sorry for
+Aldous Raeburn that day.
+
+The death sentences--three in number--were over. The judge was a very
+ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries with
+it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on voice
+and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could be
+felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women
+broke from the gallery.
+
+"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed, amid stifled
+sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly alive to
+everything around it.
+
+The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly
+pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about
+face towards a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed
+out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, stopped an
+instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery.
+Hurd also turned irresolutely.
+
+"Look!" exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside
+her, "he's goin'."
+
+Marcella bent forward. She, rather than the wife, caught the last look
+on his large dwarf's face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under
+the gas.
+
+Aldous touched her softly on the arm.
+
+"Yes," she said quickly, "yes, we must get her out. Ann, can you lift
+her?"
+
+Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman: Ann Mullins held her on
+the other. Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her
+long black cloak. The gallery made way for them; every one looked and
+whispered till they had passed. Below, at the foot of the stairs, they
+found themselves in a passage crowded with people--lawyers, witnesses,
+officials, mixed with the populace. Again a road was opened for Aldous
+and his charges.
+
+"This way, Mr. Raeburn," said a policeman, with alacrity. "Stand back,
+please! Is your carriage there, sir?"
+
+"Let Ann Mullins take her--put them into the cab--I want to speak to Mr.
+Wharton," said Marcella in Aldous's ear.
+
+"Get me a cab at once," he said to the policeman, "and tell my carriage
+to wait."
+
+"Miss Boyce!"
+
+Marcella turned hastily and saw Wharton beside her. Aldous also saw
+him, and the two men interchanged a few words.
+
+"There is a private room close by," said Wharton, "I am to take you
+there, and Mr. Raeburn will join us at once."
+
+He led her along a corridor, and opened a door to the left. They entered
+a small dingy room, looking through a begrimed window on a courtyard.
+The gas was lit, and the table was strewn with papers.
+
+"Never, never more beautiful!" flashed through Wharton's mind, "with
+that knit, strenuous brow--that tragic scorn for a base world--that
+royal gait--"
+
+Aloud he said:
+
+"I have done my best privately among the people I can get at, and I
+thought, before I go up to town to-night--you know Parliament meets on
+Monday?--I would show you what I had been able to do, and ask you to
+take charge of a copy of the petition." He pointed to a long envelope
+lying on the table. "I have drafted it myself--I think it puts all the
+points we can possibly urge--but as to the names--"
+
+He took out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
+
+"It won't do," he said, looking down at it, and shaking his head. "As I
+said to you, it is so far political merely. There is a very strong
+Liberal and Radical feeling getting up about the case. But that won't
+carry us far. This petition with these names is a demonstration against
+game preserving and keepers' tyranny. What we want is the co-operation
+of a _neighbourhood_, especially of its leading citizens. However, I
+explained all this to you--there is no need to discuss it. Will you look
+at the list?"
+
+Still holding it, he ran his finger over it, commenting here and there.
+She stood beside him; the sleeve of his gown brushed her black cloak;
+and under his perfect composure there beat a wild exultation in his
+power--without any apology, any forgiveness--to hold her there, alone
+with him, listening--her proud head stooped to his--her eye following
+his with this effort of anxious attention.
+
+She made a few hurried remarks on the names, but her knowledge of the
+county was naturally not very serviceable. He folded up the paper and
+put it back.
+
+"I think we understand," he said. "You will do what you can in the only
+quarter"--he spoke slowly--"that can really aid, and you will
+communicate with me at the House of Commons? I shall do what I can, of
+course, when the moment comes, in Parliament, and meanwhile I shall
+start the matter in the Press--our best hope. The Radical papers are
+already taking it up."
+
+There was a sound of steps in the passage outside. A policeman opened
+the door, and Aldous Raeburn entered. His quick look ran over the two
+figures standing beside the table.
+
+"I had some difficulty in finding a cab," he explained, "and we had to
+get some brandy; but she came round, and we got her off. I sent one of
+our men with her. The carriage is here."
+
+He spoke--to Marcella--with some formality. He was very pale, but there
+was both authority and tension in his bearing.
+
+"I have been consulting with Miss Boyce," said Wharton, with equal
+distance of manner, "as to the petition we are sending up to the Home
+Office."
+
+Aldous made no reply.
+
+"One word, Miss Boyce,"--Wharton quietly turned to her. "May I ask you
+to read the petition carefully, before you attempt to do anything with
+it? It lays stress on the _only_ doubt that can reasonably be felt after
+the evidence, and after the judge's summing up. That particular doubt I
+hold to be entirely untouched by the trial; but it requires careful
+stating--the issues may easily be confused."
+
+"Will you come?" said Aldous to Marcella. What she chose to think the
+forced patience of his tone exasperated her.
+
+"I will do everything I can," she said in a low, distinct voice to
+Wharton. "Good-bye."
+
+She held out her hand. To both the moment was one of infinite meaning;
+to her, in her high spiritual excitement, a sacrament of pardon and
+gratitude--expressed once for all--by this touch--in Aldous Raeburn's
+presence.
+
+The two men nodded to each other. Wharton was already busy, putting his
+papers together.
+
+"We shall meet next week, I suppose, in the House?" said Wharton,
+casually. "Good-night."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Will you take me to the Court?" said Marcella to Aldous, directly the
+door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping crowd that
+almost filled the little market-place of Widrington, the horses moved
+off. "I told mamma, that, if I did not come home, I should be with you,
+and that I should ask you to send me back from the Court to-night."
+
+She still held the packet Wharton had given her in her hand. As though
+for air, she had thrown back the black gauze veil she had worn all
+through the trial, and, as they passed through the lights of the town,
+Aldous could see in her face the signs--the plain, startling signs--of
+the effect of these weeks upon her. Pale, exhausted, yet showing in
+every movement the nervous excitement which was driving her on--his
+heart sank as he looked at her--foreseeing what was to come.
+
+As soon as the main street had been left behind, he put his head out of
+the window, and gave the coachman, who had been told to go to Mellor,
+the new order.
+
+"Will you mind if I don't talk?" said Marcella, when he was again beside
+her. "I think I am tired out, but I might rest now a little. When we get
+to the Court, will you ask Miss Raeburn to let me have some food in her
+sitting-room? Then, at nine o'clock or so, may I come down and see Lord
+Maxwell and you--together?"
+
+What she said, and the manner in which she said it, could only add to
+his uneasiness; but he assented, put a cushion behind her, wrapped the
+rugs round her, and then sat silent, train after train of close and
+anxious thought passing through his mind as they rolled along the dark
+roads.
+
+When they arrived at Maxwell Court, the sound of the carriage brought
+Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn at once into the hall.
+
+Aldous went forward in front of Marcella. "I have brought Marcella," he
+said hastily to his aunt. "Will you take her upstairs to your
+sitting-room, and let her have some food and rest? She is not fit for
+the exertion of dinner, but she wishes to speak to my grandfather
+afterwards."
+
+Lord Maxwell had already hurried to meet the black-veiled figure
+standing proudly in the dim light of the outer hall.
+
+"My dear! my dear!" he said, drawing her arm within his, and patting her
+hand in fatherly fashion. "How worn-out you look!--Yes,
+certainly--Agneta, take her up and let her rest--And you wish to speak
+to me afterwards? Of course, my dear, of course--at any time."
+
+Miss Raeburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of Aldous's
+manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest upstairs
+straightway, put her on the sofa in a cheerful sitting-room with a
+bright fire, and then, shrewdly guessing that she herself could not
+possibly be a congenial companion to the girl at such a moment, whatever
+might have happened or might be going to happen, she looked at her
+watch, said that she must go down to dinner, and promptly left her to
+the charge of a kind elderly maid, who was to do and get for her
+whatever she would.
+
+Marcella made herself swallow some food and wine. Then she said that she
+wished to be alone and rest for an hour, and would come downstairs at
+nine o'clock. The maid, shocked by her pallor, was loth to leave her,
+but Marcella insisted.
+
+When she was left alone she drew herself up to the fire and tried hard
+to get warm, as she had tried to eat. When in this way a portion of
+physical ease and strength had come back to her, she took out the
+petition from its envelope and read it carefully. As she did so her lip
+relaxed, her eye recovered something of its brightness. All the points
+that had occurred to her confusedly, amateurishly, throughout the day,
+were here thrown into luminous and admirable form. She had listened to
+them indeed, as urged by Wharton in his concluding speech to the jury,
+but it had not, alas! seemed so marvellous to her then, as it did now,
+that, _after_ such a plea, the judge should have summed up as he did.
+
+When she had finished it and had sat thinking awhile over the declining
+fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss Raeburn's
+desk, and wrote on it:
+
+"Will you read this--and Lord Maxwell--before I come down? I forgot that
+you had not seen it.--M."
+
+A ring at the bell brought the maid.
+
+"Will you please get this taken to Mr. Raeburn? And then, don't disturb
+me again for half an hour."
+
+And for that time she lay in Miss Raeburn's favourite chair, outwardly
+at rest. Inwardly she was ranging all her arguments, marshalling all her
+forces.
+
+When the chiming clock in the great hall below struck nine, she got up
+and put the lamp for a moment on the mantelpiece, which held a mirror.
+She had already bathed her face and smoothed her hair. But she looked at
+herself again with attention, drew down the thick front waves of hair a
+little lower on the white brow, as she liked to have them, and once
+more straightened the collar and cuffs which were the only relief to her
+plain black dress.
+
+The house as she stepped out into it seemed very still. Perfumed breaths
+of flowers and pot-pourri ascended from the hall. The pictures along the
+walls as she passed were those same Caroline and early Georgian beauties
+that had so flashingly suggested her own future rule in this domain on
+the day when Aldous proposed to her.
+
+She felt suddenly very shrinking and lonely as she went downstairs. The
+ticking of a large clock somewhere--the short, screaming note of Miss
+Raeburn's parrot in one of the ground-floor rooms--these sounds and the
+beating of her own heart seemed to have the vast house to themselves.
+
+No!--that was a door opening--Aldous coming to fetch her. She drew a
+childish breath of comfort.
+
+He sprang up the stairs, two or three steps at a time, as he saw her
+coming.
+
+"Are you rested--were they good to you? Oh! my precious one!--how pale
+you are still! Will you come and see my--grandfather now? He is quite
+ready."
+
+She let him lead her in. Lord Maxwell was standing by his writing-table,
+leaning over the petition which was open before him--one hand upon it.
+At sight of her he lifted his white head. His fine aquiline face was
+grave and disturbed. But nothing could have been kinder or more courtly
+than his manner as he came towards her.
+
+"Sit down in that chair. Aldous, make her comfortable. Poor child, how
+tired she looks! I hear you wished to speak to me on this most unhappy,
+most miserable business."
+
+Marcella, who was sitting erect on the edge of the chair into which
+Aldous had put her, lifted her eyes with a sudden confidence. She had
+always liked Lord Maxwell.
+
+"Yes," she said, struggling to keep down eagerness and emotion. "Yes, I
+came to bring you this petition, which is to be sent up to the Home
+Secretary on behalf of Jim Hurd, and--and--to _beg_ of you and Aldous to
+sign it, if in any way you can. I know it will be difficult, but I
+thought I might--I might be able to suggest something to you--to
+convince you--as I have known these people so well--and it is very
+important to have your signatures."
+
+How crude it sounded--how mechanical! She felt that she had not yet
+command of herself. The strange place, the stately room, the
+consciousness of Aldous behind her--Aldous, who should have been on her
+side and was not--all combined to intimidate her.
+
+Lord Maxwell's concern was evident. In the first place, he was
+painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker. Why, what
+had Aldous been about? So thin! so frail and willowy in her black
+dress--monstrous!
+
+"My dear," he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly hand on her
+shoulder, "my dear, I wish I could make you understand how gladly I
+would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably could. I would
+do it for your sake and for your grandfather's sake. But--this is a
+matter of conscience, of public duty, both for Aldous and myself. You
+will not surely _wish_ even, that we should be governed in our relations
+to it by any private feeling or motive?"
+
+"No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about it--and I
+take such a different view from Aldous. He knows--everybody must
+know--that there is another side, another possible view from that which
+the judge took. You weren't in court to-day, were you, at all?"
+
+"No. But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great care,
+and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed
+everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of
+Mr. Wharton's speeches."
+
+"Aldous!"--her voice broke irrepressibly into another note--"I thought
+he would have let me speak to you first!--to-night!"
+
+Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.
+Aldous bent over her chair.
+
+"You remember," he said, "you sent down the petition. I thought that
+meant that we were to read and discuss it. I am very sorry."
+
+She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow. But already
+she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.
+
+"The whole point lies in this," she said, looking up: "_Can_ we believe
+Hurd's own story? There is no evidence to corroborate it. I grant
+that--the judge did not believe it--and there is the evidence of hatred.
+But is it not possible and conceivable all the same? He says that he did
+not go out with any thought whatever of killing Westall, but that when
+Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him,
+as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him.
+Surely, _surely_ that is conceivable? There _is_--there _must_ be a
+doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite
+different from other kinds and degrees of murder."
+
+Now she possessed herself. The gift of flowing persuasive speech which
+was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had
+been maturing, came to her call. She leant forward and took up the
+petition. One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and
+there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's life--presenting
+it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of
+emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the "tears of things." To
+her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole matter--so sordid, commonplace,
+brutal in Lord Maxwell's eyes!--had become a tragic poem, a thing of
+fear and pity, to which her whole being vibrated. And as she conceived
+it, so she reproduced it. Wharton's points were there indeed, but so
+were Hurd's poverty, Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a
+tyrant's insults, the miserable wife, the branded children--emphasised,
+all of them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the
+girl's voice.
+
+Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one
+knee crossed over the other. Aldous still hung over her chair. Neither
+interrupted her. Once the eyes of the two men met over her head--a
+distressed, significant look. Aldous heard all she said, but what
+absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close
+below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that
+moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed.
+
+When her voice broke--when she had said all she could think of--she
+remained looking imploringly at Lord Maxwell.
+
+He was silent a little; then he stooped forward and took her hand.
+
+"You have spoken," he said with great feeling, "most nobly--most
+well--like a good woman, with a true compassionate heart. But all these
+things you have said are not new to me, my dear child. Aldous warned me
+of this petition--he has pressed upon me, still more I am sure upon
+himself, all that he conceived to be your view of the case--the view of
+those who are now moving in the matter. But with the best will in the
+world I cannot, and I believe that he cannot--though he must speak for
+himself--I cannot take that view. In my belief Hurd's act was murder,
+and deserves the penalty of murder. I have paid some attention to these
+things. I was a practising barrister in my youth, and later I was for
+two years Home Secretary. I will explain to you my grounds very
+shortly."
+
+And, bending forward, he gave the reasons for his judgment of the case
+as carefully and as lucidly as though he were stating them to a
+fellow-expert, and not to an agitated girl of twenty-one. Both in words
+and manner there was an implied tribute, not only to Marcella, but
+perhaps to that altered position of the woman in our moving world which
+affects so many things and persons in unexpected ways.
+
+Marcella listened, restlessly. She had drawn her hand away, and was
+twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. The flush that had sprung
+up while she was talking had died away. She grew whiter and whiter. When
+Lord Maxwell ceased, she said quickly, and as he thought unreasonably--
+
+"So you will not sign?"
+
+"No," he replied firmly, "I cannot sign. Holding the conviction about
+the matter I do, I should be giving my name to statements I do not
+believe; and in order to give myself the pleasure of pleasing you, and
+of indulging the pity that every man must feel for every murderer's wife
+and children, I should be not only committing a public wrong, but I
+should be doing what I could to lessen the safety and security of one
+whole class of my servants--men who give me honourable service--and two
+of whom have been so cruelly, so wantonly hurried before their Maker!"
+
+His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the
+matter. Marcella shivered.
+
+"Then," she said slowly, "Hurd will be executed."
+
+Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.
+
+"Let me tell you," he said, "that that does not follow at all. There is
+_some_ importance in signatures--or rather in the local movement that
+the signatures imply. It enables a case to be reopened, which, in any
+event, this case is sure to be. But any Home Secretary who could decide
+a murder case on any other grounds whatever than those of law and his
+own conscience would not deserve his place a day--an hour! Believe me,
+you mistake the whole situation."
+
+He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and
+authority. Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to
+throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice,
+which was in itself an agony.
+
+"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.
+
+"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly. "Won't you try and believe
+what it costs me to refuse?"
+
+It was a heavy blow to her. Amply as she had been prepared for it, there
+had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end
+she would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before
+that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly
+conscious. Yet it had not availed her here--not even with the man who
+loved her.
+
+Lord Maxwell looked at the two--the man's face of suffering, the girl's
+struggling breath.
+
+"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave you a minute. Do
+make Marcella rest--get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little.
+Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above all, persuade her
+that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a
+matter of this kind she must leave us to do--as before God!--what we
+think right."
+
+He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity--nay,
+a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the room.
+
+Marcella sprang up.
+
+"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled voice. "I will go
+upstairs."
+
+"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me, if it is
+impossible for you to be generous?"
+
+"Just!" she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him
+back from her. "_You_ can talk of justice!"
+
+He tried to speak, stammered, and failed. That strange paralysis of the
+will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must
+either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never
+loved her more passionately--but as he stood there looking at her,
+something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable
+dawned.
+
+"_You_," she said again, walking stormily to and fro, and catching at
+her breath--"_You_, in this house, with this life--to talk of
+justice--the justice that comes of slaying a man like Hurd! And I must
+go back to that cottage, to that woman, and tell her there is _no_
+hope--none! Because _you_ must follow your conscience--you who have
+everything! Oh! I would not have your conscience--I wish you a
+heart--rather! Don't come to me, please! Oh! I must think how it can be.
+Things cannot go on so. I should kill myself, and make you miserable.
+But now I must go to _her_--to the _poor_--to those whom I _love_, whom
+I carry in my heart!"
+
+She broke off sobbing. He saw her, in her wild excitement, look round
+the splendid room as though she would wither it to ruin with one fiery,
+accusing glance.
+
+"You are very scornful of wealth," he said, catching her wrists, "but
+one thing you have no right to scorn!--the man who has given you his
+inmost heart--and now only asks you to believe in this, that he is not
+the cruel hypocrite you are determined to make him!"
+
+His face quivered in every feature. She was checked a moment--checked by
+the moral compulsion of his tone and manner, as well as by his words.
+But again she tore herself away.
+
+"_Please_ go and order the carriage," she said. "I cannot bear any more.
+I _must_ go home and rest. Some day I will ask your pardon--oh! for
+this--and--and--" she was almost choked again--"other things. But now I
+must go away. There is some one who will help me. I must not forget
+that!"
+
+The reckless words, the inflection, turned Aldous to stone.
+Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect--their eyes met. Then he
+went up to the bell and rang it.
+
+"The brougham at once, for Miss Boyce. Will you have a maid to go with
+you?" he asked, motioning the servant to stay till Miss Boyce had given
+her answer.
+
+"No, thank you. I must go and put on my things. Will you explain to Miss
+Raeburn?"
+
+The footman opened the door for her. She went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+"But this is unbearable!" said Aldous. "Do you mean to say that she is
+at home and that she will not see me?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed
+humiliation of the man before her.
+
+"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly. "I remonstrated with
+Marcella, but I could do nothing. I think, if you are wise, you will not
+for the present attempt to see her."
+
+Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor. After a
+few moments' silence he looked up again.
+
+"And she gave you no message for me?"
+
+"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly. "Only that she could not bear to see
+anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter was still
+undecided."
+
+Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was arrested by
+a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of
+which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some black
+silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair;
+the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter. She had
+been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled before him. The door
+into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.
+
+He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the
+writing. Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside
+her.
+
+"Will you tell me," he said steadily--"I think you will admit I have a
+right to know--is Marcella in constant correspondence now with Henry
+Wharton?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.
+
+"I believe so," she quickly replied. "So far as I can judge, he writes
+to her almost every other day."
+
+"Does she show you his letters?"
+
+"Very often. They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews and
+efforts on Hurd's behalf."
+
+"Would you not say," he asked, after another pause, raising his clear
+grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December Marcella's
+whole views and thoughts have been largely--perhaps vitally--influenced
+by this man?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind--had, indeed, often
+marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before. Now
+that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them
+with common sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both
+parties. The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and
+oppressed the mother. For herself she asked to see things in a dry
+light. Yet she knew well that the moment was critical. Her feeling was
+more mixed than it had been. On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's
+side--with qualifications and impatiences, however.
+
+She took up her embroidery again before she answered him. In her
+opinion the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the
+diplomatist.
+
+"Yes, certainly," she said at last. "He has done a great deal to form
+her opinions. He has made her both read and think on all those subjects
+she has so long been fond of talking about."
+
+She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with him.
+
+"Has there been nothing else than that in it?" said Aldous, in an odd
+voice.
+
+Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions. She looked at him straight, her slight,
+energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind
+her.
+
+"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real truth. I _think_
+there is nothing else. But let me tell you what more I think."
+
+Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant. In his pity and liking for
+her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.
+
+"If you would," he entreated.
+
+"Leave Marcella quite alone--for the present. She is not herself--not
+normal, in any way. Nor will she be till this dreadful thing is over.
+But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a little,
+_then_"--her thin voice expressed all the emphasis it could--"_then_
+assert yourself! Ask her that question you have asked me--and get your
+answer."
+
+He understood. Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she
+had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past.
+But there was a proud and sensitive instinct in him which both told him
+that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.
+
+"You have come from London to-day?" said Mrs. Boyce, changing the
+subject. All intimate and personal conversation was distasteful to her,
+and she admitted few responsibilities. Her daughter hardly counted among
+them.
+
+"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said, trying to smile.
+"I must get back to-night."
+
+"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs. Boyce.
+
+He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and trouble I
+am, he must be spared. Indeed, since the night of the trial, I feel as
+though I had been of very little use to any human being."
+
+He spoke simply, but every word touched her. What an inconceivable
+entanglement the whole thing was! Yet she was no longer merely
+contemptuous of it.
+
+"Look!" she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the ground beside
+the chair which held the envelope; "she is already making the mourning
+for the children. I can see she despairs."
+
+He made a sound of horror.
+
+"Can you do nothing?" he cried reproachfully. "To think of her dwelling
+upon this--nothing but this, day and night--and I, banished and
+powerless!"
+
+He buried his head in his hands.
+
+"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately. Then, after a
+pause, "You do not imagine there is any chance of success for her?"
+
+He looked up and shook his head.
+
+"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know. Wharton is managing it
+with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the House. But I
+happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I certainly
+gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm. There
+may be some delay. The new ministry will not kiss hands till Saturday.
+But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home
+Secretary.--By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my seeing
+Judge Cartwright," he added hastily--almost imploringly. "I could not
+bear that she should suppose--"
+
+Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have
+imagined such a man in such a plight.
+
+"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from me," he added
+slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to
+let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty--without
+a word?"
+
+"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.
+"Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton, in his letter
+this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which
+were important to him. She specially wished you to be thanked for it."
+
+His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was
+genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget
+that the world yields itself only to the "violent."
+
+He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from,
+her window, watched him go.
+
+"How _could_ she see him?" she asked herself passionately, both then
+and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days. His turn
+would come, and it should be amply given him. But _now_ the very thought
+of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears.
+The time for entreaty--for argument--was gone by, so far as he was
+concerned. He might have been her champion, and would not. She threw
+herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man
+who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her
+lover's. It had become to her a _fight_--with society, with the law,
+with Aldous--in which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of
+the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter
+offence to her.
+
+How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the
+newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line;
+she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters;
+she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been
+started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd
+and her children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector,
+because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with
+her father were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of
+alarm as to how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but
+that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was,
+notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon
+discovered, that he really desired. During six months he had taken it
+for granted; so had the county. He, of all men, could not afford to be
+made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of
+the matter. He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was
+not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had
+had a good deal to do with it. So that between him and his daughter
+there were now constant sparrings--sparrings which degraded Marcella in
+her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from
+home.
+
+The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course,
+was in Minta Hurd's kitchen. Side by side with that piteous plaintive
+misery, her own fierceness dwindled. She would sit with little Willie on
+her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and
+crying silently. She never suspected that her presence was often a
+burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the
+wife herself. While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs.
+Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and
+simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.
+
+The last week arrived. Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and
+despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause
+became more desperate. On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man,
+who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope.
+Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament. Friday was
+the day fixed for the execution.
+
+The question in Parliament came on late. The Home Secretary's answer,
+though not final in form, was final in substance. Wharton went out
+immediately and wrote to Marcella. "She will not sleep if I telegraph
+to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for
+physical detail, which had in it something of the woman. But, knowing
+that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of
+eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn
+the news first from the papers.
+
+Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an
+oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might
+reach her any hour.
+
+She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the
+house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind
+her. William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of
+understanding. Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out
+of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.
+
+"All over. The Home Secretary's official refusal to interfere with
+sentence sent to Widrington to-day. Accept my sorrow and sympathy."
+
+She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically. Before her
+lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her father's
+big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied his ferrets
+in the winter nights. But to-day the spring worked in it, and breathed
+upon it. The young corn was already green in the furrows; the
+hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air,
+daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the
+flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the
+wide treeless basin.
+
+Human helplessness, human agony--set against the careless joy of
+nature--there is no new way of feeling these things. But not to have
+felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled
+Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full
+stature of our kind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Marcella, it is my strong wish--my command--that you do _not_ go out to
+the village to-night."
+
+"I must go, papa."
+
+It was Thursday night--the night before the Friday morning fixed for
+Hurd's execution. Dinner at Mellor was just over. Mr. Boyce, who was
+standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own
+inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter. She
+had not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black
+cloak and black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks.
+Mr. Boyce detested the garb.
+
+"You are making yourself _ridiculous_, Marcella. Pity for these wretched
+people is all very well, but you have no business to carry it to such a
+point that you--and we--become the talk, the laughing-stock of the
+county. And I should like to see you, too, pay some attention to Aldous
+Raeburn's feelings and wishes."
+
+The admonition, in her father's mouth, would almost have made her laugh,
+if she could have laughed at anything. But, instead, she only repeated:
+
+"I must go, I have explained to mamma."
+
+"Evelyn! why do you permit it?" cried Mr. Boyce, turning aggressively to
+his wife.
+
+"Marcella explained to me, as she truly said," replied Mrs. Boyce,
+looking up calmly. "It is not her habit to ask permission of any one."
+
+"Mamma," exclaimed the girl, in her deep voice, "you would not wish to
+stop me?"
+
+"No," said Mrs. Boyce, after a pause, "no. You have gone so far, I
+understand your wish to do this. Richard,"--she got up and went to
+him,--"don't excite yourself about it; shall I read to you, or play a
+game with you?"
+
+He looked at her, trembling with anger. But her quiet eye warned him
+that he had had threatenings of pain that afternoon. His anger sank into
+fear. He became once more irritable and abject.
+
+"Let her gang her gait," he said, throwing himself into a chair. "But I
+tell you I shall not put up with this kind of thing much longer,
+Marcella."
+
+"I shall not ask you, papa," she said steadily, as she moved towards the
+door. Mrs. Boyce paused where she stood, and looked after her daughter,
+struck by her words. Mr. Boyce simply took them as referring to the
+marriage which would emancipate her before long from any control of his,
+and fumed, without finding a reply.
+
+The maid-servant who, by Mrs. Boyce's orders, was to accompany Marcella
+to the village, was already at the front door. She carried a basket
+containing invalid food for little Willie, and a lighted lantern.
+
+It was a dark night and raining fast. Marcella was fastening up her
+tweed skirt in the hall, when she saw Mrs. Boyce hurry along the gallery
+above, and immediately afterwards her mother came across the hall to
+her.
+
+"You had better take the shawl, Marcella: it is cold and raw. If you are
+going to sit up most of the night you will want it."
+
+She put a wrap of her own across Marcella's arm.
+
+"Your father is quite right," she went on. "You have had one horrible
+experience to-day already--"
+
+"Don't, mamma!" exclaimed Marcella, interrupting her. Then suddenly she
+threw her arms round her mother.
+
+"Kiss me, mamma! please kiss me!"
+
+Mrs. Boyce kissed her gravely, and let herself even linger a moment in
+the girl's strong hold.
+
+"You are extraordinarily wilful," she said. "And it is so strange to me
+that you think you do any good. Are you sure even that she wants to have
+you?"
+
+Marcella's lip quivered. She could not speak, apparently. Waving her
+hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two
+disappeared into the blackness.
+
+"But _does_ it do any good?" Mrs. Boyce repeated to herself as she went
+back to the drawing-room. "_Sympathy!_ who was ever yet fed, warmed,
+comforted by _sympathy_? Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that
+the human being should want at such a moment--solitude. Why should we
+force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?"
+
+Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the
+warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this
+horror which was beneath them.
+
+At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the
+little maid.
+
+"Now, Ruth, you can go home. Run quick, it is so dark, Ruth!"
+
+"Yes, miss."
+
+The young country girl trembled. Miss Boyce's tragic passion in this
+matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she
+lived.
+
+"Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the
+poor,--and to punish the cruel!"
+
+"Yes, miss," said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry. The lantern she
+held flashed its light on Miss Boyce's white face and tall form. Till
+her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark eye, so
+wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.
+
+On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused. She heard voices inside--or
+rather the rector's voice reading.
+
+A thought of scorn rose in her heart. "How long will the poor endure
+this religion--this make-believe--which preaches patience, _patience_!
+when it ought to be urging war?"
+
+But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt. The rector looked up and
+made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade
+any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose
+makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and
+the reading went on.
+
+Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that
+afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for. He had
+bade them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a
+mattress had been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it.
+Her huddled form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed
+eyelids, thrown out against the dark oak of the settle, and the
+disordered mass of grizzled hair, made the centre of the cottage.
+
+Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough
+hand she held, her eyes red with weeping. Fronting them, beside a little
+table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his
+Testament in his hand, his slight boy's figure cast in sharp shadow on
+the cottage wall. He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light
+of the lamp from the wife's eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a
+chair to keep it from little Willie. Between mother and child sat Ann
+Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from
+time to time--a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children
+and much poverty--of whom Marcella was often impatient.
+
+"_And he said, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom. And
+He said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me
+in Paradise."_
+
+The rector's voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt insistently on each
+word, then paused. "_To-day_," whispered Mary, caressing Minta's hand,
+while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the
+Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."
+
+Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the
+cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and
+sent a start through Willie's wasted body. The reader resumed; but
+perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
+Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling leaven.
+
+Nevertheless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on
+every pang of the Passion, putting together every sacred and sublime
+word. For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held
+up the Man of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had
+come, his moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he
+accepted it with the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.
+
+"_And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they
+beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their breasts_."
+
+He closed the book, and bent forward, so as to bring his voice close to
+the wife's ear.
+
+"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your husband. He has
+passed through death--through cruel death; and where He has gone, we
+poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to Him. No sin, however
+black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His hand in the dark
+waters, if it be only repented,--thrown upon His Cross. Let us pray for
+your husband, let us implore the Lord's mercy this night--this
+hour!--upon his soul."
+
+A shudder of remembrance passed through Marcella. The rector knelt; Mrs.
+Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at
+intervals; Ann Mullins sobbed loudly; and Mary Harden wept as she
+prayed, lost in a mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there
+on the cottage floor--stretching hands of pity over the woman beside
+her, showing His marred side and brow.
+
+Marcella alone sat erect, her whole being one passionate protest against
+a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities of
+this too real earth on the shadowy head of one far-off Redeemer. "This
+very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort an accomplice of
+those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and killing, because they
+know of nothing better to do with the life they themselves have made
+outcast."
+
+And she hardened her heart.
+
+When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for
+some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the
+boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother
+and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager,
+concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she
+perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the
+rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of
+pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and
+moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better. The
+child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton
+hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little, all--with
+just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had
+fascinated Wharton. Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could
+have wept.
+
+At last the rector and his sister rose.
+
+"God be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; "God
+support you!"
+
+His voice trembled. Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Harden!" she cried with a sudden wail. "Mr. Harden!"
+
+Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with
+quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."
+
+The rector turned to Marcella.
+
+"You are staying the night with her?" he asked, under his breath.
+
+"Yes. Mrs. Mullins was up all last night. I offered to come to-night."
+
+"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did you see Hurd?"
+
+"For a very few minutes."
+
+"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?" he asked anxiously. "Is he
+penitent?"
+
+"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce humanness in her
+unfriendly eyes. "I promised him that when the child died, he should be
+buried respectably--not by the parish. And I told him I would always
+look after the little girls."
+
+The rector sighed. He moved away. Then unexpectedly he came back again.
+
+"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as not to be
+heard by any one else in the cottage. "You are taking a great
+responsibility here to-night. Let me implore you not to fill that poor
+woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her
+life. That _you_ feel bitterly, I know. Mary has explained to me--but
+ask yourself, I beg of you!--how is _she_ to be helped through her
+misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission
+to the will of God?"
+
+He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of
+his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.
+
+"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella, coldly. She
+felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which
+his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her. That
+hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell
+once for all.
+
+Mary did not venture to kiss her friend. They all went. Ann Mulling, who
+was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last. When she
+was going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the
+skirt, saying incoherent things.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her, "won't you
+let Ann go? I am going to spend the night here, and take care of you and
+Willie."
+
+Mrs. Hurd gave a painful start.
+
+"You're very good, miss," she said half-consciously, "very good, I'm
+sure. But she's his own flesh and blood is Ann--his own flesh and blood.
+Ann!"
+
+The two women clung together, the rough, ill-tempered sister-in-law
+muttering what soothing she could think of. When she was gone, Minta
+Hurd turned her face to the back of the settle and moaned, her hands
+clenched under her breast.
+
+Marcella went about her preparations for the night. "She is extremely
+weak," Dr. Clarke had said; "the heart in such a state she may die of
+syncope on very small provocation. If she is to spend the night in
+crying and exciting herself, it will go hard with her. Get her to sleep
+if you possibly can."
+
+And he had left a sleeping draught. Marcella resolved that she would
+persuade her to take it. "But I will wake her before eight o'clock," she
+thought. "No human being has the right to rob her of herself through
+that last hour."
+
+And tenderly she coaxed Minta to take the doctor's "medicine." Minta
+swallowed it submissively, asking no questions. But the act of taking it
+roused her for the time, and she would talk. She even got up and
+tottered across to Willie.
+
+"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he's got his animals--he don't think
+of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won't you think of your father?--you'll
+never have a father, Willie, not after to-night!"
+
+The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his haggard,
+dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the face,
+and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He
+looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not
+speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it
+struck her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and
+there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced
+Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had
+fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same
+as it had been for days; she reassured herself.
+
+And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching
+limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed
+the shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of
+the watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.
+
+Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself
+with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock
+showed that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she
+drew it upon her knee; but it lay unopened.
+
+A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes
+of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on
+her cloak.
+
+A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the
+chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside
+her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of
+ear, and imagined more.
+
+All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look
+round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn
+across one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the
+light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without
+at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door
+of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came
+out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on
+the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon
+him.
+
+She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something
+else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman's face!--the
+powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline features--the mad
+keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes looked in hungrily
+at the prostrate form on the settle--at the sleeping child. Another
+figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path. There was a slight
+scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the curtain close with a
+hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The woman who had
+looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was becoming more
+and more difficult to manage and to watch.
+
+Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a
+sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it
+haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.
+
+The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and
+struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more
+piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours passed, as all
+sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence
+settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to
+repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with
+shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife.
+"He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information
+which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant
+sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.
+"Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal
+_knows_--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us
+something as against the _nothing_ of death--and a man wastes them in
+sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily
+struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no
+husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may
+well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity!
+Oh, why are we here--why am _I_ here--to ache like this--to hate good
+people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to
+madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot
+forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"
+
+She sat over the fire, Willie's hand clasped in hers. He alone in this
+forlorn household _loved_ her. Mrs. Hurd and the other children feared
+and depended on her. This creature of thistle-down--this little thread
+and patch of humanity--felt no fear of her. It was as though his
+weakness divined through her harshness and unripeness those maternal and
+protecting powers with which her nature was in truth so richly dowered.
+He confided himself to her with no misgivings. He was at ease when she
+was there.
+
+Little piteous hand!--its touch was to her symbolic, imperative.
+
+Eight months had she been at Mellor? And that Marcella, who had been
+living and moving amid these woods and lanes all this time--that foolish
+girl, delighting in new grandeurs, and flattered by Aldous Raeburn's
+attentions--that hot, ambitious person who had meant to rule a county
+through a husband--what had become of her? Up to the night of Hurd's
+death sentence she had still existed in some sort, with her obligations,
+qualms, remorses. But since then--every day, every hour had been
+grinding, scorching her away--fashioning in flame and fever this new
+Marcella who sat here, looking impatiently into another life, which
+should know nothing of the bonds of the old.
+
+Ah, yes!--her _thought_ could distinguish between the act and the man,
+between the man and his class; but in her _feeling_ all was confounded.
+This awful growth of sympathy in her--strange irony!--had made all
+sympathy for Aldous Raeburn impossible to her. Marry him?--no!
+no!--never! But she would make it quite easy to him to give her up.
+Pride should come in--he should feel no pain in doing it. She had in her
+pocket the letter she had received from him that afternoon. She had
+hardly been able to read it. Ear and heart were alike dull to it.
+
+From time to time she probably slept in her chair. Or else it was the
+perpetual rush of images and sensations through the mind that hastened
+the hours. Once when the first streaks of the March dawn were showing
+through the curtains Minta Hurd sprang up with a loud cry:
+
+"Oh, my God! Jim, _Jim!_ Oh, no!--take that off. Oh, _please_, sir,
+please! Oh, for God's sake, sir!"
+
+Agony struggled with sleep. Marcella, shuddering, held and soothed her,
+and for a while sleep, or rather the drug in her veins, triumphed again.
+For another hour or two she lay restlessly tossing from side to side,
+but unconscious.
+
+Willie hardly moved all night. Again and again Marcella held beef-tea or
+milk to his mouth, and tried to rouse him to take it, but she could make
+no impression on the passive lips; the sleeping serenity of the brow
+never changed.
+
+At last, with a start, Marcella looked round and saw that the morning
+was fully there. A cold light was streaming through the curtains; the
+fire was still glowing; but her limbs were stiff and chilled under her
+shawl. She sprang up, horror descending on her. Her shaking fingers
+could hardly draw out the watch in her belt.
+
+_Ten minutes to eight_!
+
+For the first time the girl felt nerve and resolution fail her. She
+looked at Mrs. Hurd and wrung her hands. The mother was muttering and
+moving, but not yet fully awake; and Willie lay as before. Hardly
+knowing what she was doing, she drew the curtains back, as though
+inspiration might come with the light. The rain-clouds trailed across
+the common; water dripped heavily from the thatch of the cottage; and a
+few birds twittered from some bedraggled larches at the edge of the
+common. Far away, beyond and beneath those woods to the right,
+Widrington lay on the plain, with that high-walled stone building at its
+edge. She saw everything as it must now be happening as plainly as
+though she were bodily present there--the last meal--the pinioning--the
+chaplain.
+
+Goaded by the passing seconds, she turned back at last to wake that poor
+sleeper behind her. But something diverted her. With a start she saw
+that Willie's eyes were open.
+
+"Willie," she said, running to him, "how are you, dear? Shall I lift
+your head a little?"
+
+He did not answer, though she thought he tried, and she was struck by
+the blueness under the eyes and nose. Hurriedly she felt his tiny feet.
+They were quite cold.
+
+"Mrs. Hurd!" she cried, rousing her in haste; "dear Mrs. Hurd, come and
+see Willie!"
+
+The mother sprang up bewildered, and, hurrying across the room, threw
+herself upon him.
+
+"Willie, what is it ails you, dear? Tell mother! Is it your feet are so
+cold? But we'll rub them--we'll get you warm soon. And here's something
+to make you better." Marcella handed her some brandy. "Drink it, dear;
+drink it, sweetheart!" Her voice grew shrill.
+
+"He can't," said Marcella. "Do not let us plague him; it is the end. Dr.
+Clarke said it would come in the morning."
+
+They hung over him, forgetting everything but him for the moment--the
+only moment in his little life he came first even with his mother.
+
+There was a slight movement of the hand.
+
+"He wants his animals," said Marcella, the tears pouring down her
+cheeks. She lifted them and put them on his breast, laying the cold
+fingers over them.
+
+Then he tried to speak.
+
+"Daddy!" he whispered, looking up fully at his mother; "take 'em to
+Daddy!"
+
+She fell on her knees beside him with a shriek, hiding her face, and
+shaking from head to foot. Marcella alone saw the slight, mysterious
+smile, the gradual sinking of the lids, the shudder of departing life
+that ran through the limbs.
+
+A heavy sound swung through the air--a heavy repeated sound. Mrs. Hurd
+held up her head and listened. The church clock tolled eight. She knelt
+there, struck motionless by terror--by recollection.
+
+"Oh, Jim!" she said, under her breath--"my Jim!"
+
+The plaintive tone--as of a creature that has not even breath and
+strength left wherewith to chide the fate that crushes it--broke
+Marcella's heart. Sitting beside the dead son, she wrapt the mother in
+her arms, and the only words that even her wild spirit could find
+wherewith to sustain this woman through the moments of her husband's
+death were words of prayer--the old shuddering cries wherewith the human
+soul from the beginning has thrown itself on that awful encompassing
+Life whence it issued, and whither it returns.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+Two days later, in the afternoon, Aldous Raeburn found himself at the
+door of Mellor. When he entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Boyce, who had
+heard his ring, was hurrying away.
+
+"Don't go," he said, detaining her with a certain peremptoriness. "I
+want all the light on this I can get. Tell me, she has _actually_
+brought herself to regard this man's death as in some sort my doing--as
+something which ought to separate us?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce saw that he held an opened letter from Marcella crushed in
+his hand. But she did not need the explanation. She had been expecting
+him at any hour throughout the day, and in just this condition of mind.
+
+"Marcella must explain for herself," she said, after a moment's thought.
+"I have no right whatever to speak for her. Besides, frankly, I do not
+understand her, and when I argue with her she only makes me realise that
+I have no part or lot in her--that I never had. It is just enough. She
+was brought up away from me. And I have no natural hold. I cannot help
+you, or any one else, with her."
+
+Aldous had been very tolerant and compassionate in the past of this
+strange mother's abdication of her maternal place, and of its probable
+causes. But it was not in human nature that he should be either to-day.
+He resumed his questioning, not without sharpness.
+
+"One word, please. Tell me something of what has happened since
+Thursday, before I see her. I have written--but till this morning I have
+had not one line from her."
+
+They were standing by the window, he with his frowning gaze, in which
+agitation struggled against all his normal habits of manner and
+expression, fixed upon the lawn and the avenue. She told him briefly
+what she knew of Marcella's doings since the arrival of Wharton's
+telegram--of the night in the cottage, and the child's death. It was
+plain that he listened with a shuddering repulsion.
+
+"Do you know," he exclaimed, turning upon her, "that she may never
+recover this? Such a strain, such a horror! rushed upon so wantonly, so
+needlessly."
+
+"I understand. You think that I have been to blame? I do not wonder. But
+it is not true--not in this particular case. And anyway your view is not
+mine. Life--and the iron of it--has to be faced, even by women--perhaps,
+most of all, by women. But let me go now. Otherwise my husband will come
+in. And I imagine you would rather see Marcella before you see him or
+any one."
+
+That suggestion told. He instantly gathered himself together, and
+nervously begged that she would send Marcella to him at once. He could
+think of nothing, talk of nothing, till he had seen her. She went, and
+Aldous was left to walk up and down the room planning what he should
+say. After the ghastly intermingling of public interests and private
+misery in which he had lived for these many weeks there was a certain
+relief in having reached the cleared space--the decisive moment--when he
+might at last give himself wholly to what truly concerned him. He would
+not lose her without a struggle. None the less he knew, and had known
+ever since the scene in the Court library, that the great disaster of
+his life was upon him.
+
+The handle of the door turned. She was there.
+
+He did not go to meet her. She had come in wrought up to face
+attack--reproaches, entreaties--ready to be angry or to be humble, as he
+should give her the lead. But he gave her no lead. She had to break
+through that quivering silence as best she could.
+
+"I wanted to explain everything to you," she said in a low voice, as she
+came near to him. "I know my note last night was very hard and abrupt. I
+didn't mean to be hard. But I am still so tired--and everything that one
+says, and feels, hurts so."
+
+She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not
+been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he
+looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into
+which she had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a
+passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.
+
+"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you read my letter
+that I wrote you the day before--?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your
+grief--your suffering--or to the suffering of any human being for whom
+you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"
+
+"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking
+sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have
+done."
+
+"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat
+beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you
+desire so passionately for others--freedom of conscience--freedom of
+judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all
+my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have
+refused me the commonest right of love--the right to show you myself, to
+prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion--misery,
+much more, oh, much more to me than to you!--I was in truth bent on the
+same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same
+goal."
+
+"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what
+burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry--that there was a
+struggle in your mind--that you pitied me--pitied _them_. But you judged
+it all _from above_--you looked down--and I could not see that you had
+any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I
+was below--in the midst--_close_ to the horror and anguish of them."
+
+"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I
+not offer--entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed
+to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented
+us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke
+deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement
+which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?
+You owe it to me to answer."
+
+She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's
+mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last
+in this white heat of an accusing passion. In return she began to forget
+her own resolve to bear herself gently.
+
+"You don't remember," she cried, "that what divided us was
+your--your--incapacity to put the human pity first; to think of the
+surrounding circumstances--of the debt that you and I and everybody like
+us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had been stunted and starved by
+life as he had been."
+
+Her lip began to tremble.
+
+"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I had been a poor
+man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my judgment of right and
+wrong--in such a matter. You would have let me remember that I was a
+citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice! You would have let
+me plead that Hurd's sin was not against me, but against the community,
+and that in determining whether to do what you wished or no, I must
+think of the community and its good before even I thought of pleasing
+you. If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this would have been
+permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of my _money_,"--she
+shrank before the accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest
+moral rights. _My_ scruple, _my_ feeling, were nothing to you. Your
+pride was engaged as well as your pity, and I must give way. Marcella!
+you talk of justice--you talk of equality--is the only man who can get
+neither at your hands--the man whom you promised to marry!"
+
+His voice dwelt on that last word, dwelt and broke. He leant over her in
+his roused strength, and tried to take her hand. But she moved away from
+him with a cry.
+
+"It is no use! Oh, don't--don't! It may be all true. I was vain, I dare
+say, and unjust, and hard. But don't you see--don't you understand--if
+we _could_ take such different views of such a case--if it could divide
+us so deeply--what chance would there be if we were married? I ought
+never--never--to have said 'Yes' to you--even as I was then. But _now_,"
+she turned to him slowly, "can't you see it for yourself? I am a changed
+creature. Certain things in me are gone--_gone_--and instead there is a
+fire--something driving, tormenting--which must burn its way out. When I
+think of what I liked so much when you asked me to marry you--being
+rich, and having beautiful things, and dresses, and jewels, and
+servants, and power--social power--above all _that_--I feel sick and
+choked. I couldn't breathe now in a house like Maxwell Court. The poor
+have come to mean to me the only people who really _live_, and really
+_suffer_. I must live with them, work for them, find out what I can do
+for them. You must give me up--you must indeed. Oh! and you will! You
+will be glad enough, thankful enough, when--when--you know what I _am_!"
+
+He started at the words. Where was the prophetess? He saw that she was
+lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the
+chair.
+
+In an instant he was on his knees beside her.
+
+"Marcella!" he could hardly command his voice, but he held her
+struggling hand against his lips. "You think that suffering belongs to
+one class? Have you really no conception of what you will be dealing to
+me if you tear yourself away from me?"
+
+She withdrew her hand, sobbing.
+
+"Don't, don't stay near me!" she said; "there is--more--there is
+something else."
+
+Aldous rose.
+
+"You mean," he said in an altered voice, after a pause of silence, "that
+another influence--another man--has come between us?"
+
+She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.
+
+"If I could say to you only this," she began at last, with long pauses,
+"'I mistook myself and my part in life. I did wrong, but forgive me, and
+let me go for both our sakes'--that would be--well!--that would be
+difficult,--but easier than this! Haven't you understood at all?
+When--when Mr. Wharton came, I began to see things very soon, not in my
+own way, but in his way. I had never met any one like him--not any one
+who showed me such possibilities in _myself_--such new ways of using
+one's life, and not only one's possessions--of looking at all the great
+questions. I thought it was just friendship, but it made me critical,
+impatient of everything else. I was never myself from the beginning.
+Then,--after the ball,"--he stooped over her that he might hear her the
+more plainly,--"when I came home I was in my room and I heard
+steps--there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house.
+I went out to see. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts--oh, I can't tell, I
+can't tell!--anyway, he was there. We went into the library, and we
+talked. He did not want to touch our marriage,--but he said all sorts of
+mad things,--and at last--he kissed me."
+
+The last words were only breathed. She had often pictured herself
+confessing these things to him. But the humiliation in which she
+actually found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of,
+more than she could bear. All those great words of pity and mercy--all
+that implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never
+attain--to end in this story! The effect of it, on herself, rather than
+on him, was what she had not foreseen.
+
+Aldous raised himself slowly.
+
+"And when did this happen?" he asked after a moment.
+
+"I told you--the night of the ball--of the murder," she said with a
+shiver; "we saw Hurd cross the avenue. I meant to have told you
+everything at once."
+
+"And you gave up that intention?" he asked her, when he had waited a
+little for more, and nothing came.
+
+She turned upon him with a flash of the old defiance.
+
+"How could I think of my own affairs?"
+
+"Or of mine?" he said bitterly.
+
+She made no answer.
+
+Aldous got up and walked to the chimney-piece. He was very pale, but his
+eyes were bright and sparkling. When she looked up at him at last she
+saw that her task was done. His scorn--his resentment--were they not the
+expiation, the penalty she had looked forward to all along?--and with
+that determination to bear them calmly? Yet, now that they were there in
+front of her, they stung.
+
+"So that--for all those weeks--while you were letting me write as I did,
+while you were letting me conceive you and your action as I did, you had
+this on your mind? You never gave me a hint; you let me plead; you let
+me regard you as wrapped up in the unselfish end; you sent me those
+letters of his--those most misleading letters!--and all the time--"
+
+"But I meant to tell you--I always meant to tell you," she cried
+passionately. "I would never have gone on with a secret like that--not
+for your sake--but for my own."
+
+"Yet you did go on so long," he said steadily; "and my agony of mind
+during those weeks--my feeling towards you--my--"
+
+He broke off, wrestling with himself. As for her, she had fallen back in
+her chair, physically incapable of anything more.
+
+He walked over to her side and took up his hat.
+
+"You have done me wrong," he said, gazing down upon her. "I pray God you
+may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future! Give me leave to
+write to you once more, or to send my friend Edward Hallin to see you.
+Then I will not trouble you again."
+
+He waited, but she could give him no answer. Her form as she lay there
+in this physical and moral abasement printed itself upon his heart. Yet
+he felt no desire whatever to snatch the last touch--the last kiss--that
+wounded passion so often craves. Inwardly, and without words, he said
+farewell to her. She heard his steps across the room; the door shut; she
+was alone--and free.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+"O Neigung, sage, wie hast du so tief
+  Im Herzen dich verstecket?
+Wer hat dich, die verborgen schlief,
+  Gewecket?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+"Don't suppose that I feel enthusiastic or sentimental about the 'claims
+of Labour,'" said Wharton, smiling to the lady beside him. "You may get
+that from other people, but not from me. I am not moral enough to be a
+fanatic. My position is simplicity itself. When things are inevitable, I
+prefer to be on the right side of them, and not on the wrong. There is
+not much more in it than that. I would rather be on the back of the
+'bore' for instance, as it sweeps up the tidal river, than the swimmer
+caught underneath it."
+
+"Well, that is intelligible," said Lady Selina Farrell, looking at her
+neighbour, as she crumbled her dinner-roll. To crumble your bread at
+dinner is a sign of nervousness, according to Sydney Smith, who did it
+with both hands when he sat next an Archbishop; yet no one for a good
+many years past had ever suspected Lady Selina of nervousness, though
+her powers had probably been tried before now by the neighbourhood of
+many Primates, Catholic and Anglican. For Lady Selina went much into
+society, and had begun it young.
+
+"Still, you know," she resumed after a moment's pause--"you _play_
+enthusiasm in public--I suppose you must."
+
+"Oh! of course," said Wharton, indifferently. "That is in the game."
+
+"Why should it be--always? If you are a leader of the people, why don't
+you educate them? My father says that bringing feeling into politics is
+like making rhymes in one's account book."
+
+"Well, when you have taught the masses how _not_ to feel," said Wharton,
+laughing, "we will follow your advice. Meanwhile it is our brains and
+their feelings that do the trick. And by the way, Lady Selina, are _you_
+always so cool? If you saw the Revolution coming to-morrow into the
+garden of Alresford House, would you go to the balcony and argue?"
+
+"I devoutly hope there would be somebody ready to do something more to
+the point," said Lady Selina, hastily. "But of course _we_ have
+enthusiasms too."
+
+"What, the Flag--and the Throne--that kind of thing?"
+
+The ironical attention which Wharton began at this moment to devote to
+the selection of an olive annoyed his companion.
+
+"Yes," she repeated emphatically, "the Flag and the Throne--all that has
+made England great in the past. But we know very well that they are not
+_your_ enthusiasms."
+
+Wharton's upper lip twitched a little.
+
+"And you are quite sure that Busbridge Towers has nothing to do with
+it?" he said suddenly, looking round upon her.
+
+Busbridge Towers was the fine ancestral seat which belonged to Lady
+Selina's father, that very respectable and ancient peer, Lord Alresford,
+whom an ungrateful party had unaccountably omitted--for the first
+time--from the latest Conservative administration.
+
+"Of course we perfectly understand," replied Lady Selina, scornfully,
+"that your side--and especially your Socialist friends, put down all
+that _we_ do and say to greed and selfishness. It is our
+misfortune--hardly our fault."
+
+"Not at all," said Wharton, quietly, "I was only trying to convince you
+that it is a little difficult to drive feeling out of politics. Do you
+suppose our host succeeds? You perceive?--this is a Radical house--and a
+Radical banquet?"
+
+He pushed the _menu_ towards her significantly. Then his eye travelled
+with its usual keen rapidity over the room, over the splendid
+dinner-table, with its display of flowers and plate, and over the
+assembled guests. He and Lady Selina were dining at the hospitable board
+of a certain rich manufacturer, who drew enormous revenues from the
+west, had formed part of the Radical contingent of the last Liberal
+ministry, and had especially distinguished himself by a series of
+uncompromising attacks on the ground landlords of London.
+
+Lady Selina sighed.
+
+"It is all a horrible tangle," she said, "and what the next twenty years
+will bring forth who can tell? Oh! one moment, Mr. Wharton, before I
+forget. Are you engaged for Saturday week?"
+
+He drew a little note-book out of his pocket and consulted it. It
+appeared that he was not engaged.
+
+"Then will you dine with us?" She lightly mentioned the names of four or
+five distinguished guests, including the Conservative Premier of the
+day. Wharton made her a little ceremonious bow.
+
+"I shall be delighted. Can you trust me to behave?"
+
+Lady Selina's smile made her his match for the moment.
+
+"Oh! we can defend ourselves!" she said. "By the way I think you told me
+that Mr. Raeburn was not a friend of yours."
+
+"No," said Wharton, facing her look with coolness. "If you have asked
+Mr. Raeburn for the 23rd, let me crave your leave to cancel that note in
+my pocket-book. Not for my sake, you understand, at all."
+
+She had difficulty in concealing her curiosity. But his face betrayed
+nothing. It always seemed to her that his very dark and straight
+eyebrows, so obtrusive and unusual as compared with the delicacy of the
+features, of the fair skin and light brown curls, made it easy for him
+to wear any mask he pleased. By their mere physical emphasis they drew
+attention away from the subtler and more revealing things of expression.
+
+"They say," she went on, "that he is sure to do well in the House, if
+only he can be made to take interest enough in the party. But one of his
+admirers told me that he was not at all anxious to accept this post they
+have just given him. He only did it to please his grandfather. My father
+thinks Lord Maxwell much aged this year. He is laid up now, with a chill
+of some sort I believe. Mr. Raeburn will have to make haste if he is to
+have any career in the Commons. But you can see he cares very little
+about it. All his friends tell me they find him changed since that
+unlucky affair last year. By the way, did you ever see that girl?"
+
+"Certainly. I was staying in her father's house while the engagement
+was going on."
+
+"Were you!" said Lady Selina, eagerly, "and what did you think of her?"
+
+"Well, in the first place," said Wharton, slowly, "she is beautiful--you
+knew that?"
+
+Lady Selina nodded.
+
+"Yes. Miss Raeburn, who has told me most of what I know, always throws
+in a shrug and a 'but' when you ask about her looks. However, I have
+seen a photograph of her, so I can judge for myself. It seemed to me a
+beauty that men perhaps would admire more than women."
+
+Wharton devoted himself to his green peas, and made no reply. Lady
+Selina glanced at him sharply. She herself was by no means a beauty. But
+neither was she plain. She had a long, rather distinguished face, with a
+marked nose and a wide thin-lipped mouth. Her plentiful fair hair, a
+little dull and ashy in colour, was heaped up above her forehead in
+infinitesimal curls and rolls which did great credit to her maid, and
+gave additional height to the head and length to a thin white neck. Her
+light blue eyes were very direct and observant. Their expression implied
+both considerable knowledge of the world and a natural inquisitiveness.
+Many persons indeed were of opinion that Lady Selina wished to know too
+much about you and were on their guard when she approached.
+
+"You admired her very much, I see," she resumed, as Wharton still
+remained silent.
+
+"Oh, yes. We talked Socialism, and then I defended her poacher for her."
+
+"Oh, I remember. And it is really true, as Miss Raeburn says, that she
+broke it off because she could not get Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn to
+sign the petition for the poacher?"
+
+"Somewhere about true," said Wharton, carelessly.
+
+"Miss Raeburn always gives the same account; you can never get anything
+else out of her. But I sometimes wonder whether it is the _whole_ truth.
+_You_ think she was sincere?"
+
+"Well, she gave up Maxwell Court and thirty thousand a year," he replied
+drily. "I should say she had at least earned the benefit of the doubt."
+
+"I mean," said Lady Selina, "was she in love with anybody else, and was
+the poacher an excuse?"
+
+She turned upon him as she spoke--a smiling, self-possessed person--a
+little spoilt by those hard, inquisitive eyes.
+
+"No, I think not," said Wharton, throwing his head back to meet her
+scrutiny. "If so, nothing has been heard of him yet. Miss Boyce has been
+at St. Edward's Hospital for the last year."
+
+"To learn nursing? It is what all the women do nowadays, they tell me,
+who can't get on with their relations or their lovers. Do you suppose it
+is such a very hard life?"
+
+"I don't want to try!" said Wharton. "Do you?"
+
+She evaded his smile.
+
+"What is she going to do when she has done her training?"
+
+"Settle down and nurse among the poor, I believe."
+
+"Magnificent, no doubt, but hardly business, from her point of view. How
+much more she might have done for the poor with thirty thousand a year!
+And any woman could put up with Aldous Raeburn."
+
+Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"We come back to those feelings, Lady Selina, you think so badly of."
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Well, but feelings must be intelligible. And this seems so small a
+cause. However, were you there when it was broken off?"
+
+"No; I have never seen her since the day of the poacher's trial."
+
+"Oh! So she has gone into complete seclusion from all her friends?"
+
+"That I can't answer for. I can only tell you my own experience."
+
+Lady Selina bethought herself of a great many more questions to ask, but
+somehow did not ask them. The talk fell upon politics, which lasted till
+the hostess gave the signal, and Lady Selina, gathering up her fan and
+gloves, swept from the room next after the Countess at the head of the
+table, while a host of elderly ladies, wives of ministers and the like,
+stood meekly by to let her pass.
+
+As he sat down again, Wharton made the entry of the dinner at Alresford
+House, to which he had just promised himself, a little plainer. It was
+the second time in three weeks that Lady Selina had asked him, and he
+was well aware that several other men at this dinner-table, of about the
+same standing and prospects as himself, would be very glad to be in his
+place. Lady Selina, though she was unmarried, and not particularly
+handsome or particularly charming, was a personage--and knew it. As the
+mistress of her father's various fine houses, and the kinswoman of half
+the great families of England, she had ample social opportunities, and
+made, on the whole, clever use of them. She was not exactly popular, but
+in her day she had been extremely useful to many, and her invitations
+were prized. Wharton had been introduced to her at the beginning of
+this, his second session, had adopted with her the easy, aggressive,
+"personal" manner--which, on the whole, was his natural manner towards
+women--and had found it immediately successful.
+
+When he had replaced his pocket-book, he found himself approached by a
+man on his own side of the table, a member of Parliament like himself,
+with whom he was on moderately friendly terms.
+
+"Your motion comes on next Friday, I think," said the new-comer.
+
+Wharton nodded.
+
+"It'll be a beastly queer division," said the other--"a precious lot of
+cross-voting."
+
+"That'll be the way with that kind of question for a good while to
+come--don't you think"--said Wharton, smiling, "till we get a complete
+reorganisation of parties?"
+
+As he leaned back in his chair, enjoying his cigarette, his half-shut
+eyes behind the curls of smoke made a good-humoured but contemptuous
+study of his companion.
+
+Mr. Bateson was a young manufacturer, recently returned to Parliament,
+and newly married. He had an open, ruddy face, spoilt by an expression
+of chronic perplexity, which was almost fretfulness. Not that the
+countenance was without shrewdness; but it suggested that the man had
+ambitions far beyond his powers of performance, and already knew himself
+to be inadequate.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you get a considerable vote," he resumed,
+after a pause; "it's like women's suffrage. People will go on voting for
+this kind of thing, till there seems a chance of getting it. _Then_!"
+
+"Ah, well!" said Wharton, easily, "I see we shan't get _you_."
+
+"_I_!--vote for an eight-hours day, by local and trade option! In my
+opinion I might as well vote for striking the flag on the British Empire
+at once! It would be the death-knell of all our prosperity."
+
+Wharton's artistic ear disliked the mixture of metaphor, and he frowned
+slightly.
+
+Mr. Bateson hurried on. He was already excited, and had fallen upon
+Wharton as a prey.
+
+"And you really desire to make it _penal_ for us manufacturers--for me
+in my industry--in spite of all the chances and changes of the market,
+to work my men more than eight hours a day--_even_ if they wish it!"
+
+"We must get our decision, our majority of the adult workers in any
+given district in favour of an eight-hours day," said Wharton, blandly;
+"then when they have voted for it, the local authority will put the Act
+in motion."
+
+"And my men--conceivably--may have voted in the minority, against any
+such tomfoolery; yet, when the vote is given, it will be a punishable
+offence for them, and me, to work overtime? You _actually_ mean that;
+how do you propose to punish us?"
+
+"Well," said Wharton, relighting his cigarette, "that is a much debated
+point. Personally, I am in favour of imprisonment rather than fine."
+
+The other bounded on his chair.
+
+"You would imprison me for working overtime--with _willing men!_"
+
+Wharton eyed him with smiling composure. Two or three other men--an old
+general, the smart private secretary of a cabinet minister, and a
+well-known permanent official at the head of one of the great spending
+departments--who were sitting grouped at the end of the table a few feet
+away, stopped their conversation to listen.
+
+"Except in cases of emergency, which are provided for under the Act,"
+said Wharton. "Yes, I should imprison you, with the greatest pleasure in
+life. Eight hours _plus_ overtime is what we are going to stop, _at all
+hazards!_"
+
+A flash broke from his blue eyes. Then he tranquilly resumed his
+smoking.
+
+The young manufacturer flushed with angry agitation.
+
+"But you must know, it is inconceivable that you should not know, that
+the whole thing is stark staring lunacy. In our business, trade is
+declining, the export falling every year, the imports from France
+steadily advancing. And you are going to make us fight a country where
+men work eleven hours a day, for lower wages, with our hands tied behind
+our backs by legislation of this kind? Well, you know," he threw
+himself back in his chair with a contemptuous laugh, "there can be only
+one explanation. You and your friends, of course, have banished
+political economy to Saturn--and you suppose that by doing so you get
+rid of it for all the rest of the world. But I imagine it will beat you,
+all the same!"
+
+He stopped in a heat. As usual what he found to say was not equal to
+what he wanted to say, and beneath his anger with Wharton was the
+familiar fuming at his own lack of impressiveness.
+
+"Well, I dare say," said Wharton, serenely. "However, let's take your
+'political economy' a moment, and see if I can understand what you mean
+by it. There never were two words that meant all things to all men so
+disreputably!"
+
+And thereupon to the constant accompaniment of his cigarette, and with
+the utmost composure and good temper, he began to "heckle" his
+companion, putting questions, suggesting perfidious illustrations,
+extracting innocent admissions, with a practised shrewdness and malice,
+which presently left the unfortunate Bateson floundering in a sea of his
+own contradictions, and totally unable for the moment to attach any
+rational idea whatever to those great words of his favourite science,
+wherewith he was generally accustomed to make such triumphant play, both
+on the platform and in the bosom of the family.
+
+The permanent official round the corner watched the unequal fight with
+attentive amusement. Once when it was a question of Mill's doctrine of
+cost of production as compared with that of a leading modern
+collectivist, he leant forward and supplied a correction of something
+Wharton had said. Wharton instantly put down his cigarette and addressed
+him in another tone. A rapid dialogue passed between them, the dialogue
+of experts, sharp, allusive, elliptical, in the midst of which the host
+gave the signal for joining the ladies.
+
+"Well, all I know is," said Bateson, as he got up, "that these kinds of
+questions, if you and your friends have your way, will _wreck_ the
+Liberal party before long--far more effectually than anything Irish has
+ever done. On these things some of us will fight, if it must come to
+that."
+
+Wharton laughed.
+
+"It would be a national misfortune if you didn't give us a stiff job,"
+he said, with an airy good-humour which at once made the other's
+blustering look ridiculous.
+
+"I wonder what that fellow is going to do in the House," said the
+permanent official to his companion as they went slowly upstairs,
+Wharton being some distance ahead. "People are all beginning to talk of
+him as a coming man, though nobody quite knows why, as yet. They tell me
+he frames well in speaking, and will probably make a mark with his
+speech next Friday. But his future seems to me very doubtful. He can
+only become a power as the head of a new Labour party. But where is the
+party? They all want to be kings. The best point in his favour is that
+they are likely enough to take a gentleman if they must have a leader.
+But there still remains the question whether he can make anything out of
+the material."
+
+"I hope to God he can't!" said the old general, grimly; "it is these
+town-chatterers of yours that will bring the Empire about our heads
+before we've done. They've begun it already, wherever they saw a
+chance."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the drawing-room Wharton devoted himself for a few minutes to his
+hostess, a little pushing woman, who confided to his apparently
+attentive ear a series of grievances as to the bad manners of the great
+ladies of their common party, and the general evil plight of Liberalism
+in London from the social point of view.
+
+"Either they give themselves airs--_rediculous_ airs!--or they admit
+everybody!" she said, with a lavish use of white shoulders and scarlet
+fan by way of emphasis. "My husband feels it just as much as I do. It is
+a real misfortune for the party that its social affairs should be so
+villainously managed. Oh! I dare say _you_ don't mind, Mr. Wharton,
+because you are a Socialist. But, I assure you, those of us who still
+believe in the influence of the best people don't like it."
+
+A point whence Wharton easily led her through a series of spiteful
+anecdotes bearing on her own social mishaps and rebuffs, which were none
+the less illuminating because of the teller's anxious effort to give
+them a dignified and disinterested air. Then, when neither she nor her
+plight were any longer amusing, he took his leave, exchanging another
+skirmishing word or two on the staircase with Lady Selina, who it
+appeared was "going on" as he was, and to the same house.
+
+In a few minutes his hansom landed him at the door of a great mansion
+in Berkeley Square, where a huge evening party was proceeding, given by
+one of those Liberal ladies whom his late hostess had been so freely
+denouncing. The lady and the house belonged to a man who had held high
+office in the late Administration.
+
+As he made his way slowly to the top of the crowded stairs, the stately
+woman in white satin and diamonds who was "receiving" on the landing
+marked him, and when his name was announced she came forward a step or
+two. Nothing could have been more flattering than the smile with which
+she gave him her gloved hand to touch.
+
+"Have you been out of town all these Sundays?" she said to him, with the
+slightest air of soft reproach. "I am always at home, you know--I told
+you so!"
+
+She spoke with the ease of one who could afford to make whatever social
+advances she pleased. Wharton excused himself, and they chatted a little
+in the intervals of her perpetual greetings to the mounting crowd. She
+and he had met at a famous country house in the Easter recess, and her
+aristocrat's instinct for all that gives savour and sharpness to the
+dish of life had marked him at once.
+
+"Sir Hugh wants you to come down and see us in Sussex," she said,
+stretching her white neck a little to speak after him, as he was at last
+carried through the drawing-room door by the pressure behind him. "Will
+you?"
+
+He threw back an answer which she rather took for granted than heard,
+for she nodded and smiled through it--stiffening her delicate-face the
+moment afterwards to meet the timid remarks of one of her husband's
+constituents--asked by Sir Hugh in the streets that afternoon--who
+happened to present her with the next hand to shake.
+
+Inside, Wharton soon found himself brought up against the ex-Secretary
+of State himself, who greeted him cordially, and then bantered him a
+little on his coming motion.
+
+"Oh, I shall be interested to see what you make of it. But, you know, it
+has no _actuality_--never can have--till you can agree among yourselves.
+You _say_ you want the same thing--I dare say you'll all swear it on
+Friday--but _really_--"
+
+The statesman shook his head pleasantly.
+
+"The details are a little vague still, I grant you," said Wharton,
+smiling.
+
+"And you think the principle matters twopence without the details? I
+have always found that the difficulty with the Christian command, 'Be ye
+perfect.' The principle doesn't trouble me at all!"
+
+The swaying of the entering throng parted the two speakers, and for a
+second or two the portly host followed with his eye the fair profile and
+lightly-built figure of the younger man as they receded from him in the
+crowd. It was in his mind that the next twenty years, whether this man
+or that turned out to be important or no, must see an enormous
+quickening of the political pace. He himself was not conscious of any
+jealousy of the younger men; but neither did he see among them any
+commanding personality. This young fellow, with his vivacity, his
+energy, and his Socialist whims, was interesting enough; and his
+problem was interesting--the problem of whether he could make a party
+out of the heterogeneous group of which he was turning out to be
+indisputably the ablest member. But what was there _certain_ or
+_inevitable_ about his future after all? And it was the same with all
+the rest. Whereas the leaders of the past had surely announced
+themselves beyond mistake from the beginning. He was inclined to think,
+however, that we were levelling up rather than levelling down. The world
+grew too clever, and leadership was more difficult every day.
+
+Meanwhile Wharton found his progress through these stately rooms
+extremely pleasant. He was astonished at the multitude of people he
+knew, at the numbers of faces that smiled upon him. Presently, after
+half an hour of hard small talk, he found himself for a moment without
+an acquaintance, leaning against an archway between two rooms, and free
+to watch the throng. Self-love, "that froward presence, like a
+chattering child within us," was all alert and happy. A feeling of
+surprise, too, which had not yet worn away. A year before he had told
+Marcella Boyce, and with conviction, that he was an outcast from his
+class. He smiled now at that past _naďveté_ which had allowed him to
+take the flouts of his country neighbours and his mother's unpopularity
+with her aristocratic relations for an index of the way in which
+"society" in general would be likely to treat him and his opinions. He
+now knew, on the contrary, that those opinions had been his best
+advertisement. Few people, it appeared, were more in demand among the
+great than those who gave it out that they would, if they could, abolish
+the great.
+
+"It's because they're not enough afraid of us--yet," he said to himself,
+not without spleen. "When we really get to business--if we ever do--I
+shall not be coming to Lady Cradock's parties."
+
+"Mr. Wharton, do you ever do such a frivolous thing as go to the
+theatre?" said a pretty, languishing creature at his elbow, the wife of
+a London theatrical manager. "Suppose you come and see us in 'The
+Minister's Wooing,' first night next Saturday. I've got _one_ seat in my
+box, for somebody _very_ agreeable. Only it must be somebody who can
+appreciate my frocks!"
+
+"I should be charmed," said Wharton. "Are the frocks so adorable?"
+
+"Adorable! Then I may write you a note? You don't have your horrid
+Parliament that night, do you?" and she fluttered on.
+
+"I think you don't know my younger daughter, Mr. Wharton?" said a severe
+voice at his elbow.
+
+He turned and saw an elderly matron with the usual matronly cap and
+careworn countenance putting forward a young thing in white, to whom he
+bowed with great ceremony. The lady was the wife of a north-country
+magnate of very old family, and one of the most exclusive of her kind in
+London. The daughter, a vision of young shyness and bloom, looked at him
+with frightened eyes as he leant against the wall beside her and began
+to talk. She wished he would go away and let her get to the girl friend
+who was waiting for her and signalling to her across the room. But in a
+minute or two she had forgotten to wish anything of the kind. The
+mixture of audacity with a perfect self-command in the manner of her new
+acquaintance, that searching half-mocking look, which saw everything in
+detail, and was always pressing beyond the generalisations of talk and
+manners, the lightness and brightness of the whole aspect, of the curls,
+the eyes, the flexible determined mouth, these things arrested her. She
+began to open her virgin heart, first in protesting against attack, then
+in confession, till in ten minutes her white breast was heaving under
+the excitement of her own temerity and Wharton knew practically all
+about her, her mingled pleasure and remorse in "going out," her
+astonishment at the difference between the world as it was this year,
+and the world as it had been last, when she was still in the
+school-room--her Sunday-school--her brothers--her ideals--for she was a
+little nun at heart--her favourite clergyman--and all the rest of it.
+
+"I say, Wharton, come and dine, will you, Thursday, at the House--small
+party--meet in my room?"
+
+So said one of the party whips, from behind into his ear. The speaker
+was a popular young aristocrat who in the preceding year had treated the
+member for West Brookshire with chilliness. Wharton turned--to consider
+a moment--then gave a smiling assent.
+
+"All right!" said the other, withdrawing his hand from Wharton's
+shoulder--"good-night!--two more of these beastly crushes to fight
+through till I can get to my bed, worse luck! Are any of your fellows
+here to-night?"
+
+Wharton shook his head.
+
+"Too austere, I suppose?"
+
+"A question of dress coats, I should think," said Wharton, drily.
+
+The other shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"And this calls itself a party gathering--in a radical and democratic
+house--what a farce it all is!"
+
+"Agreed! good-night."
+
+And Wharton moved on, just catching as he did so the eyes of his new
+girl acquaintance looking back at him from a distant door. Their shy
+owner withdrew them instantly, coloured, and passed out of sight.
+
+At the same moment a guest entered by the same door, a tall grave man in
+the prime of life, but already grey haired. Wharton, to his surprise,
+recognised Aldous Raeburn, and saw also that the master of the house had
+him by the arm. They came towards him, talking. The crowd prevented him
+from getting effectually out of their way, but he turned aside and took
+up a magazine lying on a bookcase near.
+
+"And you really think him a trifle better?" said the ex-minister.
+
+"Oh, yes, better--certainly better--but I am afraid he will hardly get
+back to work this session--the doctors talk of sending him away at
+once."
+
+"Ah, well," said the other, smiling, "we don't intend it seems to let
+you send anything important up to the Lords yet awhile, so there will be
+time for him to recruit."
+
+"I wish I was confident about the recruiting," said Raeburn, sadly. "He
+has lost much strength. I shall go with them to the Italian lakes at the
+end of next week, see them settled and come back at once."
+
+"Shall you miss a sitting of the commission?" asked his host. Both he
+and Raeburn were members of an important Labour Commission appointed the
+year before by the new Conservative government.
+
+"Hardly, I think," said Raeburn, "I am particularly anxious not to miss
+D----'s evidence."
+
+And they fell talking a little about the Commission and the witnesses
+recently examined before it. Wharton, who was wedged in by a group of
+ladies, and could not for the moment move, heard most of what they were
+saying, much against his will. Moreover Raeburn's tone of quiet and
+masterly familiarity with what he and his companion were discussing
+annoyed him. There was nothing in the world that he himself would more
+eagerly have accepted than a seat on that Commission.
+
+"Ah! there is Lady Cradock!" said Raeburn, perceiving his hostess across
+a sea of intervening faces, and responding to her little wave of the
+hand. "I must go and get a few words with her, and then take my aunt
+away."
+
+As he made his way towards her, he suddenly brushed against Wharton, who
+could not escape. Raeburn looked up, recognised the man he had touched,
+flushed slightly and passed on. A bystander would have supposed them
+strangers to each other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Two or three minutes later, Wharton was walking down a side street
+towards Piccadilly. After all the flattering incidents of the evening,
+the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly.
+Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been
+thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome
+pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in
+the library at Mellor to her _fiancé_ at the moment of giving him his
+dismissal--and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached
+him about the broken engagement, by the help still more of the look, or
+rather the entire absence of look wherewith Raeburn had walked past his
+greeting and his outstretched hand in a corridor of the House, on the
+first occasion of their meeting after the news had become public
+property, Wharton was inclined to think she _had_--what then? No doubt
+the stern moralist might have something to say on the subject of taking
+advantage of a guest's position to tamper with another man's betrothed.
+If so, the stern moralist would only show his usual incapacity to grasp
+the actual facts of flesh and blood. What chance would he or any one
+else have had with Marcella Boyce, if she had happened to be in love
+with the man she had promised to marry? That little trifle had been left
+out in the arrangement. It might have worked through perfectly well
+without; as it happened it had broken down. _Realities_ had broken it
+down. Small blame to them!
+
+"I stood for _truth_!" he said to himself with a kind of rage--"that
+moment when I held her in the library, she _lived_.--Raeburn offered her
+a platform, a position; _I_ made her think, and feel. I helped her to
+know herself. Our relation was not passion; it stood on the
+threshold--but it was real--a true relation so far as it went. That it
+went no farther was due again to circumstances--realities--of another
+kind. That _he_ should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is
+natural enough. If we were in France he would call me out and I should
+give him satisfaction with all the pleasure in life. But what am _I_
+about? Are his ways mine? I should have nothing left but to shoot myself
+to-morrow if they were!"
+
+He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a
+merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in
+him by contact with Aldous Raeburn.
+
+"Has he not interfered with my freedom--stamped his pedantic foot on
+me--ever since we were boys together! I have owed him one for many
+years--now I have paid it. Let him take the chances of war!"
+
+Then, driven on by an irritation not to be quieted, he began against his
+will to think of those various occasions on which he and Aldous Raeburn
+had crossed each other in the past--of that incident in particular which
+Miss Raeburn had roughly recalled to Lady Winterbourne's reluctant
+memory.
+
+Well, and what of it? It had occurred when Wharton was a lad of
+twenty-one, and during an interval of some months when Aldous Raeburn,
+who had left Cambridge some three years before, and was already the man
+of importance, had shown a decided disposition to take up the brilliant,
+unmanageable boy, whom the Levens, among other relations, had already
+washed their hands of.
+
+"What did he do it for?" thought Wharton. "Philanthropic motives of
+course. He is one of the men who must always be saving their souls, and
+the black sheep of the world come in handy for the purpose. I remember I
+was flattered then. It takes one some time to understand the workings of
+the Hebraistic conscience!"
+
+Yes--as it galled him to recollect--he had shown great plasticity for a
+time. He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and Raeburn's
+letters and Raeburn's influence had certainly pulled him through various
+scrapes that might have been disastrous. Then--a little later--he could
+see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch Etive, where he and
+Raeburn, Lord Maxwell, Miss Raeburn, and a small party had spent the
+August of his twenty-first birthday. Well--that surly keeper, and his
+pretty wife who had been Miss Raeburn's maid--could anything be more
+inevitable? A hard and jealous husband, and one of the softest, most
+sensuous natures that ever idleness made love to. The thing was in the
+air!--in the summer, in the blood--as little to be resisted as the
+impulse to eat when you are hungry, or drink when you thirst. Besides,
+what particular harm had been done, what particular harm _could_ have
+been done with such a Cerberus of a husband? As to the outcry which had
+followed one special incident, nothing could have been more uncalled
+for, more superfluous. Aldous had demanded contrition, had said strong
+things with the flashing eyes, the set mouth of a Cato. And the culprit
+had turned obstinate--would repent nothing--not for the asking.
+Everything was arguable, and Renan's doubt as to whether he or Théophile
+Gautier were in the right of it, would remain a doubt to all time--that
+was all Raeburn could get out of him. After which the Hebraist friend of
+course had turned his back on the offender, and there was an end of it.
+
+That incident, however, had belonged to a stage in his past life, a
+stage marked by a certain prolonged tumult of the senses, on which he
+now looked back with great composure. That tumult had found vent in
+other adventures more emphatic a good deal than the adventure of the
+keeper's wife. He believed that one or two of them had been not unknown
+to Raeburn.
+
+Well, that was done with! His mother's death--that wanton stupidity on
+the part of fate--and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first
+drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he
+now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of travel, and
+the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of
+adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the intellectual
+stimulus which comes of perpetual change, of new heavens, new seas, new
+societies, had loosened the yoke of the flesh and saved him from
+himself. The deliverance so begun had been completed at home, by the
+various chances and opportunities which had since opened to him a solid
+and tempting career in that Labour movement his mother had linked him
+with, without indeed ever understanding either its objects or its men.
+The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the
+vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things
+had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with
+the thrill of increasing personal success. Passion would require to
+present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession of him
+again.
+
+As to his relation to Raeburn, he well remembered that when, after that
+long break in his life, he and Aldous had met casually again, in London
+or elsewhere, Aldous had shown a certain disposition to forget the old
+quarrel, and to behave with civility, though not with friendliness. As
+to Wharton he was quite willing, though at the same time he had gone
+down to contest West Brookshire, and, above all, had found himself in
+the same house as Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, with an even livelier
+sense than usual of the excitement to be got out of mere living.
+
+No doubt when Raeburn heard that story of the library--if he had heard
+it--he recognised in it the man and the character he had known of old,
+and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in bitter
+and insurmountable disgust. A mere Hebraist's mistake!
+
+"That girl's attraction for me was not an attraction of the
+senses--except so far that for every normal man and woman charm is
+charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be! What I played
+for with her was _power_--power over a nature that piqued and yet by
+natural affinity belonged to me. I could not have retained that power,
+as it happened, by any bait of passion. Even without the Hurd affair, if
+I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have
+risen against me and her own treachery. I knew that perfectly well, and
+took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting,
+too interesting, to give up. For the moment! then a few days,--a few
+weeks later--Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!"
+
+And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own
+idiosyncrasies. It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of
+mental emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him
+within the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the
+Hurd agitation was over. That agitation had brought him vigorously and
+profitably into public notice at a convenient moment. But what had
+originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became
+in the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation. Wharton
+had no sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself
+strangely at home there. He had the instinct for debate, the instinct
+for management, together with a sensitive and contriving ambition. He
+found himself possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance
+that astonished him--a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for
+drudgery, and for making the best of dull men. The omens were all
+favourable, sometimes startlingly so. He was no longer hampered by the
+ill-will of a county or a family connection. Here in this new world,
+every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was
+worth. Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two
+preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House,
+from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still
+loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise. The anxieties
+and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.
+
+The quick, elastic nature adjusted itself at once. To some kinds of
+success, nothing is so important as the ability to forget--to sweep the
+mind free of everything irrelevant and superfluous. Marcella Boyce, and
+all connected with her, passed clean out of Wharton's consciousness.
+Except that once or twice he said to himself with a passing smile that
+it was a good thing he had not got himself into a worse scrape at
+Mellor. Good heavens! in what plight would a man stand--a man with his
+career to make--who had given Marcella Boyce claims upon him! As well
+entangle oneself with the Tragic Muse at once as with that stormy,
+unmanageable soul!
+
+So much for a year ago. To-night, however, the past had been thrust back
+upon him, both by Lady Selina's talk and by the meeting with Raeburn. To
+smart indeed once more under that old ascendency of Raeburn's, was to
+be provoked into thinking of Raeburn's old love.
+
+Where was Miss Boyce? Surely her year of hospital training must be up by
+now?
+
+He turned into St. James Street, stopped at a door not far from the
+Palace end, let himself in, and groped his way to the second floor. A
+sleepy man-servant turned out of his room, and finding that his master
+was not inclined to go to bed, brought lights and mineral water. Wharton
+was practically a teetotaller. He had taken a whim that way as a boy,
+and a few experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had
+only confirmed what had been originally perhaps a piece of
+notoriety-hunting. He had, as a rule, flawless health; and the
+unaccustomed headaches and nausea which followed these occasional
+excesses had disgusted and deterred him. He shook himself easily free of
+a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and had ever since found
+his abstinence a source both of vanity and of distinction. Nothing
+annoyed him more than to hear it put down to any ethical motive. "If I
+liked the beastly stuff, I should swim in it to-morrow," he would say
+with an angry eye when certain acquaintance--not those he made at Labour
+Congresses--goaded him on the point. "As it is, why should I make it, or
+chloral, or morphia, or any other poison, my master! What's the
+inducement--eh, you fellows?"
+
+_En revanche_ he smoked inordinately.
+
+"Is that all, sir," said his servant, pausing behind his chair, after
+candles, matches, cigarettes, and Apollinaris had been supplied in
+abundance.
+
+"Yes; go to bed, Williams, but don't lock up. Good-night."
+
+The man departed, and Wharton, going to the window which opened on a
+balcony looking over St. James Street, threw it wide, and smoked a
+cigarette leaning against the wall. It was on the whole a fine night and
+warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air. In the
+street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only
+just past midnight and the clubs were not yet empty. To his right the
+turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky
+covered with light, windy cloud. Beyond it his eye sought instinctively
+for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless--like some
+one in a stupid silence. That light of the sitting House had become to
+him one of the standing pleasures of life. He had never yet been
+honestly glad of its extinction.
+
+"I'm a precious raw hand," he confessed to himself with a shake of the
+head as he stood there smoking. "And it can't last--nothing does."
+
+Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the edge of the
+balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a
+little, and finally took out a letter. He stooped over the lamp to read
+it. It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had written him some two or
+three days after the breach of her engagement. That fact was barely
+mentioned at the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any
+kind. Then the letter continued:
+
+"I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and
+attempted through these many weeks. But for them it must have been plain
+to us both that we could never rightly meet again. I am very destitute
+just now--and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing
+left me. But that scene in the past, which put us both wrong with
+honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out--_thought--suffered_
+away. I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other
+co-worker and co-thinker--if in the future you ever want my work, if you
+can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could
+do--ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.
+
+"But for the present I am going quite away into another world. I have
+been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and
+they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go. As
+soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year's training at a
+London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and
+nurse. This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife from
+seeing Hurd the day before the execution. I knew then that all was over
+for me at Mellor.
+
+"As for the wretched break-down of everything--of all my schemes and
+friendships here--I had better not speak of it. I feel that I have given
+these village-folk, whom I had promised to help, one more reason to
+despair of life. It is not pleasant to carry such a thought away with
+one. But if the tool breaks and blunts, how can the task be done? It can
+be of no use till it has been re-set.
+
+"I should like to know how your plans prosper. But I shall see your
+paper and follow what goes on in Parliament. For the present I want
+neither to write nor get letters. They tell me that as a probationer I
+shall spend my time at first in washing glasses, and polishing
+bath-taps, on which my mind rests!
+
+"If you come across my friends of whom I have spoken to you--Louis,
+Anthony, and Edith Craven--and could make any use of Louis for the
+_Labour Clarion_, I should be grateful. I hear they have had bad times
+of late, and Louis has engaged himself, and wants to be married. You
+remember I told you how we worked at the South Kensington classes
+together, and how they made me a Venturist?
+
+  "Yours very truly,
+
+  "MARCELLA BOYCE."
+
+Wharton laid down the letter, making a wry mouth over some of its
+phrases.
+
+"'_Put us both wrong with honour and conscience.' 'One more reason for
+despair of life'--'All was over for me at Mellor_'--dear! dear!--how
+women like the big words--the emphatic pose. All those little odds and
+ends of charities--that absurd straw-plaiting scheme! Well, perhaps one
+could hardly expect her to show a sense of humour just then. But why
+does nature so often leave it out in these splendid creatures?"
+
+"Hullo!" he added, as he bent over the table to look for a pen; "why
+didn't that idiot give me these?"
+
+For there, under an evening paper which he had not touched, lay a pile
+of unopened letters. His servant had forgotten to point them out to him.
+On the top was a letter on which Wharton pounced at once. It was
+addressed in a bold inky hand, and he took it to be from Nehemiah
+Wilkins, M.P., his former colleague at the Birmingham Labour Congress,
+of late a member of the _Labour Clarion_ staff, and as such a daily
+increasing plague and anxiety to the _Clarion's_ proprietor.
+
+However, the letter was not from Wilkins. It was from the secretary of
+a Midland trades-union, with whom Wharton had already been in
+communication. The union was recent, and represented the as yet feeble
+organisation of a metal industry in process of transition from the
+home-workshop to the full factory, or Great Industry stage. The
+conditions of work were extremely bad, and grievances many; wages were
+low, and local distress very great. The secretary, a young man of
+ability and enthusiasm, wrote to Wharton to say that certain alterations
+in the local "payment lists" lately made by the employers amounted to a
+reduction of wages; that the workers, beginning to feel the heartening
+effects of their union, were determined not to submit; that bitter and
+even desperate agitation was spreading fast, and that a far-reaching
+strike was imminent. Could they count on the support of the _Clarion_?
+The _Clarion_ had already published certain letters on the industry from
+a Special Commissioner--letters which had drawn public attention, and
+had been eagerly read in the district itself. Would the _Clarion_ now
+"go in" for them? Would Mr. Wharton personally support them, in or out
+of Parliament, and get his friends to do the same? To which questions,
+couched in terms extremely flattering to the power of the _Clarion_ and
+its owner, the secretary appended a long and technical statement of the
+situation.
+
+Wharton looked up from the letter with a kindling eye. He foresaw an
+extremely effective case, both for the newspaper and the House of
+Commons. One of the chief capitalists involved was a man called Denny,
+who had been long in the House, for whom the owner of the _Clarion_
+entertained a strong personal dislike. Denny had thwarted him
+vexatiously--had perhaps even made him ridiculous--on one or two
+occasions; and Wharton saw no reason whatever for forgiving one's
+enemies until, like Narvaez, one had "shot them all." There would be
+much satisfaction in making Denny understand who were his masters. And
+with these motives there mingled a perfectly genuine sympathy with the
+"poor devils" in question, and a desire to see them righted.
+
+"Somebody must be sent down at once," he said to himself. "I suppose,"
+he added, with discontent, "it must be Wilkins."
+
+For the man who had written the articles for the _Labour Clarion_, as
+Special Commissioner, had some three weeks before left England to take
+command of a colonial newspaper.
+
+Still pondering, he took up the other letters, turned them
+over--childishly pleased for the thousandth time by the M.P. on each
+envelope and the number and variety of his correspondence--and eagerly
+chose out three--one from his bankers, one from his Lincolnshire agent,
+and one from the _Clarion_ office, undoubtedly this time in Wilkins's
+hand.
+
+He read them, grew a little pale, swore under his breath, and, angrily
+flinging the letters away from him, he took up his cigarette again and
+thought.
+
+The letter from his bankers asked his attention in stiff terms to a
+largely overdrawn account, and entirely declined to advance a sum of
+money for which he had applied to them without the guarantee of two
+substantial names in addition to his own. The letter from his agent
+warned him that the extraordinary drought of the past six weeks,
+together with the general agricultural depression, would certainly mean
+a large remission of rents at the June quarter day, and also informed
+him that the holders of his co-operative farm would not be able to pay
+their half-yearly interest on the capital advanced to them by the
+landlord.
+
+As to the third letter, it was in truth much more serious than the two
+others. Wilkins, the passionate and suspicious workman, of great natural
+ability, who had been in many ways a thorn in Wharton's side since the
+beginning of his public career, was now member for a mining
+constituency. His means of support were extremely scanty, and at the
+opening of the new Parliament Wharton had offered him well-paid work on
+the _Clarion_ newspaper. It had seemed to the proprietor of the
+_Clarion_ a way of attaching a dangerous man to himself, perhaps also of
+controlling him. Wilkins had grudgingly accepted, understanding
+perfectly well what was meant.
+
+Since then the relation between the two men had been one of perpetual
+friction. Wilkins's irritable pride would yield nothing, either in the
+House or in the _Clarion_ office, to Wharton's university education and
+class advantages, while Wharton watched with alarm the growing influence
+of this insubordinate and hostile member of his own staff on those
+labour circles from which the _Clarion_ drew its chief support.
+
+In the letter he had just read Wilkins announced to the proprietor of
+the _Clarion_ that in consequence of the "scandalous mismanagement" of
+that paper's handling of a certain trade arbitration which had just
+closed, he, Wilkins, could no longer continue to write for it, and
+begged to terminate his engagement at once, there being no formal
+agreement between himself and Wharton as to length of notice on either
+side. A lively attack on the present management and future prospects of
+the _Clarion_ followed, together with the threat that the writer would
+do what in him lay henceforward to promote the cause of a certain rival
+organ lately started, among such working men as he might be able to
+influence.
+
+"_Brute_! jealous, impracticable brute!" exclaimed Wharton aloud, as he
+stood chafing and smoking by the window. All the difficulties which this
+open breach was likely to sow in his path stood out before him in clear
+relief.
+
+"_Personal_ leadership, there is the whole problem," he said to himself
+in moody despair. "Can I--like Parnell--make a party and keep it
+together? Can I through the _Clarion_--and through influence _outside_
+the House--coerce the men _in_ the House? If so, we can do something,
+and Lady Cradock will no longer throw me her smiles. If not the game is
+up, both for me and for them. They have no cohesion, no common
+information, no real power. Without leaders they are a mere set of
+half-educated firebrands whom the trained mind of the country humours
+because it must, and so far as they have brute force behind them.
+Without _leadership_, _I_ am a mere unit of the weakest group in the House.
+Yet, by Jove! it looks as though I had not the gifts."
+
+And he looked back with passionate chagrin on the whole course of his
+connection with Wilkins, his unavailing concessions and small
+humiliations, his belief in his own tact and success, all the time that
+the man dealt with was really slipping out of his hands.
+
+"Damn the fellow!" he said at last, flinging his cigarette away. "Well,
+that's done with. All the same, he would have liked that Midland job! He
+has been hankering after a strike there for some time, and might have
+ranted as he pleased. I shall have the satisfaction of informing him he
+has lost his opportunity. Now then--who to send? By Jove! what about
+Miss Boyce's friend?"
+
+He stood a moment twisting the quill-pen he had taken up, then he
+hastily found a sheet of paper and wrote:
+
+"Dear Miss Boyce,--It is more than a year since I have heard of you, and
+I have been wondering with much interest lately whether you have really
+taken up a nursing life. You remember speaking to me of your friends the
+Cravens? I come across them sometimes at the Venturist meetings, and
+have always admired their ability. Last year I could do nothing
+practical to meet your wishes. This year, however, there is an opening
+on the _Clarion_, and I should like to discuss it with you. Are you in
+town or to be found? I could come any afternoon next week, _early_--I go
+down to the House at four--or on Saturdays. But I should like it to be
+Tuesday or Wednesday, that I might try and persuade you to come to our
+Eight Hours debate on Friday night. It would interest you, and I think I
+could get you a seat. We Labour members are like the Irishmen--we can
+always get our friends in.
+
+"I must send this round by Mellor, so it may not reach you till Tuesday.
+Perhaps you will kindly telegraph. The _Clarion_ matter is pressing.
+
+  "Yours sincerely,
+
+  "H.S. WHARTON."
+
+When he had finished he lingered a moment over the letter, the play of
+conflicting motives and memories bringing a vague smile to the lips.
+
+Reverie, however, was soon dispersed. He recollected his other
+correspondents, and springing up he began to pace his room, gloomily
+thinking over his money difficulties, which were many. He and his mother
+had always been in want of money ever since he could remember. Lady
+Mildred would spend huge sums on her various crotchets and campaigns,
+and then subside for six months into wretched lodgings in a back street
+of Southsea or Worthing, while the Suffolk house was let, and her son
+mostly went abroad. This perpetual worry of needy circumstances had
+always, indeed, sat lightly on Wharton. He was unmarried, and so far
+scarcity had generally passed into temporary comfort before he had time
+to find it intolerable. But now the whole situation was becoming more
+serious. In the first place, his subscriptions and obligations as a
+member of Parliament, and as one of the few propertied persons in a
+moneyless movement, were considerable. Whatever Socialism might make of
+money in the future, he was well aware that money in the present was no
+less useful to a Socialist politician than to any one else. In the next
+place, the starting and pushing of the _Clarion_ newspaper--originally
+purchased by the help of a small legacy from an uncle--had enormously
+increased the scale of his money transactions and the risks of life.
+
+How was it that, with all his efforts, the _Clarion_ was not making, but
+losing money? During the three years he had possessed it he had raised
+it from the position of a small and foul-mouthed print, indifferently
+nourished on a series of small scandals, to that of a Labour organ of
+some importance. He had written a weekly signed article for it, which
+had served from the beginning to bring both him and the paper into
+notice; he had taken pains with the organisation and improvement of the
+staff; above all, he had spent a great deal more money upon it, in the
+way of premises and appliances, than he had been, as it turned out, in
+any way justified in spending.
+
+Hence, indeed, these tears. Rather more than a year before, while the
+_Clarion_ was still enjoying a first spurt of success and notoriety, he
+had, with a certain recklessness which belonged to his character,
+invested in new and costly machinery, and had transferred the paper to
+larger offices. All this had been done on borrowed money.
+
+Then, for some reason or other, the _Clarion_ had ceased to answer to
+the spur--had, indeed, during the past eight months been flagging
+heavily. The outside world was beginning to regard the _Clarion_ as an
+important paper. Wharton knew all the time that its advertisements were
+falling off, and its circulation declining. Why? Who can say? If it is
+true that books have their fates, it is still more true of newspapers.
+Was it that a collectivist paper--the rival organ mentioned by
+Wilkins--recently started by a group of young and outrageously clever
+Venturists and more closely in touch than the _Clarion_ with two or
+three of the great unions, had filched the _Clarion's_ ground? Or was it
+simply that, as Wharton put it to himself in moments of rage and
+despondency, the majority of working men "are either sots or
+block-heads, and will read and support _nothing_ but the low racing or
+police-court news, which is all their intelligences deserve?" Few people
+had at the bottom of their souls a more scornful distrust of the
+"masses" than the man whose one ambition at the present moment was to be
+the accepted leader of English labour.
+
+Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was
+liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept
+waiting. On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great
+indulgence.
+
+He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his
+curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back. Presently
+he stopped--absently--in front of the inner wall of the room, where,
+above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolnshire house, a
+number of large framed photographs were hung close together.
+
+His eye caught one and brightened. With an impatient gesture, like that
+of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.
+
+"If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will
+take me out of it! What a _gorgeous_ time we had on that glacier!"
+
+He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan
+Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had spent
+four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very grain
+and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could
+_feel_ the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind. The man
+seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself. And
+there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and
+that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they
+had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of
+the glacier. Ah, those had been years of _life_, those _Wanderjahre_! He
+ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing
+itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores
+with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and
+fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the
+wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever
+of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.
+
+"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,'" he thought.
+"Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?"
+
+And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a
+flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how
+indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we
+choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! _Somewhere_, while we
+toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is _air_, there is _sea_, the joy
+of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying! This
+interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or
+altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose--why! they
+could be shaken off at a moment's notice!
+
+"However"--he turned on his heel--"suppose we try a few other trifles
+first. What time? those fellows won't have gone to bed yet!"
+
+He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way
+to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped
+before a well-known fashionable club, extremely small, and extremely
+select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had
+introduced him when he was young and tender, and his mother's relations
+still cherished hopes of snatching him as a brand from the burning.
+
+The front rooms of the club were tolerably full still. He passed on to
+the back. A door-keeper stationed in the passage stepped back and
+silently opened a door. It closed instantly behind him, and Wharton
+found himself in a room with some twenty other young fellows playing
+baccarat, piles of shining money on the tables, the electric lamps hung
+over each, lighting every detail of the scene with the same searching
+disenchanting glare.
+
+"I say!" cried a young dark-haired fellow, like a dishevelled Lord
+Byron. "Here comes the Labour leader--make room!"
+
+And amid laughter and chaffing he was drawn down to the baccarat table,
+where a new deal was just beginning. He felt in his pockets for money;
+his eyes, intent and shining, followed every motion of the dealer's
+hand. For three years now, ever since his return from his travels, the
+gambler's passion had been stealing on him. Already this season he had
+lost and won--on the whole lost--large sums. And the fact was--so
+far--absolutely unknown except to the men with whom he played in this
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+"If yer goin' downstairs, Nuss, you'd better take that there scuttle
+with yer, for the coals is gittin' low an' it ull save yer a journey!"
+
+Marcella looked with amusement at her adviser--a small bandy-legged boy
+in shirt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly
+featured face. He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding,
+his sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his
+expression sharp and keen as a hawk's.
+
+"Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I'm gone, and don't
+let any one in but the doctor."
+
+And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick
+woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.
+
+"I aint a goin' ter," said the boy, shortly, beginning to sweep again
+with energy, "an' if this 'ere baby cries, give it the bottle, I
+s'pose?"
+
+"No, certainly not," said Marcella, firmly; "it has just had one. You
+sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone."
+
+Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and
+ran a general's eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the room.
+
+"Now look 'ere, Nuss," he said in a tone of pitying remonstrance, "yer
+never a goin' down to that 'ere coal cellar without a light. Yer'll 'ave
+to come runnin' up all them stairs again--sure as I'm alive yer will!"
+
+And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end
+of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the
+coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still
+masterfully considering her, let her go.
+
+Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar
+all over the poorer parts of West Central London--the eighteenth-century
+house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now
+parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air,
+water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its
+chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic
+art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.
+
+Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling
+on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade.
+Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors
+of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and
+dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that
+the house added one more to the standing shames of the district--an
+opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings
+among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again
+with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.
+
+The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed
+a sleepless night. The evening before she had been sent for in haste to
+a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a
+ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women
+friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation
+of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the
+patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been
+Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had
+done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an
+instant. The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman
+among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse;
+while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as
+best she could, in the midst of the poor thing's wild shrieks and
+wrestlings.
+
+It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their
+utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the day's
+work. Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband
+looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged
+suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had
+not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and
+night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and
+that--she could hardly have told how.
+
+"_Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!_" said the husband, rising and shaking
+himself. He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race,
+a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter. Yet,
+after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of
+perspiration.
+
+"You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again,"
+said Marcella.
+
+The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the
+nurse.
+
+"You will not go away, mees," he implored, "you will not leaf me alone?"
+
+Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.
+
+"No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes.
+You had better go to bed."
+
+It was close on three o'clock. The man demurred a little, but he was in
+truth too worn out to resist. He went into the back room and lay down
+with the children.
+
+Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her
+patient. Her quick ear caught every sound about her--the heavy breaths
+of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the
+sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the
+crowded house. Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances
+for pulling the woman through--for it was what a nurse calls "a good
+case," one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty--partly on the
+extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and
+mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman's
+illness; and partly--in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought--on
+the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in
+this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother
+and her child!
+
+The year in hospital had _rushed_--dreamless sleep by night, exhausting
+fatigue of mind and body by day. A hospital nurse, if her work _seizes_
+her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself. Now, for some
+six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse,
+under the control of a central office and superintendent. Her work lay
+in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind. The life was
+freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to self-consciousness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now the night was over. The husband had gone off to work at a
+factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children
+had been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself
+had been home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office
+asking that her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in
+sole charge, with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.
+
+When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found
+Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.
+
+"Well, Benny!" she said as she entered, "how have you got on?"
+
+"Yer can't move the dirt on them boards with sweepin'," said Benny,
+looking at them with disgust; "an' I ain't a goin' to try it no more."
+
+"You're about right there, Benny," said Marcella, mournfully, as she
+inspected them; "well, we'll get Mrs. Levi to come in and scrub--as soon
+as your mother can bear it."
+
+She stepped up to the bed and looked at her patient, who seemed to be
+passing into a state of restless prostration, more or less under the
+influence of morphia. Marcella fed her with strong beef tea made by
+herself during the night, and debated whether she should give brandy.
+No--either the doctor would come directly, or she would send for him.
+She had not seen him yet, and her lip curled at the thought of him. He
+had ordered a nurse the night before, but had not stayed to meet her,
+and Marcella had been obliged to make out his instructions from the
+husband as best she could.
+
+Benny looked up at her with a wink as she went back to the fire.
+
+"I didn't let none o' _them_ in," he said, jerking his thumb over his
+shoulder. "They come a whisperin' at the door, an' a rattlin' ov the
+handle as soon as ever you gone downstairs. But I tole 'em just to take
+theirselves off, an' as 'ow you didn't want 'em. Sillies!"
+
+And taking a crust smeared with treacle out of his pocket, Benny
+returned with a severe air to the sucking of it.
+
+Marcella laughed.
+
+"Clever Benny," she said, patting his head; "but why aren't you at
+school, sir?"
+
+Benjamin grinned.
+
+"'Ow d'yer s'pose my ma's goin' to git along without me to do for 'er
+and the babby?" he replied slily.
+
+"Well, Benny, you'll have the Board officer down on you."
+
+At this the urchin laughed out.
+
+"Why, 'e wor here last week! Ee can't be troublin' 'isself about this
+'ere bloomin' street _ev_ery day in the week."
+
+There was a sharp knock at the door.
+
+"The doctor," she said, as her face dismissed the frolic brightness
+which had stolen upon it for a moment. "Run away, Benny."
+
+Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then
+withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with
+him.
+
+The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair
+moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the
+fire.
+
+"You come from the St. Martin's Association?"
+
+Marcella stiffly replied. He took her temperature-chart from her hand
+and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time
+to time with eyes that displeased her. Presently she came to an account
+of the condition in which she had found her patient. The edge on the
+words, for all their professional quiet, was unmistakable. She saw him
+flush.
+
+He moved towards the bed, and she went with him. The woman moaned as he
+approached her. He set about his business with hands that shook.
+Marcella decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his
+proceedings with increasing disgust and amazement. Presently she could
+bear it no longer.
+
+"I think," she said, touching his arm, "that you had better leave it to
+me--and--go away!"
+
+He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying,
+and faced her fiercely.
+
+"What do you mean?" he said, "don't you know your place?"
+
+The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.
+
+"Yes--I know my place!"
+
+Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she
+had to say. She knew--and he could not deny--that he had endangered his
+patient's life. She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it
+again. Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse.
+His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.
+
+Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for
+an instant he would have struck her. Finally he turned down his
+shirt-cuffs and walked away.
+
+"You understand," he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his
+hand, "that I shall not attend this case again till your Association can
+send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the
+doctor. I shall now write a report to your superintendent."
+
+"As you please," said Marcella, quietly. And she went to the door and
+opened it.
+
+He passed her sneering:
+
+"A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say.
+I'd sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!"
+
+Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening. "Will you go?" she
+said.
+
+He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside,
+breathing threats.
+
+Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.
+There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth
+and strain.
+
+Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to
+fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking. In another
+minute or two she would be besieged by them. She called sharply,
+"Benny!"
+
+Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses
+to right and left.
+
+"What is it you want, Nuss? No, she don't want none o' _you_--_there_!"
+
+And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in
+all their faces, but that Marcella said to him--
+
+"Let in Mrs. Levi, please."
+
+The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was
+admitted, and then the key was turned. Marcella scribbled a line on a
+half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with
+it.
+
+"I have sent for a new doctor," she explained, still frowning and white,
+to Mrs. Levi. "That one was not fit."
+
+The woman's olive-skinned face lightened all over. "Thanks to the Lord!"
+she said, throwing up her hands. "But how in the world did you do 't,
+miss? There isn't a single soul in this house that doesn't go all of a
+tremble at the sight of 'im. Yet all the women has 'im when they're
+ill--bound to. They thinks he must be clever, 'cos he's such a brute. I
+do believe sometimes it's that. He _is_ a brute!"
+
+Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set
+her straight and comfortable again. But the woman had begun to mutter
+once more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did not understand,
+and could no longer be kept still. The temperature was rising again, and
+another fit of delirium was imminent. Marcella could only hope that she
+and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor
+came. When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the
+poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could,
+while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman's
+illness and of Dr. Blank's conduct of it. Marcella's feeling, as she
+listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity! The sufferings
+of the poor, _because_ they were poor--these things often, still,
+darkened earth and heaven for her. That wretch would have been quite
+capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently,
+if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do
+squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.
+
+"Hullo, nurse!" said a cheery voice; "you seem to have got a bad case."
+
+The sound was as music in Marcella's ears. The woman she held was fast
+becoming unmanageable--had just shrieked, first for "poison," then for a
+"knife," to kill herself with, and could hardly be prevented by the
+combined strength of her nurse and Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself
+madly out of bed, and now from tearing out her black hair in handfuls.
+The doctor--a young Scotchman with spectacles, and stubbly red
+beard--came quickly up to the bed, asked Marcella a few short questions,
+shrugged his shoulders over her dry report of Dr. Blank's proceedings,
+then took out a black case from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe
+together.
+
+For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by any treatment.
+The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and
+nurse, in the intervals of his wife's paroxysms, not to leave him alone.
+
+Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the
+passage of time. Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out
+with a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected
+his professional sense. Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an
+instant, struck out with a wild right hand. The blow caught Marcella on
+the cheek, and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.
+
+"You are hurt," said Dr. Angus, running up to her.
+
+"No, no," she said, smiling through the tears that the shock had called
+into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside; "it is nothing.
+You said you wanted some fresh ice."
+
+And she went into the back room to get it.
+
+The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the patient.
+
+"You will have to send her to the infirmary," he said to the husband;
+"there is nothing else for it."
+
+Marcella came back with the ice, and was able to apply it to the head.
+The patient was quieter--was, in fact, now groaning herself into a fresh
+period of exhaustion.
+
+The doctor's sharp eyes took note of the two figures, the huddled
+creature on the pillows and the stately head bending over her, with the
+delicately hollowed cheek, whereon the marks of those mad fingers stood
+out red and angry. He had already had experience of this girl in one or
+two other cases.
+
+"Well," he said, taking up his hat, "it is no good shilly-shallying. I
+will go and find Dr. Swift." Dr. Swift was the parish doctor.
+
+When he had gone, the big husband broke down and cried, with his head
+against the iron of the bed close to his wife. He put his great hand on
+hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois. They had been
+eight years married, and she had never had a day's serious illness till
+now. Marcella's eyes filled with tears as she moved about the room,
+doing various little tasks.
+
+At last she went up to him.
+
+"Won't you go and have some dinner?" she said to him kindly. "There's
+Benjamin calling you," and she pointed to the door of the back room,
+where stood Benny, his face puckered with weeping, forlornly holding out
+a plate of fried fish, in the hope of attracting his father's attention.
+
+The man, who in spite of his size and strength was in truth childishly
+soft and ductile, went as he was bid, and Marcella and Mrs. Levi set
+about doing what they could to prepare the wife for her removal.
+
+Presently parish doctor and sanitary inspector appeared, strange and
+peremptory invaders who did but add to the terror and misery of the
+husband. Then at last came the ambulance, and Dr. Angus with it. The
+patient, now once more plunged in narcotic stupor, was carried
+downstairs by two male nurses, Dr. Angus presiding. Marcella stood in
+the doorway and watched the scene,--the gradual disappearance of the
+helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat
+of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by
+step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and
+browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and
+landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr.
+Angus could hardly make his directions heard, angrily as he bade them
+stand back; and on the top stair, the big husband, following the form of
+his departing and unconscious wife with his eyes, his face convulsed
+with weeping, the whimpering children clinging about his knees.
+
+How hot it was!--how stifling the staircase smelt, and how the sun beat
+down from that upper window on the towzled unkempt women with their
+large-eyed children.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Marcella on her way home turned into a little street leading to a great
+block of model dwellings, which rose on the right hand side and made
+everything else, the mews entrance opposite, the lines of squalid shops
+on either side, look particularly small and dirty. The sun was beating
+fiercely down, and she was sick and tired.
+
+As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the
+large asphalted court round which they ran--blazing heat on one side of
+it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with
+chalk marks for wickets--she was seized with depression. The tall yet
+mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of
+packed and crowded humanity--these things, instead of offering her rest,
+only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more
+endurance, more making the best of it.
+
+But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her,
+and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of
+her own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her
+children, who had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In
+sets 7 and 8, on either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two
+widows, each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.
+
+Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside the
+"home" of the district on certain conditions, which had been fulfilled
+in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her old friends in
+these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable though poor
+class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her to make a
+temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that she
+could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for
+their companionship, as she pleased.
+
+As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or
+entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the
+living room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back
+kitchen.
+
+The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's training
+showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak flap
+tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three cane
+chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the
+varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books
+on the tables--there was not one of these things that was not in its
+degree a pleasure to her young senses, that did not help her to live her
+life. This afternoon as she opened the door and looked in, the pretty
+colours and forms in the tiny room were as water to the thirsty. Her
+mother had sent her some flowers the day before. There they were on the
+tables, great bunches of honey-suckles, of blue-bells, and Banksia
+roses. And over the mantelpiece was a photograph of the place where such
+flowers as Mellor possessed mostly grew--the unkempt lawn, the old
+fountain and grey walls of the Cedar Garden.
+
+The green blind over the one window which looked into the court, had
+been drawn down against the glare of the sun, as though by a careful
+hand. Beside a light wooden rocking chair, which was Marcella's
+favourite seat, a tray of tea things had been put out. Marcella drew a
+long breath of comfort as she put down her bag.
+
+"Now, _can_ I wait for my tea till I have washed and dressed?"
+
+She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy
+child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door
+between her rooms and the Hurds.
+
+"Minta!"
+
+A voice responded.
+
+"Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there's a good soul! I will be
+back directly."
+
+And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room,
+daintily fresh and clean but very pale. She had taken off her nurse's
+dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung
+about her in cool folds.
+
+But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her
+disapprovingly.
+
+"Whatever are you so late for?" she asked a little peevishly. "You'll
+get ill if you go missing your dinner."
+
+"I couldn't help it, Minta, it was such a bad case."
+
+Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased. Her mind was
+constantly full of protest against this nursing. Why should Miss Boyce
+do such "funny things"--why should she live as she did, at all?
+
+Their relation to each other was a curious one. Marcella, knowing that
+the life of Hurd's widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent for
+her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering
+her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service. Minta
+already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her.
+It was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine
+that one of the "gentlemen" who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve
+Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out
+of pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce
+would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling,
+and leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from
+Mellor. Her first instinct after her husband's execution had been to
+hide herself from all the world. But for a long time her precarious
+state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary
+Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village. It was not till
+Marcella's proposal came that her way was clear. She sold her bits of
+things at once, took her children and went up to Brown's buildings.
+
+Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from
+which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often
+shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at
+thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with
+almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps
+there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open
+mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the
+result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed
+mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of
+their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never
+have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask
+of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression
+that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and
+distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man,
+Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not
+pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the
+children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic
+pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss
+Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and
+Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she
+came in and found him sitting there.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through
+this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not
+call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening,
+had declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be
+that of servant in any sense, but of friend and sister; and on her and
+her children Marcella had spent from the beginning a number of new
+womanish wiles which, strangely enough, this hard, strenuous life had
+been developing in her. She would come and help put the children to bed;
+she would romp with them in their night-gowns; she would bend her
+imperious head over the anxious endeavour to hem a pink cotton pinafore
+for Daisy, or dress a doll for the baby. But the relation jarred and
+limped perpetually, and Marcella wistfully thought it her fault.
+
+Just now, however, as she sat gently swaying backwards and forwards in
+the rocking-chair, enjoying her tea, her mood was one of nothing but
+content.
+
+"Oh, Minta, give me another cup. I want to have a sleep so badly, and
+then I am going to see Miss Hallin, and stay to supper with them."
+
+"Well, you mustn't go out in them nursin' things again," said Minta,
+quickly; "I've put you in some lace in your black dress, an' it looks
+beautiful."
+
+"Oh, thank you, Minta; but that black dress always seems to me too smart
+to walk about these streets in."
+
+"It's just _nice_," said Minta, with decision. "It's just what everybody
+that knows you--what your mamma--would like to see you in. I can't abide
+them nursin' clothes--nasty things!"
+
+"I declare!" cried Marcella, laughing, but outraged; "I never like
+myself so well in anything."
+
+Minta was silent, but her small mouth took an obstinate look. What she
+really felt was that it was absurd for ladies to wear caps and aprons
+and plain black bonnets, when there was no need for them to do anything
+of the kind.
+
+"Whatever have you been doing to your cheek?" she exclaimed, suddenly,
+as Marcella handed her the empty cup to take away.
+
+Marcella explained shortly, and Minta looked more discontented than
+ever. "A lot of low people as ought to look after themselves," that was
+how in her inmost mind she generally defined Marcella's patients. She
+had been often kind and soft to her neighbours at Mellor, but these
+dirty, crowded Londoners were another matter.
+
+"Where is Daisy?" asked Marcella as Minta was going away with the tea;
+"she must have come back from school."
+
+"Here I am," said Daisy, with a grin, peeping in through the door of the
+back kitchen. "Mother, baby's woke up."
+
+"Come here, you monkey," said Marcella; "come and go to sleep with me.
+Have you had your tea?"
+
+"Yes, lots," said Daisy, climbing up into Marcella's lap. "Are you going
+to be asleep a long time?"
+
+"No--only a nap. Oh! Daisy, I'm so tired. Come and cuddlie a bit! If you
+don't go to sleep you know you can slip away--I shan't wake."
+
+The child, a slight, red-haired thing, with something of the ethereal
+charm that her dead brother had possessed, settled herself on Marcella's
+knees, slipped her left thumb into her mouth, and flung her other arm
+round Marcella's neck. They had often gone to sleep so. Mrs. Hurd came
+back, drew down the blind further, threw a light shawl over them both,
+and left them.
+
+An hour and a half later Minta came in again as she had been told.
+Daisy had slipped away, but Marcella was still lying in the perfect
+gentleness and relaxation of sleep.
+
+"You said I was to come and wake you," said Minta, drawing up the blind;
+"but I don't believe you're a bit fit to be going about. Here's some hot
+water, and there's a letter just come."
+
+Marcella woke with a start, Minta put the letter on her knee, and dream
+and reality flowed together as she saw her own name in Wharton's
+handwriting.
+
+She read the letter, then sat flushed and thinking for a while with her
+hands on her knees.
+
+A little while later she opened the Hurds' front-door.
+
+"Minta, I am going now. I shall be back early after supper, for I
+haven't written my report."
+
+"There--now you look something like!" said Minta, scanning her
+approvingly--the wide hat and pretty black dress. "Shall Daisy run out
+with that telegram?"
+
+"No, thanks. I shall pass the post. Good-bye."
+
+And she stooped and kissed the little withered woman. She wished,
+ardently wished, that Minta would be more truly friends with her!
+
+After a brisk walk through the June evening she stopped--still within
+the same district--at the door of a house in a long, old-fashioned
+street, wherein the builder was busy on either hand, since most of the
+long leases had just fallen in. But the house she entered was still
+untouched. She climbed a last-century staircase, adorned with panels of
+stucco work--slender Italianate reliefs of wreaths, ribbons, and
+medallions on a pale green ground. The decoration was clean and cared
+for, the house in good order. Eighty years ago it was the home of a
+famous judge, who entertained in its rooms the legal and literary
+celebrities of his day. Now it was let out to professional people in
+lodgings or unfurnished rooms. Edward Hallin and his sister occupied the
+top floor.
+
+Miss Hallin, a pleasant-looking, plain woman of about thirty-five, came
+at once in answer to Marcella's knock, and greeted her affectionately.
+Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.
+
+"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had forgotten
+us!"
+
+"I didn't get home till four, and then I had to have a sleep," she
+explained, half shyly.
+
+"What! you haven't been night-nursing?"
+
+"Yes, for once."
+
+"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let's look after her."
+
+He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window--the charming
+circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of the room
+and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of back
+gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane trees
+here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs of
+another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities
+of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their
+blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of
+the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of line against the blue
+and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur
+that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were
+sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.
+
+Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The walls,
+indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by
+photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to
+be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a
+few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had
+chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a
+piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one
+side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair,
+the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its
+knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she
+sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching
+over her brother.
+
+"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled
+herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have
+rested you more."
+
+"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly
+hoped to find them alone.
+
+"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you
+were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away.
+Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There
+are some anxious things going on."
+
+He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly
+wrenched himself from what were evidently recurrent thoughts.
+
+"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said, bending forward
+to her. "You don't know how much I have thought of what you have told me
+already."
+
+"I'm doing just the same," she said, laughing. "Don't take so much
+interest in it. It's the fashion just now to admire nurses; but it's
+ridiculous. We do our work like other people--sometimes badly, sometimes
+well. And some of us wouldn't do it if we could help it."
+
+She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager
+to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her
+kindly.
+
+"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?" he asked.
+
+"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more character. But
+there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for you--every
+hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And the 'off'
+times were no trouble--I never did anything else but walk up and down
+the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National Gallery if it was
+wet."
+
+"And it was the monotony you liked?"
+
+She made a sign of assent.
+
+"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen it?"
+
+She flushed.
+
+"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said, not without a little
+impatience. "But I didn't like it all at once. I hated a great deal of
+it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and
+wash--the things they set me to at first--I thought I should have been
+quite happy. To see my table full of glasses without a spot, and my
+brass-taps shining, made me as proud as a peacock! But then of course I
+had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."
+
+"How? Morally?"
+
+She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes--it seemed to me all
+topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather a
+stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn't have spoken two
+words to her. And here she was ordering me about--rating me as I had
+never rated a house-maid--laughing at me for not knowing this or that,
+and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the
+things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well
+that she had said to herself, 'Now then I must take that proud girl down
+a peg, or she will be no use to anybody;' and I had somehow to put up
+with it."
+
+"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort yourself by
+reflecting that it was everybody's fate?"
+
+Her lip twitched with amusement.
+
+"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd ideas!--sometimes
+looking back I can hardly believe it--perhaps it was partly a queer
+state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a passion I used to try
+and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces.
+And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive
+sort of way that they _couldn't_ know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor,
+and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village--or
+they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it
+came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and
+had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment
+all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming
+to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course;
+but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the
+patient's elbow in two places. Oh! the _fuss_, and the scolding, and the
+humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home
+next day."
+
+"But you didn't?"
+
+"If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have
+gone. But I couldn't think it out--I was too _dead_ tired. That is the
+chief feature of your first months in hospital--the utter helpless
+fatigue at night. You go to bed aching and you wake up aching. If you
+are healthy as I was, it doesn't hurt you; but, when your time comes to
+sleep, sleep you _must_. Even that miserable night my head was no sooner
+on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the
+routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty. Then
+when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went
+out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so grateful to her! I could
+have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with
+delight. And--then--somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of
+the work seized me--I grew ambitious--they pushed me on
+rapidly--everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my
+enemy--and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and
+engrossing place in the whole world."
+
+"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you had never obeyed any
+one in your life before?"
+
+"Not since I was at school--and then--not much!"
+
+Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the
+face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but
+that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with
+her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than
+the woman, had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in
+something new--something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the
+pathos and the pain of growth.
+
+"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.
+
+"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this afternoon."
+
+Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"
+
+"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?" she asked
+him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air. "And don't
+suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a very rare thing for us to
+undertake night-nursing at all."
+
+"Can you tell me what the case was?"
+
+She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with
+Dr. Blank.
+
+"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless look, "and
+that I shall be blamed."
+
+"I should think your second doctor will take care of that!" said Hallin.
+
+"I don't know. I couldn't help it. But it is one of our first principles
+not to question a doctor. And last week too I got the Association into
+trouble. A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got quite fond of
+had to be removed to hospital. She asked me to cut her hair. It was
+matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to the
+ward. So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at one
+to meet the doctor and help get her off. When I came, I found the whole
+court in an uproar. The sister of the woman, who had been watching for
+me, stood on the doorstep, and implored me to go away. The husband had
+gone out of his senses with rage because I had cut his wife's hair
+without his consent. 'He'll murder you, Nuss!' said the sister, 'if he
+sees you! Don't come in!--he's mad--he's _been going round on 'is 'ands
+and knees on the floor_!'"--Hallin interrupted with a shout of laughter.
+Marcella laughed too; but to his amazement he saw that her hand shook,
+and that there were tears in her eyes.
+
+"It's all very well," she said with a sigh, "but I had to come away in
+disgrace, all the street looking on. And he made such a fuss at the
+office as never was. It was unfortunate--we don't want the people set
+against the nurses. And now Dr. Blank!--I seem to be always getting into
+scrapes. It is different from hospital, where everything is settled for
+one."
+
+Hallin could hardly believe his ears. Such womanish terrors and
+depressions from Marcella Boyce! Was she, after all, too young for the
+work, or was there some fret of the soul reducing her natural force? He
+felt an unwonted impulse of tenderness towards her--such as one might
+feel towards a tired child--and set himself to cheer and rest her.
+
+He had succeeded to some extent, when he saw her give a little start,
+and following her eyes he perceived that unconsciously his arm, which
+was resting on the table, had pushed into her view a photograph in a
+little frame, which had been hitherto concealed from her by a glass of
+flowers. He would have quietly put it out of sight again, but she sat up
+in her chair.
+
+"Will you give it me?" she said, putting out her hand.
+
+He gave it her at once.
+
+"Alice brought it home from Miss Raeburn the other day. His aunt made
+him sit to one of the photographers who are always besieging public men.
+We thought it good."
+
+"It is very good," she said, after a pause. "Is the hair really--as grey
+as that?" She pointed to it.
+
+"Quite. I am very glad that he is going off with Lord Maxwell to Italy.
+It will be ten days' break for him at any rate. His work this last year
+has been very heavy. He has had his grandfather's to do really, as well
+as his own; and this Commission has been a stiff job too. I am rather
+sorry that he has taken this new post."
+
+"What post?"
+
+"Didn't you hear? They have made him Under-secretary to the Home
+Department. So that he is now in the Government."
+
+She put back the photograph, and moved her chair a little so as to see
+more of the plane trees and the strips of sunset cloud.
+
+"How is Lord Maxwell?" she asked presently.
+
+"Much changed. It might end in a sudden break-up at any time."
+
+Hallin saw a slight contraction pass over her face. He knew that she had
+always felt an affection for Lord Maxwell. Suddenly Marcella looked
+hastily round her. Miss Hallin was busy with a little servant at the
+other end of the room making arrangements for supper.
+
+"Tell me," she said, bending over the arm of her chair and speaking in a
+low, eager voice, "he is beginning to forget it?"
+
+Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile
+suggested an answer from which she turned away.
+
+"If he only would!" she said, speaking almost to herself, with a kind of
+impatience. "He ought to marry, for everybody's sake."
+
+"I see no sign of his marrying--at present," said Hallin, drily.
+
+He began to put some papers under his hand in order. There was a cold
+dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood. Ever since that
+day--that never-forgotten day--when he had come to her the morning after
+her last interview with Aldous Raeburn--come with reluctance and
+dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him--and had gone away her
+friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had ever been in
+the days of the engagement, their relation on this subject had been the
+same. His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life
+during the past eighteen months, had been very great. In that first
+interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on
+the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry,
+something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly
+difficult task--its simplicity, its delicate respect for her
+personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than
+anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the
+stress of emotion--this something had suddenly broken down his pale,
+proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and
+to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as
+amazed them both.
+
+Experiences of this kind were not new to him. His life consecrated to
+ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a
+crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him
+off from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially
+cut him off from marriage--together with the ardent temperament, the
+charm, the imaginative insight which had been his cradle-gifts--these
+things ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide
+and prop of natures stronger and stormier than his own. Often the
+unwilling guide; for he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of
+the man who has set himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will
+have power and time to finish it. The claims made upon him seemed to him
+often to cost him physical and brain energy he could ill spare.
+
+But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey
+in such matters. Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and
+there was no help for it. Since their first memorable interview, at long
+intervals, he had written to her and she to him. Of her hospital life,
+till to-night, she had never told him much. Her letters had been the
+passionate outpourings of a nature sick of itself, and for the moment of
+living; full of explanations which really explained little; full too of
+the untaught pangs and questionings of a mind which had never given any
+sustained or exhaustive effort to any philosophical or social question,
+and yet was in a sense tortured by them all--athirst for an impossible
+justice, and aflame for ideals mocked first and above all by the
+writer's own weakness and defect. Hallin had felt them interesting, sad,
+and, in a sense, fine; but he had never braced himself to answer them
+without groans. There were so many other people in the world in the same
+plight!
+
+Nevertheless, all through the growth of friendship one thing had never
+altered between them from the beginning--Hallin's irrevocable judgment
+of the treatment she had bestowed on Aldous Raeburn. Never throughout
+the whole course of their acquaintance had he expressed that judgment to
+her in so many words. Notwithstanding, she knew perfectly well both the
+nature and the force of it. It lay like a rock in the stream of their
+friendship. The currents of talk might circle round it, imply it, glance
+off from it; they left it unchanged. At the root of his mind towards
+her, at the bottom of his gentle sensitive nature, there was a
+sternness which he often forgot--she never.
+
+This hard fact in their relation had insensibly influenced her greatly,
+was constantly indeed working in and upon her, especially since the
+chances of her nursing career had brought her to settle in this
+district, within a stone's throw of him and his sister, so that she saw
+them often and intimately. But it worked in different ways.
+Sometimes--as to-night--it evoked a kind of defiance.
+
+A minute or two after he had made his remark about Aldous, she said to
+him suddenly,
+
+"I had a letter from Mr. Wharton to-day. He is coming to tea with me
+to-morrow, and I shall probably go to the House on Friday with Edith
+Craven to hear him speak."
+
+Hallin gave a slight start at the name. Then he said nothing; but went
+on sorting some letters of the day into different heaps. His silence
+roused her irritation.
+
+"Do you remember," she said, in a low, energetic voice, "that I told you
+I could never be ungrateful, never forget what he had done?"
+
+"Yes, I remember," he said, not without a certain sharpness of tone.
+"You spoke of giving him help if he ever asked it of you--has he asked
+it?"
+
+She explained that what he seemed to be asking was Louis Craven's help,
+and that his overtures with regard to the _Labour Clarion_ were
+particularly opportune, seeing that Louis was pining to be able to
+marry, and was losing heart, hope, and health for want of some fixed
+employment. She spoke warmly of her friends and their troubles, and
+Hallin's inward distaste had to admit that all she said was plausible.
+Since the moment in that strange talk which had drawn them together,
+when she had turned upon him with the passionate cry--"I see what you
+mean, perfectly! but I am not going to marry Mr. Wharton, so don't
+trouble to warn me--for the matter of that he has warned me
+himself:--but my _gratitude_ he _has_ earned, and if he asks for it I
+will _never_ deny it him "--since that moment there had been no word of
+Wharton between them. At the bottom of his heart Hallin distrusted her,
+and was ashamed of himself because of it. His soreness and jealousy for
+his friend knew no bounds. "If that were to come on again"--he was
+saying to himself now, as she talked to him--"I could not bear it, I
+could not forgive her!"
+
+He only wished that she would give up talking about Wharton altogether.
+But, on the contrary, she would talk of him--and with a curious
+persistence. She must needs know what Hallin thought of his career in
+Parliament, of his prospects, of his powers as a speaker. Hallin
+answered shortly, like some one approached on a subject for which he
+cares nothing.
+
+"Yet, of course, it is not that; it is injustice!" she said to herself,
+with vehemence. "He _must_ care; they are his subjects, his interests
+too. But he will not look at it dispassionately, because--"
+
+So they fell out with each other a little, and the talk dragged. Yet,
+all the while, Marcella's inner mind was conscious of quite different
+thoughts. How good it was to be here, in this room, beside these two
+people! She must show herself fractious and difficult with Hallin
+sometimes; it was her nature. But in reality, that slight and fragile
+form, that spiritual presence were now shrined in the girl's eager
+reverence and affection. She felt towards him as many a Catholic has
+felt towards his director; though the hidden yearning to be led by him
+was often oddly covered, as now, by an outer self-assertion. Perhaps her
+quarrel with him was that he would not lead her enough--would not tell
+her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with
+each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.
+
+"I say, Hallin--is this all right?"
+
+The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the
+door, and cautiously put in a curly head.
+
+"Frank!--is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.
+
+Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the
+window.
+
+"Well, I _am_ glad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking
+Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends
+were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what--"
+
+He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair
+boy's face.
+
+"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to
+pretend he did."
+
+"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twice
+as--I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"--this in a stage aside to
+Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studying
+Marcella.
+
+"Well, _I_ think she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at
+a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain
+danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was
+very welcome.
+
+The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to
+it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three
+others--over-driven and over-pressed, all of them--responded with a kind
+of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all
+his budget--his peacock's pride at having been just put into the
+'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with
+his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just
+scraped through his Mods.
+
+"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared,
+with a child's complacency. "_Brutes!_ I couldn't remember them. I
+learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards--but it was no good;
+they nearly dished me!"
+
+"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain
+person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure
+year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to
+last, without a hitch."
+
+"The winner of the _Derby_!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with
+his hands on his knees; "why, I should rather think so! That isn't
+memory; that's _knowledge_!--Goodness! who's this?"
+
+The last remark was addressed _sotto voce_ to Marcella. Supper was just
+over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had returned to the window, while
+Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and
+set all straight.
+
+Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking.
+Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to
+Hallin and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others
+were Bennett, Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders,
+and Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and
+Leven; but the new-comers took little notice of any one but their host,
+and were soon seated about him discussing a matter already apparently
+familiar to them, and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with
+that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative field,
+replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong
+disagreement with the rest--a disagreement which troubled himself and
+irritated them.
+
+Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was
+sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven
+turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.
+
+"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it
+rum! isn't it _rum_! Look at Hallin,--those are the people whom he
+_cares_ to talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left--really an
+awfully cute fellow--and this man in front, I think he told me he was a
+mason, a Socialist of course--would like to string _me_ up to-morrow.
+Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think
+we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would pray
+over us first and shoot us afterwards--which isn't the case, I
+understand, with many of 'em. Then the others--you know them? That's
+Bennett--regular good fellow--always telling his pals not to make fools
+of themselves--for which of course they love him no more than they are
+obliged--And Wilkins--oh! _Wilkins_"--he chuckled--"they say it'll come
+to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my
+charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."
+
+Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a
+little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and
+looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him.
+Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head
+in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to
+anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that,
+notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.
+
+"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with
+a little scorn.
+
+"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't
+know anything about anything!--Miss Boyce!"
+
+He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at
+once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside
+her.
+
+Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several
+times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of
+his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she
+recognised the old symptoms.
+
+"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said--"how many
+since we met last?"
+
+"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his
+fingers--"you're like all the rest."
+
+Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a
+flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.
+
+"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk!
+And yet I did want to tell you about it--you were awfully kind to me
+down at home. I want to tell you--and I don't want to tell you--perhaps
+I _oughtn't_ to tell you--you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an
+ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all--and yet somehow--"
+
+The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a
+hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at
+Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by
+its two years or so of time!
+
+"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."
+
+"No--really?--shall I?"
+
+Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to
+some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A
+pretty girl--or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some
+relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again
+at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and
+adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking
+her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not
+to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed
+like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or
+family; yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of
+them--how familiar it all was!--and how many more of them there seemed
+to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!
+
+"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's so _frightfully_
+pretty--well, frightfully fetching, rather--and well dressed and all the
+rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed
+girls--not she. She's read a _lot_ of things--a lot! I'm sure, Miss
+Boyce"--he looked at her confidently,--"if _you_ were to see her you'd
+think her awfully clever. And yet she's so little--and so dainty--and
+she dances--my goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I
+mean--Letty Lind isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her
+mother's a most dreadful old bore--well, no, I didn't mean that--of
+course I didn't mean that!--but she's fussy, you know, and invalidy, and
+has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged about in bath chairs, and
+Betty's an angel to her--she is really--though her mother's always
+snapping her head off. And as to the _poor_--"
+
+Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval,
+sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to
+restrain this plunging lover.
+
+"Look here--do come to the point--have you proposed to her?"
+
+"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently. "About once a
+week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me--that sort always
+does--but I think I might really have a chance with her, if it weren't
+for her mother--horrible old--no, of _course_ I don't mean that! But
+now it comes in--what I oughtn't to tell you--I _know_ I oughtn't to
+tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't
+help talking of it!"
+
+And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red
+cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.
+
+Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in
+riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?--of course you must
+tell me."
+
+"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could
+mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you
+about--about--You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the
+Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's
+taken a fancy to her lately--and her mother's treated me like dirt ever
+since they asked her to go to Italy--and naturally a fellow sees what
+_that_ means--and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty
+_would_; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"--this time he
+smote his knee in real desperation--"now I _have_ done it. I'm simply
+_bursting_ always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say.
+Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"
+
+"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience--"that her mother wants her
+to marry Mr. Raeburn?"
+
+He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair,
+her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the
+pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night
+with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into
+his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist
+the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the
+Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He
+knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but
+all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the
+headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a
+burning curiosity as to how she would take it--what she would say.
+
+Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his
+chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and
+self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.
+
+"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him
+steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr.
+Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't
+matter what I suppose--that _you_ think--about my present state of mind.
+It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved
+badly. I know it--and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living
+one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for
+you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about
+Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."
+
+Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.
+
+"I never thought of that," he said.
+
+"Well, you might, mightn't you?"
+
+For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush
+of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.
+
+Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy
+and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.
+
+"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him, smiling, and in
+her most ordinary voice.
+
+The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on
+chattering.
+
+"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mrs.
+Macdonald--that's Betty's mother--she hasn't got a father--had talked it
+over. And now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too
+for ten days--and when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me
+as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death.
+It's sickening!"
+
+"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"
+
+"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said despondently. "She's
+always teasing and amusing him. When she's there she never lets him
+alone. She harries him out. She makes him read to her and ride with her.
+She makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'd _never_ think
+Aldous would discuss--her lovers and her love affairs, and being in
+love!--it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she
+and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me
+she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so
+flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to
+Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said; 'this'll never do! you've
+got to come and dance with me, and _push_ those chairs and tables
+aside'--I can fancy the little stamp she'd give--'and make those other
+people dance too.' And she made him--she positively made him. Aldous
+declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And
+presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of
+it--and of course the evening went like smoke."
+
+Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on
+the speaker.
+
+"And Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded
+incredulous.
+
+"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that,
+and he told her everything--oh, well," said the lad, embarrassed, and
+clutching at his usual formula--"of course, I didn't mean that. And
+she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she
+adores him--that he's the only great man she's ever known--that I'm not
+fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to
+me--and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall
+have to shoot myself--I declare I shall!"
+
+"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't
+clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over
+there to listen to that talk. But--first--come and see me whenever you
+like--3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street--and tell me how this
+goes on?"
+
+She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half
+sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts
+had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was
+suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away
+from him.
+
+"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself
+discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of
+course she'll get rid of _them_. Just like my luck!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from
+her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of
+listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was
+reflecting how little men knew of each other!--even the most intimate
+friends--and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like,
+married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her
+meant, of course, the attraction of contraries--one of the most
+promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's
+chances were poor.
+
+Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she
+discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion
+of his present position and prospects in the Labour party--a discussion,
+however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the
+air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for
+treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his
+chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in
+these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had
+no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and
+made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind
+to send all her guests away.
+
+The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an
+organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They
+referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish
+fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to
+learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and
+strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to
+smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation,
+separate place in the House, separate Whips--they were ready, nay
+clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry
+Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the _Clarion_ with enthusiasm, and
+declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was,
+moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.
+
+The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one
+or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to
+nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of
+the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this
+big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair,
+and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with
+these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!
+
+Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some
+of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two
+workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably--Wilkins's dialect getting
+more pronounced with each step of the argument.
+
+"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself
+and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at
+_home_, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be
+the People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong
+ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak _use_ of us
+all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an'
+ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he?
+Is he a man of _us_--bone of our bone? He's a _landlord_, and an
+aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns
+in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have
+they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of
+years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o' _them_--living
+on his rent and interest--grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound
+if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do--is goin' to lead
+_me_, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords!
+Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for
+us? Let him go to his own class--I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of
+countesses, and they of him!--or let him set up as the friend of the
+working man just as he likes--I'm quite agreeable!--I shan't make any
+bones about takin' his _vote_; but I'm not goin' to make him master over
+me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of
+Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"
+
+Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a
+worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in
+and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason,
+with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of
+the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.
+
+"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly,
+"and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd
+have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our
+business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"
+
+"I'm not saying we shouldn't _organise_," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What
+I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working class--a man who has the _wants_
+of the working class--a man whom the working class can get a hold on--to
+do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or
+capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the
+coontry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"
+
+The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it
+yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold
+his own with the swells--and quite right too!"
+
+"And if Mr. Wharton _is_ a landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the
+shoemaker--a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many
+on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about
+the land, and the co-operative farming. E's _straight_ is Mr. Wharton.
+We 'aven't got Socialism yet--an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord.
+Ee was born it."
+
+"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the
+red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek--"he's runnin' that paper for
+his own hand--Haven't I had experience of him? I know it--And I'll prove
+it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton--and
+when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for
+any good we're iver likely to get out o' _him. He_ go agen the landlords
+when it coom to the real toossle,--I know 'em--I tell tha--I know 'em!"
+
+A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.
+
+"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on
+groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small
+attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been
+re-housed in our generation by these same landlords--no fuss about
+it--and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and
+fourpence a week!"
+
+Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker--amazed!
+
+Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like
+women--least of all, ladies.
+
+He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she
+said--which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe--it was done
+for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or
+just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize
+cattle must have prize cottages of course--"with a race of slaves
+inside 'em!"
+
+Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee,
+went avengingly into facts--the difference between landlords' villages
+and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great
+landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point
+of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for
+the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the
+French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.
+
+Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.
+
+"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her
+head or am I?"
+
+After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen
+joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous
+silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence
+of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox,
+everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.
+
+"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said
+Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd
+take a lot of beating."
+
+"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I _am_."
+
+He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.
+
+When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.
+
+"Are there many of these Labour members like _that_?"
+
+Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.
+
+"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he
+has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular
+audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,--it's his
+tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for
+the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"
+
+And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of
+expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.
+
+"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics
+is one thing--slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her
+head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in
+the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and
+Wharton had scored his first point.
+
+He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their
+ways.
+
+"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it
+teases.' _We_ know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you
+get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid
+Radical in the House I'm always having rows with--and upon my word I
+didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"
+
+Marcella flushed.
+
+"Never mind where I got it!" she said.
+
+In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had
+worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much
+angry zest, and to such different purpose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort
+her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for
+a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.
+
+His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."
+
+"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of
+exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into
+sleeping trim. But you go, Alice--good-night."
+
+When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the
+thought--"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! _She_--and
+justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last
+year--"
+
+He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection,
+oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep.
+Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh
+sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four
+men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in
+his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the
+night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either
+to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.
+
+He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which
+so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped
+activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since
+he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content,
+cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite
+compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The
+study of economical and historical questions; the expression through
+them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as
+few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty,
+and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the
+power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world
+on whom all his thoughts centred--these things had been his joy, and had
+led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of
+every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.
+
+And now he had come upon opposition--the first cooling of friendships,
+the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.
+
+Early in the spring of this year a book called _To-morrow and the Land_
+had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great
+ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not
+offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the
+question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It
+showed--or tried to show--in picturesque detail what might be the
+consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land
+into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and
+transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and
+the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from
+_Progress and Poverty_, which also powerfully and directly affected the
+English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great
+apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the
+landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average
+working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style,
+and--by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly
+from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of
+London--treated with abundant humour.
+
+The thing had an enormous success--in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon
+Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the
+working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were
+touched--nay, possessed--by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic
+newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the
+working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness--an
+infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense
+sale, and was in every one's hands.
+
+To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled
+problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of
+extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction,
+intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its
+success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to
+battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his
+openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen
+to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.
+
+And he had been saying his say--throwing into it all his energies, all
+his finest work. With the result that--for the first time in eleven
+years--he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath
+his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in
+place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness
+to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged
+to the inner circle and the trusted few--these bitter ghosts, with their
+hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist
+effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could
+not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul--it had been the
+source of his power--and every economical or social conviction was in
+some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his
+being--his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain,
+his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other
+men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a
+question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw
+himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with
+some prescience of the martyr's fate.
+
+Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent
+over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought
+bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him
+through so many lesser contests. It was _impossible_ that Bennett
+should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the
+honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most
+clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him.
+Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was
+so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent,
+while all his friends were talking language which was almost the
+language of a new faith!
+
+He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great
+debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He
+had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked
+forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of
+hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken
+friendships. Oh, for _sleep_--for the power to rest--to escape this
+corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled
+nothing!
+
+"_The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of
+man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it_."
+These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his
+own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or
+the hidden evil, but the hidden _wisdom_. Could one die and still
+believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven.
+"This is Friday--say Monday?"
+
+Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little
+sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the
+door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that
+the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had
+gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the
+_Labour Clarion_, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with
+special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose
+tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he
+had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the
+man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and
+had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was
+abundantly satisfied.
+
+"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper _goes in_ for the
+strike, that you will fight it through?"
+
+He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven
+was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face,
+delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in
+appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a
+courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had
+never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the
+old days of Venturist debates.
+
+"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with
+emphasis--"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now
+hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have
+been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up. There
+are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should say, belonged quite
+to the worst type of employer going."
+
+He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air
+of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.
+
+"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just
+one according to his lights. There are plenty worse than he."
+
+Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never
+accepting anything that was said quite as it stood--of not, even in
+small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was conscious of
+the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought
+to have been enough for Craven.
+
+"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his
+stick--"you see there is talk of arbitration."
+
+"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind. The men have
+been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig from the
+neighbourhood--not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it--and, of
+course, the award goes against the men."
+
+"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"
+
+Craven took out a note-book.
+
+"No!--The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men are asking
+for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all
+these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them! I
+mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you read the
+evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let them
+live first!"
+
+Craven looked up absently.
+
+"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address?" Mr. Thorpe
+was the secretary.
+
+Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it
+was not for Craven to take no notice.
+
+Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as
+anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's
+grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep
+disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of
+self-advertisement, held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an
+amazing disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.
+
+Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt
+directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave
+the minutest attention.
+
+"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.
+
+"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. "Business
+is up and I am off!"
+
+He took up his hat as he spoke.
+
+"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said
+Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy
+who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea-table.
+
+Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her
+_tęte-ŕ-tęte_ before Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the
+House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so
+easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this
+disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began
+at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a
+chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and
+armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head,
+and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He
+hesitated and stayed.
+
+"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed Louis Craven
+on her way to get some cake.
+
+He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all
+gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.
+
+The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat
+among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a
+Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the
+occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven
+said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his
+arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and
+Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose
+plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded.
+Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some
+presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?
+
+"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than
+spent.--"You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven
+comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you.
+Good-bye!--good-bye!"
+
+And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen
+glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in
+which they had been sitting, he went.
+
+He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother,
+who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.
+
+"Well--any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.
+
+"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton
+had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley
+strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a salary--two hundred a
+year. Oh! it'll do."
+
+He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide
+his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the
+pinched and worn face.
+
+"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" said
+Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.
+
+"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing.
+"Anna's got to work out her shirt-making time. She only left the
+tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago. And she was to
+have a month at each."
+
+Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen
+Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a
+better authority on many Labour questions than he.
+
+Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the
+benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her
+last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he
+had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on
+to shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this
+heat.
+
+"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith pensively. "Louis
+was lodging on the second floor, she in the third floor back, and they
+used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him imploring the little
+slavey to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavey tossed her head,
+and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs,
+calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey under her thumb, got
+them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When Louis came home he
+discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course he
+wept--whatever he may say. But next morning Miss Anna found her shoes
+outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a
+note inside one of them. Affecting! wasn't it? Thenceforward, as long as
+they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked.
+Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."
+
+Marcella laughed.
+
+"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.
+
+"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can get hold of her.
+But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or trying to set up Unions.
+She does the work of six. She'll earn nearly as much as I do when we're
+married. Oh! we shall swim!"
+
+Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect--so unlike the gentle or satirical
+detachment which made his ordinary manner--with a darkening eye, as
+though annoyed by his effusion.
+
+"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what Mr. Harry Wharton
+spends on his clothes, I should think. The Labour men tell me he is
+superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his clothes,
+he is able to buy _you_, Louis, body and soul, and you seem inclined to
+be grateful."
+
+"Never mind," said Louis recklessly. "He didn't buy some one else--and I
+_am_ grateful!"
+
+"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of
+tone. "_You_ the dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to
+put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your
+becoming dependent on him."
+
+Marcella gave an angry start. Louis protested.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have to bear it from me, I
+tell you--unless you muzzle me too with an Anna."
+
+"But I don't see why _I_ should bear it," said Marcella, turning upon
+him. "I think you know that I owe Mr. Wharton a debt. Please remember
+it!"
+
+Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A question crossed his
+mind concerning her. Then he made her a little clumsy bow.
+
+"I am dumb," he said. "My manners, you perceive, are what they always
+were."
+
+"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming. "How can a
+man who has reached the position he has in so short a time--in so many
+different worlds--be disposed of by calling him an ugly name? It is more
+than unjust--it is absurd! Besides, what can you know of him?"
+
+"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread
+and butter, "that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton
+joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all. I watched his
+beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did.
+And most of them--as he knows!--have pretty strong opinions by now about
+the man."
+
+"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a man of that type to
+be the pure-eyed patriot. But neither you nor I can deny that he has
+done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my bosom? Not at all!
+He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me. I like the job, and mean
+to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a
+bit of decent work."
+
+"_You_--use Harry Wharton!" said the cripple, with a sarcasm that
+brought the colour to Louis's thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than
+before. She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal
+prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough, that a man of Anthony
+Craven's type--poor, unsuccessful, and embittered--should dislike a
+popular victorious personality.
+
+"Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?" she said with emphasis, and
+Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself
+back in his chair, and was silent.
+
+It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her
+friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men,
+especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into
+a mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art, and
+devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that
+he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle,
+Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative
+design. Yet he was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist
+of the two. Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the
+whole with Anthony a counsel of despair. He loathed wealth more
+passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in
+his kind. Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would
+probably remain a sorry spot.
+
+In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the
+hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly--though
+with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn's name--what had happened to her
+at Mellor. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it
+a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil--the lover! To fall a victim
+to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard.
+And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of
+it. At any rate he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty
+was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor
+in her fate. He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years'
+interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.
+
+After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their
+chat with an abrupt--
+
+"What _is_ this job, Louis?"
+
+"I told you. I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley
+strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."
+
+"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are too strong. I had a
+talk with Denny yesterday."
+
+The Denny he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the House,
+but his son--a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one of the
+most stiff-backed and autocratic of capitalists, had developed socialist
+opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a member of the
+"intellectual proletariat," as they have been called, the free-lances of
+the Collectivist movement. He had lately joined the Venturists. Anthony
+had taken a fancy to him. Louis as yet knew little or nothing of him.
+
+"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I don't know. I think the
+_Clarion can_ do something. The press grows more and more powerful in
+these things."
+
+And he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made--that
+Wharton always did make, in talking of the _Clarion_--as to its growth
+under his hands, and increasing influence in Labour disputes.
+
+"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum! My own belief is
+that the _Clarion_ is a rotten property, and that he knows it!"
+
+At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance after a
+certain point becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony
+for the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious
+person whom one humours but does not argue with. He accepted the part,
+saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing
+from one to the other.
+
+However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell. It
+was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and
+her pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the
+right to be rude.
+
+"How are you getting on?" he said to her abruptly as he dropped her
+hand.
+
+"Oh, very well! my superintendent leaves me almost alone now, which is a
+compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good woman,' and a
+sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice.
+Those are my chief grievances, I think."
+
+"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"
+
+She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her
+say:--
+
+"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"How like a woman! A few ill-housed villagers made you a democrat. A few
+well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class. Your
+people were wise to let you take this work."
+
+"Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans?" she asked him,
+mocking. "And I didn't say 'money' or 'comfort,' did I? but 'happiness.'
+As for my 'democracy,' you are not perhaps the best judge."
+
+She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an
+attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of
+storm in her great eyes.
+
+"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+"Because I have every right to be! I joined a society, pledged to work
+'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what poor work I can
+in that spirit."
+
+"_You_ are not a Socialist. Half the things you say, or imply, show it.
+And we _are_ Socialists."
+
+She hesitated, looking at him steadily.
+
+"No!--so far as Socialism means a political system--the trampling out of
+private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it--I find
+myself slipping away from it more and more. No!--as I go about among
+these wage-earners, the emphasis--do what I will--comes to lie less and
+less on possession--more and more on character. I go to two tenements in
+the same building. One is Hell--the other Heaven. Why? Both belong to
+well-paid artisans with equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see,
+might have a decent and pleasant life of it. But one is a man--the
+other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not
+all, I know--oh! don't trouble to tell me so!--but it is more than I
+thought. No!--my sympathies in this district where I work are not so
+much with the Socialists that I know here--saving your presence!
+but--with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation!
+and get all the abuse from all sides."
+
+Anthony laughed scornfully.
+
+"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she invariably prefers
+the tinkers to the reformers."
+
+"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the thought of many
+days finding defiant expression--"it seems to me like all other
+interesting and important things--destined to help something else!
+Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods--it becomes the
+great bulwark of property and the feudal state. The Crusades--they set
+out to recover the tomb of the Lord!--what they did was to increase
+trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It talks of a new
+order--what it _will_ do is to help to make the old sound!"
+
+Anthony clapped her ironically.
+
+"Excellent! When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold
+of you--ask me to come and hear!"
+
+Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in
+his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome
+half-taught girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or
+desired to have it.
+
+Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for
+him, rare effusion. Two years before, for the space of some months, he
+had been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything
+warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed
+him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of
+all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt
+as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her
+by that moment of passionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly!--she
+had given him his Anna.
+
+When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment
+to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Louis's thanks
+had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a child's
+brightness. The old passion for ruling and influencing was all alive and
+happy.
+
+"I will see it is all right," she was saying to herself. "I will look
+after them."
+
+What she meant was, "I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after them!" and
+through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to that
+_tęte-ŕ-tęte_ with him which had preceded the Cravens' arrival.
+
+How changed he was, yet how much the same! He had not sat beside her for
+ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of
+the other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious
+claim to confidence, to intimacy--on the other hand a new atmosphere, a
+new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties
+of power, a great position--everything fitted to touch such an
+imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was noble, both
+in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had
+gained lines that pleased her--lines that a woman marks, because she
+thinks they mean experience an I mastery.
+
+Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was
+pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was
+pleasure; so too was his new connection with her old friends. And a
+pleasure which took nothing from self-respect; which was open,
+honourable, eager. As for that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at
+the thought of it, only to thrust the remembrance passionately away.
+That _he_ should remember or allude to it, would put an end to
+friendship. Otherwise friends they would and should be; and the personal
+interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping
+influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and
+suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between men and women grow
+more possible every day. While, as for Hallin's distrust, and Anthony
+Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either
+of them? Could any one suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's
+would be congenial to Hallin or to Craven--or--to yet another person, of
+whom she did not want to think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of
+him? It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made
+its force.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this
+pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the
+dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who
+came to clear away the tea.
+
+"Why, it is close on the half-hour!" cried Marcella, springing up.
+"Where are my things?"
+
+She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag
+contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.
+
+Suddenly--the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the
+tea--by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on
+Hallin's table flashed into her mind--its look--the grizzled hair. With
+an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings
+of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her--a dumb gesture of
+contrition and of grief.
+
+She!--she talk of social reform and "character," she give her opinion,
+as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main
+achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something
+belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her
+pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Her first case was in Brown's Buildings itself--a woman suffering from
+bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated
+foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks. She lived on
+the top floor of one of the easterly blocks, with two daughters and a
+son of eighteen.
+
+When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean
+and smelt of flowers. The windows were open, and a young woman was busy
+shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her
+mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then, they introduced
+her with some ceremony to a "lady," who was sitting beside the patient,
+a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen
+handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy.
+The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as "the
+young person," but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not
+have been surpassed.
+
+Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale
+transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off;
+but between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and
+grateful to her nurse. "I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle as
+you--" or--"I _do_ take it kind of you, Nurse, to do it so _slow_--oh!
+there were a young person before you--" or "hasn't she got nice hands,
+Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem to _jar_ yer."
+
+"Poor foot! but I think it is looking better," said Marcella, getting up
+at last from her work, when all was clean and comfortable and she had
+replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it--for its
+owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old armchair. "And
+how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?"
+
+"Oh! it's very bad, nights," said Mrs. Jervis, mildly--"disturbs Emily
+dreadful. But I always pray every night, when she lifts me into bed, as
+I may be took before the morning, an' God ull do it soon."
+
+"Mother!" cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, "you know you oughtn't to
+say them things."
+
+Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face
+was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the
+frail form there breathed an indomitable air of _life_, a gay courage
+indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.
+
+"Well, yer not to take 'em to heart, Em'ly. It ull be when it will
+be--for the Lord likes us to pray, but He'll take his own time--an'
+she's got troubles enough of her own, Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off
+her ring?"
+
+Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over,
+and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.
+
+"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last two days," she said
+with low vehemence--"as I'm _never_ goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn
+me!"
+
+Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had
+married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her
+baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the
+brutal ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her
+feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time
+in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no
+effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could
+what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven
+shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen,
+had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some
+six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled
+branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the
+prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from
+his earnings enough to teach Emily "the shirt-ironing," denying himself
+every indulgence till her training was over.
+
+Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back; her
+earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease;
+while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they
+lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness
+and care.
+
+Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's speech.
+
+"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that
+held down the shirt on the board.
+
+Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's eyes glowed with
+things unsaid and inexpressible--the "eternal passion, eternal pain,"
+which in half the human race have no voice.
+
+"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband," said Mrs. Jervis, in her
+delicate thoughtful voice--"a very uncultivated man."
+
+Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But
+the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them
+apparently to express what had to be said.
+
+"It's a sad thing is want of edication," Mrs. Jervis went on in the same
+tone. "Now there's that lady there"--with a little courtly wave of her
+hand towards Mrs. Burton--"she can't read yer know, Nurse, and I'm that
+sorry for her! But I've been reading to her, an' Emily--just while my
+cough's quiet--one of my ole tracks."
+
+She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use. It was called "A
+Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?" Marcella looked at it in
+respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in her
+line.
+
+"I do _love_ a track!" said Mrs. Jervis, pensively. "That's why I don't
+like these buildings so well as them others, Em'ly. Here you never get
+no tracks; and there, what with one person and another, there was a new
+one most weeks. But"--her voice dropped, and she looked timidly first at
+her friend, and then at Marcella--"she isn't a Christian, Nurse. Isn't
+it sad?"
+
+Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich mahogany complexion, with a black
+"front," and a mouth which turned down decisively at the corners,
+looked up from her embroidery with severe composure.
+
+"No, Nurse, I'm not a Christian," she said in the tone of one stating a
+disagreeable fact for which they are noways responsible. "My brother
+is--and my sisters--real good Christian people. One of my sisters
+married a gentleman up in Wales. She 'as two servants, an' fam'ly
+prayers reg'lar. But I've never felt no 'call,' and I tell 'em I can't
+purtend. An' Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no
+different."
+
+She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of
+probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked
+at her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a
+churchwoman.
+
+"Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton," she said indignantly. "What
+she means, Nurse, is she isn't a 'member' of any chapel, like mother.
+But she's been baptised and confirmed, for I asked her. And of course
+she's a Christian."
+
+"Em'ly!" said Mrs. Jervis, with energy.
+
+Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt
+upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The
+glances of the two women crossed; there seemed to be a mute struggle
+between them. Then Emily laid down her iron, stepped quickly across to
+her mother, and kneeling beside her, threw her arms around her.
+
+"Have it your own way, mother," she said, while her lip quivered; "I
+wasn't a-goin' to cross you."
+
+Mrs. Jervis laid her waxen cheek against her daughter's tangle of brown
+hair with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and
+panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a
+terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might
+kill out the struggling flame of life.
+
+"You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis," said Marcella, with gentle
+authority. "You know the dressing must tire you, though you won't
+confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There; aren't the pillows easier
+so? Now rest--and good-bye."
+
+But Mrs. Jervis held her, while Emily slipped away.
+
+"I shall rest soon," she said significantly. "An' it hurts me when Emily
+talks like that. It's the only thing that ever comes atween us. She
+thinks o' forms an' ceremonies; an' _I_ think o' _grace_."
+
+Her old woman's eyes, so clear and vivid under the blanched brow,
+searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood, shy and
+wondering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so
+little. So narrow a life, in these poor rooms, under these crippling
+conditions of disease!--and all this preoccupation with, this passion
+over, the things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of
+the spirit--wonderful!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On coming out from Brown's Buildings, she turned her steps reluctantly
+towards a street some distance from her own immediate neighbourhood,
+where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion and an
+unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman who often availed himself of
+the help of the St. Martin's nurses had asked the superintendent to
+undertake for him "a difficult case." Would one of their nurses go
+regularly to visit a certain house, ostensibly for the sake of a little
+boy of five just come back from the hospital, who required care at home
+for a while, _really_ for the sake of his young mother, who had suddenly
+developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin?
+
+Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She
+somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or
+three visits, always dressing the child's sore leg, and endeavouring to
+make acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not
+had much success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty, with a flighty,
+restless manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella, and
+grateful to her apparently for the ease she gave the boy. But she
+offered no confidences; the rooms she and her husband occupied showed
+them to be well-to-do; Marcella had so far found them well-kept; and
+though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious,
+she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her
+that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about
+her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others;
+and neither alternative pleased her.
+
+To-day, however, as she stopped at the Vincents' door, she noticed that
+the doorstep, which was as a rule shining white, was muddy and
+neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang
+repeatedly. At last a neighbour, who had been watching the strange
+nurse through her own parlour window, came out to the street.
+
+"I think, miss," she said, with an air of polite mystery, "as you'd
+better walk in. Mrs. Vincent 'asn't been enjyin' very good 'ealth this
+last few days."
+
+Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after
+six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the back
+of the house. But in the Vincents' front parlour the blinds were all
+pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of a
+child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door.
+
+The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent
+sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The
+elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a
+wretched silence; but the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly
+throwing himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts,
+now crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice, for "Máma! din-din!
+Máma! din-din!"
+
+Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She
+sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of
+words. She was dirty and unkempt; the room was covered with litter; the
+breakfast things were still on the table; and the children were
+evidently starving.
+
+Marcella, seized with pity, and divining what had happened, tried to
+rouse and comfort her. But she got no answer. Then she asked for
+matches. Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but
+subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them
+herself, lit a tire of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put
+on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of
+the children--the only eatables she could find--and after she had
+dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea things and tidy the
+room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute
+to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her.
+
+In the midst of her labours, an elderly woman cautiously opened the door
+and beckoned to her.
+
+Marcella went out into the passage.
+
+"I'm her mother, miss! I 'eered you were 'ere, an' I follered yer. Oh!
+such a business as we 'ad, 'er 'usband an' me, a gettin' of 'er 'ome
+last night. There's a neighbour come to me, an' she says: 'Mrs. Lucas,
+there's your daughter a drinkin' in that public 'ouse, an' if I was you
+I'd go and fetch her out; for she's got a lot o' money, an' she's
+treatin' everybody all round.' An' Charlie--that's 'er 'usband--ee come
+along too, an' between us we got holt on her. An' iver sence we brought
+her 'ome last night, she set there in that cheer, an' niver a word to
+nobody! Not to me 't any rate, nor the chillen. I believe 'er 'usband
+an' 'er 'ad words this mornin'. But she won't tell me nothin'. She sits
+there--just heart-broke"--the woman put up her apron to her eyes and
+began crying. "She ain't eatin' nothink all day, an' I dursen't leave
+the 'ouse out o' me sight--I lives close by, miss--for fear of 'er doing
+'erself a mischief."
+
+"How long has she been like this?" said Marcella, drawing the door
+cautiously to behind her.
+
+"About fourteen month," said the woman, hopelessly. "An' none of us
+knows why. She was such a neat, pretty girl when she married 'im--an' ee
+such a steady fellow. An' I've done _my_ best. I've talked to 'er, an'
+I've 'id 'er 'at an' her walking things, an' taken 'er money out of 'er
+pockets. An', bless yer, she's been all right now for seven weeks--till
+last night. Oh, deary, deary, me! whatever 'ull become o' them--'er, an'
+'im, an' the children!"
+
+The tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face.
+
+"Leave her to me a little longer," said Marcella, softly; "but come back
+to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be alone."
+
+The woman nodded, and went away.
+
+Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke
+for the first time:
+
+"That was my mother you were talkin' to?"
+
+"Yes," said Marcella, quietly, as she took the kettle off the fire. "Now
+I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will you, if I make
+it?"
+
+The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's movements
+with her weary eyes. At last when Marcella knelt down beside her holding
+out a cup of tea and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry.
+Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked
+out of her hand.
+
+"He struck me this morning!--Charlie did--the first time in seven years.
+Look here!"
+
+She pulled up her sleeve, and on her white, delicate arm she showed a
+large bruise. As she pointed to it her eyes filled with miserable tears;
+her lips quivered; anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even in this
+abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her
+refined air. This woman drinking and treating in a low public-house at
+midnight!--rescued thence by a decent husband!
+
+She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making
+the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into
+her, she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before
+which she quailed. The woman clung to her, moaning about her husband,
+about the demon instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew
+how--by means it seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and
+small self-indulgences--and she felt herself powerless to fight; about
+the wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who
+was the respected, well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the
+neighbourhood. All through it came back to him.
+
+"We had words, Nurse, this morning, when he went out to his work. He
+said he'd nearly died of shame last night; that he couldn't bear it no
+more; that he'd take the children from me. And I was all queer in the
+head still, and I sauced him--and then--he looked like a devil--and he
+took me by the arm--and _threw_ me down--as if I'd been a sack. An' he
+never, _never,_--touched me--before--in all his life. An' he's never
+come in all day. An' perhaps I shan't ever see him again. An' last
+time--but it wasn't so bad as this--he said he'd try an' love me again
+if I'd behave. An' he did try--and I tried too. But now it's no good,
+an' perhaps he'll not come back. Oh, what shall I do? what shall I do!"
+she flung her arms above her head. "Won't _anybody_ find him? won't
+_anybody_ help me?"
+
+She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching it, her wild eyes
+seeking her companion's.
+
+But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a
+cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could
+do nothing--that there was nothing in her adequate to such an
+appeal--nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human life thus
+flung upon her.
+
+She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried
+still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home--took
+hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and
+touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a
+barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and
+poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in
+her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no
+efficacy--no power.
+
+At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came
+in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the
+wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached
+the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her
+at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what
+to say.
+
+"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and
+miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"
+
+The husband looked at her, and then turned away.
+
+"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went without another word, and
+with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being
+which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's
+death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards--saying that
+she must write some letters and reports--she shut herself up, and bade
+good-night to Minta and the children.
+
+But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time,
+watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and
+even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread
+out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the
+floor, with her head against a chair--an attitude of her stormy
+childhood--she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known
+for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis--the saint--so near to death, so
+satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the
+poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay.
+Both experiences had this in common--that each had had some part in
+plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.
+
+What had come to her? Daring the past weeks there had been something
+wrestling in her--some new birth--some "conviction of sin," as Mrs.
+Jervis would have said. As she looked back over all her strenuous youth
+she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to Anthony Craven
+returned upon her, mocked her--made now a scourge for her own pride, not
+a mere, measure of blame for others. Aldous Raeburn, her father and
+mother, her poor--one and all rose against her--plucked at
+her--reproached her. "Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?" cried
+a voice, which was the voice of them all; "what are opinions--what is
+influence, beauty, cleverness?--what is anything worth but
+_character_--but _soul?_"
+
+And character--soul--can only be got by self-surrender; and
+self-surrender comes not of knowledge but of love.
+
+A number of thoughts and phrases, hitherto of little meaning to her,
+floated into her mind--sank and pressed there. That strange word "grace"
+for instance!
+
+A year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first
+inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school
+years, the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that
+religion was played out, that Socialism and Science were enough for
+mankind.
+
+But nobody could live in hospital--nobody could go among the
+poor--nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward
+Hallin and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in
+the world--this "grace" that "sustaineth"--however variously
+interpreted, still living and working, as it worked of old, among the
+little Galilean towns, in Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallin it did
+not mean the same, perhaps, as it meant to the hard-worked clergymen she
+knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But to all it meant the motive power of
+life--something subduing, transforming, delivering--something that
+to-night she envied with a passion and a yearning that amazed herself.
+
+How many things she craved, as an eager child craves them! First some
+moral change, she knew not what--then Aldous Raeburn's pardon and
+friendship--then and above all, the power to lose herself--the power to
+_love_.
+
+Dangerous significant moment in a woman's life--moment at once of
+despair and of illusion!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of
+Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him,
+and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon;
+questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the
+last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there,
+and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that
+he might verify a quotation.
+
+An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been
+in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a
+speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar
+House-of-Commons acquaintance.
+
+"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first
+Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.
+
+Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.
+
+Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a
+dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at
+all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's
+remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.
+
+When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly
+and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same
+general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for
+pleasure--their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way.
+What had he been about all this time? _Forget_?--such a creature? Why,
+it was the merest wantonness! As if such women--with such a brow, such
+vitality, such a gait--passed in every street!
+
+What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to
+recover the old intimacy--and as to what might come out of it, let the
+gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at
+Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her
+then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.
+
+As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it
+was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be
+all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge
+soon. To rule and shine was as much her _métier_ as it was the _métier_
+of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady
+Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be
+brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch
+Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for
+her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and
+pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and _live_ democracy
+instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. _Il
+ne faut pas sortir de son caractčre_.
+
+The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.
+
+Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.
+
+"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. "Talks of
+his conscience--and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it
+with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much harm."
+
+"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitterness. "Goodness! let's
+leave him alone!"
+
+He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics.
+Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the _enfant terrible_
+of a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day
+to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of to-night's
+debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution,
+pledging the House to a Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at
+the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear
+practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in
+fact gained greatly in significance and interest since it was first
+heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable
+proposals--a moderate tone--and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony
+and a united front among the representatives of labour--if so much at
+least could be attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that
+not only the cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the
+House would be found to have gained enormously.
+
+"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said Bennett, as he was
+going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be
+till half-past ten at earliest."
+
+Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his
+pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him
+what line Bennett would take--with regard to one or two points. After a
+long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor
+indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As
+to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and
+hear a famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far
+from the House. The streets were full of placards.
+
+Well!--to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at
+his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind
+him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his
+springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.
+
+The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference.
+Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.
+
+"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front--oh! not
+very full yet, sir--will be directly."
+
+Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in.
+Yes!--there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the
+grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of
+Commons puts its ladies--as though its owner were already absorbed in
+what was passing before her.
+
+She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.
+
+"Oh! now, come and tell us everything--and who everybody is. Why don't
+we see the Speaker?--and which is the Government side?--oh, yes, I see.
+And who's this speaking now?"
+
+"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting
+to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair
+for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"
+
+"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella,
+impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's
+names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!--he's just
+come in!--oh, don't be so superior, though you _have_ been here
+before--you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"
+
+Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.
+
+"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's
+no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!--do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the
+Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you
+sit?--I see--and there's Mr. Bennett--and that black-faced man, Mr.
+Wilkins, I met at the Hallins--you don't like him, do you?" she said,
+drawing back and looking at him sharply.
+
+"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said
+Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a
+fool of himself and us to-night--we shall see! It's kind of you to wish
+us an Irish row!--considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall
+never get another!"
+
+"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh,
+that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"--a pause--"Dear me,
+how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a
+Democrat, Mr. Wharton--I find myself terribly in love with the
+Government. But who's that?"
+
+She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew
+hurriedly back.
+
+"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."
+
+A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was
+giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the
+first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw
+Aldous Raeburn.
+
+She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick
+glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as
+the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.
+
+"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to
+take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much--they don't get any
+change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under
+the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night
+the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over
+to a friend if I may--a Staffordshire member, who has his wife
+here--Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you.
+Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion;
+but they will look after you."
+
+The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said
+about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was
+Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.
+
+"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty
+minutes. Wish me well through!"
+
+Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for
+the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the
+fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn
+ghost should walk this particular evening.
+
+Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long
+silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was
+lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well
+that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she
+shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and
+singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the
+light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.
+
+"_All that my life can do to pour good measure_--_down_--_running
+over_--_into yours, I vowed you then!_"
+
+The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain.
+Was it indeed this man under her eyes--so listless, so unconscious--who
+had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think
+of.
+
+And now--never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them
+again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"--separate, estranged, for
+ever? It was like the touch of death--the experience brought with it
+such a chill--such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to
+be broken through.
+
+Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To
+have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in
+one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank
+Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It
+was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of
+family than he. And as for the girl--the little dancing, flirting
+girl!--why the thing happened every day. _His_ wife should not be too
+strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should
+cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with
+the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at
+least was clear to her--the curious recognition that never before had
+she considered Aldous Raeburn, _in and for himself_, as an independent
+human being.
+
+"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to
+herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"
+
+But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn,
+after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared
+suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her
+with the same fascination as before.
+
+The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the
+speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both
+inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was
+fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters
+were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had
+been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their
+paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government--all
+were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.
+
+"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of
+excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the
+crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his
+hat.
+
+In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and
+crowded House in a voice--clear, a little hard, but capable of the most
+accomplished and subtle variety--which for the first moment sent a
+shudder of memory through Marcella.
+
+Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as
+though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on
+the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an
+_irritable_ sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible
+for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any
+effect upon such a crowd!--so irresponsive, individualist, unfused--so
+lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and
+excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below,
+under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were
+those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call
+"_cheers_"?
+
+But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the
+atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one
+wholly different--nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent
+sense--informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the
+memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had
+been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader--awoke to the peculiar
+conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its
+performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the
+House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion
+offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand
+to succeed in it.
+
+Why? Because here after all is power--here is the central machine. Here
+are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have
+for their span of life the leading--or the wrecking?--of this great
+fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our country. Here things
+are not only debated, but done--lamely or badly, perhaps, but still
+_done_--which will affect our children's children; which link us to the
+Past; which carry us on safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods
+know. And in this passage, this chequered, doubtful passage from
+thinking to doing, an infinite savour and passion of life is somehow
+disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure,
+public and personal; it enwraps the spectacle and the actors; it carries
+and supports patriot and adventurer alike.
+
+Ideas, perceptions of this kind--the first chill over--stole upon and
+conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into
+Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It
+would be a success this speech--it was a success! The House was gained,
+was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments,
+which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was
+being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent--with
+brilliancy, moderation, practical detail--moderation above all! From the
+slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English
+"working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts--through
+the general description of the present situation, of the workman's
+present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for
+State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the
+effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the
+great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the
+economic future of England--the speaker carried his thread of luminous
+speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point
+he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the
+propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of
+detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist
+terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions
+of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the
+regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated
+to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life,
+possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of
+leisure, knowledge, and delight--the crowded benches before and behind
+him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of
+"flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had
+earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the
+Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in
+the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a
+deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in
+the utterances of the Labour men.
+
+"'The mildest mannered man' _et cetera!_" said a smiling member of the
+late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton
+sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up
+of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are
+eager to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance
+on anything last year."
+
+"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled
+the man addressed.
+
+"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put
+up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his
+hat again which he had taken up.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her
+chair with a long breath.
+
+"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she
+sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very
+competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government
+side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she
+possessed--and she was full of them--had been stirred and satisfied by
+the speech and the speaker.
+
+But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his
+peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact
+the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley
+personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the
+poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same
+time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to
+measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A
+year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of
+pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time
+conscious of a curious growth--independence.
+
+But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as
+it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon
+her--in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in
+the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.
+
+Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her
+brothers were typical Venturists--a little cynical, therefore, towards
+all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and
+a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it
+down--through him--as a first law, that sentiment in public is the
+abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was
+little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.
+
+"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That
+man _Wilkins_!"
+
+Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's
+Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting
+down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and
+frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.
+
+With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to
+have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short
+stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an
+important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of
+the bill which had been sketched by Wharton--personal jealousy and
+distrust of the mover of the resolution--denial of his representative
+place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which
+he had nothing to do--the most violent protest against the servility
+with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and
+political enfranchisement--and the most passionate assertion that
+between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great
+parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred,
+unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and
+landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its
+heel--all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness
+from the torrent of north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah
+Wilkins rioted in one of the best "times" of his life. That he was an
+orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again;
+and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.
+
+The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words
+rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady
+Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench,
+caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!--you haven't
+even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final
+attack upon the Liberals--who, after ruining their own chances and the
+chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man
+whining for his support as their only hope of recovery--was delivered to
+a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an
+angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.
+
+Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech in a
+state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting
+erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had come to
+sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down,
+and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government _non
+possumus_, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour
+which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened
+with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity as to which hand
+to shake and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of
+compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the
+Opposition under the ferocities of some others of its nominal friends.
+
+Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, the _habitué_.
+While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come
+back again to his seat next to the Speaker, who was his official chief.
+Every now and then the Minister turned to him, and Raeburn handed him a
+volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the
+great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the
+Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once
+more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver
+of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far
+turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other--and
+she, once more, looking on!
+
+When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with
+thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun--when it was seen
+that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who
+were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House,
+a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity
+felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be
+leader had been for some time considerable.
+
+When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire,
+both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A
+man who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the
+unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had
+hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had
+given Wharton the warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals,
+to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous
+though still perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he
+personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during
+the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour
+members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young
+and brilliant man beside him.
+
+Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of
+religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an
+imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its
+expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong
+conviction that the time had come when the Labour party _must_ have
+separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to
+this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might
+have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy
+of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He
+threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the
+phrase, in the direction of Wilkins--who in the middle of the speech
+abruptly walked out--and before he sat down, the close attention, the
+looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about
+him,--amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in
+Parliament--made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch
+not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary
+history of the great industrial movement.
+
+The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out
+to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one
+man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with
+his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt
+a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him--perfectly white,
+with a lip he in vain tried to steady.
+
+"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."
+
+Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the
+out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of
+the Englishman.
+
+Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an
+ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the
+Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the
+spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience
+behind him!--and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How
+could he get her to himself somehow for a moment--and dispose of that
+Craven girl?
+
+"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of
+the Gallery.
+
+But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw,
+the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.
+
+"Don't let's talk here," she said. "Can't we go out? I am melted!"
+
+"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we
+shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested?"
+
+Edith smiled demurely.
+
+"I thought it a good debate," she said.
+
+"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward remark as he led
+the way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+"How enchanting!" cried Marcella, as they emerged on the terrace, and
+river, shore, and sky opened upon them in all the thousand-tinted light
+and shade of a still and perfect evening. "Oh, how hot we were--and how
+badly you treat us in those dens!"
+
+Those confident eyes of Wharton's shone as they glanced at her.
+
+She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff--it seemed to him he
+remembered it of old--and on the waving masses of hair lay a little
+bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied
+demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the
+beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing--the rich arresting
+note of the voice--the inimitable carriage of the head--Wharton realised
+them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in
+some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was in
+his power, his possession.
+
+The terrace was full of people, and alive with a Babel of talk. Yet, as
+he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that
+Marcella was instantly marked. Every one who passed them, or made way
+for them, looked and looked again.
+
+The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew
+nothing of her own effect. She was drinking in the sunset light--the
+poetic mystery of the river--the lovely line of the bridge--the
+associations of the place where she stood, of this great building
+overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror
+lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Raeburn; then when a
+stranger showed himself she gave herself up again to her young pleasure
+in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed;
+Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so
+well-fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh
+homage to itself; and she had more and more glamour for him in the
+reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment.
+
+"Ah, here are the Lanes!" he said, detecting at last a short lady in
+black amid a group of men.
+
+Marcella and Edith were introduced. Then Edith found a friend in a young
+London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him
+till dinner should be announced.
+
+"I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace," said Wharton to
+Mr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet awhile. What a crowd! The
+Alresfords not come yet, I see."
+
+Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round.
+
+"Raeburn has a party to-night. And there are at least three or four
+others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be
+equally scarce!"
+
+Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella. But she was talking to Mrs. Lane,
+and had heard nothing.
+
+"Let me just show you the terrace," he said to her. "No chance of dinner
+for another twenty minutes."
+
+They strolled away together. As they moved along, a number of men
+waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and congratulations--glancing
+the while at the lady on his left. But presently they were away from the
+crowd which hung about the main entrance to the terrace, and had reached
+the comparatively quiet western end, where were only a few pairs and
+groups walking up and down.
+
+"Shall I see Mr. Bennett?" she asked him eagerly, as they paused by the
+parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing under the fast
+incoming tide. "I want to."
+
+"I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a
+prayer-meeting--at least I guess so. There is a famous American
+evangelist speaking in Westminster to-night--I am as certain as I ever
+am of anything that Bennett is there--dining on Moody and Sankey. Men
+are a medley, don't you think?--So you liked his speech?"
+
+"How coolly you ask!" she said, laughing. "Did _you_?"
+
+He was silent a moment, his smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he
+turned to her.
+
+"How much gratitude do you think I owe him?"
+
+"As much as you can pay," she said with emphasis. "I never heard
+anything more complete, more generous."
+
+"So you were carried away?"
+
+She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity--a touch of defiance.
+
+"No!--neither by him, nor by you. I don't believe in your Bill--and I am
+_sure_ you will never carry it!"
+
+Wharton lifted his eyebrows.
+
+"Perhaps you'll tell me where you are," he said, "that I may know how to
+talk? When we last discussed these things at Mellor, I _think_--you were
+a Socialist?"
+
+"What does it matter what I was last year?" she asked him gaily, yet
+with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay; "I was a baby!
+_Now_ perhaps I have earned a few poor, little opinions--but they are a
+ragged bundle--and I have never any time to sort them."
+
+"Have you left the Venturists?"
+
+"No!--but I am full of perplexities; and the Cravens, I see, will soon
+be for turning me out. You understand--I _know_ some working folk now!"
+
+"So you did last year."
+
+"No!"--she insisted, shaking her head--"that was all different. But now
+I am _in_ their world--I live with them--and they talk to me. One
+evening in the week I am 'at home' for all the people I know in our
+Buildings--men and women. Mrs. Hurd--you know who I mean?"--her brow
+contracted a moment--"she comes with her sewing to keep me company; so
+does Edith Craven; and sometimes the little room is packed. The men
+smoke--when we can have the windows open!--and I believe I shall soon
+smoke too--it makes them talk better. We get all sorts--Socialists,
+Conservatives, Radicals--"
+
+"--And you don't think much of the Socialists?"
+
+"Well! they are the interesting, dreamy fellows," she said, laughing,
+"who don't save, and muddle their lives. And as for argument, the
+Socialist workman doesn't care twopence for facts--that don't suit him.
+It's superb the way he treats them!"
+
+"I should like to know who does care!" said Wharton, with a shrug. Then
+he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command her. He
+had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the crisp
+curls of hair. "But tell me"--he went on--"who has been tampering with
+you? Is it Hallin? You told me you saw him often."
+
+"Perhaps. But what if it's everything?--_living?_--saving your presence!
+A year ago at any rate the world was all black--_or_ white--to me. Now I
+lie awake at night, puzzling my head about the shades between--which
+makes the difference. A compulsory Eight Hours' Day for all men in all
+trades!" Her note of scorn startled him. "You _know_ you won't get it!
+And all the other big exasperating things you talk about--public
+organisation of labour, and the rest--you won't get them till all the
+world is a New Jerusalem--and when the world is a New Jerusalem nobody
+will want them!"
+
+Wharton made her an ironical bow.
+
+"Nicely said!--though we have heard it before. Upon my word, you have
+marched!--or Edward Hallin has carried you. So now you think the poor
+are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible worlds--is that
+the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in fact? the man who
+got up after me?"
+
+His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a
+recollection that brought a frown.
+
+"That was the man, then, you attacked in the _Clarion_ this morning!"
+
+"Ah! you read me!" said Wharton, with sudden pleasure. "Yes--that opened
+the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven has gone down, and the
+strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two batteries to bear, he
+letting fly as correspondent, and I from the office. I enjoyed writing
+that article."
+
+"So I should think," she said drily; "all I know is, it made _one_
+reader passionately certain that there was another side to the matter!
+There may not be. I dare say there isn't; but on me at least that was
+the effect. Why is it"--she broke out with vehemence--"that not a single
+Labour paper is ever capable of the simplest justice to an opponent?"
+
+"You think any other sort of paper is any better?" he asked her
+scornfully.
+
+"I dare say not. But that doesn't matter to me! it is _we_ who talk of
+justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to man, and then we go and
+blacken the men who don't agree with us--whole classes, that is to say,
+of our fellow-countrymen, not in the old honest slashing style,
+Tartuffes that we are!--but with all the delicate methods of a new art
+of slander, pursued almost for its own sake. We know so much
+better--always--than our opponents, we hardly condescend even to be
+angry. One is only 'sorry'--'obliged to punish'--like the priggish
+governess of one's childhood!"
+
+In spite of himself, Wharton flushed.
+
+"My best thanks!" he said. "Anything more? I prefer to take my drubbing
+all at once."
+
+She looked at him steadily.
+
+"Why did you write, or allow that article on the West Brookshire
+landlords two days ago?"
+
+Wharton started.
+
+"Well! wasn't it true?"
+
+"No!" she said with a curling lip; "and I think you know it wasn't
+true."
+
+"What! as to the Raeburns? Upon my word, I should have imagined," he
+said slowly, "that it represented your views at one time with tolerable
+accuracy."
+
+Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet, and, taking
+up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river.
+He saw the hand shake.
+
+"Look here," he said, turning round so that he too leant over the river,
+his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear. "Are you always
+going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you know that there is no one
+in the world I would sooner please if I could?"
+
+She did not speak.
+
+"In the first place," he said, laughing, "as to my speech, do you
+suppose that I believe in that Bill which I described just now?"
+
+"I don't know," she said indignantly, once more playing with the stones
+on the wall. "It sounded like it."
+
+"That is my gift--my little _carillon_, as Renan would say. But do you
+imagine I want you or any one else to tell me that we shan't get such a
+Bill for generations? Of course we shan't!"
+
+"Then why do you make farcical speeches, bamboozling your friends and
+misleading the House of Commons?"
+
+He saw the old storm-signs with glee--the lightning in the eye, the rose
+on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry.
+
+"Because, my dear lady--_we must generate our force_. Steam must be got
+up--I am engaged in doing it. We shan't get a compulsory eight hours'
+day for all trades--but in the course of the agitation for that precious
+illusion, and by the help of a great deal of beating of tom-toms, and
+gathering of clans, we shall get a great many other things by the way
+that we _do_ want. Hearten your friends, and frighten your
+enemies--there is no other way of scoring in politics--and the
+particular score doesn't matter. Now don't look at me as if you would
+like to impeach me!--or I shall turn the tables. _I_ am still fighting
+for my illusions in my own way--_you_, it seems, have given up yours!"
+
+But for once he had underrated her sense of humour. She broke into a low
+merry laugh which a little disconcerted him.
+
+"You mock me?" he said quickly--"think me insincere,
+unscrupulous?--Well, I dare say! But you have no right to mock me. Last
+year, again and again, you promised me guerdon. Now it has come to
+paying--and I claim!"
+
+His low distinct voice in her ear had a magnetising effect upon her. She
+slowly turned her face to him, overcome by--yet fighting
+against--memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference
+to that scene she hated to think of, he would have probably lost this
+hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but
+a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all
+those tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things
+of pity and fear, which had so often seemed to her the atonement for,
+the washing away of that old baseness.
+
+He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly--
+
+"I promised to be grateful. So I am."
+
+"No, no!" he said, still in the same low tone. "You promised me a
+friend. Where is she?"
+
+She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and
+her eyes were fixed on the haze opposite, whence emerged the blocks of
+the great hospital and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But
+his gaze compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an
+expression half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could
+speak.
+
+"Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life?" he said drily. "It is
+not the life for you; it does not fit you in the least."
+
+"You test your friends!" she cried, her cheek flaming again at the
+provocative change of voice. "What possible right have you to that
+remark?"
+
+"I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You can't serve
+them where you are. Nursing is not for you; you are wanted among your
+own class--among your equals--among the people who are changing and
+shaping England. It is absurd. You are masquerading."
+
+She gave him a little sarcastic nod.
+
+"Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in my
+life."
+
+He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or posing.
+
+"You are just what you were in one respect--terribly in the right! Be a
+little humble to-night for a change. Come, condescend to the classes! Do
+you see Mr. Lane calling us?"
+
+And, in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning
+to them from the distance.
+
+"Do you know Lady Selina Farrell?" he asked her, as they walked quickly
+back to the dispersing crowd.
+
+"No; who is she?"
+
+Wharton laughed.
+
+"Providence should contrive to let Lady Selina overhear that question
+once a week--in your tone! Well, she is a personage--Lord Alresford's
+daughter--unmarried, rich, has a _salon_, or thinks she has--manipulates
+a great many people's fortunes and lives, or thinks she does, which,
+after all, is what matters--to Lady Selina. She wants to know you,
+badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is--you will let
+me introduce you? She dines with us."
+
+In another moment Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a
+very fashionable black and pink bonnet, who held out a gracious hand.
+
+"I have heard so much of you!" said Lady Selina, as they walked along
+the passage to the dining-room together. "It must be so wonderful, your
+nursing!"
+
+Marcella laughed rather restively.
+
+"No, I don't think it is," she said; "there are so many of us."
+
+"Oh, but the things you do--Mr. Wharton told me--so interesting!"
+
+Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady
+Selina thought her a very handsome but very _gauche_ young woman. Still,
+_gauche_ or no, she had thrown over Aldous Raeburn and thirty thousand a
+year; an act which, as Lady Selina admitted, put you out of the common
+run.
+
+"Do you know most of the people dining?" she enquired in her blandest
+voice. "But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton's, I
+think?"
+
+"He stayed at our house last year," said Marcella, abruptly. "No, I
+don't know anybody."
+
+"Then shall I tell you? It makes it more interesting, doesn't it? It
+ought to be a pleasant little party."
+
+And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella
+that most of them were very "smart" or very important. Some of the smart
+names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn's talk of last year;
+and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and two or
+three prominent members. It was all rather surprising.
+
+At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the
+young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were
+agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown
+beauty. The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing
+with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that
+story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong
+to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.
+
+Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she
+could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lady
+Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella's
+minister on his left. At the other end of the table sat Mrs. Lane, doing
+her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a blind old age,
+gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and possible premier.
+But the talk, on the whole, was general--a gay and careless
+give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball
+flying from one accustomed hand to another.
+
+And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in
+it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as
+her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor--the solitary, eccentric figure
+pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate--bringing the enmity
+of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead.
+Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot and of
+Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour
+of country-house "sets," with a patter of names which sounded in her
+scornful ear like a paragraph from the _World_; above all, a general air
+of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate, seemed
+inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the
+"idle rich," whereof--in the popular idea--he was held to be one of the
+very particular foes!--
+
+No doubt, as the dinner moved on, this first impression changed
+somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost
+upon her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself
+had so often fumed; she watched the occasional recoil of the women about
+him, as though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal, and
+had been suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things
+puzzled, partly propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and
+hostile. How was it possible--from such personal temporising--such a
+frittering of the forces and sympathies--to win the single-mindedness
+and the power without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk
+with him--reproach him!
+
+"Well--I must go--worse luck," said Wharton at last, laying down his
+napkin and rising. "Lane, will you take charge? I will join you outside
+later."
+
+"If he ever finds us!" said her neighbour to Marcella. "I never saw the
+place so crowded. It is odd how people enjoy these scrambling meals in
+these very ugly rooms."
+
+Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee-tavern
+place, in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the
+end, while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space
+below.
+
+"Are there any other rooms than this?" she asked idly.
+
+"One more," said a young man across the table, who had been introduced
+to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to
+look at him, as he desired. "But there is another big party there
+to-night--Raeburn--you know," he went on innocently, addressing the
+minister; "he has got the Winterbournes and the Macdonalds--quite a
+gathering--rather an unusual thing for him."
+
+The minister glanced quickly at his companion. But she had turned to
+answer a question from Lady Selina, and thenceforward, till the party
+rose, she gave him little opportunity of observing her.
+
+As the outward-moving stream of guests was once more in the corridor
+leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane.
+
+"I think," she said--"I am afraid--we ought to be going--my friend and
+I. Perhaps Mr. Lane--perhaps he would just show us the way out; we can
+easily find a cab."
+
+There was an imploring, urgent look in her face which struck Mrs. Lane.
+But Mr. Lane's loud friendly voice broke in from behind.
+
+"My dear Miss Boyce!--we can't possibly allow it--no! no--just half an
+hour--while they bring us our coffee--to do your homage, you know, to
+the terrace--and the river--and the moon!--And then--if you don't want
+to go back to the House for the division, we will see you safely into
+your cab. Look at the moon!--and the tide"--they had come to the wide
+door opening on the terrace--"aren't they doing their very best for
+you?"
+
+Marcella looked behind her in despair. _Where_ was Edith? Far in the
+rear!--and fully occupied apparently with two or three pleasant
+companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on, with Mr.
+Lane chatting beside her--though the sight of the shining terrace, with
+its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she
+could hardly control.
+
+"Come and look at the water," she said to Mr. Lane; "I would rather not
+walk up and down if you don't mind."
+
+He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or
+promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now
+trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and
+sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for
+the voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Lady Winterbourne, above
+all! How unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a
+forwarded letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her
+address.
+
+"Well, how did you like the speech to-night--_the_ speech?" said Mr.
+Lane, a genial Gladstonian member, more heavily weighted with estates
+than with ideas. "It was splendid, wasn't it?--in the way of speaking.
+Speeches like that are a safety-valve--that's my view of it. Have 'em
+out--all these ideas--get 'em discussed!"--with a good-humoured shake of
+the head for emphasis. "Does nobody any harm and may do good. I can tell
+you, Miss Boyce, the House of Commons is a capital place for taming
+these clever young men!--you must give them their head--and they make
+excellent fellows after a bit. Why--who's this?--My dear Lady
+Winterbourne!--this _is_ a sight for sair een!"
+
+And the portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately
+lady in black, whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight.
+
+"_Marcella_!" cried a woman's voice.
+
+Yes--there he was!--close behind Lady Winterbourne. In the soft darkness
+he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over the wall
+without an idea--a suspicion.
+
+She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winterbourne, hesitated a
+second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She
+could not see his face in the darkness; but she was suddenly and
+strangely conscious of the whole scene--of the great dark building with
+its lines of fairy-lit gothic windows--the blue gulf of the river
+crossed by lines of wavering light--the swift passage of a steamer with
+its illuminated saloon and crowded deck--of the wonderful mixture of
+moonlight and sunset in the air and sky--of this dark figure in front of
+her.
+
+Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not
+know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She
+threw herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a
+tremor almost equal to her own.
+
+"Oh! do come with me--come away!--I want to talk to you!" she said
+incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winterbourne with a strong
+hand.
+
+Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the terrace.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elder lady--"to think of finding _you_
+here! How astonishing--how--how dreadful! No!--I don't mean that. Of
+course you and he must meet--but it was only yesterday he told me he
+had never seen you again--since--and it gave me a turn. I was very
+foolish just now. There now--stay here a moment--and tell me about
+yourself."
+
+And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind
+her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne
+recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic
+severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same
+delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling.
+She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed
+it in the dark so that no one saw.
+
+"I _am_ glad to see you again," she said passionately, "so glad!"
+
+Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.
+
+"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child! And I
+have heard so little of you--your mother never seemed to know. When will
+you come and see me--or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we
+were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to
+a ball. How _strange_"--she broke off--"how very strange that you and he
+should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with
+Lord Maxwell."
+
+"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily. "Will you come to tea
+with me next week?--Oh, I will write.--And we must go too--where _can_
+my friend be?"
+
+She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.
+
+"I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway," said Lady Winterbourne;
+"or shall we look after you?"
+
+"No! no! Take me back to the Lanes."
+
+"Mamma, are you coming?" said a voice like a softened version of Lady
+Winterbourne's. Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl's
+voice said piteously:
+
+"_Dear_ Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take so long to do! _I_
+shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend. Ermyntrude will be
+sorry she ever knew me. _Do_ come!"
+
+"Don't cry, Betty. I certainly shan't take you if you do!" said Lady
+Ermyntrude, laughing. "Mamma, is this Miss Boyce--_your_ Miss Boyce?"
+
+She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude
+under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall
+stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had
+little notion of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the
+girlish form hanging on Lady Winterbourne's arm than she was of her own
+words, of "Betty's" beautiful soft eyes--also shyly and gravely fixed
+upon herself--under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the long,
+pointed chin; the whimsical little face.
+
+"Well, none of _you_ are any good!" said Betty at last, in a tragic
+voice. "I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and 'ask a
+p'leeceman.' Mr. Raeburn!"
+
+He disengaged himself from a group behind and came--with no alacrity.
+Betty ran up to him.
+
+"Mr. Raeburn! Ermyntrude and Lady Winterbourne are going to sleep here,
+if you don't mind making arrangements. But _I_ want a hansom."
+
+At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along
+towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world
+had never rolled more evenly.
+
+"Oh! there she is--there is my friend!" cried Marcella to Lady
+Winterbourne. "Good-night--good-night!"
+
+She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a
+moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to "collect"
+another straying member of the party.
+
+An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort--even
+her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes. She walked up to
+him.
+
+"Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?" she said in a tremulous hurry. "I
+am so sorry he is ill--I hadn't heard--I--"
+
+She dared not look up. Was that _his_ voice answering?
+
+"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day
+give a rather better report. We take him abroad to-morrow."
+
+"Marcella! at last!" cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend;
+"you lost me? Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way. But look, there is
+Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go--come and say good-night--everybody is
+departing."
+
+Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of
+humiliation--pain--sore resentment. That cold, strange tone--those
+unwilling words!--She had gone up to him--as undisciplined in her
+repentance as she had been in aggression--full of a passionate yearning
+to make friends--somehow to convey to him that she "was sorry," in the
+old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little.
+There could be no misunderstanding possible! He of all men knew best how
+irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and
+you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another
+human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and
+go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the
+promises of ethics and religion _ought_ to bring peace--peace and a
+soothed conscience?
+
+But she had been repulsed--put aside, so she took it--and by one of the
+kindest and most generous of men! She moved along the terrace in a maze,
+seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All that
+obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her--which had
+found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once
+loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike, her--was
+beating and swelling stormlike within her. She had taken being loved so
+easily, so much as a matter of course! How was it that it hurt her now
+so much to have lost love, and power, and consideration? She had never
+felt any passion for Aldous Raeburn--had taken him lightly and shaken
+him off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from
+him--the proud manner of a moment--had inflicted a smart upon her she
+could hardly bear. They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy,
+uncared for!
+
+But, on the contrary, she _must_ be happy!--_must_ be loved! To this,
+and this only, had she been brought by the hard experience of this
+strenuous year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Lane, _be_ an angel!" exclaimed Wharton's voice. "Just one
+turn--five minutes! The division will be called directly, and then we
+will all thank our stars and go to bed!"
+
+In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bare-headed, radiant,
+reckless even, as he was wont to be in moments of excitement. He had
+seen her speak to Raeburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind
+was too full for any perception of other people's situations--even hers.
+He was absorbed with himself, and with her, as she fitted his present
+need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his
+lips; and his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and
+the pleasure of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to
+homage; his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference,
+a flattery, to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the
+evening had lent a new prestige.
+
+She, too, in his eyes, had triumphed--had made her mark. His ears were
+full of the comments made upon her to-night by the little world on the
+terrace. If it were not for money--_hateful_ money!--what more brilliant
+wife could be desired for any rising man?
+
+So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division
+was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of
+herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment,
+had given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet to
+think her kind and fair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I.
+Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all
+these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than--"
+
+"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give
+you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us
+weaklings? Do you think I _want_ to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing
+too much,' my good friend!"
+
+Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by
+Hallin's "chaff."
+
+"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out
+with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more
+unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now,
+rest, and begin again in the winter?"
+
+Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly
+joined in front of him.
+
+"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.
+
+Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed
+it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.
+
+"Why you should behave as though you _wished_ to make such a prophecy
+true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.
+
+Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in
+front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked
+unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had
+possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its
+clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes--_coeli lucida
+templa_--the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under
+its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been
+something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and
+movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between
+the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.
+
+"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting
+up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I _shall_ give up soon.
+Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with
+their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures.
+I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead,
+and--I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh
+when no man can work."
+
+They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the political
+situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive
+now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind.
+Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with
+positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have
+passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain
+current _isms_ and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years
+had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs,
+indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.
+
+He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his
+early friends by his passionate democracy--his belief in, and trust of,
+the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and
+manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for
+Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest
+remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith,
+but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among
+the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the
+friendship of these two in the least.
+
+But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his
+working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he
+had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all
+kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the
+prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had
+grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and
+the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which
+logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human
+powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away
+with--say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller
+human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his
+life. And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of
+the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future
+enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to
+distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private
+possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them
+already. And that not for wealth's sake--though a more equal
+distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably
+tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that
+continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual
+heritage.
+
+How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have
+answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of the land."
+Not, of course, by violence--which only means the worst form of waste
+known to history--but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating
+legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other
+kinds of property--by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of
+communal initiative and control--and above all by the continuous private
+effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all
+sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student--or
+the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of
+rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a
+vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A
+nation is not saved so cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to
+land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which
+might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men,
+women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his
+profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a
+growing despair.
+
+The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and
+Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other
+European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the
+community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more
+and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified
+will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a
+state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for
+effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and
+decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external
+conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and
+pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for
+ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him,
+could never do without them, if man was to be man.
+
+So that he saw it all _sub specie aeternitatis_, as a matter not of
+economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank
+in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled
+speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry
+Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was
+spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not
+with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to
+Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!--to be exhausting in him the very
+springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at
+last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What
+help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to
+discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and
+affections as any _homoousion_ of old? Had they not already cost him
+love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ah, dear old fellow--enough!" said Hallin at last--"take me back to
+Italy! You have told me so little--such a niggardly little!"
+
+"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous;
+"the first rain in Northern Italy for four months--worse luck! 'Rain at
+Reggio, rain at Parma.--At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'--that might about
+stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty
+Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."
+
+"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"
+
+Aldous laughed.
+
+"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in
+Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a
+kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a
+deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was
+pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with
+the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got
+his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in
+hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him
+round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the
+spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt
+Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff--and then positively skipped
+for joy in the street outside--the amazed officer looking on. And as for
+her career over the roof of the Duomo--the agitation of it nearly
+brought my aunt to destruction--and even I heaved a sigh of relief when
+I got them both down safe."
+
+"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of
+her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a
+barrel organ."
+
+"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as
+every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it
+makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across,
+especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old
+maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel _salon_ at
+night--a perfect ring of them--and the men outside, totally neglected,
+and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody
+she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade--a governess, or a
+schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy--that she did not devote herself to that
+somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is
+nature or art."
+
+He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the
+thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign
+or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the
+over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the
+place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.
+
+"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes
+to his friend, "that I had seen her again."
+
+Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:
+
+"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she
+dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you--but she
+said nothing."
+
+"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and
+I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's
+party. She spoke to me afterwards--I believe now--she meant to be
+kind"--his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all--"but I
+saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own
+manner, but I could not help myself."
+
+His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow.
+Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce,
+but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that
+Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his
+life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in
+him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had
+not perhaps expected.
+
+"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a
+pause, "that she is going to marry him?"
+
+"No--no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly,
+perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more
+likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success--of a
+kind--in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come
+rapidly to the front."
+
+"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that
+group are too unmanageable. If he _were_ a Parnell! But he lacks just
+the qualities that matter--the reticence, the power of holding
+himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard
+self-concentration."
+
+Aldous raised his shoulders.
+
+"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds
+himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him everywhere."
+
+"What!--among the smart people?"
+
+Aldous nodded.
+
+"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do
+it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all
+at once."
+
+"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody
+supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well
+overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and
+its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the
+_Clarion?_"
+
+"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I
+might not be able to go on giving to the strike."
+
+Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked
+back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest
+friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella
+Boyce--never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything
+connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let
+him follow his own conviction.
+
+"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have
+been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.
+
+Aldous hesitated; then he said--
+
+"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"
+
+Hallin made a little face.
+
+"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with
+anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she
+comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I
+could cry over her!"
+
+Aldous started.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand
+on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to
+talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than
+Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But
+this--this--" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for
+a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he
+could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day,
+'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had
+thrown me over except _with ill-will._' The word astonished me, but
+sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of _anger_ to the most
+futile, the most ridiculous degree!"
+
+He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his
+own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's
+shoulders, and there was a short pause.
+
+"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands
+dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?--I forget."
+
+Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again,
+meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning
+visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the
+investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury
+Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and
+regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had
+finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of
+things in two or three selected streets.
+
+It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt
+strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly
+directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he
+thought the Government could really do good.
+
+Then Raeburn turned to go.
+
+"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he
+opened the door.
+
+"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have
+my jaunt."
+
+Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common
+Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one
+or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see
+some sight.
+
+"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand
+them over to me."
+
+"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane
+hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the
+squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic
+of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering
+in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already
+disappeared from the too short London summer.
+
+For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness
+in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun
+or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of
+tune--whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested
+him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome
+estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He
+was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty
+that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely
+intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him
+now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an
+object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was still
+free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for
+those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his
+transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all
+the ceremonial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense
+and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him
+from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less
+happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men
+felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.
+
+He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street,
+and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and
+box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention
+of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner
+crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a
+fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a
+trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital
+worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas
+out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight
+preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two
+walked on together talking.
+
+The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of
+all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were
+already marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a peculiarly
+vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the
+worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's
+notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.
+
+After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its
+condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow
+roadway strewn with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by
+costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken
+pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most
+of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat,
+seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and
+decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the
+street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human
+type.
+
+A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they
+had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.
+
+"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's
+interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after.
+The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of
+respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the
+worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it
+at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and
+stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be
+as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor
+of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."
+
+And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left,
+he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of
+some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly
+peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"--that is
+to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering,
+the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been
+slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every
+circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and
+revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to
+light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was,
+of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners;
+the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men,
+and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for
+themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.
+
+When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further
+end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil
+of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and
+heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great
+enough. But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of
+"big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of affairs,
+courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of
+preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.
+
+Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood
+still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had
+been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged
+from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the
+skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive
+before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.
+
+"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"
+
+Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air.
+The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling them, yet
+too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some ten or
+twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.
+
+"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds
+like murder. You go back for that policeman!"
+
+And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way
+through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by,
+had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and
+screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the
+house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there
+before him. The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans,
+uproar--all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the
+second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a
+voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before,
+crying piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"
+
+Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were
+trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be
+shot out from the dark passage inside--two wrestling with the third, a
+wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed
+with blood.
+
+"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister
+too!"
+
+"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous--it's the nuss he means! I
+sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer
+_blackguard_, you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a
+frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.
+
+"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's
+call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.
+
+Aldous was already upstairs.
+
+"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the
+first landing--for all sounds from above had ceased.
+
+"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us _begged_ and
+_implored_ of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we,
+Betsy?--didn't we, Doll?"
+
+Aldous ran up.
+
+On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on
+the ground, apparently beaten to death.
+
+By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two
+or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity.
+Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left
+arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was
+doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag
+stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her
+what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on
+Raeburn's heart.
+
+In such an exaltation of nerve _she_ could be surprised at nothing.
+When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.
+
+"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her--speaking with pauses, as
+though to get her breath--"he has--killed her. But there--is a chance.
+Are the--police there--and a stretcher?"
+
+Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly
+sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's
+nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.
+
+"Did you see it, miss?"
+
+"I--I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same
+difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other
+side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the
+bandage she was applying. "But he was--such a great--powerful brute."
+
+Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried
+to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.
+
+"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his
+note-book, "attending a child--that's ill--when I heard the screams.
+They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room--then rushed
+after her--I _think_--to throw her downstairs--I stopped that. Then he
+took up something--oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken
+piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink--I
+couldn't--do much."
+
+Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.
+
+"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.
+
+"It's not broken--it's wrenched; I can't use it. There--that's all we
+can do--till she gets--to hospital."
+
+Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he
+could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and
+was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and
+quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the
+deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little.
+Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing
+at the woman's marred face--indescribably patient in its deep
+unconsciousness--at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their
+wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair--with tears that ran
+unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched
+a chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once
+before--beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.
+
+At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had
+cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse
+before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names
+and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.
+
+"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her.
+"Won't you let me take you home?--you want it sorely. The police are
+trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They
+will remove her with every care--he will see to it."
+
+Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he
+was--where they were--how they had last met. And with the remembrance
+came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness.
+She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her
+anymore--after this! When at the White House she had got herself into
+disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would
+silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and
+so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now.
+No!--after this he _must_ be friends with her.
+
+"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a
+quivering, appealing accent--and so they fell silent.
+
+Aldous looked round the room--at the miserable filthy garret with its
+begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its
+heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty
+gin-bottles here and there--all the familiar, one might almost say
+conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation--then at this
+breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling
+was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance--against her
+mother!--against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the
+finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a
+hopeless struggle with devildom.
+
+"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint
+voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not
+much worse than others--though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a
+little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in
+the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing--used to
+come in and out--when I was nursing him--Oh, I wish--I _wish_ they would
+come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form--"every
+moment is of importance!"
+
+As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it
+opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the
+lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and
+skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently
+the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole
+street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.
+
+Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police,
+who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her
+as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning
+against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and
+seemed to him on the point of fainting.
+
+"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then
+going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few
+words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.
+
+"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They
+will not trouble you any more for the present."
+
+He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the
+cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street
+as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she
+recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab.
+Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to
+control herself and not to faint.
+
+He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the
+exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was
+this what her new career--her enthusiasms--meant, or might mean!
+Twenty-three!--in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable
+waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.
+
+Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made
+impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such
+scenes--such gross physical abominations. Amazing!--how meanly,
+passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman! He
+himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern
+joy of the fight. But she!--let her leave the human brute and his
+unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne--it was never meant--that
+she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in
+such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed
+him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in
+the cottage.
+
+In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely.
+Presently, as he watched her--hating the man for driving and the cab for
+shaking--he saw her white lips suddenly smile.
+
+"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing
+is all like that!"
+
+"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.
+
+"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again.
+"Nobody is ever rude to us--I often pine for experiences!"
+
+How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.
+
+"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your
+arm hurt you much?"
+
+"Yes,--but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up
+work for a bit.--Mr. Raeburn!"
+
+"Yes." His heart beat.
+
+"We may meet often--mayn't we?--at Lady Winterbourne's--or in the
+country? Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often--" She turned
+away her weary head a moment--gathered strength to begin again--"--how
+often I have regretted--last year. I see now--that I behaved--more
+unkindly"--her voice was almost a whisper--"than I thought then. But it
+is all done with--couldn't we just be good friends--understand each
+other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"
+
+She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.
+
+As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was
+really in his mind was the Terrace--was Wharton's advancing figure. But
+her state--the moment--coerced him.
+
+"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with
+astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She
+knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.
+
+She put out her hand.
+
+"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh
+no!"
+
+Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant
+against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her
+self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been
+able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But
+she hardly heard him.
+
+At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of
+Brown's Buildings.
+
+"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know
+you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs--then I shan't
+be any more trouble."
+
+So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the
+court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of children.
+Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him
+with a wan smile.
+
+"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"
+
+Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed. Then
+he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and
+implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best
+cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.
+
+After which he spent--poor Aldous!--one of the most restless and
+miserable nights of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window
+of Lady Winterbourne's drawing-room. The house--in James Street,
+Buckingham Gate--looked out over the exercising ground of the great
+barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James's Park to the
+left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things,
+and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of
+sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's
+Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie
+still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let
+alone.
+
+Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still
+out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon.
+Marcella had her thoughts to herself.
+
+But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In
+the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady
+Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained
+service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so
+pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic
+temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had
+been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood
+was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort
+and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place
+among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these
+parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay
+the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her
+heart was somehow wrestling--must somehow wrestle--its passionate way.
+But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover,
+under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could
+neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her
+nursing--a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent
+and moody.
+
+On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she
+paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she _had_ saved--probably
+at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed
+through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and--as
+Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their
+minds--would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.
+
+Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest.
+She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of
+that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge
+of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her
+and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been
+with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable
+appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible;
+the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in
+common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had
+been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she
+had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange
+if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had
+let it count with him so little.
+
+Childishly, angrily--_she wanted him to be friends!_ Why shouldn't he?
+He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin
+might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future
+lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the
+same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her
+father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day,
+whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable
+though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must
+go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a
+situation?--make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not
+simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was
+inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.
+
+Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to
+whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him
+with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his
+private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle;
+and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and
+colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a
+number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the
+information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined
+ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of
+Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious
+surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained
+his place in Brookshire--by the mere accidents of birth. After all,
+aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men
+by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays
+is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by
+what he has--so far at least has "progress" brought us.
+
+She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of
+temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of
+"consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political
+contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the
+future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried;
+while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public.
+Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and
+various sources--mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men
+already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work
+of England. Above all things did she love and admire power--the power of
+personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the
+secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly
+different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a
+kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her
+imagination.
+
+Then--apart from the political world and its judgments--the intimacy
+between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new
+aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend, he
+was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the
+affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little
+oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the
+memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady
+Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were
+both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no
+one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or
+agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to
+regard him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not
+easily yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by
+strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and
+sweetness of disposition had full play; and although, now that Marcella
+was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than
+usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were all so
+kind and indulgent to _her_, seeing that they cared so much for him and
+all that affected him.
+
+Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain
+irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement
+she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her
+conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as
+combative as ever.
+
+Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more
+soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that
+nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the
+lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of
+course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual
+adornments of the "New Journalism."
+
+The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them--comparatively a large
+world--fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names. To lose
+your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come across
+her again in this manner and in these circumstances--there was a
+dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us
+too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would
+have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in
+particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she
+had claims, and was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and
+see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention
+whatever of playing the lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and
+fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once
+or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for
+the wounded arm that its owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane
+lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly, just across
+the Green Park.
+
+Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession
+a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller
+sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had
+been no craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally
+indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the
+attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry
+Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever.
+She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady
+Winterbourne neither knew him, nor apparently wished to know him--a fact
+which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate.
+
+Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and
+again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women,
+with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them
+he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent
+lived their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening
+returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new
+friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the
+young demagogue had yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least
+as much duped as he. Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he
+was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to
+his interest to break them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these
+people--the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his
+mind--seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished
+eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something
+she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.
+
+Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her
+from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that
+he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of
+appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and
+Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between
+them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great
+friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread
+of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On
+the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed
+him, as a lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be
+sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes,
+she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious
+little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great
+lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself
+flushing from brow to chin at the thought--"He does not want any one to
+suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!"
+
+It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects
+of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that
+she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When
+it _did_ enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his--and
+that he was full of doubts! The perception had given to her manner an
+increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into
+efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not
+refrain, if he was to preserve his power.
+
+So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in
+it neither simplicity nor joy. She was conscious of a certain dull and
+baffled feeling--a sense of humiliation--which hurt. Moreover, the scene
+of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination
+perpetually. She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her--the pity,
+the ugliness, the confusion of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The muslin curtain beside her suddenly swelled out in a draught of air,
+and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it
+should swing to. Some one had opened the door of the room.
+
+"_Did_ I blow you out of window?" said a girl's voice; and there behind
+her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty Macdonald, a vision of white
+muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed
+face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big shady hat.
+
+"Oh, do come in!" said Marcella, shyly; "Lady Winterbourne will be in
+directly."
+
+"So Panton told me," said Betty, sinking down on a high stool beside
+Marcella's chair, and taking off her hat; "and Panton doesn't tell _me_
+any stories _now_--I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in the
+day? Don't you think there will be a special little corner of purgatory
+for London butlers? I hope Panton will get off easy!"
+
+Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand, and studied Marcella.
+Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved; her pale
+face and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis.
+When Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain
+story, she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet, if only
+to prick her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she
+saw her close she felt herself near to falling in love with her.
+Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had
+thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little
+merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the
+thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have
+already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her heart, and by
+contrast honesty despising--for the moment--that very happy and popular
+person, Betty Macdonald!
+
+"Do you like being alone?" she asked Marcella, abruptly.
+
+Marcella coloured.
+
+"Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company," she said. "I
+was very glad to see you come in."
+
+"Were you?" said Betty, joyously, with a little gleam in her pretty
+eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. "May I kiss you?" she
+said, in the wistfullest, eagerest voice.
+
+Marcella smiled, and, laying her hand on Betty's, shyly drew her.
+
+"That's better!" said Betty, with a long breath. "That's the second
+milestone; the first was when I saw you on the Terrace. Couldn't you
+mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the
+horrid thing is when you have to mark them back again! Nobody ever did
+that with you!"
+
+"Because I have no friends," said Marcella, quickly; then, when Betty
+clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added quickly with
+a smile, "except a few I make poultices for."
+
+"There!" said Betty, enviously, "to think of being really _wanted_--for
+poultices--or, anything! I never was wanted in my life! When I die
+they'll put on my poor little grave--
+
+  "She's buried here--that hizzie Betty;
+  She did na gude--so don't ee fret ye!
+
+"--oh, there they are!"--she ran to the window--"Lady Winterbourne and
+Ermyntrude. Doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterbourne doing her
+duties? She gets into her carriage after lunch as one might mount a
+tumbril. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to the scaffold
+at Hyde Park Corner.' She looks the unhappiest woman in England--and all
+the time Ermyntrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her
+season for the world! She gives Ermyntrude a lot of trouble, but she
+_is_ a dear--a naughty dear--and mothers are _such_ a chance!
+Ermyntrude! _where_ did you get that bonnet? You got it without me--and
+my feelings won't stand it!"
+
+Lady Ermyntrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together,
+chattering and laughing. Lady Winterbourne came up to Marcella and
+enquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves, when
+the drawing-room door opened again.
+
+"Tea, Panton!" said Lady Winterbourne, without turning her head, and in
+the tone of Lady Macbeth. But the magnificent butler took no notice.
+
+"Lady Selina Farrell!" he announced in a firm voice.
+
+Lady Winterbourne gave a nervous start; then, with the air of a person
+cut out of wood, made a slight advance, and held out a limp hand to her
+visitor.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" she said.
+
+Anybody who did not know her would have supposed that she had never seen
+Lady Selina before. In reality she and the Alresfords were cousins. But
+she did not like Lady Selina, and never took any pains to conceal it--a
+fact which did not in the smallest degree interfere with the younger
+lady's performance of her family duties.
+
+Lady Selina found a seat with easy aplomb, put up her bejewelled fingers
+to draw off her veil, and smilingly prepared herself for tea. She
+enquired of Betty how she was enjoying herself, and of Lady Ermyntrude
+how her husband and baby in the country were getting on without her. The
+tone of this last question made the person addressed flush and draw
+herself up. It was put as banter, but certainly conveyed that Lady
+Ermyntrude was neglecting her family for the sake of dissipations. Betty
+meanwhile curled herself up in a corner of the sofa, letting one pretty
+foot swing over the other, and watching the new-comer with a malicious
+eye, which instantly and gleefully perceived that Lady Selina thought
+her attitude ungraceful.
+
+Marcella, of course, was greeted and condoled with--Lady Selina,
+however, had seen her since the tragedy--and then Lady Winterbourne,
+after every item of her family news, and every symptom of her own and
+her husband's health had been rigorously enquired into, began to attempt
+some feeble questions of her own--how, for instance, was Lord
+Alresford's gout?
+
+Lady Selina replied that he was well, but much depressed by the
+political situation. No doubt Ministers had done their best, but he
+thought two or three foolish mistakes had been made during the session.
+Certain blunders ought at all hazards to have been avoided. He feared
+that the party and the country might have to pay dearly for them. But
+_he_ had done his best.
+
+Lady Winterbourne, whose eldest son was a junior whip, had been the
+recipient, since the advent of the new Cabinet, of so much rejoicing
+over the final exclusion of "that vain old idiot, Alresford," from any
+further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selina's talk
+made her at once nervous and irritable. She was afraid of being
+indiscreet; yet she longed to put her visitor down. In her odd
+disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving
+idealist nature--mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at
+her, yet had made her happy--was always trying to reconcile the ends of
+eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of
+Sisyphus; but she would not let it alone.
+
+"I do not agree with you," she said with cold shyness in answer to Lady
+Selina's concluding laments--"I am told--our people say--we are doing
+very well--except that the session is likely to be dreadfully long."
+
+Lady Selina raised both her eyebrows and her shoulders.
+
+"_Dear_ Lady Winterbourne! you really mean it?" she said with the
+indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded--"But just think!
+The session will go on, every one says, till _quite_ the end of
+September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented?
+_All_ our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believes
+so _much_ of the friction might have been avoided. He is all in favour
+of doing more for Labour. He thinks these Labour men might have been
+easily propitiated without anything revolutionary. It's no good
+supposing that these poor starving people will wait for ever!"
+
+"Oh!" said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor. To those
+who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more
+expressive. Lady Winterbourne's sense of humour had no voice, but
+inwardly it was busy with Lord Alresford as the "friend of the poor."
+_Alresford_!--the narrowest and niggardliest tyrant alive, so far as his
+own servants and estate were concerned. And as to Lady Selina, it was
+well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a
+maid to stay with her six months.
+
+"What did _you_ think of Mr. Wharton's speech the other night?" said
+Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella.
+
+"It was very interesting," said Marcella, stiffly--perfectly conscious
+that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and
+angry with her cheeks for reddening.
+
+"Wasn't it?" said Lady Selina, heartily. "You can't _do_ those things,
+of course! But you should show every sympathy to the clever enthusiastic
+young men--the men like that--shouldn't you? That's what my father says.
+He says we've got to win them. We've got somehow to make them feel us
+their friends--or we shall _all_ go to ruin! They have the voting
+power--and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only
+lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our cause--and at
+the same time give them our help--in reason--show them we want to be
+their friends--wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it
+rightly--you know so much about these things! But we can't undo '67--can
+we? We must get round it somehow--mustn't we? And my father thinks
+Ministers so unwise! But perhaps"--and Lady Selina drew herself back
+with a more gracious smile than ever--"I ought not to be saying these
+things to you--of course I know you _used_ to think us Conservatives
+very bad people--but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think
+_quite_ so hardly of us as you used?"
+
+Lady Selina's head in its Paris bonnet fell to one side in a gentle
+interrogative sort of way.
+
+Something roused in Marcella.
+
+"Our cause?" she repeated, while the dark eye dilated--"I wonder what
+you mean?"
+
+"Well, I mean--" said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in
+the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl--"I mean, of course, the
+cause of the educated--of the people who have made the country."
+
+"I think," said Marcella, quietly, "you mean the cause of the rich,
+don't you?"
+
+"Marcella!" cried Lady Winterbourne, catching at the tone rather than
+words--"I thought you didn't feel like that any more--not about the
+distance between the poor and the rich--and our tyranny--and its being
+hopeless--and the poor always hating us--I thought you changed."
+
+And forgetting Lady Selina, remembering only the old talks at Mellor,
+Lady Winterbourne bent forward and laid an appealing hand on Marcella's
+arm.
+
+Marcella turned to her with an odd look.
+
+"If you only knew," she said, "how much more possible it is to think
+well of the rich, when you are living amongst the poor!"
+
+"Ah! you must be at a distance from us to do us justice?" enquired Lady
+Selina, settling her bracelets with a sarcastic lip.
+
+"_I_ must," said Marcella, looking, however, not at her, but at Lady
+Winterbourne. "But then, you see,"--she caressed her friend's hand with
+a smile--"it is so easy to throw some people into opposition!"
+
+"Dreadfully easy!" sighed Lady Winterbourne.
+
+The flush mounted again in the girl's cheek. She hesitated, then felt
+driven to explanations.
+
+"You see--oddly enough"--she pointed away for an instant to the
+north-east through the open window--"it's when I'm over there--among the
+people who have nothing--that it does me good to remember that there
+are persons who live in James Street, Buckingham Gate!"
+
+"My dear! I don't understand," said Lady Winterbourne, studying her with
+her most perplexed and tragic air.
+
+"Well, isn't it simple?" said Marcella, still holding her hand and
+looking up at her. "It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those
+streets and houses, among people who live in one room--with not a bit of
+prettiness anywhere--and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come
+home and _gloat_ over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I
+can think of!"
+
+"But don't you _hate_ the people that have them?" said Betty, again on
+her stool, chin in hand.
+
+"No! it doesn't seem to matter to me then what kind of people they are.
+And I don't so much want to take from them and give to the others. I
+only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness
+are _some_where--not lost out of the world."
+
+"How strange!--in a life like yours--that one should think so much of
+the _ugliness_ of being poor--more than of suffering or pain," said
+Betty, musing.
+
+"Well--in some moods--you do--_I_ do!" said Marcella; "and it is in
+those moods that I feel least resentful of wealth. If I say to myself
+that the people who have all the beauty and the leisure are often
+selfish and cruel--after all they die out of their houses and their
+parks, and their pictures, in time, like the shell-fish out of its
+shell. The beauty and the grace which they created or inherited remain.
+And why should one be envious of _them_ personally? They have had the
+best chances in the world and thrown them away--are but poor animals at
+the end! At any rate I can't hate them--they seem to have a
+function--when I am moving about Drury Lane!" she added with a smile.
+
+"But how can one help being ashamed?" said Lady Winterbourne, as her
+eyes wandered over her pretty room, and she felt herself driven somehow
+into playing devil's advocate.
+
+"No! No!" said Marcella, eagerly, "don't be ashamed! As to the people
+who make beauty more beautiful--who share it and give it--I often feel
+as if I could say to them on my knees, Never, _never_ be ashamed merely
+of being rich--of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy
+them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a
+cripple, or having two eyes rather than one!"
+
+"Oh, but, my dear!" cried Lady Winterbourne, piteous and bewildered,
+"when one has all the beauty and the freedom--and other people must
+_die_ without any--"
+
+"Oh, I know, I _know_!" said Marcella, with a quick gesture of despair;
+"that's what makes the world the world. And one begins with thinking it
+can be changed--that it _must_ and _shall_ be changed!--that everybody
+could have wealth--could have beauty and rest, and time to think, that
+is to say--if things were different--if one could get Socialism--if one
+could beat down the capitalist--if one could level down, and level up,
+till everybody had 200 _l._ a year. One turns and fingers the puzzle all
+day long. It seems so _near_ coming right--one guesses a hundred ways in
+which it might be done! Then after a while one stumbles upon doubt--one
+begins to see that it never _will_, never _can_ come right--not in any
+mechanical way of that sort--that _that_ isn't what was meant!"
+
+Her voice dropped drearily. Betty Macdonald gazed at her with a girl's
+nascent adoration. Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy,
+but absorbed like Betty in Marcella. Lady Selina, studying the three
+with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful
+attention to fringe and hairpins. As for Ermyntrude, she was no longer
+on the sofa; she had risen noiselessly, finger on lip, almost at the
+beginning of Marcella's talk, to greet a visitor. She and he were
+standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory,
+unnoticed by any of the group in the bow window.
+
+"Don't you think," said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still
+busy with her bonnet, "that it would be a very good thing to send all
+the Radicals--the well-to-do Radicals I mean--to live among the poor? It
+seems to teach people such extremely useful things!"
+
+Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her
+impertinently. She looked round quickly.
+
+"I wonder what you suppose it teaches?"
+
+"Well," said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; "well! I
+suppose it teaches a person to be content--and not to cry for the moon!"
+
+"You _think_," said Marcella, slowly, "that to live among the poor can
+teach any one--any one that's _human_--to be _content_!"
+
+Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force
+that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could
+hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation--without pose.
+At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of
+either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.
+
+Lady Selina's feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by
+her social inferior. She drew herself up.
+
+"As I understand you," she said stiffly, "you yourself confessed that to
+live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth."
+
+Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude's made the speaker turn her head.
+She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.
+
+"Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great
+discussion? Most consoling, wasn't it--on the whole--to us West End
+people?"
+
+She threw back a keen glance at Marcella. Lady Ermyntrude and Raeburn
+came forward.
+
+"I made him be quiet," said Ermyntrude, not looking, however, quite at
+her ease; "it would have been a shame to interrupt."
+
+"I think so, indeed!" said Lady Selina, with emphasis. "Good-bye, dear
+Lady Winterbourne; good-bye, Miss Boyce! You have comforted me very
+much! Of _course_ one is sorry for the poor; but it is a great thing to
+hear from anybody who knows as much about it as _you_ do, that--after
+all--it is no crime--to possess a little!"
+
+She stood smiling, looking from the girl to the man--then, escorted by
+Raeburn in his very stiffest manner, she swept out of the room.
+
+When Aldous came back, with a somewhat slow and hesitating step, he
+approached Marcella, who was standing silent by the window, and asked
+after the lame arm. He was sorry, he said, to see that it was still in
+its sling. His tone was a little abrupt. Only Lady Winterbourne saw the
+quick nervousness of the eyes,
+
+"Oh! thank you," said Marcella, coldly, "I shall get back to work next
+week."
+
+She stooped and took up her book.
+
+"I must please go and write some letters," she said, in answer to Lady
+Winterbourne's flurried look.
+
+And she walked away. Betty and Lady Ermyntrude also went to take off
+their things.
+
+"Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, holding out her hand to him.
+
+He took it, glanced unwillingly at her wistful, agitated face, pressed
+the hand, and let it go.
+
+"Isn't it sad," said his old friend, unable to help herself, "to see her
+battling like this with life--with thought--all alone? Isn't it sad,
+Aldous?"
+
+"Yes," he said. Then, after a pause, "Why _doesn't_ she go home? My
+patience gives out when I think of Mrs. Boyce."
+
+"Oh! it isn't Mrs. Boyce's fault," said Lady Winterbourne, hopelessly.
+"And I don't know why one should be sorry for her particularly--why one
+should want her to change her life again. She does it splendidly. Only
+I never, _never_ feel that she is a bit happy in it."
+
+It was Hallin's cry over again.
+
+He said nothing for a moment; then he forced a smile.
+
+"Well! neither you nor I can help it, can we?" he said. The grey eyes
+looked at her steadily--bitterly. Lady Winterbourne, with the sensation
+of one who, looking for softness, has lit on granite, changed the
+subject.
+
+Meanwhile, Marcella upstairs was walking restlessly up and down. She
+could hardly keep herself from rushing off--back to Brown's Buildings at
+once. _He_ in the room while she was saying those things! Lady Selina's
+words burnt in her ears. Her morbid, irritable sense was all one
+vibration of pride and revolt. Apology--appeal--under the neatest comedy
+guise! Of course!--now that Lord-Maxwell was dying, and the ill-used
+suitor was so much the nearer to his earldom. A foolish girl had
+repented her of her folly--was anxious to make those concerned
+understand--what more simple?
+
+Her nerves were strained and out of gear. Tears came in a proud,
+passionate gush; and she must needs allow herself the relief of them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, Lady Selina had gone home full of new and uncomfortable
+feelings. She could not get Marcella Boyce out of her head--neither as
+she had just seen her, under the wing of "that foolish woman, Madeleine
+Winterbourne," nor as she had seen her first, on the terrace with Harry
+Wharton. It did not please Lady Selina to feel herself in any way
+eclipsed or even rivalled by such an unimportant person as this strange
+and ridiculous girl. Yet it crossed her mind with a stab, as she lay
+resting on the sofa in her little sitting-room before dinner, that never
+in all her thirty-five years had any human being looked into _her_ face
+with the same alternations of eagerness and satisfied pleasure she had
+seen on Harry Wharton's, as he and Miss Boyce strolled the terrace
+together--nor even with such a look as that silly baby Betty Macdonald
+had put on, as she sat on the stool at the heroine's feet.
+
+There was to be a small dinner-party at Alresford House that night.
+Wharton was to be among the guests. He was fast becoming one of the
+_habitues_ of the house, and would often stay behind to talk to Lady
+Selina when the guests were gone, and Lord Alresford was dozing
+peacefully in a deep arm-chair.
+
+Lady Selina lay still in the evening light, and let her mind, which
+worked with extraordinary shrewdness and force in the grooves congenial
+to it, run over some possibilities of the future.
+
+She was interrupted by the entrance of her maid, who, with the quickened
+breath and heightened colour she could not repress when speaking to her
+formidable mistress, told her that one of the younger housemaids was
+very ill. Lady Selina enquired, found that the doctor who always
+attended the servants had been sent for, and thought that the illness
+_might_ turn to rheumatic fever.
+
+"Oh, send her off to the hospital at once!" said Lady Selina. "Let Mrs.
+Stewart see Dr. Briggs first thing in the morning, and make
+arrangements. You understand?"
+
+The girl hesitated, and the candles she was lighting showed that she had
+been crying.
+
+"If your ladyship would but let her stay," she said timidly, "we'd all
+take our turns at nursing her. She comes from Ireland, perhaps you'll
+remember, my lady. She's no friends in London, and she's frightened to
+death of going to the hospital."
+
+"That's nonsense!" said Lady Selina, sternly. "Do you think I can have
+all the work of the house put out because some one is ill? She might die
+even--one never knows. Just tell Mrs. Stewart to arrange with her about
+her wages, and to look out for somebody else at once."
+
+The girl's mouth set sullenly as she went about her work--put out the
+shining satin dress, the jewels, the hairpins, the curling-irons, the
+various powders and cosmetics that were wanted for Lady Selina's
+toilette, and all the time there was ringing in her ears the piteous cry
+of a little Irish girl, clinging like a child to her only friend: "O
+Marie! dear Marie! do get her to let me stay--I'll do everything the
+doctor tells me--I'll make _haste_ and get well--I'll give no trouble.
+And it's all along of the work--and the damp up in these rooms--the
+doctor said so."
+
+An hour later Lady Selina was in the stately drawing-room of Alresford
+House, receiving her guests. She was out of sorts and temper, and though
+Wharton arrived in due time, and she had the prospect to enliven her
+during dinner--when he was of necessity parted from her by people of
+higher rank--of a _tęte-ŕ-tęte_ with him before the evening was over,
+the dinner went heavily. The Duke on her right hand, and the Dean on her
+left, were equally distasteful to her. Neither food nor wine had savour;
+and once, when in an interval of talk she caught sight of her father's
+face and form at the further end, growing more vacant and decrepit week
+by week, she was seized with a sudden angry pang of revolt and
+repulsion. Her father wearied and disgusted her. Life was often triste
+and dull in the great house. Yet, when the old man should have found his
+grave, she would be a much smaller person than she was now, and the days
+would be so much the more tedious.
+
+Wharton, too, showed less than his usual animation. She said to herself
+at dinner that he had the face of a man in want of sleep. His young
+brilliant look was somewhat tarnished, and there was worry in the
+restless eye. And, indeed, she knew that things had not been going so
+favourably for him in the House of late--that the stubborn opposition
+of the little group of men led by Wilkins was still hindering that
+concentration of the party and definition of his own foremost place in
+it which had looked so close and probable a few weeks before. She
+supposed he had been exhausting himself, too, over that shocking Midland
+strike. The _Clarion_ had been throwing itself into the battle of the
+men with a monstrous violence, for which she had several times
+reproached him.
+
+When all the guests had gone but Wharton, and Lord Alresford, duly
+placed for the sake of propriety in his accustomed chair, was safely
+asleep, Lady Selina asked what was the matter.
+
+"Oh, the usual thing!" he said, as he leant against the mantelpiece
+beside her. "The world's a poor place, and my doll's stuffed with
+sawdust. Did you ever know any doll that wasn't?"
+
+She looked up at him a moment without speaking.
+
+"Which means," she said, "that you can't get your way in the House?"
+
+"No," said Wharton, meditatively, looking down at his boots. "No--not
+yet."
+
+"You think you will get it some day?"
+
+He raised his eyes.
+
+"Oh yes!" he said; "oh dear, yes!--some day."
+
+She laughed.
+
+"You had better come over to us."
+
+"Well, there is always that to think of, isn't there? You can't deny you
+want all the new blood you can get!"
+
+"If you only understood your moment and your chance," she said quickly,
+"you would make the opportunity and do it at once."
+
+He looked at her aggressively.
+
+"How easy it comes to you Tories to rat!" he said.
+
+"Thank you! it only means that we are the party of common sense. Well, I
+have been talking to your Miss Boyce."
+
+He started.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"At Lady Winterbourne's. Aldous Raeburn was there. Your beautiful
+Socialist was very interesting--and rather surprising. She talked of the
+advantages of wealth; said she had been converted--by living among the
+poor--had changed her mind, in fact, on many things. We were all much
+edified--including Mr. Raeburn. How long do you suppose that business
+will remain 'off'? To my mind I never saw a young woman more eager to
+undo a mistake." Then she added slowly, "The accounts of Lord Maxwell
+get more and more unsatisfactory."
+
+Wharton stared at her with sparkling eyes. "How little you know her!" he
+said, not without a tone of contempt.
+
+"Oh! very well," said Lady Selina, with the slightest shrug of her white
+shoulders.
+
+He turned to the mantelpiece and began to play with some ornaments upon
+it.
+
+"Tell me what she said," he enquired presently.
+
+Lady Selina gave her own account of the conversation. Wharton recovered
+himself.
+
+"Dear me!" he said, when she stopped. "Yes--well--we may see another
+act. Who knows? Well, good-night, Lady Selina."
+
+She gave him her hand with her usual aristocrat's passivity, and he
+went. But it was late indeed that night before she ceased to speculate
+on what the real effect of her words had been upon him.
+
+As for Wharton, on his walk home he thought of Marcella Boyce and of
+Raeburn with a certain fever of jealous vanity which was coming, he told
+himself, dangerously near to passion. He did not believe Lady Selina,
+but nevertheless he felt that her news might drive him into rash steps
+he could ill afford, and had indeed been doing his best to avoid.
+Meanwhile it was clear to him that the mistress of Alresford House had
+taken an envious dislike to Marcella. How plain she had looked to-night
+in spite of her gorgeous dress! and how intolerable Lord Alresford grew!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+But what right had Wharton to be thinking of such irrelevant matters as
+women and love-making at all? He had spoken of public worries to Lady
+Selina. In reality his public prospects in themselves were, if anything,
+improved. It was his private affairs that were rushing fast on
+catastrophe, and threatening to drag the rest with them.
+
+He had never been so hard pressed for money in his life. In the first
+place his gambling debts had mounted up prodigiously of late. His
+friends were tolerant and easy-going. But the more tolerant they were
+the more he was bound to frequent them. And his luck for some time had
+been monotonously bad. Before long these debts must be paid, and some of
+them--to a figure he shrank from dwelling upon--were already urgent.
+
+Then as to the _Clarion_, it became every week a heavier burden. The
+expenses of it were enormous; the returns totally inadequate.
+Advertisements were falling off steadily; and whether the working cost
+were cut down, or whether a new and good man like Louis Craven, whose
+letters from the strike district were being now universally read, were
+put on, the result financially seemed to be precisely the same. It was
+becoming even a desperate question how the weekly expenses were to be
+met; so that Wharton's usual good temper now deserted him entirely as
+soon as he had crossed the _Clarion_ threshold; bitterness had become
+the portion of the staff, and even the office boys walked in gloom.
+
+Yet, at the same time, withdrawing from the business, was almost as
+difficult as carrying it on. There were rumours in the air which had,
+already seriously damaged the paper as a saleable concern. Wharton,
+indeed, saw no prospect whatever of selling except at ruinous loss.
+Meanwhile, to bring the paper to an abrupt end would have not only
+precipitated a number of his financial obligations; it would have been
+politically, a dangerous confession of failure made at a very critical
+moment. For what made the whole thing the more annoying was that the
+_Clarion_ had never been so important politically, never so much read by
+the persons on whom Wharton's parliamentary future depended, as it was
+at this moment. The advocacy of the Damesley strike had been so far a
+stroke of business for Wharton as a Labour Member.
+
+It was now the seventh week of the strike, and Wharton's "leaders,"
+Craven's letters from the seat of war, and the _Clarion_ strike fund,
+which articles and letters had called into existence, were as vigorous
+as ever. The struggle itself had fallen into two chapters. In the first
+the metal-workers concerned, both men and women, had stood out for the
+old wages unconditionally and had stoutly rejected all idea of
+arbitration. At the end of three or four weeks, however, when grave
+suffering had declared itself among an already half-starved population,
+the workers had consented to take part in the appointment of a board of
+conciliation. This board, including the workmen's delegates, overawed
+by the facts of foreign competition as they were disclosed by the
+masters, recommended terms which would have amounted to a victory for
+the employers.
+
+The award was no sooner known in the district than the passionate
+indignation of the great majority of the workers knew no bounds.
+Meetings were held everywhere; the men's delegates at the board were
+thrown over, and Craven, who with his new wife was travelling
+incessantly over the whole strike area, wrote a letter to the _Clarion_
+on the award which stated the men's case with extreme ability, was
+immediately backed up by Wharton in a tremendous "leader," and was
+received among the strikers with tears almost of gratitude and
+enthusiasm.
+
+Since then all negotiations had been broken off. The _Clarion_ had gone
+steadily against the masters, against the award, against further
+arbitration. The theory of the "living wage," of which more recent days
+have heard so much, was preached in other terms, but with equal vigour;
+and the columns of the _Clarion_ bore witness day by day in the long
+lists of subscriptions to the strike fund, to the effects of its
+eloquence on the hearts and pockets of Englishmen.
+
+Meanwhile there were strange rumours abroad. It was said that the trade
+was really on the eve of a complete and striking revolution in its whole
+conditions--could this labour war be only cleared out of the way. The
+smaller employers had been for long on the verge of ruin; and the larger
+men, so report had it, were scheming a syndicate on the American plan
+to embrace the whole industry, cut down the costs of production, and
+regulate the output.
+
+But for this large capital would be wanted. Could capital be got? The
+state of things in the trade, according to the employers, had been
+deplorable for years; a large part of the market had been definitely
+forfeited, so they declared, for good, to Germany and Belgium. It would
+take years before even a powerful syndicate could work itself into a
+thoroughly sound condition. Let the men accept the award of the
+conciliation board; let there be some stable and reasonable prospect of
+peace between masters and men, say, for a couple of years; and a certain
+group of bankers would come forward; and all would be well. The men
+under the syndicate would in time get more than their old wage. _But the
+award first_; otherwise the plan dropped, and the industry must go its
+own way to perdition.
+
+"'Will you walk into my parlour?'" said Wharton, scornfully, to the
+young Conservative member who, with a purpose, was explaining these
+things to him in the library of the House of Commons, "the merest trap!
+and, of course, the men will see it so. Who is to guarantee them even
+the carrying through, much less the success, of your precious syndicate?
+And, in return for your misty millennium two years hence, the men are to
+join at once in putting the employers in a stronger position than ever?
+Thank you! The 'rent of ability' in the present state of things is, no
+doubt, large. But in this particular case the _Clarion_ will go on doing
+its best--I promise you--to nibble some of it away!"
+
+The Conservative member rose in indignation.
+
+"I should be sorry to have as many starving people on my conscience as
+you'll have before long!" he said as he took up his papers.
+
+At that moment Denny's rotund and square-headed figure passed along the
+corridor, to which the library door stood open.
+
+"Well, if I thrive upon it as well as Denny does, I shall do!" returned
+Wharton, with his usual caustic good-humour, as his companion departed.
+
+And it delighted him to think as he walked home that Denny, who had
+again of late made himself particularly obnoxious in the House of
+Commons, on two or three occasions, to the owner of the _Clarion_, had
+probably instigated the quasi-overtures he had just rejected, and must
+be by now aware of their result.
+
+Then he sent for Craven to come and confer with him.
+
+Craven accordingly came up from the Midlands, pale, thin, and exhausted,
+with the exertions and emotions of seven weeks' incessant labour. Yet
+personally Wharton found him, as before, dry and unsympathetic; and
+disliked him, and his cool, ambiguous manner, more than ever. As to the
+strike, however, they came to a complete understanding. The _Clarion_,
+or rather the _Clarion_ fund, which was doing better and better, held
+the key of the whole situation. If that fund could be maintained, the
+men could hold out. In view of the possible formation of the syndicate,
+Craven denounced the award with more fierceness than ever, maintaining
+the redoubled importance of securing the men's terms before the
+syndicate was launched. Wharton promised him with glee that he should be
+supported to the bitter end.
+
+_If_, that is to say--a proviso he did not discuss with Craven--the
+_Clarion_ itself could be kept going. In August a large sum, obtained
+two years before on the security of new "plant," would fall due. The
+time for repayment had already been extended; and Wharton had
+ascertained that no further extension was possible.
+
+Well! bankruptcy would be a piquant interlude in his various social and
+political enterprises! How was it to be avoided? He had by now plenty of
+rich friends in the City or elsewhere, but none, as he finally decided,
+likely to be useful to him at the present moment. For the amount of
+money that he required was large--larger, indeed, than he cared to
+verify with any strictness, and the security that he could offer, almost
+nil.
+
+As to friends in the City, indeed, the only excursion of a business kind
+that he had made into those regions since his election was now adding
+seriously to his anxieties--might very well turn out, unless the matter
+were skilfully managed, to be one of the blackest spots on his horizon.
+
+In the early days of his parliamentary life, when, again, mostly for the
+_Clarion's_ sake, money happened to be much wanted, he had become
+director of what promised to be an important company, through the
+interest and good nature of a new and rich acquaintance, who had taken a
+liking to the young member. The company had been largely "boomed," and
+there had been some very profitable dealing in the original shares.
+Wharton had made two or three thousand pounds, and contributed both
+point and finish to some of the early prospectuses.
+
+Then, after six months, he had withdrawn from the Board, under
+apprehensions that had been gradually realised with alarming accuracy.
+Things, indeed, had been going very wrong indeed; there were a number of
+small investors; and the annual meeting of the company, to be held now
+in some ten days, promised a storm. Wharton discovered, partly to his
+own amazement, for he was a man who quickly forgot, that during his
+directorate he had devised or sanctioned matters that were not at all
+likely to commend themselves to the shareholders, supposing the past
+were really sifted. The ill-luck of it was truly stupendous; for on the
+whole he had kept himself financially very clean since he had become a
+member; having all through a jealous eye to his political success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the political situation, nothing could be at once more promising
+or more anxious!
+
+An important meeting of the whole Labour group had been fixed for August
+10, by which time it was expected that a great measure concerning Labour
+would be returned from the House of Lords with highly disputable
+amendments. The last six weeks of the session would be in many ways more
+critical for Labour than its earlier months had been; and it would be
+proposed by Bennett, at the meeting on the 10th, to appoint a general
+chairman of the party, in view of a campaign which would fill the
+remainder of the session and strenuously occupy the recess.
+
+That Bennett would propose the name of the member for West Brookshire
+was perfectly well known to Wharton and his friends. That the nomination
+would meet with the warmest hostility from Wilkins and a small group of
+followers was also accurately forecast.
+
+To this day, then, Wharton looked forward as to the crisis of his
+parliamentary fortunes. All his chances, financial or social, must now
+be calculated with reference to it. Every power, whether of combat or
+finesse, that he commanded must be brought to bear upon the issue.
+
+What was, however, most remarkable in the man and the situation at the
+moment was that, through all these gathering necessities, he was by no
+means continuously anxious or troubled in his mind. During these days of
+July he gave himself, indeed, whenever he could, to a fatalist oblivion
+of the annoyances of life, coupled with a passionate pursuit of all
+those interests where his chances were still good and the omens still
+with him.
+
+Especially--during the intervals of ambition, intrigue, journalism, and
+unsuccessful attempts to raise money--had he meditated the beauty of
+Marcella Boyce and the chances and difficulties of his relation to her.
+As he saw her less, he thought of her more, instinctively looking to her
+for the pleasure and distraction that life was temporarily denying him
+elsewhere.
+
+At the same time, curiously enough, the stress of his financial position
+was reflected even in what, to himself, at any rate, he was boldly
+beginning to call his "passion" for her. It had come to his knowledge
+that Mr. Boyce had during the past year succeeded beyond all expectation
+in clearing the Mellor estate. He had made skilful use of a railway
+lately opened on the edge of his property; had sold building land in
+the neighbourhood of a small country town on the line, within a
+convenient distance of London; had consolidated and improved several of
+his farms and relet them at higher rents; was, in fact, according to
+Wharton's local informant, in a fair way to be some day, if he lived,
+quite as prosperous as his grandfather, in spite of old scandals and
+invalidism. Wharton knew, or thought he knew, that he would not live,
+and that Marcella would be his heiress. The prospect was not perhaps
+brilliant, but it was something; it affected the outlook.
+
+Although, however, this consideration counted, it was, to do him
+justice, _Marcella_, the creature herself, that he desired. But for her
+presence in his life he would probably have gone heiress-hunting with
+the least possible delay. As it was, his growing determination to win
+her, together with his advocacy of the Damesley workers--amply sufficed,
+during the days that followed his evening talk with Lady Selina, to
+maintain his own illusions about himself and so to keep up the zest of
+life.
+
+Yes!--to master and breathe passion into Marcella Boyce, might safely be
+reckoned on, he thought, to hurry a man's blood. And after it had gone
+so far between them--after he had satisfied himself that her fancy, her
+temper, her heart, were all more or less occupied with him--was he to
+see her tamely recovered by Aldous Raeburn--by the man whose advancing
+parliamentary position was now adding fresh offence to the old grievance
+and dislike? No! not without a dash--a throw for it!
+
+For a while, after Lady Selina's confidences, jealous annoyance,
+together with a certain reckless state of nerves, turned him almost into
+the pining lover. For he could not see Marcella. She came no more to
+Mrs. Lane; and the house in James Street was not open to him. He
+perfectly understood that the Winterbournes did not want to know him.
+
+At last Mrs. Lane, a shrewd little woman with a half contemptuous liking
+for Wharton, let him know--on the strength of a chance meeting with Lady
+Ermyntrude--that the Winterbournes would be at the Masterton party on
+the 26th. They had persuaded Miss Boyce to stay for it, and she would go
+back to her work the Monday after. Wharton carelessly replied that he
+did not know whether he would be able to put in an appearance at the
+Mastertons'. He might be going out of town.
+
+Mrs. Lane looked at him and said, "Oh, really!" with a little laugh.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lady Masterton was the wife of the Colonial Secretary, and her grand
+mansion in Grosvenor Square was the principal rival to Alresford House
+in the hospitalities of the party. Her reception on July 25 was to be
+the last considerable event of a protracted but now dying season.
+Marcella, detained in James Street day after day against her will by the
+weakness of the injured arm and the counsels of her doctor, had at last
+extracted permission to go back to work on the 27th; and to please Betty
+Macdonald she had promised to go with the Winterbournes to the Masterton
+party on the Saturday. Betty's devotion, shyly as she had opened her
+proud heart to it, had begun to mean a good deal to her. There was balm
+in it for many a wounded feeling; and, besides, there was the constant,
+half eager, half painful interest of watching Betty's free and childish
+ways with Aldous Raeburn, and of speculating upon what would ultimately
+come out of them.
+
+So, when Betty first demanded to know what she was going to wear, and
+then pouted over the dress shown her, Marcella submitted humbly to being
+"freshened up" at the hands of Lady Ermyntrude's maid, bought what Betty
+told her, and stood still while Betty, who had a genius for such things,
+chattered, and draped, and suggested.
+
+"I wouldn't make you fashionable for the world!" cried Betty, with a
+mouthful of pins, laying down masterly folds of lace and chiffon the
+while over the white satin with which Marcella had provided her. "What
+was it Worth said to me the other day?--Ce qu'on porte, Mademoiselle? O
+pas grand'chose!--presque pas de corsage, et pas du tout de
+manches!'--No, that kind of thing wouldn't suit you. But _distinguished_
+you shall be, if I sit up all night to think it out!"
+
+In the end Betty was satisfied, and could hardly be prevented from
+hugging Marcella there and then, out of sheer delight in her own
+handiwork, when at last the party emerged from the cloak-room into the
+Mastertons' crowded hall. Marcella too felt pleasure in the reflections
+of herself as they passed up the lavishly bemirrored staircase. The
+chatter about dress in which she had been living for some days had
+amused and distracted her; for there were great feminine potentialities
+in her; though for eighteen months she had scarcely given what she wore
+a thought, and in her pre-nursing days had been wont to waver between a
+kind of proud neglect, which implied the secret consciousness of beauty,
+and an occasional passionate desire to look well. So that she played her
+part to-night very fairly; pinched Betty's arm to silence the elf's
+tongue; and held herself up as she was told, that Betty's handiwork
+might look its best. But inwardly the girl's mood was very tired and
+flat. She was pining for her work; pining even for Minta Hurd's peevish
+look, and the children to whom she was so easily an earthly providence.
+
+In spite of the gradual emptying of London, Lady Masterton's rooms were
+very full. Marcella found acquaintances. Many of the people whom she had
+met at Mrs. Lane's, the two Cabinet Ministers of the House of Commons
+dinner, Mr. Lane himself--all were glad or eager to recall themselves to
+her as she stood by Lady Winterbourne, or made her way half absently
+through the press. She talked, without shyness--she had never been shy,
+and was perhaps nearer now to knowing what it might mean than she had
+been as a schoolgirl--but without heart; her black eye wandering
+meanwhile, as though in quest. There was a gay sprinkling of uniforms in
+the crowd, for the Speaker was holding a _levée_, and as it grew late
+his guests began to set towards Lady Masterton. Betty, who had been
+turning up her nose at the men she had so far smiled upon, all of whom
+she declared were either bald or seventy, was a little propitiated by
+the uniforms; otherwise, she pronounced the party very dull.
+
+"Well, upon my word!" she cried suddenly, in a tone that made Marcella
+turn upon her. The child was looking very red and very upright--was
+using her fan with great vehemence, and Frank Leven was humbly holding
+out his hand to her.
+
+"I don't like being startled," said Betty, pettishly. "Yes, you _did_
+startle me--you did--you did! And then you begin to contradict before
+I've said a word! I'm sure you've been contradicting all the way
+upstairs--and why don't you say 'How do you do?' to Miss Boyce?"
+
+Frank, looking very happy, but very nervous, paid his respects rather
+bashfully to Marcella--she laughed to see how Betty's presence subdued
+him--and then gave himself up wholly to Betty's tender mercies.
+
+Marcella observed them with an eager interest she could not wholly
+explain to herself. It was clear that all thought of anything or anybody
+else had vanished for Frank Leven at the sight of Betty. Marcella
+guessed, indeed knew, that they had not met for some little time; and
+she was touched by the agitation and happiness on the boy's handsome
+face. But Betty? what was the secret of her kittenish, teasing ways--or
+was there any secret? She held her little head very high and chattered
+very fast--but it was not the same chatter that she gave to Marcella,
+nor, so far as Marcella could judge, to Aldous Raeburn. New elements of
+character came out in it. It was self-confident, wilful, imperious.
+Frank was never allowed to have an opinion; was laughed at before his
+words were out of his mouth; was generally heckled, played with, and
+shaken in a way which seemed alternately to enrage and enchant him. In
+the case of most girls, such a manner would have meant encouragement;
+but, as it was Betty, no one could be sure. The little thing was a great
+puzzle to Marcella, who had found unexpected reserves in her. She might
+talk of her love affairs to Aldous Raeburn; she had done nothing of the
+sort with her new friend. And in such matters Marcella herself was far
+more reserved than most modern women.
+
+"Betty!" cried Lady Winterbourne, "I am going on into the next room."
+
+Then in a lower tone she said helplessly to Marcella:
+
+"Do make her come on!"
+
+Marcella perceived that her old friend was in a fidget. Stooping her
+tall head, she said with a smile:
+
+"But look how she is amusing herself!"
+
+"My dear!--that's just it! If you only knew how her mother--tiresome
+woman--has talked to me! And the young man has behaved so beautifully
+till now--has given neither Ermyntrude nor me any trouble."
+
+Was that why Betty was leading him such a life? Marcella wondered,--then
+suddenly--was seized with a sick distaste for the whole scene--for
+Betty's love affairs--for her own interest in them--for her own self and
+personality above all. Her great black eyes gazed straight before them,
+unseeing, over the crowd, the diamonds, the lights; her whole being
+gave itself to a quick, blind wrestle with some vague overmastering
+pain, some despair of life and joy to which she could give no name.
+
+She was roused by Betty's voice:
+
+"Mr. Raeburn! will _you_ tell me who people are? Mr. Leven's no more use
+than my fan. Just imagine--I asked him who that lady in the tiara
+is--and he vows he doesn't know! Why, it just seems that when you go to
+Oxford, you leave the wits you had before, behind! And then--of
+course"--Betty affected a delicate hesitation--"there's the difficulty
+of being quite sure that you'll ever get any new ones!--But
+there--look!--I'm in despair!--she's vanished--and I shall _never_
+know!"
+
+"One moment!" said Raeburn, smiling, "and I will take you in pursuit.
+She has only gone into the tea-room."
+
+His hand touched Marcella's.
+
+"Just a _little_ better," he said, with a sudden change of look, in
+answer to Lady Winterbourne's question. "The account to-night is
+certainly brighter. They begged me not to come, or I should have been
+off some days ago. And next week, I am thankful to say, they will be
+home."
+
+Why should she be standing there, so inhumanly still and
+silent?--Marcella asked herself. Why not take courage again--join
+in--talk--show sympathy? But the words died on her lips. After
+to-night--thank heaven!--she need hardly see him again.
+
+He asked after herself as usual. Then, just as he was turning away with
+Betty, he came back to her, unexpectedly.
+
+"I should like to tell you about Hallin," he said gently. "His sister
+writes to me that she is happier about him, and that she hopes to be
+able to keep him away another fortnight. They are at Keswick."
+
+For an instant there was pleasure in the implication of common ground, a
+common interest--here if no-where else. Then the pleasure was lost in
+the smart of her own strange lack of self-government as she made a
+rather stupid and awkward reply.
+
+Raeburn's eyes rested on her for a moment. There was in them a flash of
+involuntary expression, which she did not notice--for she had turned
+away--which no one saw--except Betty. Then the child followed him to the
+tea-room, a little pale and pensive.
+
+Marcella looked after them.
+
+In the midst of the uproar about her, the babel of talk fighting against
+the Hungarian band, which was playing its wildest and loudest in the
+tea-room, she was overcome by a sudden rush of memory. Her eyes were
+tracing the passage of those two figures through the crowd; the man in
+his black court suit, stooping his refined and grizzled head to the girl
+beside him, or turning every now and then to greet an acquaintance, with
+the manner--cordial and pleasant, yet never quite gay even when he
+smiled--that she, Marcella, had begun to notice of late as a new thing;
+the girl lifting her small face to him, the gold of her hair showing
+against his velvet sleeve. But the inward sense was busy with a number
+of other impressions, past, and, as it now seemed, incredible.
+
+The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long
+ago--why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his
+arm about her!--the drive home after the Gairsley meeting--that poignant
+moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball--his face, his anxious,
+tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him
+on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather
+in vain:--had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part
+of the living world? Impossible! Why, there he was--not ten yards from
+her--and yet more irrevocably separate from her than if the Sahara
+stretched between them. The note of cold distance in his courteous
+manner put her further from him than the merest stranger.
+
+Marcella felt a sudden terror rush through her as she blindly followed
+Lady Winterbourne; her limbs trembled under her; she took advantage of a
+conversation between her companion and the master of the house to sink
+down for a moment on a settee, where she felt out of sight and notice.
+
+What was this intolerable sense of loss and folly, this smarting
+emptiness, this rage with herself and her life? She only knew that
+whereas the touch, the eye of Aldous Raeburn had neither compelled nor
+thrilled her, so long as she possessed his whole heart and
+life--_now_--that she had no right to either look or caress; now that he
+had ceased even to regard her as a friend, and was already perhaps
+making up that loyal and serious mind of his to ask from another woman
+the happiness she had denied him; now, when it was absurdly too late,
+she could--
+
+Could what? Passionate, wilful creature that she was!--with that breath
+of something wild and incalculable surging through the inmost places of
+the soul, she went through a moment of suffering as she sat pale and
+erect in her corner--brushed against by silks and satins, chattered
+across by this person and that--such as seemed to bruise all the
+remaining joy and ease out of life.
+
+But only a moment! Flesh and blood rebelled. She sprang up from her
+seat; told herself that she was mad or ill; caught sight of Mr. Lane
+coming towards them, and did her best by smile and greeting to attract
+him to her.
+
+"You look very white, my dear Miss Boyce," said that cheerful and
+fatherly person. "Is it that tiresome arm still? Now, don't please go
+and be a heroine any more!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+Meanwhile, in the tea-room, Betty was daintily sipping her claret-cup,
+while Aldous stood by her.
+
+"No," said Betty, calmly, looking straight at the lady in the tiara who
+was standing by the buffet, "she's not beautiful, and I've torn my dress
+running after her. There's only one beautiful person here to-night!"
+
+Aldous found her a seat, and took one himself beside her, in a corner
+out of the press. But he did not answer her remark.
+
+"Don't you think so, Mr. Aldous?" said Betty, persisting, but with a
+little flutter of the pulse.
+
+"You mean Miss Boyce?" he said quietly, as he turned to her.
+
+"Of course!" cried Betty, with a sparkle in her charming eyes; "what
+_is_ it in her face? It excites me to be near her. One feels that she
+will just have lived _twice_ as much as the rest of us by the time she
+comes to the end. You don't mind my talking of her, Mr. Aldous?"
+
+There was an instant's silence on his part. Then he said in a
+constrained voice, looking away from his companion, "I don't _mind_ it,
+but I am not going to pretend to you that I find it easy to talk of
+her."
+
+"It would be a shame of you to pretend anything," said Betty, fervently,
+"after all I've told you! I confessed all my scrapes to you, turned out
+all my rubbish bag of a heart--well, nearly all"--she checked herself
+with a sudden flush--"And you've been as kind to me as any big brother
+could be. But you're dreadfully lofty, Mr. Aldous! You keep yourself to
+yourself. I don't think it's fair!"
+
+Aldous laughed.
+
+"My dear Miss Betty, haven't you found out by now that I am a good
+listener and a bad talker? I don't talk of myself or"--he
+hesitated--"the things that have mattered most to me--because, in the
+first place, it doesn't come easy to me--and, in the next, I can't, you
+see, discuss my own concerns without discussing other people's."
+
+"Oh, good gracious!" said Betty, "what you must have been thinking about
+me! I declare I'll never tell you anything again!"--and, beating her
+tiny foot upon the ground, she sat, scarlet, looking down at it.
+
+Aldous made all the smiling excuses he could muster. He had found Betty
+a most beguiling and attaching little companion, both at the Court in
+the Easter recess, and during the Italian journey. Her total lack of
+reserve, or what appeared so, had been first an amazement to him, and
+then a positive pleasure and entertainment. To make a friend of
+him--difficult and scrupulous as he was, and now more than ever--a woman
+must be at the cost of most of the advances. But, after the first
+evening with him, Betty had made them in profusion, without the smallest
+demur, though perfectly well aware of her mother's ambitions. There was
+a tie of cousinship between them, and a considerable difference of age.
+Betty had decided at once that a mother was a dear old goose, and that
+great friends she and Aldous Raeburn should be--and, in a sense, great
+friends they were.
+
+Aldous was still propitiating her, when Lady Winterbourne came into the
+tea-room, followed by Marcella. The elder lady threw a hurried and not
+very happy glance at the pair in the corner. Marcella appeared to be in
+animated talk with a young journalist whom Raeburn knew, and did not
+look their way.
+
+"Just _one_ thing!" said Betty, bending forward and speaking eagerly in
+Aldous's ear. "It was all a mistake--wasn't it? Now I know her I feel
+sure it was. You don't--you don't--really think badly of her?"
+
+Aldous heard her unwillingly. He was looking away from her towards the
+buffet, when she saw a change in the eyes--a tightening of the lip--a
+something keen and hostile in the whole face.
+
+"Perhaps Miss Boyce will be less of a riddle to all of us before long!"
+he said hastily, as though the words escaped him. "Shall we get out of
+this very uncomfortable corner?"
+
+Betty looked where he had looked, and saw a young man greeting Marcella
+with a manner so emphatic and intimate, that the journalist had
+instantly moved out of his way. The young man had a noticeable pile of
+fair curls above a very white and rounded forehead.
+
+"Who is that talking to Miss Boyce?" she asked of Aldous; "I have seen
+him, but I can't remember the name."
+
+"That is Mr. Wharton, the member for one of our divisions," said
+Aldous, as he rose from his chair.
+
+Betty gave a little start, and her brow puckered into a frown. As she
+too rose, she said resentfully to Aldous:
+
+"Well, you _have_ snubbed me!"
+
+As usual, he could not find the effective or clever thing to say.
+
+"I did not mean to," he replied simply; but Betty, glancing at him, saw
+something in his face which gripped her heart. A lump rose in her
+throat.
+
+"Do let's go and find Ermyntrude!" she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Wharton had barely begun his talk with Marcella when a gentleman, on
+his way to the buffet with a cup to set down, touched him on the arm.
+Wharton turned in some astonishment and annoyance. He saw a youngish,
+good-looking man, well known to him as already one of the most important
+solicitors in London, largely trusted by many rich or eminent persons.
+
+"May I have a word with you presently?" said Mr. Pearson, in a pleasant
+undertone. "I have something of interest to say to you, and it occurred
+to me that I might meet you to-night. Excuse my interrupting you."
+
+He glanced with admiration at Marcella, who had turned away.
+
+Wharton had a momentary qualm. Then it struck him that Mr. Pearson's
+manner was decidedly friendly.
+
+"In a moment," he said. "We might find a corner, I think, in that
+further room."
+
+He made a motion of the head towards a little boudoir which lay beyond
+the tea-room.
+
+Mr. Pearson nodded and passed on.
+
+Wharton returned to Marcella, who had fallen back on Frank Leven. At the
+approach of the member for West Brookshire, Lady Winterbourne and her
+daughter had moved severely away to the further end of the buffet.
+
+"A tiresome man wants me on business for a moment," he said; then he
+dropped his voice a little; "but I have been looking forward to this
+evening, this chance, for days--shall I find you here again in five
+minutes?"
+
+Marcella, who had flushed brightly, said that would depend on the time
+and Lady Winterbourne. He hurried away with a little gesture of despair.
+Frank followed him with a sarcastic eye.
+
+"Any one would think he was prime minister already! I never met him yet
+anywhere that he hadn't some business on hand. Why does he behave as
+though he had the world on his shoulders? Your _real_ swells always seem
+to have nothing to do."
+
+"Do you know so many busy people?" Marcella asked him sweetly.
+
+"Oh, you shan't put me down, Miss Boyce!" said the boy, sulkily
+thrusting his hands into his pockets. "I am going to work like blazes
+this winter, if only my dons will let a fellow alone. I say, isn't she
+_ripping_ to-night--Betty?"
+
+And, pulling his moustache in helpless jealousy and annoyance, he stared
+at the Winterbourne group across the room, which had been now joined by
+Aldous Raeburn and Betty, standing side by side.
+
+"What do you want me to say?" said Marcella, with a little cold laugh.
+"I shall make you worse if I praise her. Please put my cup down."
+
+At the same moment she saw Wharton coming back to her--Mr. Pearson
+behind him, smiling, and gently twirling the seals of his watch-chain.
+She was instantly struck by Wharton's look of excitement, and by the
+manner in which--with a momentary glance aside at the Winterbourne
+party--he approached her.
+
+"There is such a charming little room in there," he said, stooping his
+head to her, "and so cool after this heat. Won't you try it?"
+
+The energy of his bright eye took possession of her. He led the way; she
+followed. Her dress almost brushed Aldous Raeburn as she passed.
+
+He took her into a tiny room. There was no one else there, and he found
+a seat for her by an open window, where they were almost hidden from
+view by a stand of flowers.
+
+As he sat down again by her, she saw that a decisive moment had come,
+and blanched almost to the colour of her dress. Oh! what to do! Her
+heart cried out vaguely to some power beyond itself for guidance, then
+gave itself up again to the wayward thirst for happiness.
+
+He took her hand strongly in both his own, and bending towards her as
+she sat bowered among the scent and colours of the flowers, he made her
+a passionate declaration. From the first moment that he had seen her
+under the Chiltern beeches, so he vowed, he had felt in her the supreme,
+incomparable attraction which binds a man to one woman, and one only.
+His six weeks under her father's roof had produced in him feelings
+which he knew to be wrong, without thereby finding in himself any power
+to check them. They had betrayed him into a mad moment, which he had
+regretted bitterly because it had given her pain. Otherwise--his voice
+dropped and shook, his hand pressed hers--"I lived for months on the
+memory of that one instant." But he had respected her suffering, her
+struggle, her need for rest of mind and body. For her sake he had gone
+away into silence; he had put a force upon himself which had alone
+enabled him to get through his parliamentary work.
+
+Then, with his first sight of her in that little homely room and
+dress--so changed, but so lovely!--everything--admiration, passion--had
+revived with double strength. Since that meeting he must have often
+puzzled her, as he had puzzled himself. His life had been a series of
+perplexities. He was not his own master; he was the servant of a cause,
+in which--however foolishly a mocking habit might have led him at times
+to be-little his own enthusiasms and hers--his life and honour were
+engaged; and this cause and his part in it had been for long hampered,
+and all his clearness of vision and judgment dimmed by the pressure of a
+number of difficulties and worries he could not have discussed with
+her--worries practical and financial, connected with the _Clarion_, with
+the experiments he had been carrying out on his estate, and with other
+troublesome matters. He had felt a thousand times that his fortunes,
+political or private, were too doubtful and perilous to allow him to ask
+any woman to share them.--Then, again, he had seen her--and his
+resolution, his scruple, had melted in his breast!
+
+Well! there were still troubles in front! But he was no longer cowed by
+them. In spite of them, he dared now to throw himself at her feet, to
+ask her to come and share a life of combat and of labour, to bring her
+beauty and her mind to the joint conduct of a great enterprise. To _her_
+a man might show his effort and his toil,--from _her_ he might claim a
+sympathy it would be vain to ask of any smaller woman.
+
+Then suddenly he broke down. Speech seemed to fail him. Only his
+eyes--more intense and piercing under their straight brows than she had
+ever known them--beseeched her--his hand sought hers.
+
+She meanwhile sat in a trance of agitation, mistress neither of reason
+nor of feeling. She felt his spell, as she had always done. The woman in
+her thrilled at last to the mere name and neighbourhood of love. The
+heart in her cried out that pain and loss could only be deadened so--the
+past could only be silenced by filling the present with movement and
+warm life.
+
+Yet what tremors of conscience--what radical distrust of herself and
+him! And the first articulate words she found to say to him were very
+much what she had said to Aldous so long ago--only filled with a
+bitterer and more realised content.
+
+"After all, what do we know of each other! You don't know me--not as I
+am. And I feel--"
+
+"Doubts?" he said, smiling. "Do you imagine that that seems anything but
+natural to me? _I_ can have none; but _you_--After all, we are not quite
+boy and girl, you and I; we have lived, both of us! But ask
+yourself--has not destiny brought us together? Think of it all!"
+
+Their eyes met again. Hers sank under the penetration, the flame of his.
+Yet, throughout, he was conscious of the doorway to his right, of the
+figures incessantly moving across it. His own eloquence had convinced
+and moved himself abundantly. Yet, as he saw her yielding, he was filled
+with the strangest mixture of passion--and a sort of disillusion--almost
+contempt! If she had turned from him with the dignity worthy of that
+head and brow, it flashed across him that he could have tasted more of
+the _abandonment_ of love--have explored his own emotion more perfectly.
+
+Still, the situation was poignant enough--in one sense complete. Was
+Raeburn still there--in that next room?
+
+"My answer?" he said to her, pressing her hand as they sat in the
+shelter of the flowers. For _he_ was aware of the practical facts--the
+hour, the place--if she was not.
+
+She roused herself.
+
+"I can't," she said, making a movement to rise, which his strong grasp,
+however, prevented. "I _can't_ answer you to-night, Mr. Wharton. I
+should have much to think over--so much! It might all look quite
+different to me. You must give me time."
+
+"To-morrow?" he said quietly.
+
+"No!" she said impetuously, "not to-morrow; I go back to my work, and I
+must have quiet and time. In a fortnight--not before. I will write."
+
+"Oh, impossible!" he said, with a little frown.
+
+And still holding her, he drew her towards him. His gaze ran over the
+face, the warm whiteness under the lace of the dress, the beautiful
+arms. She shrank from it--feeling a sudden movement of dislike and fear;
+but before she could disengage herself he had pressed his lips on the
+arm nearest to him.
+
+"I gave you no leave!" she said passionately, under her breath, as he
+let her go.
+
+He met her flashing look with tender humbleness.
+
+"_Marcella_!"
+
+The word was just breathed into the air. She wavered--yet a chill had
+passed over her. She could not recover the moment of magic.
+
+"_Not_ to-morrow," she repeated steadily, though dreading lest she
+should burst into tears, "and not till I see clearly--till I can--" She
+caught her breath. "Now I am going back to Lady Winterbourne."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+For some hours after he reached his own room, Wharton sat in front of
+his open window, sunk in the swift rushing of thought, as a bramble
+sways in a river. The July night first paled, then flushed into morning;
+the sun rose above the empty street and the light mists enwrapping the
+great city, before he threw himself on his bed, exhausted enough at last
+to fall into a restless sleep.
+
+The speculation of those quick-pulsed hours was in the end about equally
+divided between Marcella and the phrases and turns of his interview with
+Mr. Pearson. It was the sudden leap of troubled excitement stirred in
+him by that interview--heightened by the sight of Raeburn--that had
+driven him past recall by the most natural of transitions, into his
+declaration to Marcella.
+
+But he had no sooner reached his room than, at first with iron will, he
+put the thought of Marcella, of the scene which had just passed, away
+from him. His pulses were still quivering. No matter! It was the brain
+he had need of. He set it coolly and keenly to work.
+
+Mr. Pearson? Well!--Mr. Pearson had offered him a _bribe_; there could
+be no question as to that. His clear sense never blinked the matter for
+an instant. Nor had he any illusions as to his own behaviour. Even now
+he had no further right to the sleep of the honest man.
+
+Let him realise, however, what had happened. He had gone to Lady
+Masterton's party, in the temper of a man who knows that ruin is upon
+him, and determined, like the French criminal, to exact his cigar and
+_eau de vie_ before the knife falls. Never had things looked so
+desperate; never had all resource seemed to him so completely exhausted.
+Bankruptcy must come in the course of a few weeks; his entailed property
+would pass into the hands of a receiver; and whatever recovery might be
+ultimately possible, by the end of August he would be, for the moment,
+socially and politically undone.
+
+There could be no question of his proposing seriously to Marcella Boyce.
+Nevertheless, he had gone to Lady Masterton's on purpose to meet her;
+and his manner on seeing her had asserted precisely the same intimate
+claim upon her, which, during the past six weeks, had alternately
+attracted and repelled her.
+
+Then Mr. Pearson had interrupted.
+
+Wharton, shutting his eyes, could see the great man lean against the
+window-frame close to the spot where, a quarter of an hour later,
+Marcella had sat among the flowers--the dapper figure, the long, fair
+moustaches, the hand playing with the eye-glass.
+
+"I have been asked--er--er--" What a conceited manner the fellow
+had!--"to get some conversation with you, Mr. Wharton, on the subject of
+the Damesley strike. You give me leave?"
+
+Whereupon, in less than ten minutes, the speaker had executed an
+important commission, and, in offering Wharton a bribe of the most
+bare-faced kind, had also found time for supplying him with a number of
+the most delicate and sufficient excuses for taking it.
+
+The masters, in fact, sent an embassy. They fully admitted the power of
+the _Clarion_ and its owner. No doubt, it would not be possible for the
+paper to keep up its strike fund indefinitely; there were perhaps
+already signs of slackening. Still it had been maintained for a
+considerable time; and so long as it was reckoned on, in spite of the
+wide-spread misery and suffering now prevailing, the men would probably
+hold out.
+
+In these circumstances, the principal employers concerned had thought it
+best to approach so formidable an opponent and to put before him
+information which might possibly modify his action. They had authorised
+Mr. Pearson to give him a full account of what was proposed in the way
+of re-organisation of the trade, including the probable advantages which
+the work-people themselves would be likely to reap from it in the
+future.
+
+Mr. Pearson ran in a few sentences through the points of the scheme.
+Wharton stood about a yard away from him, his hands in his pockets, a
+little pale and frowning--looking intently at the speaker.
+
+Then Mr. Pearson paused and cleared his throat.
+
+Well!--that was the scheme. His principals believed that, when both it
+and the employers' determination to transfer their business to the
+Continent rather than be beaten by the men were made fully known to the
+owner of the _Clarion_, it must affect his point of view. Mr. Pearson
+was empowered to give him any details he might desire. Meanwhile--so
+confident were they in the reasonableness of the case that they even
+suggested that the owner of the _Clarion_ himself should take part in
+the new Syndicate. On condition of his future co-operation--it being
+understood that the masters took their stand irrevocably on the
+award--the men at present responsible for the formation of the Syndicate
+proposed to allot Mr. Wharton ten Founder's Shares in the new
+undertaking.
+
+Wharton, sitting alone, recalling these things, was conscious again of
+that start in every limb, that sudden rush of blood to the face, as
+though a lash had struck him.
+
+For in a few seconds his mind took in the situation. Only the day
+before, a city acquaintance had said to him, "If you and your confounded
+paper were out of the way, and this thing could be placed properly on
+the market, there would be a boom in it at once. I am told that in
+twenty-four hours the Founder's Shares would be worth 2,000 _l._
+apiece!"
+
+There was a pause of silence. Then Wharton threw a queer dark look at
+the solicitor, and was conscious that his pulse was thumping.
+
+"There can be no question I think, Mr. Pearson--between you and me--as
+to the nature of such a proposal as that!"
+
+"My dear sir," Mr. Pearson had interrupted hastily, "let me, above all,
+ask you to take _time_--time enough, at any rate, to turn the matter
+well over in your mind. The interests of a great many people, besides
+yourself, are concerned. Don't give me an answer to-night; it is the
+last thing I desire. I have thrown out my suggestion. Consider it.
+To-morrow is Sunday. If you are disposed to carry it further, come and
+see me Monday morning--that's all. I will be at your service at any
+hour, and I can then give you a much more complete outline of the
+intentions of the Company. Now I really must go and look for Mrs.
+Pearson's carriage."
+
+Wharton followed the great man half mechanically across the little room,
+his mind in a whirl of mingled rage and desire. Then suddenly he stopped
+his companion:
+
+"Has George Denny anything to do with this proposal, Mr. Pearson?"
+
+Mr. Pearson paused, with a little air of vague cogitation.
+
+"George Denny? Mr. George Denny, the member for Westropp? I have had no
+dealings whatever with that gentleman in the matter."
+
+Wharton let him pass.
+
+Then as he himself entered the tea-room, he perceived the bending form
+of Aldous Raeburn chatting to Lady Winterbourne on his right, and that
+tall whiteness close in front, waiting for him.
+
+His brain cleared in a flash. He was perfectly conscious that a bribe
+had just been offered him, of the most daring and cynical kind, and that
+he had received the offer in the tamest way. An insult had been put upon
+him which had for ever revealed the estimate held of him by certain
+shrewd people, for ever degraded him in his own eyes.
+
+Nevertheless, he was also conscious that the thing was done. The bribe
+would be accepted, the risk taken. So far as his money-matters were
+concerned he was once more a free man. The mind had adjusted itself,
+reached its decision in a few minutes.
+
+And the first effect of the mingled excitement and self-contempt which
+the decision brought with it had been to drive him into the scene with
+Marcella. Instinctively he asked of passion to deliver him quickly from
+the smart of a new and very disagreeable experience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well! why should he not take these men's offer?
+
+He was as much convinced as they that this whole matter of the strike
+had of late come to a deadlock. So long as the public would give, the
+workers, passionately certain of the justice of their own cause, and
+filled with new ambitions after more decent living, would hold out. On
+the other hand, he perfectly understood that the masters had also in
+many ways a strong case, that they had been very hard hit by the strike,
+and that many of them would rather close their works or transfer them
+bodily to the Continent than give way. Some of the facts Pearson had
+found time to mention had been certainly new and striking.
+
+At the same time he never disguised from himself for an instant that but
+for a prospective 20,000 _l._ the facts concerned would not have
+affected him in the least. Till to-night it had been to his interest to
+back the strike, and to harass the employers. Now things were changed;
+and he took a curious satisfaction in the quick movements of his own
+intelligence, as his thought rapidly sketched the "curve" the _Clarion_
+would have to take, and the arguments by which he would commend it.
+
+As to his shares, they would be convertible of course into immediate
+cash. Some man of straw would be forthcoming to buy what he would
+possess in the name of another man of straw. It was not supposed--he
+took for granted--by the men who had dared to tempt him, that he would
+risk his whole political reputation and career for anything less than a
+bird in the hand.
+
+Well! what were the chances of secrecy?
+
+Naturally _they_ stood to lose less by disclosure, a good deal, than he
+did. And Denny, one of the principal employers, was his personal enemy.
+He would be likely enough for the present to keep his name out of the
+affair. But no man of the world could suppose that the transaction would
+pass without his knowledge. Wharton's own hasty question to Mr. Pearson
+on the subject seemed to himself now, in cold blood, a remarkably
+foolish one.
+
+He walked up and down thinking this point out. It was the bitter pill of
+the whole affair.
+
+In the end, with a sudden recklessness of youth and resource, he
+resolved to dare it. There would _not_ be much risk. Men of business do
+not as a rule blazon their own dirty work, and public opinion would be
+important to the new Syndicate.
+
+_Some_ risk, of course, there would be. Well! his risks, as they stood,
+were pretty considerable. He chose the lesser--not without something of
+a struggle, some keen personal smart. He had done a good many mean and
+questionable things in his time, but never anything as gross as this.
+The thought of what his relation to a certain group of men--to Denny
+especially--would be in the future, stung sharply. But it is the part
+of the man of action to put both scruple and fear behind him on
+occasion. His career was in question.
+
+Craven? Well, Craven would be a difficulty. He would telegraph to him
+first thing in the morning before the offices closed, and see him on
+Monday. For Marcella's sake the man must be managed--somehow.
+
+And--Marcella! How should she ever know, ever suspect! She already
+disliked the violence with which the paper had supported the strike. He
+would find no difficulty whatever in justifying all that she or the
+public would see, to her.
+
+Then insensibly he let his thoughts glide into thinking of the money.
+Presently he drew a sheet of paper towards him and covered it with
+calculations as to his liabilities. By George! how well it worked out!
+By the time he threw it aside, and walked to the window for air, he
+already felt himself a _bonâ-fide_ supporter of the Syndicate--the
+promoter in the public interest of a just and well-considered scheme.
+
+Finally, with a little joyous energetic movement which betrayed the
+inner man, he flung down his cigarette, and turned to write an ardent
+letter to Marcella, while the morning sun stole into the dusty room.
+
+Difficult? of course! Both now and in the future. It would take him half
+his time yet--and he could ill afford it--to bring her bound and
+captive. He recognised in her the southern element, so strangely mated
+with the moral English temper. Yet he smiled over it. The subtleties of
+the struggle he foresaw enchanted him.
+
+And she would be mastered! In this heightened state of nerve his man's
+resolution only rose the more fiercely to the challenge of her
+resistance.
+
+Nor should she cheat him with long delays. His income would be his own
+again, and life decently easy. He already felt himself the vain showman
+of her beauty.
+
+A thought of Lady Selina crossed his mind, producing amusement and
+compassion--indulgent amusement, such as the young man is apt to feel
+towards the spinster of thirty-five who pays him attention. A certain
+sense of re-habilitation, too, which at the moment was particularly
+welcome. For, no doubt, he might have married her and her fortune had he
+so chosen. As it was, why didn't she find some needy boy to take pity on
+her? There were plenty going, and she must have abundance of money. Old
+Alresford, too, was fast doddering off the stage, and then where would
+she be--without Alresford House, or Busbridge, or those various other
+pedestals which had hitherto held her aloft?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early on Sunday morning Wharton telegraphed to Craven, directing him to
+"come up at once for consultation." The rest of the day the owner of the
+_Clarion_ spent pleasantly on the river with Mrs. Lane and a party of
+ladies, including a young Duchess, who was pretty, literary, and
+socialistic. At night he went down to the _Clarion_ office, and produced
+a leader on the position of affairs at Damesley which, to the practised
+eye, contained one paragraph--but one only--wherein the dawn of a new
+policy might have been discerned.
+
+Naturally the juxtaposition of events at the moment gave him
+considerable anxiety. He knew very well that the Damesley bargain could
+not be kept waiting. The masters were losing heavily every day, and were
+not likely to let him postpone the execution of his part of the contract
+for a fortnight or so to suit his own convenience. It was like the sale
+of an "old master." His influence must be sold now--at the ripe
+moment--or not at all.
+
+At the same time it was very awkward. In one short fortnight the meeting
+of the party would be upon him. Surrender on the Damesley question would
+give great offence to many of the Labour members. It would have to be
+very carefully managed--very carefully thought out.
+
+By eleven o'clock on Monday he was in Mr. Pearson's office. After the
+first involuntary smile, concealed by the fair moustaches, and instantly
+dismissed, with which the eminent lawyer greeted the announcement of his
+visitor's name, the two augurs carried through their affairs with
+perfect decorum. Wharton realised, indeed, that he was being firmly
+handled. Mr. Pearson gave the _Clarion_ a week in which to accomplish
+its retreat and drop its strike fund. And the fund was to be "checked"
+as soon as possible.
+
+A little later, when Wharton abruptly demanded a guarantee of secrecy,
+Mr. Pearson allowed himself his first--visible--smile.
+
+"My dear sir, are such things generally made public property? I can
+give you no better assurance than you can extract yourself from the
+circumstances. As to writing--well!--I should advise you very strongly
+against anything of the sort. A long experience has convinced me that in
+any delicate negotiation the less that is _written_ the better."
+
+Towards the end Wharton turned upon his companion sharply, and asked:
+
+"How did you discover that I wanted money?"
+
+Mr. Pearson lifted his eyebrows pleasantly.
+
+"Most of the things in this world, Mr. Wharton, that one wants to know,
+can be found out. Now--I have no wish to hurry you--not in the least,
+but I may perhaps mention that I have an important appointment directly.
+Don't you think--we might settle our business?"
+
+Wharton was half-humorously conscious of an inward leap of fury with the
+necessities which had given this man--to whom he had taken an
+instantaneous dislike--the power of dealing thus summarily with the
+member for West Brookshire. However, there was no help for it; he
+submitted, and twenty minutes afterwards he left Lincoln's Inn carrying
+documents in the breast-pocket of his coat which, when brought under his
+bankers' notice, would be worth to him an immediate advance of some
+eight thousand pounds. The remainder of the purchase-money for his
+"shares" would be paid over to him as soon as his part of the contract
+had been carried out.
+
+He did not, however, go to his bank, but straight to the _Clarion_
+office, where he had a mid-day appointment with Louis Craven.
+
+At first sight of the tall, narrow-shouldered form and anxious face
+waiting for him in his private room, Wharton felt a movement of
+ill-humour.
+
+Craven had the morning's _Clarion_ in his hand.
+
+"This _cannot_ mean"--he said, when they had exchanged a brief
+salutation--"that the paper is backing out?"
+
+He pointed to the suspicious paragraph in Wharton's leader, his delicate
+features quivering with an excitement he could ill repress.
+
+"Well, let us sit down and discuss the thing," said Wharton, closing the
+door, "that's what I wired to you for."
+
+He offered Craven a cigarette, which was refused, took one himself, and
+the two men sat confronting each other with a writing-table between
+them. Wharton was disagreeably conscious at times of the stiff papers in
+his coat-pocket, and was perhaps a little paler than usual. Otherwise he
+showed no trace of mental disturbance; and Craven, himself jaded and
+sleepless, was struck with a momentary perception of his companion's
+boyish good looks--the tumbling curls, that Wharton straightened now and
+then, the charming blue eyes, the athlete's frame. Any stranger would
+have taken Craven for the older man; in reality it was the other way.
+
+The conversation lasted nearly an hour. Craven exhausted both argument
+and entreaty, though when the completeness of the retreat resolved upon
+had been disclosed to him, the feeling roused in him was so fierce that
+he could barely maintain his composure. He had been living among scenes
+of starvation and endurance, which, to his mind, had all the character
+of martyrdom. These men and women were struggling for two objects--the
+power to live more humanly, and the free right of combination--to both
+of which, if need were, he would have given his own life to help them
+without an instant's hesitation. Behind his blinking manner he saw
+everything with the idealist's intensity, the reformer's passion. To be
+fair to an employer was not in his power. To spend his last breath, were
+it called for, in the attempt to succour the working-man against his
+capitalist oppressors, would have seemed to him the merest matter of
+course.
+
+And his mental acuteness was quite equal to his enthusiasm, and far more
+evident. In his talk with Wharton, he for a long time avoided, as
+before, out of a certain inner disdain, the smallest touch of sentiment.
+He pointed out--what, indeed, Wharton well knew--that the next two or
+three weeks of the strike would be the most critical period in its
+history; that, if the work-people could only be carried through them,
+they were almost sure of victory. He gave his own reasons for believing
+that the employers could ultimately be coerced, he offered proof of
+yielding among them, proof also that the better men in their ranks were
+fully alive to and ashamed of the condition of the workers. As to the
+Syndicate, he saw no objection to it, _provided_ the workers' claims
+were first admitted. Otherwise it would only prove a more powerful
+engine of oppression.
+
+Wharton's arguments may perhaps be left to the imagination. He would
+have liked simply to play the proprietor and the master--to say, "This
+is my decision, those are my terms--take my work or leave it." But
+Craven was Miss Boyce's friend; he was also a Venturist. Chafing under
+both facts, Wharton found that he must state his case.
+
+And he did state it with his usual ability. He laid great stress on
+"information from a private source which I cannot disregard," to the
+effect that, if the resistance went on, the trade would be broken up;
+that several of the largest employers were on the point of making
+arrangements for Italian factories.
+
+"I know," he said finally, "that but for the _Clarion_ the strike would
+drop. Well! I have come to the conclusion that the responsibility is too
+heavy. I shall be doing the men themselves more harm than good. There is
+the case in a nutshell. We differ--I can't help that. The responsibility
+is mine."
+
+Craven rose with a quick, nervous movement. The prophet spoke at last.
+
+"You understand," he said, laying a thin hand on the table, "that the
+condition of the workers in this trade is _infamous_!--that the award
+and your action together plunge them back into a state of things which
+is a _shame_ and a _curse_ to England!"
+
+Wharton made no answer. He, too, had risen, and was putting away some
+papers in a drawer. A tremor ran through Craven's tall frame; and for an
+instant, as his eye rested on his companion, the idea of foul play
+crossed his mind. He cast it out, that he might deal calmly with his own
+position.
+
+"Of course, you perceive," he said, as he took up his hat, "that I can
+no longer on these terms remain the _Clarion's_ correspondent. Somebody
+else must be found to do this business."
+
+"I regret your decision, immensely," said Wharton, with perfect
+suavity, "but of course I understand it. I trust, however, that you will
+not leave us altogether. I can give you plenty of work that will suit
+you. Here, for instance"--he pointed to a pile of Blue Books from the
+Labour Commission lying on the table--"are a number of reports that want
+analysing and putting before the public. You could do them in town at
+your leisure."
+
+Craven struggled with himself. His first instinct was to fling the offer
+in Wharton's face. Then he thought of his wife; of the tiny new
+household just started with such small, happy, self-denying shifts; of
+the woman's inevitable lot, of the hope of a child.
+
+"Thank you," he said, in a husky voice. "I will consider, I will write."
+
+Wharton nodded to him pleasantly, and he went.
+
+The owner of the _Clarion_ drew a long breath.
+
+"Now I think on the whole it would serve my purpose best to sit down and
+write to _her_--after that. It would be well that _my_ account should
+come first."
+
+A few hours later, after an interview with his bankers and a further
+spell of letter-writing, Wharton descended the steps of his club in a
+curious restless state. The mortgage on the _Clarion_ had been arranged
+for, his gambling debts settled, and all his other money matters were
+successfully in train. Nevertheless, the exhilaration of the morning had
+passed into misgiving and depression.
+
+Vague presentiments hung about him all day, whether in the House of
+Commons or elsewhere, and it was not till he found himself on his legs
+at a crowded meeting at Rotherhithe, violently attacking the Government
+Bill and the House of Lords, that he recovered that easy confidence in
+the general favourableness of the universe to Harry Wharton, and Harry
+Wharton's plans, which lent him so much of his power.
+
+A letter from Marcella--written before she had received either of
+his--reached him at the House just before he started for his meeting. A
+touching letter!--yet with a certain resolution in it which disconcerted
+him.
+
+"Forget, if you will, everything that you said to me last night. It
+might be--I believe it would be--best for us both. But if you will
+not--if I must give my answer, then, as I said, I must have time. It is
+only quite recently that I have _realised_ the enormity of what I did
+last year. I must run no risks of so wrenching my own life--or
+another's--a second time. Not to be _sure_ is for me torment. Why
+perfect simplicity of feeling--which would scorn the very notion of
+questioning itself--seems to be beyond me, I do not know. That it is so
+fills me with a sort of shame and bitterness. But I must follow my
+nature.
+
+"So let me think it out. I believe you know, for one thing, that your
+'cause,' your life-work, attracts me strongly. I should not any longer
+accept all you say, as I did last year. But mere opinion matters
+infinitely less to me than it did. I can imagine now agreeing with a
+friend 'in everything except opinion.' All that would matter to me now
+would be to feel that _your_ heart was wholly in your work, in your
+public acts, so that I might still admire and love all that I might
+differ from. But there--for we must be frank with each other--is just my
+difficulty. _Why_ do you do so many contradictory things? Why do you
+talk of the poor, of labour, of self-denial, and live whenever you can
+with the idle rich people, who hate all three in their hearts? You talk
+their language; you scorn what they scorn, or so it seems; you accept
+their standards. Oh!--to the really 'consecrate' in heart and thought I
+could give my life so easily, so slavishly even! There is no one weaker
+than I in the world. I must have strength to lean upon--and a strength,
+pure at the core, that I can respect and follow.
+
+"Here in this nursing life of mine, I go in and out among people to the
+best of whom life is very real and simple--and often, of course, very
+sad. And I am another being in it from what I was at Lady
+Winterbourne's. Everything looks differently to me. No, no! you must
+please wait till the inner voice speaks so that I can hear it
+plainly--for your sake at least as much as for mine. If you persisted in
+coming to see me now, I should have to put an end to it all."
+
+"Strange is the modern woman!" thought Wharton to himself, not without
+sharp pique, as he pondered that letter in the course of his drive home
+from the meeting. "I talk to her of passion, and she asks me in return
+why I do things inconsistent with my political opinions! puts me through
+a moral catechism, in fact! What is the meaning of it all--confound it!
+--her state of mind and mine? Is the good old _ars amandi_ perishing out
+of the world? Let some Stendhal come and tell us why!"
+
+But he sat up to answer her, and could not get free from an inward
+pleading or wrestle with her, which haunted him through all the
+intervals of these rapid days.
+
+Life while they lasted was indeed a gymnast's contest of breath and
+endurance. The _Clarion_ made its retreat in Wharton's finest style, and
+the fact rang through labouring England. The strike-leaders came up from
+the Midlands; Wharton had to see them. He was hotly attacked in the
+House privately, and even publicly by certain of his colleagues. Bennett
+showed concern and annoyance. Meanwhile the Conservative papers talked
+the usual employers' political economy; and the Liberal papers, whose
+support of the strike had been throughout perfunctory, and of no
+particular use to themselves or to other people, took a lead they were
+glad to get, and went in strongly for the award.
+
+Through it all Wharton showed extraordinary skill. The columns of the
+_Clarion_ teemed with sympathetic appeals to the strikers, flanked by
+long statements of "hard fact"--the details of foreign competition and
+the rest, the plans of the masters--freely supplied him by Mr. Pearson.
+With Bennett and his colleagues in the House he took a bold line;
+admitted that he had endangered his popularity both inside Parliament
+and out of it at a particularly critical moment; and implied, though he
+did not say, that some men were still capable of doing independent
+things to their own hurt. Meanwhile he pushed a number of other matters
+to the front, both in the paper and in his own daily doings. He made at
+least two important speeches in the provinces, in the course of these
+days, on the Bill before the House of Lords; he asked questions in
+Parliament on the subject of the wages paid to Government employés; and
+he opened an attack on the report of a certain Conservative Commission
+which had been rousing the particular indignation of a large mass of
+South London working men.
+
+At the end of ten days the strike was over; the workers, sullen and
+enraged, had submitted, and the plans of the Syndicate were in all the
+papers. Wharton, looking round him, realised to his own amazement that
+his political position had rather gained than suffered. The general
+impression produced by his action had been on the whole that of a man
+strong enough to take a line of his own, even at the risk of
+unpopularity. There was a new tone of respect among his opponents, and,
+resentful as some of the Labour members were, Wharton did not believe
+that what he had done would ultimately damage his chances on the 10th at
+all. He had vindicated his importance, and he held his head high,
+adopting towards his chances of the leadership a strong and careless
+tone that served him well.
+
+Meanwhile there were, of course, clever people behind the scenes who
+looked on and laughed. But they held their tongues, and Wharton, who had
+carefully avoided the mention of names during the negotiations with
+Pearson, did his best to forget them. He felt uncomfortable, indeed,
+when he passed the portly Denny in the House or in the street. Denny had
+a way of looking at the member for West Brookshire out of the corner of
+a small, slit-like eye. He did it more than usual during these days,
+and Wharton had only to say to himself that for all things there is a
+price--which the gods exact.
+
+Wilkins, since the first disclosure of the _Clarion_ change of policy,
+had been astonishingly quiet. Wharton had made certain of violent attack
+from him. On the contrary, Wilkins wore now in the House a subdued and
+pre-occupied air that escaped notice even with his own party in the
+general fulness of the public mind. A few caustic north-countryisms on
+the subject of the _Clarion_ and its master did indeed escape him now
+and then, and were reported from mouth to mouth; but on the whole he lay
+very low.
+
+Still, whether in elation or anxiety, Wharton seemed to himself
+throughout the whole period to be a _fighter_, straining every muscle,
+his back to the wall and his hand against every man. There at the end of
+the fortnight stood the three goal-posts that must be passed, in victory
+or defeat; the meeting that would for the present decide his
+parliamentary prospects, his interview with Marcella, and--the
+confounded annual meeting of the "People's Banking Company," with all
+its threatened annoyances.
+
+He became, indeed, more and more occupied with this latter business as
+the days went on. But he could see no way of evading it. He would have
+to fight it; luckily, now, he had the money.
+
+The annual meeting took place two days before that fixed for the
+committee of the Labour party. Wharton was not present at it, and in
+spite of ample warning he gave way to certain lively movements of
+disgust and depression when at his club he first got hold of the
+evening papers containing the reports. His name, of course, figured
+amply in the denunciations heaped upon the directors of all dates; the
+sums which he with others were supposed to have made out of the first
+dealings with the shares on the Stock Exchange were freely mentioned;
+and the shareholders as a body had shown themselves most uncomfortably
+violent. He at once wrote off a letter to the papers disclaiming all
+responsibility for the worst irregularities which had occurred, and
+courting full enquiry--a letter which, as usual, both convinced and
+affected himself.
+
+Then he went, restless and fuming, down to the House. Bennett passed him
+in the lobby with an uneasy and averted eye. Whereupon Wharton seized
+upon him, carried him into the Library, and talked to him, till Bennett,
+who, in spite of his extraordinary shrewdness and judgment in certain
+departments, was a babe in matters of company finance, wore a somewhat
+cheered countenance.
+
+They came out into the lobby together, Wharton holding his head very
+high.
+
+"I shall deal with the whole thing in my speech on Thursday!" he said
+aloud, as they parted.
+
+Bennett gave him a friendly nod and smile.
+
+There was in this little man, with his considerable brain and his poet's
+heart, something of the "imperishable child." Like a wholesome child, he
+did not easily "think evil"; his temper towards all men--even the owners
+of "way-leaves" and mining royalties--was optimist. He had the most
+naďve admiration for Wharton's ability, and for the academic
+attainments he himself secretly pined for; and to the young complex
+personality itself he had taken from the beginning an unaccountable
+liking. The bond between the two, though incongruous and recent, was
+real; Wharton was as glad of Bennett's farewell kindness as Bennett had
+been of the younger man's explanations.
+
+So that during that day and the next, Bennett went about contradicting,
+championing, explaining; while Wharton, laden with parliamentary
+business, vivid, unabashed, and resourceful, let it be known to all whom
+it concerned that in his solicitor's opinion he had a triumphant answer
+to all charges; and that meanwhile no one could wonder at the soreness
+of those poor devils of shareholders.
+
+The hours passed on. Wednesday was mainly spent by Wharton in a series
+of conferences and intrigues either at the House or at his club; when he
+drove home exhausted at night he believed that all was arranged--the
+train irrevocably laid, and his nomination to the chairmanship of the
+party certain.
+
+Wilkins and six or seven others would probably prove irreconcilable; but
+the vehemence and rancour shown by the great Nehemiah during the summer
+in the pursuit of his anti-Wharton campaign had to some extent defeated
+themselves. A personal grudge in the hands of a man of his type is not a
+formidable weapon. Wharton would have felt perfectly easy on the subject
+but for some odd bits of manner on Wilkins's part during the last
+forty-eight hours--whenever, in fact, the two men had run across each
+other in the House--marked by a sort of new and insolent good humour,
+that puzzled him. But there is a bravado of defeat. Yes!--he thought
+Wilkins was disposed of.
+
+From his present point of ease--debts paid, banker propitiated, income
+assured--it amazed him to look back on his condition of a fortnight
+before. Had the Prince of Darkness himself offered such a bargain it
+must have been accepted. After all his luck had held! Once get through
+this odious company business--as to which, with a pleasing
+consciousness of turning the tables, he had peremptorily instructed Mr.
+Pearson himself--and the barque of his fortunes was assured.
+
+Then, with a quick turn of the mind, he threw the burden of affairs from
+him. His very hopefulness and satisfaction had softened his mood. There
+stole upon him the murmurs and voices of another world of thought--a
+world well known to his versatility by report, though he had as a rule
+small inclination to dwell therein. But he was touched and shaken
+to-night by his own achievement. The heavenly powers had been
+unexpectedly kind to him, and he was half moved to offer them something
+in return.
+
+"Do as you are done by"--that was an ethic he understood. And in moments
+of feeling he was as ready to apply it to great Zeus himself as to his
+friends or enemies in the House of Commons. He had done this doubtful
+thing--but why should it ever be necessary for him to do another? Vague
+philosophic yearnings after virtue, moderation, patriotism, crossed his
+mind. The Pagan ideal sometimes smote and fired him, the Christian
+never. He could still read his Plato and his Cicero, whereas gulfs of
+unfathomable distaste rolled between him and the New Testament. Perhaps
+the author of all authors for whom he had most relish was Montaigne. He
+would have taken him down to-night had there been nothing more kindling
+to think of.
+
+_Marcella_!--ah! Marcella! He gave himself to the thought of her with a
+new and delightful tenderness which had in it elements of compunction.
+After those disagreeable paragraphs in the evening papers, he had
+instantly written to her. "Every public man"--he had said to her,
+finding instinctively the note of dignity that would appeal to her--"is
+liable at some period of his career to charges of this sort. They are at
+once exaggerated and blackened, because he is a public man. To you I owe
+perfect frankness, and you shall have it. Meanwhile I do not ask--I
+know--that you will be just to me, and put the matter out of your
+thoughts till I can discuss it with you. Two days more till I see your
+face! The time is long!"
+
+To this there had been no answer. Her last letter indeed had rung sadly
+and coldly. No doubt Louis Craven had something to do with it. It would
+have alarmed him could he simply have found the time to think about it.
+Yet she was ready to see him on the 11th; and his confidence in his own
+powers of managing fate was tougher than ever. What pleasant lies he had
+told her at Lady Masterton's! Well! What passion ever yet but had its
+subterfuges? One more wrestle, and he would have tamed her to his wish,
+wild falcon that she was. Then--pleasure and brave living! And she also
+should have her way. She should breathe into him the language of those
+great illusions he had found it of late so hard to feign with her; and
+they two would walk and rule a yielding world together. Action, passion,
+affairs--life explored and exploited--and at last--"_que la mort me
+treuve plantant mes choulx--mais nonchalant d'elle!--et encore plus de
+mon jardin imparfaict_!"
+
+He declaimed the words of the great Frenchman with something of the same
+temper in which the devout man would have made an act of faith. Then,
+with a long breath and a curious emotion, he went to try and sleep
+himself into the new day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+The following afternoon about six o'clock Marcella came in from her
+second round. After a very busy week, work happened to be slack; and she
+had been attending one or two cases in and near Brown's Buildings rather
+because they were near than because they seriously wanted her. She
+looked to see whether there was any letter or telegram from the office
+which would have obliged her to go out again. Nothing was to be seen;
+and she put down her bag and cloak, childishly glad of the extra hour of
+rest.
+
+She was, indeed, pale and worn. The moral struggle which had filled the
+past fortnight from end to end had deepened all the grooves and strained
+the forces of life; and the path, though glimmering, was not wholly
+plain.
+
+A letter lay unfinished in her drawer--if she sent it that night, there
+would be little necessity or inducement for Wharton to climb those
+stairs on the morrow. Yet, if he held her to it, she must see him.
+
+As the sunset and the dusk crept on she still sat silent and alone, sunk
+in a depression which showed itself in every line of the drooping form.
+She was degraded in her own eyes. The nature of the impulses which had
+led her to give Wharton the hold upon her she had given him had become
+plain to her. What lay between them, and the worst impulses that poison
+the lives of women, but differences of degree, of expression? After
+those wild hours of sensuous revolt, a kind of moral terror was upon
+her.
+
+What had worked in her? What was at the root of this vehemence of moral
+reaction, this haunting fear of losing for ever the _best_ in
+life--self-respect, the comradeship of the good, communion with things
+noble and unstained--which had conquered at last the mere _woman_, the
+weakness of vanity and of sex? She hardly knew. Only there was in her a
+sort of vague thankfulness _for her daily work_. It did not seem to be
+possible to see one's own life solely under the aspects of selfish
+desire while hands and mind were busy with the piteous realities of
+sickness and of death. From every act of service--from every contact
+with the patience and simplicity of the poor--_something_ had spoken to
+her, that divine ineffable something for ever "set in the world," like
+beauty, like charm, for the winning of men to itself. "Follow truth!" it
+said to her in faint mysterious breathings--"the truth of your own
+heart. The sorrow to which it will lead you is the only _joy_ that
+remains to you."
+
+Suddenly she looked round her little room with a rush of tenderness. The
+windows were open to the evening and the shouts of children playing in
+the courtyard came floating up. A bowl of Mellor roses scented the air;
+the tray for her simple meal stood ready, and beside it a volume of "The
+Divine Comedy," one of her mother's very rare gifts to her, in her
+motherless youth--for of late she had turned thirstily to poetry. There
+was a great peace and plainness about it all; and, besides, touches of
+beauty--tokens of the soul. Her work spoke in it; called to her;
+promised comfort and ennobling. She thought with yearning, too, of her
+parents; of the autumn holiday she was soon to spend with them. Her
+heart went out--sorely--to all the primal claims upon it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, clear as was the inner resolution, the immediate future
+filled her with dread. Her ignorance of herself--her excitable
+folly--had given Wharton rights which her conscience admitted. He would
+not let her go without a struggle, and she must face it.
+
+As to the incidents which had happened during the fortnight--Louis
+Craven's return, and the scandal of the "People's Banking Company"--they
+had troubled and distressed her; but it would not be true to say that
+they had had any part in shaping her slow determination. Louis Craven
+was sore and bitter. She was very sorry for him; and his reports of the
+Damesley strikers made her miserable. But she took Wharton's "leaders"
+in the _Clarion_ for another equally competent opinion on the same
+subject; and told herself that she was no judge. As for the Company
+scandal, she had instantly and proudly responded to the appeal of his
+letter, and put the matter out of her thoughts, till at least he should
+give his own account. So much at any rate she owed to the man who had
+stood by her through the Hurd trial. Marcella Boyce would not readily
+believe in his dishonour! She did not in fact believe it. In spite of
+later misgivings, the impression of his personality, as she had first
+conceived it, in the early days at Mellor, was still too strong.
+
+No--rather--she had constantly recollected throughout the day what was
+going on in Parliament. These were for him testing and critical hours,
+and she felt a wistful sympathy. Let him only rise to his part--take up
+his great task.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An imperious knocking on her thin outer door roused her. She went to
+open it and saw Anthony Craven,--the perspiration standing on his brow,
+his delicate cripple's face white and fierce.
+
+"I want to talk to you," he said without preface. "Have you seen the
+afternoon papers?"
+
+"No," she said in astonishment, "I was just going to send for them. What
+is wrong?"
+
+He followed her into the sitting-room without speaking; and then he
+unfolded the _Pall Mall_ he had in his hand and pointed to a large-print
+paragraph on the central page with a shaking hand.
+
+Marcella read:
+
+"EXCITING SCENES IN THE HOUSE.--MEETING OF THE LABOUR MEMBERS.--A
+committee of the Labour representatives in Parliament met this afternoon
+at 2 o'clock for the purpose of electing a chairman, and appointing
+whips to the party, thus constituting a separate parliamentary group.
+Much interest was felt in the proceedings, which it was universally
+supposed would lead to the appointment of Mr. H. S. Wharton, the member
+for West Brookshire, as chairman and leader of the Labour party. The
+excitement of the meeting and in the House may be imagined when--after a
+short but very cordial and effective speech from Mr. Bennett, the member
+for North Whinwick, in support of Mr. Wharton's candidature--Mr.
+Wilkins, the miner's member for Derlingham, rose and made a series of
+astounding charges against the personal honour of the member for West
+Brookshire. Put briefly, they amount to this: that during the recent
+strike at Damesley the support of the _Clarion_ newspaper, of which Mr.
+Wharton is owner and practically editor, was _bought_ by the employers
+in return for certain shares in the new Syndicate; that the money for
+these shares--which is put as high as 20,000 _l._--had already gone into
+Mr. Wharton's private pocket; and that the change of policy on the part
+of the _Clarion_, which led to the collapse of the strike, was thus
+entirely due to what the Labour members can only regard under the
+circumstances as a bribe of a most disgraceful kind. The effect produced
+has been enormous. The debate is still proceeding, and reporters have
+been excluded. But I hope to send a fuller account later."
+
+Marcella dropped the paper from her hand.
+
+"What does it mean?" she said to her companion.
+
+"Precisely what it says," replied Anthony, with a nervous impatience he
+could not repress. "Now," he added, as his lameness forced him to sit
+down, "will you kindly allow me some conversation with you? It was
+you--practically--who introduced Louis to that man. You meant well to
+Louis, and Mr. Wharton has been your friend. We therefore feel that we
+owe you some explanation. For that paragraph"--he pointed to the
+paper--"is, substantially--Louis's doing, and mine."
+
+"_Yours?_" she said mechanically. "But Louis has been going on working
+for the paper--I persuaded him."
+
+"I know. It was not we who actually discovered the thing. But we set a
+friend to work. Louis has had his suspicions all along. And at last--by
+the merest chance--we got the facts."
+
+Then he told the story, staring at her the while with his sparkling
+eyes, his thin invalid's fingers fidgeting with his hat. If there was in
+truth any idea in his mind that the relations between his companion and
+Harry Wharton were more than those of friendship, it did not avail to
+make him spare her in the least. He was absorbed in vindictive feeling,
+which applied to her also. He might _say_ for form's sake that she had
+meant well; but in fact he regarded her at this moment as a sort of
+odious Canidia whose one function had been to lure Louis to misfortune.
+Cut off himself, by half a score of peculiarities, physical and other,
+from love, pleasure, and power, Anthony Craven's whole affections and
+ambitions had for years centred in his brother. And now Louis was not
+only violently thrown out of employment, but compromised by the
+connection with the _Clarion_; was, moreover, saddled with a wife--and
+in debt.
+
+So that his explanation was given with all the edge he could put upon
+it. Let her stop him, if she pleased!--but she did not stop him.
+
+The facts were these:
+
+Louis had, indeed, been persuaded by Marcella, for the sake of his wife
+and bread and butter, to go on working for the _Clarion_, as a reviewer.
+But his mind was all the time feverishly occupied with the apostasy of
+the paper and its causes. Remembering Wharton's sayings and letters
+throughout the struggle, he grew less and less able to explain the
+incident by the reasons Wharton had himself supplied, and more and more
+convinced that there was some mystery behind.
+
+He and Anthony talked the matter over perpetually. One evening Anthony
+brought home from a meeting of the Venturists that George Denny, the son
+of one of the principal employers in the Damesley trade, whose name he
+had mentioned once before in Marcella's ears. Denny was by this time the
+candidate for a Labour constituency, an ardent Venturist, and the
+laughing-stock of his capitalist family, with whom, however, he was
+still on more or less affectionate terms. His father thought him an
+incorrigible fool, and his mother wailed over him to her friends. But
+they were still glad to see him whenever he would condescend to visit
+them; and all friction on money matters was avoided by the fact that
+Denny had for long refused to take any pecuniary help from his father,
+and was nevertheless supporting himself tolerably by lecturing and
+literature.
+
+Denny was admitted into the brothers' debate, and had indeed puzzled
+himself a good deal over the matter already. He had taken a lively
+interest in the strike, and the articles in the _Clarion_ which led to
+its collapse had seemed to him both inexplicable and enraging.
+
+After his talk with the Cravens, he went away, determined to dine at
+home on the earliest possible opportunity. He announced himself
+accordingly in Hertford Street, was received with open arms, and then
+deliberately set himself, at dinner and afterwards, to bait his father
+on social and political questions, which, as a rule, were avoided
+between them.
+
+Old Denny fell into the trap, lost his temper and self-control
+completely, and at a mention of Harry Wharton--skilfully introduced at
+the precisely right moment--as an authority on some matter connected
+with the current Labour programme, he threw himself back in his chair
+with an angry laugh.
+
+"Wharton? _Wharton_? You quote that fellow to _me?_"
+
+"Why shouldn't I?" said the son, quietly.
+
+"Because, my good sir,--he's a _rogue_,--that's all!--a common rogue,
+from my point of view even--still more from yours."
+
+"I know that any vile tale you can believe about a Labour leader you do,
+father," said George Denny, with dignity.
+
+Whereupon the older man thrust his hand into his coat-pocket, and
+drawing out a small leather case, in which he was apt to carry important
+papers about with him, extracted from it a list containing names and
+figures, and held it with a somewhat tremulous hand under his son's
+eyes.
+
+"Read it, sir! and hold your tongue! Last week my friends and I _bought_
+that man--and his precious paper--for a trifle of 20,000 _l._ or
+thereabouts. It paid us to do it, and we did it. I dare say _you_ will
+think the preceding questionable. In my eyes it was perfectly
+legitimate, a piece of _bonne guerre_. The man was ruining a whole
+industry. Some of us had taken his measure, had found out too--by good
+luck!--that he was in sore straits for money--mortgages on the paper,
+gambling debts, and a host of other things--discovered a shrewd man to
+play him, and made our bid! He rose to it like a gudgeon--gave us no
+trouble whatever. I need not say, of course"--he added, looking up at
+his son--"that I have shown you that paper in the _very strictest
+confidence_. But it seemed to me it was my duty as a father to warn you
+of the nature of some of your associates!"
+
+"I understand," said George Denny, as, after a careful study of the
+paper--which contained, for the help of the writer's memory, a list of
+the sums paid and founders' shares allotted to the various "promoters"
+of the new Syndicate--he restored it to its owner. "Well, I, father,
+have _this_ to say in return. I came here to-night in the hope of
+getting from you this very information, and in the public interest I
+hold myself not only free but _bound_ to make public use of it, at the
+earliest possible opportunity!"
+
+The family scene may be imagined. But both threats and blandishments
+were entirely lost upon the son. There was in him an idealist obstinacy
+which listened to nothing but the cry of a _cause_, and he declared that
+nothing would or should prevent him from carrying the story of the bribe
+direct to Nehemiah Wilkins, Wharton's chief rival in the House, and so
+saving the country and the Labour party from the disaster and disgrace
+of Wharton's leadership. There was no time to lose, the party meeting in
+the House was only two days off.
+
+At the end of a long struggle, which exhausted everybody concerned, and
+was carried on to a late hour of the night, Denny _pčre_, influenced by
+a desire to avoid worse things--conscious, too, of the abundant evidence
+he possessed of Wharton's acceptance and private use of the money--and,
+probably, when it came to the point, not unwilling,--under
+compulsion!--to tumble such a hero from his pedestal, actually wrote,
+under his son's advice, a letter to Wilkins. It was couched in the most
+cautious language, and professed to be written in the interests of
+Wharton himself, to put an end "to certain ugly and unfounded rumours
+that have been brought to my knowledge." The negotiation itself was
+described in the driest business terms. "Mr. Wharton, upon cause shown,
+consented to take part in the founding of the Syndicate, and in return
+for his assistance, was allotted ten founders' shares in the new
+company. The transaction differed in nothing from those of ordinary
+business"--a last sentence slily added by the Socialist son, and
+innocently accepted by one of the shrewdest of men.
+
+After which Master George Denny scarcely slept, and by nine o'clock next
+morning was in a hansom on his way to Wilkins's lodgings in Westminster.
+The glee of that black-bearded patriot hardly needs description. He
+flung himself on the letter with a delight and relief so exuberant that
+George Denny went off to another more phlegmatic member of the
+anti-Wharton "cave," with entreaties that an eye should be kept on the
+member for Derlingham, lest he should do or disclose anything before the
+dramatic moment.
+
+Then he himself spent the next forty-eight hours in ingenious efforts to
+put together certain additional information as to the current value of
+founders' shares in the new company, the nature and amount of Wharton's
+debts, and so on. Thanks to his father's hints he was able in the end
+to discover quite enough to furnish forth a supplementary statement. So
+that, when the 10th arrived, the day rose upon a group of men
+breathlessly awaiting a play within a play--with all their parts
+rehearsed, and the prompter ready.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such in substance, was Anthony's story. So carried away was he by the
+excitement and triumph of it, that he soon ceased to notice what its
+effect might be upon his pale and quick-breathing companion.
+
+"And now what has happened?" she asked him abruptly, when at last he
+paused.
+
+"Why, you saw!" he said in astonishment, pointing to the evening
+paper--"at least the beginning of it. Louis is at the House now. I
+expect him every moment. He said he would follow me here."
+
+Marcella pressed her hands upon her eyes a moment as though in pain.
+Anthony looked at her with a tardy prick of remorse.
+
+"I hear Louis's knock!" he said, springing up. "May I let him in?" And,
+without waiting for reply, he hobbled as fast as his crutch would carry
+him to the outer door. Louis came in. Marcella rose mechanically. He
+paused on the threshold, his short sight trying to make her out in the
+dusk. Then his face softened and quivered. He walked forward quickly.
+
+"I know you have something to forgive us," he said, "and that this will
+distress you. But we could not give you warning. Everything was so
+rapid, and the public interests involved so crushing."
+
+He was flushed with vengeance and victory, but as he approached her his
+look was deprecating--almost timid. Only the night before, Anthony for
+the first time had suggested to him an idea about her. He did not
+believe it--had had no time in truth to think of it in the rush of
+events. But now he saw her, the doubt pulled at his heart. Had he indeed
+stabbed the hand that had tried to help him?
+
+Anthony touched him impatiently on the arm. "What has happened, Louis? I
+have shown Miss Boyce the first news."
+
+"It is all over," said Louis, briefly. "The meeting was breaking up as I
+came away. It had lasted nearly five hours. There was a fierce fight, of
+course, between Wharton and Wilkins. Then Bennett withdrew his
+resolution, refused to be nominated himself--nearly broke down, in fact,
+they say; he had always been attached to Wharton, and had set his heart
+upon making him leader--and finally, after a long wrangle, Molloy was
+appointed chairman of the party."
+
+"Good!" cried Anthony, not able to suppress the note of exultation.
+
+Louis did not speak. He looked at Marcella.
+
+"Did he defend himself?" she asked in a low, sharp voice.
+
+Louis shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, yes. He spoke--but it did him no good. Everybody agreed that the
+speech was curiously ineffective. One would have expected him to do it
+better. But he seemed to be knocked over. He said, of course, that he
+had satisfied himself, and given proof in the paper, that the strike
+could not be maintained, and that being so he was free to join any
+syndicate he pleased. But he spoke amid dead silence, and there was a
+general groan when he sat down. Oh, it was not this business only!
+Wilkins made great play in part of his speech with the Company scandal
+too. It is a complete smash all round."
+
+"Which he will never get over?" said Marcella, quickly.
+
+"Not with our men. What he may do elsewhere is another matter. Anthony
+has told you how it came out?"
+
+She made a sign of assent. She was sitting erect and cold, her hands
+round her knees.
+
+"I did not mean to keep anything from you," he said in a low voice,
+bending to her. "I know--you admired him--that he had given you cause.
+But--my mind has been on _fire_--ever since I came back from those
+Damesley scenes!"
+
+She offered no reply. Silence fell upon all three for a minute or two;
+and in the twilight each could hardly distinguish the others. Every now
+and then the passionate tears rose in Marcella's eyes; her heart
+contracted. That very night when he spoke to her, when he used all those
+big words to her about his future, those great ends for which he had
+claimed her woman's help--he had these things in his mind.
+
+"I think," said Louis Craven presently, touching her gently on the
+arm--he had tried once in vain to attract her attention--"I think I hear
+some one asking for you outside on the landing--Mrs. Hurd seems to be
+bringing them in."
+
+As he spoke, Anthony suddenly sprang to his feet, and the outer door
+opened.
+
+"Louis!" cried Anthony, "it is _he_!"
+
+"Are yer at home, miss?" said Minta Hurd, putting in her head; "I can
+hardly see, it's so dark. Here's a gentleman wants to see you."
+
+As she spoke, Wharton passed her, and stood--arrested--by the sight of
+the three figures. At the same moment Mrs. Hurd lit the gas in the
+little passage. The light streamed upon his face, and showed him the
+identity of the two men standing beside Marcella.
+
+Never did Marcella forget that apparition--the young grace and power of
+the figure--the indefinable note of wreck, of catastrophe--the Lucifer
+brightness of the eyes in the set face. She moved forward. Anthony
+stopped her.
+
+"Good-night, Miss Boyce!"
+
+She shook hands unconsciously with him and with Louis. The two Cravens
+turned to the door. Wharton advanced into the room, and let them pass.
+
+"You have been in a hurry to tell your story!" he said, as Louis walked
+by him.
+
+Contemptuous hate breathed from every feature, but he was perfectly
+self-controlled.
+
+"Yes--" said Craven, calmly--"Now it is your turn."
+
+The door was no sooner shut than Wharton strode forward and caught her
+hand.
+
+"They have told you everything? Ah!--"
+
+His eye fell upon the evening paper. Letting her go, he felt for a chair
+and dropped into it. Throwing himself back, his hands behind his head,
+he drew a long breath and his eyes closed. For the first time in his
+life or hers she saw him weak and spent like other men. Even his nerve
+had been worn down by the excitement of these five fighting hours. The
+eyes were lined and hollow--the brow contracted; the young roundness of
+the cheek was lost in the general pallor and patchiness of the skin; the
+lower part of the face seemed to have sharpened and lengthened,--and
+over the whole had passed a breath of something aging and withering the
+traces of which sent a shiver through Marcella. She sat down near him,
+still in her nurse's cloak, one trembling hand upon her lap.
+
+"Will you tell me what made you do this?" she asked, not being able to
+think of anything else to say.
+
+He opened his eyes with a start.
+
+In that instant's quiet the scene he had just lived through had been
+rushing before him again--the long table in the panelled committee-room,
+the keen angry faces gathered about it. Bennett, in his blue tie and
+shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable--Molloy,
+small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the
+midst of tumult--and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering
+on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out
+Denny's letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some
+thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.
+
+"_Spies,_ yo call us?" with a finger like a dart, threatening the
+enemy--"Aye; an' yo're aboot reet! I and my friends--we _have_ been
+trackin' and spyin' for weeks past. We _knew_ those men, those starvin'
+women and bairns, were bein' _sold_, but we couldn't prove it. Now
+we've come at the how and the why of it! And we'll make it harder for
+men like you to _sell 'em again_! Yo call it infamy?--well, _we_ call it
+detection."
+
+Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which
+followed on the director of "The People's Banking Association," the
+injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous
+finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year--and finally the
+last dramatic cry:
+
+"But it's noa matter, yo say! Mester Wharton has nobbut played his party
+and the workin' man a dirty trick or two--_an' yo mun have a gentleman!_
+Noa--the workin' man isn't fit _himself_ to speak wi' his own enemies i'
+th' gate--_yo mun have a gentleman_!--an' Mester Wharton, he says he'll
+tak' the post, an' dea his best for yo--an', remember, _yo mun have a
+gentleman_! Soa now--Yes! or No!--wull yo?--or _woan't yo_?"
+
+And at that, the precipitation of the great unwieldy form half across
+the table towards Wharton's seat--the roar of the speaker's immediate
+supporters thrown up against the dead silence of the rest!
+
+As to his own speech--he thought of it with a soreness, a disgust which
+penetrated to bones and marrow. He had been too desperately taken by
+surprise--had lost his nerve--missed the right tone throughout. Cool
+defiance, free self-justification, might have carried him through.
+Instead of which--faugh!
+
+All this was the phantom-show of a few seconds' thought. He roused
+himself from a miserable reaction of mind and body to attend to
+Marcella's question.
+
+"Why did I do it?" he repeated; "why--"
+
+He broke off, pressing both his hands upon his brow. Then he suddenly
+sat up and pulled himself together.
+
+"Is that tea?" he said, touching the tray. "Will you give me some?"
+
+Marcella went into the back kitchen and called Minta. While the boiling
+water was brought and the tea was made, Wharton sat forward with his
+face on his hands and saw nothing. Marcella whispered a word in Minta's
+ear as she came in. The woman paused, looked at Wharton, whom she had
+not recognised before in the dark--grew pale--and Marcella saw her hands
+shaking as she set the tray in order. Wharton knew nothing and thought
+nothing of Kurd's widow, but to Marcella the juxtaposition of the two
+figures brought a wave of complex emotion.
+
+Wharton forced himself to eat and drink, hardly speaking the while.
+Then, when the tremor of sheer exhaustion had to some extent abated, he
+suddenly realised who this was that was sitting opposite to him
+ministering to him.
+
+She felt his hand--his quick powerful hand--on hers.
+
+"To _you_ I owe the whole truth--let me tell it!"
+
+She drew herself away instinctively--but so softly that he did not
+realise it. He threw himself back once more in the chair beside her--one
+knee over the other, the curly head so much younger to-night than the
+face beneath it supported on his arms, his eyes closed again for
+rest--and plunged into the story of the _Clarion_.
+
+It was admirably told. He had probably so rehearsed it to himself
+several times already. He described his action as the result of a double
+influence working upon him--the influence of his own debts and
+necessities, and the influence of his growing conviction that the
+maintenance of the strike had become a blunder, even a misfortune for
+the people themselves.
+
+"Then--just as I was at my wit's end, conscious besides that the paper
+was on a wrong line, and must somehow be got out of it--came the
+overtures from the Syndicate. I knew perfectly well I ought to have
+refused them--of _course_ my whole career was risked by listening to
+them. But at the same time they gave me assurances that the workpeople
+would ultimately gain--they proved to me that I was helping to
+extinguish the trade. As to the _money_--when a great company has to be
+launched, the people who help it into being get _paid_ for it--it is
+invariable--it happens every day. I like the system no more than you may
+do--or Wilkins. But consider. I was in such straits that _bankruptcy_
+lay between me and my political future. Moreover--I had lost nerve,
+sleep, balance. I was scarcely master of myself when Pearson first
+broached the matter to me--"
+
+"Pearson!" cried Marcella, involuntarily. She recalled the figure of the
+solicitor; had heard his name from Frank Leven. She remembered Wharton's
+impatient words--"There is a tiresome man wants to speak to me on
+business--"
+
+It was _then I_--that evening! Something sickened her.
+
+Wharton raised himself in his chair and looked at her attentively with
+his young haggard eyes. In the faint lamplight she was a pale vision of
+the purest and noblest beauty. But the lofty sadness of her face filled
+him with a kind of terror. Desire--impotent pain--violent resolve, swept
+across him. He had come to her, straight from the scene of his ruin, as
+to the last bulwark left him against a world bent on his destruction,
+and bare henceforward of all delights.
+
+"Well, what have you to say to me?" he said, suddenly, in a low changed
+voice--"as I speak--as I look at you--I see in your face that you
+distrust--that you have judged me; those two men, I suppose, have done
+their work! Yet from you--_you_ of all people--I might look not only for
+justice--but--I will dare say it--for kindness!"
+
+She trembled. She understood that he appealed to the days at Mellor, and
+her lips quivered.
+
+"No," she exclaimed, almost timidly--"I try to think the best. I see the
+pressure was great."
+
+"And consider, please," he said proudly, "what the reasons were for that
+pressure."
+
+She looked at him interrogatively--a sudden softness in her eyes. If at
+that moment he had confessed himself fully, if he had thrown himself
+upon her in the frank truth of his mixed character--and he could have
+done it, with a Rousseau-like completeness--it is difficult to say what
+the result of this scene might have been. In the midst of shock and
+repulsion, she was filled with pity; and there were moments when she was
+more drawn to his defeat and undoing, than she had ever been to his
+success.
+
+Yet how question him? To do so, would be to assume a right, which in
+turn would imply _his_ rights. She thought of that mention of "gambling
+debts," then of his luxurious habits, and extravagant friends. But she
+was silent. Only, as she sat there opposite to him, one slim hand
+propping the brow, her look invited him.
+
+He thought he saw his advantage.
+
+"You must remember," he said, with the same self-assertive bearing,
+"that I have never been a rich man, that my mother spent my father's
+savings on a score of public objects, that she and I started a number of
+experiments on the estate, that my expenses as a member of Parliament
+are very large, and that I spent thousands on building up the _Clarion_.
+I have been ruined by the _Clarion_, by the cause the _Clarion_
+supported. I got no help from my party--where was it to come from? They
+are all poor men. I had to do everything myself, and the struggle has
+been more than flesh and blood could bear! This year, often, I have not
+known how to move, to breathe, for anxieties of every sort. Then came
+the crisis--my work, my usefulness, my career, all threatened. The men
+who hated me saw their opportunity. I was a fool and gave it them. And
+my enemies have used it--to the bitter end!"
+
+Tone and gesture were equally insistent and strong. What he was saying
+to himself was that, with a woman of Marcella's type, one must "bear it
+out." This moment of wreck was also with him the first moment of
+all-absorbing and desperate desire. To win her--to wrest her from the
+Cravens' influence--that had been the cry in his mind throughout his
+dazed drive from the House of Commons. Her hand in his--her strength,
+her beauty, the romantic reputation that had begun to attach to her, at
+his command--and he would have taken the first step to recovery, he
+would see his way to right himself.
+
+Ah! but he had missed his chance! Somehow, every word he had been saying
+rang false to her. She could have thrown herself as a saving angel on
+the side of weakness and disaster which had spoken its proper language,
+and with a reckless and confiding truth had appealed to the largeness of
+a woman's heart. But this patriot--ruined so nobly--for such
+disinterested purposes--left her cold! She began to think even--hating
+herself--of the thousands he was supposed to have made in the gambling
+over that wretched company--no doubt for the "cause" too!
+
+But before she could say a word he was kneeling beside her.
+
+"_Marcella_ I give me my answer!--I am in trouble and defeat--be a
+woman, and come to me!"
+
+He had her hands. She tried to recover them.
+
+"No!" she said, with passionate energy, "_that_ is impossible. I had
+written to you before you came, before I had heard a word of this.
+Please, _please_ let me go!"
+
+"Not till you explain!"--he said, still holding her, and roused to a
+white heat of emotion--"_why_ is it impossible? You said to me once,
+with all your heart, that you thanked me, that I had taught you, helped
+you. You cannot ignore the bond between us! And you are free. I have a
+right to say to you--you thirst to save, to do good--come and save a
+man that cries to you!--he confesses to _you_, freely enough, that he
+has made a hideous mistake--help him to redeem it!"
+
+She rose suddenly with all her strength, freeing herself from him, so
+that he rose too, and stood glowering and pale.
+
+"When I said that to you," she cried, "I was betraying "--her voice
+failed her an instant--"we were both false--to the obligation that
+should have held us--restrained us. No! _no!_ I will never be your wife!
+We should hurt each other--poison each other!"
+
+Her eyes shone with wild tears. As he stood there before her she was
+seized with a piteous sense of contrast--of the irreparable--of what
+might have been.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, roughly.
+
+She was silent.
+
+His passion rose.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, approaching her again, "that you have given
+me cause to hope? It is those two fanatics that have changed
+you--possessed your mind."
+
+She looked at him with a pale dignity.
+
+"My letters must have warned you," she said simply. "If you had come
+to-morrow--in prosperity--you would have got the same answer, at once.
+To-day--now--I have had weak moments, because--because I did not know
+how to add pain to pain. But they are gone--I see my way! _I do not love
+you_--that is the simple, the whole truth--I could not follow you!"
+
+He stared at her an instant in a bitter silence.
+
+"I have been warned,"--he said slowly, but in truth losing control of
+himself, "not only by you--and I suppose I understand! You repent last
+year. Your own letter said as much. You mean to recover, the ground--the
+place you lost. Ah, well!--most natural!--most fitting! When the time
+comes--and my bones are less sore--I suppose I shall have my second
+congratulations ready! Meanwhile--"
+
+She gave a low cry and burst suddenly into a passion of weeping, turning
+her face from him. But when in pale sudden shame he tried to excuse
+himself--to appease her--she moved away, with a gesture that overawed
+him.
+
+"_You_ have not confessed yourself"--she said, and his look wavered
+under the significance of hers--"but you drive me to it. Yes, _I
+repent!_"--her breast heaved, she caught her breath. "I have been trying
+to cheat myself these last few weeks--to run away from grief--and the
+other night when you asked me--I would have given all I have and am to
+feel like any happy girl, who says 'Yes' to her lover. I tried to feel
+so. But even then, though I was miserable and reckless, I knew in my
+heart--it was impossible! If you suppose--if you like to suppose--that
+I--I have hopes or plans--as mean as they would be silly--you must--of
+course. But I have given no one any _right_ to think so or say so. Mr.
+Wharton--"
+
+Gathering all her self-control, she put out her white hand to him.
+"Please--please say good-bye to me. It has been hideous vanity--and
+mistake--and wretchedness--our knowing each other--from the beginning.
+I _am_ grateful for all you did, I shall always be grateful. I hope--oh!
+I hope--that--that you will find a way through this trouble. I don't
+want to make it worse by a word. If I could do anything! But I can't.
+You must please go. It is late. I wish to call my friend, Mrs. Hurd."
+
+Their eyes met--hers full of a certain stern yet quivering power, his
+strained and bloodshot, in his lined young face.
+
+Then, with a violent gesture--as though he swept her out of his path--he
+caught up his hat, went to the door, and was gone.
+
+She fell on her chair almost fainting, and sat there for long in the
+summer dark, covering her face. But it was not his voice that haunted
+her ears.
+
+"_You have done me wrong--I pray God you may not do yourself a greater
+wrong in the future!_"
+
+Again and again, amid the whirl of memory, she pressed the sad
+remembered words upon the inward wound and fever--tasting, cherishing
+the smart of them. And as her trance of exhaustion and despair gradually
+left her, it was as though she crept close to some dim beloved form in
+whom her heart knew henceforward the secret and sole companion of its
+inmost life.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+
+"You and I--
+Why care by what meanders we are here
+I' the centre of the labyrinth? Men have died
+Trying to find this place which we have found."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Ah! how purely, cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long
+hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of
+London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty
+delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the
+ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul of yearning and of memory into
+the pearly silence of the morning.
+
+High up on the distant hill to the left, beyond the avenue, the pale
+apricots and golds of the newly-shorn stubbles caught the mounting
+light. The beeches of the avenue were turning fast, and the chestnuts
+girdling the church on her right hand were already thin enough to let
+the tower show through. That was the bell--the old bell given to the
+church by Hampden's friend, John Boyce--striking half-past five; and
+close upon it came the call of a pheasant in the avenue. There he was,
+fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, redeemed all at once by the
+sudden whirr of towering flight.
+
+To-day Mary Harden and the Rector would be at work in the church, and
+to-morrow was to be the Harvest Festival. Was it two years?--or in an
+hour or two would she be going with her basket from the Cedar Garden, to
+find that figure in the brown shooting-coat standing with the Hardens on
+the altar steps?
+
+Alas!--alas!--her head dropped on her hands as she knelt by the open
+window. How changed were all the aspects of the world! Three weeks
+before, the bell in that little church had tolled for one who, in the
+best way and temper of his own generation, had been God's servant and
+man's friend--who had been Marcella's friend--and had even, in his last
+days, on a word from Edward Hallin, sent her an old man's kindly
+farewell.
+
+"Tell her," Lord Maxwell had written with his own hand to Hallin, "she
+has taken up a noble work, and will make, I pray God, a noble woman. She
+had, I think, a kindly liking for an old man, and she will not disdain
+his blessing."
+
+He had died at Geneva, Aldous and Miss Raeburn with him. For instead of
+coming home in August, he had grown suddenly worse, and Aldous had gone
+out to him. They had brought him to the Court for burial, and the new
+Lord Maxwell, leaving his aunt at the Court, had almost immediately
+returned to town,--because of Edward Hallin's state of health.
+
+Marcella had seen much of Hallin since he and his sister had come back
+to London in the middle of August. Hallin's apparent improvement had
+faded within a week or two of his return to his rooms; Aldous was at
+Geneva; Miss Hallin was in a panic of alarm; and Marcella found herself
+both nurse and friend. Day after day she would go in after her nursing
+rounds, share their evening meal, and either write for Hallin, or help
+the sister--by the slight extra weight of her professional voice--to
+keep him from writing and thinking.
+
+He would not himself admit that he was ill at all, and his whole
+energies at the time were devoted to the preparation of a series of
+three addresses on the subject of Land Reform, which were to be
+delivered in October to the delegates of a large number of working-men's
+clubs from all parts of London. So strong was Hallin's position among
+working-men reformers, and so beloved had been his personality, that as
+soon as his position towards the new land nationalising movement, now
+gathering formidable strength among the London working men, had come to
+be widely understood, a combined challenge had been sent him by some
+half-dozen of the leading Socialist and Radical clubs, asking him to
+give three weekly addresses in October to a congress of London
+delegates, time to be allowed after the lecture for questions and
+debate.
+
+Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an
+intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often
+seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical
+strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell
+message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure. For all the
+time he was struggling with cardiac weakness and brain irritability
+which would have overwhelmed any one less accustomed to make his account
+with illness, or to balance against feebleness of body a marvellous
+discipline of soul.
+
+Lord Maxwell was still alive, and Hallin, in the midst of his work, was
+looking anxiously for the daily reports from Aldous, living in his
+friend's life almost as much as in his own--handing on the reports, too,
+day by day to Marcella, with a manner which had somehow slipped into
+expressing a new and sure confidence in her sympathy--when she one
+evening found Minta Hurd watching for her at the door with a telegram
+from her mother: "Your father suddenly worse. Please come at once." She
+arrived at Mellor late that same night.
+
+On the same day Lord Maxwell died. Less than a week later he was buried
+in the little Gairsley church. Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and
+Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from
+time to time of what was passing three miles away--of the great house in
+its mourning--of the figures round the grave. Hallin, of course, would
+be there. It was a dripping September day, and she passed easily from
+moments of passionate yearning and clairvoyance to worry herself about
+the damp and the fatigue that Hallin must be facing.
+
+Since then she had heard occasionally from Miss Hallin. Everything was
+much as it had been, apparently. Edward was still hard at work, still
+ill, still serene. "Aldous"--Miss Hallin could not yet reconcile herself
+to the new name--was alone in the Curzon Street house, much occupied and
+harassed apparently by the legal business of the succession, by the
+election presently to be held in his own constituency, and by the
+winding-up of his work at the Home Office. He was to resign his
+under-secretaryship; but with the new session and a certain
+rearrangement of offices it was probable that he would be brought back
+into the Ministry. Meanwhile he was constantly with them; and she
+thought that his interest in Edward's work and anxiety about his health
+were perhaps both good for him as helping to throw off something of his
+own grief and depression.
+
+Whereby it will be noticed that Miss Hallin, like her brother, had by
+now come to speak intimately and freely to Marcella of her old lover and
+their friend.
+
+Now for some days, however, she had received no letter from either
+brother or sister, and she was particularly anxious to hear. For this
+was the fourth of October, and on the second he was to have delivered
+the first of his addresses. How had the frail prophet sped? She had her
+fears. For her weekly "evenings" in Brown's Buildings had shown her a
+good deal of the passionate strength of feeling developed during the
+past year in connection with this particular propaganda. She doubted
+whether the London working man at the present moment was likely to give
+even Hallin a fair hearing on the point. However, Louis Craven was to be
+there. And he had promised to write even if Susie Hallin could find no
+time. Some report ought to reach Mellor by the evening.
+
+Poor Cravens! The young wife, who was expecting a baby, had behaved with
+great spirit through the _Clarion_ trouble; and, selling their bits of
+furniture to pay their debts, they had gone to lodge near Anthony. Louis
+had got some odds and ends of designing and artistic work to do through
+his brother's influence; and was writing where he could, here and there.
+Marcella had introduced them to the Hallins, and Susie Hallin was taking
+a motherly interest in the coming child. Anthony, in his gloomy way, was
+doing all he could for them. But the struggle was likely to be a hard
+one, and Marcella had recognised of late that in Louis as in Anthony
+there were dangerous possibilities of melancholy and eccentricity. Her
+heart was often sore over their trouble and her own impotence.
+
+Meantime for some wounds, at any rate, time had brought swift cautery!
+Not three days after her final interview with Wharton, while the
+catastrophe in the Labour party was still in every one's mouth, and the
+air was full of bitter speeches and recriminations, Hallin one evening
+laid down his newspaper with a sudden startled gesture, and then pushed
+it over to Marcella. There, in the columns devoted to personal news of
+various sorts, appeared the announcement:
+
+"A marriage has been arranged between Mr. H.S. Wharfon, M.P. for West
+Brookshire, and Lady Selina Farrell, only surviving daughter of Lord
+Alresford. The ceremony will probably take place somewhere about Easter
+next. Meanwhile Mr. Wharton, whose health has suffered of late from his
+exertions in and out of the House, has been ordered to the East for rest
+by his medical advisers. He and his friend Sir William Ffolliot start
+for French Cochin China in a few days. Their object is to explore the
+famous ruined temples of Angkor in Cambodia, and if the season is
+favourable they may attempt to ascend the Mekong. Mr. Wharton is paired
+for the remainder of the session."
+
+"Did you know anything of this?" said Hallin, with that careful
+carelessness in which people dress a dubious question.
+
+"Nothing," she said quietly.
+
+Then an impulse not to be stood against, springing from very mingled
+depths of feeling, drove her on. She, too, put down the paper, and
+laying her finger-tips together on her knee she said with an odd slight
+laugh:
+
+"But I was the last person to know. About a fortnight ago Mr. Wharton
+proposed to me."
+
+Hallin sprang from his chair, almost with a shout. "And you refused
+him?"
+
+She nodded, and then was angrily aware that, totally against her will or
+consent, and for the most foolish and remote reasons, those two eyes of
+hers had grown moist.
+
+Hallin went straight over to her.
+
+"Do you mind letting me shake hands with you?" he said, half ashamed of
+his outburst, a dancing light of pleasure transforming the thin face.
+"There--I am an idiot! We won't say a word more--except about Lady
+Selina. Have you seen her?"
+
+"Three or four times."
+
+"What is she like?"
+
+Marcella hesitated.
+
+"Is she fat--and forty?" said Hallin, fervently--she beat him?"
+
+"Not at all. She is very thin--thirty-five, elegant, terribly of her own
+opinion--and makes a great parade of 'papa.'"
+
+She looked round at him, unsteadily, but gaily.
+
+"Oh! I see," said Hallin, with disappointment, "she will only take care
+he doesn't beat her--which I gather from your manner doesn't matter. And
+her politics?"
+
+"Lord Alresford was left out of the Ministry," said Marcella slily. "He
+and Lady Selina thought it a pity."
+
+"Alresford--_Alresford_? Why, of course! He was Lord Privy Seal in their
+last Cabinet--a narrow-minded old stick!--did a heap of mischief in the
+Lords. _Well!_"--Hallin pondered a moment--"Wharton will go over!"
+
+Marcella was silent. The tremor of that wrestler's hour had not yet
+passed away. The girl could find no words in which to discuss Wharton
+himself, this last amazing act, or its future.
+
+As for Hallin, he sat lost in pleasant dreams of a whitewashed Wharton,
+comfortably settled at last below the gangway on the Conservative side,
+using all the old catch-words in slightly different connections, and
+living gaily on his Lady Selina. Fragments from the talk of
+Nehemiah--Nehemiah the happy and truculent, that new "scourge of God"
+upon the parasites of Labour--of poor Bennett, of Molloy, and of various
+others who had found time to drop in upon him since the Labour smash,
+kept whirling in his mind. The same prediction he had just made to
+Marcella was to be discerned in several of them. He vowed to himself
+that he would write to Raeburn that night, congratulate him and the
+party on the possibility of so eminent a recruit--and hint another item
+of news by the way. She had trusted her confidence to him without any
+pledge--an act for which he paid her well thenceforward, in the coin of
+a friendship far more intimate, expansive, and delightful than anything
+his sincerity had as yet allowed him to show her.
+
+But these London incidents and memories, near as they were in time,
+looked many of them strangely remote to Marcella in this morning
+silence. When she drew back from the window, after darkening the now
+sun-flooded room in a very thorough business-like way, in order that she
+might have four or five hours' sleep, there was something symbolic in
+the act. She gave back her mind, her self, to the cares, the anxieties,
+the remorses of the past three weeks. During the night she had been
+sitting up with her father that her mother might rest. Now, as she lay
+down, she thought with the sore tension which had lately become habitual
+to her, of her father's state, her mother's strange personality, her own
+short-comings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the middle of the morning she was downstairs again, vigorous and
+fresh as ever. Mrs. Boyce's maid was for the moment in charge of the
+patient, who was doing well. Mrs. Boyce was writing some household notes
+in the drawing-room. Marcella went in search of her.
+
+The bare room, just as it ever was--with its faded antique charm--looked
+bright and tempting in the sun. But the cheerfulness of it did but
+sharpen the impression of that thin form writing in the window. Mrs.
+Boyce looked years older. The figure had shrunk and flattened into that
+of an old woman; the hair, which two years before had been still young
+and abundant, was now easily concealed under the close white cap she had
+adopted very soon after her daughter had left Mellor. The dress was
+still exquisitely neat; but plainer and coarser. Only the beautiful
+hands and the delicate stateliness of carriage remained--sole relics of
+a loveliness which had cost its owner few pangs to part with.
+
+Marcella hovered near her--a little behind her--looking at her from time
+to time with a yearning compunction--which Mrs. Boyce seemed to be aware
+of, and to avoid.
+
+"Mamma, can't I do those letters for you? I am quite fresh."
+
+"No, thank you. They are just done."
+
+When they were all finished and stamped, Mrs. Boyce made some careful
+entries in a very methodical account-book, and then got up, locking the
+drawers of her little writing-table behind her.
+
+"We can keep the London nurse another week I think," she said.
+
+"There is no need," said Marcella, quickly. "Emma and I could divide the
+nights now and spare you altogether. You see I can sleep at any time."
+
+"Your father seems to prefer Nurse Wenlock," said Mrs. Boyce.
+
+Marcella took the little blow in silence. No doubt it was her due.
+During the past two years she had spent two separate months at Mellor;
+she had gone away in opposition to her father's wish; and had found
+herself on her return more of a stranger to her parents than ever. Mr.
+Boyce's illness, involving a steady extension of paralytic weakness,
+with occasional acute fits of pain and danger, had made steady though
+very gradual progress all the time. But it was not till some days after
+her return home that Marcella had realised a tenth part of what her
+mother had undergone since the disastrous spring of the murder.
+
+She passed now from the subject of the nurse with a half-timid remark
+about "expense."
+
+"Oh! the expense doesn't matter!" said Mrs. Boyce, as she stood absently
+before the lately kindled fire, warming her chilled fingers at the
+blaze.
+
+"Papa is more at ease in those ways?" Marcella ventured. And kneeling
+down beside her mother she gently chafed one of the cold hands.
+
+"There seems to be enough for what is wanted," said Mrs. Boyce, bearing
+the charing with patience. "Your father, I believe, has made great
+progress this year in freeing the estate. Thank you, my dear. I am not
+cold now."
+
+And she gently withdrew her hand.
+
+Marcella, indeed, had already noticed that there were now no weeds on
+the garden-paths, that instead of one gardener there were three, that
+the old library had been decently patched and restored, that there was
+another servant, that William, grown into a very--tolerable footman,
+wore a reputable coat, and that a plain but adequate carriage and horse
+had met her at the station. Her pity even understood that part of her
+father's bitter resentment of his ever-advancing disablement came from
+his feeling that here at last--just as death was in sight--he, that
+squalid failure, Dick Boyce, was making a success of something.
+
+Presently, as she knelt before the fire, a question escaped her, which,
+when it was spoken, she half regretted.
+
+"Has papa been able to do anything for the cottages yet?"
+
+"I don't think so," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly. After a minute's pause she
+added, "That will be for your reign, my dear."
+
+Marcella looked up with a sharp thrill of pain.
+
+"Papa is better, mamma, and--and I don't know what you mean. I shall
+never reign here without you."
+
+Mrs. Boyce began to fidget with the rings on her thin left hand.
+
+"When Mellor ceases to be your father's it will be yours," she said, not
+without a certain sharp decision; "that was settled long ago. I must be
+free--and if you are to do anything with this place, you must give your
+youth and strength to it. And your father is not better--except for the
+moment. Dr. Clarke exactly foretold the course of his illness to me two
+years ago, on my urgent request. He may live four months--six, if we can
+get him to the South. More is impossible."
+
+There was something ghastly in her dry composure. Marcella caught her
+hand again and leant her trembling young cheek against it.
+
+"I could not live here without you, mamma!"
+
+Mrs. Boyce could not for once repress the inner fever which in general
+her will controlled so well.
+
+"I hardly think it would matter to you so much, my dear."
+
+Marcella shrank.
+
+"I don't wonder you say that!" she said in a low voice. "Do you think it
+was all a mistake, mamma, my going away eighteen months ago--a wrong
+act?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce grew restless.
+
+"I judge nobody, my dear!--unless I am obliged. As you know, I am for
+liberty--above all"--she spoke with emphasis--"for letting the past
+alone. But I imagine you must certainly have learnt to do without us.
+Now I ought to go to your father."
+
+But Marcella held her.
+
+"Do you remember in the _Purgatorio_, mamma, the lines about the loser
+in the game: 'When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers
+sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and _learning by his grief_'?
+Do you remember?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a
+little nervous, but assenting. It was one of the inconsistencies of her
+strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante
+student. The taste for the most strenuous and passionate of poets had
+developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of
+her middle life. Like everything else personal to herself she never
+spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to
+Marcella from a child.
+
+"_E tristo impara?_" repeated Marcella, her voice wavering. "Mamma
+"--she laid her face against her mother's dress again--"I have lost more
+throws than you think in the last two years. Won't you believe I may
+have learnt a little?"
+
+She raised her eyes to her mother's pinched and mask-like face. Mrs.
+Boyce's lips moved as though she would have asked a question. But she
+did not ask it. She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew
+well--the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of
+endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into
+alien fields of emotion.
+
+"Well, but one expects persons like you to learn," she said, with a
+light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention. There was
+silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just
+touched her daughter's hair. "Now, will you come up in half an hour?
+That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his
+food."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella went to her father at the hour named. She found him in his
+wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the
+Cedar Garden. The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old
+house. It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and
+red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a
+carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an
+array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring
+wall a rack of old swords and rapiers. The needlework hangings of the
+bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed
+or tattered. But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity
+of his sleeping-room were a bitter satisfaction to Richard Boyce, even
+in his sickness. After all said and done, he was king here in his
+father's and grandfather's place; ruling where they ruled, and--whether
+they would or no--dying where they died, with the same family faces to
+bear him witness from the walls, and the same vault awaiting him.
+
+When his daughter entered, he turned his head, and his eyes, deep and
+black still as ever, but sunk in a yellow relic of a face, showed a
+certain agitation. She was disagreeably aware that his thoughts were
+much occupied with her; that he was full of grievance towards her, and
+would probably before long bring the pathos of his situation as well as
+the weight of his dying authority to bear upon her, for purposes she
+already suspected with alarm.
+
+"Are you a little easier, papa?" she said, as she came up to him.
+
+"I should think as a nurse you ought to know better, my dear, than to
+ask," he said testily. "When a person is in my condition, enquiries of
+that sort are a mockery!"
+
+"But one may be in less or more pain," she said gently. "I hoped Dr.
+Clarke's treatment yesterday might have given you some relief."
+
+He did not vouchsafe an answer. She took some work and sat down by him.
+Mrs. Boyce, who had been tidying a table of food and medicine, came and
+asked him if he would be wheeled into another room across the gallery,
+which had been arranged as a sitting-room. He shook his head irritably.
+
+"I am not fit for it. Can't you see? And I want to speak to Marcella."
+
+Mrs. Boyce went away. Marcella waited, not without a tremor. She was
+sitting in the sun, her head bent over the muslin strings she was
+hemming for her nurse's bonnet. The window was wide open; outside, the
+leaves under a warm breeze were gently drifting down into the Cedar
+Garden, amid a tangled mass of flowers, mostly yellow or purple. To one
+side rose the dark layers of the cedars; to the other, the grey front
+of the library wing.
+
+Mr. Boyce looked at her with the frown which had now become habitual to
+him, moved his lips once or twice without speaking; and at last made his
+effort.
+
+"I should think, Marcella, you must often regret by now the step you
+took eighteen months ago!"
+
+She grew pale.
+
+"How regret it, papa?" she said, without looking up.
+
+"Why, good God!" he said angrily; "I should think the reasons for regret
+are plain enough. You threw over a man who was devoted to you, and could
+have given you the finest position in the county, for the most
+nonsensical reasons in the world--reasons that by now, I am certain, you
+are ashamed of."
+
+He saw her wince, and enjoyed his prerogative of weakness. In his normal
+health he would never have dared so to speak to her. But of late, during
+long fits of feverish brooding--intensified by her return home--he had
+vowed to himself to speak his mind.
+
+"Aren't you ashamed of them?" he repeated, as she was silent.
+
+She looked up.
+
+"I am not ashamed of anything I did to save Hurd, if that is what you
+mean, papa."
+
+Mr. Boyce's anger grew.
+
+"Of course you know what everybody said?"
+
+She stooped over her work again, and did not reply.
+
+"It's no good being sullen over it," he said in exasperation; "I'm your
+father, and I'm dying. I have a right to question you. It's my duty to
+see something settled, if I can, before I go. Is it _true_ that all the
+time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and
+what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved,
+with Harry Wharton?"
+
+He gave out the words with sharp emphasis, and, bending towards her, he
+laid an emaciated hand upon her arm.
+
+"What use is there, papa, in going back to these things?" she said,
+driven to bay, her colour going and coming. "I may have been wrong in a
+hundred ways, but you never understood that the real reason for it all
+was that--that--I never was in love with Mr. Raeburn."
+
+"Then why did you accept him?" He fell back against his pillows with a
+jerk.
+
+"As to that, I will confess my sins readily enough," she said, while her
+lip trembled, and he saw the tears spring into her eyes. "I accepted him
+for what you just now called his position in the county, though not
+quite in that way either."
+
+He was silent a little, then he began again in a voice which gradually
+became unsteady from self-pity.
+
+"Well, now look here! I have been thinking about this matter a great
+deal--and God knows I've time to think and cause to think, considering
+the state I'm in--and I see no reason whatever why I should not
+try--before I die--to put this thing _straight_. That man was head over
+ears in love with you, _madly_ in love with you. I used to watch him,
+and I know. Of course you offended and distressed him greatly. He could
+never have expected such conduct from you or any one else. But _he's_
+not the man to change round easily, or to take up with any one else.
+Now, if you regret what you did or the way in which you did it, why
+shouldn't I--a dying man may be allowed a little licence I should
+think!--give him a hint?"
+
+"_Papa!_" cried Marcella, dropping her work, and looking at him with a
+pale, indignant passion, which a year ago would have quelled him
+utterly. But he held up his hand.
+
+"Now just let me finish. It would be no good my doing a thing of this
+kind without saying something to you first, because you'd find it out,
+and your pride would be the ruin of it. You always had a demoniacal
+pride, Marcella, even when you were a tiny child; but if you make up
+your mind now to let me tell him you regret what you did--just
+that--you'll make him happy, and yourself, for you know very well he's a
+man of the highest character--and your poor father, who never did _you_
+much harm anyway!" His voice faltered. "I'd manage it so that there
+should be nothing humiliating to you in it whatever. As if there could
+be anything humiliating in confessing such a mistake as that; besides,
+what is there to be ashamed of? You're no pauper. I've pulled Mellor out
+of the mud for you, though you and your mother do give me credit for so
+precious little!"
+
+He lay back, trembling with fatigue, yet still staring at her with
+glittering eyes, while his hand on the invalid table fixed to the side
+of his chair shook piteously. Marcella dreaded the effect the whole
+scene might have upon him; but, now they were in the midst of it, both
+feeling for herself and prudence for him drove her into the strongest
+speech she could devise.
+
+"Papa, if _anything_ of that sort were done, I should take care Mr.
+Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it--in such a way that it
+would be _impossible_ for him to carry it further. Dear papa, don't
+think of such a thing any more. Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly
+last year, are we now to harass and persecute him? I would sooner
+disappear from everybody I know--from you and mamma, from England--and
+never be heard of again."
+
+She stopped a moment--struggling for composure--that she might not
+excite him too much.
+
+"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr.
+Raeburn lately--while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has
+entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that
+plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright,
+fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street--a
+Miss Macdonald."
+
+"Miss how--much?" he asked roughly.
+
+She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of
+confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter--half
+conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself
+and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner
+mind--but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all
+the same.
+
+He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet
+also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of
+death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised
+the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some
+way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.
+
+Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous
+things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the
+Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly--
+
+"And that other fellow--Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him
+in London. Has he been making love to you?"
+
+"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no
+more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as
+good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina
+Farrell--a distant cousin of the Winterbournes--was announced, in
+several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."
+
+At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and
+half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral
+fibre, got up to go.
+
+Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the
+room drew her father's eyes after her, and for the time his feeling
+towards her softened curiously. Well, _she_ had not made very much of
+her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty,
+and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished
+her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain
+balm in the idea that she too--her mother's daughter--with her Merritt
+blood--could be unlucky.
+
+Marcella went about all day under a vague sense of impending
+trouble--the result, no doubt, of that intolerable threat of her
+father's, against which she was, after all, so defenceless.
+
+But whatever it was, it made her all the more nervous and sensitive
+about the Hallins; about her one true friend, to whom she was slowly
+revealing herself, even without speech; whose spiritual strength had
+been guiding and training her; whose physical weakness had drawn to him
+the maternal, the _spending_ instincts which her nursing life had so
+richly developed.
+
+She strolled down the drive to meet the post. But there were no letters
+from London, and she came in, inclined to be angry indeed with Louis
+Craven for deserting her, but saying to herself at the same time that
+she must have heard if anything had gone wrong.
+
+An hour or so later, just as the October evening was closing in, she was
+sitting dreaming over a dim wood-fire in the drawing-room. Her father,
+as might have been expected, had been very tired and comatose all day.
+Her mother was with him; the London nurse was to sit up, and Marcella
+felt herself forlorn and superfluous.
+
+Suddenly, in the silence of the house, she heard the front-door bell
+ring. There was a step in the hall--she sprang up--the door opened, and
+William, with fluttered emphasis, announced--
+
+"Lord Maxwell!"
+
+In the dusk she could just see his tall form--the short pause as he
+perceived her--then her hand was in his, and the paralysing astonishment
+of that first instant had disappeared under the grave emotion of his
+look.
+
+"Will you excuse me," he said, "for coming at this hour? But I am
+afraid you have heard nothing yet of our bad news--and Hallin himself
+was anxious I should come and tell you. Miss Hallin could not write, and
+Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You
+haven't then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?"
+
+"No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was
+nothing--"
+
+"Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it.
+But when we got down here this afternoon, and there was nothing from
+you, both Miss Hallin and Edward felt sure you had not heard--and I
+walked over. It was a most painful, distressing scene, and he--is very
+ill."
+
+"But you have brought him to the Court?" she said trembling, lost in the
+thought of Hallin, her quick breath coming and going. "He was able to
+bear the journey? Will you tell me?--will you sit down?"
+
+He thanked her hurriedly, and took a seat opposite to her, within the
+circle of the firelight, so that she saw his deep mourning and the look
+of repressed suffering.
+
+"The whole thing was extraordinary--I can hardly now describe it," he
+said, holding his hat in his hands and staring into the fire. "It began
+excellently. There was a very full room. Bennett was in the chair--and
+Edward seemed much as usual. He had been looking desperately ill, but he
+declared that he was sleeping better, and that his sister and I coddled
+him. Then,--directly he was well started!--I felt somehow that the
+audience was very hostile. And _he_ evidently felt it more and more.
+There was a good deal of interruption and hardly any cheers--and I saw
+after a little--I was sitting not far behind him--that he was
+discouraged--that he had lost touch. It was presently clear, indeed,
+that the real interest of the meeting lay not in the least in what he
+had to say, but in the debate that was to follow. They meant to let him
+have his hour--but not a minute more. I watched the men about me, and I
+could see them following the clock--thirsting for their turn. Nothing
+that he said seemed to penetrate them in the smallest degree. He was
+there merely as a ninepin to be knocked over. I never saw a meeting so
+_possessed_ with a madness of fanatical conviction--it was amazing!"
+
+He paused, looking sadly before him. She made a little movement, and he
+roused himself instantly.
+
+"It was just a few minutes before he was to sit down--I was
+thankful!--when suddenly--I heard his voice change. I do not know now
+what happened--but I believe he completely lost consciousness of the
+scene before him--the sense of strain, of exhaustion, of making no way,
+must have snapped something. He began a sort of confession--a reverie in
+public--about himself, his life, his thoughts, his prayers, his
+hopes--mostly his religious hopes--for the working man, for England--I
+_never_ heard anything of the kind from him before--you know his
+reserve. It was so intimate--so painful--oh! so painful!"--he drew
+himself together with an involuntary shudder--"before this crowd, this
+eager hostile crowd which was only pining for him to sit down--to get
+out of their way. The men near me began to look at each other and
+titter. They wondered what he meant by maundering on like that--'damned
+canting stuff'--I heard one man near me call it. I tore off a bit of
+paper, and passed a line to Bennett asking him to get hold of Edward, to
+stop it. But I think Bennett had rather lost his presence of mind, and I
+saw him look back at me and shake his head. Then time was up, and they
+began to shout him down."
+
+Marcella made an exclamation of horror. He turned to her.
+
+"I think it was the most tragic scene I ever saw," he said with a
+feeling as simple as it was intense. "This crowd so angry and
+excited--without a particle of understanding or sympathy--laughing, and
+shouting at him--and he in the midst--white as death--talking this
+strange nonsense--his voice floating in a high key, quite unlike itself.
+At last just as I was getting up to go to him, I saw Bennett rise. But
+we were both too late. He fell at our feet!"
+
+Marcella gave an involuntary sob! "What a horror!" she said, "what a
+martyrdom!"
+
+"It was just that," he answered in a low voice--"It was a martyrdom. And
+when one thinks of the way in which for years past he has held these big
+meetings in the hollow of his hand, and now, because he crosses their
+passion, their whim,--no kindness!--no patience--nothing but a blind
+hostile fury! Yet _they_ thought him a traitor, no doubt. Oh! it was all
+a tragedy!"
+
+There was silence an instant. Then he resumed:
+
+"We got him into the back room. Luckily there was a doctor on the
+platform. It was heart failure, of course, with brain prostration. We
+managed to get him home, and Susie Hallin and I sat up. He was delirious
+all night; but yesterday he rallied, and last night he begged us to move
+him out of London if we could. So we got two doctors and an invalid
+carriage, and by three this afternoon we were all at the Court. My aunt
+was ready for him--his sister is there--and a nurse. Clarke was there to
+meet him. He thinks he cannot possibly live more than a few
+weeks--possibly even a few days. The shock and strain have been
+irreparable."
+
+Marcella lay back in her chair, struggling with her grief, her head and
+face turned away from him, her eyes hidden by her handkerchief. Then in
+some mysterious way she was suddenly conscious that Aldous was no longer
+thinking of Hallin, but of her.
+
+"He wants very much to see you," he said, bending towards her; "but I
+know that you have yourself serious illness to nurse. Forgive me for not
+having enquired after Mr. Boyce. I trust he is better?"
+
+She sat up, red-eyed, but mistress of herself. The tone had been all
+gentleness, but to her quivering sense some slight indefinable
+change--coldness--had passed into it.
+
+"He _is_ better, thank you--for the present. And my mother does not let
+me do very much. We have a nurse too. When shall I come?"
+
+He rose.
+
+"Could you--come to-morrow afternoon? There is to be a consultation of
+doctors in the morning, which will tire him. About six?--that was what
+he said. He is very weak, but in the day quite conscious and rational.
+My aunt begged me to say how glad she would be--"
+
+He paused. An invincible awkwardness took possession of both of them.
+She longed to speak to him of his grandfather but could not find the
+courage.
+
+When he was gone, she, standing alone in the firelight, gave one
+passionate thought to the fact that so--in this tragic way--they had met
+again in this room where he had spoken to her his last words as a lover;
+and then, steadily, she put everything out of her mind but her
+friend--and death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Mrs. Boyce received Marcella's news with more sympathy than her daughter
+had dared to hope for, and she made no remark upon Aldous himself and
+his visit, for which Marcella was grateful to her.
+
+As they left the dining-room, after their short evening meal, to go up
+to Mr. Boyce, Marcella detained her mother an instant.
+
+"Mamma, will you please not tell papa that--that Lord Maxwell came here
+this afternoon? And will you explain to him why I am going there
+to-morrow?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's fair cheek flushed. Marcella saw that she understood.
+
+"If I were you, I should not let your father talk to you any more about
+those things," she said with a certain proud impatience.
+
+"If I can help it!" exclaimed Marcella. "Will you tell him,
+mamma,--about Mr. Hallin?--and how good he has been to me?"
+
+Then her voice failed her, and, hurriedly leaving her mother at the top
+of the stairs, she went away by herself to struggle with a grief and
+smart almost unbearable.
+
+That night passed quietly at the Court. Hallin was at intervals slightly
+delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning
+the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as
+calmer and a little stronger. But the heart mischief was hopeless, and
+might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.
+
+He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and
+difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous's sitting-room,
+drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide
+range of wood and plain that it commanded. After a very wet September,
+the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny
+peace. The great woods of the Chilterns, just yellowing towards that
+full golden moment--short, like all perfection,--which only beeches
+know, rolled down the hill-slopes to the plain, their curving lines cut
+here and there by straight fir stems, drawn clear and dark on the pale
+background of sky and lowland. In the park, immediately below the
+window, groups of wild cherry and of a slender-leaved maple made spots
+of "flame and amethyst" on the smooth falling lawns; the deer wandered
+and fed, and the squirrels were playing and feasting among the beech
+nuts.
+
+Since Aldous and his poor sister had brought him home from the Bethnal
+Green hall in which the Land Reform Conference had been held, Hallin had
+spoken little, except in delirium, and that little had been marked by
+deep and painful depression. But this morning, when Aldous was summoned
+by the nurse, and found him propped up by the window, in front of the
+great view, he saw gracious signs of change. Death, indeed, already in
+possession, looked from the blue eyes so plainly that Aldous, on his
+first entrance, had need of all his own strength of will to keep his
+composure. But with the certainty of that great release, and with the
+abandonment of all physical and mental struggle--the struggle of a
+lifetime--Hallin seemed to-day to have recovered something of his
+characteristic serenity and blitheness--the temper which had made him
+the leader of his Oxford contemporaries, and the dear comrade of his
+friend's life.
+
+When Aldous came in, Hallin smiled and lifted a feeble hand towards the
+park and the woods.
+
+"Could it have greeted me more kindly," he said, in his whispering
+voice, "for the end?"
+
+Aldous sat down beside him, pressing his hand, and there was silence
+till Hallin spoke again.
+
+"You will keep this sitting-room, Aldous?"
+
+"Always."
+
+"I am glad. I have known you in it so long. What good talks we have had
+here in the old hot days! I was hot, at least, and you bore with me.
+Land Reform--Church Reform--Wages Reform--we have threshed them all out
+in this room. Do you remember that night I kept you up till it was too
+late to go to bed, talking over my Church plans? How full I was of
+it!--the Church that was to be the people--reflecting their life, their
+differences--governed by them--growing with them. You wouldn't join it,
+Aldous--our poor little Association!"
+
+Aldous's strong lip quivered.
+
+"Let me think of something I _did_ join in," he said.
+
+Hallin's look shone on him with a wonderful affection.
+
+"Was there anything else you didn't help in? I don't remember it. I've
+dragged you into most things. You never minded failure. And I have not
+had so much of it--not till this last. This has been failure--absolute
+and complete."
+
+But there was no darkening of expression. He sat quietly smiling.
+
+"Do you suppose anybody who could look beyond the moment would dream of
+calling it failure?" said Aldous, with difficulty.
+
+Hallin shook his head gently, and was silent for a little time,
+gathering strength and breath again.
+
+"I ought to suffer"--he said, presently. "Last week I dreaded my own
+feeling if I should fail or break down--more than the failure itself.
+But since yesterday--last night--I have no more regrets. I see that my
+power is gone--that if I were to live I could no longer carry on the
+battle--or my old life. I am out of touch. Those whom I love and would
+serve, put me aside. Those who invite me, I do not care to join. So I
+drop--into the gulf--and the pageant rushes on. But the curious thing is
+now--I have no suffering. And as to the future--do you remember Jowett
+in the Introduction to the Phaedo--"
+
+He feebly pointed to a book beside him, which Aldous took up. Hallin
+guided him and he read--
+
+"_Most persons when the last hour comes are resigned to the order of
+nature and the will of God. They are not thinking of Dante's 'Inferno'
+or 'Paradiso,' or of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Heaven and Hell are not
+realities to them, but words or ideas_--_the outward symbols of some
+great mystery, they hardly know what_."
+
+"It is so with me," said Hallin, smiling, as, at his gesture, Aldous
+laid the book aside; "yet not quite. To my _mind_, that mystery indeed
+is all unknown and dark--but to the heart it seems unveiled--with the
+heart, I see."
+
+A little later Aldous was startled to hear him say, very clearly and
+quickly:
+
+"Do you remember that this is the fifth of October?"
+
+Aldous drew his chair closer, that he might not raise his voice.
+
+"Yes, Ned."
+
+"Two years, wasn't it, to-day? Will you forgive me if I speak of her?"
+
+"You shall say anything you will."
+
+"Did you notice that piece of news I sent you, in my last letter to
+Geneva? But of course you did. Did it please you?"
+
+"Yes, I was glad of it," said Aldous, after a pause, "extremely glad. I
+thought she had escaped a great danger."
+
+Hallin studied his face closely.
+
+"She is free, Aldous--and she is a noble creature--she has learnt from
+life--and from death--this last two years. And--you still love her. Is
+it right to make no more effort?"
+
+Aldous saw the perspiration standing on the wasted brow--would have
+given the world to be able to content or cheer him--yet would not, for
+the world, at such a moment be false to his own feeling or deceive his
+questioner.
+
+"I think it is right," he said deliberately, "--for a good many reasons,
+Edward. In the first place I have not the smallest cause--not the
+fraction of a cause--to suppose that I could occupy with her now any
+other ground than that I occupied two years ago. She has been kind and
+friendly to me--on the whole--since we met in London. She has even
+expressed regret for last year--meaning, of course, as I understood, for
+the pain and trouble that may be said to have come from her not knowing
+her own mind. She wished that we should be friends. And"--he turned his
+head away--"no doubt I could be, in time.... But, you see--in all that,
+there is nothing whatever to bring me forward again. My fatal mistake
+last year, I think now, lay in my accepting what she gave me--accepting
+it so readily, so graspingly even. That was my fault, my blindness,
+and--it was as unjust to her--as it was hopeless for myself. For hers is
+a nature"--his eyes came back to his friend; his voice took a new force
+and energy--"which, in love at any rate, will give all or nothing--and
+will never be happy itself, or bring happiness, till it gives all. That
+is what last year taught me. So that even if she--out of kindness or
+remorse for giving pain--were willing to renew the old tie--I should be
+her worst enemy and my own if I took a single step towards it. Marriage
+on such terms as I was thankful for last year, would be humiliation to
+me, and bring no gain to her. It will never serve a man with her"--his
+voice broke into emotion--"that he should make no claims! Let him claim
+the uttermost far-thing--her whole self. If she gives it, _then_ he may
+know what love means!"
+
+Hallin had listened intently. At Aldous's last words his expression
+showed pain and perplexity. His mind was full of vague impressions,
+memories, which seemed to argue with and dispute one of the chief things
+Aldous had been saying. But they were not definite enough to be put
+forward. His sensitive chivalrous sense, even in this extreme weakness,
+remembered the tragic weight that attaches inevitably to dying words.
+Let him not do more harm than good.
+
+He rested a little. They brought him food; and Aldous sat beside him
+making pretence to read, so that he might be encouraged to rest. His
+sister came and went; so did the doctor. But when they were once more
+alone, Hallin put out his hand and touched his companion.
+
+"What is it, dear Ned?"
+
+"Only one thing more, before we leave it. Is that _all_ that stands
+between you now--the whole? You spoke to me once in the summer of
+feeling _angry_, more angry than you could have believed. Of course, I
+felt the same. But just now you spoke of its all being your fault. Is
+there anything changed in your mind?"
+
+Aldous hesitated. It was extraordinarily painful to him to speak of the
+past, and it troubled him that at such a moment it should trouble
+Hallin.
+
+"There is nothing changed, Ned, except that perhaps time makes _some_
+difference always. I don't want now"--he tried to smile--"as I did then,
+to make anybody else suffer for my suffering. But perhaps I marvel even
+more than I did at first, that--that--she could have allowed some things
+to happen as she did!"
+
+The tone was firm and vibrating; and, in speaking, the whole face had
+developed a strong animation most passionate and human.
+
+Hallin sighed.
+
+"I often think," he said, "that she was extraordinarily immature--much
+more immature than most girls of that age--as to feeling. It was really
+the brain that was alive."
+
+Aldous silently assented; so much so that Hallin repented himself.
+
+"But not now," he said, in his eager dying whisper; "not now. The plant
+is growing full and tall, into the richest life."
+
+Aldous took the wasted hand tenderly in his own. There was something
+inexpressibly touching in this last wrestle of Hallin's affection with
+another's grief. But it filled Aldous with a kind of remorse, and with
+the longing to free him from that, as from every other burden, in these
+last precious hours of life. And at last he succeeded, as he thought, in
+drawing his mind away from it. They passed to other things. Hallin,
+indeed, talked very little more during the day. He was very restless and
+weak, but not in much positive suffering. Aldous read to him at
+intervals, from Isaiah or Plato, the bright sleepless eyes following
+every word.
+
+At last the light began to sink. The sunset flooded in from the
+Berkshire uplands and the far Oxford plain, and lay in gold and purple
+on the falling woods and the green stretches of the park. The distant
+edges of hill were extraordinarily luminous and clear, and Aldous,
+looking into the west with the eye of one to whom every spot and line
+were familiar landmarks, could almost fancy he saw beyond the invisible
+river, the hill, the "lovely tree against the western sky," which keep
+for ever the memory of one with whose destiny it had often seemed to him
+that Hallin's had something in common. To him, as to Thyrsis, the same
+early joy, the same "happy quest," the same "fugitive and gracious
+light" for guide and beacon, that--
+
+  does not come with houses or with gold,
+  With place, with honour and a flattering crew;
+
+and to him, too, the same tasked pipe and tired throat, the same
+struggle with the "life of men unblest," the same impatient tryst with
+death.
+
+The lovely lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief,
+beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every
+change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene
+with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane
+into the evening haze. His soul followed the quiet deer, the homing
+birds, loosening itself gently the while from pain and from desire,
+saying farewell to country, to the poor, to the work left undone, and
+the hopes unrealised--to everything except to love.
+
+It had just struck six when he bent forward to the window beneath which
+ran the wide front terrace.
+
+"That was her step!" he said, while his face lit up, "will you bring her
+here?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella rang the bell at the Court with a fast beating heart. The old
+butler who came gave what her shrinking sense thought a forbidding
+answer to her shy greeting of him, and led her first into the
+drawing-room. A small figure in deep black rose from a distant chair and
+came forward stiffly. Marcella found herself shaking hands with Miss
+Raeburn.
+
+"Will you sit and rest a little before you go upstairs?" said that lady
+with careful politeness, "or shall I send word at once? He is hardly
+worse--but as ill as he can be."
+
+"I am not the least tired," said Marcella, and Miss Raeburn rang.
+
+"Tell his lordship, please, that Miss Boyce is here."
+
+The title jarred and hurt Marcella's ear. But she had scarcely time to
+catch it before Aldous entered, a little bent, as it seemed to her, from
+his tall erectness, and speaking with an extreme quietness, even
+monotony of manner.
+
+"He is waiting for you--will you come at once?"
+
+He led her up the central staircase and along the familiar passages,
+walking silently a little in front of her. They passed the long line of
+Caroline and Jacobean portraits in the upper gallery, till just outside
+his own door Aldous paused.
+
+"He ought not to talk long," he said, hesitating, "but you will know--of
+course--better than any of us."
+
+"I will watch him," she said, almost inaudibly, and he gently opened the
+door and let her pass, shutting it behind her.
+
+The nurse, who was sitting beside her patient, got up as Marcella
+entered, and pointed her to a low chair on his further side. Susie
+Hallin rose too, and kissed the new-comer hurriedly, absently, without
+a word, lest she should sob. Then she and the nurse disappeared through
+an inner door. The evening light was still freely admitted; and there
+were some candles. By the help of both she could only see him
+indistinctly. But in her own mind, as she sat down, she determined that
+he had not even days to live.
+
+Yet as she bent over him she saw a playful gleam on the cavernous face.
+
+"You won't scold me?" said the changed voice--"you did warn me--you and
+Susie--but--I was obstinate. It was best so!"
+
+She pressed her lips to his hand and was answered by a faint pressure
+from the cold fingers.
+
+"If I could have been there!" she murmured.
+
+"No--I am thankful you were not. And I must not think of it--or of any
+trouble. Aldous is very bitter--but he will take comfort by and by--he
+will see it--and them--more justly. They meant me no unkindness. They
+were full of an idea, as I was. When I came back to myself--first--all
+was despair. I was in a blank horror of myself and life. Now it has
+gone--I don't know how. It is not of my own will--some hand has lifted a
+weight. I seem to float--without pain."
+
+He closed his eyes, gathering strength again in the interval, by a
+strong effort of will--calling up in the dimming brain what he had to
+say. She meanwhile, spoke to him in a low voice, mainly to prevent his
+talking, telling him of her father, of her mother's strain of
+nursing--of herself--she hardly knew what. Hew grotesque to be giving
+him these little bits of news about strangers--to him, this hovering,
+consecrated soul, on the brink of the great secret!
+
+In the intervals, while he was still silent, she could not sometimes
+prevent the pulse of her own life from stirring. Her eye wandered round
+the room--Aldous's familiar room. There, on the writing-table with its
+load of letters and books, stood the photograph of Hallin; another, her
+own, used to stand beside it; it was solitary now.
+
+Otherwise, all was just as it had been--flowers, books, newspapers--the
+signs of familiar occupation, the hundred small details of character and
+personality which in estrangement take to themselves such a smarting
+significance for the sad and craving heart. The date--the
+anniversary--echoed in her mind.
+
+Then, with a rush of remorseful pain, her thoughts came back to the
+present and to Hallin. At the same moment she saw that his eyes were
+open, and fixed upon her with a certain anxiety and expectancy. He made
+a movement as though to draw her towards him; and she stooped to him.
+
+"I feel," he said, "as though my strength were leaving me fast. Let me
+ask you one question--because of my love for you--and _him_. I have
+fancied--of late--things were changed. Can you tell me--will you?--or is
+it unfair?"--the words had all their bright, natural intonation--"Is
+your heart--still where it was?--or, could you ever--undo the past--"
+
+He held her fast, grasping the hand she had given him with unconscious
+force. She had looked up startled, her lip trembling like a child's.
+Then she dropped her head against the arm of her chair, as though she
+could not speak.
+
+He moved restlessly, and sighed.
+
+"I should not," he said to himself; "I should not--it was wrong. The
+dying are tyrannous."
+
+He even began a word of sweet apology. But she shook her head.
+
+"Don't!" she said, struggling with herself; "don't say that! It would do
+me good to speak--to you--"
+
+An exquisite smile dawned on Hallin's face.
+
+"Then!"--he said--"confess!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few minutes later they were still sitting together. She strongly
+wished to go; but he would not yet allow it. His face was full of a
+mystical joy--a living faith, which must somehow communicate itself in
+one last sacramental effort.
+
+"How strange that you--and I--and he--should have been so mixed together
+in this queer life. Now I seem to regret nothing--I _hope_ everything.
+One more little testimony let me bear!--the last. We disappear one by
+one--into the dark--but each may throw his comrades--a token--before he
+goes. You have been in much trouble of mind and spirit--I have seen it.
+Take my poor witness. There is one clue, one only--_goodness_--_the
+surrendered will_. Everything is there--all faith--all religion--all
+hope for rich or poor.--Whether we feel our way through consciously to
+the Will--that asks our will--matters little. Aldous and I have differed
+much on this--in words--never at heart! I could use words, symbols he
+cannot--and they have given me peace. But half my best life I owe to
+him."
+
+At this he made a long pause--but, still, through that weak grasp,
+refusing to let her go--till all was said. Day was almost gone; the
+stars had come out over the purple dusk of the park.
+
+"That Will--we reach--through duty and pain," he whispered at last, so
+faintly she could hardly hear him, "is the root, the source. It leads us
+in living--it--carries us in death. But our weakness and vagueness--want
+help--want the human life and voice--to lean on--to drink from. We
+Christians--are orphans--without Christ! There again--what does it
+matter what we think--_about_ him--if only we think--_of_ him. In _one_
+such life are all mysteries, and all knowledge--and our fathers have
+chosen for us--"
+
+The insistent voice sank lower and lower into final silence--though the
+lips still moved. The eyelids too fell. Miss Hallin and the nurse came
+in. Marcella rose and stood for one passionate instant looking down upon
+him. Then, with a pressure of the hand to the sister beside her, she
+stole out. Her one prayer was that she might see and meet no one. So
+soft was her step that even the watching Aldous did not hear her. She
+lifted the heavy latch of the outer door without the smallest noise, and
+found herself alone in the starlight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Marcella left him, Hallin remained for some hours in what seemed
+to those about him a feverish trance. He did not sleep, but he showed no
+sign of responsive consciousness. In reality his mind all through was
+full of the most vivid though incoherent images and sensations. But he
+could no longer distinguish between them and the figures and movements
+of the real people in his room. Each passed into and intermingled with
+the other. In some vague, eager way he seemed all the time to be waiting
+or seeking for Aldous. There was the haunting impression of some word to
+say--some final thing to do--which would not let him rest. But something
+seemed always to imprison him, to hold him back, and the veil between
+him and the real Aldous watching beside him grew ever denser.
+
+At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the
+half-sitting posture in which he had passed the day. Death had come too
+near. His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him
+from London watched with him. The curtains were drawn back from both the
+windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent
+moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.
+
+Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of
+purpose and of strength. He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to
+be alone with him. But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of
+his showed no change. Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of
+anguish and of struggle. Three words to say--only three words; but those
+he _must_ say! He tried again, but Aldous's dumb grief still sat
+motionless. Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, "Speech is gone;
+I shall speak no more!"
+
+It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt. But something checked both,
+and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.
+
+What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it
+asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking
+fingers, and Hallin's latest movement--which death stopped half-way--was
+to raise it to his lips.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Marcella's confession--made in the abandonment, the blind passionate
+trust, of a supreme moment--bore no fruit. It went with Hallin to the
+grave.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+"I think I saw the letters arrive," said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter.
+"And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us."
+
+"Let me go for them, mamma."
+
+"No, thank you, I must go in."
+
+And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel.
+Marcella watched her widow's cap and black dress as they passed along
+the _pergola_ of the hotel garden, between bright masses of geraniums
+and roses on either side.
+
+They had been sitting in the famous garden of the Cappucini Hotel at
+Amalfi. To Marcella's left, far below the high terrace of the hotel, the
+green and azure of the Salernian gulf shone and danced in the sun, to
+her right a wood of oak and arbutus stretched up into a purple cliff--a
+wood starred above with gold and scarlet berries, and below with
+cyclamen and narcissus. From the earth under the leafy oaks--for the
+oaks at Amalfi lose and regain their foliage in winter and spring by
+imperceptible gradations--came a moist English smell. The air was damp
+and warm. A convent bell tolled from invisible heights above the garden;
+while the olives and vines close at hand were full of the chattering
+voices of gardeners and children, and broken here and there by clouds of
+pink almond-blossom. March had just begun, and the afternoons were fast
+lengthening. It was little more than a fortnight since Mr. Boyce's
+death. In the November of the preceding year Mrs. Boyce and Marcella had
+brought him to Naples by sea, and there, at a little villa on Posilippo,
+he had drawn sadly to his end. It had been a dreary time, from which
+Marcella could hardly hope that her mother would ever fully recover. She
+herself had found in the long months of nursing--nursing of which, with
+quiet tenacity, she had gradually claimed and obtained her full share--a
+deep moral consolation. They had paid certain debts to conscience, and
+they had for ever enshrined her father's memory in the silence of an
+unmeasured and loving pity.
+
+But the wife? Marcella sorely recognised that to her mother these last
+days had brought none of the soothing, reconciling influences they had
+involved for herself. Between the husband and wife there had been dumb
+friction and misery--surely also a passionate affection!--to the end.
+The invalid's dependence on her had been abject, her devotion wonderful.
+Yet, in her close contact with them, the daughter had never been able to
+ignore the existence between them of a wretched though tacit
+debate--reproach on his side, self-defence or spasmodic effort on
+hers--which seemed to have its origin deep in the past, yet to be
+stimulated afresh by a hundred passing incidents of the present. Under
+the blight of it, as under the physical strain of nursing, Mrs. Boyce
+had worn and dwindled to a white-haired shadow; while he had both clung
+to life and feared death more than would normally have been the case.
+At the end he had died in her arms, his head on her breast; she had
+closed his eyes and performed every last office without a tear; nor had
+Marcella ever seen her weep from then till now. The letters she had
+received, mostly, Marcella believed, from her own family, remained
+unopened in her travelling-bag. She spoke very little, and was
+constantly restless, nor could Marcella as yet form any idea of the
+future.
+
+After the funeral at Naples Mrs. Boyce had written immediately to her
+husband's solicitor for a copy of his will and a statement of affairs.
+She had then allowed herself to be carried off to Amalfi, and had there,
+while entirely declining to admit that she was ill, been clearly doing
+her best to recover health and nerve sufficient to come to some
+decision, to grapple with some crisis which Marcella also felt to be
+impending--though as to why it should be impending, or what the nature
+of it might be, she could only dread and guess.
+
+There was much bitter yearning in the girl's heart as she sat, breathed
+on by the soft Italian wind blowing from this enchanted sea. The inner
+cry was that her mother did not love her, had never loved her, and might
+even now--weird, incredible thought!--be planning to desert her. Hallin
+was dead--who else was there that cared for her or thought of her? Betty
+Macdonald wrote often, wild, "_schwärmerisch_" letters. Marcella looked
+for them with eagerness, and answered them affectionately. But Betty
+must soon marry, and then all that would be at an end. Meanwhile
+Marcella knew well it was Betty's news that made Betty's adoration
+doubly welcome. Aldous Raeburn--she never did or could think of him
+under his new name--was apparently in London, much occupied in politics,
+and constantly, as it seemed, in Betty's society. What likelihood was
+there that her life and his would ever touch again? She thought often of
+her confession to Hallin, but in great perplexity of feeling. She had,
+of course, said no word of secrecy to him at the time. Such a demand in
+a man's last hour would have been impossible. She had simply followed a
+certain mystical love and obedience in telling him what he asked to
+know, and in the strong spontaneous impulse had thought of nothing
+beyond. Afterwards her pride had suffered fresh martyrdom. Could he,
+with his loving instinct, have failed to give his friend some sign? If
+so, it had been unwelcome, for since the day of Hallin's funeral she and
+Aldous had been more complete strangers than before. Lady Winterbourne,
+Betty, Frank Leven, had written since her father's death; but from him,
+nothing.
+
+By the way, Frank Leven had succeeded at Christmas, by old Sir Charles
+Leven's unexpected death, to the baronetcy and estates. How would that
+affect his chances with Betty?--if indeed there were any such chances
+left.
+
+As to her own immediate future, Marcella knew from many indications that
+Mellor would be hers at once. But in her general tiredness of mind and
+body she was far more conscious of the burden of her inheritance than of
+its opportunities. All that vivid castle-building gift which was
+specially hers, and would revive, was at present in abeyance. She had
+pined once for power and freedom, that she might make a Kingdom of
+Heaven of her own, quickly. Now power and freedom, up to a certain
+point, were about to be put into her hands; and instead of plans for
+acting largely and bountifully on a plastic outer world, she was saying
+to herself, hungrily, that unless she had something close to her to love
+and live for, she could do nothing. If her mother would end these
+unnatural doubts, if she would begin to make friends with her own
+daughter, and only yield herself to be loved and comforted, why _then_
+it might be possible to think of the village and the straw-plaiting!
+Otherwise--the girl's attitude as she sat dreaming in the sun showed her
+despondency.
+
+She was roused by her mother's voice calling her from the other end of
+the _pergola_.
+
+"Yes, mamma."
+
+"Will you come in? There are some letters."
+
+"It is the will," thought Marcella, as Mrs. Boyce turned back to the
+hotel, and she followed.
+
+Mrs. Boyce shut the door of their sitting-room, and then went up to her
+daughter with a manner which suddenly struck and startled Marcella.
+There was natural agitation and trouble in it.
+
+"There is something in the will, Marcella, which will, I fear, annoy and
+distress you. Your father inserted it without consulting me. I want to
+know what you think ought to be done. You will find that Lord Maxwell
+and I have been appointed joint executors."
+
+Marcella turned pale.
+
+"Lord Maxwell!" she said, bewildered. "_Lord Maxwell--Aldous_! What do
+you mean, mamma?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce put the will into her hands, and, pointing the way among the
+technicalities she had been perusing while Marcella was still lingering
+in the garden, showed her the paragraph in question. The words of the
+will were merely formal: "I hereby appoint," &c., and no more; but in a
+communication from the family solicitor, Mr. French, which Mrs. Boyce
+silently handed to her daughter after she had read the legal
+disposition, the ladies were informed that Mr. Boyce had, before
+quitting England, written a letter to Lord Maxwell, duly sealed and
+addressed, with instructions that it should be forwarded to its
+destination immediately after the writer's burial. "Those instructions,"
+said Mr. French, "I have carried out. I understand that Lord Maxwell was
+not consulted as to his appointment as executor prior to the drawing up
+of the will. But you will no doubt hear from him at once, and as soon as
+we know that he consents to act, we can proceed immediately to probate."
+
+"Mamma, how _could_ he?" said Marcella, in a low, suffocated voice,
+letting will and letter fall upon her knee.
+
+"Did he give you no warning in that talk you had with him at Mellor?"
+said Mrs. Boyce, after a minute's silence.
+
+"Not the least," said Marcella, rising restlessly and beginning to walk
+up and down. "He spoke to me about wishing to bring it on again--asked
+me to let him write. I told him it was all done with--for ever! As to my
+own feelings, I felt it was no use to speak of them; but I thought--I
+_believed_, I had proved to him that Lord Maxwell had absolutely given
+up all idea of such a thing; and that it was already probable he would
+marry some one else. I told him I would rather disappear from every one
+I knew than consent to it--he could only humiliate us all by saying a
+word. And _now_, after that!--"
+
+She stopped in her restless walk, pressing her hands miserably together.
+
+"What _does_ he want with us and our affairs?" she broke out. "He
+wishes, of course, to have no more to do with me. And now we force
+him--_force_ him into these intimate relations. What can papa have said
+in that letter to him? What _can_ he have said? Oh! it is unbearable!
+Can't we write at once?"
+
+She pressed her hands over her eyes in a passion of humiliation and
+disgust. Mrs. Boyce watched her closely.
+
+"We must wait, anyway, for his letter," she said. "It ought to be here
+by to-morrow morning."
+
+Marcella sank on a chair by an open glass door, her eyes wandering,
+through the straggling roses growing against the wall of the stone
+balcony outside, to the laughing purples and greens of the sea.
+
+"Of course," she said unhappily, "it is most probable he will consent.
+It would not be like him to refuse. But, mamma, you must write. _I_ must
+write and beg him not to do it. It is quite simple. We can manage
+everything for ourselves. Oh! how _could_ papa?" she broke out again in
+a low wail, "how could he?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's lips tightened sharply. It seemed to her a foolish
+question. _She_, at least, had had the experience of twenty years out of
+which to answer it. Death had made no difference. She saw her husband's
+character and her own seared and broken life with the same tragical
+clearness; she felt the same gnawing of an affection not to be plucked
+out while the heart still beat. This act of indelicacy and injustice was
+like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion
+and concealment towards herself. No matter. She had made her account
+with it all twenty years before. What astonished her was, that the force
+of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within
+the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.
+
+"Have you read the rest of the will?" she asked, after a long pause.
+
+Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.
+
+"Mamma!" she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into
+her face, "I find no mention of you in it throughout. There seems to be
+no provision for you."
+
+"There is none," said Mrs. Boyce, quietly. "There was no need. I have my
+own income. We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to
+Mellor. It is therefore amply sufficient for me now."
+
+"You cannot imagine," cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, "that I
+am going to take the whole of my father's estate, and leave
+nothing--_nothing_ for his wife. It would be impossible--unseemly. It
+would be to do _me_ an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself," she added
+proudly.
+
+"No, I think not," said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of
+emotion. "You do not yet understand the situation. Your father's
+misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time. Your grandfather went
+through great trouble, and raised large sums to--" she paused for the
+right phrase--"to free us from the consequences of your father's
+actions. I benefited, of course, as much as he did. Those sums crippled
+all your grandfather's old age. He was a man to whom I was
+attached--whom I respected. Mellor, I believe, had never been
+embarrassed before. Well, your uncle did a little towards recovery--but
+on the whole he was a fool. Your father has done much more, and you, no
+doubt, will complete it. As for me, I have no claim to anything more
+from Mellor. The place itself is"--again she stopped for a word of which
+the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her--"hateful to me. I shall
+feel freer if I have no tie to it. And at last I persuaded your father
+to let me have my way."
+
+Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room,
+and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.
+
+"Mamma, are you still determined--now that we two are alone in the
+world--to act towards me, to treat me as though I were not your
+daughter--not your child at all, but a stranger?"
+
+It was a cry of anguish. A sudden slight tremor swept over Mrs. Boyce's
+thin and withered face. She braced herself to the inevitable.
+
+"Don't let us make a tragedy of it, my dear," she said, with a light
+touch on Marcella's hands. "Let us discuss it reasonably. Won't you sit
+down? I am not proposing anything very dreadful. But, like you, I have
+some interests of my own, and I should be glad to follow them--now--a
+little. I wish to spend some of the year in London; to make that,
+perhaps, my headquarters, so as to see something of some old friends
+whom I have had no intercourse with for years--perhaps also of my
+relations." She spoke of them with a particular dryness. "And I should
+be glad--after this long time--to be somewhat taken out of oneself, to
+read, to hear what is going on, to feed one's mind a little."
+
+Marcella, looking at her, saw a kind of feverish light, a sparkling
+intensity in the pale blue eyes, that filled her with amazement. What,
+after all, did she know of this strange individuality from which her own
+being had taken its rise? The same flesh and blood--what an irony of
+nature!
+
+"Of course," continued Mrs. Boyce, "I should go to you, and you would
+come to me. It would only be for part of the year. Probably we should
+get more from each other's lives so. As you know, I long to see things
+as they are, not conventionally. Anyway, whether I were there or no, you
+would probably want some companion to help you in your work and plans. I
+am not fit for them. And it would be easy to find some one who could act
+as chaperon in my absence."
+
+The hot tears sprang to Marcella's eyes. "Why did you send me away from
+you, mamma, all my childhood," she cried. "It was wrong--cruel. I have
+no brother or sister. And you put me out of your life when I had no
+choice, when I was too young to understand."
+
+Mrs. Boyce winced, but made no reply. She sat with her delicate hand
+across her brow. She was the white shadow of her former self; but her
+fragility had always seemed to Marcella more indomitable than anybody
+else's strength.
+
+Sobs began to rise in Marcella's throat.
+
+"And now," she said, in half-coherent despair, "do you know what you are
+doing? You are cutting yourself off from me--refusing to have any real
+bond to me just when I want it most. I suppose you think that I shall be
+satisfied with the property and the power, and the chance of doing what
+I like. But"--she tried her best to gulp back her pain, her outraged
+feeling, to speak quietly--"I am not like that really any more. I can
+take it all up, with courage and heart, if you will stay with me, and
+let me--let me--love you and care for you. But, by myself, I feel as if
+I could not face it! I am not likely to be happy--for a long
+time--except in doing what work I can. It is very improbable that I
+shall marry. I dare say you don't believe me, but it is true. We are
+both sad and lonely. We have no one but each other. And then you talk in
+this ghastly way of separating from me--casting me off."
+
+Her voice trembled and broke, she looked at her mother with a frowning
+passion.
+
+Mrs. Boyce still sat silent, studying her daughter with a strange,
+brooding eye. Under her unnatural composure there was in reality a
+half-mad impatience, the result of physical and moral reaction. This
+beauty, this youth, talk of sadness, of finality! What folly! Still, she
+was stirred, undermined in spite of herself.
+
+"There!" she said, with a restless gesture, "let us, please, talk of it
+no more. I will come back with you--I will do my best. We will let the
+matter of my future settlement alone for some months, at any rate, if
+that will satisfy you or be any help to you."
+
+She made a movement as though to rise from her low chair. But the great
+waters swelled in Marcella--swelled and broke. She fell on her knees
+again by her mother, and before Mrs. Boyce could stop her she had thrown
+her young arms close round the thin, shrunken form.
+
+"Mother!" she said. "Mother, be good to me--love me--you are all I
+have!"
+
+And she kissed the pale brow and cheek with a hungry, almost a violent
+tenderness that would not be gainsaid, murmuring wild incoherent things.
+
+Mrs. Boyce first tried to put her away, then submitted, being physically
+unable to resist, and at last escaped from her with a sudden sob that
+went to the girl's heart. She rose, went to the window, struggled hard
+for composure, and finally left the room.
+
+But that evening, for the first time, she let Marcella put her on the
+sofa, tend her, and read to her. More wonderful still, she went to sleep
+while Marcella was reading. In the lamplight her face looked piteously
+old and worn. The girl sat for long with her hands clasped round her
+knees, gazing down upon it, in a trance of pain and longing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella was awake early next morning, listening to the full voice of
+the sea as it broke three hundred feet below, against the beach and
+rocky walls of the little town. She was lying in a tiny white room, one
+of the cells of the old monastery, and the sun as it rose above the
+Salernian mountains--the mountains that hold Paestum in their blue and
+purple shadows--danced in gold on the white wall. The bell of the
+cathedral far below tolled the hour. She supposed it must be six
+o'clock. Two hours more or so, and Lord Maxwell's letter might be looked
+for.
+
+She lay and thought of it--longed for it, and for the time of answering
+it, with the same soreness that had marked all the dreams of a restless
+night. If she could only see her father's letter! It was inconceivable
+that he should have mentioned _her_ name in his plea. He might have
+appealed to the old friendship between the families. That was possible,
+and would have, at any rate, an _appearance_ of decency. But who could
+answer for it--or for him? She clasped her hands rigidly behind her
+head, her brows frowning, bending her mind with an intensity of will to
+the best means of assuring Aldous Raeburn that she and her mother would
+not encroach upon him. She had a perpetual morbid vision of herself as
+the pursuer, attacking him now through his friend, now through her
+father. Oh! when would that letter come, and let her write her own!
+
+She tried to read, but in reality listened for every sound of awakening
+life in the hotel. When at last her mother's maid came in to call her,
+she sprang up with a start.
+
+"Deacon, are the letters come?"
+
+"There are two for your mother, miss; none for you."
+
+Marcella threw on her dressing-gown, watched her opportunity, and
+slipped in to her mother, who occupied a similar cell next door.
+
+Mrs. Boyce was sitting up in bed, with a letter before her, her pale
+blue eyes fixed absently on the far stretch of sea.
+
+She looked round with a start as Marcella entered. "The letter is to me,
+of course," she said.
+
+Marcella read it breathlessly.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Boyce,--I have this morning received from your solicitor, Mr.
+French, a letter written by Mr. Boyce to myself in November of last
+year. In it he asks me to undertake the office of executor, to which, I
+hear from Mr. French, he has named me in his will. Mr. French also
+enquires whether I shall be willing to act, and asks me to communicate
+with you.
+
+"May I, then, venture to intrude upon you with these few words? Mr.
+Boyce refers in his touching letter to the old friendship between our
+families, and to the fact that similar offices have often been performed
+by his relations for mine, or _vice versa_. But no reminder of the kind
+was in the least needed. If I can be of any service to yourself and to
+Miss Boyce, neither your poor husband nor you could do me any greater
+kindness than to command me.
+
+"I feel naturally some diffidence in the matter. I gather from Mr.
+French that Miss Boyce is her father's heiress, and comes at once into
+the possession of Mellor. She may not, of course, wish me to act, in
+which case I should withdraw immediately; but I sincerely trust that she
+will not forbid me the very small service I could so easily and gladly
+render.
+
+"I cannot close my letter without venturing to express the deep
+sympathy I have felt for you and yours during the past six months. I
+have been far from forgetful of all that you have been going through,
+though I may have seemed so. I trust that you and your daughter will not
+hurry home for any business cause, if it is still best for your health
+to stay in Italy. With your instructions Mr. French and I could arrange
+everything.
+
+  "Believe me,
+
+  "Yours most sincerely,
+
+  "MAXWELL."
+
+"You will find it difficult, my dear, to write a snub in answer to that
+letter," said Mrs. Boyce, drily, as Marcella laid it down.
+
+Marcella's face was, indeed, crimson with perplexity and feeling.
+
+"Well, we can think it over," she said as she went away.
+
+Mrs. Boyce pondered the matter a good deal when she was left alone. The
+signs of reaction and change in Marcella were plain enough. What they
+precisely meant, and how much, was another matter. As to him, Marcella's
+idea of another attachment might be true, or might be merely the
+creation of her own irritable pride. Anyway, he was in the mood to write
+a charming letter. Mrs. Boyce's blanched lip had all its natural irony
+as she thought it over. To her mind Aldous Raeburn's manners had always
+been a trifle too good, whether for his own interests or for this wicked
+world. And if he had any idea now of trying again, let him, for
+Heaven's sake, not be too yielding or too eager! "It was always the
+way," thought Mrs. Boyce, remembering a child in white frock and baby
+shoes--"if you wished to make her want anything, you had to take it away
+from her."
+
+Meanwhile the mere thought that matters might even yet so settle
+themselves drew from the mother a long breath of relief. She had spent
+an all but sleepless night, tormented by Marcella's claim upon her.
+After twenty years of self-suppression this woman of forty-five,
+naturally able, original, and independent, had seen a glimpse of
+liberty. In her first youth she had been betrayed as a wife, degraded as
+a member of society. A passion she could not kill, combined with some
+stoical sense of inalienable obligation, had combined to make her both
+the slave and guardian of her husband up to middle life; and her family
+and personal pride, so strong in her as a girl, had found its only
+outlet in this singular estrangement she had achieved between herself
+and every other living being, including her own daughter. Now her
+husband was dead, and all sorts of crushed powers and desires, mostly of
+the intellectual sort, had been strangely reviving within her. Just
+emerged, as she was, from the long gloom of nursing, she already wished
+to throw it all behind her--to travel, to read, to make
+acquaintances--she who had lived as a recluse for twenty years! There
+was in it a last clutch at youth, at life. And she had no desire to
+enter upon this new existence--in comradeship with Marcella. They were
+independent and very different human beings. That they were mother and
+daughter was a mere physical accident.
+
+Moreover, though she was amply conscious of the fine development in
+Marcella during the past two years, it is probable that she felt her
+daughter even less congenial to her now than of old. For the rich,
+emotional nature had, as we have seen, "suffered conviction," had turned
+in the broad sense to "religion," was more and more sensitive,
+especially since Hallin's death, to the spiritual things and symbols in
+the world. At Naples she had haunted churches; had read, as her mother
+knew, many religious books.
+
+Now Mrs. Boyce in these matters had a curious history. She had begun
+life as an ardent Christian, under evangelical influences. Her husband,
+on the other hand, at the time she married him was a man of purely
+sceptical opinions, a superficial disciple of Mill and Comte, and fond
+of an easy profanity which seemed to place him indisputably with the
+superior persons of this world. To the amazement and scandal of her
+friends, Evelyn Merritt had not been three months his wife before she
+had adopted his opinions _en bloc_, and was carrying them out to their
+logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher.
+Thenceforward her conception of things--of which, however, she seldom
+spoke--had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had
+been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that,
+in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk
+to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things
+orthodox and established.
+
+Then, in his last illness, he had finally broken away from her, and his
+own past. "Evelyn, I should like to see a clergyman," he had said to
+her in his piteous voice, "and I shall ask him to give me the
+Sacrament." She had made every arrangement accordingly; but her bitter
+soul could see nothing in the step but fear and hypocrisy; and he knew
+it. And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two
+or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been
+conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy. Had not the hard devotion of
+twenty years made him at least her own? And here was this black-coated
+reciter of incredible things stepping into her place. Only in death she
+recovered him wholly. No priest interfered while he drew his last breath
+upon her bosom.
+
+And now Marcella! Yet the girl's voice and plea tugged at her withered
+heart. She felt a dread of unknown softnesses--of being invaded and
+weakened by things in her akin to her daughter, and so captured afresh.
+Her mind fell upon the bare idea of a revival of the Maxwell engagement,
+and caressed it.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella stood dressing by the open window in the sunlight,
+which filled the room with wavy reflections caught from the sea.
+Fishing-boats were putting off from the beach, three hundred feet below
+her; she could hear the grating of the keels, the songs of the boatmen.
+On the little breakwater to the right an artist's white umbrella shone
+in the sun; and a half-naked boy, poised on the bows of a boat moored
+beside the painter, stood bent in the eager attitude of one about to
+drop the bait into the blue wave below. His brown back burnt against the
+water. Cliff, houses, sea, glowed in warmth and light; the air was full
+of roses and orange-blossom; and to an English sense had already the
+magic of summer.
+
+And Marcella's hands, as she coiled and plaited her black hair, moved
+with a new lightness; for the first time since her father's death her
+look had its normal fire, crossed every now and then by something that
+made her all softness and all woman. No! as her mother said, one could
+not snub that letter or its writer. But how to answer it! In imagination
+she had already penned twenty different replies. How not to be grasping
+or effusive, and yet to show that you could feel and repay
+kindness--there was the problem!
+
+Meanwhile, from that letter, or rather in subtle connection with it, her
+thoughts at last went wandering off with a natural zest to her new realm
+of Mellor, and to all that she would and could do for the dwellers
+therein.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+It was a bleak east-wind day towards the end of March. Aldous was at
+work in the library at the Court, writing at his grandfather's table,
+where in general he got through his estate and county affairs, keeping
+his old sitting-room upstairs for the pursuits that were more
+particularly his own.
+
+All the morning he had been occupied with a tedious piece of local
+business, wading through endless documents concerning a dispute between
+the head-master of a neighbouring grammar-school and his governing body,
+of which Aldous was one. The affair was difficult, personal, odious. To
+have wasted nearly three hours upon it was, to a man of Aldous's type,
+to have lost a day. Besides he had not his grandfather's knack in such
+things, and was abundantly conscious of it.
+
+However, there it was, a duty which none but he apparently could or
+would do, and he had been wrestling with it. With more philosophy than
+usual, too, since every tick of the clock behind him bore him nearer to
+an appointment which, whatever it might be, would not be tedious.
+
+At last he got up and went to the window to look at the weather. A
+cutting wind, clearly, but no rain. Then he walked into the
+drawing-room, calling for his aunt. No one was to be seen, either there
+or in the conservatory, and he came back to the library and rang.
+
+"Roberts, has Miss Raeburn gone out?"
+
+"Yes, my lord," said the old butler addressed. "She and Miss Macdonald
+have gone out driving, and I was to tell your lordship that Miss Raeburn
+would drop Miss Macdonald at Mellor on her way home."
+
+"Is Sir Frank anywhere about?"
+
+"He was in the smoking-room a little while ago, my lord."
+
+"Will you please try and find him?"
+
+"Yes, my lord."
+
+Aldous's mouth twitched with impatience as the old servant shut the
+door.
+
+"How many times did Roberts manage to be-lord me in a minute?" he asked
+himself; "yet if I were to remonstrate, I suppose I should only make him
+unhappy."
+
+And walking again to the window, he thrust his hands into his pockets
+and stood looking out with a far from cheerful countenance.
+
+One of the things that most tormented him indeed in this recent
+existence was a perpetual pricking sense of the contrast between this
+small world of his ancestral possessions and traditions, with all its
+ceremonial and feudal usage, and the great rushing world outside it of
+action and of thought. Do what he would, he could not un-king himself
+within the limits of the Maxwell estate. To the people living upon it he
+was the man of most importance within their ken, was inevitably their
+potentate and earthly providence. He confessed that there was a real
+need of him, if he did his duty. But on this need the class-practice of
+generations had built up a deference, a sharpness of class-distinction,
+which any modern must find more and more irksome in proportion to his
+modernness. What was in Aldous's mind, as he stood with drawn brows
+looking out over the view which showed him most of his domain, was a
+sort of hot impatience of being made day by day, in a hundred foolish
+ways, to play at greatness.
+
+Yet, as we know, he was no democrat by conviction, had no comforting
+faith in what seemed to him the rule of a multitudinous ignorance. Still
+every sane man of to-day knows, at any rate, that the world has taken
+the road of democracy, and that the key to the future, for good or ill,
+lies not in the revolts and speculations of the cultivated few, but in
+the men and movements that can seize the many. Aldous's temper was
+despondently critical towards the majority of these, perhaps; he had,
+constitutionally, little of that poet's sympathy with the crowd, as
+such, which had given Hallin his power. But, at any rate, they filled
+the human stage--these men and movements--and his mind as a beholder.
+Beside the great world-spectacle perpetually in his eye and thought, the
+small old-world pomps and feudalisms of his own existence had a way of
+looking ridiculous to him. He constantly felt himself absurd. It was
+ludicrously clear to him, for instance, that in this kingdom he had
+inherited it would be thought a huge condescension on his part if he
+were to ask the secretary of a trades union to dine with him at the
+Court. Whereas, in his own honest opinion, the secretary had a far more
+important and interesting post in the universe than he.
+
+So that, in spite of a strong love of family, rigidly kept to himself,
+he had very few of the illusions which make rank and wealth delightful.
+On the other hand, he had a tyrannous sense of obligation, which kept
+him tied to his place and his work--to such work as he had been spending
+the morning on. This sense of obligation had for the present withdrawn
+him from any very active share in politics. He had come to the
+conclusion early in the year, just about the time when, owing to some
+rearrangements in the _personnel_ of the Government, the Premier had
+made him some extremely flattering overtures, that he must for the
+present devote himself to the Court. There were extensive changes and
+reforms going on in different parts of the estate: some of the schools
+which he owned and mainly supported were being rebuilt and enlarged; and
+he had a somewhat original scheme for the extension of adult education
+throughout the property very much on his mind--a scheme which must be
+organised and carried through by himself apparently, if it was to thrive
+at all.
+
+Much of this business was very dreary to him, some of it altogether
+distasteful. Since the day of his parting with Marcella Boyce his only
+real _pleasures_ had lain in politics or books. Politics, just as they
+were growing absorbing to him, must, for a while at any rate, be put
+aside; and even books had not fared as well as they might have been
+expected to do in the country quiet. Day after day he walked or rode
+about the muddy lanes of the estate, doing the work that seemed to him
+to be his, as best he could, yet never very certain of its value;
+rather, spending his thoughts more and more, with regard to his own
+place and function in the world, on a sort of mental apologetic which
+was far from stimulating; sorely conscious the while of the unmatched
+charm and effectiveness with which his grandfather had gone about the
+same business; and as lonely at heart as a man can well be--the wound of
+love unhealed, the wound of friendship still deep and unconsoled. To
+bring social peace and progress, as he understood them, to this bit of
+Midland England a man of first-rate capacities was perhaps sacrificing
+what ambition would have called his opportunities. Yet neither was he a
+hero to himself nor to the Buckinghamshire farmers and yokels who
+depended on him. They had liked the grandfather better, and had become
+stolidly accustomed to the grandson's virtues.
+
+The only gleam in the grey of his life since he had determined about
+Christmas-time to settle down at the Court had come from Mr. French's
+letter. That letter, together with Mr. Boyce's posthumous note, which
+contained nothing, indeed, but a skilful appeal to neighbourliness and
+old family friendship, written in the best style of the ex-Balkan
+Commissioner, had naturally astonished him greatly. He saw at once what
+_she_ would perceive in it, and turned impatiently from speculation as
+to what Mr. Boyce might actually have meant, to the infinitely more
+important matter, how she would take her father's act. Never had he
+written anything with greater anxiety than he devoted to his letter to
+Mrs. Boyce. There was in him now a craving he could not stay, to be
+brought near to her again, to know how her life was going. It had first
+raised its head in him since he knew that her existence and Wharton's
+were finally parted, and had but gathered strength from the
+self-critical loneliness and tedium of these later months.
+
+Mrs. Boyce's reply couched in terms at once stately and grateful, which
+accepted his offer of service on her own and her daughter's behalf, had
+given him extraordinary pleasure. He turned it over again and again,
+wondering what part or lot Marcella might have had in it, attributing to
+her this cordiality or that reticence; picturing the two women together
+in their black dresses--the hotel, the _pergola_, the cliff--all of
+which he himself knew well. Finally, he went up to town, saw Mr. French,
+and acquainted himself with the position and prospects of the Mellor
+estate, feeling himself a sort of intruder, yet curiously happy in the
+business. It was wonderful what that poor sickly fellow had been able to
+do in the last two years; yet his thoughts fell rather into amused
+surmise as to what _she_ would find it in her restless mind to do in the
+_next_ two years.
+
+Nevertheless, all the time, the resolution of which he had spoken to
+Hallin seemed to himself unshaken. He recognised and adored the womanly
+growth and deepening which had taken place in her; he saw that she
+wished to show him kindness. But he thought he could trust himself now
+and henceforward not to force upon her a renewed suit for which there
+was in his eyes no real or abiding promise of happiness.
+
+Marcella and her mother had now been at home some three or four days,
+and he was just about to walk over to Mellor for his first interview
+with them. A great deal of the merely formal business consequent on Mr.
+Boyce's death had been already arranged by himself and Mr. French. Yet
+he had to consult Marcella as to certain investments, and in a pleasant
+though quite formal little note he had that morning received from her
+she had spoken of asking his advice as to some new plans for the estate.
+It was the first letter she herself had as yet written to him; hitherto
+all his correspondence had been carried on with Mrs. Boyce. It had
+struck him, by the way, as remarkable that there was no mention of the
+wife in the will. He could only suppose that she was otherwise provided
+for. But there had been some curious expressions in her letters.
+
+Where was Frank? Aldous looked impatiently at the clock, as Roberts did
+not reappear. He had invited Leven to walk with him to Mellor, and the
+tiresome boy was apparently not to be found. Aldous vowed he would not
+wait a minute, and going into the hall, put on coat and hat with most
+business-like rapidity.
+
+He was just equipped when Roberts, somewhat breathless with long
+searching, arrived in time to say that Sir Frank was on the front
+terrace.
+
+And there Aldous caught sight of the straight though somewhat heavily
+built figure, in its grey suit with the broad band of black across the
+arm.
+
+"Hullo, Frank! I thought you were to look me up in the library. Roberts
+has been searching the house for you."
+
+"You said nothing about the library," said the boy, rather sulkily, "and
+Roberts hadn't far to search. I have been in the smoking-room till this
+minute."
+
+Aldous did not argue the point, and they set out. It was presently
+clear to the elder man that his companion was not in the best of
+tempers. The widowed Lady Leven had sent her firstborn over to the Court
+for a few days that Aldous might have some discussion as to his
+immediate future with the young man. She was a silly, frivolous woman;
+but it was clear, even to her, that Frank was not doing very well for
+himself in the world; and advice she would not have taken from her son's
+Oxford tutor seemed cogent to her when it came from a Raeburn. "Do at
+least, for goodness' sake, get him to give up his absurd plan of going
+to America!" she wrote to Aldous; "if he can't take his degree at
+Oxford, I suppose he must get on without it, and certainly his dons seem
+very unpleasant. But at least he might stay at home and do his duty to
+me and his sisters till he marries, instead of going off to the
+'Rockies' or some other ridiculous place. He really never seems to think
+of Fanny and Rachel, or what he might do to help me to get them settled
+now that his poor father is gone."
+
+No; certainly the young man was not much occupied with "Fanny and
+Rachel!" He spoke with ill-concealed impatience, indeed, of both his
+sisters and his mother. If his people would get in the way of everything
+he wanted to do, they needn't wonder if he cut up rough at home. For the
+present it was settled that he should at any rate go back to Oxford till
+the end of the summer term--Aldous heartily pitying the unfortunate dons
+who might have to do with him--but after that he entirely declined to be
+bound. He swore he would not be tied at home like a girl; he must and
+would see the world. This in itself, from a lad who had been accustomed
+to regard his home as the centre of all delights, and had on two
+occasions stoutly refused to go with his family to Rome, lest he should
+miss the best month for his father's trout-stream, was sufficiently
+surprising.
+
+However, of late some tardy light had been dawning upon Aldous! The
+night after Frank's arrival at the Court Betty Macdonald came down to
+spend a few weeks with Miss Raeburn, being for the moment that lady's
+particular pet and _protégée_. Frank, whose sulkiness during the
+twenty-four hours before she appeared had been the despair of both his
+host and hostess, brightened up spasmodically when he heard she was
+expected, and went fishing with one of the keepers, on the morning
+before her arrival, with a fair imitation of his usual spirits. But
+somehow, since that first evening, though Betty had chattered, and
+danced, and frolicked her best, though her little figure running up and
+down the big house gave a new zest to life in it, Frank's manners had
+gone from bad to worse. And at last Aldous, who had not as yet seen the
+two much together, and was never an observant man in such matters, had
+begun to have an inkling. Was it _possible_ that the boy was in love,
+and with Betty? He sounded Miss Raeburn; found that she did not rise to
+his suggestion at all--was, in fact, annoyed by it--and with the usual
+stupidity of the clever man failed to draw any reasonable inference from
+the queerness of his aunt's looks and sighs.
+
+As to the little minx herself, she was inscrutable. She teased them all
+in turns, Frank, perhaps, less than the others. Aldous, as usual, found
+her a delightful companion. She would walk all over the estate with him
+in the most mannish garments and boots conceivable, which only made her
+childish grace more feminine and more provocative than ever. She took an
+interest in all his tenants; she dived into all his affairs; she
+insisted on copying his letters. And meanwhile, on either side were Miss
+Raeburn, visibly recovering day by day her old cheeriness and bustle,
+and Frank--Frank, who ate nothing, or nothing commensurate to his bulk,
+and, if possible, said less.
+
+Aldous had begun to feel that the situation must be probed somehow, and
+had devised this walk, indeed, with some vague intention of plying
+remonstrances and enquiries. He had an old affection for the boy, which
+Lady Leven had reckoned upon.
+
+The first difficulty, of course, was to make him talk at all. Aldous
+tried various sporting "gambits" with very small success. At last, by
+good-luck, the boy rose to something like animation in describing an
+encounter he had had the week before with a piebald weasel in the course
+of a morning's ferreting.
+
+"All at once we saw the creature's head poke out of the hole--_pure
+white_, with a brown patch on it. When it saw us, back it scooted!--and
+we sent in another ferret after the one that was there already. My
+goodness! there _was_ a shindy down in the earth--you could hear them
+rolling and kicking like anything. We had our guns ready,--but all of a
+sudden everything stopped--not a sound or a sign of anything! We threw
+down our guns and dug away like blazes. Presently we came on the two
+ferrets gorging away at a dead rabbit,--nasty little beasts!--that
+accounted for _them_; but where on earth was the weasel? I really began
+to think we had imagined the creature, when, whish! came a flash of
+white lightning, and out the thing bolted--pure white with a splash of
+brown--its winter coat, of course. I shot at it, but it was no go. If
+I'd only put a bag over the hole, and not been an idiot, I should have
+caught it."
+
+The boy swung along, busily ruminating for a minute or two, and
+forgetting his trouble.
+
+"I've seen one something like it before," he went on--"ages ago, when I
+was a little chap, and Harry Wharton and I were out rabbiting. By the
+way--" he stopped short--"do you see that that fellow's come back?"
+
+"I saw the paragraph in the _Times_ this morning," said Aldous, drily.
+
+"And I've got a letter from Fanny this morning, to say that he and Lady
+Selina are to be married in July, and that she's going about making a
+martyr and a saint of him, talking of the 'persecution' he's had to put
+up with, and the vulgar fellows who couldn't appreciate him, and
+generally making an ass of herself. Oh! he won't ask any of us to his
+wedding--trust him. It is a rum business. You know Willie Ffolliot--that
+queer dark fellow--that used to be in the 10th Hussars--did all those
+wild things in the Soudan?"
+
+"Yes--slightly."
+
+"I heard all about it from him. He was one of that gambling set at
+Harry's club there's been all that talk about you know, since Harry came
+to grief. Well!--he was going along Piccadilly one night last summer,
+quite late, between eleven and twelve, when Harry caught hold of him
+from behind. Willie thought he was out of his mind, or drunk. He told me
+he never saw anybody in such a queer state in his life. 'You come along
+with me,' said Harry, 'come and talk to me, or I shall shoot myself!' So
+Willie asked him what was up. 'I'm engaged to be married,' said Harry.
+Whereupon Willie remarked that, considering his manner and his
+appearance, he was sorry for the young lady. '_Young_!' said Harry as
+though he would have knocked him down. And then it came out that he had
+just--that moment!--engaged himself to Lady Selina. And it was the very
+same day that he got into that precious mess in the House--the _very
+same night_! I suppose he went to her to be comforted, and thought he'd
+pull something off, anyway! Why she took him! But of course she's no
+chicken, and old Alresford may die any day. And about the bribery
+business--I suppose he made her think him an injured innocent. Anyway,
+he talked to Willie, when they got to his rooms, like a raving lunatic,
+and you know he was always such a cool hand. 'Ffolliot,' he said, 'can
+you come with me to Siam next week?' 'How much?' said Will. 'I thought
+you were engaged to Lady Selina.' Then he swore little oaths, and vowed
+he had told her he must have a year. 'We'll go and explore those temples
+in Siam,' he said, and then he muttered something about 'Why should I
+ever come back?' Presently he began to talk of the strike--and the
+paper--and the bribe, and all the rest of it, making out a long
+rigmarole story. Oh! of course he'd done everything for the best--trust
+him!--and everybody else was a cur and a slanderer. And Ffolliot
+declared he felt quite pulpy--the man was such a wreck; and he said he'd
+go with him to Siam, or anywhere else, if he'd only cheer up. And they
+got out the maps, and Harry began to quiet down, and at last Will got
+him to bed. Fanny says Ffolliot reports he had great difficulty in
+dragging him home. However, Lady Selina has no luck!--there he is."
+
+"Oh! he will be one of the shining lights of our side before long," said
+Aldous, with resignation. "Since he gave up his seat here, there has
+been some talk of finding him one in the Alresfords' neighbourhood, I
+believe. But I don't suppose anybody's very anxious for him. He is to
+address a meeting, I see, on the Tory Labour Programme next week. The
+_Clarion_, I suppose, will go round with him."
+
+"Beastly rag!" said Frank, fervently. "It's rather a queer thing, isn't
+it, that such a clever chap as that should have made such a mess of his
+chances. It almost makes one not mind being a fool."
+
+He laughed, but bitterly, and at the same moment the cloud that for some
+twenty minutes or so seemed to have completely rolled away descended
+again on eye and expression.
+
+"Well, there are worse things than being a fool," said Aldous, with
+insidious emphasis--"sulking, and shutting up with your best friends,
+for instance."
+
+Frank flushed deeply, and turned upon him with a sort of uncertain fury.
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+Whereupon Aldous slipped his arm inside the boy's, and prepared himself
+with resignation for the scene that had to be got through somehow, when
+Frank suddenly exclaimed:
+
+"I say, there's Miss Boyce!"
+
+Never was a man more quickly and completely recalled from altruism to
+his own affairs. Aldous dropped his companion's arm, straightened
+himself with a thrill of the whole being, and saw Marcella some distance
+ahead of them in the Mellor drive, which they had just entered. She was
+stooping over something on the ground, and was not apparently aware of
+their approach. A ray of cold sun came out at the moment, touched the
+bending figure and the grass at her feet--grass starred with primroses,
+which she was gathering.
+
+"I didn't know you were going to call," said Frank, bewildered. "Isn't
+it too soon?"
+
+And he looked at his companion in astonishment.
+
+"I came to speak to Miss Boyce and her mother on business," said Aldous,
+with all his habitual reserve. "I thought you wouldn't mind the walk
+back by yourself."
+
+"Business?" the boy echoed involuntarily.
+
+Aldous hesitated, then said quietly:
+
+"Mr. Boyce appointed me executor under his will."
+
+Frank lifted his eyebrows, and allowed himself at least an inward "By
+Jove!"
+
+By this time Marcella had caught sight of them, and was advancing. She
+was in deep mourning, but her hands were full of primroses, which shone
+against the black; and the sun, penetrating the thin green of some
+larches to her left, danced in her eyes and on a face full of sensitive
+and beautiful expression.
+
+They had not met since they stood together beside Hallin's grave. This
+fact was in both their minds. Aldous felt it, as it were, in the touch
+of her hand. What he could not know was, that she was thinking quite as
+much of his letter to her mother and its phrases.
+
+They stood talking a little in the sunshine. Then, as Frank was taking
+his leave, Marcella said:
+
+"Won't you wait for--for Lord Maxwell, in the old library? We can get at
+it from the garden, and I have made it quite habitable. My mother, of
+course, does not wish to see anybody."
+
+Frank hesitated, then, pushed by a certain boyish curiosity, and by the
+angry belief that Betty had been carried off by Miss Raeburn, and was
+out of his reach till luncheon-time, said he would wait. Marcella led
+the way, opened the garden-door of the lower corridor, close to the spot
+where she had seen Wharton standing in the moonlight on a
+never-to-be-forgotten night, and then ushered them into the library. The
+beautiful old place had been decently repaired, though in no sense
+modernised. The roof had no holes, and its delicate stucco-work,
+formerly stained and defaced by damp, had been whitened, so that the
+brown and golden tones of the books in the latticed cases told against
+it with delightful effect. The floor was covered with a cheap matting,
+and there were a few simple chairs and tables. A wood fire burnt on the
+old hearth. Marcella's books and work lay about, and some shallow
+earthenware pans filled with home-grown hyacinths scented the air. What
+with the lovely architecture of the room itself, its size, its books
+and old portraits, and the signs it bore of simple yet refined use, it
+would have been difficult to find a gentler, mellower place. Aldous
+looked round him with delight.
+
+"I hope to make a village drawing-room of it in time," she said casually
+to Frank as she stooped to put a log on the fire. "I think we shall get
+them to come, as it has a separate door, and scraper, and mat all to
+itself."
+
+"Goodness!" said Frank, "they won't come. It's too far from the
+village."
+
+"Don't you be so sure," said Marcella, laughing. "Mr. Craven has all
+sorts of ideas."
+
+"Who's Mr. Craven?"
+
+"Didn't you meet him at my rooms?"
+
+"Oh! I remember," ejaculated the boy--"a frightful Socialist!"
+
+"And his wife's worse," said Marcella, merrily. "They've come down to
+settle here. They're going to help me."
+
+"Then for mercy's sake keep them to yourself," cried Frank, "and don't
+let them go loose over the county. We don't want them at our place."
+
+"Oh! your turn will come. Lord Maxwell"--her tone changed--became shy
+and a little grave. "Shall we go into the Stone Parlour? My mother will
+come down if you wish to see her, but she thought that--that--perhaps we
+could settle things."
+
+Aldous had been standing by, hat in hand, watching her as she chattered
+to Frank. As she addressed him he gave a little start.
+
+"Oh! I think we can settle everything," he said.
+
+"Well, this is rum!" said Frank to himself, as the door closed behind
+them, and instead of betaking himself to the chair and the newspaper
+with which Marcella had provided him, he began to walk excitedly up and
+down. "Her father makes him executor--he manages her property for
+her--and they behave nicely to each other, as though nothing had ever
+happened at all. What the deuce does it mean? And all the time
+Betty--why, Betty's devoted to him!--and it's as plain as a pikestaff
+what that old cat, Miss Raeburn, is thinking of from morning till night!
+Well, I'm beat!"
+
+And throwing himself down on a stool by the fire, his chin between his
+hands, he stared dejectedly at the burning logs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Meanwhile Marcella and her companion were sitting in the Stone Parlour
+side by side, save for a small table between them, which held the
+various papers Aldous had brought with him. At first, there had been on
+her side--as soon as they were alone--a feeling of stifling
+embarrassment. All the painful, proud sensations with which she had
+received the news of her father's action returned upon her; she would
+have liked to escape; she shrank from what once more seemed an
+encroachment, a situation as strange as it was embarrassing.
+
+But his manner very soon made it impossible, indeed ridiculous, to
+maintain such an attitude of mind. He ran through his business with his
+usual clearness and rapidity. It was not complicated; her views proved
+to be the same as his; and she was empowered to decide for her mother.
+Aldous took notes of one or two of her wishes, left some papers with her
+for her mother's signature, and then his work was practically done.
+Nothing, throughout, could have been more reassuring or more everyday
+than his demeanour.
+
+Then, indeed, when the end of their business interview approached, and
+with it the opportunity for conversation of a different kind, both were
+conscious of a certain tremor. To him this old parlour was torturingly
+full of memories. In this very place where they sat he had given her
+his mother's pearls, and taken a kiss in return from the cheek that was
+once more so near to him. With what free and exquisite curves the hair
+set about the white brow! How beautiful was the neck--the hand! What
+ripened, softened charm in every movement! The touching and rebuking
+thought rose in his mind that from her nursing experience, and its frank
+contact with the ugliest realities of the physical life--a contact he
+had often shrunk from realising--there had come to her, not so much
+added strength, as a new subtlety and sweetness, some delicate,
+vibrating quality, that had been entirely lacking to her first splendid
+youth.
+
+Suddenly she said to him, with a certain hesitation:
+
+"There was one more point I wanted to speak to you about. Can you advise
+me about selling some of those railway shares?"
+
+She pointed to an item in a short list of investments that lay beside
+them.
+
+"But why?" said Aldous, surprised. "They are excellent property already,
+and are going up in value."
+
+"Yes, I know. But I want some ready money immediately--more than we
+have--to spend on cottage-building in the village. I saw a builder
+yesterday and came to a first understanding with him. We are altering
+the water-supply too. They have begun upon it already, and it will cost
+a good deal."
+
+Aldous was still puzzled.
+
+"I see," he said. "But--don't you suppose that the income of the estate,
+now that your father has done so much to free it, will be enough to meet
+expenses of that kind, without trenching on investments? A certain
+amount, of course, should be systematically laid aside every year for
+rebuilding, and estate improvements generally."
+
+"Yes; but you see I only regard half of the income as mine."
+
+She looked up with a little smile.
+
+He was now standing in front of her, against the fire, his grey eyes,
+which could be, as she well knew, so cold and inexpressive, bent upon
+her with eager interest.
+
+"Only half the income?" he repeated. "Ah!"--he smiled kindly--"is that
+an arrangement between you and your mother?"
+
+Marcella let her hand fall with a little despairing gesture.
+
+"Oh no!" she said--"oh no! Mamma--mamma will take nothing from me or
+from the estate. She has her own money, and she will live with me part
+of the year."
+
+The intonation in the words touched Aldous profoundly.
+
+"Part of the year?" he said, astonished, yet not knowing how to question
+her. "Mrs. Boyce will not make Mellor her home?"
+
+"She would be thankful if she had never seen it," said Marcella,
+quickly--"and she would never see it again if it weren't for me. It's
+dreadful what she went through last year, when--when I was in London."
+
+Her voice fell. Glancing up at him involuntarily, her eye looked with
+dread for some chill, some stiffening in him. Probably he condemned her,
+had always condemned her for deserting her home and her parents. But
+instead she saw nothing but sympathy.
+
+"Mrs. Boyce has had a hard life," he said, with grave feeling.
+
+Marcella felt a tear leap, and furtively raised her handkerchief to
+brush it away. Then, with a natural selfishness, her quick thought took
+another turn. A wild yearning rose in her mind to tell him much more
+than she had ever done in old days of the miserable home-circumstances
+of her early youth; to lay stress on the mean unhappiness which had
+depressed her own child-nature whenever she was with her parents, and
+had withered her mother's character. Secretly, passionately, she often
+made the past an excuse. Excuse for what? For the lack of delicacy and
+loyalty, of the best sort of breeding, which had marked the days of her
+engagement?
+
+Never--_never_ to speak of it with him!--to pour out everything--to ask
+him to judge, to understand, to forgive!--
+
+She pulled herself together by a strong effort, reminding herself in a
+flash of all that divided them:--of womanly pride--of Betty Macdonald's
+presence at the Court--of that vain confidence to Hallin, of which her
+inmost being must have been ashamed, but that something calming and
+sacred stole upon her whenever she thought of Hallin, lifting everything
+concerned with him into a category of its own.
+
+No; let her selfish weakness make no fettering claim upon the man before
+her. Let her be content with the friendship she had, after all,
+achieved, that was now doing its kindly best for her.
+
+All these images, like a tumultuous procession, ran through the mind in
+a moment. He thought, as she sat there with her bent head, the hands
+clasped round the knee in the way he knew so well, that she was full of
+her mother, and found it difficult to put what she felt into words.
+
+"But tell me about your plan," he said gently, "if you will."
+
+"Oh! it is nothing," she said hurriedly. "I am afraid you will think it
+impracticable--perhaps wrong. It's only this: you see, as there is no
+one depending on me--as I am practically alone--it seemed to me I might
+make an experiment. Four thousand a year is a great deal more than I
+need ever spend--than I _ought_, of course, to spend on myself. I don't
+think altogether what I used to think. I mean to keep up this house--to
+make it beautiful, to hand it on, perhaps _more_ beautiful than I found
+it, to those that come after. And I mean to maintain enough service in
+it both to keep it in order and to make it a social centre for all the
+people about--for everybody of all classes, so far as I can. I want it
+to be a place of amusement and delight and talk to us all--especially to
+the very poor. After all"--her cheek flushed under the quickening of her
+thought--"_everybody_ on the estate, in their different degree, has
+contributed to this house, in some sense, for generations. I want it to
+come into their lives--to make it _their_ possession, _their_ pride,--as
+well as mine. But then that isn't all. The people here can enjoy
+nothing, use nothing, till they have a worthier life of their own. Wages
+here, you know, are terribly low, much lower"--she added timidly--"than
+with you. They are, as a rule, eleven or twelve shillings a week. Now
+there seem to be about one hundred and sixty labourers on the estate
+altogether, in the farmers' employment and in our own. Some, of course,
+are boys, and some old men earning a half-wage. Mr. Craven and I have
+worked it out, and we find that an average weekly increase of five
+shillings per head--which would give the men of full age and in full
+work about a pound a week--would work out at about two thousand a year."
+
+She paused a moment, trying to put her further statement into its best
+order.
+
+"Your farmers, you know," he said, smiling, after a pause, "will be your
+chief difficulty."
+
+"Of course! But I thought of calling a meeting of them. I have discussed
+it with Mr. French--of course he thinks me mad!--but he gave me some
+advice. I should propose to them all fresh leases, with certain small
+advantages that Louis Craven thinks would tempt them, at a reduced
+rental exactly answering to the rise in wages. Then, in return they must
+accept a sort of fair-wage clause, binding them to pay henceforward the
+standard wage of the estate."
+
+She looked up, her face expressing urgent though silent interrogation.
+
+"You must remember," he said quickly, "that though the estate is
+recovering, and rents have been fairly paid about here during the last
+eighteen months, you may be called upon at any moment to make the
+reductions which hampered your uncle. These reductions will, of course,
+fall upon you as before, seeing that the farmers, in a different way,
+will be paying as much as before. Have you left margin enough?"
+
+"I think so," she said eagerly. "I shall live here very simply, and
+accumulate all the reserve fund I can. I have set all my heart upon it.
+I know there are not many people _could_ do such a thing--other
+obligations would, must, come first. And it may turn out a mistake.
+But--whatever happens--whatever any of us, Socialists or not, may hope
+for in the future--here one _is_ with one's conscience, and one's money,
+and these people, who like oneself have but the one life? In all labour,
+it is the modern question, isn't it?--_how much_ of the product of
+labour the workman can extract from the employer? About here there is no
+union to act for the labourers--they have practically no power. But _in
+the future_, we must surely _hope_ they will combine, that they will be
+stronger--strong enough to _force_ a decent wage. What ought to prevent
+my free will anticipating a moment--since I _can_ do it--that we all
+want to see?"
+
+She spoke with a strong feeling; but his ear detected a new
+note--something deeper and wistfuller than of old.
+
+"Well--as you say, you are for experiments!" he replied, not finding it
+easy to produce his own judgment quickly. Then, in another tone--"it was
+always Hallin's cry."
+
+She glanced up at him, her lips trembling.
+
+"I know. Do you remember how he used to say--'the big changes may
+come--the big Collectivist changes. But neither you nor I will see them.
+I pray _not_ to see them. Meanwhile--all still hangs upon, comes back
+to, the individual, Here are you with your money and power; there are
+those men and women whom you can share with--in new and honourable
+ways--_to-day_.'"
+
+Then she checked herself suddenly.
+
+"But now I want you to tell me--will you tell me?--all the objections
+you see. You must often have thought such things over."
+
+She was looking nervously straight before her. She did not see the flash
+of half-bitter, half-tender irony that crossed his face. Her tone of
+humility, of appeal, was so strange to him, remembering the past.
+
+"Yes, very often," he answered. "Well, I think these are the kind of
+arguments you will have to meet."
+
+He went through the objections that any economist would be sure to weigh
+against a proposal of the kind, as clearly as he could, and at some
+length--but without zest. What affected Marcella all through was not so
+much the matter of what he said, as the manner of it. It was so
+characteristic of the two voices in him--the voice of the idealist
+checked and mocked always by the voice of the observer and the student.
+A year before, the little harangue would have set her aflame with
+impatience and wrath. Now, beneath the speaker, she felt and yearned
+towards the man.
+
+Yet, as to the scheme, when all demurs were made, she was "of the same
+opinion still"! His arguments were not new to her; the inward eagerness
+over-rode them.
+
+"In my own case"--he said at last, the tone passing instantly into
+reserve and shyness, as always happened when he spoke of himself--"my
+own wages are two or three shillings higher than those paid generally by
+the farmers on the estate; and we have a pension fund. But so far, I
+have felt the risks of any wholesale disturbance of labour on the
+estate, depending, as it must entirely in my case, on the individual
+life and will, to be too great to let me go further. I sometimes believe
+that it is the farmers who would really benefit most by experiments of
+the kind!"
+
+She protested vehemently, being at the moment, of course, not at all in
+love with mankind in general, but only with those members of mankind who
+came within the eye of imagination. He was enchanted to see the old self
+come out again--positive, obstinate, generous; to see the old confident
+pose of the head, the dramatic ease of gesture.
+
+Meanwhile something that had to be said, that must, indeed, be said, if
+he were to give her serious and official advice, pressed uncomfortably
+on his tongue.
+
+"You know," he said, not looking at her, when at last she had for the
+moment exhausted argument and prophecy, "you have to think of those who
+will succeed you here; still more you have to think--of marriage--before
+you pledge yourself to the halving of your income."
+
+Now he must needs look at her intently, out of sheer nervousness. The
+difficulty he had had in compelling himself to make the speech at all
+had given a certain hardness and stiffness to his voice. She felt a
+sudden shock and chill--resented what he had dismally felt to be an
+imperative duty.
+
+"I do not think I have any need to think of it--in this connection," she
+said proudly. And getting up, she began to gather her papers together.
+
+The spell was broken, the charm gone. He felt that he was dismissed.
+
+With a new formality and silence, she led the way into the hall, he
+following. As they neared the library there was a sound of voices.
+
+Marcella opened the door in surprise, and there, on either side of the
+fire, sat Betty Macdonald and Frank Leven.
+
+"_That's_ a mercy!" cried Betty, running forward to Marcella and kissing
+her. "I really don't know what would have happened if Mr. Leven and I
+had been left alone any longer. As for the Kilkenny cats, my dear, don't
+mention them!"
+
+The child was flushed and agitated, and there was an angry light in her
+blue eyes. Frank looked simply lumpish and miserable.
+
+"Yes, here I am," said Betty, holding Marcella, and chattering as fast
+as possible. "I made Miss Raeburn bring me over, that I might _just_
+catch a sight of you. She would walk home, and leave the carriage for
+me. Isn't it like all the topsy-turvy things nowadays? When _I'm_ her
+age I suppose I shall have gone back to dolls. Please to look at those
+ponies!--they're pawing your gravel to bits. And as for my watch, just
+inspect it!"--She thrust it reproachfully under Marcella's eyes. "You've
+been such a time in there talking, that Sir Frank and I have had time to
+quarrel for life, and there isn't a minute left for anything rational.
+Oh! good-bye, my dear, good-bye. I never kept Miss Raeburn waiting for
+lunch yet, did I, Mr. Aldous? and I mustn't begin now. Come along, Mr.
+Aldous! You'll have to come home with me. I'm frightened to death of
+those ponies. You shan't drive, but if they bolt, I'll give them to you
+to pull in. Dear, _dear_ Marcella, let me come again--soon--directly!"
+
+A few more sallies and kisses, a few more angry looks at Frank and
+appeals to Aldous, who was much less responsive than usual, and the
+child was seated, very erect and rosy, on the driving seat of the little
+pony-carriage, with Aldous beside her.
+
+"Are you coming, Frank?" said Aldous; "there's plenty of room."
+
+His strong brow had a pucker of annoyance. As he spoke he looked, not at
+Frank, but at Marcella. She was standing a trifle back, among the
+shadows of the doorway, and her attitude conveyed to him an impression
+of proud aloofness. A sigh that was half pain, half resignation, passed
+his lips unconsciously.
+
+"Thank you, I'll walk," said Frank, fiercely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now, will you please explain to me why you look like that, and talk
+like that?" said Marcella, with cutting composure, when she was once
+more in the library, and Frank, crimson to the roots of his hair, and
+saying incoherent things, had followed her there.
+
+"I should think you might guess," said Frank, in reproachful misery, as
+he hung over the fire.
+
+"Not at all!" said Marcella; "you are rude to Betty, and disagreeable to
+me, by which I suppose that you are unhappy. But why should _you_ be
+allowed to show your feelings, when other people don't?"
+
+Frank fairly groaned.
+
+"Well," he said, making efforts at a tragic calm, and looking for his
+hat, "you will, none of you, be troubled with me long. I shall go home
+to-morrow, and take my ticket for California the day after."
+
+_"You,"_ said Marcella, "go to California! What right have you to go to
+California?"
+
+"What right?" Frank stared, then he went on impetuously. "If a girl
+torments a man, as Betty has been tormenting me, there is nothing for
+it, I should think, but to clear out of the way. I am going to clear out
+of the way, whatever anybody says."
+
+"And shoot big game, I suppose--amuse yourself somehow?"
+
+Frank hesitated.
+
+"Well, a fellow can't do nothing," he said helplessly. "I suppose I
+shall shoot."
+
+"And what right have you to do it? Have you any more right than a public
+official would have to spend public money in neglecting his duties?"
+
+Frank stared at her.
+
+"Well, I don't know what you mean," he said at last, angrily; "give it
+up."
+
+"It's quite simple what I mean. You have inherited your father's
+property. Your tenants pay you rent, that comes from their labour. Are
+you going to make no return for your income, and your house, and your
+leisure?"
+
+"Ah! that's your Socialism!" cried the young fellow, roused by her tone.
+"No return? Why, they have the land."
+
+"If I were a thorough-going Socialist," said Marcella, steadily, "I
+should say to you, Go! The sooner you throw off all ties to your
+property, the sooner you prove to the world that you and your class are
+mere useless parasites, the sooner we shall be rid of you. But
+unfortunately _I_ am not such a good Socialist as that. I waver--I am
+not sure of what I wish. But one thing I _am_ sure of, that unless
+people like you are going to treat their lives as a profession, to take
+their calling seriously, there are no more superfluous drones, no more
+idle plunderers than you, in all civilised society!"
+
+Was she pelting him in this way that she might so get rid of some of her
+own inner smart and restlessness? If so, the unlucky Frank could not
+guess it. He could only feel himself intolerably ill-used. He had meant
+to pour himself out to her on the subject of Betty and his woes, and
+here she was rating him as to his _duties_, of which he had hardly as
+yet troubled himself to think, being entirely taken up either with his
+grievances or his enjoyments.
+
+"I'm sure you know you're talking nonsense," he said sulkily, though he
+shrank from meeting her fiery look. "And if I _am_ idle, there are
+plenty of people idler than me--people who live on their money, with no
+land to bother about, and nothing to do for it at all."
+
+"On the contrary, it is they who have an excuse. They have no natural
+opening, perhaps--no plain call. You have both, and, as I said before,
+you have no _right_ to take holidays before you have earned them. You
+have got to learn your business first, and then do it. Give your eight
+hours' day like other people! Who are you that you should have all the
+cake of the world, and other people the crusts?"
+
+Frank walked to the window, and stood staring out, with his back turned
+to her. Her words stung and tingled; and he was too miserable to fight.
+
+"I shouldn't care whether it were cake or crusts," he said at last, in a
+low voice, turning round to her, "if only Betty would have me."
+
+"Do you think she is any the more likely to have you," said Marcella,
+unrelenting, "if you behave as a loafer and a runaway? Don't you suppose
+that Betty has good reasons for hesitating when she sees the difference
+between you--and--and other people?"
+
+Frank looked at her sombrely--a queer mixture of expressions on the
+face, in which the maturer man was already to be discerned at war with
+the powerful young animal.
+
+"I suppose you mean Lord Maxwell?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"You may take what I said," she said at last, looking into the fire, "as
+meaning anybody who pays honestly with work and brains for what society
+has given him--as far as he can pay, at any rate."
+
+"Now look here," said Frank, coming dolefully to sit down beside her;
+"don't slate me any more. I'm a bad lot, I know--well, an idle lot--I
+don't think I am a _bad_ lot--But it's no good your preaching to me
+while Betty's sticking pins into me like this. Now just let me tell you
+how she's been behaving."
+
+Marcella succumbed, and heard him. He glanced at her surreptitiously
+from time to time, but he could make nothing of her. She sat very quiet
+while he described the constant companionship between Aldous and Betty,
+and the evident designs of Miss Raeburn. Just as when he made his first
+confidences to her in London, he was vaguely conscious that he was doing
+a not very gentlemanly thing. But again, he was too unhappy to restrain
+himself, and he longed somehow to make an ally of her.
+
+"Well, I have only one thing to say," she said at last, with an odd
+nervous impatience--"go and ask her, and have done with it! She might
+have some respect for you then. No, I won't help you; but if you don't
+succeed, I'll pity you--I promise you that. And now you must go away."
+
+He went, feeling himself hardly treated, yet conscious nevertheless of a
+certain stirring of the moral waters which had both stimulus and balm in
+it.
+
+She, left behind, sat quiet in the old library for a few lonely minutes.
+The boy's plight made her alternately scornful and repentant of her
+sharpness to him. As to his report, one moment it plunged her in an
+anguish she dared not fathom; the next she was incredulous--could not
+simply make herself take the thing as real.
+
+But one thing had been real--that word from Aldous to her of
+"_marriage_"! The nostril dilated, the breast heaved, as she lost all
+thought of Frank in a resentful passion that could neither justify nor
+calm itself. It seemed still as though he had struck her. Yet she knew
+well that she had nothing to forgive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning she went down to the village meaning to satisfy herself on
+two or three points connected with the new cottages. On the way she
+knocked at the Rectory garden-door, in the hope of finding Mary Harden
+and persuading her to come with her.
+
+She had not seen much of Mary since their return. Still, she had had
+time to be painfully struck once or twice with the white and bloodless
+look of the Rector's sister, and with a certain patient silence about
+her which seemed to Marcella new. Was it the monotony of the life? or
+had both of them been overworking and underfeeding as usual? The Rector
+had received Marcella with his old gentle but rather distant kindness.
+Two years before he had felt strongly about many of her proceedings, and
+had expressed himself frankly enough, at least to Mary. Now he had put
+his former disapprovals out of his mind, and was only anxious to work
+smoothly with the owner of Mellor. He had a great respect for
+"dignities," and she, as far as the village was concerned, was to be his
+"dignity" henceforward. Moreover, he humbly and truly hoped that she
+might be able to enlighten him as to a good many modern conceptions and
+ideas about the poor, for which, absorbed as he was, either in
+almsgiving of the traditional type, or spiritual ministration, or
+sacramental theory, he had little time, and, if the truth were known,
+little affinity.
+
+In answer to her knock Marcella heard a faint "Come in" from the
+interior of the house. She walked into the dining-room, and found Mary
+sitting by the little table in tears. There were some letters before
+her, which she pushed away as Marcella entered, but she did not attempt
+to disguise her agitation.
+
+"What is it, dear? Tell me," said Marcella, sitting down beside her, and
+kissing one of the hands she held.
+
+And Mary told her. It was the story of her life--a simple tale of
+ordinary things, such as wring the quiet hearts and train the unnoticed
+saints of this world. In her first youth, when Charles Harden was for a
+time doing some divinity lecturing in his Oxford college, Mary had gone
+up to spend a year with him in lodgings. Their Sunday teas and other
+small festivities were frequented by her brother's friends, men of like
+type with himself, and most of them either clergymen or about to be
+ordained. Between one of them, a young fellow looking out for his first
+curacy, and Mary an attachment had sprung up, which Mary could not even
+now speak of. She hurried over it, with a trembling voice, to the
+tragedy beyond. Mr. Shelton got his curacy, went off to a parish in the
+Lincolnshire Fens, and there was talk of their being married in a year
+or so. But the exposure of a bitter winter's night, risked in the
+struggle across one of the bleakest flats of the district to carry the
+Sacrament to a dying parishioner, had brought on a peculiar and
+agonising form of neuralgia. And from this pain, so nobly earned, had
+sprung--oh! mystery of human fate!--a morphia-habit, with all that such
+a habit means for mind and body. It was discovered by the poor fellow's
+brother, who brought him up to London and tried to cure him. Meanwhile
+he himself had written to Mary to give her up. "I have no will left, and
+am no longer a man," he wrote to her. "It would be an outrage on my
+part, and a sin on yours, if we did not cancel our promise." Charles,
+who took a hard, ascetic view, held much the same language, and Mary
+submitted, heart-broken.
+
+Then came a gleam of hope. The brother's care and affection prevailed;
+there were rumours of great improvement, of a resumption of work. "Just
+two years ago, when you first came here, I was beginning to
+believe"--she turned away her head to hide the rise of tears--"that it
+might still come right." But after some six or eight months of clerical
+work in London fresh trouble developed, lung mischief showed itself, and
+the system, undermined by long and deep depression, seemed to capitulate
+at once.
+
+"He died last December, at Madeira," said Mary, quietly. "I saw him
+before he left England. We wrote to each other almost to the end. He was
+quite at peace. This letter here was from the chaplain at Madeira, who
+was kind to him, to tell me about his grave."
+
+That was all. It was the sort of story that somehow might have been
+expected to belong to Mary Harden--to her round, plaintive face, to her
+narrow, refined experience; and she told it in a way eminently
+characteristic of her modes of thinking, religious or social, with
+old-fashioned or conventional phrases which, whatever might be the case
+with other people, had lost none of their bloom or meaning for her.
+
+Marcella's face showed her sympathy. They talked for half an hour, and
+at the end of it Mary flung her arms round her companion's neck.
+
+"There!" she said, "now we must not talk any more about it. I am glad I
+told you. It was a comfort. And somehow--I don't mean to be unkind; but
+I couldn't have told you in the old days--it's wonderful how much better
+I like you now than I used to do, though perhaps we don't agree much
+better."
+
+Both laughed, though the eyes of both were full of tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently they were in the village together. As they neared the Hurds'
+old cottage, which was now empty and to be pulled down, a sudden look of
+disgust crossed Marcella's face.
+
+"Did I tell you my news of Minta Hurd?" she said.
+
+No; Mary had heard nothing. So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly
+news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi. Jim Hurd's
+widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky "professor of
+elocution," with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the
+floor beneath her in Brown's Buildings, and had been wont to come in of
+an evening and play comic songs to her and the children. Marcella was
+vehemently sure that he was a charlatan--that he got his living by a
+number of small dishonesties, that he had scented Minta's pension. But
+apart from the question whether he would make Minta a decent husband, or
+live upon her and beat her, was the fact itself of her re-marriage, in
+itself hideous to the girl.
+
+"_Marry_ him!" she said. "Marry any one! Isn't it incredible?"
+
+They were in front of the cottage. Marcella paused a moment and looked
+at it. She saw again in sharp vision the miserable woman fainting on the
+settle, the dwarf sitting, handcuffed, under the eye of his captors;
+she felt again the rush of that whirlwind of agony through which she had
+borne the wife's helpless soul in that awful dawn.
+
+And after that--exit!--with her "professor of elocution." It made the
+girl sick to think of. And Mary, out of a Puseyite dislike of second
+marriage, felt and expressed much the same repulsion.
+
+Well--Minta Hurd was far away, and if she had been there to defend
+herself her powers of expression would have been no match for theirs.
+Nor does youth understand such pleas as she might have urged.
+
+"Will Lord Maxwell continue the pension?" said Mary.
+
+Marcella stopped again, involuntarily.
+
+"So that was his doing?" she said. "I supposed as much."
+
+"You did not know?" cried Mary, in distress. "Oh! I believe I ought not
+to have said anything about it."
+
+"I always guessed it," said Marcella, shortly, and they walked on in
+silence.
+
+Presently they found themselves in front of Mrs. Jellison's very trim
+and pleasant cottage, which lay farther along the common, to the left of
+the road to the Court. There was an early pear-tree in blossom over the
+porch, and a swelling greenery of buds in the little garden.
+
+"Will you come in?" said Mary. "I should like to see Isabella Westall."
+
+Marcella started at the name.
+
+"How is she?" she asked.
+
+"Just the same. She has never been in her right mind since. But she is
+quite harmless and quiet."
+
+They found Mrs. Jellison on one side of the fire, with her daughter on
+the other, and the little six-year-old Johnnie playing between them.
+Mrs. Jellison was straw-plaiting, twisting the straws with amazing
+rapidity, her fingers stained with red from the dye of them. Isabella
+was, as usual, doing nothing. She stared when Marcella and Mary came in,
+but she took no other notice of them. Her powerful and tragic face had
+the look of something originally full of intention, from which spirit
+and meaning had long departed, leaving a fine but lifeless outline.
+Marcella had seen it last on the night of the execution, in ghastly
+apparition at Minta Hurd's window, when it might have been caught by
+some sculptor in quest of the secrets of violent expression, fixed in
+clay or marble, and labelled "Revenge," or "Passion."
+
+Its passionless emptiness now filled her with pity and horror. She sat
+down beside the widow and took her hand. Mrs. Westall allowed it for a
+moment, then drew her own away suddenly, and Marcella saw a curious and
+sinister contraction of the eyes.
+
+"Ah! yo never know how much Isabella unnerstan's, an' how much she
+don't," Mrs. Jellison was saying to Mary. "I can't allus make her out,
+but she don't give no trouble. An' as for that boy, he's a chirruper, he
+is. He gives 'em fine times at school, he do. Miss Barton, she ast him
+in class, Thursday, 'bout Ananias and Sappira. 'Johnnie,' says she,
+'whatever made 'em do sich a wicked thing?' 'Well, _I_ do'n' know,' says
+he; 'it was jus' their nassty good-for-nothink,' says he; 'but they was
+great sillies,' says he. Oh! he don't mean no harm!--lor' bless yer,
+the men is all born contrary, and they can't help themselves. Oh! thank
+yer, miss, my 'ealth is pretty tidy, though I 'ave been plagued this
+winter with a something they call the 'flenzy. I wor very bad! 'Yo go to
+bed, Mrs. Jellison,' says Dr. Sharpe, 'or yo'll know of it.' But I
+worn't goin' to be talked to by 'im. Why, I knowed 'im when he wor no
+'igher nor Johnnie. An' I kep' puddlin' along, an' one mornin' I wor
+fairly choked, an' I just crawled into that parlour, an' I took a sup o'
+brandy out o' the bottle"--she looked complacently at Mary, quite
+conscious that the Rector's sister must be listening to her with
+disapproving ears--"an', lor' bless yer, it cut the phlegm, it did, that
+very moment. My! I did cough. I drawed it up by the yard, I did--and I
+crep' back along the wall, and yo cud ha' knocked me down wi' one o' my
+own straws. But I've been better iver since, an' beginnin' to eat my
+vittles, too, though I'm never no great pecker--I ain't--not at no
+time."
+
+Mary managed to smother her emotions on the subject of the brandy, and
+the old woman chattered on, throwing out the news of the village in a
+series of humorous fragments, tinged in general with the lowest opinion
+of human nature.
+
+When the girls took leave of her, she said slily to Marcella:
+
+"An' 'ow about your plaitin', miss?--though I dessay I'm a bold 'un for
+astin'."
+
+Marcella coloured.
+
+"Well, I've got it to think about, Mrs. Jellison. We must have a meeting
+in the village and talk it over one of these days."
+
+The old woman nodded in a shrewd silence, and watched them depart.
+
+"Wull, I reckon Jimmy Gedge ull lasst my time," she said to herself with
+a chuckle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Mrs. Jellison had this small belief in the powers of the new mistress
+of Mellor over matters which, according to her, had been settled
+generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no
+mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return
+scanning everything about her--the slatternly girls plaiting on the
+doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various
+"publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to
+her--with a moody and passionate eye.
+
+"Mary!" she broke out as they neared the Rectory, "I shall be
+twenty-four directly. How much harm do you think I shall have done here
+by the time I am sixty-four?"
+
+Mary laughed at her, and tried to cheer her. But Marcella was in the
+depths of self-disgust.
+
+"What is wanted, really wanted," she said with intensity, "is not _my_
+help, but _their_ growth. How can I make them _take for
+themselves_--take, roughly and selfishly even, if they will only take!
+As for my giving, what relation has it to anything real or lasting?"
+
+Mary was scandalised.
+
+"I declare you are as bad as Mr. Craven," she said. "He told Charles
+yesterday that the curtseys of the old women in the village to him and
+Charles--women old enough to be their grandmothers--sickened him of the
+whole place, and that he should regard it as the chief object of his
+work here to make such things impossible in the future. Or perhaps
+you're still of Mr.--Mr. Wharton's opinion--you'll be expecting Charles
+and me to give up charity. But it's no good, my dear. We're not
+'advanced,' and we never shall be."
+
+At the mention of Wharton Marcella threw her proud head back; wave after
+wave of changing expression passed over the face.
+
+"I often remember the things Mr. Wharton said in this village," she said
+at last. "There was life and salt and power in many of them. It's not
+what he said, but what he was, that one wants to forget."
+
+They parted presently, and Marcella went heavily home. The rising of the
+spring, the breath of the April air, had never yet been sad and
+oppressive to her as they were to-day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"Oh! Miss Boyce, may I come in?"
+
+The voice was Frank Leven's. Marcella was sitting in the old library
+alone late on the following afternoon. Louis Craven, who was now her
+paid agent and adviser, had been with her, and she had accounts and
+estimates before her.
+
+"Come in," she said, startled a little by Frank's tone and manner, and
+looking at him interrogatively.
+
+Frank shut the heavy old door carefully behind him. Then, as he advanced
+to her she saw that his flushed face wore an expression unlike anything
+she had yet seen there--of mingled joy and fear.
+
+She drew back involuntarily.
+
+"Is there anything--anything wrong?"
+
+"No," he said impetuously, "no! But I have something to tell you, and I
+don't know how. I don't know whether I ought. I have run almost all the
+way from the Court."
+
+And, indeed, he could hardly get his breath. He took a stool she pushed
+to him, and tried to collect himself. She heard her heart beat as she
+waited for him to speak.
+
+"It's about Lord Maxwell," he said at last, huskily, turning his head
+away from her to the fire. "I've just had a long walk with him. Then he
+left me; he had no idea I came on here. But something drove me; I felt
+I must come, I must tell. Will you promise not to be angry with me--to
+believe that I've thought about it--that I'm doing it for the best?"
+
+He looked at her nervously.
+
+"If you wouldn't keep me waiting so long," she said faintly, while her
+cheeks and lips grew white.
+
+"Well,--I was mad this morning! Betty hasn't spoken to me since
+yesterday. She's been always about with him, and Miss Raeburn let me see
+once or twice last night that she thought I was in the way. I never
+slept a wink last night, and I kept out of their sight all the morning.
+Then, after lunch, I went up to him, and I asked him to come for a walk
+with me. He looked at me rather queerly--I suppose I was pretty savage.
+Then he said he'd come. And off we went, ever so far across the park.
+And I let out. I don't know what I said; I suppose I made a beast of
+myself. But anyway, I asked him to tell me what he meant, and to tell
+me, if he could, what Betty meant. I said I knew I was a cool hand, and
+he might turn me out of the house, and refuse to have anything more to
+do with me if he liked. But I was going to rack and ruin, and should
+never be any good till I knew where I stood--and Betty would never be
+serious--and, in short, was he in love with her himself? for any one
+could see what Miss Raeburn was thinking of."
+
+The boy gulped down something like a sob, and tried to give himself time
+to be coherent again. Marcella sat like a stone.
+
+"When he heard me say that--'in love with her yourself,' he stopped
+dead. I saw that I had made him angry. 'What right have you or any one
+else,' he said, very short, 'to ask me such a question?' Then I just
+lost my head, and said anything that came handy. I told him everybody
+talked about it--which, of course, was rubbish--and at last I said, 'Ask
+anybody; ask the Winterbournes, ask Miss Boyce--they all think it as
+much as I do.' '_Miss Boyce_!' he said--'Miss Boyce thinks I want to
+marry Betty Macdonald?' Then I didn't know what to say--for, of course,
+I knew I'd taken your name in vain; and he sat down on the grass beside
+a little stream there is in the park, and he didn't speak to me for a
+long time--I could see him throwing little stones into the water. And at
+last he called me. 'Frank!' he said; and I went up to him. And then--"
+
+The lad seemed to tremble all over. He bent forward and laid his hand on
+Marcella's knee, touching her cold ones.
+
+"And then he said, 'I can't understand yet, Frank, how you or anybody
+else can have mistaken my friendship for Betty Macdonald. At any rate, I
+know there's been no mistake on her part. And if you take my advice,
+you'll go and speak to her like a man, with all your heart, and see what
+she says. You don't deserve her yet, that I can tell you. As for me'--I
+can't describe the look of his face; I only know I wanted to go
+away--'you and I will be friends for many years, I hope, so perhaps you
+may just understand this, once for all. For me there never has been, and
+there never will be, but one woman in the world--to love. And you know,'
+he said after a bit, 'or you ought to know, very well, who that woman
+is.' And then he got up and walked away. He did not ask me to come, and
+I felt I dared not go after him. And then I lay and thought. I
+remembered being here; I thought of what I had said to you--of what I
+had fancied now and then about--about you. I felt myself a brute all
+round; for what right had I to come and tell you what he told me? And
+yet, there it was--I had to come. And if it was no good my coming, why,
+we needn't say anything about it ever, need we? But--but--just look
+here, Miss Boyce; if you--if you could begin over again, and make Aldous
+happy, then there'd be a good many other people happy too--I can tell
+you that."
+
+He could hardly speak plainly. Evidently there was on him an
+overmastering impulse of personal devotion, gratitude, remorse, which
+for the moment even eclipsed his young passion. It was but vaguely
+explained by anything he had said; it rested clearly on the whole of his
+afternoon's experience.
+
+But neither could Marcella speak, and her pallor began to alarm him.
+
+"I say!" he cried; "you're not angry with me?"
+
+She moved away from him, and with her shaking finger began to cut the
+pages of a book that lay open on the mantelpiece. The little mechanical
+action seemed gradually to restore her to self-control.
+
+"I don't think I can talk about it," she said at last, with an effort;
+"not now."
+
+"Oh! I know," said Frank, in penitence, looking at her black dress;
+"you've been upset, and had such a lot of trouble. But I--"
+
+She laid her hand on his shoulder. He thought he had never seen her so
+beautiful, pale as she was.
+
+"I'm not the least angry. I'll tell you so--another day. Now, are you
+going to Betty?"
+
+The young fellow sprang up, all his expression changing, answering to
+the stimulus of the word.
+
+"They'll be home directly, Miss Raeburn and Betty," he said steadily,
+buttoning his coat; "they'd gone out calling somewhere. Oh! she'll lead
+me a wretched life, will Betty, before she's done!"
+
+A charming little ghost of a smile crossed Marcella's white lips.
+
+"Probably Betty knows her business," she said; "if she's quite
+unmanageable, send her to me."
+
+In his general turmoil of spirits the boy caught her hand and kissed
+it--would have liked, indeed, to kiss her and all the world. But she
+laughed, and sent him away, and with a sly, lingering look at her he
+departed.
+
+She sank into her chair and never moved for long. The April sun was just
+sinking behind the cedars, and through the open south window of the
+library came little spring airs and scents of spring flowers. There was
+an endless twitter of birds, and beside her the soft chatter of the wood
+fire. An hour before, her mood had been at open war with the spring, and
+with all those impulses and yearnings in herself which answered to it.
+Now it seemed to her that a wonderful and buoyant life, akin to all the
+vast stir, the sweet revivals of Nature, was flooding her whole being.
+
+She gave herself up to it, in a trance interwoven with all the loveliest
+and deepest things she had ever felt--with her memory of Hallin, with
+her new gropings after God. Just as the light was going she got up
+hurriedly and went to her writing-table. She wrote a little note, sat
+over it a while, with her face hidden in her hands, then sealed,
+addressed, and stamped it. She went out herself to the hall to put it in
+the letter-box. For the rest of the evening she went about in a state of
+dream, overcome sometimes by rushes of joy, which yet had in them
+exquisite elements of pain; hungering for the passage of the hours, for
+sleep that might cancel some of them; picturing the road to the Court
+and Widrington, along which the old postman had by now carried her
+letter--the bands of moonlight and shade lying across it, the quiet of
+the budding woods, and the spot on the hillside where he had spoken to
+her in that glowing October. It must lie all night in a dull office--her
+letter; she was impatient and sorry for it. And when he got it, it would
+tell him nothing, though she thought it would rather surprise him. It
+was the merest formal request that he would, if he could, come and see
+her again the following morning on business.
+
+During the evening Mrs. Boyce lay on the sofa and read. It always still
+gave the daughter a certain shock of surprise when she saw the slight
+form resting in this way. In words Mrs. Boyce would allow nothing, and
+her calm composure had been unbroken from the moment of their return
+home, though it was not yet two months since her husband's death. In
+these days she read enormously, which again was a new trait--especially
+novels. She read each through rapidly, laid it down without a word of
+comment, and took up another. Once or twice, but very rarely, Marcella
+surprised her in absent meditation, her hand covering the page. From the
+hard, satiric brightness of her look on these occasions it seemed
+probable that she was speculating on the discrepancies between fiction
+and real life, and on the falsity of most literary sentiment.
+
+To-night Marcella sat almost silent--she was making a frock for a
+village child she had carried off from its mother, who was very ill--and
+Mrs. Boyce read. But as the clock approached ten, the time when they
+generally went upstairs, Marcella made a few uncertain movements, and
+finally got up, took a stool, and sat down beside the sofa.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later Marcella entered her own room. As she closed the door
+behind her she gave an involuntary sob, put down her light, and hurrying
+up to the bed, fell on her knees beside it and wept long. Yet her mother
+had not been unkind to her. Far from it. Mrs. Boyce had praised her--in
+few words, but with evident sincerity--for the courage that could, if
+necessary, put convention aside; had spoken of her own relief; had said
+pleasant things of Lord Maxwell; had bantered Marcella a little on her
+social schemes, and wished her the independence to stick to them.
+Finally, as they got up to go to bed, she kissed Marcella twice instead
+of once, and said:
+
+"Well, my dear, I shall not be in your way to-morrow morning; I promise
+you that."
+
+The speaker's satisfaction was plain; yet nothing could have been less
+maternal. The girl's heart, when she found herself alone, was very sore,
+and the depression of a past which had been so much of a failure, so
+lacking in any satisfied emotion and the sweet preludes of family
+affection, darkened for a while even the present and the future.
+
+After a time she got up, and leaving her room, went to sit in a passage
+outside it. It was the piece of wide upper corridor leading to the
+winding stairs she had descended on the night of the ball. It was one of
+the loneliest and oddest places in the house, for it communicated only
+with her room and the little staircase, which was hardly ever used. It
+was, indeed, a small room in itself, and was furnished with a few huge
+old chairs with moth-eaten frames and tattered seats. A flowery paper of
+last-century date sprawled over the walls, the carpet had many holes in
+it, and the shallow, traceried windows, set almost flush in the outer
+surface of the wall, were curtainless now, as they had been two years
+before.
+
+She drew one of the old chairs to a window, and softly opened it. There
+was a young moon, and many stars, seen uncertainly through the rush of
+April cloud. Every now and then a splash of rain moved the creepers and
+swept across the lawn, to be followed by a spell of growing and
+breathing silence. The scent of hyacinths and tulips mounted through the
+wet air. She could see a long ghostly line of primroses, from which rose
+the grey base of the Tudor front, checkered with a dim light and shade.
+Beyond the garden, with its vague forms of fountain and sun-dial, the
+cedars stood watching; the little church slept to her left.
+
+So, face to face with Nature, the old house, and the night, she took
+passionate counsel with herself. After to-night surely, she would be no
+more lonely! She was going for ever from her own keeping to that of
+another. For she never, from the moment she wrote her letter, had the
+smallest doubt as to what his answer to her would be; never the smallest
+dread that he would, even in the lightest passing impression, connect
+what she was going to do with any thought of blame or wonder. Her pride
+and fear were gone out of her; only, she dared not think of how he would
+look and speak when the moment came, because it made her sick and faint
+with feeling.
+
+How strange to imagine what, no doubt, would be said and thought about
+her return to him by the outside world! His great place in society, his
+wealth, would be the obvious solution of it for many--too obvious even
+to be debated. Looking back upon her thoughts of this night in after
+years, she could not remember that the practical certainty of such an
+interpretation had even given her a moment's pain. It was too remote
+from all her now familiar ways of thinking--and his. In her early Mellor
+days the enormous importance that her feverish youth attached to wealth
+and birth might have been seen in her very attacks upon them. Now all
+her standards were spiritualised. She had come to know what happiness
+and affection are possible in three rooms, or two, on twenty-eight
+shillings a week; and, on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous--a man
+of stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student's tastes, into the
+position of a great landowner--had shown her, in the case at least of
+one member of the rich class, how wealth may be a true moral burden and
+test, the source of half the difficulties and pains--of half the
+nobleness also--of a man's life. Not in mere wealth and poverty, she
+thought, but in things of quite another order--things of social sympathy
+and relation--alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions,
+by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man.
+
+Had they ever really formed a part of historical time, those eight
+months of their engagement? Looking back upon them, she saw herself
+moving about in them like a creature without eyes, worked, blindfold, by
+a crude inner mechanism that took no account really of impressions from
+without. Yet that passionate sympathy with the poor--that hatred of
+oppression? Even these seemed to her to-night the blind, spasmodic
+efforts of a mind that all through _saw_ nothing--mistook its own
+violences and self-wills for eternal right, and was but traitor to what
+should have been its own first loyalties, in seeking to save and reform.
+
+Was _true_ love now to deliver her from that sympathy, to deaden in her
+that hatred? Her whole soul cried out in denial. By daily life in
+natural relations with the poor, by a fruitful contact with fact, by the
+clash of opinion in London, by the influence of a noble friendship, by
+the education of awakening passion--what had once been mere tawdry and
+violent hearsay had passed into a true devotion, a true thirst for
+social good. She had ceased to take a system cut and dried from the
+Venturists, or any one else; she had ceased to think of whole classes
+of civilised society with abhorrence and contempt; and there had dawned
+in her that temper which is in truth implied in all the more majestic
+conceptions of the State--the temper that regards the main institutions
+of every great civilisation, whether it be property, or law, or
+religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, divine and sacred. For
+man has not been their sole artificer! Throughout there has been working
+with him "the spark that fires our clay."
+
+Yes!--but modification, progress, change, there must be, for us as for
+our fathers! Would marriage fetter her? It was not the least probable
+that he and she, with their differing temperaments, would think alike in
+the future, any more than in the past. She would always be for
+experiments, for risks, which his critical temper, his larger brain,
+would of themselves be slow to enter upon. Yet she knew well enough that
+in her hands they would become bearable and even welcome to him. And for
+himself, she thought with a craving, remorseful tenderness of that
+pessimist temper of his towards his own work and function that she knew
+so well. In old days it had merely seemed to her inadequate, if not
+hypocritical. She would have liked to drive the dart deeper, to make him
+still unhappier! Now, would not a wife's chief function be to reconcile
+him with himself and life, to cheer him forward on the lines of his own
+nature, to believe, understand, help?
+
+Yet always in the full liberty to make her own sacrifices, to realise
+her own dreamlands! She thought with mingled smiles and tears of her
+plans for this bit of earth that fate had brought under her hand; she
+pledged herself to every man, woman, and child on it so to live her life
+that each one of theirs should be the richer for it; she set out, so far
+as in her lay, to "choose equality." And beyond Mellor, in the great
+changing world of social speculation and endeavour, she prayed always
+for the open mind, the listening heart.
+
+"There is one conclusion, one cry, I always come back to at last," she
+remembered hearing Hallin say to a young Conservative with whom he had
+been having a long economic and social argument. "_Never resign
+yourself_!--that seems to be the main note of it. Say, if you
+will--believe, if you will, that human nature, being what it is, and
+what, so far as we can see, it always must be, the motives which work
+the present social and industrial system can never be largely
+superseded; that property and saving--luck, too!--struggle, success, and
+failure, must go on. That is one's intellectual conclusion; and one has
+a right to it--you and I are at one in it. But then--on the heels of it
+comes the moral imperative! 'Hold what you please about systems and
+movements, and fight for what you hold; only, as an individual--_never
+say--never think!_--that it is in the order of things, in the purpose of
+God, that one of these little ones--this Board-School child, this man
+honestly out of work, this woman "sweated" out of her life--should
+perish!' A contradiction, or a commonplace, you say? Well and good. The
+only truths that burn themselves into the conscience, that work
+themselves out through the slow and manifold processes of the personal
+will into a pattern of social improvement, are the contradictions and
+the commonplaces!"
+
+So here, in the dark, alone with the haunting, uplifting presences of
+"admiration, hope, and love," Marcella vowed, within the limits of her
+personal scope and power, never to give up the struggle for a nobler
+human fellowship, the lifelong toil to understand, the passionate effort
+to bring honour and independence and joy to those who had them not. But
+not alone; only, not alone! She had learnt something of the dark
+aspects, the crushing complexity of the world. She turned from them
+to-night, at last, with a natural human terror, to hide herself in her
+own passion, to make of love her guide and shelter. Her whole rich being
+was wrought to an intoxication of self-giving. Oh! let the night go
+faster! faster! and bring his step upon the road, her cry of repentance
+to his ear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I trust I am not late. Your clocks, I think, are ahead of ours. You
+said eleven?"
+
+Aldous advanced into the room with hand outstretched. He had been
+ushered into the drawing-room, somewhat to his surprise.
+
+Marcella came forward. She was in black as before, and pale, but there
+was a knot of pink anemones fastened at her throat, which, in the play
+they made with her face and hair, gave him a start of pleasure.
+
+"I wanted," she said, "to ask you again about those shares--how to
+manage the sale of them. Could you--could you give me the name of some
+one in the City you trust?"
+
+He was conscious of some astonishment.
+
+"Certainly," he said. "If you would rather not entrust it to Mr. French,
+I can give you the name of the firm my grandfather and I have always
+employed; or I could manage it for you if you would allow me. You have
+quite decided?"
+
+"Yes," she said mechanically,--"quite. And--and I think I could do it
+myself. Would you mind writing the address for me, and will you read
+what I have written there?"
+
+She pointed to the little writing-table and the writing materials upon
+it, then turned away to the window. He looked at her an instant with
+uneasy amazement.
+
+He walked up to the table, put down his hat and gloves beside it, and
+stooped to read what was written.
+
+_"It was in this room you told me I had done you a great wrong. But
+wrongdoers may be pardoned sometimes, if they ask it. Let me know by a
+sign, a look, if I may ask it. If not it would be kind to go away
+without a word."_
+
+She heard a cry. But she did not look up. She only knew that he had
+crossed the room, that his arms were round her, her head upon his
+breast.
+
+"Marcella!--wife!" was all he said, and that in a voice so low, so
+choked, that she could hardly hear it.
+
+He held her so for a minute or more, she weeping, his own eyes dim with
+tears, her cheek laid against the stormy beating of his heart.
+
+At last he raised her face, so that he could see it.
+
+"So this--this was what you had in your mind towards me, while I have
+been despairing--fighting with myself, walking in darkness. Oh, my
+darling! explain it. How can it be? Am I real? Is this face--these lips
+real?"--he kissed both, trembling. "Oh! when a man is raised thus--in a
+moment--from torture and hunger to full joy, there are no words--"
+
+His head sank on hers, and there was silence again, while he wrestled
+with himself.
+
+At last she looked up, smiling.
+
+"You are to please come over here," she said, and leading him by the
+hand, she took him to the other side of the room. "That is the chair you
+sat in that morning. Sit down!"
+
+He sat down, wondering, and before he could guess what she was going to
+do she had sunk on her knees beside him.
+
+"I am going to tell you," she said, "a hundred things I never told you
+before. You are to hear me confess; you are to give me penance; you are
+to say the hardest things possible to me. If you don't I shall distrust
+you."
+
+She smiled at him again through her tears. "Marcella," he cried in
+distress, trying to lift her, to rise himself, "you can't imagine that I
+should let _you_ kneel to _me_!"
+
+"You must," she said steadily; "well, if it will make you happier, I
+will take a stool and sit by you. But you are there above me--I am at
+your feet--it is the same chair, and you shall not move"--she stooped in
+a hasty passion, as though atoning for her "shall," and kissed his
+hand--"till I have said it all--every word!"
+
+So she began it--her long confession, from the earliest days. He winced
+often--she never wavered. She carried through the sharpest analysis of
+her whole mind with regard to him; of her relations to him and Wharton
+in the old days; of the disloyalty and lightness with which she had
+treated the bond, that yet she had never, till quite the end, thought
+seriously of breaking; of her selfish indifference to, even contempt
+for, his life, his interests, his ideals; of her calm forecasts of a
+married state in which she was always to take the lead and always to be
+in the right--then of the real misery and struggle of the Hurd trial.
+
+"That was my first true _experience_," she said; "it made me wild and
+hard, but it burnt, it purified. I began to live. Then came the day
+when--when we parted--the time in hospital--the nursing--the evening on
+the terrace. I had been thinking of you--because remorse made me think
+of you--solitude--Mr. Hallin--everything. I wanted you to be kind to me,
+to behave as though you had forgotten everything, because it would have
+made me comfortable and happy; or I thought it would. And then, that
+night you wouldn't be kind, you wouldn't forget--instead, you made me
+pay my penalty."
+
+She stared at him an instant, her dark brows drawn together, struggling
+to keep her tears back, yet lightening from moment to moment into a
+divine look of happiness. He tried to take possession of her, to stop
+her, to silence all this self-condemnation on his breast. But she would
+not have it; she held him away from her.
+
+"That night, though I walked up and down the terrace with Mr. Wharton
+afterwards, and tried to fancy myself in love with him--that night, for
+the first time, I began to love you! It was mean and miserable, wasn't
+it, not to be able to appreciate the gift, only to feel when it was
+taken away? It was like being good when one is punished, because one
+must--"
+
+She laid down her head against his chair with a long sigh. He could bear
+it no longer. He lifted her in his arms, talking to her passionately of
+the feelings which had been the counterpart to hers, the longings,
+jealousies, renunciations--above all, the agony of that moment at the
+Mastertons' party.
+
+"Hallin was the only person who understood," he said; "he knew all the
+time that I should love you to my grave. I could talk to him."
+
+She gave a little sob of joy, and pushing herself away from him an
+instant, she laid a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"I told him," she said--"I told him, that night he was dying."
+
+He looked at her with an emotion too deep even for caresses.
+
+"He never spoke--coherently--after you left him. At the end he motioned
+to me, but there were no words. If I could possibly love you more, it
+would be because you gave him that joy."
+
+He held her hand, and there was silence. Hallin stood beside them,
+living and present again in the life of their hearts.
+
+Then, little by little, delight and youth and love stole again upon
+their senses.
+
+"Do you suppose," he exclaimed, "that I yet understand in the least how
+it is that I am here, in this chair, with you beside me? You have told
+me much ancient history!--but all that truly concerns me this morning
+lies in the dark. The last time I saw you, you were standing at the
+garden-door, with a look which made me say to myself that I was the same
+blunderer I had always been, and had far best keep away. Bridge me the
+gap, please, between that hell and this heaven!"
+
+She held her head high, and changed her look of softness for a frown.
+
+"You had spoken of '_marriage!_'" she said. "Marriage in the abstract,
+with a big _M_. You did it in the tone of my guardian giving me away.
+Could I be expected to stand that?"
+
+He laughed. The joy in the sound almost hurt her.
+
+"So one's few virtues smite one," he said as he captured her hand again.
+"Will you acknowledge that I played my part well? I thought to myself,
+in the worst of tempers, as I drove away, that I could hardly have been
+more official. But all this is evasion. What I desire to know,
+categorically, is, what made you write that letter to me last night,
+after--after the day before?"
+
+She sat with her chin on her hand, a smile dancing.
+
+"Whom did you walk with yesterday afternoon?" she said slowly.
+
+He looked bewildered.
+
+"There!" she cried, with a sudden wild gesture; "when I have told you it
+will undo it all. Oh! if Frank had never said a word to me; if I had had
+no excuse, no assurance, nothing to go upon, had just called to you in
+the dark, as it were, there would be some generosity, some atonement in
+that! Now you will think I waited to be meanly sure, instead of--"
+
+She dropped her dark head upon his hand again with an abandonment which
+unnerved him, which he had almost to brace himself against.
+
+"So it was Frank," he said--"_Frank!_ Two hours ago, from my window, I
+saw him and Betty down by the river in the park. They were supposed to
+be fishing. As far as I could see they were sifting or walking hand in
+hand, in the face of day and the keepers. I prepared wise things to say
+to them. None of them will be said now, or listened to. As Frank's
+mentor I am undone."
+
+He held her, looking at her intently.
+
+"Shall I tell you," he asked, in a lower voice--"shall I show you
+something--something that I had on my heart as I was walking here?"
+
+He slipped his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and drew out a
+little plain black leather case. When he opened it she saw that it
+contained a pen-and-ink sketch of herself that had been done one evening
+by a young artist staying at the Court, and--a bunch of traveller's joy.
+
+She gazed at it with a mixture of happiness and pain. It reminded her of
+cold and selfish thoughts, and set them in relief against his constancy.
+But she had given away all rights--even the right to hate herself.
+Piteously, childishly, with seeking eyes, she held out her hand to him,
+as though mutely asking him for the answer to her outpouring--the last
+word of it all. He caught her whisper.
+
+"Forgive?" he said to her, scorning her for the first and only time in
+their history. "Does a man _forgive_ the hand that sets him free, the
+voice that recreates him? Choose some better word--my wife!"
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCELLA***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 13728-8.txt or 13728-8.zip *******
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Marcella, by Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Marcella
+
+Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2004  [eBook #13728]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCELLA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+MARCELLA
+
+by
+
+MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
+
+Author of _Robert Elsmere_, _The History Of David Grieve_, etc.
+
+In Two Volumes
+
+1894
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Portrait of Mary A. Ward]
+
+
+
+TO MY FATHER I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE
+
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+
+"If nature put not forth her power
+About the opening of the flower,
+Who is it that could live an hour?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"The mists--and the sun--and the first streaks of yellow in the
+beeches--beautiful!--_beautiful_!"
+
+
+And with a long breath of delight Marcella Boyce threw herself on her
+knees by the window she had just opened, and, propping her face upon her
+hands, devoured the scene, before her with that passionate intensity of
+pleasure which had been her gift and heritage through life.
+
+She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care of
+centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some Scotch
+firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow selective hand
+of time had been at work for generations, developing here the delightful
+roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there the bold caprice of bare
+fir trunks and ragged branches, standing black against the sky. Beyond
+the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye
+indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn
+onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid
+maturity, ending at last in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate
+of some importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of
+the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
+avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
+steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
+lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with
+them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity.
+Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at the same
+moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the
+avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the
+lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace
+beneath her window.
+
+"It _is_ a heavenly place, all said and done," she protested to herself
+with a little frown. "But no doubt it would have been better still if
+Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden
+decent. Still--"
+
+She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped
+themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the
+former look of glowing content--that content of youth which is never
+merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous
+eagerness.
+
+It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr. Richard
+Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the
+Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had
+received her summons home from the students' boarding-house in
+Kensington, where she had been lately living. She had ardently wished
+to assist in the June "settling-in," having not been able to apply her
+mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor
+indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their
+inheritance had reached her. But her mother in a dry little note had let
+it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself. Marcella
+had better go on with her studies as long as possible.
+
+Yet Marcella was here at last. And as she looked round her large bare
+room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods
+and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her
+childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out--atoned for by
+this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so
+deplorably!--since no one could have reasonably expected that an
+apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the
+sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted
+successfully a score of times before.
+
+Her great desire now was to put the past--the greater part of it at any
+rate--behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with,
+poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present
+position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid
+for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money,
+and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or
+fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these
+past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity
+of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible
+figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was
+Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the
+only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one
+of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a
+life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest
+possible degree of interest and novelty.
+
+Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only
+succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.
+
+For against her will, she fell straightway--in this quiet of the autumn
+morning--into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her
+present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after
+scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or
+disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the
+fine plastic face turned to the September woods.
+
+She had been at school since she was nine years old--there was the
+dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in
+her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so
+impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a
+dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a
+large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice
+of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to
+the complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical
+phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet
+adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in
+the background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory
+was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague--the image of a
+tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces
+behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to
+fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one,
+she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and
+stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.
+
+When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall
+for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed
+with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and
+tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her
+nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life
+she had been an average child of the quick and clever type, with average
+faults. But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the discipline, the
+teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff House School for
+Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for the time being,
+into a demon. She hated her lessons, though, when she chose, she could
+do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions; she
+hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold ablutions with some
+dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated the meals in the
+long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was forbidden and twice
+pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and
+scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself
+out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her own thwarted appetite as she sat
+black-browed and brooding in her place. She was not a favourite with her
+companions, and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her
+perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress. The whole of her first year
+was one continual series of sulks, quarrels, and revolts.
+
+Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed,
+when Miss Frederick, at her wit's end, would take advantage of one of
+the child's perpetual colds to try the effects of a day's seclusion and
+solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her
+charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good. "For I do believe a
+great part of it's liver or nerves! No child in her right senses could
+behave so," she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who had
+been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend and
+excuse Marcella than any one else in the house--no one exactly knew why.
+
+Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold
+was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the
+bedclothes--for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed
+you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in
+the early morning with a cup of senna-tea, and at long and regular
+intervals throughout the day with beef-tea and gruel; and that no one
+should come to see and talk with her, unless, indeed, it were the
+doctor, quiet being in all cases of sickness the first condition of
+recovery, and the natural schoolgirl in Miss Frederick's persuasion
+being more or less inclined to complain without cause if illness were
+made agreeable.
+
+For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella
+was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and
+a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the
+bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her--a pitiable morsel,
+in truth, of rather forlorn humanity. For though she had her movements
+of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing the senna-tea
+in Martha's face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown to denounce
+Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom, something
+generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or any wish
+"to be good," but only an aching, inmost sense of childish loneliness
+and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried everybody's
+patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented crises
+which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.
+
+So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to
+amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming
+awake. Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was
+always the heroine. Before the annoyance of her afternoon gruel, which
+she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full fairy-land again,
+figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess
+of Wales--of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and model of English
+society whose portrait in the window of the little stationer's shop at
+Marswell--the small country town near Cliff House--had attracted the
+child's attention once, on a dreary walk, and had ever since governed
+her dreams. Marcella had no fairy-tales, but she spun a whole cycle for
+herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long
+her own particular property. She had only to shut her eyes and she had
+caught her idol's attention--either by some look or act of passionate
+yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the
+street--or by throwing herself in front of the divinity's runaway
+horses--or by a series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative
+child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old
+family and had aristocratic relations. Then, when the Princess had held
+out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight! Marcella grew up on the
+instant: she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the
+"Boyce eyes and hair;" she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin
+with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess,
+laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land,
+her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the
+time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate
+flatteries and attentions.
+
+Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest
+summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening
+her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare
+white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper
+opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet
+stretching away on either hand. The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the
+depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of
+the Princess's maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty
+child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in
+contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party
+frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb
+day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold
+was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a
+page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom,
+at seven.
+
+Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie
+of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of
+amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily
+miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social
+difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the
+girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three
+neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal
+on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her
+establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt
+themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs
+which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like
+Marcella Boyce. Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she
+was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a
+famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of this great-uncle
+had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed
+so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the
+child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish
+eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired
+gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called
+"Grandpapa." Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory
+of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.
+There they were now--the glory and the dignity--a feverish leaven,
+driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks,
+which could lead to nothing but humiliation.
+
+"I wish my great-uncle were here! _He'd_ make you remember--you
+great--you great--big bully you!"--she shrieked on one occasion when she
+had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl--the stout
+and comely daughter of a local ironmonger--had been successfully
+asserting herself.
+
+The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.
+
+"_Your_ great-uncle! Upon my word! And who may he be, miss? If it comes
+to that, I'd like to show _my_ great-uncle David how you've scratched my
+wrist. He'd give it you. He's almost as strong as father, though he is
+so old. You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don't talk
+stuff to me."
+
+Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed
+out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her. She rushed up to the
+top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden
+niche of the wall, shaking and crying,--now planning vengeance on her
+conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own
+ill-bred and impotent folly.
+
+No--during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory
+declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday--Marcella
+sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and
+small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and
+self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly
+allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the
+top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Renier, Miss
+Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small
+sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged "the little wild-cat,"
+as the school generally dubbed the Speaker's great-niece, whenever she
+could.
+
+But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.
+Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections. In the first
+place, a taste for reading had rooted itself--reading of the adventurous
+and poetical kind. There were two or three books which Marcella had
+absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember. For at twenty-one
+people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry to have
+opinions, must skim and "turn over" books rather than read them, must
+use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind, and suffer
+occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders. But at thirteen--what
+concentration! what devotion! what joy! One of these precious volumes
+was Bulwer's "Rienzi"; another was Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs"; a
+third was a little red volume of "Marmion" which an aunt had given her.
+She probably never read any of them through--she had not a particle of
+industry or method in her composition--but she lived in them. The parts
+which it bored her to read she easily invented for herself, but the
+scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no
+gift for verse-making, but she laboriously wrote a long poem on the
+death of Rienzi, and she tried again and again with a not inapt hand to
+illustrate for herself in pen and ink the execution of Wallace.
+
+But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in
+comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.
+
+To take the adoration first. When Marcella came to Cliff House she was
+recommended by the same relation who gave her "Marmion" to the kind
+offices of the clergyman of the parish, who happened to be known to some
+of the Boyce family. He and his wife--they had no children--did their
+duty amply by the odd undisciplined child. They asked her to tea once or
+twice; they invited her to the school-treat, where she was only
+self-conscious and miserably shy; and Mr. Ellerton had at least one
+friendly and pastoral talk with Miss Frederick as to the difficulties of
+her pupil's character. For a long time little came of it. Marcella was
+hard to tame, and when she went to tea at the Rectory Mrs. Ellerton, who
+was refined and sensible, did not know what to make of her, though in
+some unaccountable way she was drawn to and interested by the child. But
+with the expansion of her thirteenth year there suddenly developed in
+Marcie's stormy breast an overmastering absorbing passion for these two
+persons. She did not show it to them much, but for herself it raised
+her to another plane of existence, gave her new objects and new
+standards. She who had hated going to church now counted time entirely
+by Sundays. To see the pulpit occupied by any other form and face than
+those of the rector was a calamity hardly to be borne; if the exit of
+the school party were delayed by any accident so that Mr. and Mrs.
+Ellerton overtook them in the churchyard, Marcella would walk home on
+air, quivering with a passionate delight, and in the dreary afternoon of
+the school Sunday she would spend her time happily in trying to write
+down the heads of Mr. Ellerton's sermon. In the natural course of things
+she would, at this time, have taken no interest in such things at all,
+but whatever had been spoken by him had grace, thrill, meaning.
+
+Nor was the week quite barren of similar delights. She was generally
+sent to practise on an old square piano in one of the top rooms. The
+window in front of her overlooked the long white drive and the distant
+high road into which it ran. Three times a week on an average Mrs.
+Ellerton's pony carriage might be expected to pass along that road.
+Every day Marcella watched for it, alive with expectation, her fingers
+strumming as they pleased. Then with the first gleam of the white pony
+in the distance, over would go the music stool, and the child leapt to
+the window, remaining fixed there, breathing quick and eagerly till the
+trees on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs.
+Ellerton. Then her moment of Paradise was over; but the afterglow of it
+lasted for the day.
+
+So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can
+know them, full of kindling charm and mystery. Her friendship had been
+of course different, but it also left deep mark. A tall, consumptive
+girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a
+clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick's, had for some time taken notice of
+Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance,
+than a remarkable gift for story-telling. She was a parlour-boarder, had
+a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold. She was
+not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food
+were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite
+maternal solicitude. When winter came she developed a troublesome cough,
+and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south
+and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up
+to her. There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a
+little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door
+opening upon it.
+
+Here Mary Lant spent week after week. Whenever lesson hours were done
+she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to
+her. She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door,
+run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof
+nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room.
+Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her
+friend, she was entirely happy. The tiny room was built on the edge of
+the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window
+commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and
+hedges, and scattered wood. Marcella, looking back upon that room,
+seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle
+boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the
+warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind,
+beating against the terrace door.
+
+But what a story-teller was Mary Lant! She was the inventor of a story
+called "John and Julia," which went on for weeks and months without ever
+producing the smallest satiety in Marcella. Unlike her books of
+adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was
+extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively
+religious author for Marcie's correction and improvement. There was in
+it a sublime hero, who set everybody's faults to rights and lectured the
+heroine. In real life Marcella would probably before long have been
+found trying to kick his shins--a mode of warfare of which in her demon
+moods she was past mistress. But as Mary Lant described him, she not
+only bore with and trembled before him--she adored him. The taste for
+him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself--a girl of a
+tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist
+faith, and already prescient of death--grew upon her. Soon her absorbing
+desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at
+practising times. For this purpose she gave herself the worst cold she
+could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to
+be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only
+threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former,
+whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and
+gave up the cough in despair. It was her first sorrow and cost her some
+days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears,
+when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother
+announced the sudden death of Mary Lant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Friendship and love are humanising things, and by her fourteenth year
+Marcella was no longer a clever little imp, but a fast-maturing and in
+some ways remarkable girl, with much of the woman in her already. She
+had begun even to feel an interest in her dress, to speculate
+occasionally on her appearance. At the fourth breaking-up party after
+her arrival at Cliff House, Marcella, who had usually figured on these
+occasions in a linsey-woolsey high to the throat, amid the frilled and
+sashed splendours of her companions, found lying on her bed, when she
+went up with the others to dress, a plain white muslin dress with blue
+ribbons. It was the gift of old Mademoiselle Renier, who affectionately
+wished her queer, neglected favourite to look well. Marcella examined it
+and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings. First of all there
+was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to
+the kindness of the French governess, whereas finery for the occasion
+had been freely sent to all the other girls from "home." She very nearly
+turned her back upon the bed and its pretty burden. But then the mere
+snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the
+burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature
+which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by
+a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness. Marcella
+wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Renier for it
+at night with an effusion, nay, some tears, which no one at Cliff House
+had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage
+and fury.
+
+A little later her father came to see her, the first and only visit he
+paid to her at school. Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a
+stranger, received him demurely, making no confidences, and took him
+over the house and gardens. When he was about to leave her a sudden
+upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she was happy and if
+she wanted anything.
+
+"Yes!" said Marcella, her large eyes gleaming; "tell mamma I want a
+'fringe.' Every other girl in the school has got one."
+
+And she pointed disdainfully to her plainly parted hair. Her father,
+astonished by her unexpected vehemence, put up his eyeglass and studied
+the child's appearance. Three days later, by her mother's permission,
+Marcella was taken to the hairdresser at Marswell by Mademoiselle
+Renier, returned in all the glories of a "fringe," and, in
+acknowledgment thereof, wrote her mother a letter which for the first
+time had something else than formal news in it.
+
+Meanwhile new destinies were preparing for her. For a variety of small
+reasons Mr. Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter
+from a distance, was not, upon personal inspection, very favourably
+struck with his daughter's surroundings. His wife remarked shortly, when
+he complained to her, that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the
+daughter of persons of their means could expect to be. But Mr. Boyce
+stuck to his point. He had just learnt that Harold, the only son of his
+widowed brother Robert, of Mellor Park, had recently developed a deadly
+disease, which might be long, but must in the end be sure. If the young
+man died and he outlived Robert, Mellor Park would be his; they would
+and must return, in spite of certain obstacles, to their natural rank in
+society, and Marcella must of course be produced as his daughter and
+heiress. When his wife repulsed him, he went to his eldest sister, an
+old maid with a small income of her own, who happened to be staying with
+them, and was the only member of his family with whom he was now on
+terms. She was struck with his remarks, which bore on family pride, a
+commodity not always to be reckoned on in the Boyces, but which she
+herself possessed in abundance; and when he paused she slowly said that
+if an ideal school of another type could be found for Marcella, she
+would be responsible for what it might cost over and above the present
+arrangement. Marcella's manners were certainly rough; it was difficult
+to say what she was learning, or with whom she was associating;
+accomplishments she appeared to have none. Something should certainly be
+done for her--considering the family contingencies. But being a strong
+evangelical, the aunt stipulated for "religious influences," and said
+she would write to a friend.
+
+The result was that a month or two later Marcella, now close on her
+fourteenth birthday, was transferred from Cliff House to the charge of a
+lady who managed a small but much-sought-after school for young ladies
+at Solesby, a watering place on the east coast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But when in the course of reminiscence Marcella found herself once more
+at Solesby, memory began to halt and wander, to choose another tone and
+method. At Solesby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of
+Cliff House, together with her own burning sense of inferiority and
+disadvantage, had troubled her no more. She was well taught there, and
+developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly
+broken in to all social proprieties. But it was not her lessons or her
+dancing masters that she remembered. She had made for herself agitations
+at Cliff House, but what were they as compared to the agitations of
+Solesby! Life there had been one long Wertherish romance in which there
+were few incidents, only feelings, which were themselves events. It
+contained humiliations and pleasures, but they had been all matters of
+spiritual relation, connected with one figure only--the figure of her
+schoolmistress, Miss Pemberton; and with one emotion only--a passion, an
+adoration, akin to that she had lavished on the Ellertons, but now much
+more expressive and mature. A tall slender woman with brown,
+grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our
+grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot
+behind--the face of a saint, an enthusiast--eyes overflowing with
+feeling above a thin firm mouth--the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet
+sweet also: this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella's
+heart. What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in
+connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself
+through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a
+figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?--for Miss
+Pemberton, who slept little and read late, never went to rest without
+softly going the rounds of her pupils' rooms. What storms of contest,
+mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions, first of
+combat, then of reconciliation to which they led! What a strange
+development on the pupil's side of a certain histrionic gift, a turn for
+imaginative intrigue, for endless small contrivances such as might rouse
+or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling! What agitated moments
+of religious talk! What golden days in the holidays, when
+long-looked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition, letters
+which were carried about and wept over till they fell to pieces under
+the stress of such a worship--what terrors and agonies of a stimulated
+conscience--what remorse for sins committed at school--what zeal to
+confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence--and what indifference
+meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home!
+
+Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart's blood
+from their very cradles! Marcella could hardly look back now, in the
+quiet of thought, to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver
+of agitation. Yet now she never saw her. It was two years since they
+parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to join a
+widowed brother. It was all over--for ever. Those precious letters had
+worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella's religious feelings; she
+was once more another being.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her
+school days? Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and
+its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of all
+that it had opened to her, and meant for her. Fresh agitations!--fresh
+passions!--but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and
+sympathies.
+
+At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it
+was apparently not convenient that she should join them. Marcella,
+looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired at
+home. No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays;
+but she suspected--nay, was certain--that there had been other and more
+permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with them a burden.
+At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave Miss Pemberton, her
+mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of late shown decided
+aptitude both for music and painting, it would be well that she should
+cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than would be possible
+at home. Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries, and was quite willing that her
+daughter should go, for a time, to a lady whose address she enclosed,
+and to whom she herself had written--a lady who received girl-students
+working at the South Kensington art classes.
+
+So began an experience, as novel as it was strenuous. Marcella soon
+developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two
+professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her
+gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and
+confident critic of the art of other people--which is much. But though
+art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it
+was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and
+motive-power of her new life--not in art, but in the birth of social and
+philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.
+
+One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London,
+both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister.
+The three were orphans. They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and
+Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so much
+living into the twenty-four hours. The two brothers, both of them
+skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all
+day, were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their
+evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist
+propaganda. They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere and
+quite unworldly. They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and the
+charities of the rich were equally odious to them. That there could be
+any "right" in private property or private wealth had become incredible
+to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from
+the existing state of London; and though one was humorous and handsome,
+the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither could discuss the
+Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked without anger.
+And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more artistic gift
+than either of them, was like unto them.
+
+Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their
+friends. She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public
+evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged. Edie,
+the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the
+books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and
+dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the
+herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall
+enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason,
+brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle,
+together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they
+flattered her with technical talk; they were full of the importance of
+women to the new doctrine and the new era.
+
+The handsome brother was certainly in love with her; the other,
+probably. Marcella was not in love with either of them, but she was
+deeply interested in all three, and for the sickly brother she felt at
+that time a profound admiration--nay, reverence--which influenced her
+vitally at a critical moment of life. "Blessed are the poor"--"Woe unto
+you, rich men"--these were the only articles of his scanty creed, but
+they were held with a fervour, and acted upon with a conviction, which
+our modern religion seldom commands. His influence made Marcella a
+rent-collector under a lady friend of his in the East End; because of
+it, she worked herself beyond her strength in a joint attempt made by
+some members of the Venturist Society to organise a Tailoresses' Union;
+and, to please him, she read articles and blue-books on Sweating and
+Overcrowding. It was all very moving and very dramatic; so, too, was the
+persuasion Marcella divined in her friends, that she was destined in
+time, with work and experience, to great things and high place in the
+movement.
+
+The wholly unexpected news of Mr. Boyce's accession to Mellor had very
+various effects upon this little band of comrades. It revived in
+Marcella ambitions, instincts and tastes wholly different from those of
+her companions, but natural to her by temperament and inheritance. The
+elder brother, Anthony Craven, always melancholy and suspicious, divined
+her immediately.
+
+"How glad you are to be done with Bohemia!" he said to her ironically
+one day, when he had just discovered her with the photographs of Mellor
+about her. "And how rapidly it works!"
+
+"What works?" she asked him angrily.
+
+"The poison of possession. And what a mean end it puts to things! A week
+ago you were all given to causes not your own; now, how long will it
+take you to think of us as 'poor fanatics!'--and to be ashamed you ever
+knew us?"
+
+"You mean to say that I am a mean hypocrite!" she cried. "Do you think
+that because I delight in--in pretty things and old associations, I must
+give up all my convictions? Shall I find no poor at Mellor--no work to
+do? It is unkind--unfair. It is the way all reform breaks down--through
+mutual distrust!"
+
+He looked at her with a cold smile in his dark, sunken eyes, and she
+turned from him indignantly.
+
+When they bade her good-bye at the station, she begged them to write to
+her.
+
+"No, no!" said Louis, the handsome younger brother. "If ever you want
+us, we are there. If you write, we will answer. But you won't need to
+think about us yet awhile. Good-bye!"
+
+And he pressed her hand with a smile.
+
+The good fellow had put all his own dreams and hopes out of sight with a
+firm hand since the arrival of her great news. Indeed, Marcella realised
+in them all that she was renounced. Louis and Edith spoke with affection
+and regret. As to Anthony, from the moment that he set eyes upon the
+maid sent to escort her to Mellor, and the first-class ticket that had
+been purchased for her, Marcella perfectly understood that she had
+become to him as an enemy.
+
+"They shall see--I will show them!" she said to herself with angry
+energy, as the train whirled her away. And her sense of their
+unwarrantable injustice kept her tense and silent till she was roused to
+a childish and passionate pleasure by a first sight of the wide lawns
+and time-stained front of Mellor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of such elements, such memories of persons, things, and events, was
+Marcella's reverie by the window made up. One thing, however, which,
+clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of
+energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her
+musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and
+loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of
+many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations
+all through--and were not the great passion of her Solesby days,
+together with the interest and novelty of her London experience, enough
+to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect? Ah! but it will be
+observed that in this sketch of Marcella's schooldays nothing has been
+said of Marcella's holidays. In this omission the narrative has but
+followed the hasty, half-conscious gaps and slurs of the girl's own
+thought. For Marcella never thought of those holidays and all that was
+connected with them _in detail_, if she could possibly avoid it. But it
+was with them, in truth, and with what they implied, that she was so
+irritably anxious to be done when she first began to be reflective by
+the window; and it was to them she returned with vague, but still
+intense consciousness when the rush of active reminiscence died away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That surely was the breakfast bell ringing, and with the dignified
+ancestral sound which was still so novel and attractive to Marcella's
+ear. Recalled to Mellor Park and its circumstances, she went
+thoughtfully downstairs, pondering a little on the shallow steps of the
+beautiful Jacobean staircase. _Could_ she ever turn her back upon those
+holidays? Was she not rather, so to speak, just embarked upon their
+sequel, or second volume?
+
+But let us go downstairs also.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part of
+the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the house
+in the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. The
+decorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed by
+their eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at any
+rate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the worn
+and discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, and
+petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760,
+besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed on
+them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately
+carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a
+miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian
+carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely
+Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the
+purposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, which
+disturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, and
+its modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one.
+Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of her
+tall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till
+now, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.
+
+Her father and mother were already at table, together with Mrs. Boyce's
+brown spaniel Lynn.
+
+Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn and
+greasy livery coat, who represented the men-service of the
+establishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of her
+eyebrows, and the twitching of her thin lips, it was plain to Marcella
+that her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behaving
+foolishly.
+
+"There, for goodness' sake, cut some bread on the sideboard," said the
+angry master, "and hand it round instead of staring about you like a
+stuck pig. What they taught you at Sir William Jute's I can't conceive.
+_I_ didn't undertake to make a man-servant of you, sir."
+
+The pale, harassed lad flew at the bread, cut it with a vast scattering
+of crumbs, handed it clumsily round, and then took glad advantage of a
+short supply of coffee to bolt from the room to order more.
+
+"Idiot!" said Mr. Boyce, with an angry frown, as he disappeared.
+
+"If you would allow Ann to do her proper parlour work again," said his
+wife blandly, "you would, I think, be less annoyed. And as I believe
+William was boot boy at the Jutes', it is not surprising that he did not
+learn waiting."
+
+"I tell you, Evelyn, that our position _demands_ a man-servant!" was the
+hot reply. "None of my family have ever attempted to run this house with
+women only. It would be unseemly--unfitting--incon--"
+
+"Oh, I am no judge of course of what a Boyce may do!" said his wife
+carelessly. "I leave that to you and the neighbourhood."
+
+Mr. Boyce looked uncomfortable, cooled down, and presently when the
+coffee came back asked his wife for a fresh supply in tones from which
+all bellicosity had for the time departed. He was a small and singularly
+thin man, with blue wandering eyes under the blackest possible eyebrows
+and hair. The cheeks were hollow, the complexion as yellow as that of
+the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden
+by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between
+irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were
+as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and
+self-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce,
+of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect with
+the pride of old family; his dress was careful and correct to the last
+detail; and his hands with their long fingers were of an excessive
+delicacy, though marred as to beauty by a thinness which nearly amounted
+to emaciation.
+
+"The servants say they must leave unless the ghost does, Marcella," said
+Mrs. Boyce, suddenly, laying a morsel of toast as she spoke on Lynn's
+nose. "Someone from the village of course has been talking--the cook
+says she heard _something_ last night, though she will not condescend to
+particulars--and in general it seems to me that you and I may be left
+before long to do the house work."
+
+"What do they say in the village?" asked Marcella eagerly.
+
+"Oh! they say there was a Boyce two hundred years ago who fled down
+here from London after doing something he shouldn't--I really forget
+what. The sheriff's officers were advancing on the house. Their approach
+displeased him, and he put an end to himself at the head of the little
+staircase leading from the tapestry-room down to my sitting-room. Why
+did he choose the _staircase_?" said Mrs. Boyce with light
+reflectiveness.
+
+"It won't do," said Marcella, shaking her head. "I know the Boyce they
+mean. He was a ruffian, but he shot himself in London; and, any way, he
+was dead long before that staircase was built."
+
+"Dear me, how well up you are!" said her mother. "Suppose you give a
+little lecture on the family in the servants' hall. Though I never knew
+a ghost yet that was undone by dates."
+
+There was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply with
+Marcella's amused but sympathetic interest. _Detachment_ was perhaps the
+characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner,--a curious separateness, as
+it were, from all the things and human beings immediately about her.
+
+Marcella pondered.
+
+"I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently. "He will
+have heard them in the village. I am going to the church this morning."
+
+Her mother looked at her--a look of quiet examination--and smiled. The
+Lady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already assumed during the six
+weeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly.
+
+"Harden!" said Mr. Boyce, catching the name. "I wish that man would
+leave me alone. What have I got to do with a water-supply for the
+village? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a water-tight
+roof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert has
+behaved."
+
+Marcella's cheek flushed.
+
+"The village water-supply is a _disgrace_," she said with low emphasis.
+"I never saw such a crew of unhealthy, wretched-looking children in my
+life as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought to
+look after them. I believe you could be _forced_ to do something,
+papa--if the local authority were of any use."
+
+She looked at him defiantly.
+
+"Nonsense," said Mr. Boyce testily. "They got along in your Uncle
+Robert's days, and they can get along now. Charity, indeed! Why, the
+state of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, I
+should think, to take a man's mind. Don't you go talking to Mr. Harden
+in the way you do, Marcella. I don't like it, and I won't have it. You
+have the interests of your family and your home to think of first."
+
+"Poor starved things!" said Marcella sarcastically--"living in such a
+_den_!"
+
+And she swept her white hand round, as though calling to witness the
+room in which they sat.
+
+"I tell you," said Mr. Boyce, rising and standing before the fire,
+whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth so
+little known to him, and whose nature and aims during the close contact
+of the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity and
+disturbance to him,--"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all,
+must be to keep up the family position!--_our_ position. Look at that
+library, and its condition; look at the state of these wall-papers; look
+at the garden; look at the estate books if it comes to that. Why, it
+will be years before, even with all my knowledge of affairs, I can pull
+the thing through--years!"
+
+Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough--she had pushed back her chair, and was
+alternately studying her husband and daughter. They might have been
+actors performing for her amusement. And yet, amusement is not precisely
+the word. For that hazel eye, with its frequent smile, had not a spark
+of geniality. After a time those about her found something scathing in
+its dry light.
+
+Now, as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him, his
+look wavered, and his mood collapsed. He threw her a curious furtive
+glance, and fell silent.
+
+"I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London Socialist
+friends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the pause that
+followed. "You have, I see, taken a great liking for them."
+
+"Oh! well--I don't know," said Marcella, with a shrug, and something of
+a proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very kind--but--he doesn't seem to
+have thought much about things."
+
+She never talked about her London friends to her mother, if she could
+help it. The sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they
+could. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was constantly her
+mother's victim, do what she would. But in her quiet moments she stood
+on the defensive.
+
+"So the Socialists are the only people who think?" said Mrs. Boyce, who
+was now standing by the window, pressing her dog's head against her
+dress as he pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens.
+They tell me they give all their substance away--already--and every one
+says it is going to be a particularly bad winter. The living, I hear, is
+worth nothing. All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful.
+It is the first duty of martyrs."
+
+Marcella looked at her mother indignantly. It seemed to her often that
+she said the most heartless things imaginable.
+
+"Cheerful!" she said--"in a village like this--with all the young men
+drifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters--no one
+to stand by him--no money and no helpers--the people always ill--wages
+eleven and twelve shillings a week--and only the old wrecks of men left
+to do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in _this_ house to
+back him up a little. All he asks is that papa should go and satisfy
+himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and
+Lord Maxwell's--"
+
+"Lord Maxwell's!" cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state of
+half-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away his
+cigarette--"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousand
+a year, if he has a penny. By the way, I wish he would just have the
+civility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!"
+
+He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the
+footman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and a
+note.
+
+"The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?"
+
+"Well, that's odd!" said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening. "Here _is_
+Lord Maxwell's answer, just as I was talking of it."
+
+His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, a
+strange expectancy in her whole attitude. He tore it open, read it, and
+then threw it angrily under the grate.
+
+"No answer. Shut the door." The lad retreated. Mr. Boyce sat down and
+began carefully to put the fire together. His thin left hand shook upon
+his knee.
+
+There was a moment's pause of complete silence. Mrs. Boyce's face might
+have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she
+stood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in her
+sweeping black. But she said not a word, and presently left the room.
+
+Marcella watched her father.
+
+"Papa--_was_ that a note from Lord Maxwell?"
+
+Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any one
+was still there. It struck Marcella that he looked yellow and
+shrunken--years older than her mother. An impulse of tenderness, joined
+with anger and a sudden sick depression--she was conscious of them all
+as she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out. Her
+parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; but
+her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes
+the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might
+have had. She had no habitual deference to break through, and the
+hindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strong
+than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year
+by year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing
+at them, as was now so often the case with her.
+
+"Papa, is Lord Maxwell's note an uncivil one?"
+
+Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over the
+blaze.
+
+"Why, that man's only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket
+together from morning till night when we were boys. Henry Raeburn was a
+bit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first
+rabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the
+two estates join. After that we were always companions--we used to go
+out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow
+watching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the inner
+hall door, in the Windmill Hill fields--at least I did--I was a better
+shot than he by that time. He didn't like Robert--he always wanted me."
+
+"Well, papa, but what does he say?" asked Marcella, impatiently. She
+laid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father's shoulder.
+
+Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her. He and her mother had originally
+sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily
+worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming
+to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her. But the sight
+of her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanly
+compassion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.
+
+"He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refers
+me to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who had
+just bought the place. Oh, it is quite evident what he means. They were
+here without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeks
+at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a
+card nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the
+Levens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I did
+think--I was fool enough to think--that when I came back to the old
+place, my father's old friends would let bygones be bygones. I never did
+_them_ any harm. Let them 'gang their gait,' confound them!"--the little
+dark man straightened himself fiercely--"I can get my pleasure out of
+the land; and as for your mother, she'd not lift a finger to propitiate
+one of them!"
+
+In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic
+pride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.
+
+Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither with
+lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks--now
+over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second
+volume beginning--the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories
+of shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?
+
+"What was it you wanted about those coverts, papa?" she asked presently,
+with a quick decision.
+
+"What the deuce does it matter? If you want to know, I proposed to him
+to exchange my coverts over by the Scrubs, which work in with his
+shooting, for the wood down by the Home Farm. It was an exchange made
+year after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found
+it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack and
+ruin after Harold's death. It gave me something to write about, and I
+was determined to know where I stood--Well! the old Pharisee can go his
+way: I'll go mine."
+
+And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his native
+heath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height,
+and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns--a picturesque and
+elegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.
+
+"I shall ask Mr. Aldous Raeburn about it, if I see him in the village
+to-day," said Marcella, quietly.
+
+Her father started, and looked at her with some attention.
+
+"What have you seen of Aldous Raeburn?" he inquired. "I remember hearing
+that you had come across him."
+
+"Certainly I have come across him. I have met him once or twice at the
+Vicarage--and--oh! on one or two other occasions," said Marcella,
+carelessly. "He has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says his
+grandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away from
+home. He does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now: writes for him, and
+helps to manage the estate; and next year, when the Tories come back and
+Lord Maxwell is in office again--"
+
+"Why, of course, there'll be plums for the grandson," said Mr. Boyce
+with a sneer. "That goes without saying--though we are such a virtuous
+lot."
+
+"Oh yes, he'll get on--everybody says so. And he'll deserve it too!" she
+added, her eye kindling combatively as she surveyed her father. "He
+takes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board of
+guardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very much, but he is not
+exactly popular, according to them. His manners are sometimes shy and
+awkward, and the poor people think he's proud."
+
+"Ah! a prig I dare say--like some of his uncles before him," said Mr.
+Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, you say?"
+
+And again he turned a quick considering eye on his daughter.
+
+"Oh dear! yes," said Marcella, with a little proud smile. There was a
+pause; then she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardens
+have hard work just now with the harvest festival, and I promised to
+take them some flowers."
+
+"Well"--said her father, grudgingly, "so long as you don't promise
+anything on my account! I tell you, I haven't got sixpence to spend on
+subscriptions to anything or anybody. By the way, if you see Reynolds
+anywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are going
+round the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what the
+coverts look like. The stock has all run down, and the place has been
+poached to death. But he thinks if we take on an extra man in the
+spring, and spend a little on rearing, we shall do pretty decently next
+year."
+
+The colour leapt to Marcella's cheek as she tied on her hat.
+
+"You will set up another keeper, and you won't do anything for the
+village?" she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another word
+she opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace,
+leaving her father both angered and amazed.
+
+A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a
+good deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhood
+are expected to join. His wife had long since consented to play the
+game, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no
+dupe. As to what Marcella's part in the affair might be going to be, her
+father was as yet uneasily in the dark. What constantly astonished him,
+as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl's beauty. Surely she
+had been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not only
+beauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by the
+possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was very
+accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a
+father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by
+misfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would have
+lovers--friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell
+was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the
+daughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie,
+wherein the Raeburns' behaviour and Marcella's unexpected gifts played
+about equal parts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the most
+adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey,
+mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "garden
+front," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny
+and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers
+grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though
+conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeed
+wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it;
+the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of two
+gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases,
+and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.
+
+As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by
+the ragged charm of the old place.
+
+On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for
+beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if
+house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the
+neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply,
+shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,--in short, the general
+self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,--where would have been
+that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely,
+which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend
+even upon _her_, the latest born of all its children--to ask for
+tendance and cherishing even from _her_. She was always planning
+how--with a minimum of money to spend--it could be comforted and healed,
+and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though
+she had been bred there.
+
+But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and
+depression of spirit. What _was_ this past which in these new
+surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?
+She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the
+truth. Yet, of whom? Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to
+any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her
+power. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tell
+me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you."
+All the same, it _was_ due to them all, due to herself especially, now
+that she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in the
+dark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of the
+facts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, as
+untowardly in their, in _her_ way, as they had done in the shabby school
+and lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.
+
+Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and could
+not, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to be
+insurmountable. Her instinct told her as she looked back that their
+relation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts and
+humiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts. Their poverty and
+the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the
+disrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends of
+their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool
+distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget the
+existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, and
+laid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of the
+world. Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw no
+personal advantage and distinction in the Boyces' acquaintance, but
+rather the contrary.
+
+As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that the
+breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or
+his oldest friends. A little shiver passed through her as she reflected
+that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the
+feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be
+strongest. Well, it _was_ hard upon them!--hard upon her mother--hard
+upon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the
+dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these
+things! And there they were all the time--dogging and thwarting.
+
+She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel
+path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little
+church. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the
+Park, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, of
+the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south
+sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been
+already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit
+of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.
+
+It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble
+graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any
+rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various
+styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the
+name of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in
+the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who
+fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field,
+lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his
+later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then
+with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful
+idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family
+of any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal,
+upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, on
+the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had
+given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the
+making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the
+terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried
+on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate
+justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them
+intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's
+education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections--a
+tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but
+on the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, and
+still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.
+
+Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--a
+break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a
+moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into
+brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of
+poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went
+abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend of
+Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever
+doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the
+leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly
+acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an
+Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home
+to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its
+fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted,
+pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected
+whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined
+names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks
+mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.
+
+The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle life
+she died--much loved and passionately mourned. Her tomb bore no
+long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace--for
+she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for
+it--the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's
+_Vita Nuova_.
+
+The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her
+music-books survived,--a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but
+the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own
+physique and her father's were to be traced to its original, as well, no
+doubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both--aptitudes not hitherto
+conspicuous in her respectable race.
+
+In reality, however, she loved every one of them--these Jacobean and
+Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood in
+the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled
+heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable
+pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great
+lifting wave. The depression of her father's repentances and
+trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter
+of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their
+guild of honour.
+
+There were difficulties in her path, no doubt--but she had her
+vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others.
+_She_ had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed
+individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and
+wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two
+years had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knew
+perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age
+could never venture--that she had fascination, resource, brain.
+
+Already, in these few weeks--Smiles played about her lips as she thought
+of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the
+Hardens'. His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alter
+the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one
+of the _partis_ most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the
+neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce's
+daughter--all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which
+it had to contend.
+
+No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and
+her parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman's
+charm, a woman's energy should do it all.
+
+Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, her
+mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust.
+Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--of
+mission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her was
+the Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched
+bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when
+it came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought
+face to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism,
+but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and
+upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had
+worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their
+generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the
+workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive,
+resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy
+misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid
+unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse,
+or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanched
+and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of
+insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food--these figures and
+types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. In
+London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been
+to her as a pawn in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh;
+and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk about
+him. Under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was very
+clear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, and had always depended,
+the labourer of Mellor.
+
+Well, she had tried to live with them ever since she came--had gone in
+and out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and their
+lives and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by their
+cringing; now enjoying her position among them with the natural
+aristocratic instinct of women, now grinding her teeth over her father's
+and uncle's behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doing
+for her new subjects.
+
+What, _their_ friend and champion, and ultimately their redeemer too?
+Well, and why not? Weak women have done greater things in the world. As
+she stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, she
+was conscious of a dramatic moment--would not have been sorry,
+perhaps, if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her.
+
+But there was a saving sincerity at the root of her, and her strained
+mood sank naturally into a girlish excitement.
+
+"We shall see!--We shall see!" she said aloud, and was startled to hear
+her words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she stooped
+to separate her flowers and see what quantities she had of each.
+
+But while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herself
+again. She walked down the church and stood at the open south door,
+looking and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leading
+across the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were coming
+along it towards the church, both flower-laden, and beside walked a tall
+man in a brown shooting suit, with his gun in his hand and his dog
+beside him.
+
+The excitement in Marcella's eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as she
+saw the group, and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow. She
+waited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signals
+of the vicar's sister; but inwardly she was not quiet at all. For the
+tall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Raeburn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+"How kind of you!" said the rector's sister, enthusiastically; "but I
+thought you would come and help us."
+
+And as Marcella took some of her burdens from her, Miss Harden kissed
+Marcella's cheek with a sort of timid eagerness. She had fallen in love
+with Miss Boyce from the beginning, was now just advanced to this
+privilege of kissing, and being entirely convinced that her new friend
+possessed all virtues and all knowledge, found it not difficult to hold
+that she had been divinely sent to sustain her brother and herself in
+the disheartening task of civilising Mellor. Mary Harden was naturally a
+short, roundly made girl, neither pretty nor plain, with grey-blue eyes,
+a shy manner, and a heart all goodness. Her brother was like unto
+her--also short, round, and full-faced, with the same attractive eyes.
+Both were singularly young in aspect--a boy and girl pair. Both had the
+worn, pinched look which Mrs. Boyce complained of, and which, indeed,
+went oddly with their whole physique. It was as though creatures built
+for a normal life of easy give and take with their fellows had fallen
+upon some unfitting and jarring experience. One striking difference,
+indeed, there was between them, for amid the brother's timidity and
+sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of
+the priest--nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic.
+
+Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure
+at the sight of Marcella Boyce. Aldous Raeburn was clearly embarrassed
+thereby. Indeed, as he laid down his gun outside the low churchyard
+wall, while Marcella and the Hardens were greeting, that generally
+self-possessed though modest person was conscious of a quite disabling
+perturbation of mind. Why in the name of all good manners and decency
+had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting trim, on that
+particular morning, by Mr. Boyce's daughter on her father's land, and
+within a stone's throw of her father's house? Was he not perfectly well
+aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning despatched
+to the new owner of Mellor? Had he not ineffectually tried to delay
+execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his
+grandfather? Had not the incident weighed on him ever since, wounding an
+admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the
+dark, during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce's
+acquaintance, so strong and startling did he all in a moment feel them
+to be?
+
+And then to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer
+moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public
+property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male
+to help her. But why in this neighbourhood at all?--why not rather on
+the other side of the county? He could have scourged himself on the
+spot for an unpardonable breach of manners and feeling.
+
+However, Miss Boyce certainly made no sign. She received him without any
+_empressement_, but also without the smallest symptom of offence. They
+all moved into the church together, Mr. Raeburn carrying a vast bundle
+of ivy and fern, the rector and his sister laden with closely-packed
+baskets of cut flowers. Everything was laid down on the chancel steps
+beside Marcella's contribution, and then the Hardens began to plan out
+operations. Miss Harden ran over on her fingers the contributions which
+had been sent in to the rectory, or were presently coming over to the
+church in a hand-cart. "Lord Maxwell has sent the most _beautiful_ pots
+for the chancel," she said, with a grateful look at young Raeburn. "It
+will be quite a show." To which the young rector assented warmly. It was
+very good, indeed, of Lord Maxwell to remember them always so liberally
+at times like these, when they had so little direct claim upon him. They
+were not his church or his parish, but he never forgot them all the
+same, and Mellor was grateful. The rector had all his sister's gentle
+effusiveness, but a professional dignity besides, even in his thanks,
+which made itself felt.
+
+Marcella flushed as he was speaking.
+
+"I went to see what I could get in the way of greenhouse things," she
+said in a sudden proud voice. "But we have nothing. There are the
+houses, but there is nothing in them. But you shall have all our
+out-of-door flowers, and I think a good deal might be done with autumn
+leaves and wild things if you will let me try."
+
+A speech, which brought a flush to Mr. Raeburn's cheek as he stood in
+the background, and led Mary Harden into an eager asking of Marcella's
+counsels, and an eager praising of her flowers.
+
+Aldous Raeburn said nothing, but his discomfort increased with every
+moment. Why had his grandfather been so officious in this matter of the
+flowers? All very well when Mellor was empty, or in the days of a miser
+and eccentric, without womankind, like Robert Boyce. But now--the act
+began to seem to him offensive, a fresh affront offered to an
+unprotected girl, whose quivering sensitive look as she stood talking to
+the Hardens touched him profoundly. Mellor church might almost be
+regarded as the Boyces' private chapel, so bound up was it with the
+family and the house. He realised painfully that he ought to be
+gone--yet could not tear himself away. Her passionate willingness to
+spend herself for the place and people she had made her own at first
+sight, checked every now and then by a proud and sore reserve--it was
+too pretty, too sad. It stung and spurred him as he watched her; one
+moment his foot moved for departure, the next he was resolving that
+somehow or other he must make speech with her--excuse--explain.
+Ridiculous! How was it possible that he should do either!
+
+He had met her--perhaps had tried to meet her--tolerably often since
+their first chance encounter weeks ago in the vicarage drawing-room. All
+through there had been on his side the uncomfortable knowledge of his
+grandfather's antipathy to Richard Boyce, and of the social steps to
+which that antipathy would inevitably lead. But Miss Boyce had never
+shown the smallest consciousness, so far, of anything untoward or
+unusual in her position. She had been clearly taken up with the interest
+and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered. The old
+house, its associations, its history, the beautiful country in which it
+lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with
+that of the town,--he had heard her talk of all these things with a
+freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no
+doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention.
+The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical
+discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The
+girl's vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special
+fulness of life. So that in his new preoccupation with herself, and by
+contact with her frank self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her
+position, and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that
+unlucky note from Mellor; his grandfather's prompt reply to it; his own
+ineffective protest; and now this tongue-tiedness--this clumsy
+intrusion--which she must feel to be an indelicacy--an outrage.
+
+Suddenly he heard Miss Harden saying, with penitent emphasis, "I _am_
+stupid! I have left the scissors and the wire on the table at home; we
+can't get on without them; it is really too bad of me."
+
+"I will go for them," said Marcella promptly. "Here is the hand-cart
+just arrived and some people come to help; you can't be spared. I will
+be back directly."
+
+And, gathering up her black skirt in a slim white hand, she sped down
+the church, and was out of the south door before the Hardens had time to
+protest, or Aldous Raeburn understood what she was doing.
+
+A vexed word from Miss Harden enlightened him, and he went after the
+fugitive, overtaking her just where his gun and dog lay, outside the
+churchyard.
+
+"Let me go, Miss Boyce," he said, as he caught her up. "My dog and I
+will run there and back."
+
+But Marcella hardly looked at him, or paused.
+
+"Oh no!" she said quickly, "I should like the walk."
+
+He hesitated; then, with a flush which altered his usually quiet,
+self-contained expression, he moved on beside her.
+
+"Allow me to go with you then. You are sure to find fresh loads to bring
+back. If it's like our harvest festival, the things keep dropping in all
+day."
+
+Marcella's eyes were still on the ground.
+
+"I thought you were on your way to shoot, Mr. Raeburn?"
+
+"So I was, but there is no hurry; if I can be useful. Both the birds and
+the keeper can wait."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To some outlying fields of ours on the Windmill Hill. There is a tenant
+there who wants to see me. He is a prosy person with a host of
+grievances. I took my gun as a possible means of escape from him."
+
+"Windmill Hill? I know the name. Oh! I remember: it was there--my father
+has just been telling me--that your father and he shot the pair of
+kestrels, when they were boys together."
+
+Her tone was quite light, but somehow it had an accent, an emphasis,
+which made Aldous Raeburn supremely uncomfortable. In his disquiet, he
+thought of various things to say; but he was not ready, nor naturally
+effusive; the turn of them did not please him; and he remained silent.
+
+Meantime Marcella's heart was beating fast. She was meditating a _coup_.
+
+"Mr. Raeburn!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Will you think me a very extraordinary person if I ask you a question?
+Your father and mine were great friends, weren't they, as boys?--your
+family and mine were friends, altogether?"
+
+"I believe so--I have always heard so," said her companion, flushing
+still redder.
+
+"You knew Uncle Robert--Lord Maxwell did?"
+
+"Yes--as much as anybody knew him--but--"
+
+"Oh, I know: he shut himself up and hated his neighbours. Still you knew
+him, and papa and your father were boys together. Well then, if you
+won't mind telling me--I know it's bold to ask, but I have reasons--why
+does Lord Maxwell write to papa in the third person, and why has your
+aunt, Miss Raeburn, never found time in all these weeks to call on
+mamma?"
+
+She turned and faced him, her splendid eyes one challenge. The glow and
+fire of the whole gesture--the daring of it, and yet the suggestion of
+womanish weakness in the hand which trembled against her dress and in
+the twitching lip--if it had been fine acting, it could not have been
+more complete. And, in a sense, acting there was in it. Marcella's
+emotions were real, but her mind seldom deserted her. One half of her
+was impulsive and passionate; the other half looked on and put in
+finishing touches.
+
+Acting or no, the surprise of her outburst swept the man beside her off
+his feet. He found himself floundering in a sea of excuses--not for his
+relations, but for himself. He ought never to have intruded; it was
+odious, unpardonable; he had no business whatever to put himself in her
+way! Would she please understand that it was an accident? It should not
+happen again. He quite understood that she could not regard him with
+friendliness. And so on. He had never so lost his self-possession.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella's brows contracted. She took his excuses as a fresh
+offence.
+
+"You mean, I suppose, that I have no right to ask such questions!" she
+cried; "that I am not behaving like a lady--as one of your relations
+would? Well, I dare say! I was not brought up like that. I was not
+brought up at all; I have had to make myself. So you must avoid me if
+you like. Of course you will. But I resolved there--in the church--that
+I would make just one effort, before everything crystallises, to break
+through. If we must live on here hating our neighbours and being cut by
+them, I thought I would just ask you why, first. There is no one else to
+ask. Hardly anybody has called, except the Hardens, and a few new people
+that don't matter. And _I_ have nothing to be ashamed of," said the girl
+passionately, "nor has mamma. Papa, I suppose, did some bad things long
+ago. I have never known--I don't know now--what they were. But I should
+like to understand. Is everybody going to cut us because of that?"
+
+With a great effort Aldous Raeburn pulled himself together, certain fine
+instincts both of race and conduct coming to his help. He met her
+excited look by one which had both dignity and friendliness.
+
+"I will tell you what I can, Miss Boyce. If you ask me, it is right I
+should. You must forgive me if I say anything that hurts you. I will try
+not--I will try not!" he repeated earnestly. "In the first place, I know
+hardly anything in detail. I do not remember that I have ever wished to
+know. But I gather that some years ago--when I was still a
+lad--something in Mr. Boyce's life--some financial matters, I
+believe--during the time that he was member of Parliament, made a
+scandal, and especially among his family and old friends. It was the
+effect upon his old father, I think, who, as you know, died soon
+afterwards--"
+
+Marcella started.
+
+"I didn't know," she said quickly.
+
+Aldous Raeburn's distress grew.
+
+"I really oughtn't to speak of these things," he said, "for I don't know
+them accurately. But I want to answer what you said--I do indeed. It was
+that, I think, chiefly. Everybody here respected and loved your
+grandfather--my grandfather did--and there was great feeling for him--"
+
+"I see! I see!" said Marcella, her chest heaving; "and against papa."
+
+She walked on quickly, hardly seeing where she was going, her eyes dim
+with tears. There was a wretched pause. Then Aldous Raeburn broke out--
+
+"But after all it is very long ago. And there may have been some harsh
+judgment. My grandfather may have been misinformed as to some of the
+facts. And I--"
+
+He hesitated, struck with the awkwardness of what he was going to say.
+But Marcella understood him.
+
+"And you will try and make him alter his mind?" she said, not
+ungratefully, but still with a touch of sarcasm in her tone. "No, Mr.
+Raeburn, I don't think that will succeed."
+
+They walked on in silence for a little while. At last he said, turning
+upon her a face in which she could not but see the true feeling of a
+just and kindly man--
+
+"I meant that if my grandfather could be led to express himself in a way
+which Mr. Boyce could accept, even if there were no great friendship as
+there used to be, there might be something better than this--this,
+which--which--is so painful. And any way, Miss Boyce, whatever happens,
+will you let me say this once, that there is no word, no feeling in this
+neighbourhood--how could there be?--towards you and your mother, but one
+of respect and admiration? Do believe that, even if you feel that you
+can never be friendly towards me and mine again--or forget the things I
+have said!"
+
+"Respect and admiration!" said Marcella, wondering, and still scornful.
+"Pity, perhaps. There might be that. But any way mamma goes with papa.
+She always has done. She always will. So shall I, of course. But I am
+sorry--_horribly_ sore and sorry! I was so delighted to come here. I
+have been very little at home, and understood hardly anything about
+this worry--not how serious it was, nor what it meant. Oh! I _am_
+sorry--there was so much I wanted to do here--if anybody could only
+understand what it means to me to come to this place!"
+
+They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them,
+beyond a stubble field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners,
+lay the small scattered Tillage, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls
+of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning
+against a great belt of distant beechwood which begirt the hamlet and
+the common along which it lay. The stubble field was a feast of shade
+and tint, of apricots and golds shot with the subtlest purples and
+browns; the flame of the wild-cherry leaf and the deeper crimson of the
+haws made every hedge a wonder; the apples gleamed in the cottage
+garden; and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the
+half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers
+which made the village.
+
+Instinctively both stopped. Marcella locked her hands behind her in a
+gesture familiar to her in moments of excitement; the light wind blew
+back her dress in soft, eddying folds; for the moment, in her tall
+grace, she had the air of some young Victory poised upon a height, till
+you looked at her face, which was, indeed, not exultant at all, but
+tragic, extravagantly tragic, as Aldous Raeburn, in his English reserve,
+would perhaps have thought in the case of any woman with tamer eyes and
+a less winning mouth.
+
+"I don't want to talk about myself," she began. "But you know, Mr.
+Raeburn--you must know--what a state of things there is here--you know
+what a _disgrace_ that village is. Oh! one reads books, but I never
+thought people could actually _live_ like that--here in the wide
+country, with room for all. It makes me lie awake at night. We are not
+rich--we are very poor--the house is all out of repair, and the estate,
+as of course you know, is in a wretched condition. But when I see these
+cottages, and the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to
+anything we get. I had some friends in London who were Socialists, and I
+followed and agreed with them, but here one _sees_! Yes, indeed!--it
+_is_ too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives
+depend upon him. Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser; and look at
+the death-rate of the village--look at the children; you can see how it
+has crushed the Hardens already. No, we have no right to it!--it ought
+to be taken from us; some day it will be taken from us!"
+
+Aldous Raeburn smiled, and was himself again. A woman's speculations
+were easier to deal with than a woman's distress.
+
+"It is not so hopeless as that, I think," he said kindly. "The Mellor
+cottages are in a bad state certainly. But you have no idea how soon a
+little energy and money and thought sets things to rights."
+
+"But we have no money!" cried Marcella. "And if he is miserable here, my
+father will have no energy to do anything. He will not care what
+happens. He will defy everybody, and just spend what he has on himself.
+And it will make me wretched--_wretched_. Look at that cottage to the
+right, Mr. Raeburn. It is Jim Hurd's--a man who works mainly on the
+Church Farm, when he is in work. But he is deformed, and not so strong
+as others. The farmers too seem to be cutting down labour everywhere--of
+course I don't understand--I am so new to it. Hurd and his family had an
+_awful_ winter, last winter--hardly kept body and soul together. And now
+he is out of work already--the man at the Church Farm turned him off
+directly after harvest. He sees no prospect of getting work by the
+winter. He spends his days tramping to look for it; but nothing turns
+up. Last winter they parted with all they could sell. This winter it
+must be the workhouse! It's _heart-breaking_. And he has a mind; he can
+_feel_! I lend him the Labour paper I take in, and get him to talk. He
+has more education than most, and oh! the _bitterness_ at the bottom of
+him. But not against persons--individuals. It is like a sort of blind
+patience when you come to that--they make excuses even for Uncle Robert,
+to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a
+crime--yes, a _crime_! The woman must have been such a pretty
+creature--and refined too. She is consumptive, of course--what else
+could you expect with that cottage and that food? So is the eldest
+boy--a little white atomy! And the other children. Talk of London--I
+never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village. Twelve
+shillings a week, and work about half the year! Oh! they _ought_ to hate
+us!--I try to make them," cried Marcella, her eyes gleaming. "They ought
+to hate all of us landowners, and the whole wicked system. It keeps them
+from the land which they ought to be sharing with us; it makes one man
+master, instead of all men brothers. And who is fit to be master? Which
+of us? Everybody is so ready to take the charge of other people's lives,
+and then look at the result!"
+
+"Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad," said
+Aldous Raeburn, smiling a little, but more coldly. Marcella, glancing at
+him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and
+class pride in him--a pride which was not going to assert itself, but
+none the less implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and
+him. In an instant her quick imagination realised herself as the
+daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class. When she
+attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her--any man in
+similar circumstances--must naturally think: "Ah, well, poor girl--Dick
+Boyce's daughter--what can you expect?" Whereas--Aldous Raeburn!--she
+thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell
+possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for
+honourable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or
+towards their neighbours and dependents. A shiver of passionate vanity,
+wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frame stiffened.
+
+"There are model squires, of course," she said slowly, striving at least
+for a personal dignity which should match his. "There are plenty of
+landowners who do their duty as they understand it--no one denies that.
+But that does not affect the system; the grandson of the best man may be
+the worst, but his one-man power remains the same. No! the time has come
+for a wider basis. Paternal government and charity were very well in
+their way--democratic self-government will manage to do without them!"
+
+She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look. It delighted her to pit
+these wide and threatening generalisations against the Maxwell power--to
+show the heir of it that she at least--father or no father--was no
+hereditary subject of his, and bound to no blind admiration of the
+Maxwell methods and position.
+
+Aldous Raeburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at
+her indeed all the time. Miss Boyce's opinions could hardly matter to
+him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her
+talk. This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class
+went, as it happened, very deep with him--too deep for chance
+discussion. What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself,
+seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal
+history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous
+type pick up from newspapers and magazines. She had touched his family
+pride for an instant; but only for an instant. What he was abidingly
+conscious of, was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with
+difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of
+which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more
+determined--absurdly determined--to help her.
+
+"Oh! no doubt the world will do very well without us some day," he said
+lightly, in answer to her tirade; "no one is indispensable. But are you
+so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had
+observed--pardon me for saying it--on the two or three occasions we have
+met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the
+old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your
+ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor
+people out of the mire in your own way. No! I don't feel that you are
+thorough-going!"
+
+Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful
+laugh--a laugh of humorous confession, which changed her whole look and
+mood.
+
+"Is that all you have noticed? If you wish to know, Mr. Raeburn, I love
+the labourers for touching their hats to me. I love the school children
+for bobbing to me. I love my very self--ridiculous as _you_ may think
+it--for being Miss Boyce of Mellor!"
+
+"Don't say things like that, please!" he interrupted; "I think I have
+not deserved them."
+
+His tone made her repent her gibe. "No, indeed, you have been most kind
+to me," she cried. "I don't know how it is. I am bitter and personal in
+a moment--when I don't mean to be. Yes! you are quite right. I am proud
+of it all. If nobody comes to see us, and we are left all alone out in
+the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in--proud of the
+old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the
+beeches! How absurd it would seem to other people, who have so much
+more! But I have had so little--so _little_!" Her voice had a hungry
+lingering note. "And as for the people, yes, I am proud too that they
+like me, and that already I can influence them. Oh, I will do my best
+for them, my _very best_! But it will be hard, very hard, if there is
+no one to help me!"
+
+She heaved a long sigh. In spite of the words, what she had said did not
+seem to be an appeal for his pity. Rather there was in it a sweet
+self-dedicating note as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a
+note which once more left Aldous Raeburn's self-restraint tottering. She
+was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over
+the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside
+him--after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must
+surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat!
+
+He bent over to her.
+
+"Don't talk of there being no one to help! There may be many ways out of
+present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be
+large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?"
+
+She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller--she liked that;
+she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and
+bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no
+thrill. But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already
+constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her,
+and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own
+power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, "I
+_am_ large-minded enough! You have been very kind, and I have been very
+wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret: I am sure, if you can help me,
+you will."
+
+There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before
+the miry village road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage.
+Aldous Raeburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of
+travellers'-joy out of the hedge beside him.
+
+"That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it," he said, and
+with a smile put the cluster of white seed-tufts and green leaves into
+one of the pockets of his shooting jacket.
+
+"Oh, don't tie me down!" said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also.
+"And don't you think, Mr. Raeburn, that you might open that gate? At
+least, we can't get the scissors and the wire unless you do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day's
+shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home. He
+glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a
+glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long
+eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light
+streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing
+black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards
+in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both
+desires and dreads.
+
+He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of
+him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined. His dog, a
+black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat
+weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous
+Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two
+miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.
+
+About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland.
+After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its
+three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of
+arable--representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by
+the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern
+uplands--the beech woods closed thickly round him. Beech woods of all
+kinds--from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring
+pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the
+dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished
+bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings
+crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of
+leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green
+heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and
+far-receding path. Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far
+within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner's wheel, which told
+him he was passing one of the wood-cutter's huts that in the hilly parts
+of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking
+industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous
+valleys. And two or three times also he passed a string of the great
+timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown
+horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks
+rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters' pipes rising
+slowly into the damp sunset air. But for the most part the road along
+which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind. Nor were there any
+signs of habitation--no cottages, no farms. He was scarcely more than
+thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have
+been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that
+through which he was passing.
+
+And presently the solitude took a grander note. He was nearing the edge
+of the high upland along which he had been walking. In front of him the
+long road with its gleaming pools bent sharply to the left, showing pale
+and distinct against a darkening heaven and the wide grey fields which
+had now, on one side of his path, replaced the serried growth of young
+plantations. Night was fast advancing from south and east over the
+upland. But straight in front of him and on his right, the forest trees,
+still flooded with sunset, fell in sharp steeps towards the plain.
+Through their straight stems glowed the blues and purples of that lower
+world; and when the slopes broke and opened here and there, above the
+rounded masses of their red and golden leaf the level distances of the
+plain could be seen stretching away, illimitable in the evening dusk, to
+a west of glory, just vacant of the sun. The golden ball had sunk into
+the mists awaiting it, but the splendour of its last rays was still on
+all the western front of the hills, bathing the beech woods as they rose
+and fell with the large undulations of the ground.
+
+Insensibly Raeburn, filled as he was with a new and surging emotion,
+drew the solemnity of the forest glades and of the rolling distances
+into his heart. When he reached the point where the road diverged to the
+left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, whence he commanded the whole
+sweep of the hill rampart from north to west, and the whole expanse of
+the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost
+in many thoughts, while the night fell.
+
+He looked over the central plain of England--the plain which stretches
+westward to the Thames and the Berkshire hills, and northward through
+the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent.
+An historic plain--symbolic, all of it, to an English eye. There in the
+western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford; in front of
+him was the site of Chalgrove Field, where Hampden got his clumsy death
+wound, and Thame, where he died; and far away, to his right, where the
+hills swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the
+face of the down, the vast scoured cross, whereby a Saxon king had
+blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath.
+
+Aldous Raeburn was a man to feel these things. He had seldom stood on
+this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him
+of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous. If it had not
+been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul. For the
+great view had an interest for him personally it could hardly have
+possessed to the same degree for any other man. On his left hand Maxwell
+Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill--a splendid pile
+which some day would be his. Behind him; through all the upland he had
+just traversed; beneath the point where he stood; along the sides of the
+hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land which also would be
+his--which, indeed, practically was already his--for his grandfather was
+an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections
+and hopes were centred. The dim churches scattered over the immediate
+plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers
+in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages
+showing here and there on the fringes of the wood--all the equipment and
+organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English
+midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated,
+under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him--upon his one
+man's brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.
+
+In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's
+tremulous elation and sense of romance. Since his Cambridge days, and of
+late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot
+in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight
+than of inspiration. Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed
+by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers. During
+his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had
+drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation which, as it
+happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men. The
+responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the
+relation of the State to the individual--of the old Radical dogma of
+free contract to the thwarting facts of social inequality; the Tory
+ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the Liberal
+ideal of self-government by the many: these commonplaces of economical
+and political discussion had very early become living and often sore
+realities in Aldous Raeburn's mind, because of the long conflict in him,
+dating from his Cambridge life, between the influences of birth and
+early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection
+which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world.
+
+Towards the close of his first year at Trinity, & young man joined the
+college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages,
+a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows. He was poor and held
+a small scholarship; but it was soon plain that his health was not equal
+to the Tripos routine, and that the prizes of the place, brilliant as
+was his intellectual endowment, were not for him. After an inward
+struggle, of which none perhaps but Aldous Raeburn had any exact
+knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to
+another career. A couple of hours' serious brainwork in the day was all
+that was ever possible to him henceforward. He spent it, as well as the
+thoughts and conversation of his less strenuous moments, on the study of
+history and sociology, with a view to joining the staff of lecturers for
+the manufacturing and country towns which the two great Universities,
+touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organise.
+He came of a stock which promised well for such a pioneer's task. His
+father had been an able factory inspector, well-known for his share in
+the inauguration and revision of certain important factory reforms; the
+son inherited a passionate humanity of soul; and added to it a magnetic
+and personal charm which soon made him a remarkable power, not only in
+his own college, but among the finer spirits of the University
+generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after
+dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way
+imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour--the river, the dons,
+the schools--to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that
+search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the
+utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative
+opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a pose, without a false
+note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish intensity and
+simplicity. To many a Trinity man in after life the memory of his slight
+figure and fair head, of the eager slightly parted mouth, of the eyes
+glowing with some inward vision, and of the gesture with which he would
+spring up at some critical point to deliver himself, standing amid his
+seated and often dissentient auditors, came back vivid and ineffaceable
+as only youth can make the image of its prophets.
+
+Upon Aldous Raeburn, Edward Hallin produced from the first a deep
+impression. The interests to which Hallin's mind soon became exclusively
+devoted--such as the systematic study of English poverty, or of the
+relation of religion to social life, reforms of the land and of the
+Church--overflowed upon Raeburn with a kindling and disturbing force.
+Edward Hallin was his gad-fly; and he had no resource, because he loved
+his tormentor.
+
+Fundamentally, the two men were widely different. Raeburn was a true son
+of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts
+of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob-reason and all
+the vulgarities of popular rhetoric; steeped, too, in a number of subtle
+prejudices, and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler
+sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and
+conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge
+discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar; his mind
+worked slowly, yet with a delicate precision; and his generally cold
+manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet,
+except in the case of his friendship with Edward Hallin, led him to much
+personal happiness.
+
+Hallin left Cambridge after a pass degree to become lecturer on
+industrial and economical questions in the northern English towns.
+Raeburn stayed on a year longer, found himself third classic and the
+winner of a Greek verse prize, and then, sacrificing the idea of a
+fellowship, returned to Maxwell Court to be his grandfather's companion
+and helper in the work of the estate, his family proposing that, after a
+few years' practical experience of the life and occupations of a country
+gentleman, he should enter Parliament and make a career in politics.
+Since then five or six years had passed, during which he had learned to
+know the estate thoroughly, and to take his normal share in the business
+and pleasures of the neighbourhood. For the last two years he had been
+his grandfather's sole agent, a poor-law guardian and magistrate
+besides, and a member of most of the various committees for social and
+educational purposes in the county. He was a sufficiently keen sportsman
+to save appearances with his class; enjoyed a walk after the partridges
+indeed, with a friend or two, as much as most men; and played the host
+at the two or three great battues of the year with a propriety which his
+grandfather however no longer mistook for enthusiasm. There was nothing
+much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank. His
+neighbours felt him to be a personality, but thought him reserved and
+difficult; he was respected, but he was not popular like his
+grandfather; people speculated as to how he would get on in Parliament,
+or whom he was to marry; but, except to the dwellers in Maxwell Court
+itself, or of late to the farmers and labourers on the estate, it would
+not have mattered much to anybody if he had not been there. Nobody ever
+connected any romantic thought with him. There was something in his
+strong build, pale but healthy aquiline face, his inconspicuous brown
+eyes and hair, which seemed from the beginning to mark him out as the
+ordinary earthy dweller in an earthy world.
+
+Nevertheless, these years had been to Aldous Raeburn years marked by an
+expansion and deepening of the whole man, such as few are capable of.
+Edward Hallin's visits to the Court, the walking tours which brought the
+two friends together almost every year in Switzerland or the Highlands,
+the course of a full and intimate correspondence, and the various calls
+made for public purposes by the enthusiast and pioneer upon the pocket
+and social power of the rich man--these things and influences, together,
+of course, with the pressure of an environing world, ever more real,
+and, on the whole, ever more oppressive, as it was better understood,
+had confronted Aldous Raeburn before now with a good many teasing
+problems of conduct and experience. His tastes, his sympathies, his
+affinities were all with the old order; but the old faiths--economical,
+social, religious--were fermenting within him in different stages of
+disintegration and reconstruction; and his reserved habit and often
+solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over-refinement. His future
+career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him. One
+thing only was clear to him--that to dogmatise about any subject under
+heaven, at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion
+absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot.
+
+So that Aldous Raeburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed
+with struggle of different kinds. And the particular point of view where
+he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his
+memory with flashes of self-realisation which were, on the whole, more
+of a torment to him than a joy. If he had not been Aldous Raeburn, or
+any other person, tied to a particular individuality, with a particular
+place and label in the world, the task of the analytic mind, in face of
+the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one!--so it
+had often seemed to him.
+
+But to-night all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made
+doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A
+transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot--a man once more
+young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at
+last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long missed,
+long hungered for.
+
+Six weeks was it since he had first seen her--this tall, straight,
+Marcella Boyce? He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing
+golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had
+walked beside him across the church fields, in that thin black dress,
+with, the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes--the small white
+teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its
+gesture, so restless, so alive! What a presence--how absorbing,
+troubling, preoccupying! No one in her company could forget her--nay,
+could fail to observe her. What ease and daring, and yet no hardness
+with it--rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion,
+beneath it all!
+
+How straight she had flung her questions at him!--her most awkward
+embarrassing questions. What other woman would have dared such
+candour--unless perhaps as a stroke of fine art--he had known women
+indeed who could have done it so. But where could be the art, the
+policy, he asked himself indignantly, in the sudden outburst of a young
+girl pleading with her companion's sense of truth and good feeling in
+behalf of those nearest to her?
+
+As to her dilemma itself, in his excitement he thought of it with
+nothing but the purest pleasure! She had let him see that she did not
+expect him to be able to do much for her, though she was ready to
+believe him her friend. Ah well--he drew a long breath. For once,
+Raeburn, strange compound that he was of the man of rank and the
+philosopher, remembered his own social power and position with an
+exultant satisfaction. No doubt Dick Boyce had misbehaved himself
+badly--the strength of Lord Maxwell's feeling was sufficient proof
+thereof. No doubt the "county," as Raeburn himself knew, in some detail,
+were disposed to leave Mellor Park severely alone. What of that? Was it
+for nothing that the Maxwells had been for generations at the head of
+the "county," i.e. of that circle of neighbouring families connected by
+the ties of ancestral friendship, or of intermarriage, on whom in this
+purely agricultural and rural district the social pleasure and comfort
+of Miss Boyce and her mother must depend?
+
+He, like Marcella, did not believe that Richard Boyce's offences were of
+the quite unpardonable order; although, owing to a certain absent and
+preoccupied temper, he had never yet taken the trouble to enquire into
+them in detail. As to any real restoration of cordiality between the
+owner of Mellor and his father's old friends and connections, that of
+course was not to be looked for; but there should be decent social
+recognition, and--in the case of Mrs. Boyce and her daughter--there
+should be homage and warm welcome, simply because she wished it, and it
+was absurd she should not have it! Raeburn, whose mind was ordinarily
+destitute of the most elementary capacity for social intrigue, began to
+plot in detail how it should be done. He relied first upon winning his
+grandfather--his popular distinguished grandfather, whose lightest word
+had weight in Brookshire. And then, he himself had two or three women
+friends in the county--not more, for women had not occupied much place
+in his thoughts till now. But they were good friends, and, from the
+social point of view, important. He would set them to work at once.
+These things should be chiefly managed by women.
+
+But no patronage! She would never bear that, the glancing proud
+creature. She must guess, indeed, let him tread as delicately as he
+might, that he and others were at work for her. But oh! she should be
+softly handled; as far as he could achieve it, she should, in a very
+little while, live and breathe compassed with warm airs of good-will and
+consideration.
+
+He felt himself happy, amazingly happy, that at the very beginning of
+his love, it should thus be open to him, in these trivial, foolish ways,
+to please and befriend her. Her social dilemma and discomfort one
+moment, indeed, made him sore for her; the next, they were a kind of
+joy, since it was they gave him this opportunity to put out a strong
+right arm.
+
+Everything about her at this moment was divine and lovely to him; all
+the qualities of her rich uneven youth which she had shown in their
+short intercourse--her rashness, her impulsiveness, her generosity. Let
+her but trust herself to him, and she should try her social experiments
+as she pleased--she should plan Utopias, and he would be her hodman to
+build them. The man perplexed with too much thinking remembered the
+girl's innocent, ignorant readiness to stamp the world's stuff anew
+after the forms of her own pitying thought, with a positive thirst of
+sympathy. The deep poetry and ideality at the root of him under all the
+weight of intellectual and critical debate leapt towards her. He thought
+of the rapid talk she had poured out upon him, after their compact of
+friendship, in their walk back to the church, of her enthusiasm for her
+Socialist friends and their ideals,--with a momentary madness of
+self-suppression and tender humility. In reality, a man like Aldous
+Raeburn is born to be the judge and touchstone of natures like Marcella
+Boyce. But the illusion of passion may deal as disturbingly with moral
+rank as with social.
+
+It was his first love. Years before, in the vacation before he went to
+college, his boyish mind had been crossed, by a fancy for a pretty
+cousin a little older than himself, who had been very kind indeed to
+Lord Maxwell's heir. But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental
+life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral
+storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to
+her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick
+of parrot phrases. She, on her part, thought him detestable; she married
+shortly afterwards, and often spoke to her husband in private of her
+"escape" from that queer fellow Aldous Raeburn.
+
+Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women, both in
+London and in the country, and had made friends with some of them in his
+quiet serious way. But none of them had roused in him even a passing
+thrill of passion. He had despised himself for it; had told himself
+again and again that he was but half a man--
+
+Ah! he had done himself injustice--he had done himself injustice!
+
+His heart was light as air. When at last the sound of a clock striking
+in the plain roused him with a start, and he sprang up from the heap of
+stones where he had been sitting in the dusk, he bent down a moment to
+give a gay caress to his dog, and then trudged off briskly home,
+whistling under the emerging stars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+By the time, however, that Aldous Raeburn came within sight of the
+windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down. The
+lover had fallen, for the time, into the background, and the capable,
+serious man of thirty, with a considerable experience of the world
+behind him, was perfectly conscious that there were many difficulties in
+his path. He could not induce his grandfather to move in the matter of
+Richard Boyce without a statement of his own feelings and aims. Nor
+would he have avoided frankness if he could. On every ground it was his
+grandfather's due. The Raeburns were reserved towards the rest of the
+world, but amongst themselves there had always been a fine tradition of
+mutual trust; and Lord Maxwell amply deserved that at this particular
+moment his grandson should maintain it.
+
+But Raeburn could not and did not flatter himself that his grandfather
+would, to begin with, receive his news even with toleration. The grim
+satisfaction with which that note about the shooting had been
+despatched, was very clear in the grandson's memory. At the same time it
+said much for the history of those long years during which the old man
+and his heir had been left to console each other for the terrible
+bereavements which had thrown them together, that Aldous Raeburn never
+for an instant feared the kind of violent outburst and opposition that
+other men in similar circumstances might have looked forward to. The
+just living of a life-time makes a man incapable of any mere selfish
+handling of another's interests--a fact on which the bystander may
+reckon.
+
+It was quite dark by the time he entered the large open-roofed hall of
+the Court.
+
+"Is his lordship in?" he asked of a passing footman.
+
+"Yes, sir--in the library. He has been asking for you, sir."
+
+Aldous turned to the right along the fine corridor lighted with Tudor
+windows to an inner quadrangle, and filled with Graeco-Roman statuary
+and sarcophagi, which made one of the principal features of the Court.
+The great house was warm and scented, and the various open doors which
+he passed on his way to the library disclosed large fire-lit rooms, with
+panelling, tapestry, pictures, books everywhere. The colour of the whole
+was dim and rich; antiquity, refinement reigned, together with an
+exquisite quiet and order. No one was to be seen, and not a voice was to
+be heard; but there was no impression of solitude. These warm,
+darkly-glowing rooms seemed to be waiting for the return of guests just
+gone out of them; not one of them but had an air of cheerful company.
+For once, as he walked through it, Aldous Raeburn spared the old house
+an affectionate possessive thought. Its size and wealth, with all that
+both implied, had often weighed upon him. To-night his breath quickened
+as he passed the range of family portraits leading to the library door.
+There was a vacant space here and there--"room for your missus, too, my
+boy, when you get her!" as his grandfather had once put it.
+
+"Why, you've had a long day, Aldous, all by yourself," said Lord
+Maxwell, turning sharply round at the sound of the opening door. "What's
+kept you so late?"
+
+His spectacles fell forward as he spoke, and the old man shut them in
+his hand, peering at his grandson through the shadows of the room. He
+was sitting by a huge fire, an "Edinburgh Review" open on his knee. Lamp
+and fire-light showed a finely-carried head, with a high wave of snowy
+hair thrown back, a long face delicately sharp in the lines, and an
+attitude instinct with the alertness of an unimpaired bodily vigour.
+
+"The birds were scarce, and we followed them a good way," said Aldous,
+as he came up to the fire. "Rickman kept me on the farm, too, a good
+while, with interminable screeds about the things he wants done for
+him."
+
+"Oh, there is no end to Rickman," said Lord Maxwell, good-humouredly.
+"He pays his rent for the amusement of getting it back again. Landowning
+will soon be the most disinterested form of philanthropy known to
+mankind. But I have some news for you! Here is a letter from Barton by
+the second post"--he named an old friend of his own, and a Cabinet
+Minister of the day. "Look at it. You will see he says they can't
+possibly carry on beyond January. Half their men are becoming
+unmanageable, and S----'s bill, to which they are committed, will
+certainly dish them. Parliament will meet in January, and he thinks an
+amendment to the Address will finish it. All this confidential, of
+course; but he saw no harm in letting me know. So now, my boy, you will
+have your work cut out for you this winter! Two or three evenings a
+week--you'll not get off with less. Nobody's plum drops into his mouth
+nowadays. Barton tells me, too, that he hears young Wharton will
+certainly stand for the Durnford division, and will be down upon us
+directly. He will make himself as disagreeable to us and the Levens as
+he can--that we may be sure of. We may be thankful for one small mercy,
+that his mother has departed this life! otherwise you and I would have
+known _furens quid femina posset_!"
+
+The old man looked up at his grandson with a humorous eye. Aldous was
+standing absently before the fire, and did not reply immediately.
+
+"Come, come, Aldous!" said Lord Maxwell with a touch of impatience,
+"don't overdo the philosopher. Though I am getting old, the next
+Government can't deny me a finger in the pie. You and I between us will
+be able to pull through two or three of the things we care about in the
+next House, with ordinary luck. It is my firm belief that the next
+election will give our side the best chance we have had for half a
+generation. Throw up your cap, sir! The world may be made of green
+cheese, but we have got to live in it!"
+
+Aldous smiled suddenly--uncontrollably--with a look which left his
+grandfather staring. He had been appealing to the man of maturity
+standing on the threshold of a possibly considerable career, and, as he
+did so, it was as though he saw the boy of eighteen reappear!
+
+"_Je ne demands pas mieux_!" said Aldous with a quick lift of the voice
+above its ordinary key. "The fact is, grandfather, I have come home with
+something in my mind very different from politics--and you must give me
+time to change the focus. I did not come home as straight as I
+might--for I wanted to be sure of myself before I spoke to you. During
+the last few weeks--"
+
+"Go on!" cried Lord Maxwell.
+
+But Aldous did not find it easy to go on. It suddenly struck him that it
+was after all absurd that he should be confiding in any one at such a
+stage, and his tongue stumbled.
+
+But he had gone too far for retreat. Lord Maxwell sprang up and seized
+him by the arms.
+
+"You are in love, sir! Out with it!"
+
+"I have seen the only woman in the world I have ever wished to marry,"
+said Aldous, flushing, but with deliberation. "Whether she will ever
+have me, I have no idea. But I can conceive no greater happiness than to
+win her. And as I want _you_, grandfather, to do something for her and
+for me, it seemed to me I had no right to keep my feelings to myself.
+Besides, I am not accustomed to--to--" His voice wavered a little. "You
+have treated me as more than a son!"
+
+Lord Maxwell pressed his arm affectionately.
+
+"My dear boy! But don't keep me on tenterhooks like this--tell me the
+name!--the name!"
+
+And two or three long meditated possibilities flashed through the old
+man's mind.
+
+Aldous replied with a certain slow stiffness--
+
+"Marcella Boyce!--Richard Boyce's daughter. I saw her first six weeks
+ago."
+
+"God bless my soul!" exclaimed Lord Maxwell, falling back a step or two,
+and staring at his companion. Aldous watched him with anxiety.
+
+"You know that fellow's history, Aldous?"
+
+"Richard Boyce? Not in detail. If you will tell me now all you know, it
+will be a help. Of course, I see that you and the neighbourhood mean to
+cut him,--and--for the sake of--of Miss Boyce and her mother, I should
+be glad to find a way out."
+
+"Good heavens!" said Lord Maxwell, beginning to pace the room, hands
+pressed behind him, head bent. "Good heavens! what a business! what an
+extraordinary business!"
+
+He stopped short in front of Aldous. "Where have you been meeting
+her--this young lady?"
+
+"At the Hardens'--sometimes in Mellor village. She goes about among the
+cottages a great deal."
+
+"You have not proposed to her?"
+
+"I was not certain of myself till to-day. Besides it would have been
+presumption so far. She has shown me nothing but the merest
+friendliness."
+
+"What, you can suppose she would refuse you!" cried Lord Maxwell, and
+could not for the life of him keep the sarcastic intonation out of his
+voice.
+
+Aldous's look showed distress. "You have not seen her, grandfather," he
+said quietly.
+
+Lord Maxwell began to pace again, trying to restrain the painful emotion
+that filled him. Of course, Aldous had been entrapped; the girl had
+played upon his pity, his chivalry--for obvious reasons.
+
+Aldous tried to soothe him, to explain, but Lord Maxwell hardly
+listened. At last he threw himself into his chair again with a long
+breath.
+
+"Give me time, Aldous--give me time. The thought of marrying my heir to
+that man's daughter knocks me over a little."
+
+There was silence again. Then Lord Maxwell looked at his watch with
+old-fashioned precision.
+
+"There is half an hour before dinner. Sit down, and let us talk this
+thing out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The conversation thus started, however, was only begun by dinner-time;
+was resumed after Miss Raeburn--the small, shrewd, bright-eyed person
+who governed Lord Maxwell's household--had withdrawn; and was continued
+in the library some time beyond his lordship's usual retiring hour. It
+was for the most part a monologue on the part of the grandfather, broken
+by occasional words from his companion; and for some time Marcella Boyce
+herself--the woman whom Aldous desired to marry--was hardly mentioned in
+it. Oppressed and tormented by a surprise which struck, or seemed to
+strike, at some of his most cherished ideals and just resentments, Lord
+Maxwell was bent upon letting his grandson know, in all their fulness,
+the reasons why no daughter of Richard Boyce could ever be, in the true
+sense, fit wife for a Raeburn.
+
+Aldous was, of course, perfectly familiar with the creed implied in it
+all. A Maxwell should give himself no airs whatever, should indeed feel
+no pride whatever, towards "men of goodwill," whether peasant,
+professional, or noble. Such airs or such feeling would be both vulgar
+and unchristian. But when it came to _marriage_, then it behoved him to
+see that "the family"--that carefully grafted and selected stock to
+which he owed so much--should suffer no loss or deterioration through
+him. Marriage with the fit woman meant for a Raeburn the preservation of
+a pure blood, of a dignified and honourable family habit, and moreover
+the securing to his children such an atmosphere of self-respect within,
+and of consideration from without, as he had himself grown up in. And a
+woman could not be fit, in this sense, who came either of an
+insignificant stock, untrained to large uses and opportunities, or of a
+stock which had degenerated, and lost its right of equal mating with the
+vigorous owners of unblemished names. Money was of course important and
+not to be despised, but the present Lord Maxwell, at any rate,
+large-minded and conscious of wealth he could never spend, laid
+comparatively little stress upon it; whereas, in his old age, the other
+instinct had but grown the stronger with him, as the world waxed more
+democratic, and the influence of the great families waned.
+
+Nor could Aldous pretend to be insensible to such feelings and beliefs.
+Supposing the daughter could be won, there was no doubt whatever that
+Richard Boyce would be a cross and burden to a Raeburn son-in-law. But
+then! After all! Love for once made philosophy easy--made class
+tradition sit light. Impatience grew; a readiness to believe Richard
+Boyce as black as Erebus and be done with it,--so that one might get to
+the point--the real point.
+
+As to the story, it came to this. In his youth, Richard Boyce had been
+the younger and favourite son of his father. He possessed some ability,
+some good looks, some manners, all of which were wanting in his loutish
+elder brother. Sacrifices were accordingly made for him. He was sent to
+the bar. When he stood for Parliament his election expenses were
+jubilantly paid, and his father afterwards maintained him with as
+generous a hand as the estate could possibly bear, often in the teeth of
+the grudging resentment of Robert his firstborn. Richard showed signs of
+making a rapid success, at any rate on the political platform. He spoke
+with facility, and grappled with the drudgery of committees during his
+first two years at Westminster in a way to win him the favourable
+attention of the Tory whips. He had a gift for modern languages, and
+spoke chiefly on foreign affairs, so that when an important Eastern
+Commission had to be appointed, in connection with some troubles in the
+Balkan States, his merits and his father's exertions with certain old
+family friends sufficed to place him upon it.
+
+The Commission was headed by a remarkable man, and was able to do
+valuable work at a moment of great public interest, under the eyes of
+Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much
+feted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to
+see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's
+face and white head might have been observed at many a London party
+beside the small Italianate physique of his son.
+
+And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune. A certain fresh
+west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty
+at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr.
+Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world,
+and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as
+unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her
+character--a character of much complexity and stoical strength--was
+little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce
+through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him,
+and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.
+
+Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then--a crash. It
+was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife,
+and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities
+of Dick Boyce himself. First, the desire to maintain a "position," to
+make play in society with a pretty wife, and, in the City, with a
+marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more
+doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful
+than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public,
+filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours. Nor was
+this all. A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going
+badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the
+East had been elected by acclamation a member of several fashionable
+clubs, tried to retrieve himself at the gaming-table. Lastly, when money
+matters at home and abroad, when the anxieties of his wife and the
+altered manners of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons
+grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came
+upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even
+than they were before. No story could be more commonplace or more
+detestable.
+
+"Ah, how well I remember that poor old fellow--old John Boyce," said
+Lord Maxwell, slowly, shaking his stately white head over it, as he
+leant talking and musing against the mantelpiece. "I saw him the day he
+came back from the attempt to hush up the company business. I met him in
+the road, and could not help pulling up to speak to him. I was so sorry
+for him. We had been friends for many years, he and I. 'Oh, good God!'
+he said, when he saw me. 'Don't stop me--don't speak to me!' And he
+lashed his horse up--as white as a sheet--fat, fresh-coloured man that
+he was in general--and was off. I never saw him again till after his
+death. First came the trial, and Dick Boyce got three months'
+imprisonment, on a minor count, while several others of the precious lot
+he was mixed up with came in for penal servitude. There was some
+technical flaw in the evidence with regard to him, and the clever
+lawyers they put on made the most of it; but we all thought, and society
+thought, that Dick was morally as bad as any of them. Then the papers
+got hold of the gambling debts and the woman. She made a disturbance at
+his club, I believe, during the trial, while he was out on bail--anyway
+it all came out. Two or three other people were implicated in the
+gambling business--men of good family. Altogether it was one of the
+biggest scandals I remember in my time."
+
+The old man paused, the long frowning face sternly set. Aldous gazed at
+him in silence. It was certainly pretty bad--worse than he had thought.
+
+"And the wife and child?" he said presently.
+
+"Oh, poor things!"--said Lord Maxwell, forgetting everything for the
+moment but his story--"when Boyce's imprisonment was up they disappeared
+with him. His constituents held indignation meetings, of course. He gave
+up his seat, and his father allowed him a small fixed income--she had
+besides some little money of her own--which was secured him afterwards,
+I believe, on the estate during his brother's lifetime. Some of her
+people would have gladly persuaded her to leave him, for his behaviour
+towards her had been particularly odious,--and they were afraid, too, I
+think, that he might come to worse grief yet and make her life
+unbearable. But she wouldn't. And she would have no sympathy and no
+talk. I never saw her after the first year of their marriage, when she
+was a most radiant and beautiful creature. But, by all accounts of her
+behaviour at the time, she must be a remarkable woman. One of her family
+told me that she broke with all of them. She would know nobody who would
+not know him. Nor would she take money, though they were wretchedly
+poor; and Dick Boyce was not squeamish. She went off to little lodgings
+in the country or abroad with him without a word. At the same time, it
+was plain that her life was withered. She could make one great effort;
+but, according to my informant, she had no energy left for anything
+else--not even to take interest in her little girl--"
+
+Aldous made a movement.
+
+"Suppose we talk about her?" he said rather shortly.
+
+Lord Maxwell started and recollected himself. After a pause he said,
+looking down under his spectacles at his grandson with an expression in
+which discomfort strove with humour--
+
+"I see. You think we are beating about the bush. Perhaps we are. It is
+the difference between being old and being young, Aldous, my boy.
+Well--now then--for Miss Boyce. How much have you seen of her?--how deep
+has it gone? You can't wonder that I am knocked over. To bring that man
+amongst us! Why, the hound!" cried the old man, suddenly, "we could not
+even get him to come and see his father when he was dying. John had lost
+his memory mostly--had forgotten, anyway, to be angry--and just _craved_
+for Dick, for the only creature he had ever loved. With great difficulty
+I traced the man, and tried my utmost. No good! He came when his father
+no longer knew him, an hour before the end. His nerves, I understood,
+were delicate--not so delicate, however, as to prevent his being present
+at the reading of the will! I have never forgiven him that cruelty to
+the old man, and never will!"
+
+And Lord Maxwell began to pace the library again, by way of working off
+memory and indignation.
+
+Aldous watched him rather gloomily. They had now been discussing Boyce's
+criminalities in great detail for a considerable time, and nothing else
+seemed to have any power to touch--or, at any rate, to hold--Lord
+Maxwell's attention. A certain deep pride in Aldous--the pride of
+intimate affection--felt itself wounded.
+
+"I see that you have grave cause to think badly of her father," he said
+at last, rising as he spoke. "I must think how it concerns me. And
+to-morrow you must let me tell you something about her. After all, she
+has done none of these things. But I ought not to keep you up like this.
+You will remember Clarke was very emphatic about your not exhausting
+yourself at night, last time he was here."
+
+Lord Maxwell turned and stared.
+
+"Why--why, what is the matter with you, Aldous? Offended?
+Well--well--There--I _am_ an old fool!"
+
+And, walking up to his grandson, he laid an affectionate and rather
+shaking hand on the younger's shoulder.
+
+"You have a great charge upon you, Aldous--a charge for the future. It
+has upset me--I shall be calmer to-morrow. But as to any quarrel between
+us! Are you a youth, or am I a three-tailed bashaw? As to money, you
+know, I care nothing. But it goes against me, my boy, it goes against
+me, that _your_ wife should bring such a story as that with her into
+this house!"
+
+"I understand," said Aldous, wincing. "But you must see her,
+grandfather. Only, let me say it again--don't for one moment take it for
+granted that she will marry me. I never saw any one so free, so
+unspoilt, so unconventional."
+
+His eyes glowed with the pleasure of remembering her looks, her tones.
+
+Lord Maxwell withdrew his hand and shook his head slowly.
+
+"You have a great deal to offer. No woman, unless she were either
+foolish or totally unexperienced, could overlook that. Is she about
+twenty?"
+
+"About twenty."
+
+Lord Maxwell waited a moment, then, bending over the fire, shrugged his
+shoulders in mock despair.
+
+"It is evident you are out of love with me, Aldous. Why, I don't know
+yet whether she is dark or fair!"
+
+The conversation jarred on both sides. Aldous made an effort.
+
+"She is very dark," he said; "like her mother in many ways, only quite
+different in colour. To me she seems the most beautiful--the only
+beautiful woman I have ever seen. I should think she was very clever in
+some ways--and very unformed--childish almost--in others. The Hardens
+say she has done everything she could--of course it isn't much--for that
+miserable village in the time she has been there. Oh! by the way, she is
+a Socialist. She thinks that all we landowners should be done away
+with."
+
+Aldous looked round at his grandfather, so soon probably to be one of
+the lights of a Tory Cabinet, and laughed. So, to his relief, did Lord
+Maxwell.
+
+"Well, don't let her fall into young Wharton's clutches, Aldous, or he
+will be setting her to canvas. So, she is beautiful and she is
+clever--and _good_, my boy? If she comes here, she will have to fill
+your mother's and your grandmother's place."
+
+Aldous tried to reply once or twice, but failed.
+
+"If I did not feel that she were everything in herself to be loved and
+respected"--he said at last with some formality--"I should not long, as
+I do, to bring you and her together."
+
+Silence fell again. But instinctively Aldous felt that his grandfather's
+mood had grown gentler--his own task easier. He seized on the moment at
+once.
+
+"In the whole business," he said, half smiling, "there is only one thing
+clear, grandfather, and that is, that, if you will, you can do me a
+great service with Miss Boyce."
+
+Lord Maxwell turned quickly and was all sharp attention, the keen
+commanding eyes under their fine brows absorbing, as it were, expression
+and life from the rest of the blanched and wrinkled face.
+
+"You could, if you would, make matters easy for her and her mother in
+the county," said Aldous, anxious to carry it off lightly. "You could,
+if you would, without committing yourself to any personal contact with
+Boyce himself, make it possible for me to bring her here, so that you
+and my aunt might see her and judge."
+
+The old man's expression darkened.
+
+"What, take back that note, Aldous! I never wrote anything with greater
+satisfaction in my life!"
+
+"Well,--more or less," said Aldous, quietly. "A very little would do it.
+A man in Richard Boyce's position will naturally not claim very
+much--will take what he can get."
+
+"And you mean besides," said his grandfather, interrupting him, "that I
+must send your aunt to call?"
+
+"It will hardly be possible to ask Miss Boyce here unless she does!"
+said Aldous.
+
+"And you reckon that I am not likely to go to Mellor, even to see her?
+And you want me to say a word to other people--to the Winterbournes and
+the Levens, for instance?"
+
+"Precisely," said Aldous.
+
+Lord Maxwell meditated; then rose.
+
+"Let me now appease the memory of Clarke by going to bed!" (Clarke was
+his lordship's medical attendant and autocrat.) "I must sleep upon this,
+Aldous."
+
+"I only hope I shall not have tired you out."
+
+Aldous moved to extinguish a lamp standing on a table near.
+
+Suddenly his grandfather called him.
+
+"Aldous!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+But, as no words followed, Aldous turned. He saw his grandfather
+standing erect before the fire, and was startled by the emotion he
+instantly perceived in eye and mouth.
+
+"You understand, Aldous, that for twenty years--it is twenty years last
+month since your father died--you have been the blessing of my life? Oh!
+don't say anything, my boy; I don't want any more agitation. I have
+spoken strongly; it was hardly possible but that on such a matter I
+should feel strongly. But don't go away misunderstanding me--don't
+imagine for one instant that there is anything in the world that really
+matters to me in comparison with your happiness and your future!"
+
+The venerable old man wrung the hand he held, walked quickly to the
+door, and shut it behind him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later, Aldous was writing in his own sitting-room, a room on the
+first floor, at the western corner of the house, and commanding by
+daylight the falling slopes of wood below the Court, and all the wide
+expanses of the plain. To-night, too, the blinds were up, and the great
+view drawn in black and pearl, streaked with white mists in the ground
+hollows and overarched by a wide sky holding a haloed moon, lay spread
+before the windows. On a clear night Aldous felt himself stifled by
+blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with
+a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not
+interfering with the full range of his eye over the night-world without.
+He secretly believed that human beings see far too little of the night,
+and so lose a host of august or beautiful impressions, which might be
+honestly theirs if they pleased, without borrowing or stealing from
+anybody, poet or painter.
+
+The room was lined with books, partly temporary visitors from the great
+library downstairs, partly his old college books and prizes, and partly
+representing small collections for special studies. Here were a large
+number of volumes, blue books, and pamphlets, bearing on the condition
+of agriculture and the rural poor in England and abroad; there were some
+shelves devoted to general economics, and on a little table by the fire
+lay the recent numbers of various economic journals, English and
+foreign. Between the windows stood a small philosophical bookcase, the
+volumes of it full of small reference slips, and marked from end to end;
+and on the other side of the room was a revolving book-table crowded
+with miscellaneous volumes of poets, critics, and novelists--mainly,
+however, with the first two. Aldous Raeburn read few novels, and those
+with a certain impatience. His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle
+with difficult and unmanageable fact; and for that transformation and
+illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes
+take refuge and comfort, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to
+natural beauty. Hardly any novel writing, or reading, seemed to him
+worth while. A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in
+doing either.
+
+Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture--the picture of a young
+woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of
+art, yet linked in Aldous's mind with a hundred touching recollections,
+buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve. She had died
+in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her
+husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two
+years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which
+come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of
+helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.
+
+Aldous remembered his mother's death; still more his father's, that
+father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb
+upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the
+hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and
+trembling hand of the son. His boyhood had been spent under the shadow
+of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early
+realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left
+to affection and to ambition. This premature development, amid the most
+melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance--not in any
+egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact--had robbed a nervous
+and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity
+which it could ill do without. Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought
+for and too painfully loved. But for Edward Hallin he might well have
+acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's
+range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties.
+
+It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir
+of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his
+grandfather's outburst, seemed to put sleep far off. On the table before
+him stood a photograph of Hallin, besides a miniature of his mother as a
+girl. He had drawn the miniature closer to him, finding sympathy and joy
+in its youth, in the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it
+were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight.
+
+To Hallin he had already spoken of Miss Boyce, drawing her in light,
+casual, and yet sympathetic strokes as the pretty girl in a difficult
+position whom one would watch with curiosity and some pity. To-night his
+letter, which should have discussed a home colonisation scheme of
+Hallin's, had but one topic, and his pen flew.
+
+"Would you call her beautiful? I ask myself again and again, trying to
+put myself behind your eyes. She has nothing, at any rate, in common
+with the beauties we have down here, or with those my aunt bade me
+admire in London last May. The face has a strong Italian look, but not
+Italian of to-day. Do you remember the Ghirlandajo frescoes in Santa
+Maria Novella, or the side groups in Andrea's frescoes at the
+Annunziata? Among them, among the beautiful tall women of them, there
+are, I am sure, noble, freely-poised, suggestive heads like hers--hair,
+black wavy hair, folded like hers in large simple lines, and faces
+with the same long, subtle curves. It is a face of the Renaissance,
+extraordinarily beautiful, as it seems to me, in colour and expression;
+imperfect in line, as the beauty which marks the meeting point
+between antique perfection and modern character must always be. It
+has _morbidezza_--unquiet melancholy charm, then passionate
+gaiety--everything that is most modern grafted on things Greek and old.
+I am told that Burne Jones drew her several times while she was in
+London, with delight. It is the most _artistic_ beauty, having both the
+harmonies and the dissonances that a full-grown art loves.
+
+"She may be twenty or rather more. The mind has all sorts of ability;
+comes to the right conclusion by a divine instinct, ignoring the how and
+why. What does such a being want with the drudgery of learning? to such
+keenness life will be master enough. Yet she has evidently read a good
+deal--much poetry, some scattered political economy, some modern
+socialistic books, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle. She takes everything
+dramatically, imaginatively, goes straight from it to life, and back
+again. Among the young people with whom she made acquaintance while she
+was boarding in London and working at South Kensington, there seem to
+have been two brothers, both artists, and both Socialists; ardent young
+fellows, giving all their spare time to good works, who must have
+influenced her a great deal. She is full of angers and revolts, which
+you would delight in. And first of all, she is applying herself to her
+father's wretched village, which will keep her hands full. A large and
+passionate humanity plays about her. What she says often seems to me
+foolish--in the ear; but the inner sense, the heart of it, command me.
+
+"Stare as you please, Ned! Only write to me, and come down here as soon
+as you can. I can and will hide nothing from you, so you will believe me
+when I say that all is uncertain, that I know nothing, and, though I
+hope everything, may just as well fear everything too. But somehow I am
+another man, and the world shines and glows for me by day and night."
+
+Aldous Raeburn rose from his chair and, going to the window, stood
+looking out at the splendour of the autumn moon. Marcella moved across
+the whiteness of the grass; her voice was still speaking to his inward
+ear. His lips smiled; his heart was in a wild whirl of happiness.
+
+Then he walked to the table, took up his letter, read it, tore it
+across, and locked the fragments in a drawer.
+
+"Not yet, Ned--not yet, dear old fellow, even to you," he said to
+himself, as he put out his lamp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Three days passed. On the fourth Marcella returned late in the afternoon
+from a round of parish visits with Mary Harden. As she opened the oak
+doors which shut off the central hall of Mellor from the outer
+vestibule, she saw something white lying on the old cut and disused
+billiard table, which still occupied the middle of the floor till
+Richard Boyce, in the course of his economies and improvements, could
+replace it by a new one.
+
+She ran forward and took up a sheaf of cards, turning them over in a
+smiling excitement. "Viscount Maxwell," "Mr. Raeburn," "Miss Raeburn,"
+"Lady Winterbourne and the Misses Winterbourne," two cards of Lord
+Winterbourne's--all perfectly in form.
+
+Then a thought flashed upon her. "Of course it is his doing--and I asked
+him!"
+
+The cards dropped from her hand on the billiard table, and she stood
+looking at them, her pride fighting with her pleasure. There was
+something else in her feeling too--the exultation of proved power over a
+person not, as she guessed, easily influenced, especially by women.
+
+"Marcella, is that you?"
+
+It was her mother's voice. Mrs. Boyce had come in from the garden
+through the drawing-room, and was standing at the inner door of the
+hall, trying with shortsighted eyes to distinguish her daughter among
+the shadows of the great bare place. A dark day was drawing to its
+close, and there was little light left in the hall, except in one corner
+where a rainy sunset gleam struck a grim contemporary portrait of Mary
+Tudor, bringing out the obstinate mouth and the white hand holding a
+jewelled glove.
+
+Marcella turned, and by the same gleam her mother saw her flushed and
+animated look.
+
+"Any letters?" she asked.
+
+"No; but there are some cards. Oh yes, there is a note," and she pounced
+upon an envelope she had overlooked. "It is for you, mother--from the
+Court."
+
+Mrs. Boyce came up and took note and cards from her daughter's hand.
+Marcella watched her with quick breath.
+
+Her mother looked through the cards, slowly putting them down one by one
+without remark.
+
+"Oh, mother! do read the note!" Marcella could not help entreating.
+
+Mrs. Boyce drew herself together with a quick movement as though her
+daughter jarred upon her, and opened the note. Marcella dared not look
+over her. There was a dignity about her mother's lightest action, about
+every movement of her slender fingers and fine fair head, which had
+always held the daughter in check, even while she rebelled.
+
+Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.
+
+"I must go and make the tea," she said, in a light, cold tone, and
+turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had
+just been carried.
+
+Marcella followed, reading. The note was from Miss Raeburn, and it
+contained an invitation to Mrs. Boyce and her daughter to take luncheon
+at the Court on the following Friday. The note was courteously and
+kindly worded. "We should be so glad," said the writer, "to show you and
+Miss Boyce our beautiful woods while they are still at their best, in
+the way of autumn colour."
+
+"How will mamma take it?" thought Marcella anxiously. "There is not a
+word of papa!"
+
+When she entered the drawing-room, she caught her mother standing
+absently at the tea-table. The little silver caddy was still in her hand
+as though she had forgotten to put it down; and her eyes, which
+evidently saw nothing, were turned to the window, the brows frowning.
+The look of suffering for an instant was unmistakable; then she started
+at the sound of Marcella's step, and put down the caddy amid the
+delicate china crowded on the tray, with all the quiet precision of her
+ordinary manner.
+
+"You will have to wait for your tea," she said, "the water doesn't
+nearly boil."
+
+Marcella went up to the fire and, kneeling before it, put the logs with
+which it was piled together. But she could not contain herself for long.
+
+"Will you go to the Court, mamma?" she asked quickly, without turning
+round.
+
+There was a pause. Then Mrs. Boyce said drily--
+
+"Miss Raeburn's proceedings are a little unexpected. We have been here
+four months, within two miles of her, and it has never occurred to her
+to call. Now she calls and asks us to luncheon in the same afternoon.
+Either she took too little notice of us before, or she takes too much
+now--don't you think so?"
+
+Marcella was silent a moment. Should she confess? It began to occur to
+her for the first time that in her wild independence she had been taking
+liberties with her mother.
+
+"Mamma!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I asked Mr. Aldous Raeburn the other day whether everybody here was
+going to cut us! Papa told me that Lord Maxwell had written him an
+uncivil letter and--"
+
+"You--asked--Mr. Raeburn--" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly. "What do you
+mean?"
+
+Marcella turned round and met the flash of her mother's eyes.
+
+"I couldn't help it," she said in a low hurried voice. "It seemed so
+horrid to feel everybody standing aloof--we were walking together--he
+was very kind and friendly--and I asked him to explain."
+
+"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce. "And he went to his aunt--and she went to Lady
+Winterbourne--they were compassionate--and there are the cards. You have
+certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"
+
+Marcella felt an instant's fear--fear of the ironic power in the
+sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before
+the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother's fragile
+imperious beauty. Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.
+
+"You have got used to it, mamma! I feel as if it would kill me to live
+here, shut off from everybody--joining with nobody--with no friendly
+feelings or society. It was bad enough in the old lodging-house days;
+but here--why _should_ we?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.
+
+"I supposed you would ask sooner or later," she said in a low determined
+voice, with what to Marcella was a quite new note of reality in it.
+"Probably Mr. Raeburn told you--but you must of course have guessed it
+long ago--that society does not look kindly on us--and has its reasons.
+I do not deny in the least that it has its reasons. I do not accuse
+anybody, and resent nothing. But the question with me has always been,
+Shall I accept pity? I have always been able to meet it with a No! You
+are very different from me--but for you also I believe it would be the
+happiest answer."
+
+The eyes of both met--the mother's full of an indomitable fire which had
+for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter's
+troubled and miserable.
+
+"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly. "There are so many things I
+want to do here, and one can do nothing if every one is against you.
+People would be friends with you and me--and with papa too,--through us.
+Some of them wish to be kind"--she added insistently, thinking of Aldous
+Raeburn's words and expression as he bent to her at the gate--"I know
+they do. And if we can't hold our heads high because--because of things
+in the past--ought we to be so proud that we won't take their hands when
+they stretch them out--when they write so kindly and nicely as this?"
+
+And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.
+
+Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot. Then with
+a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a
+spoon near her.
+
+"You shall go," she said presently--"you wish it--then go--go by all
+means. I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage.
+One can put a great deal on health--mine is quite serviceable in the way
+of excuses. I will try and do you no harm, Marcella. If you have chosen
+your line and wish to make friends here--very well--I will do what I can
+for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life--for which, my
+dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."
+
+Marcella looked at her with dismay and a yearning she had never felt
+before.
+
+"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"
+
+There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which
+for once suggested the normal filial relation. But Mrs. Boyce did not
+waver. She had long learnt perhaps to regard Marcella as a girl
+singularly well able to take care of herself; and had recognised the
+fact with relief.
+
+"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping
+her tea--"in your interests as well as mine. You will make all the
+greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave.
+Those cards shall be properly returned, of course. For the rest--let no
+one disturb themselves till they must. And if I were you, Marcella, I
+would hardly discuss the family affairs any more--with Mr. Raeburn or
+anybody else."
+
+And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose
+power over the world about her had never extended to her mother.
+Marcella flushed and played with the fire.
+
+"You see, mamma," she said after a moment, still looking at the logs and
+the shower of sparks they made as she moved them about, "you never let
+me discuss them with you."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly; then, after a pause: "You
+will find your own line in a little while, Marcella, and you will see,
+if you so choose it, that there will be nothing unsurmountable in your
+way. One piece of advice let me give you. Don't be too _grateful_ to
+Miss Raeburn, or anybody else! You take great interest in your Boyce
+belongings, I perceive. You may remember too, perhaps, that there is
+other blood in you--and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to
+either patronage or pity."
+
+Marcella started. Her mother had never named her own kindred to her
+before that she could remember. She had known for many years that there
+was a breach between the Merritts and themselves. The newspapers had
+told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were
+fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the
+Boyces' threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could
+still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even
+a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother's
+mother. The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her
+first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was
+almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the
+Merritts.
+
+And now this note of intense personal and family pride, under which Mrs.
+Boyce's voice had for the first time quivered a little! Marcella had
+never heard it before, and it thrilled her. She sat on by the fire,
+drinking her tea and every now and then watching her companion with a
+new and painful curiosity. The tacit assumption of many years with her
+had been that her mother was a dry limited person, clever and determined
+in small ways, that affected her own family, but on the whole
+characterless as compared with other people of strong feelings and
+responsive susceptibilities. But her own character had been rapidly
+maturing of late, and her insight sharpening. During these recent weeks
+of close contact, her mother's singularity had risen in her mind to the
+dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.
+
+Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.
+
+"Your father will be in, I suppose. Yes, I hear the front door."
+
+As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a
+sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her
+dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in
+mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a
+good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and
+velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks,
+generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various
+fanciful and distinguished trifles--rings, an old chatelaine, a diamond
+brooch--which Marcella remembered, the same, and worn in the same way,
+since her childhood. Mrs. Boyce, however, wore her clothes so daintily,
+and took such scrupulous and ingenious care of them, that her dress
+cost, in truth, extremely little--certainly less than Marcella's.
+
+There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding
+of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from
+shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.
+
+"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife
+abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry
+by the fire. He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to
+trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.
+
+"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her
+silver kettle.
+
+"_I_ don't want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They
+should have done their calling long ago. There's no grace in it now; I
+don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion."
+
+But the women were silent. Marcella's attention was diverted from her
+mother to the father's small dark head and thin face. There was a great
+repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against
+circumstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural
+affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and
+silenced her. He stood in her way--terribly in her way--and yet it
+strangely seemed to her, that never before till these last few weeks had
+she felt herself a daughter.
+
+"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she took his cup; "don't
+you think you had better go at once and change?"
+
+"I'm all right," he said shortly--"as right as I'm likely to be, anyway.
+As for the shooting, it's nothing but waste of time and shoe leather. I
+shan't go out any more. The place has been clean swept by some of those
+brutes in the village--your friends, Marcella. By the way, Evelyn, I
+came across young Wharton in the road just now."
+
+"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively. "I don't remember--ought I?"
+
+"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said
+testily. "I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on. He is
+working like a horse, he tells me. Dodgson, the Raeburns' candidate, has
+got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him
+up. I like him. I won't vote for him; but I'll see fair play. I've asked
+him to come to tea here on Saturday, Evelyn. He'll be back again by the
+end of the week. He stays at Dell's farm when he comes--pretty bad
+accommodation, I should think. We must show him some civility."
+
+He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening
+under his nervous determination to assert himself--to hold up his head
+physically and morally against those who would repress him.
+
+Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly. He had passed his first
+weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and
+country friends should recognise him again and condone his
+"irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through
+his head. He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour
+if they would give him the chance--not like that miserly fool, his
+brother Robert. The past was so much past; who now was more respectable
+or more well intentioned than he? He was an impressionable imaginative
+man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he
+pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts,
+partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and
+daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store
+of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past
+catastrophe. Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after
+such a lapse? He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither
+drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child. These things, if
+the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of
+physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in him, than to
+self-conquest; but he was no doubt entitled to make the most of them.
+There were signs indeed that his forecast had been not at all
+unreasonable. His womenkind _were_ making their way. At the very moment
+when Lord Maxwell had written him a quelling letter, he had become aware
+that Marcella was on good terms with Lord Maxwell's heir. Had he not
+also been stopped that morning in a remote lane by Lord Winterbourne and
+Lord Maxwell on their way back from the meet, and had not both
+recognised and shaken hands with him? And now there were these cards.
+
+Unfortunately, in spite of Raeburn's opinion to the contrary, no man in
+such a position and with such a temperament ever gets something without
+claiming more--and more than he can conceivably or possibly get.
+Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and
+his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his
+afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So
+these were the terms he was to be on with them--the deuce take them and
+their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look
+foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men,
+soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished
+he had not answered them; he would show them in the future that he would
+eat no dirt for them or anybody else.
+
+So on the way home there had been a particular zest in his chance
+encounter with the young man who was likely to give the Raeburns and
+their candidate--so all the world said--a very great deal of trouble.
+The seat had been held to be an entirely safe one for the Maxwell
+nominee. Young Wharton, on the contrary, was making way every day, and,
+what with securing Aldous's own seat in the next division, and helping
+old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full.
+Dick Boyce was glad of it. He was a Tory; but all the same he wished
+every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential
+manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.
+
+The three sat on together for a little while in silence. Marcella kept
+her seat by the fire on the old gilt fenderstool, conscious in a
+dreamlike way of the room in front of her--the stately room with its
+stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind
+the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red
+twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to
+the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert
+Boyce--conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her
+own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on
+the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had
+he said to Lord Maxwell?--and to the Winterbournes? She wished she could
+know. She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again
+quickly. Yet it would be awkward too.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently she got up and went away to take off her things. As the door
+closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn's note, which
+Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.
+
+"They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said. "I am not going,
+but I shall send her."
+
+He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most
+contradictory effects upon him.
+
+"Why don't you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a
+moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.
+
+"I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old
+to begin again."
+
+"What! you mean to say," he asked her angrily, raising his voice, "that
+you have never _meant_ to do your duties here--the duties of your
+position?"
+
+"I did not foresee many, outside this house and land. Why should we
+change our ways? We have done very well of late. I have no mind to risk
+what I have got."
+
+He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back
+again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some
+respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on.
+His anger sank into moroseness.
+
+"Then why do you let Marcella go? What good will it do her to go about
+without her parents? People will only despise her for a girl of no
+spirit--as they ought."
+
+"It depends upon how it is done. I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs.
+Boyce. "A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of
+health. She need never give offence if she has decent wits. It will be
+understood that I do not go out, and then someone--Miss Raeburn or Lady
+Winterbourne--will take up Marcella and mother her."
+
+She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.
+
+"If you were to talk of _my_ health, it would be more to the purpose,"
+he said, with grim inconsequence. And raising his heavy lids he looked
+at her full.
+
+She got up and went over to him.
+
+"Do you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly
+you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"
+
+She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in
+their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost
+touched him. A passionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and
+kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did
+not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give
+him again.
+
+Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.
+
+"Clarke does me no good--not an atom," he said, rising. "There--don't
+you come. I Can look after myself."
+
+He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She
+put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so
+stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from
+the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more
+nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor
+God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late
+that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety
+dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."
+
+A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart--pain, new-born and
+insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous
+Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden
+invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with
+her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.
+
+But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence
+not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon
+impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.
+
+"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be
+all true what Mr. Raeburn said--probably a great deal more. Poor, poor
+mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty
+quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."
+
+Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white
+reflection in the old flawed glass.
+
+She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in
+her service. There could be no question but that he was specially
+interested in her.
+
+And he was not a man to be lightly played upon--nay, rather a singularly
+reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had been always held
+concerning him. Marcella was triumphantly conscious that he had not from
+the beginning given _her_ much trouble. But the common report of him
+made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more
+significant. Even the Hardens--so Marcella gathered from her friend and
+admirer Mary--unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the
+hastening of Christ's kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take
+note.
+
+It was not as though he were in the dark as to her antecedents. He knew
+all--at any rate, more than she did--and yet it might end in his asking
+her to marry him. What then?
+
+Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the glass! _Love_, at such a
+thought, must have sunk upon its knees and hid its face for tender
+humbleness and requital. Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty
+which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.
+
+What was stirring in her was really a passionate ambition--ambition to
+be the queen and arbitress of human lives--to be believed in by her
+friends, to make a mark for herself among women, and to make it in the
+most romantic and yet natural way, without what had always seemed to her
+the sordid and unpleasant drudgeries of the platform, of a tiresome
+co-operation with, or subordination to others who could not understand
+your ideas.
+
+Of course, if it happened, people would say that she had tried to
+capture Aldous Raeburn for his money and position's sake. Let them say
+it. People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it.
+Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what
+purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such
+a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her
+maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for
+something to carry her _deep_ into life; into the heart of its widest
+and most splendid opportunities!
+
+She threw up her hands, clasping them above her head amid her clouds of
+curly hair--a girlish excited gesture.
+
+"I could revive the straw-plaiting; give them better teaching and better
+models. The cottages should be rebuilt. Papa would willingly hand the
+village over to me if I found the money! We would have a parish
+committee to deal with the charities--oh! the Hardens would come in. The
+old people should have their pensions as of right. No hopeless old age,
+no cringing dependence! We would try co-operation on the land, and pull
+it through. And not in Mellor only. One might be the ruler, the
+regenerator of half a county!"
+
+Memory brought to mind in vivid sequence the figures and incidents of
+the afternoon, of her village round with Mary Harden.
+
+"_As the eyes of servants towards the hand of their mistress_"--the old
+words occurred to her as she thought of herself stepping in and out of
+the cottages. Then she was ashamed of herself and rejected the image
+with vehemence. Dependence was the curse of the poor. Her whole aim, of
+course, should be to teach them to stand on their own feet, to know
+themselves as men. But naturally they would be grateful, they would let
+themselves be led. Intelligence and enthusiasm give power, and ought to
+give it--power for good. No doubt, under Socialism, there will be less
+scope for either, because there will be less need. But Socialism, as a
+system, will not come in our generation. What we have to think for is
+the transition period. The Cravens had never seen that, but Marcella saw
+it. She began to feel herself a person of larger experience than they.
+
+As she undressed, it seemed to her as though she still felt the clinging
+hands of the Hurd children round her knees, and through them, symbolised
+by them, the suppliant touch of hundreds of other helpless creatures.
+
+She was just dropping to sleep when her own words to Aldous Raeburn
+flashed across her,--
+
+"Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people's lives, and look
+at the result!"
+
+She must needs laugh at herself, but it made little matter. She fell
+asleep cradled in dreams. Aldous Raeburn's final part in them was not
+great!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Mrs. Boyce wrote her note to Miss Raeburn, a note containing cold though
+civil excuses as to herself, while accepting the invitation for
+Marcella, who should be sent to the Court, either in the carriage or
+under the escort of a maid who could bring her back. Marcella found her
+mother inclined to insist punctiliously on conventions of this kind. It
+amused her, in submitting to them, to remember the free and easy ways of
+her London life. But she submitted--and not unwillingly.
+
+On the afternoon of the day which intervened between the Maxwells' call
+and her introduction to the Court, Marcella walked as usual down to the
+village. She was teeming with plans for her new kingdom, and could not
+keep herself out of it. And an entry in one of the local papers had
+suggested to her that Hurd might possibly find work in a parish some
+miles from Mellor. She must go and send him off there.
+
+When Mrs. Hurd opened the door to her, Marcella was astonished to
+perceive behind her the forms of several other persons filling up the
+narrow space of the usually solitary cottage--in fact, a tea-party.
+
+"Oh, come in, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, with some embarrassment, as though
+it occurred to her that her visitor might legitimately wonder to find a
+person of her penury entertaining company. Then, lowering her voice,
+she hurriedly explained: "There's Mrs. Brunt come in this afternoon to
+help me wi' the washin' while I finished my score of plait for the woman
+who takes 'em into town to-morrow. And there's old Patton an' his
+wife--you know 'em, miss?--them as lives in the parish houses top o' the
+common. He's walked out a few steps to-day. It's not often he's able,
+and when I see him through the door I said to 'em, 'if you'll come in
+an' take a cheer, I dessay them tea-leaves 'ull stan' another wettin'. I
+haven't got nothink else.' And there's Mrs. Jellison, she came in along
+o' the Pattons. You can't say her no, she's a queer one. Do you know
+her, miss?"
+
+"Oh, bless yer, yes, yes. She knows me!" said a high, jocular voice,
+making Mrs. Hurd start; "she couldn't be long hereabouts without makkin'
+eeaste to know me. You coom in, miss. We're not afraid o' you--Lor'
+bless you!"
+
+Mrs. Hurd stood aside for her visitor to pass in, looking round her the
+while, in some perplexity, to see whether there was a spare chair and
+room to place it. She was a delicate, willowy woman, still young in
+figure, with a fresh colour, belied by the grey circles under the eyes
+and the pinched sharpness of the features. The upper lip, which was
+pretty and childish, was raised a little over the teeth; the whole
+expression of the slightly open mouth was unusually soft and sensitive.
+On the whole, Minta Hurd was liked in the village, though she was
+thought a trifle "fine." The whole family, indeed, "kept theirsels to
+theirsels," and to find Mrs. Hurd with company was unusual. Her name,
+of course, was short for Araminta.
+
+Marcella laughed as she caught Mrs. Jellison's remarks, and made her way
+in, delighted. For the present, these village people affected her like
+figures in poetry or drama. She saw them with the eye of the imagination
+through a medium provided by Socialist discussion, or by certain phases
+of modern art; and the little scene of Mrs. Hurd's tea-party took for
+her in an instant the dramatic zest and glamour.
+
+"Look here, Mrs. Jellison," she said, going up to her; "I was just going
+to leave these apples for your grandson. Perhaps you'll take them, now
+you're here. They're quite sweet, though they look green. They're the
+best we've got, the gardener says."
+
+"Oh, they are, are they?" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly, looking up at
+her. "Well, put 'em down, miss. I dare say he'll eat 'em. He eats most
+things, and don't want no doctor's stuff nayther, though his mother do
+keep on at me for spoilin' his stummuck."
+
+"You are just fond of that boy, aren't you, Mrs. Jellison?" said
+Marcella, taking a wooden stool, the only piece of furniture left in the
+tiny cottage on which it was possible to sit, and squeezing herself into
+a corner by the fire, whence she commanded the whole group. "No! don't
+you turn Mr. Patton out of that chair, Mrs. Hurd, or I shall have to go
+away."
+
+For Mrs. Hurd, in her anxiety, was whispering in old Patton's ear that
+it might be well for him to give up her one wooden arm-chair, in which
+he was established, to Miss Boyce. But he, being old, deaf, and
+rheumatic, was slow to move, and Marcella's peremptory gesture bade her
+leave him in peace.
+
+"Well, it's you that's the young 'un, ain't it, miss?" said Mrs.
+Jellison, cheerfully. "Poor old Patton, he do get slow on his legs,
+don't you, Patton? But there, there's no helping it when you're turned
+of eighty."
+
+And she turned upon him a bright, philosophic eye, being herself a young
+thing not much over seventy, and energetic accordingly. Mrs. Jellison
+passed for the village wit, and was at least talkative and excitable
+beyond her fellows.
+
+"Well, _you_ don't seem to mind getting old, Mrs. Jellison," said
+Marcella, smiling at her.
+
+The eyes of all the old people round their tea-table were by now drawn
+irresistibly to Miss Boyce in the chimney corner, to her slim grace, and
+the splendour of her large black hat and feathers. The new squire's
+daughter had so far taken them by surprise. Some of them, however, were
+by now in the second stage of critical observation--none the less
+critical because furtive and inarticulate.
+
+"Ah?" said Mrs. Jellison, interrogatively, with a high, long-drawn note
+peculiar to her. "Well, I've never found you get forrarder wi' snarlin'
+over what you can't help. And there's mercies. When you've had a husband
+in his bed for fower year, miss, and he's took at last, you'll _know_."
+
+She nodded emphatically. Marcella laughed.
+
+"I know you were very fond of him, Mrs. Jellison, and looked after him
+very well, too."
+
+"Oh, I don't say nothin' about that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "But
+all the same you kin reckon it up, and see for yoursen. Fower year--an'
+fire upstairs, an' fire downstairs, an' fire all night, an' soomthin'
+allus wanted. An' he such an objeck afore he died! It do seem like a
+holiday now to sit a bit."
+
+And she crossed her hands on her lap with a long breath of content. A
+lock of grey hair had escaped from her bonnet, across her wrinkled
+forehead, and gave her a half-careless rakish air. Her youth of long
+ago--a youth of mad spirits, and of an extraordinary capacity for
+physical enjoyment, seemed at times to pierce to the surface again, even
+through her load of years. But in general she had a dreamy, sunny look,
+as of one fed with humorous fancies, but disinclined often to the
+trouble of communicating them.
+
+"Well, I missed my daughter, I kin tell you," said Mrs. Brunt, with a
+sigh, "though she took a deal more lookin' after nor your good man, Mrs.
+Jellison."
+
+Mrs. Brunt was a gentle, pretty old woman, who lived in another of the
+village almshouses, next door to the Pattons, and was always ready to
+help her neighbours in their domestic toils. Her last remaining
+daughter, the victim of a horrible spinal disease, had died some nine or
+ten months before the Boyces arrived at Mellor. Marcella had already
+heard the story several times, but it was part of her social gift that
+she was a good listener to such things even at the twentieth hearing.
+
+"You wouldn't have her back though," she said gently, turning towards
+the speaker.
+
+"No, I wouldn't have her back, miss," said Mrs. Brunt, raising her hand
+to brush away a tear, partly the result of feeling, partly of a
+long-established habit. "But I do miss her nights terrible! 'Mother,
+ain't it ten o'clock?--mother, look at the clock, do, mother--ain't it
+time for my stuff, mother--oh, I do _hope_ it is.' That was her stuff,
+miss, to make her sleep. And when she'd got it, she'd _groan_--you'd
+think she couldn't be asleep, and yet she was, dead-like--for two hours.
+I didn't get no rest with her, and now I don't seem to get no rest
+without her."
+
+And again Mrs. Brunt put her hand up to her eyes.
+
+"Ah, you were allus one for toilin' an' frettin'," said Mrs. Jellison,
+calmly. "A body must get through wi' it when it's there, but I don't
+hold wi' thinkin' about it when it's done."
+
+"I know one," said old Patton, slily, "that fretted about _her_ darter
+when it didn't do her no good."
+
+He had not spoken so far, but had sat with his hands on his stick, a
+spectator of the women's humours. He was a little hunched man, twisted
+and bent double with rheumatic gout, the fruit of seventy years of field
+work. His small face was almost lost, dog-like, under shaggy hair and
+overgrown eyebrows, both snow-white. He had a look of irritable
+eagerness, seldom, however, expressed in words. A sudden passion in the
+faded blue eyes; a quick spot of red in his old cheeks; these Marcella
+had often noticed in him, as though the flame of some inner furnace
+leapt. He had been a Radical and a rebel once in old rick-burning days,
+long before he lost the power in his limbs and came down to be thankful
+for one of the parish almshouses. To his social betters he was now a
+quiet and peaceable old man, well aware of the cakes and ale to be got
+by good manners; but in the depths of him there were reminiscences and
+the ghosts of passions, which were still stirred sometimes by causes not
+always intelligible to the bystander.
+
+He had rarely, however, physical energy enough to bring any
+emotion--even of mere worry at his physical ills--to the birth. The
+pathetic silence of age enwrapped him more and more. Still he could gibe
+the women sometimes, especially Mrs. Jellison, who was in general too
+clever for her company.
+
+"Oh, you may talk, Patton!" said Mrs. Jellison, with a little flash of
+excitement. "You do like to have your talk, don't you! Well, I dare say
+I _was_ orkard with Isabella. I won't go for to say I _wasn't_ orkard,
+for I _was_. She should ha' used me to 't before, if she wor took that
+way. She and I had just settled down comfortable after my old man went,
+and I didn't see no sense in it, an' I don't now. She might ha' let the
+men alone. She'd seen enough o' the worrit ov 'em."
+
+"Well, she did well for hersen," said Mrs. Brunt, with the same gentle
+melancholy. "She married a stiddy man as 'ull keep her well all her
+time, and never let her want for nothink."
+
+"A sour, wooden-faced chap as iver I knew," said Mrs. Jellison,
+grudgingly. "I don't have nothink to say to him, nor he to me. He thinks
+hissen the Grand Turk, he do, since they gi'en him his uniform, and made
+him full keeper. A nassty, domineerin' sort, I calls him. He's allus
+makin' bad blood wi' the yoong fellers when he don't need. It's the way
+he's got wi' 'im. But _I_ don't make no account of 'im, an' I let 'im
+see 't."
+
+All the tea-party grinned except Mrs. Hurd. The village was well
+acquainted with the feud between Mrs. Jellison and her son-in-law,
+George Westall, who had persuaded Isabella Jellison at the mature age of
+thirty-five to leave her mother and marry him, and was now one of Lord
+Maxwell's keepers, with good pay, and an excellent cottage some little
+way out of the village. Mrs. Jellison had never forgiven her daughter
+for deserting her, and was on lively terms of hostility with her
+son-in-law; but their only child, little Johnnie, had found the soft
+spot in his grandmother, and her favourite excitement in life, now that
+he was four years old, was to steal him from his parents and feed him on
+the things of which Isabella most vigorously disapproved.
+
+Mrs. Hurd, as has been said, did not smile. At the mention of Westall,
+she got up hastily, and began to put away the tea things.
+
+Marcella meanwhile had been sitting thoughtful.
+
+"You say Westall makes bad blood with the young men, Mrs. Jellison?" she
+said, looking up. "Is there much poaching in this village now, do you
+think?"
+
+There was a dead silence. Mrs. Hurd was at the other end of the cottage
+with her back to Marcella; at the question, her hands paused an instant
+in their work. The eyes of all the old people--of Patton and his wife,
+of Mrs. Jellison, and pretty Mrs. Brunt--were fixed on the speaker, but
+nobody said a word, not even Mrs. Jellison. Marcella coloured.
+
+"Oh, you needn't suppose--" she said, throwing her beautiful head back,
+"you needn't suppose that _I_ care about the game, or that I would ever
+be mean enough to tell anything that was told me. I know it _does_
+cause a great deal of quarrelling and bad blood. I believe it does
+here--and I should like to know more about it. I want to make up my mind
+what to think. Of course, my father has got his land and his own
+opinions. And Lord Maxwell has too. But I am not bound to think like
+either of them--I should like you to understand that. It seems to me
+right about all such things that people should enquire and find out for
+themselves."
+
+Still silence. Mrs. Jellison's mouth twitched, and she threw a sly
+provocative glance at old Patton, as though she would have liked to poke
+him in the ribs. But she was not going to help him out; and at last the
+one male in the company found himself obliged to clear his throat for
+reply.
+
+"We're old folks, most on us, miss, 'cept Mrs. Hurd. We don't hear talk
+o' things now like as we did when we were younger. If you ast Mr. Harden
+he'll tell you, I dessay."
+
+Patton allowed himself an inward chuckle. Even Mrs. Jellison, he
+thought, must admit that he knew a thing or two as to the best way of
+dealing with the gentry.
+
+But Marcella fixed him with her bright frank eyes.
+
+"I had rather ask in the village," she said. "If you don't know how it
+is now, Mr. Patton, tell me how it used to be when you were young. Was
+the preserving very strict about here? Were there often fights, with the
+keepers--long ago?--in my grandfather's days?--and do you think men
+poached because they were hungry, or because they wanted sport?"
+
+Patton looked at her fixedly a moment undecided, then her strong
+nervous youth seemed to exercise a kind of compulsion on him; perhaps,
+too, the pretty courtesy of her manner. He cleared his throat again, and
+tried to forget Mrs. Jellison, who would be sure to let him hear of it
+again, whatever he said.
+
+"Well, I can't answer for 'em, miss, I'm sure, but if you ast _me_, I
+b'lieve ther's a bit o' boath in it. Yer see it's not in human natur,
+when a man's young and 's got his blood up, as he shouldn't want ter
+have 'is sport with the wild creeturs. Perhaps he see 'em when ee's
+going to the wood with a wood cart--or he cooms across 'em in the
+turnips--wounded birds, you understan', miss, perhaps the day after the
+gentry 'as been bangin' at 'em all day. An' ee don't see, not for the
+life of 'im, why ee shouldn't have 'em. Ther's bin lots an' lots for the
+rich folks, an' he don't see why _ee_ shouldn't have a few arter they've
+enjoyed theirselves. And mebbe he's eleven shillin' a week--an'
+two-threy little chillen--you understan', miss?"
+
+"Of course I understand!" said Marcella, eagerly, her dark cheek
+flushing. "Of course I do! But there's a good deal of game given away in
+these parts, isn't there? I know Lord Maxwell does, and they say Lord
+Winterbourne gives all his labourers rabbits, almost as many as they
+want."
+
+Her questions wound old Patton up as though he had been a disused clock.
+He began to feel a whirr among his creaking wheels, a shaking of all his
+rusty mind.
+
+"Perhaps they do, miss," he said, and his wife saw that he was beginning
+to tremble. "I dessay they do--I don't say nothink agen it--though
+theer's none of it cooms my way. But that isn't all the rights on it
+nayther--no, that it ain't. The labourin' man ee's glad enough to get a
+hare or a rabbit for 'is eatin'--but there's more in it nor that, miss.
+Ee's allus in the fields, that's where it is--ee can't help seein' the
+hares and the rabbits a-comin' in and out o' the woods, if it were iver
+so. Ee knows ivery run ov ivery one on 'em; if a hare's started furthest
+corner o' t' field, he can tell yer whar she'll git in by, because he's
+allus there, you see, miss, an' it's the only thing he's got to take his
+mind off like. And then he sets a snare or two--an' ee gits very sharp
+at settin' on 'em--an' ee'll go out nights for the sport of it. Ther
+isn't many things _ee's_ got to liven him up; an' ee takes 'is chances
+o' goin' to jail--it's wuth it, ee thinks."
+
+The old man's hands on his stick shook more and more visibly. Bygones of
+his youth had come back to him.
+
+"Oh, I know! I know!" cried Marcella, with an accent half of
+indignation, half of despair. "It's the whole wretched system. It spoils
+those who've got, and those who haven't got. And there'll be no mending
+it till the _people_ get the land back again, and till the rights on it
+are common to all."
+
+"My! she do speak up, don't she?" said Mrs. Jellison, grinning again at
+her companions. Then, stooping forward with one of her wild movements,
+she caught Marcella's arm--"I'd like to hear yer tell that to Lord
+Maxwell, miss. I likes a roompus, I do."
+
+Marcella flushed and laughed.
+
+"I wouldn't mind saying that or anything else to Lord Maxwell," she said
+proudly. "I'm not ashamed of anything I think."
+
+"No, I'll bet you ain't," said Mrs. Jellison, withdrawing her hand. "Now
+then, Patton, you say what _you_ thinks. You ain't got no vote now
+you're in the parish houses--I minds that. The quality don't trouble
+_you_ at 'lection times. This yoong man, Muster Wharton, as is goin'
+round so free, promisin' yer the sun out o' the sky, iv yer'll only vote
+for 'im, so th' men say--_ee_ don't coom an' set down along o' you an'
+me, an' cocker of us up as ee do Joe Simmons or Jim Hurd here. But that
+don't matter. Yur thinkin's yur own, anyway."
+
+But she nudged him in vain. Patton had suddenly run down, and there was
+no more to be got out of him.
+
+Not only had nerves and speech failed him as they were wont, but in his
+cloudy soul there had risen, even while Marcella was speaking, the
+inevitable suspicion which dogs the relations of the poor towards the
+richer class. This young lady, with her strange talk, was the new
+squire's daughter. And the village had already made up its mind that
+Richard Boyce was "a poor sort," and "a hard sort" too, in his landlord
+capacity. He wasn't going to be any improvement on his brother--not a
+haporth! What was the good of this young woman talking, as she did, when
+there were three summonses as he, Patton, heard tell, just taken out by
+the sanitary inspector against Mr. Boyce for bad cottages? And not a
+farthing given away in the village neither, except perhaps the bits of
+food that the young lady herself brought down to the village now and
+then, for which no one, in truth, felt any cause to be particularly
+grateful. Besides, what did she mean by asking questions about the
+poaching? Old Patton knew as well as anybody else in the village, that
+during Robert Boyce's last days, and after the death of his sportsman
+son, the Mellor estate had become the haunt of poachers from far and
+near, and that the trouble had long since spread into the neighbouring
+properties, so that the Winterbourne and Maxwell keepers regarded it
+their most arduous business to keep watch on the men of Mellor. Of
+course the young woman knew it all, and she and her father wanted to
+know more. That was why she talked. Patton hardened himself against the
+creeping ways of the quality.
+
+"I don't think nought," he said roughly in answer to Mrs. Jellison.
+"Thinkin' won't come atwixt me and the parish coffin when I'm took. I've
+no call to think, I tell yer."
+
+Marcella's chest heaved with indignant feeling.
+
+"Oh, but, Mr. Patton!" she cried, leaning forward to him, "won't it
+comfort you a bit, even if you can't live to see it, to think there's a
+better time coming? There must be. People can't go on like this
+always--hating each other and trampling on each other. They're beginning
+to see it now, they are! When I was living in London, the persons I was
+with talked and thought of it all day. Some day, whenever the people
+choose--for they've got the power now they've got the vote--there'll be
+land for everybody, and in every village there'll be a council to
+manage things, and the labourer will count for just as much as the
+squire and the parson, and he'll be better educated and better fed, and
+care for many things he doesn't care for now. But all the same, if he
+wants sport and shooting, it will be there for him to get. For everybody
+will have a chance and a turn, and there'll be no bitterness between
+classes, and no hopeless pining and misery as there is now!"
+
+The girl broke off, catching her breath. It excited her to say these
+things to these people, to these poor tottering old things who had lived
+out their lives to the end under the pressure of an iron system, and had
+no lien on the future, whatever Paradise it might bring. Again the
+situation had something foreseen and dramatic in it. She saw herself, as
+the preacher, sitting on her stool beside the poor grate--she realised
+as a spectator the figures of the women and the old man played on by the
+firelight--the white, bare, damp-stained walls of the cottage, and in
+the background the fragile though still comely form of Minta Hurd, who
+was standing with her back to the dresser, and her head bent forward,
+listening to the talk while her fingers twisted the straw she plaited
+eternally from morning till night, for a wage of about 1s. 3d. a week:
+
+Her mind was all aflame with excitement and defiance--defiance of her
+father, Lord Maxwell, Aldous Raeburn. Let him come, her friend, and see
+for himself what she thought it right to do and say in this miserable
+village. Her soul challenged him, longed to provoke him! Well, she was
+soon to meet him, and in a new and more significant relation and
+environment. The fact made her perception of the whole situation the
+more rich and vibrant.
+
+Patton, while these broken thoughts and sensations were coursing through
+Marcella's head, was slowly revolving what she had been saying, and the
+others were waiting for him.
+
+At last he rolled his tongue round his dry lips and delivered himself by
+a final effort.
+
+"Them as likes, miss, may believe as how things are going to happen that
+way, but yer won't ketch me! Them as have got 'ull _keep_"--he let his
+stick sharply down on the floor--"an' them as 'aven't got 'ull 'ave to
+go without and _lump it_--as long as you're alive, miss, you mark my
+words!"
+
+"Oh, Lor', you wor allus one for makin' a poor mouth, Patton!" said Mrs.
+Jellison. She had been sitting with her arms folded across her chest,
+part absent, part amused, part malicious. "The young lady speaks
+beautiful, just like a book she do. An' she's likely to know a deal
+better nor poor persons like you and me. All _I_ kin say is,--if there's
+goin' to be dividin' up of other folks' property, when I'm gone, I hope
+George Westall won't get nothink ov it! He's bad enough as 'tis.
+Isabella 'ud have a fine time if _ee_ took to drivin' ov his carriage."
+
+The others laughed out, Marcella at their head, and Mrs. Jellison
+subsided, the corners of her mouth still twitching, and her eyes shining
+as though a host of entertaining notions were trooping through
+her--which, however, she preferred to amuse herself with rather than the
+public. Marcella looked at Patton thoughtfully.
+
+"You've been all your life in this village, haven't you, Mr. Patton?"
+she asked him.
+
+"Born top o' Witchett's Hill, miss. An' my wife here, she wor born just
+a house or two further along, an' we two bin married sixty-one year come
+next March."
+
+He had resumed his usual almshouse tone, civil and a little plaintive.
+His wife behind him smiled gently at being spoken of. She had a long
+fair face, and white hair surmounted by a battered black bonnet, a mouth
+set rather on one side, and a more observant and refined air than most
+of her neighbours. She sighed while she talked, and spoke in a delicate
+quaver.
+
+"D'ye know, miss," said Mrs. Jellison, pointing to Mrs. Patton, "as she
+kep' school when she was young?"
+
+"Did you, Mrs. Patton?" asked Marcella in her tone of sympathetic
+interest. "The school wasn't very big then, I suppose?"
+
+"About forty, miss," said Mrs. Patton, with a sigh. "There was eighteen
+the Rector paid for, and eighteen Mr. Boyce paid for, and the rest paid
+for themselves."
+
+Her voice dropped gently, and she sighed again like one weighted with an
+eternal fatigue.
+
+"And what did you teach them?"
+
+"Well, I taught them the plaitin', miss, and as much readin' and writin'
+as I knew myself. It wasn't as high as it is now, you see, miss," and a
+delicate flush dawned on the old cheek as Mrs. Patton threw a glance
+round her companions as though appealing to them not to tell stories of
+her.
+
+But Mrs. Jellison was implacable. "It wor she taught _me_," she said,
+nodding at Marcella and pointing sideways to Mrs. Patton. "She had a
+queer way wi' the hard words, I can tell yer, miss. When she couldn't
+tell 'em herself she'd never own up to it. 'Say Jerusalem, my dear, and
+pass on.' That's what she'd say, she would, sure's as you're alive! I've
+heard her do it times. An' when Isabella an' me used to read the Bible,
+nights, I'd allus rayther do 't than be beholden to me own darter. It
+gets yer through, anyway."
+
+"Well, it wor a good word," said Mrs. Patton, blushing and mildly
+defending herself. "It didn't do none of yer any harm."
+
+"Oh, an' before her, miss, I went to a school to another woman, as lived
+up Shepherd's Row. You remember her, Betsy Brunt?"
+
+Mrs. Brunt's worn eyes began already to gleam and sparkle.
+
+"Yis, I recolleck very well, Mrs. Jellison. She wor Mercy Moss, an' a
+goodish deal of trouble you'd use to get me into wi' Mercy Moss, all
+along o' your tricks."
+
+Mrs. Jellison, still with folded arms, began to rock herself gently up
+and down as though to stimulate memory.
+
+"My word, but Muster Maurice--he wor the clergyman here then, miss--wor
+set on Mercy Moss. He and his wife they flattered and cockered her up.
+Ther wor nobody like her for keepin' school, not in their eyes--till one
+midsummer--she--well she--I don't want to say nothink onpleasant--_but
+she transgressed_," said Mrs. Jellison, nodding mysteriously,
+triumphant however in the unimpeachable delicacy of her language, and
+looking round the circle for approval.
+
+"What do you say?" asked Marcella, innocently. "What did Mercy Moss do?"
+
+Mrs. Jellison's eyes danced with malice and mischief, but her mouth shut
+like a vice. Patton leaned forward on his stick, shaken with a sort of
+inward explosion; his plaintive wife laughed under her breath till she
+must needs sigh because laughter tired her old bones. Mrs. Brunt gurgled
+gently. And finally Mrs. Jellison was carried away.
+
+"Oh, my goodness me, don't you make me tell tales o' Mercy Moss!" she
+said at last, dashing the water out of her eyes with an excited
+tremulous hand. "She's bin dead and gone these forty year--married and
+buried mos' respeckable--it 'ud be a burning shame to bring up tales
+agen her now. Them as tittle-tattles about dead folks needn't look to
+lie quiet theirselves in their graves. I've said it times, and I'll say
+it again. What are you lookin' at me for, Betsy Brunt?"
+
+And Mrs. Jellison drew up suddenly with a fierce glance at Mrs. Brunt.
+
+"Why, Mrs. Jellison, I niver meant no offence," said Mrs. Brunt,
+hastily.
+
+"I won't stand no insinooating," said Mrs. Jellison, with energy. "If
+you've got soomthink agen me, you may out wi' 't an' niver mind the
+young lady."
+
+But Mrs. Brunt, much flurried, retreated amid a shower of excuses,
+pursued by her enemy, who was soon worrying the whole little company, as
+a dog worries a flock of sheep, snapping here and teasing there,
+chattering at the top of her voice in broad dialect, as she got more and
+more excited, and quite as ready to break her wit on Marcella as on
+anybody else. As for the others, most of them had known little else for
+weeks than alternations of toil and sickness; they were as much amused
+and excited to-night by Mrs. Jellison's audacities as a Londoner is by
+his favourite low comedian at his favourite music-hall. They played
+chorus to her, laughed, baited her; even old Patton was drawn against
+his will into a caustic sociability.
+
+Marcella meanwhile sat on her stool, her chin upon her hand, and her
+full glowing eyes turned upon the little spectacle, absorbing it all
+with a covetous curiosity.
+
+The light-heartedness, the power of enjoyment left in these old folk
+struck her dumb. Mrs. Brunt had an income of two-and-sixpence a week,
+_plus_ two loaves from the parish, and one of the parish or "charity"
+houses, a hovel, that is to say, of one room, scarcely fit for human
+habitation at all. She had lost five children, was allowed two shillings
+a week by two labourer sons, and earned sixpence a week--about--by
+continuous work at "the plait." Her husband had been run over by a farm
+cart and killed; up to the time of his death his earnings averaged about
+twenty-eight pounds a year. Much the same with the Pattons. They had
+lost eight children out of ten, and were now mainly supported by the
+wages of a daughter in service. Mrs. Patton had of late years suffered
+agonies and humiliations indescribable, from a terrible illness which
+the parish doctor was quite incompetent to treat, being all through a
+singularly sensitive woman, with a natural instinct for the decorous and
+the beautiful.
+
+Amazing! Starvation wages; hardships of sickness and pain; horrors of
+birth and horrors of death; wholesale losses of kindred and friends; the
+meanest surroundings; the most sordid cares--of this mingled cup of
+village fate every person in the room had drunk, and drunk deep. Yet
+here in this autumn twilight, they laughed and chattered, and
+joked--weird, wrinkled children, enjoying an hour's rough play in a
+clearing of the storm! Dependent from birth to death on squire, parson,
+parish, crushed often, and ill-treated, according to their own ideas,
+but bearing so little ill-will; amusing themselves with their own
+tragedies even, if they could but sit by a fire and drink a neighbour's
+cup of tea.
+
+Her heart swelled and burned within her. Yes, the old people were past
+hoping for; mere wreck and driftwood on the shore, the spring-tide of
+death would soon have swept them all into unremembered graves. But the
+young men and women, the children, were they too to grow up, and grow
+old like these--the same smiling, stunted, ignobly submissive creatures?
+One woman at least would do her best with her one poor life to rouse
+some of them to discontent and revolt!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The fire sank, and Mrs. Hurd made no haste to light her lamp. Soon the
+old people were dim chattering shapes in a red darkness. Mrs. Hurd still
+plaited, silent and upright, lifting her head every now and then at each
+sound upon the road.
+
+At last there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Hurd ran to open it.
+
+"Mother, I'm going your way," said a strident voice. "I'll help you home
+if you've a mind."
+
+On the threshold stood Mrs. Jellison's daughter, Mrs. Westall, with her
+little boy beside her, the woman's broad shoulders and harsh striking
+head standing out against the pale sky behind. Marcella noticed that she
+greeted none of the old people, nor they her. And as for Mrs. Hurd, as
+soon as she saw the keeper's wife, she turned her back abruptly on her
+visitor, and walked to the other end of the kitchen.
+
+"Are you comin', mother?" repeated Isabella.
+
+Mrs. Jellison grumbled, gibed at her, and made long leave-takings, while
+the daughter stood silent, waiting, and every now and then peering at
+Marcella, who had never seen her before.
+
+"I don' know where yur manners is," said Mrs. Jellison sharply to her,
+as though she had been a child of ten, "that you don't say good evenin'
+to the young lady."
+
+Mrs. Westall curtsied low, and hoped she might be excused, as it had
+grown so dark. Her tone was smooth and servile, and Marcella disliked
+her as she shook hands with her.
+
+The other old people, including Mrs. Brunt, departed a minute or two
+after the mother and daughter, and Marcella was left an instant with
+Mrs. Hurd.
+
+"Oh, thank you, thank you kindly, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, raising her
+apron to her eyes to staunch some irrepressible tears, as Marcella
+showed her the advertisement which it might possibly be worth Hurd's
+while to answer. "He'll try, you may be sure. But I can't think as how
+anythink 'ull come ov it."
+
+And then suddenly, as though something unexplained had upset her
+self-control, the poor patient creature utterly broke down. Leaning
+against the bare shelves which held their few pots and pans, she threw
+her apron over her head and burst into the forlornest weeping. "I wish I
+was dead; I wish I was dead, an' the chillen too!"
+
+Marcella hung over her, one flame of passionate pity, comforting,
+soothing, promising help. Mrs. Hurd presently recovered enough to tell
+her that Hurd had gone off that morning before it was light to a farm
+near Thame, where it had been told him he might possibly find a job.
+
+"But he'll not find it, miss, he'll not find it," she said, twisting her
+hands in a sort of restless misery; "there's nothing good happens to
+such as us. An' he wor allus a one to work if he could get it."
+
+There was a sound outside. Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short,
+deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly,
+splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long
+walking.
+
+He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the
+fire-lit gloom.
+
+"It's Miss Boyce, Jim," said his wife. "Did you hear of anythink?"
+
+"They're turnin' off hands instead of takin' ov 'em on," he said
+briefly, and fell into a chair by the grate.
+
+He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted.
+Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she
+had taken a warm interest in this man and his family. There was
+something about them which marked them out a bit from their
+fellows--whether it was the husband's strange but not repulsive
+deformity, contrasted with the touch of plaintive grace in the wife, or
+the charm of the elfish children, with their tiny stick-like arms and
+legs, and the glancing wildness of their blue eyes, under the frizzle of
+red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had
+begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant
+lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly
+because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal
+simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon
+discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours.
+At any rate, he would sit listening to her--and smoking, as she made him
+do--while she talked politics and socialism to him; and though he said
+little in return, she made the most of it, and was sure anyway that he
+was glad to see her come in, and must some time read the labour
+newspapers and Venturist leaflets she brought him, for they were always
+well thumbed before they came back to her.
+
+But to-night his sullen weariness would make no effort, and the hunted
+restless glances he threw from side to side as he sat crouching over the
+fire--the large mouth tight shut, the nostrils working--showed her that
+he would be glad when she went away.
+
+Her young exacting temper was piqued. She had been for some time trying
+to arrange their lives for them. So, in spite of his dumb resistance,
+she lingered on, questioning and suggesting. As to the advertisement she
+had brought down, he put it aside almost without looking at it. "There
+ud be a hun'erd men after it before ever he could get there," was all he
+would say to it. Then she inquired if he had been to ask the steward of
+the Maxwell Court estate for work. He did not answer, but Mrs. Hurd said
+timidly that she heard tell a new drive was to be made that winter for
+the sake of giving employment. But their own men on the estate would
+come first, and there were plenty of them out of work.
+
+"Well, but there is the game," persisted Marcella. "Isn't it possible
+they might want some extra men now the pheasant shooting has begun. I
+might go and inquire of Westall--I know him a little."
+
+The wife made a startled movement, and Hurd raised his misshapen form
+with a jerk.
+
+"Thank yer, miss, but I'll not trouble yer. I don't want nothing to do
+with Westall."
+
+And taking up a bit of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw
+it violently back into the grate. Marcella looked from one to the other
+with surprise. Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort,
+and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands.
+
+"Yes, I _shall_ tell, Jim!" she broke out. "I shall. I know Miss Boyce
+is one as ull understand--"
+
+Hurd turned round and looked at his wife full. But she persisted.
+
+"You see, miss, they don't speak, don't Jim and George Westall. When Jim
+was quite a lad he was employed at Mellor, under old Westall, George's
+father as was. Jim was 'watcher,' and young George he was assistant.
+That was in Mr. Robert's days, you understand, miss--when Master Harold
+was alive; and they took a deal o' trouble about the game. An' George
+Westall, he was allays leading the others a life--tale-bearing an'
+spyin', an' settin' his father against any of 'em as didn't give in to
+him. An', oh, he behaved _fearful_ to Jim! Jim ull tell you. Now, Jim,
+what's wrong with you--why shouldn't I tell?"
+
+For Hurd had risen, and as he and his wife looked at each other a sort
+of mute conversation seemed to pass between them. Then he turned
+angrily, and went out of the cottage by the back door into the garden.
+
+The wife sat in some agitation a moment, then she resumed. "He can't
+bear no talk about Westall--it seems to drive him silly. But I say as
+how people _should_ know."
+
+Her wavering eye seemed to interrogate her companion. Marcella was
+puzzled by her manner--it was so far from simple.
+
+"But that was long ago, surely," she said.
+
+"Yes, it wor long ago, but you don't forget them things, miss! An'
+Westall, he's just the same sort as he was then, so folks say," she
+added hurriedly. "You see Jim, miss, how he's made? His back was twisted
+that way when he was a little un. His father was a good old
+man--everybody spoke well of 'im--but his mother, she was a queer mad
+body, with red hair, just like Jim and the children, and a temper! my
+word. They do say she was an Irish girl, out of a gang as used to work
+near here--an' she let him drop one day when she was in liquor, an'
+never took no trouble about him afterwards. He was a poor sickly lad, he
+was! you'd wonder how he grew up at all. And oh! George Westall he
+treated him _cruel_. He'd kick and swear at him; then he'd dare him to
+fight, an' thrash him till the others came in, an' got him away. Then
+he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within
+an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im.
+The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was
+that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his
+hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his
+father, and next morning he told me, as he couldn't stand it no longer,
+an' he never went back no more."
+
+"And he told no one else?--he never complained?" asked Marcella,
+indignantly.
+
+"What ud ha been the good o' that, miss?" Mrs. Hurd said, wondering.
+"Nobody ud ha taken his word agen old Westall's. But he come and told
+me. I was housemaid at Lady Leven's then, an' he and his father were old
+friends of ourn. And I knew George Westall too. He used to walk out with
+me of a Sunday, just as civil as could be, and give my mother rabbits
+now and again, and do anything I'd ask him. An' I up and told him he was
+a brute to go ill-treatin' a sickly fellow as couldn't pay him back.
+That made him as cross as vinegar, an' when Jim began to be about with
+me ov a Sunday sometimes, instead of him, he got madder and madder. An'
+Jim asked me to marry him--he begged of me--an' I didn't know what to
+say. For Westall had asked me twice; an' I was afeard of Jim's health,
+an' the low wages he'd get, an' of not bein' strong myself. But one day
+I was going up a lane into Tudley End woods, an' I heard George Westall
+on tother side of the hedge with a young dog he was training. Somethin'
+crossed him, an' he flew into a passion with it. It turned me _sick_. I
+ran away and I took against him there and then. I was frightened of him.
+I duresn't trust myself, and I said to Jim I'd take him. So you can
+understan', miss, can't you, as Jim don't want to have nothing to do
+with Westall? Thank you kindly, all the same," she added, breaking off
+her narrative with the same uncertainty of manner, the same timid
+scrutiny of her visitor that Marcella had noticed before.
+
+Marcella replied that she could certainly understand.
+
+"But I suppose they've not got in each other's way of late years," she
+said as she rose to go.
+
+"Oh! no, miss, no," said Mrs. Hurd as she went hurriedly to fetch a fur
+tippet which her visitor had laid down on the dresser.
+
+"There is _one_ person I can speak to," said Marcella, as she put on the
+wrap. "And I will." Against her will she reddened a little; but she had
+not been able to help throwing out the promise. "And now, you won't
+despair, will you? You'll trust me? I could always do something."
+
+She took Mrs. Hurd's hand with a sweet look and gesture. Standing there
+in her tall vigorous youth, her furs wrapped about her, she had the air
+of protecting and guiding this poverty that could not help itself. The
+mother and wife felt herself shy, intimidated. The tears came back to
+her brown eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Miss Boyce had gone, Minta Hurd went to the fire and put it
+together, sighing all the time, her face still red and miserable.
+
+The door opened and her husband came in. He carried some potatoes in his
+great earth-stained hands.
+
+"You're goin' to put that bit of hare on? Well, mak' eeaste, do, for I'm
+starvin'. What did she want to stay all that time for? You go and get
+it. I'll blow the fire up--damn these sticks!--they're as wet as Dugnall
+pond."
+
+Nevertheless, as she sadly came and went, preparing the supper, she saw
+that he was appeased, in a better temper than before.
+
+"What did you tell 'er?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"What do you spose I'd tell her? I acted for the best. I'm always
+thinkin' for you!" she said as though with a little cry, "or we'd soon
+be in trouble--worse trouble than we are!" she added miserably.
+
+He stopped working the old bellows for a moment, and, holding his long
+chin, stared into the flames. With his deformity, his earth-stains, his
+blue eyes, his brown wrinkled skin, and his shock of red hair, he had
+the look of some strange gnome crouching there.
+
+"I don't know what you're at, I'll swear," he said after a pause. "I
+ain't in any pertickler trouble just now--if yer wouldn't send a fellow
+stumpin' the country for nothink. If you'll just let me alone I'll get a
+livin' for you and the chillen right enough. Don't you trouble
+yourself--an' hold your tongue!"
+
+She threw down her apron with a gesture of despair as she stood beside
+him, in front of the fire, watching the pan.
+
+"What am I to do, Jim, an' them chillen--when you're took to prison?"
+she asked him vehemently.
+
+"I shan't get took to prison, I tell yer. All the same, Westall got holt
+o' me this mornin'. I thought praps you'd better know."
+
+Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he
+had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them. His brutality was
+mostly assumed. He had adopted it as a mask for more than a year past,
+because he _must_ go his way, and she worried him.
+
+"Now look here," he said resolutely, "it don't matter. I'm not goin' to
+be took by Westall. I'd kill him or myself first. But he caught me
+lookin' at a snare this mornin'--it wor misty, and I didn't see no one
+comin'. It wor close to the footpath, and it worn't my snare."
+
+"'Jim, my chap,' says he, mockin', 'I'm sorry for it, but I'm going to
+search yer, so take it quietly,' says he. He had young Dynes with
+him--so I didn't say nought--I kep' as still as a mouse, an' sure enough
+he put his ugly han's into all my pockets. An' what do yer think he
+foun'?"
+
+"What?" she said breathlessly.
+
+"Nothink!" he laughed out. "Nary an end o' string, nor a kink o'
+wire--nothink. I'd hidden the two rabbits I got las' night, and all my
+bits o' things in a ditch far enough out o' his way. I just laughed at
+the look ov 'im. 'I'll have the law on yer for assault an' battery, yer
+damned miscalculatin' brute!' says I to him--'why don't yer get that boy
+there to teach yer your business?' An' off I walked. Don't you be
+afeared--'ee'll never lay hands on me!"
+
+But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she
+made the tea. He took little heed of her. He sat by the fire quivering
+and thinking. In a public-house two nights before this one, overtures
+had been made to him on behalf of a well-known gang of poachers with
+head-quarters in a neighbouring county town, who had their eyes on the
+pheasant preserves in Westall's particular beat--the Tudley End
+beat--and wanted a local watcher and accomplice. He had thought the
+matter at first too dangerous to touch. Moreover, he was at that moment
+in a period of transition, pestered by Minta to give up "the poachin',"
+and yet drawn back to it after his spring and summer of field work by
+instincts only recently revived, after long dormancy, but now hard to
+resist.
+
+Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta's wails which happened
+to reach him.
+
+"Look 'ere!" said he to her, "where ud you an' the chillen be this night
+if I 'adn't done it? 'Adn't we got rid of every stick o' stuff we iver
+'ad? 'Ere's a well-furnished place for a chap to sit in!"--he glanced
+bitterly round the bare kitchen, which had none of the little properties
+of the country poor, no chest, no set of mahogany drawers, no
+comfortable chair, nothing, but the dresser and the few rush chairs and
+the table, and a few odds and ends of crockery and household
+stuff--"wouldn't we all a bin on the parish, if we 'adn't starved
+fust--_wouldn't_ we?--jes' answer me that! _Didn't_ we sit here an'
+starve, till the bones was comin' through the chillen's skin?--didn't
+we?"
+
+That he could still argue the point with her showed the inner
+vulnerableness, the inner need of her affection and of peace with her,
+which he still felt, far as certain new habits were beginning to sweep
+him from her.
+
+"It's Westall or Jenkins (Jenkins was the village policeman) havin' the
+_law_ on yer, Jim," she said with emphasis, putting down a cup and
+looking at him--it's the thought of _that_ makes me cold in my back.
+None o' _my_ people was ever in prison--an' if it 'appened to you I
+should just die of shame!"
+
+"Then yer'd better take and read them papers there as _she_ brought," he
+said impatiently, first jerking his finger over his shoulder in the
+direction of Mellor to indicate Miss Boyce, and then pointing to a heap
+of newspapers which lay on the floor in a corner, "they'd tell yer
+summat about the shame o' _makin_' them game-laws--not o' breakin' ov
+'em. But I'm sick o' this! Where's them chillen? Why do yer let that boy
+out so late?"
+
+And opening the door he stood on the threshold looking up and down the
+village street, while Minta once more gave up the struggle, dried her
+eyes, and told herself to be cheerful. But it was hard. She was far
+better born and better educated than her husband. Her father had been a
+small master chair-maker in Wycombe, and her mother, a lackadaisical
+silly woman, had given her her "fine" name by way of additional proof
+that she and her children were something out of the common. Moreover,
+she had the conforming law-abiding instincts of the well-treated
+domestic servant, who has lived on kindly terms with the gentry and
+shared their standards. And for years after their marriage Hurd had
+allowed her to govern him. He had been so patient, so hard-working, such
+a kind husband and father, so full of a dumb wish to show her he was
+grateful to her for marrying such a fellow as he. The quarrel with
+Westall seemed to have sunk out of his mind. He never spoke to or of
+him. Low wages, the burden of quick-coming children, the bad sanitary
+conditions of their wretched cottage, and poor health, had made their
+lives one long and sordid struggle. But for years he had borne his load
+with extraordinary patience. He and his could just exist, and the man
+who had been in youth the lonely victim of his neighbours' scorn had
+found a woman to give him all herself and children to love. Hence years
+of submission, a hidden flowering time for both of them.
+
+Till that last awful winter!--the winter before Richard Boyce's
+succession to Mellor--when the farmers had been mostly ruined, and half
+the able-bodied men of Mellor had tramped "up into the smoke," as the
+village put it, in search of London work--then, out of actual sheer
+starvation--that very rare excuse of the poacher!--Hurd had gone one
+night and snared a hare on the Mellor land. Would the wife and mother
+ever forget the pure animal satisfaction of that meal, or the fearful
+joy of the next night, when he got three shillings from a local publican
+for a hare and two rabbits?
+
+But after the first relief Minta had gone in fear and trembling. For the
+old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and
+their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place
+had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying. He became
+excited, unmanageable. Very soon he was no longer content with Mellor,
+where, since the death of young Harold, the heir, the keepers had been
+dismissed, and what remained of a once numerous head of game lay open to
+the wiles of all the bold spirits of the neighbourhood. He must needs go
+on to those woods of Lord Maxwell's, which girdled the Mellor estate on
+three sides. And here he came once more across his enemy. For George
+Westall was now in the far better-paid service of the Court--and a very
+clever keeper, with designs on the head keeper's post whenever it might
+be vacant. In the case of a poacher he had the scent of one of his own
+hares. It was known to him in an incredibly short time that that "low
+caselty fellow Hurd" was attacking "his" game.
+
+Hurd, notwithstanding, was cunning itself, and Westall lay in wait for
+him in vain. Meanwhile, all the old hatred between the two men revived.
+Hurd drank this winter more than he had ever drunk yet. It was
+necessary to keep on good terms with one or two publicans who acted as
+"receivers" of the poached game of the neighbourhood. And it seemed to
+him that Westall pursued him into these low dens. The keeper--big,
+burly, prosperous--would speak to him with insolent patronage, watching
+him all the time, or with the old brutality, which Hurd dared not
+resent. Only in his excitable dwarf's sense hate grew and throve, very
+soon to monstrous proportions. Westall's menacing figure darkened all
+his sky for him. His poaching, besides a means of livelihood, became
+more and more a silent duel between him and his boyhood's tyrant.
+
+And now, after seven months of regular field-work and respectable
+living, it was all to begin again with the new winter! The same shudders
+and terrors, the same shames before the gentry and Mr. Harden!--the
+soft, timid woman with her conscience could not endure the prospect. For
+some weeks after the harvest was over she struggled. He had begun to go
+out again at nights. But she drove him to look for employment, and lived
+in tears when he failed.
+
+As for him, she knew that he was glad to fail; there was a certain ease
+and jauntiness in his air to-night as he stood calling the children:
+
+"Will!--you come in at once! Daisy!--Nellie!"
+
+Two little figures came pattering up the street in the moist October
+dusk, a third, panted behind. The girls ran in to their mother
+chattering and laughing. Hurd lifted the boy in his arm.
+
+"Where you bin, Will? What were yo out for in this nasty damp? I've
+brought yo a whole pocket full o' chestnuts, and summat else too."
+
+He carried him in to the fire and sat him on his knees. The little
+emaciated creature, flushed with the pleasure of his father's company,
+played contentedly in the intervals of coughing with the shining
+chestnuts, or ate his slice of the fine pear--the gift of a friend in
+Thame--which proved to be the "summat else" of promise. The curtains
+were close-drawn; the paraffin lamp flared on the table, and as the
+savoury smell of the hare and onions on the fire filled the kitchen, the
+whole family gathered round watching for the moment of eating. The fire
+played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's
+cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to
+smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the
+dwarf. Family affection--and the satisfaction of the simpler physical
+needs--these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour,
+to-night, the Hurds were happy.
+
+Meanwhile, in the lane outside, Marcella, as she walked home, passed a
+tall broad-shouldered man in a velveteen suit and gaiters, his gun over
+his shoulder and two dogs behind him, his pockets bulging on either
+side. He walked with a kind of military air, and touched his cap to her
+as he passed.
+
+Marcella barely nodded.
+
+"Tyrant and bully!" she thought to herself with Mrs. Hurd's story in her
+mind. "Yet no doubt he is a valuable keeper; Lord Maxwell would be sorry
+to lose him! It is the system makes such men--and must have them."
+
+The clatter of a pony carriage disturbed her thoughts. A small, elderly
+lady, in a very large mushroom hat, drove past her in the dusk and bowed
+stiffly. Marcella was so taken by surprise that she barely returned the
+bow. Then she looked after the carriage. That was Miss Raeburn.
+
+To-morrow!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+"Won't you sit nearer to the window? We are rather proud of our view at
+this time of year," said Miss Raeburn to Marcella, taking her visitor's
+jacket from her as she spoke, and laying it aside. "Lady Winterbourne is
+late, but she will come, I am sure. She is very precise about
+engagements."
+
+Marcella moved her chair nearer to the great bow-window, and looked out
+over the sloping gardens of the Court, and the autumn splendour of the
+woods girdling them in on all sides. She held her head nervously erect,
+was not apparently much inclined to talk, and Miss Raeburn, who had
+resumed her knitting within a few paces of her guest, said to herself
+presently after a few minutes' conversation on the weather and the walk
+from Mellor: "Difficult--decidedly difficult--and too much manner for a
+young girl. But the most picturesque creature I ever set eyes on!"
+
+Lord Maxwell's sister was an excellent woman, the inquisitive,
+benevolent despot of all the Maxwell villages; and one of the soundest
+Tories still left to a degenerate party and a changing time. Her brother
+and her great-nephew represented to her the flower of human kind; she
+had never been capable, and probably never would be capable, of
+quarrelling with either of them on any subject whatever. At the same
+time she had her rights with them. She was at any rate their natural
+guardian in those matters, relating to womankind, where men are
+confessedly given to folly. She had accordingly kept a shrewd eye in
+Aldous's interest on all the young ladies of the neighbourhood for many
+years past; knew perfectly well all that he might have done, and sighed
+over all that he had so far left undone.
+
+At the present moment, in spite of the even good-breeding with which she
+knitted and chattered beside Marcella, she was in truth consumed with
+curiosity, conjecture, and alarm on the subject of this Miss Boyce.
+Profoundly as they trusted each other, the Raeburns were not on the
+surface a communicative family. Neither her brother nor Aldous had so
+far bestowed any direct confidence upon her; but the course of affairs
+had, notwithstanding, aroused her very keenest attention. In the first
+place, as we know, the mistress of Maxwell Court had left Mellor and its
+new occupants unvisited; she had plainly understood it to be her
+brother's wish that she should do so. How, indeed, could you know the
+women without knowing Richard Boyce? which, according to Lord Maxwell,
+was impossible. And now it was Lord Maxwell who had suggested not only
+that after all it would be kind to call upon the poor things, who were
+heavily weighted enough already with Dick Boyce for husband and father,
+but that it would be a graceful act on his sister's part to ask the girl
+and her mother to luncheon. Dick Boyce of course must be made to keep
+his distance, but the resources of civilisation were perhaps not unequal
+to the task of discriminating, if it were prudently set about. At any
+rate Miss Raeburn gathered that she was expected to try, and instead of
+pressing her brother for explanations she held her tongue, paid her call
+forthwith, and wrote her note.
+
+But although Aldous, thinking no doubt that he had been already
+sufficiently premature, had said nothing at all as to his own feelings
+to his great-aunt, she knew perfectly well that he had said a great deal
+on the subject of Miss Boyce and her mother to Lady Winterbourne, the
+only woman in the neighbourhood with whom he was ever really
+confidential. No woman, of course, in Miss Raeburn's position, and with
+Miss Raeburn's general interest in her kind, could have been ignorant
+for any appreciable number of days after the Boyces' arrival at Mellor
+that they possessed a handsome daughter, of whom the Hardens in
+particular gave striking but, as Miss Raeburn privately thought, by no
+means wholly attractive accounts. And now, after all these somewhat
+agitating preliminaries, here was the girl established in the Court
+drawing-room, Aldous more nervous and preoccupied than she had ever seen
+him, and Lord Maxwell expressing a particular anxiety to return from his
+Board meeting in good time for luncheon, to which he had especially
+desired that Lady Winterbourne should be bidden, and no one else! It may
+well be supposed that Miss Raeburn was on the alert.
+
+As for Marcella, she was on her side keenly conscious of being observed,
+of having her way to make. Here she was alone among these formidable
+people, whose acquaintance she had in a manner compelled. Well--what
+blame? What was to prevent her from doing the same thing again
+to-morrow? Her conscience was absolutely clear. If they were not ready
+to meet her in the same spirit in which through Mr. Raeburn she had
+approached them, she would know perfectly well how to protect
+herself--above all, how to live out her life in the future without
+troubling them.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of her dignity and those inward propitiations it
+from time to time demanded, she was, in her human vivid way, full of an
+excitement and curiosity she could hardly conceal as perfectly as she
+desired--curiosity as to the great house and the life in it, especially
+as to Aldous Raeburn's part therein. She knew very little indeed of the
+class to which by birth she belonged; great houses and great people were
+strange to her. She brought her artist's and student's eyes to look at
+them with; she was determined not to be dazzled or taken in by them. At
+the same time, as she glanced every now and then round the splendid room
+in which they sat, with its Tudor ceiling, its fine pictures, its
+combination of every luxury with every refinement, she was distinctly
+conscious of a certain thrill, a romantic drawing towards the
+stateliness and power which it all implied, together with a proud and
+careless sense of equality, of kinship so to speak, which she made light
+of, but would not in reality have been without for the world.
+
+In birth and blood she had nothing to yield to the Raeburns--so her
+mother assured her. If things were to be vulgarly measured, this fact
+too must come in. But they should not be vulgarly measured. She did not
+believe in class or wealth--not at all. Only--as her mother had told
+her--she must hold her head up. An inward temper, which no doubt led to
+that excess of manner of which Miss Raeburn was meanwhile conscious.
+
+Where were the gentlemen? Marcella was beginning to resent and tire of
+the innumerable questions as to her likes and dislikes, her
+accomplishments, her friends, her opinions of Mellor and the
+neighbourhood, which this knitting lady beside her poured out upon her
+so briskly, when to her great relief the door opened and a footman
+announced "Lady Winterbourne."
+
+A very tall thin lady in black entered the room at the words. "My dear!"
+she said to Miss Raeburn, "I am very late, but the roads are abominable,
+and those horses Edward has just given me have to be taken such tiresome
+care of. I told the coachman next time he might wrap them in shawls and
+put them to bed, and _I_ should walk."
+
+"You are quite capable of it, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, kissing her.
+"We know you! Miss Boyce--Lady Winterbourne."
+
+Lady Winterbourne shook hands with a shy awkwardness which belied her
+height and stateliness. As she sat down beside Miss Raeburn the contrast
+between her and Lord Maxwell's sister was sufficiently striking. Miss
+Raeburn was short, inclined to be stout, and to a certain gay profusion
+in her attire. Her cap was made of a bright silk handkerchief edged with
+lace; round her neck were hung a number of small trinkets on various
+gold chains; she abounded too in bracelets, most of which were clearly
+old-fashioned mementos of departed relatives or friends. Her dress was
+a cheerful red verging on crimson; and her general air suggested energy,
+bustle, and a good-humoured common sense.
+
+Lady Winterbourne, on the other hand, was not only dressed from head to
+foot in severe black without an ornament; her head and face belonged
+also to the same impression, as of some strong and forcible study in
+black and white. The attitude was rigidly erect; the very dark eyes,
+under the snowy and abundant hair, had a trick of absent staring; in
+certain aspects the whole figure had a tragic, nay, formidable dignity,
+from which one expected, and sometimes got, the tone and gesture of
+tragic acting. Yet at the same time, mixed in therewith, a curious
+strain of womanish, nay childish, weakness, appealingness. Altogether, a
+great lady, and a personality--yet something else too--something
+ill-assured, timid, incongruous--hard to be defined.
+
+"I believe you have not been at Mellor long?" the new-comer asked, in a
+deep contralto voice which she dragged a little.
+
+"About seven weeks. My father and mother have been there since May."
+
+"You must of course think it a very interesting old place?"
+
+"Of course I do; I love it," said Marcella, disconcerted by the odd
+habit Lady Winterbourne had of fixing her eyes upon a person, and then,
+as it were, forgetting what she had done with them.
+
+"Oh, I haven't been there, Agneta," said the new-comer, turning after a
+pause to Miss Raeburn, "since that summer--_you_ remember that party
+when the Palmerstons came over--so long ago--twenty years!"
+
+Marcella sat stiffly upright. Lady Winterbourne grew a little nervous
+and flurried.
+
+"I don't think I ever saw your mother, Miss Boyce--I was much away from
+home about then. Oh, yes, I did once--"
+
+The speaker stopped, a sudden red suffusing her pale cheeks. She had
+felt certain somehow, at sight of Marcella, that she should say or do
+something untoward, and she had promptly justified her own prevision.
+The only time she had ever seen Mrs. Boyce had been in court, on the
+last day of the famous trial in which Richard Boyce was concerned, when
+she had made out the wife sitting closely veiled as near to her husband
+as possible, waiting for the verdict. As she had already confided this
+reminiscence to Miss Raeburn, and had forgotten she had done so, both
+ladies had a moment of embarrassment.
+
+"Mrs. Boyce, I am sorry to say, does not seem to be strong," said Miss
+Raeburn, bending over the heel of her stocking. "I wish we could have
+had the pleasure of seeing her to-day."
+
+There was a pause. Lady Winterbourne's tragic eyes were once more
+considering Marcella.
+
+"I hope you will come and see me," she said at last abruptly--"and Mrs.
+Boyce too."
+
+The voice was very soft and refined though so deep, and Marcella looking
+up was suddenly magnetised.
+
+"Yes, I will," she said, all her face melting into sensitive life.
+"Mamma won't go anywhere, but I will come, if you will ask me."
+
+"Will you come next Tuesday?" said Lady Winterbourne quickly--"come to
+tea, and I will drive you back. Mr. Raeburn told me about you. He
+says--you read a great deal."
+
+The solemnity of the last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, were
+not to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneously
+thought her extraordinarily radiant and handsome.
+
+"How can he know? Why, I have hardly talked about books to him at all."
+
+"Well! here he comes," said Lady Winterbourne, smiling suddenly; "so I
+can ask him. But I am sure he did say so."
+
+It was now Marcella's turn to colour. Aldous Raeburn crossed the room,
+greeted Lady Winterbourne, and next moment she felt her hand in his.
+
+"You did tell me, Aldous, didn't you," said Lady Winterbourne, "that
+Miss Boyce was a great reader?"
+
+The speaker had known Aldous Raeburn as a boy, and was, moreover, a sort
+of cousin, which explained the Christian name.
+
+Aldous smiled.
+
+"I said I thought Miss Boyce was like you and me, and had a weakness
+that way, Lady Winterbourne. But I won't be cross-examined!"
+
+"I don't think I am a great reader," said Marcella, bluntly--"at least I
+read a great deal, but I hardly ever read a book through. I haven't
+patience."
+
+"You want to get at everything so quickly?" said Miss Raeburn, looking
+up sharply.
+
+"I suppose so!" said Marcella. "There seems to be always a hundred
+things tearing one different ways, and no time for any of them."
+
+"Yes, when one is young one feels like that," said Lady Winterbourne,
+sighing. "When one is old one accepts one's limitations. When I was
+twenty I never thought that I should still be an ignorant and
+discontented woman at nearly seventy."
+
+"It is because you are so young still, Lady Winterbourne, that you feel
+so," said Aldous, laughing at her, as one does at an old friend. "Why,
+you are younger than any of us! I feel all brushed and stirred up--a boy
+at school again--after I have been to see you!"
+
+"Well, I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Lady Winterbourne,
+sighing again. Then she looked at the pair beside her--at the alert
+brightness in the man's strong and quiet face as he sat stooping
+forward, with his hands upon his knees, hardly able to keep his eyes for
+an instant from the dark apparition beside him--at the girl's evident
+shyness and pride.
+
+"My dear!" she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heard
+what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a
+baby? It was born with four teeth!"
+
+Miss Raeburn's astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two old
+friends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne's
+numerous family, which was clearly meant for a _tete-a-tete_.
+
+"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour,
+after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her
+walk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my
+grandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier than
+this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept
+him an unconscionable time."
+
+Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room
+where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the
+wall from side to side.
+
+"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What a
+delicious thing to live with."
+
+And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints,
+suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in
+flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses.
+Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and
+pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled
+and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It
+was Italy at the great moment--subtle, rich, exuberant.
+
+Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.
+
+"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my special
+delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a
+garret. I am not sure that I don't in my heart prefer it to any of the
+pictures."
+
+"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it--"look at them--the irises,
+the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to have
+when one was small of what it would be like to have _flowers enough_. I
+was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always
+cheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, and
+I found one here and one there--but such a beggarly, wretched few, for
+all one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself
+by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this--yes, just like
+this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one's
+hands in and gather and gather till one was really _satisfied_! That is
+the worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough of
+anything. One day it's flowers--but the next day it is pudding--and the
+next frocks."
+
+Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant to
+feel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admiration
+and deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck,
+and vibrated happily.
+
+"Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will make
+up to you!" he said, smiling at her. "But now, I have been wondering to
+myself in my room upstairs what you would like to see. There are a good
+many treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because you
+are an artist. But you shall not be bored with them! You shall see what
+and as much as you like. You had about a quarter of an hour's talk with
+my aunt, did you not?" he asked, in a quite different tone.
+
+So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance,
+he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his own
+purposes! Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into her
+cheek.
+
+"Miss Raeburn was very kind," she said, with a return of shyness, which
+passed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring. "Yes,
+she was very kind!--but all the same she doesn't like me--I don't think
+she is going to like me--I am not her sort."
+
+"Have you been talking Socialism to her?" he asked her, smiling.
+
+"No, not yet--not yet," she said emphatically. "But I am dreadfully
+uncertain--I can't always hold my tongue--I am afraid you will be sorry
+you took me up."
+
+"Are you so aggressive? But Aunt Neta is so mild!--she wouldn't hurt a
+fly. She mothers every one in the house and out of it. The only people
+she is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will wear feathers in
+their hats!"
+
+"There!" cried Marcella, indignantly. "Why shouldn't they wear feathers
+in their hats? It is their form of beauty--their tapestry!"
+
+"But if one can't have both feathers and boots?" he asked her humbly, a
+twinkle in his grey eye. "If one hasn't boots, one may catch a cold and
+die of it--which is, after all, worse than going featherless."
+
+"But why _can't_ they have feathers and boots? It is because
+you--we--have got too much. You have the tapestry--and--and the
+pictures"--she turned and looked round the room--"and this wonderful
+house--and the park. Oh, no--I think it is Miss Raeburn has too many
+feathers!"
+
+"Perhaps it is," he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing and
+saddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled to
+him. "You see I am in a difficulty. I want to show you our feathers. I
+think they would please you--and you make me ashamed of them."
+
+"How absurd!" cried Marcella, "when I told you how I liked the school
+children bobbing to me!"
+
+They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start--"Ah, here is my
+grandfather!"
+
+Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, after
+greeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce. He saw the old man's
+somewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes which
+marked the first effect of Marcella's form and presence, the bow, the
+stately shake of the hand. The lover hearing his own heart beat,
+realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.
+
+"You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to your
+grandfather," said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch,
+Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne. "He was one of
+my dearest friends."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't know much about him," said Marcella, rather bluntly,
+"except what I have got out of old letters. I never saw him that I
+remember."
+
+Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a great
+wish to talk to her, and make her talk. He had pleasant things to say
+about Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and some
+conversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to a
+discussion of the part played by the different local families in the
+Civil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried in
+various shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease with
+herself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the local
+brotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he could
+not but divine.
+
+The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with an
+independence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life. She
+was not in the least abashed or shy. Yet it was clear that Lord
+Maxwell's first impressions were favourable. Aldous caught every now and
+then his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantly
+withdrawn--comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, and
+tone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn's wife should
+be. How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely
+real! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its
+Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding
+the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and
+silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving
+servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the
+dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive,
+extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterly
+unlike any other woman he had ever seen--every detail of it was charged
+to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.
+
+For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is,
+almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole
+nature, into the second stage--the stage of anxiety, incredulity.
+Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning,
+seemed to him not nearer, but further from him. She was terribly on her
+dignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown
+him on that walk, beside the gate? There had been a touch of it, a
+divine touch, before luncheon. How could he get her to himself again?
+
+Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic--the
+badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent
+depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.
+
+"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said Lord
+Maxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean. To give money is easy
+enough. Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and
+thought no more of it. We don't get through so easily."
+
+"No," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "It weighs one down. Last winter
+was a nightmare. The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!--though we
+seemed to be always giving. And in the middle of it Edward would buy me
+a new set of sables. I begged him not, but he laughed at me."
+
+"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, "if nobody bought
+sables, there'd be other poor people up in Russia, isn't it?--or
+Hudson's Bay?--badly off. One has, to think of that. Oh, you needn't
+talk, Aldous! I know you say it's a fallacy. _I_ call it common sense."
+
+She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago left
+his great-aunt to work out her own economics. And, anyway, she saw that
+he was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne in
+watching Miss Boyce.
+
+"It's precisely as Lord Maxwell says," replied Lady Winterbourne; "that
+kind of thing used to satisfy everybody. And our grandmothers were very
+good women. I don't know why we, who give ourselves so much more trouble
+than they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they went
+free."
+
+She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, looking
+round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.
+
+"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heard
+tales of Miss Boyce's opinions!" said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, with
+an old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.
+
+Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her
+head was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start.
+She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his
+native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a
+girl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.
+
+"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.
+
+"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "We
+can't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."
+
+Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which
+escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.
+
+"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We
+Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what
+we can get out of both."
+
+"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"
+
+Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a
+morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at
+luncheon.
+
+"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I
+ought to be--I am in my conscience."
+
+"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition
+of most of us?"
+
+"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm
+roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a
+Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries
+and precedences--the worst part of one--that makes me waver, makes me a
+traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor
+often, I know."
+
+"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and
+hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"
+
+"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after
+a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me
+worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty--such
+mutilation of mind and body--were meant to go on for ever!"
+
+Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous
+should find those eyes of hers superb?
+
+"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her mildly,
+"that if all property were divided to-morrow the force of natural
+inequality would not have undone all the work the day after, and given
+us back our poor?"
+
+The "newspaper cant" of this remark, as the Cravens would have put it,
+brought a contemptuous look for an instant into the girl's face. She
+began to talk eagerly and cleverly, showing a very fair training in the
+catch words of the school, and a good memory--as one uncomfortable
+person at the table soon perceived--for some of the leading arguments
+and illustrations of a book of Venturist Essays which had lately been
+much read and talked of in London.
+
+Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, and
+the interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged into
+history, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute of
+Labourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other great
+matters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, and
+all with the same utter oblivion--so it seemed to her stiff indignant
+hostess at the other end of the table--of the manners and modesty proper
+to a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce's
+daughter!
+
+Aldous struck in now and then, trying to soothe her by supporting her to
+a certain extent, and so divert the conversation. But Marcella was soon
+too excited to be managed; and she had her say; a very strong say often
+as far as language went: there could be no doubt of that.
+
+"Ah, well," said Lord Maxwell, wincing at last under some of her
+phrases, in spite of his courteous _savoir-faire_, "I see you are of the
+same opinion as a good man whose book I took up yesterday: 'The
+landlords of England have always shown a mean and malignant passion for
+profiting by the miseries of others?' Well, Aldous, my boy, we are
+judged, you and I--no help for it!"
+
+The man whose temper and rule had made the prosperity of a whole country
+side for nearly forty years, looked at his grandson with twinkling eyes.
+Miss Raeburn was speechless. Lady Winterbourne was absently staring at
+Marcella, a spot of red on each pale cheek.
+
+Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.
+
+"Of course, you think me very ridiculous," she said, with a tremulous
+change of tone. "I suppose I am. And I am as inconsistent as anybody--I
+hate myself for it. Very often when anybody talks to me on the other
+side, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists: they
+always told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker. But it
+can't make any difference to one's _feeling_: nothing touches that."
+
+She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing--
+
+"It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see the
+places the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, and
+one passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudging
+back from her work; when one realises that they have no _rights_ when
+they come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which _we_, who
+have everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that every
+one of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than I
+shall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state of
+things is _somehow_ wrong and topsy-turvy and _wicked_." Her voice rose
+a little, every emphasis grew more passionate. "And if I don't do
+something--the little such a person as I can--to alter it before I die,
+I might as well never have lived."
+
+Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his
+mouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was a
+forcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal
+conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?
+
+Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:
+
+"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with
+you. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."
+
+The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.
+
+"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath
+from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally
+characteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once,
+before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it--not at
+all. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should
+do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine.
+Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choose
+between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave
+nobody--not even the richest--more than four hundred a year."
+
+"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road,"
+said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have a
+maid."
+
+"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. But
+I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your _heart_ and
+_conscience_ have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with your
+class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My
+grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving
+home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer
+who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She
+stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and
+then--the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she
+drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with
+more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power
+of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"--and she laid her
+thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's
+arm--"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of
+_right_ in our place and position--at least I find I have. In the old
+days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down
+with a strong hand."
+
+"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were
+violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will
+see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will
+not be _we_--not the landowners or the capitalists--who will put it
+down. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to
+lose--a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built
+through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their
+own savings--it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friends
+down so far as they represent any real attack on property--and brutally,
+too, I fear, if need be."
+
+"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never can
+see how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one _rejoice_ in
+it? How can any one _wish_ that the present state of things should go
+on? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, and
+the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of
+course, the poaching--"
+
+Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brother
+was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let such
+talk go on? It was too unseemly.
+
+Lord Maxwell only laughed. "My dear young lady," he said, much amused,
+"are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher?
+Disillusion lies that way!--it does indeed. Why--Aldous!--I have been
+hearing such tales from Westall this morning. I stopped at Corbett's
+farm a minute or two on the way home, and met Westall at the gate coming
+out. He says he and his men are being harried to death round about
+Tudley End by a gang of men that come, he thinks, from Oxford, a driving
+gang with a gig, who come at night or in the early morning--the smartest
+rascals out, impossible to catch. But he says he thinks he will soon
+have his hand on the local accomplice--a Mellor man--a man named Hurd:
+not one of our labourers, I think."
+
+"Hurd!" cried Marcella, in dismay. "Oh no, it _can't_ be--impossible!"
+
+Lord Maxwell looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"Do you know any Hurds? I am afraid your father will find that Mellor is
+a bad place for poaching."
+
+"If it is, it is because they are so starved and miserable," said
+Marcella, trying hard to speak coolly, but excited almost beyond bounds
+by the conversation and all that it implied. "And the Hurds--I don't
+believe it a bit! But if it were true--oh! they have been in such
+straits--they were out of work most of last winter; they are out of work
+now, No one _could_ grudge them. I told you about them, didn't I?" she
+said, suddenly glancing at Aldous. "I was going to ask you to-day, if
+you could help them?" Her prophetess air had altogether left her. She
+felt ready to cry; and nothing could have been more womanish than her
+tone.
+
+He bent across to her. Miss Raeburn, invaded by a new and intolerable
+sense of calamity, could have beaten him for what she read in his
+shining eyes, and in the flush on his usually pale cheek.
+
+"Is he still out of work?" he said. "And you are unhappy about it? But I
+am sure we can find him work: I am just now planning improvements at the
+north end of the park. We can take him on; I am certain of it. You must
+give me his full name and address."
+
+"And let him beware of Westall," said Lord Maxwell, kindly. "Give him a
+hint, Miss Boyce, and nobody will rake up bygones. There is nothing I
+dislike so much as rows about the shooting. All the keepers know that."
+
+"And of course," said Miss Raeburn, coldly, "if the family are in real
+distress there are plenty of people at hand to assist them. The man need
+not steal."
+
+"Oh, charity!" cried Marcella, her lip curling.
+
+"A worse crime than poaching, you think," said Lord Maxwell, laughing.
+"Well, these are big subjects. I confess, after my morning with the
+lunatics, I am half inclined, like Horace Walpole, to think everything
+serious ridiculous. At any rate shall we see what light a cup of coffee
+throws upon it? Agneta, shall we adjourn?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Lord Maxwell closed the drawing-room door behind Aldous and Marcella.
+Aldous had proposed to take their guest to see the picture gallery,
+which was on the first floor, and had found her willing.
+
+The old man came back to the two other women, running his hand nervously
+through his shock of white hair--a gesture which Miss Raeburn well knew
+to show some disturbance of mind.
+
+"I should like to have your opinion of that young lady," he said
+deliberately, taking a chair immediately in front of them.
+
+"I like her," said Lady Winterbourne, instantly. "Of course she is crude
+and extravagant, and does not know quite what she may say. But all that
+will improve. I like her, and shall make friends with her."
+
+Miss Raeburn threw up her hands in angry amazement.
+
+"Most forward, conceited, and ill-mannered," she said with energy. "I am
+certain she has no proper principles, and as to what her religious views
+may be, I dread to think of them! If _that_ is a specimen of the girls
+of the present day--"
+
+"My dear," interrupted Lord Maxwell, laying a hand on her knee, "Lady
+Winterbourne is an old friend, a very old friend. I think we may be
+frank before her, and I don't wish you to say things you may regret.
+Aldous has made up his mind to get that girl to marry him, if he can."
+
+Lady Winterbourne was silent, having in fact been forewarned by that odd
+little interview with Aldous in her own drawing-room, when he had
+suddenly asked her to call on Mrs. Boyce. But she looked at Miss
+Raeburn. That lady took up her knitting, laid it down again, resumed it,
+then broke out--
+
+"How did it come about? Where have they been meeting?"
+
+"At the Hardens mostly. He seems to have been struck from the beginning,
+and now there is no question as to his determination. But she may not
+have him; he professes to be still entirely in the dark."
+
+"Oh!" cried Miss Raeburn, with a scornful shrug, meant to express all
+possible incredulity. Then she began to knit fast and furiously, and
+presently said in great agitation,--
+
+"What can he be thinking of? She is very handsome, of course, but--"
+then her words failed her. "When Aldous remembers his mother, how can
+he?--undisciplined! self-willed! Why, she laid down the law to _you_,
+Henry, as though you had nothing to do but to take your opinions from a
+chit of a girl like her. Oh! no, no; I really can't; you must give me
+time. And her father--the disgrace and trouble of it! I tell you, Henry,
+it will bring misfortune!"
+
+Lord Maxwell was much troubled. Certainly he should have talked to
+Agneta beforehand. But the fact was he had his cowardice, like other
+men, and he had been trusting to the girl herself, to this beauty he
+heard so much of, to soften the first shock of the matter to the present
+mistress of the Court.
+
+"We will hope not, Agneta," he said gravely. "We will hope not. But you
+must remember Aldous is no boy. I cannot coerce him. I see the
+difficulties, and I have put them before him. But I am more favourably
+struck with the girl than you are. And anyway, if it comes about, we
+must make the best of it."
+
+Miss Raeburn made no answer, but pretended to set her heel, her needles
+shaking. Lady Winterbourne was very sorry for her two old friends.
+
+"Wait a little," she said, laying her hand lightly on Miss Raeburn's.
+"No doubt with her opinions she felt specially drawn to assert herself
+to-day. One can imagine it very well of a girl, and a generous girl in
+her position. You will see other sides of her, I am sure you will. And
+you would never--you could never--make a breach with Aldous."
+
+"We must all remember," said Lord Maxwell, getting up and beginning to
+walk up and down beside them, "that Aldous is in no way dependent upon
+me. He has his own resources. He could leave us to-morrow. Dependent on
+me! It is the other way, I think, Agneta--don't you?"
+
+He stopped and looked at her, and she returned his look in spite of
+herself. A tear dropped on her stocking which she hastily brushed away.
+
+"Come, now," said Lord Maxwell, seating himself; "let us talk it over
+rationally. Don't go, Lady Winterbourne."
+
+"Why, they may be settling it at this moment," cried Miss Raeburn,
+half-choked, and feeling as though "the skies were impious not to fall."
+
+"No, no!" he said smiling. "Not yet, I think. But let us prepare
+ourselves."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile the cause of all this agitation was sitting languidly in a
+great Louis Quinze chair in the picture gallery upstairs, with Aldous
+beside her. She had taken off her big hat as though it oppressed her,
+and her black head lay against a corner of the chair in fine contrast to
+its mellowed golds and crimsons. Opposite to her were two famous Holbein
+portraits, at which she looked from time to time as though attracted to
+them in spite of herself, by some trained sense which could not be
+silenced. But she was not communicative, and Aldous was anxious.
+
+"Do you think I was rude to your grandfather?" she asked him at last
+abruptly, cutting dead short some information she had stiffly asked him
+for just before, as to the date of the gallery and its collection.
+
+"Rude!" he said startled. "Not at all. Not in the least. Do you suppose
+we are made of such brittle stuff, we poor landowners, that we can't
+stand an argument now and then?"
+
+"Your aunt thought I was rude," she said unheeding. "I think I was. But
+a house like this excites me." And with a little reckless gesture she
+turned her head over her shoulder and looked down the gallery. A
+Velasquez was beside her; a great Titian over the way; a priceless
+Rembrandt beside it. On her right hand stood a chair of carved steel,
+presented by a German town to a German emperor, which, had not its
+equal in Europe; the brocade draping the deep windows in front of her
+had been specially made to grace a state visit to the house of Charles
+II.
+
+"At Mellor," she went on, "we are old and tumble-down. The rain comes
+in; there are no shutters to the big hall, and we can't afford to put
+them--we can't afford even to have the pictures cleaned. I can pity the
+house and nurse it, as I do the village. But here--"
+
+And looking about her, she gave a significant shrug.
+
+"What--our feathers again!" he said laughing. "But consider. Even you
+allow that Socialism cannot begin to-morrow. There must be a transition
+time, and clearly till the State is ready to take over the historical
+houses and their contents, the present nominal owners of them are bound,
+if they can, to take care of them. Otherwise the State will be some day
+defrauded."
+
+She could not be insensible to the charm of his manner towards her.
+There was in it, no doubt, the natural force and weight of the man older
+and better informed than his companion, and amused every now and then by
+her extravagance. But even her irritable pride could not take offence.
+For the intellectual dissent she felt at bottom was tempered by a moral
+sympathy of which the gentleness and warmth touched and moved her in
+spite of herself. And now that they were alone he could express himself.
+So long as they had been in company he had seemed to her, as often
+before, shy, hesitating, and ineffective. But with the disappearance of
+spectators, who represented to him, no doubt, the harassing claim of
+the critical judgment, all was freer, more assured, more natural.
+
+She leant her chin on her hand, considering his plea.
+
+"Supposing you live long enough to see the State take it, shall you be
+able to reconcile yourself to it? Or shall you feel it a wrong, and go
+out a rebel?"
+
+A delightful smile was beginning to dance in the dark eyes. She was
+recovering the tension of her talk with Lord Maxwell.
+
+"All must depend, you see, on the conditions--on how you and your
+friends are going to manage the transition. You may persuade
+me--conceivably--or you may eject me with violence."
+
+"Oh, no!" she interposed quickly. "There will be no violence. Only we
+shall gradually reduce your wages. Of course, we can't do without
+leaders--we don't want to do away with the captains of any industry,
+agricultural or manufacturing. Only we think you overpaid. You must be
+content with less."
+
+"Don't linger out the process," he said laughing, "otherwise it will be
+painful. The people who are condemned to live in these houses before the
+Commune takes to them, while your graduated land and income taxes are
+slowly starving them out, will have a bad time of it."
+
+"Well, it will be your first bad time! Think of the labourer now, with
+five children, of school age, on twelve shillings a week--think of the
+sweated women in London."
+
+"Ah, think of them," he said in a different tone.
+
+There was a pause of silence.
+
+"No!" said Marcella, springing up. "Don't let's think of them. I get to
+believe the whole thing a _pose_ in myself and other people. Let's go
+back to the pictures. Do you think Titian 'sweated' his drapery
+men--paid them starvation rates, and grew rich on their labour? Very
+likely. All the same, that blue woman"--she pointed to a bending
+Magdalen--"will be a joy to all time."
+
+They wandered through the gallery, and she was now all curiosity,
+pleasure, and intelligent interest, as though she had thrown off an
+oppression. Then they emerged into the upper corridor answering to the
+corridor of the antiques below. This also was hung with pictures,
+principally family portraits of the second order, dating back to the
+Tudors--a fine series of berobed and bejewelled personages, wherein
+clothes pre-dominated and character was unimportant.
+
+Marcella's eye was glancing along the brilliant colour of the wall,
+taking rapid note of jewelled necks surmounting stiff embroidered
+dresses, of the whiteness of lace ruffs, or the love-locks and gleaming
+satin of the Caroline beauties, when it suddenly occurred to her,--
+
+"I shall be their successor. This is already potentially mine. In a few
+months, if I please, I shall be walking this house as mistress--its
+future mistress, at any rate!"
+
+She was conscious of a quickening in the blood, a momentary blurring of
+the vision. A whirlwind of fancies swept across her. She thought of
+herself as the young peeress--Lord Maxwell after all was over
+seventy--her own white neck blazing with diamonds, the historic jewels
+of a great family--her will making law in this splendid house--in the
+great domain surrounding it. What power--what a position--what a
+romance! She, the out-at-elbows Marcella, the Socialist, the friend of
+the people. What new lines of social action and endeavour she might
+strike out! Miss Raeburn should not stop her. She caressed the thought
+of the scandals in store for that lady. Only it annoyed her that her
+dream of large things should be constantly crossed by this foolish
+delight, making her feet dance--in this mere prospect of satin gowns and
+fine jewels--of young and feted beauty holding its brilliant court. If
+she made such a marriage, it should be, it must be, on public grounds.
+Her friends must have no right to blame her.
+
+Then she stole a glance at the tall, quiet gentleman beside her. A man
+to be proud of from the beginning, and surely to be very fond of in
+time. "He would always be my friend," she thought. "I could lead him. He
+is very clever, one can see, and knows a great deal. But he admires what
+I like. His position hampers him--but I could help him to get beyond it.
+We might show the way to many!"
+
+"Will you come and see this room here?" he said, stopping suddenly, yet
+with a certain hesitation in the voice. "It is my own sitting-room.
+There are one or two portraits I should like to show you if you would
+let me."
+
+She followed him with a rosy cheek, and they were presently standing in
+front of the portrait of his mother. He spoke of his recollections of
+his parents, quietly and simply, yet she felt through every nerve that
+he was not the man to speak of such things to anybody in whom he did not
+feel a very strong and peculiar interest. As he was talking a rush of
+liking towards him came across her. How good he was--how affectionate
+beneath his reserve--a woman might securely trust him with her future.
+
+So with every minute she grew softer, her eye gentler, and with each
+step and word he seemed to himself to be carried deeper into the current
+of joy. Intoxication was mounting within him, as her slim, warm youth
+moved and breathed beside him; and it was natural that he should read
+her changing behaviour for something other than it was. A man of his
+type asks for no advance from the woman; the woman he loves does not
+make them; but at the same time he has a natural self-esteem, and
+believes readily in his power to win the return he is certain he will
+deserve.
+
+"And this?" she said, moving restlessly towards his table, and taking up
+the photograph of Edward Hallin.
+
+"Ah! that is the greatest friend I have in the world. But I am sure you
+know the name. Mr. Hallin--Edward Hallin."
+
+She paused bewildered.
+
+"What! _the_ Mr. Hallin--_that_ was Edward Hallin--who settled the
+Nottingham strike last month--who lectures so much in the East End, and
+in the north?"
+
+"The same. We are old college friends. I owe him much, and in all his
+excitements he does not forget old friends. There, you see--" and he
+opened a blotting book and pointed smiling to some closely written
+sheets lying within it--"is my last letter to him. I often write two of
+those in the week, and he to me. We don't agree on a number of things,
+but that doesn't matter."
+
+"What can you find to write about?" she said wondering. "I thought
+nobody wrote letters nowadays, only notes. Is it books, or people?"
+
+"Both, when it pleases us!" How soon, oh! ye favouring gods, might he
+reveal to her the part she herself played in those closely covered
+sheets? "But he writes to me on social matters chiefly. His whole heart,
+as you probably know, is in certain experiments and reforms in which he
+sometimes asks me to help him."
+
+Marcella opened her eyes. These were new lights. She began to recall all
+that she had heard of young Hallin's position in the Labour movement;
+his personal magnetism and prestige; his power as a speaker. Her
+Socialist friends, she remembered, thought him in the way--a force, but
+a dangerous one. He was for the follies of compromise--could not be got
+to disavow the principle of private property, while ready to go great
+lengths in certain directions towards collective action and corporate
+control. The "stalwarts" of _her_ sect would have none of him as a
+leader, while admitting his charm as a human being--a charm she
+remembered to have heard discussed with some anxiety among her Venturist
+friends. But for ordinary people he went far enough. Her father, she
+remembered, had dubbed him an "Anarchist" in connection with the terms
+he had been able to secure for the Nottingham strikers, as reported in
+the newspapers. It astonished her to come across the man again as Mr.
+Raeburn's friend.
+
+They talked about Hallin a little, and about Aldous's Cambridge
+acquaintance with him. Then Marcella, still nervous, went to look at the
+bookshelves, and found herself in front of that working collection of
+books on economics which Aldous kept in his own room under his hand, by
+way of guide to the very fine special collection he was gradually making
+in the library downstairs.
+
+Here again were surprises for her. Aldous had never made the smallest
+claim to special knowledge on all those subjects she had so often
+insisted on making him discuss. He had been always tentative and
+diffident, deferential even so far as her own opinions were concerned.
+And here already was the library of a student. All the books she had
+ever read or heard discussed were here--and as few among many. The
+condition of them, moreover, the signs of close and careful reading she
+noticed in them, as she took them out, abashed her: _she_ had never
+learnt to read in this way. It was her first contact with an exact and
+arduous culture. She thought of how she had instructed Lord Maxwell at
+luncheon. No doubt he shared his grandson's interests. Her cheek burned
+anew; this time because it seemed to her that she had been ridiculous.
+
+"I don't know why you never told me you took a particular interest in
+these subjects," she said suddenly, turning round upon him
+resentfully--she had just laid down, of all things, a volume of
+Venturist essays. "You must have thought I talked a great deal of
+nonsense at luncheon."
+
+"Why!--I have always been delighted to find you cared for such things
+and took an interest in them. How few women do!" he said quite simply,
+opening his eyes. "Do you know these three pamphlets? They were
+privately printed, and are very rare."
+
+He took out a book and showed it to her as one does to a comrade and
+equal--as he might have done to Edward Hallin. But something was jarred
+in her--conscience or self-esteem--and she could not recover her sense
+of heroineship. She answered absently, and when he returned the book to
+the shelf she said that it was time for her to go, and would he kindly
+ask for her maid, who was to walk with her?
+
+"I will ring for her directly," he said. "But you will let me take you
+home?" Then he added hurriedly, "I have some business this afternoon
+with a man who lives in your direction."
+
+She assented a little stiffly--but with an inward thrill. His words and
+manner seemed suddenly to make the situation unmistakable. Among the
+books it had been for the moment obscured.
+
+He rang for his own servant, and gave directions about the maid. Then
+they went downstairs that Marcella might say good-bye.
+
+Miss Raeburn bade her guest farewell, with a dignity which her small
+person could sometimes assume, not unbecomingly. Lady Winterbourne held
+the girl's hand a little, looked her out of countenance, and insisted on
+her promising again to come to Winterbourne Park the following Tuesday.
+Then Lord Maxwell, with old-fashioned politeness, made Marcella take his
+arm through the hall.
+
+"You must come and see us again," he said smiling; "though we are such
+belated old Tories, we are not so bad as we sound."
+
+And under cover of his mild banter he fixed a penetrating attentive look
+upon her. Flushed and embarrassed! Had it indeed been done already? or
+would Aldous settle it on this walk? To judge from his manner and hers,
+the thing was going with rapidity. Well, well, there was nothing for it
+but to hope for the best.
+
+On their way through the hall she stopped him, her hand still in his
+arm. Aldous was in front, at the door, looking for a light shawl she had
+brought with her.
+
+"I should like to thank you," she said shyly, "about the Hurds. It will
+be very kind of you and Mr. Raeburn to find them work."
+
+Lord Maxwell was pleased; and with the usual unfair advantage of beauty
+her eyes and curving lips gave her little advance a charm infinitely
+beyond what any plainer woman could have commanded.
+
+"Oh, don't thank me!" he said cheerily. "Thank Aldous. He does all that
+kind of thing. And if in your good works you want any help we can give,
+ask it, my dear young lady. My old comrade's grand-daughter will always
+find friends in this house."
+
+Lord Maxwell would have been very much astonished to hear himself making
+this speech six weeks before. As it was, he handed her over gallantly to
+Aldous, and stood on the steps looking after them in a stir of mind not
+unnoted by the confidential butler who held the door open behind him.
+Would Aldous insist on carrying his wife off to the dower house on the
+other side of the estate? or would they be content to stay in the old
+place with the old people? And if so, how were that girl and his sister
+to get on? As for himself, he was of a naturally optimist temper, and
+ever since the night of his first interview with Aldous on the subject,
+he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view. He liked to
+see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding
+opinions and lines of her own. It was infinitely better than mere
+nonentity. Of course, she was now extravagant and foolish, perhaps vain
+too. But that would mend with time--mend, above all, with her position
+as Aldous's wife. Aldous was a strong man--how strong, Lord Maxwell
+suspected that this impetuous young lady hardly knew. No, he thought the
+family might be trusted to cope with her when once they got her among
+them. And she would certainly be an ornament to the old house.
+
+Her father of course was, and would be, the real difficulty, and the
+blight which had descended on the once honoured name. But a man so
+conscious of many kinds of power as Lord Maxwell could not feel much
+doubt as to his own and his grandson's competence to keep so poor a
+specimen of humanity as Richard Boyce in his place. How wretchedly ill,
+how feeble, both in body and soul, the fellow had looked when he and
+Winterbourne met him!
+
+The white-haired owner of the Court walked back slowly to his library,
+his hands in his pockets, his head bent in cogitation. Impossible to
+settle to the various important political letters lying on his table,
+and bearing all of them on that approaching crisis in the spring which
+must put Lord Maxwell and his friends in power. He was over seventy, but
+his old blood quickened within him as he thought of those two on this
+golden afternoon, among the beech woods. How late Aldous had left all
+these experiences! His grandfather, by twenty, could have shown him the
+way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile the two in question were walking along the edge of the hill
+rampart overlooking the plain, with the road on one side of them, and
+the falling beech woods on the other. They were on a woodland path, just
+within the trees, sheltered, and to all intents and purposes alone. The
+maid, with leisurely discretion, was following far behind them on the
+high road.
+
+Marcella, who felt at moments as though she could hardly breathe, by
+reason of a certain tumult of nerve, was yet apparently bent on
+maintaining a conversation without breaks. As they diverged from the
+road into the wood-path, she plunged into the subject of her companion's
+election prospects. How many meetings did he find that he must hold in
+the month? What places did he regard as his principal strongholds? She
+was told that certain villages, which she named, were certain to go
+Radical, whatever might be the Tory promises. As to a well-known
+Conservative League, which was very strong in the country, and to which
+all the great ladies, including Lady Winterbourne, belonged, was he
+actually going to demean himself by accepting its support? How was it
+possible to defend the bribery, buns, and beer by which it won its
+corrupting way?
+
+Altogether, a quick fire of questions, remarks, and sallies, which
+Aldous met and parried as best he might, comforting himself all the time
+by thought of those deeper and lonelier parts of the wood which lay
+before them. At last she dropped out, half laughing, half defiant, words
+which arrested him,--
+
+"Well, I shall know what the other side think of their prospects very
+soon. Mr. Wharton is coming to lunch with us to-morrow."
+
+"Harry Wharton!" he said astonished. "But Mr. Boyce is not supporting
+him. Your father, I think, is Conservative?"
+
+One of Dick Boyce's first acts as owner of Mellor, when social
+rehabilitation had still looked probable to him, had been to send a
+contribution to the funds of the League aforesaid, so that Aldous had
+public and conspicuous grounds for his remark.
+
+"Need one measure everything by politics?" she asked him a little
+disdainfully. "Mayn't one even feed a Radical?"
+
+He winced visibly a moment, touched in his philosopher's pride.
+
+"You remind me," he said, laughing and reddening--"and justly--that an
+election perverts all one's standards and besmirches all one's morals.
+Then I suppose Mr. Wharton is an old friend?"
+
+"Papa never saw him before last week," she said carelessly. "Now he
+talks of asking him to stay some time, and says that, although he won't
+vote for him, he hopes that he will make a good fight."
+
+Raeburn's brow contracted in a puzzled frown.
+
+"He will make an excellent fight," he said rather shortly. "Dodgson
+hardly hopes to get in. Harry Wharton is a most taking speaker, a very
+clever fellow, and sticks at nothing in the way of promises. Ah, you
+will find him interesting, Miss Boyce! He has a co-operative farm on his
+Lincolnshire property. Last year he started a Labour paper--which I
+believe you read. I have heard you quote it. He believes in all that you
+hope for--great increase in local government and communal control--the
+land for the people--graduated income-tax--the extinction of landlord
+and capitalist as soon as may be--_e tutti quanti_. He talks with great
+eloquence and ability. In our villages I find he is making way every
+week. The people think his manners perfect. ''Ee 'as a way wi' un,' said
+an old labourer to me last week. 'If 'ee wor to coe the wild birds, I do
+believe, Muster Raeburn, they'd coom to un!'"
+
+"Yet you dislike him!" said Marcella, a daring smile dancing on the dark
+face she turned to him. "One can hear it in every word you say."
+
+He hesitated, trying, even at the moment that an impulse of jealous
+alarm which astonished himself had taken possession of him, to find the
+moderate and measured phrase.
+
+"I have known him from a boy," he said. "He is a connection of the
+Levens, and used to be always there in old days. He is very brilliant
+and very gifted--"
+
+"Your 'but' must be very bad," she threw in, "it is so long in coming."
+
+"Then I will say, whatever opening it gives you," he replied with
+spirit, "that I admire him without respecting him."
+
+"Who ever thought otherwise of a clever opponent?" she cried. "It is the
+stock formula."
+
+The remark stung, all the more because Aldous was perfectly conscious
+that there was much truth in her implied charge of prejudice. He had
+never been very capable of seeing this particular man in the dry light
+of reason, and was certainly less so than before, since it had been
+revealed to him that Wharton and Mr. Boyce's daughter were to be
+brought, before long, into close neighbourhood.
+
+"I am sorry that I seem to you such a Pharisee," he said, turning upon
+her a look which had both pain and excitement in it.
+
+She was silent, and they walked on a few yards without speaking. The
+wood had thickened around them: The high road was no longer visible. No
+sound of wheels or footsteps reached them. The sun struck freely through
+the beech-trees, already half bared, whitening the grey trunks at
+intervals to an arrowy distinctness and majesty, or kindling the slopes
+of red and freshly fallen leaves below into great patches of light and
+flame. Through the stems, as always, the girdling blues of the plain,
+and in their faces a gay and buoyant breeze, speaking rather of spring
+than autumn. Robins, "yellow autumn's nightingales," sang in the hedge
+to their right. In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their
+charm felt. Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging,
+wooing, defining. Aldous's heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve.
+
+Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and
+seeing his look she paled a little.
+
+"Do you guess at all why it hurts me to jar with you?" he said--finding
+his words in a rush, he did not know how--"Why every syllable of yours
+matters to me? It is because I have hopes--dreams--which have become my
+life! If you could accept this--this--feeling--this devotion--which has
+grown up in me--if you could trust yourself to me--you should have no
+cause, I think--ever--to think me hard or narrow towards any person, any
+enthusiasm for which you had sympathy. May I say to you all that is in
+my mind--or--or--am I presuming?"
+
+She looked away from him, crimson again. A great wave of
+exultation--boundless, intoxicating--swept through her. Then it was
+checked by a nobler feeling--a quick, penitent sense of his nobleness.
+
+"You don't know me," she said hurriedly: "you think you do. But I am all
+odds and ends. I should annoy--wound--disappoint you."
+
+His quiet grey eyes flamed.
+
+"Come and sit down here, on these dry roots," he said, taking already
+joyous command of her. "We shall be undisturbed. I have so much to say!"
+
+She obeyed trembling. She felt no passion, but the strong thrill of
+something momentous and irreparable, together with a swelling
+pride--pride in such homage from such a man.
+
+He led her a few steps down the slope, found a place for her against a
+sheltering trunk, and threw himself down beside her. As he looked up at
+the picture she made amid the autumn branches, at her bent head, her
+shy moved look, her white hand lying ungloved on her black dress,
+happiness overcame him. He took her hand, found she did not resist, drew
+it to him, and clasping it in both his, bent his brow, his lips upon it.
+It shook in his hold, but she was passive. The mixture of emotion and
+self-control she showed touched him deeply. In his chivalrous modesty he
+asked for nothing else, dreamt of nothing more.
+
+Half an hour later they were still in the same spot. There had been much
+talk between them, most of it earnest, but some of it quite gay, broken
+especially by her smiles. Her teasing mood, however, had passed away.
+She was instead composed and dignified, like one conscious that life had
+opened before her to great issues.
+
+Yet she had flinched often before that quiet tone of eager joy in which
+he had described his first impressions of her, his surprise at finding
+in her ideals, revolts, passions, quite unknown to him, so far, in the
+women of his own class. Naturally he suppressed, perhaps he had even
+forgotten, the critical amusement and irritation she had often excited
+in him. He remembered, he spoke only of sympathy, delight, pleasure--of
+his sense, as it were, of slaking some long-felt moral thirst at the
+well of her fresh feeling. So she had attracted him first,--by a certain
+strangeness and daring--by what she _said_--
+
+"Now--and above all by what you _are_!" he broke out suddenly, moved out
+of his even speech. "Oh! it is too much to believe--to dream of! Put
+your hand in mine, and say again that it is really _true_ that we two
+are to go forward together--that you will be always there to inspire--to
+help--"
+
+And as she gave him the hand, she must also let him--in this first
+tremor of a pure passion--take the kiss which was now his by right. That
+she should flush and draw away from him as she did, seemed to him the
+most natural thing in the world, and the most maidenly.
+
+Then, as their talk wandered on, bit by bit, he gave her all his
+confidence, and she had felt herself honoured in receiving it. She
+understood now at least something--a first fraction--of that inner life,
+masked so well beneath his quiet English capacity and unassuming manner.
+He had spoken of his Cambridge years, of his friend, of the desire of
+his heart to make his landowner's power and position contribute
+something towards that new and better social order, which he too, like
+Hallin--though more faintly and intermittently--believed to be
+approaching. The difficulties of any really new departure were
+tremendous; he saw them more plainly and more anxiously than Hallin. Yet
+he believed that he had thought his way to some effective reform on his
+grandfather's large estate, and to some useful work as one of a group of
+like-minded men in Parliament. She must have often thought him careless
+and apathetic towards his great trust. But he was not so--not
+careless--but paralysed often by intellectual difficulty, by the claims
+of conflicting truths.
+
+She, too, explained herself most freely, most frankly. She would have
+nothing on her conscience.
+
+"They will say, of course," she said with sudden nervous abruptness,
+"that I am marrying you for wealth and position. And in a sense I shall
+be. No! don't stop me! I should not marry you if--if--I did not like
+you. But you can give me--you have--great opportunities. I tell you
+frankly, I shall enjoy them and use them. Oh! do think well before you
+do it. I shall _never_ be a meek, dependent wife. A woman, to my mind,
+is bound to cherish her own individuality sacredly, married or not
+married. Have you thought that I may often think it right to do things
+you disagree with, that may scandalise your relations?"
+
+"You shall be free," he said steadily. "I have thought of it all."
+
+"Then there is my father," she said, turning her head away. "He is
+ill--he wants pity, affection. I will accept no bond that forces me to
+disown him."
+
+"Pity and affection are to me the most sacred things in the world," he
+said, kissing her hand gently. "Be content--be at rest--my beautiful
+lady!"
+
+There was again silence, full of thought on her side, of heavenly
+happiness on his. The sun had sunk almost to the verge of the plain, the
+wind had freshened.
+
+"We _must_ go home," she said, springing up. "Taylor must have got there
+an hour ago. Mother will be anxious, and I must--I must tell them."
+
+"I will leave you at the gate," he suggested as they walked briskly;
+"and you will ask your father, will you not, if I may see him to-night
+after dinner?"
+
+The trees thinned again in front of them, and the path curved inward to
+the front. Suddenly a man, walking on the road, diverged into the path
+and came towards them. He was swinging a stick and humming. His head was
+uncovered, and his light chestnut curls were blown about his forehead by
+the wind. Marcella, looking up at the sound of the steps, had a sudden
+impression of something young and radiant, and Aldous stopped with an
+exclamation.
+
+The new-comer perceived them, and at sight of Aldous smiled, and
+approached, holding out his hand.
+
+"Why, Raeburn, I seem to have missed you twenty times a day this last
+fortnight. We have been always on each other's tracks without meeting.
+Yet I think, if we had met, we could have kept our tempers."
+
+"Miss Boyce, I think you do not know Mr. Wharton," said Aldous, stiffly.
+"May I introduce you?"
+
+The young man's blue eyes, all alert and curious at the mention of
+Marcella's name, ran over the girl's face and form. Then he bowed with a
+certain charming exaggeration--like an eighteenth-century beau with his
+hand upon his heart--and turned back with them a step or two towards the
+road.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+"A woman has enough to govern wisely
+Her own demeanours, passions and divisions."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+On a certain night in the December following the engagement of Marcella
+Boyce to Aldous Raeburn, the woods and fields of Mellor, and all the
+bare rampart of chalk down which divides the Buckinghamshire plain from
+the forest upland of the Chilterns lay steeped in moonlight, and in the
+silence which belongs to intense frost.
+
+Winter had set in before the leaf had fallen from the last oaks; already
+there had been a fortnight or more of severe cold, with hardly any snow.
+The pastures were delicately white; the ditches and the wet furrows in
+the ploughed land, the ponds on Mellor common, and the stagnant pool in
+the midst of the village, whence it drew its main water supply, were
+frozen hard. But the ploughed chalk land itself lay a dull grey beside
+the glitter of the pastures, and the woods under the bright sun of the
+days dropped their rime only to pass once more with the deadly cold of
+the night under the fantastic empire of the frost. Every day the veil of
+morning mist rose lightly from the woods, uncurtaining the wintry
+spectacle, and melting into the brilliant azure of an unflecked sky;
+every night the moon rose without a breath of wind, without a cloud; and
+all the branch-work of the trees, where they stood in the open fields,
+lay reflected clean and sharp on the whitened ground. The bitter cold
+stole into the cottages, marking the old and feeble with the touch of
+Azrael; while without, in the field solitudes, bird and beast cowered
+benumbed and starving in hole and roosting place.
+
+How still it was--this midnight--on the fringe of the woods! Two men
+sitting concealed among some bushes at the edge of Mr. Boyce's largest
+cover, and bent upon a common errand, hardly spoke to each other, so
+strange and oppressive was the silence. One was Jim Hurd; the other was
+a labourer, a son of old Patton of the almshouses, himself a man of
+nearly sixty, with a small wizened face showing sharp and white to-night
+under his slouched hat.
+
+They looked out over a shallow cup of treeless land to a further bound
+of wooded hill, ending towards the north in a bare bluff of down shining
+steep under the moon. They were in shadow, and so was most of the wide
+dip of land before them; but through a gap to their right, beyond the
+wood, the moonbeams poured, and the farms nestling under the opposite
+ridge, the plantations ranging along it, and the bald beacon hill in
+which it broke to the plain, were all in radiant light.
+
+Not a stir of life anywhere. Hurd put up his hand to his ear, and
+leaning forward listened intently. Suddenly--a vibration, a dull
+thumping sound in the soil of the bank immediately beside him. He
+started, dropped his hand, and, stooping, laid his ear to the ground.
+
+"Gi' us the bag," he said to his companion, drawing himself upright.
+"You can hear 'em turnin' and creepin' as plain as anything. Now then,
+you take these and go t' other side."
+
+He handed over a bundle of rabbit nets. Patton, crawling on hands and
+knees, climbed over the low overgrown bank on which the hedge stood into
+the precincts of the wood itself. The state of the hedge, leaving the
+cover practically open and defenceless along its whole boundary, showed
+plainly enough that it belonged to the Mellor estate. But the field
+beyond was Lord Maxwell's.
+
+Hurd applied himself to netting the holes on his own side, pushing the
+brambles and undergrowth aside with the sure hand of one who had already
+reconnoitred the ground. Then he crept over to Patton to see that all
+was right on the other side, came back, and went for the ferrets, of
+whom he had four in a closely tied bag.
+
+A quarter of an hour of intense excitement followed. In all, five
+rabbits bolted--three on Hurd's side, two on Patton's. It was all the
+two men could do to secure their prey, manage the ferrets, and keep a
+watch on the holes. Hurd's great hands--now fixing the pegs that held
+the nets, now dealing death to the entangled rabbit, whose neck he broke
+in an instant by a turn of the thumb, now winding up the line that held
+the ferret--seemed to be everywhere.
+
+At last a ferret "laid up," the string attached to him having either
+slipped or broken, greatly to the disgust of the men, who did not want
+to be driven either to dig, which made a noise and took time, or to lose
+their animal. The rabbits made no more sign, and it was tolerably
+evident that they had got as much as they were likely to get out of
+that particular "bury."
+
+Hurd thrust his arm deep into the hole where he had put the ferret.
+"Ther's summat in the way," he declared at last. "Mos' likely a dead un.
+Gi' me the spade."
+
+He dug away the mouth of the hole, making as little noise as possible,
+and tried again.
+
+"'Ere ee be," he cried, clutching at something, drew it out, exclaimed
+in disgust, flung it away, and pounced upon a rabbit which on the
+removal of the obstacle followed like a flash, pursued by the lost
+ferret. Hurd caught the rabbit by the neck, held it by main force, and
+killed it; then put the ferret into his pocket. "Lord!" he said, wiping
+his brow, "they do come suddent."
+
+What he had pulled out was a dead cat; a wretched puss, who on some
+happy hunt had got itself wedged in the hole, and so perished there
+miserably. He and Patton stooped over it wondering; then Hurd walked
+some paces along the bank, looking warily out to the right of him across
+the open country all the time. He threw the poor malodorous thing far
+into the wood and returned.
+
+The two men lit their pipes under the shelter of the bushes, and rested
+a bit, well hidden, but able to see out through a break in the bit of
+thicket.
+
+"Six on 'em," said Hurd, looking at the stark creatures beside him. "I
+be too done to try another bury. I'll set a snare or two, an' be off
+home."
+
+Patton puffed silently. He was wondering whether Hurd would give him one
+rabbit or two. Hurd had both "plant" and skill, and Patton would have
+been glad enough to come for one. Still he was a plaintive man with a
+perpetual grievance, and had already made up his mind that Hurd would
+treat him shabbily to-night, in spite of many past demonstrations that
+his companion was on the whole of a liberal disposition.
+
+"You bin out workin' a day's work already, han't yer?" he said
+presently. He himself was out of work, like half the village, and had
+been presented by his wife with boiled swede for supper. But he knew
+that Hurd had been taken on at the works at the Court, where the new
+drive was being made, and a piece of ornamental water enlarged and
+improved--mainly for the sake of giving employment in bad times. He,
+Patton, and some of his mates, had tried to get a job there. But the
+steward had turned them back. The men off the estate had first claim,
+and there was not room for all of them. Yet Hurd had been taken on,
+which had set people talking.
+
+Hurd nodded, and said nothing. He was not disposed to be communicative
+on the subject of his employment at the Court.
+
+"An' it be true as _she_ be goin' to marry Muster Raeburn?"
+
+Patton jerked his head towards the right, where above a sloping hedge
+the chimneys of Mellor and the tops of the Mellor cedars, some two or
+three fields away, showed distinct against the deep night blue.
+
+Hurd nodded again, and smoked diligently. Patton, nettled by this
+parsimony of speech, made the inward comment that his companion was "a
+deep un." The village was perfectly aware of the particular friendship
+shown by Miss Boyce to the Hurds. He was goaded into trying a more
+stinging topic.
+
+"Westall wor braggin' last night at Bradsell's"--(Bradsell was the
+landlord of "The Green Man" at Mellor)--"ee said as how they'd taken you
+on at the Court--but that didn't prevent 'em knowin' as you was a bad
+lot. Ee said _ee_ 'ad 'is eye on yer--ee 'ad warned yer twoice last
+year--"
+
+"That's a lie!" said Hurd, removing his pipe an instant and putting it
+back again.
+
+Patton looked more cheerful.
+
+"Well, ee spoke cru'l. Ee was certain, ee said, as you could tell a
+thing or two about them coverts at Tudley End, if the treuth were known.
+You wor allus a loafer, an' a loafer you'd be. Yer might go snivellin'
+to Miss Boyce, ee said, but yer wouldn't do no honest work--ee said--not
+if yer could help it--that's what ee said."
+
+"Devil!" said Hurd between his teeth, with a quick lift of all his great
+misshapen chest. He took his pipe out of his mouth, rammed it down
+fiercely with his thumb, and put it in his pocket.
+
+"Look out!" exclaimed Patton with a start.
+
+A whistle!--clear and distinct--from the opposite side of the hollow.
+Then a man's figure, black and motionless an instant on the whitened
+down, with a black speck beside it; lastly, another figure higher up
+along the hill, in quick motion towards the first, with other specks
+behind it. The poachers instantly understood that it was Westall--whose
+particular beat lay in this part of the estate--signalling to his night
+watcher, Charlie Dynes, and that the two men would be on them in no
+time. It was the work of a few seconds to efface as far as possible the
+traces of their raid, to drag some thick and trailing brambles which
+hung near over the mouth of the hole where there had been digging, to
+catch up the ferrets and game, and to bid Hurd's lurcher to come to
+heel. The two men crawled up the ditch with their burdens as far away to
+leeward as they could get from the track by which the keepers would
+cross the field. The ditch was deeply overgrown, and when the
+approaching voices warned them to lie close, they crouched under a dense
+thicket of brambles and overhanging bushes, afraid of nothing but the
+noses of the keepers' dogs.
+
+Dogs and men, however, passed unsuspecting.
+
+"Hold still!" said Hurd, checking Patton's first attempt to move. "He'll
+be back again mos' like. It's 'is dodge."
+
+And sure enough in twenty minutes or so the men reappeared. They
+retraced their steps from the further corner of the field, where some
+preserves of Lord Maxwell's approached very closely to the big Mellor
+wood, and came back again along the diagonal path within fifty yards or
+so of the men in the ditch.
+
+In the stillness the poachers could hear Westall's harsh and peremptory
+voice giving some orders to his underling, or calling to the dogs, who
+had scattered a little in the stubble. Hurd's own dog quivered beside
+him once or twice.
+
+Then steps and voices faded into the distance and all was safe.
+
+The poachers crept out grinning, and watched the keepers' progress
+along the hill-face, till they disappeared into the Maxwell woods.
+
+"_Ee_ be sold again--blast 'im!" said Hurd, with a note of quite
+disproportionate exultation in his queer, cracked voice. "Now I'll set
+them snares. But you'd better git home."
+
+Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him
+two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his
+poacher's coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a
+way as possible.
+
+Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden
+crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three
+hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.
+
+Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor
+church. The cold was bitter, but his night's work was not over yet, and
+he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.
+
+Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of
+the hills in the frosty silence. Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over
+the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to
+climb the ascent of the wood. The outskirts of it were filled with a
+thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it
+was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon,
+now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid
+the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about
+their polished trunks. Such infinite grace and strength in the line work
+of the branches!--branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected
+fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable
+harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against
+the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as
+though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, were
+but one majestic conception of a master artist.
+
+But Hurd saw nothing of this as he plunged through the leaves. He was
+thinking that it was extremely likely a man would be on the look-out for
+him to-night under the big beeches--a man with some business to propose
+to him. A few words dropped in his ear at a certain public-house the
+night before had seemed to him to mean this, and he had accordingly sent
+Patton out of the way.
+
+But when he got to the top of the hill no one was to be seen or heard,
+and he sat him down on a fallen log to smoke and wait awhile.
+
+He had no sooner, however, taken his seat than he shifted it uneasily,
+turning himself round so as to look in the other direction. For in front
+of him, as he was first placed, there was a gap in the trees, and over
+the lower wood, plainly visible and challenging attention, rose the dark
+mass of Mellor House. And the sight of Mellor suggested reflections just
+now that were not particularly agreeable to Jim Hurd.
+
+He had just been poaching Mr. Boyce's rabbits without any sort of
+scruple. But the thought of _Miss_ Boyce was not pleasant to him when he
+was out on these nightly raids.
+
+Why had she meddled? He bore her a queer sort of grudge for it. He had
+just settled down to the bit of cobbling which, together with his wife's
+plait, served him for a blind, and was full of a secret excitement as to
+various plans he had in hand for "doing" Westall, combining a maximum of
+gain for the winter with a maximum of safety, when Miss Boyce walked in,
+radiant with the news that there was employment for him at the Court, on
+the new works, whenever he liked to go and ask for it.
+
+And then she had given him an odd look.
+
+"And I was to pass you on a message from Lord Maxwell, Hurd," she had
+said: "'You tell him to keep out of Westall's way for the future, and
+bygones shall be bygones.' Now, I'm not going to ask what that means. If
+you've been breaking some of our landlords' law, I'm not going to say
+I'm shocked. I'd alter the law to-morrow, if I could!--you know I would.
+But I do say you're a fool if you go on with it, now you've got good
+work for the winter; you must please remember your wife and children."
+
+And there he had sat like a log, staring at her--both he and Minta not
+knowing where to look, or how to speak. Then at last his wife had broken
+out, crying:
+
+"Oh, miss! we should ha starved--"
+
+And Miss Boyce had stopped her in a moment, catching her by the hand.
+Didn't she know it? Was she there to preach to them? Only Hurd must
+promise not to do it any more, for his wife's sake.
+
+And he--stammering--left without excuse or resource, either against her
+charge, or the work she offered him--had promised her, and promised her,
+moreover--in his trepidation--with more fervency than he at all liked
+to remember.
+
+For about a fortnight, perhaps, he had gone to the Court by day, and had
+kept indoors by night. Then, just as the vagabond passions, the Celtic
+instincts, so long repressed, so lately roused, were goading at him
+again, he met Westall in the road--Westall, who looked him over from top
+to toe with an insolent smile, as much as to say, "Well, my man, we've
+got the whip hand of you now!" That same night he crept out again in the
+dark and the early morning, in spite of all Minta's tears and scolding.
+
+Well, what matter? As towards the rich and the law, he had the morals of
+the slave, who does not feel that he has had any part in making the
+rules he is expected to keep, and breaks them when he can with glee. It
+made him uncomfortable, certainly, that Miss Boyce should come in and
+out of their place as she did, should be teaching Willie to read, and
+bringing her old dresses to make up for Daisy and Nellie, while he was
+making a fool of her in this way. Still he took it all as it came. One
+sensation wiped out another.
+
+Besides, Miss Boyce had, after all, much part in this double life of
+his. Whenever he was at home, sitting over the fire with a pipe, he read
+those papers and things she had brought him in the summer. He had not
+taken much notice of them at first. Now he spelled them out again and
+again. He had always thought "them rich people took advantage of yer."
+But he had never supposed, somehow, they were such thieves, such mean
+thieves, as it appeared, they were. A curious ferment filled his
+restless, inconsequent brain. The poor were downtrodden, but they were
+coming to their rights. The land and its creatures were for the people!
+not for the idle rich. Above all, Westall was a devil, and must be put
+down. For the rest, if he could have given words to experience, he would
+have said that since he began to go out poaching he had burst his prison
+and found himself. A life which was not merely endurance pulsed in him.
+The scent of the night woods, the keenness of the night air, the tracks
+and ways of the wild creatures, the wiles by which he slew them, the
+talents and charms of his dog Bruno--these things had developed in him
+new aptitudes both of mind and body, which were in themselves
+exhilaration. He carried his dwarf's frame more erect, breathed from an
+ampler chest. As for his work at the Court, he thought of it often with
+impatience and disgust. It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or
+he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.
+
+"Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!" He fell
+thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked. Two of Westall's
+best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in
+November!--and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say "Jack
+Robinson." Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds.
+There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the
+hollow--they had been kept for the last shoot in January. Hang him! why
+wasn't that fellow up to time?
+
+But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack
+across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the
+ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic
+melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found
+himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood.
+A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called
+overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle or fall of a branch
+that startled him. Yet he knew every track, every tree in that wood. Up
+and down that field outside he had followed his father at the plough, a
+little sickly object of a lad, yet seldom unhappy, so long as childhood
+lasted, and his mother's temper could be fled from, either at school or
+in the fields. Under that boundary hedge to the right he had lain
+stunned and bleeding all a summer afternoon, after old Westall had
+thrashed him, his heart scorched within him by the sense of wrong and
+the craving for revenge. On that dim path leading down the slope of the
+wood, George Westall had once knocked him down for disturbing a sitting
+pheasant. He could see himself falling--the tall, powerful lad standing
+over him with a grin.
+
+Then, inconsequently, he began to think of his father's death. He made a
+good end did the old man. "Jim, my lad, the Lord's verra merciful," or
+"Jim, you'll look after Ann." Ann was the only daughter. Then a sigh or
+two, and a bit of sleep, and it was done.
+
+And everybody must go the same way, must come to the same stopping of
+the breath, the same awfulness--in a life of blind habit--of a moment
+that never had been before and never could be again? He did not put it
+to these words, but the shudder that is in the thought for all of us,
+seized him. He was very apt to think of dying, to ponder in his secret
+heart _how_ it would be, and when. And always it made him very soft
+towards Minta and the children. Not only did the _life_ instinct cling
+to them, to the warm human hands and faces hemming him in and protecting
+him from that darkness beyond with its shapes of terror. But to think of
+himself as sick, and gasping to his end, like his father, was to put
+himself back in his old relation to his wife, when they were first
+married. He might cross Minta now, but if he came to lie sick, he could
+see himself there, in the future, following her about with his eyes, and
+thanking her, and doing all she told him, just as he'd used to do. He
+couldn't die without her to help him through. The very idea of her being
+taken first, roused in him a kind of spasm--a fierceness, a clenching of
+the hands. But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his
+way, and she must just get used to it.
+
+Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood. He replied, and was
+almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith's
+apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells' village, who had often brought him
+information before.
+
+The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log. Then they parted;
+Hurd went back to the ditch where he had left the game, put two rabbits
+into his pockets, left the other two to be removed in the morning when
+he came to look at his snares, and went off home, keeping as much as
+possible in the shelter of the hedges. On one occasion he braved the
+moonlight and the open field, rather than pass through a woody corner
+where an old farmer had been found dead some six years before. Then he
+reached a deep lane leading to the village, and was soon at his own
+door.
+
+As he climbed the wooden ladder leading to the one bedroom where he, his
+wife, and his four children slept, his wife sprang up in bed.
+
+"Jim, you must be perished--such a night as 't is. Oh, Jim--where ha'
+you bin?"
+
+She was a miserable figure in her coarse nightgown, with her grizzling
+hair wild about her, and her thin arms nervously outstretched along the
+bed. The room was freezing cold, and the moonlight stealing through the
+scanty bits of curtains brought into dismal clearness the squalid bed,
+the stained walls, and bare uneven floor. On an iron bedstead, at the
+foot of the large bed, lay Willie, restless and coughing, with the elder
+girl beside him fast asleep; the other girl lay beside her mother, and
+the wooden box with rockers, which held the baby, stood within reach of
+Mrs. Hurd's arm.
+
+He made her no answer, but went to look at the coughing boy, who had
+been in bed for a week with bronchitis.
+
+"You've never been and got in Westall's way again?" she said anxiously.
+"It's no good my tryin' to get a wink o' sleep when you're out like
+this."
+
+"Don't you worrit yourself," he said to her, not roughly, but decidedly.
+"I'm all right. This boy's bad, Minta."
+
+"Yes, an' I kep' up the fire an' put the spout on the kettle, too." She
+pointed to the grate and to the thin line of steam, which was doing its
+powerless best against the arctic cold of the room.
+
+Hurd bent over the boy and tried to put him comfortable. The child, weak
+and feverish, only began to cry--a hoarse bronchial crying, which
+threatened to wake the baby. He could not be stopped, so Hurd made haste
+to take off his own coat and boots, and then lifted the poor soul in his
+arms.
+
+"You'll be quiet, Will, and go sleep, won't yer, if daddy takes keer on
+you?"
+
+He wrapped his own coat round the little fellow, and lying down beside
+his wife, took him on his arm and drew the thin brown blankets over
+himself and his charge. He himself was warm with exercise, and in a
+little while the huddling creatures on either side of him were warm too.
+The quick, panting breath of the boy soon showed that he was asleep. His
+father, too, sank almost instantly into deep gulfs of sleep. Only the
+wife--nervous, overdone, and possessed by a thousand fears--lay tossing
+and wakeful hour after hour, while the still glory of the winter night
+passed by.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+"Well, Marcella, have you and Lady Winterbourne arranged your classes?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce was stooping over a piece of needlework beside a window in
+the Mellor drawing-room, trying to catch the rapidly failing light. It
+was one of the last days of December. Marcella had just come in from the
+village rather early, for they were expecting a visitor to arrive about
+tea time, and had thrown herself, tired, into a chair near her mother.
+
+"We have got about ten or eleven of the younger women to join; none of
+the old ones will come," said Marcella. "Lady Winterbourne has heard of
+a capital teacher from Dunstable, and we hope to get started next week.
+There is money enough to pay wages for three months."
+
+In spite of her fatigue, her eye was bright and restless. The energy of
+thought and action from which she had just emerged still breathed from
+every limb and feature.
+
+"Where have you got the money?"
+
+"Mr. Raeburn has managed it," said Marcella, briefly.
+
+Mrs. Boyce gave a slight shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"And afterwards--what is to become of your product?"
+
+"There is a London shop Lady Winterbourne knows will take what we make
+if it turns out well. Of course, we don't expect to pay our way."
+
+Marcella gave her explanations with a certain stiffness of self-defence.
+She and Lady Winterbourne had evolved a scheme for reviving and
+improving the local industry of straw-plaiting, which after years of
+decay seemed now on the brink of final disappearance. The village women
+who could at present earn a few pence a week by the coarser kinds of
+work were to be instructed, not only in the finer and better paid sorts,
+but also in the making up of the plait when done, and the "blocking" of
+hats and bonnets--processes hitherto carried on exclusively at one or
+two large local centres.
+
+"You don't expect to pay your way?" repeated Mrs. Boyce. "What, never?"
+
+"Well, we shall give twelve to fourteen shillings a week wages. We shall
+find the materials, and the room--and prices are very low, the whole
+trade depressed."
+
+Mrs. Boyce laughed.
+
+"I see. How many workers do you expect to get together?"
+
+"Oh! eventually, about two hundred in the three villages. It will
+regenerate the whole life!" said Marcella, a sudden ray from the inner
+warmth escaping her, against her will.
+
+Mrs. Boyce smiled again, and turned her work so as to see it better.
+
+"Does Aldous understand what you are letting him in for?"
+
+Marcella flushed.
+
+"Perfectly. It is 'ransom'--that's all."
+
+"And he is ready to take your view of it?"
+
+"Oh, he thinks us economically unsound, of course," said Marcella,
+impatiently. "So we are. All care for the human being under the present
+state of things is economically unsound. But he likes it no more than I
+do."
+
+"Well, lucky for you he has a long purse," said Mrs. Boyce, lightly.
+"But I gather, Marcella, you don't insist upon his spending it _all_ on
+straw-plaiting. He told me yesterday he had taken the Hertford Street
+house."
+
+"We shall live quite simply," said Marcella, quickly.
+
+"What, no carriage?"
+
+Marcella hesitated.
+
+"A carriage saves time. And if one goes about much, it does not cost so
+much more than cabs."
+
+"So you mean to go about much? Lady Winterbourne talks to me of
+presenting you in May."
+
+"That's Miss Raeburn," cried Marcella. "She says I must, and all the
+family would be scandalised if I didn't go. But you can't imagine--"
+
+She stopped and took off her hat, pushing the hair back from her
+forehead. A look of worry and excitement had replaced the radiant glow
+of her first resting moments.
+
+"That you like it?" said Mrs. Boyce, bluntly. "Well, I don't know. Most
+young women like pretty gowns, and great functions, and prominent
+positions. I don't call you an ascetic, Marcella."
+
+Marcella winced.
+
+"One has to fit oneself to circumstances," she said proudly. "One may
+hate the circumstances, but one can't escape them."
+
+"Oh, I don't think you will hate your circumstances, my dear! You would
+be very foolish if you did. Have you heard finally how much the
+settlement is to be?"
+
+"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I have not asked papa, nor anybody."
+
+"It was only settled this morning. Your father told me hurriedly as he
+went out. You are to have two thousand a year of your own."
+
+The tone was dry, and the speaker's look as she turned towards her
+daughter had in it a curious hostility; but Marcella did not notice her
+mother's manner.
+
+"It is too much," she said in a low voice.
+
+She had thrown back her head against the chair in which she sat, and her
+half-troubled eyes were wandering over the darkening expanse of lawn and
+avenue.
+
+"He said he wished you to feel perfectly free to live your own life, and
+to follow out your own projects. Oh, for a person of projects, my dear,
+it is not so much. You will do well to husband it. Keep it for yourself.
+Get what _you_ want out of it: not what other people want."
+
+Again Marcella's attention missed the note of agitation in her mother's
+sharp manner. A soft look--a look of compunction--passed across her
+face. Mrs. Boyce began to put her working things away, finding it too
+dark to do any more.
+
+"By the way," said the mother, suddenly, "I suppose you will be going
+over to help him in his canvassing this next few weeks? Your father says
+the election will be certainly in February."
+
+Marcella moved uneasily.
+
+"He knows," she said at last, "that I don't agree with him in so many
+things. He is so full of this Peasant Proprietors Bill. And I hate
+peasant properties. They are nothing but a step backwards."
+
+Mrs. Boyce lifted her eyebrows.
+
+"That's unlucky. He tells me it is likely to be his chief work in the
+new Parliament. Isn't it, on the whole, probable that he knows more
+about the country than you do, Marcella?"
+
+Marcella sat up with sudden energy and gathered her walking things
+together.
+
+"It isn't knowledge that's the question, mamma; it's the principle of
+the thing. I mayn't know anything, but the people whom I follow know.
+There are the two sides of thought--the two ways of looking at things. I
+warned Aldous when he asked me to marry him which I belonged to. And he
+accepted it."
+
+Mrs. Boyce's thin fine mouth curled a little.
+
+"So you suppose that Aldous had his wits about him on that great
+occasion as much as you had?"
+
+Marcella first started, then quivered with nervous indignation.
+
+"Mother," she said, "I can't bear it. It's not the first time that you
+have talked as though I had taken some unfair advantage--made an
+unworthy bargain. It is too hard too. Other people may think what they
+like, but that you--"
+
+Her voice failed her, and the tears came into her eyes. She was tired
+and over-excited, and the contrast between the atmosphere of flattery
+and consideration which surrounded her in Aldous's company, in the
+village, or at the Winterbournes, and this tone which her mother so
+often took with her when they were alone, was at the moment hardly to be
+endured.
+
+Mrs. Boyce looked up more gravely.
+
+"You misunderstand me, my dear," she said quietly. "I allow myself to
+wonder at you a little, but I think no hard things of you ever. I
+believe you like Aldous."
+
+"Really, mamma!" cried Marcella, half hysterically.
+
+Mrs. Boyce had by now rolled up her work and shut her workbasket.
+
+"If you are going to take off your things," she said, "please tell
+William that there will be six or seven at tea. You said, I think, that
+Mr. Raeburn was going to bring Mr. Hallin?"
+
+"Yes, and Frank Leven is coming. When will Mr. Wharton be here?"
+
+"Oh, in ten minutes or so, if his train is punctual. I hear your father
+just coming in."
+
+Marcella went away, and Mrs. Boyce was left a few minutes alone. Her
+thin hands lay idle a moment on her lap, and leaning towards the window
+beside her, she looked out an instant into the snowy twilight. Her mind
+was full of its usual calm scorn for those--her daughter included--who
+supposed that the human lot was to be mended by a rise in weekly wages,
+or that suffering has any necessary dependence on the amount of
+commodities of which a man disposes. What hardship is there in starving
+and scrubbing and toiling? Had she ever seen a labourer's wife scrubbing
+her cottage floor without envy, without moral thirst? Is it these things
+that kill, or any of the great simple griefs and burdens? Doth man live
+by bread alone? The whole language of social and charitable enthusiasm
+often raised in her a kind of exasperation.
+
+So Marcella would be rich, excessively rich, even now. Outside the
+amount settled upon her, the figures of Aldous Raeburn's present income,
+irrespective of the inheritance which would come to him on his
+grandfather's death, were a good deal beyond what even Mr. Boyce--upon
+whom the daily spectacle of the Maxwell wealth exercised a certain
+angering effect--had supposed.
+
+Mrs. Boyce had received the news of the engagement with astonishment,
+but her after-acceptance of the situation had been marked by all her
+usual philosophy. Probably behind the philosophy there was much secret
+relief. Marcella was provided for. Not the fondest or most contriving
+mother could have done more for her than she had at one stroke done for
+herself. During the early autumn Mrs. Boyce had experienced some moments
+of sharp prevision as to what her future relations might be towards this
+strong and restless daughter, so determined to conquer a world her
+mother had renounced. Now all was clear, and a very shrewd observer
+could allow her mind to play freely with the ironies of the situation.
+
+As to Aldous Raeburn, she had barely spoken to him before the day when
+Marcella announced the engagement, and the lover a few hours later had
+claimed her daughter at the mother's hands with an emotion to which Mrs.
+Boyce found her usual difficulty in responding. She had done her best,
+however, to be gracious and to mask her surprise that he should have
+proposed, that Lord Maxwell should have consented, and that Marcella
+should have so lightly fallen a victim. One surprise, however, had to be
+confessed, at least to herself. After her interview with her future
+son-in-law, Mrs. Boyce realised that for the first time for fifteen
+years she was likely to admit a new friend. The impression made upon him
+by her own singular personality had translated itself in feelings and
+language which, against her will as it were, established an
+understanding, an affinity. That she had involuntarily aroused in him
+the profoundest and most chivalrous pity was plain to her. Yet for the
+first time in her life she did not resent it; and Marcella watched her
+mother's attitude with a mixture of curiosity and relief.
+
+Then followed talk of an early wedding, communications from Lord Maxwell
+to Mr. Boyce of a civil and formal kind, a good deal more notice from
+the "county," and finally this definite statement from Aldous Raeburn as
+to the settlement he proposed to make upon his wife, and the joint
+income which he and she would have immediately at their disposal.
+
+Under all these growing and palpable evidences of Marcella's future
+wealth and position, Mrs. Boyce had shown her usual restless and ironic
+spirit. But of late, and especially to-day, restlessness had become
+oppression. While Marcella was so speedily to become the rich and
+independent woman, they themselves, Marcella's mother and father, were
+very poor, in difficulties even, and likely to remain so. She gathered
+from her husband's grumbling that the provision of a suitable trousseau
+for Marcella would tax his resources to their utmost. How long would it
+be before they were dipping in Marcella's purse? Mrs. Boyce's
+self-tormenting soul was possessed by one of those nightmares her pride
+had brought upon her in grim succession during these fifteen years. And
+this pride, strong towards all the world, was nowhere so strong or so
+indomitable, at this moment, as towards her own daughter. They were
+practically strangers to each other; and they jarred. To inquire where
+the fault lay would have seemed to Mrs. Boyce futile.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Darkness had come on fast, and Mrs. Boyce was in the act of ringing for
+lights when her husband entered.
+
+"Where's Marcella?" he asked as he threw himself into a chair with the
+air of irritable fatigue which was now habitual to him.
+
+"Only gone to take off her things and tell William about tea. She will
+be down directly."
+
+"Does she know about that settlement?"
+
+"Yes, I told her. She thought it generous, but not--I think--unsuitable.
+The world cannot be reformed on nothing."
+
+"Reformed!--fiddlesticks!" said Mr. Boyce, angrily. "I never saw a girl
+with a head so full of nonsense in my life. Where does she get it from?
+Why did you let her go about in London with those people? She may be
+spoilt for good. Ten to one she'll make a laughing stock of herself and
+everybody belonging to her, before she's done."
+
+"Well, that is Mr. Raeburn's affair. I think I should take him into
+account more than Marcella does, if I were she. But probably she knows
+best."
+
+"Of course she does. He has lost his head; any one can see that. While
+she is in the room, he is like a man possessed. It doesn't sit well on
+that kind of fellow. It makes him ridiculous. I told him half the
+settlement would be ample. She would only spend the rest on nonsense."
+
+"You told him that?"
+
+"Yes, I did. Oh!"--with an angry look at her--"I suppose you thought I
+should want to sponge upon her? I am as much obliged to you as usual!"
+
+A red spot rose in his wife's thin cheek. But she turned and answered
+him gently, so gently that he had the rare sensation of having triumphed
+over her. He allowed himself to be mollified, and she stood there over
+the fire, chatting with him for some time, a friendly natural note in
+her voice which was rare and, insensibly, soothed him like an opiate.
+She chatted about Marcella's trousseau gowns, detailing her own
+contrivances for economy; about the probable day of the wedding, the
+latest gossip of the election, and so on. He sat shading his eyes from
+the firelight, and now and then throwing in a word or two. The inmost
+soul of him was very piteous, harrowed often by a new dread--the dread
+of dying. The woman beside him held him in the hollow of her hand. In
+the long wrestle between her nature and his, she had conquered. His fear
+of her and his need of her had even come to supply the place of a dozen
+ethical instincts he was naturally without.
+
+Some discomfort, probably physical, seemed at last to break up his
+moment of rest.
+
+"Well, I tell you, I often wish it were the other man," he said, with
+some impatience. "Raeburn 's so d----d superior. I suppose I offended
+him by what I said of Marcella's whims, and the risk of letting her
+control so much money at her age, and with her ideas. You never saw such
+an air!--all very quiet, of course. He buttoned his coat and got up to
+go, as though I were no more worth considering than the table. Neither
+he nor his precious grandfather need alarm themselves: I shan't trouble
+them as a visitor. If I shock them, they bore me--so we're quits.
+Marcella'll have to come here if she wants to see her father. But owing
+to your charming system of keeping her away from us all her childhood,
+she's not likely to want."
+
+"You mean Mr. Wharton by the other man?" said Mrs. Boyce, not defending
+herself or Aldous.
+
+"Yes, of course. But he came on the scene just too late, worse luck! Why
+wouldn't he have done just as well? He's as mad as she--madder. He
+believes all the rubbish she does--talks such _rot_, the people tell me,
+in his meetings. But then he's good company--he amuses you--you don't
+need to be on your p's and q's with _him_. Why wouldn't she have taken
+up with him? As far as money goes they could have rubbed along. _He's_
+not the man to starve when there are game-pies going. It's just bad
+luck."
+
+Mrs. Boyce smiled a little.
+
+"What there is to make you suppose that she would have inclined to him,
+I don't exactly see. She has been taken up with Mr. Raeburn, really,
+from the first week of her arrival here."
+
+"Well, I dare say--there was no one else," said her husband, testily.
+"That's natural enough. It's just what I say. All I know is, Wharton
+shall be free to use this house just as he pleases during his
+canvassing, whatever the Raeburns may say."
+
+He bent forward and poked the somewhat sluggish fire with a violence
+which hindered rather than helped it. Mrs. Boyce's smile had quite
+vanished. She perfectly understood all that was implied, whether in his
+instinctive dislike of Aldous Raeburn, or in his cordiality towards
+young Wharton.
+
+After a minute's silence, he got up again and left the room, walking, as
+she observed, with difficulty. She stopped a minute or so in the same
+place after he had gone, turning her rings absently on her thin fingers.
+She was thinking of some remarks which Dr. Clarke, the excellent and
+experienced local doctor, had made to her on the occasion of his last
+visit. With all the force of her strong will she had set herself to
+disbelieve them. But they had had subtle effects already. Finally she
+too went upstairs, bidding Marcella, whom she met coming down, hurry
+William with the tea, as Mr. Wharton might arrive any moment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella saw the room shut up--the large, shabby, beautiful room--the
+lamps brought in, fresh wood thrown on the fire to make it blaze, and
+the tea-table set out. Then she sat herself down on a low chair by the
+fire, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped
+in front of her. Her black dress revealed her fine full throat and her
+white wrists, for she had an impatience of restraint anywhere, and wore
+frills and falls of black lace where other people would have followed
+the fashion in high collars and close wristbands. What must have struck
+any one with an observant eye, as she sat thus, thrown into beautiful
+light and shade by the blaze of the wood fire, was the massiveness of
+the head compared with the nervous delicacy of much of the face, the
+thinness of the wrist, and of the long and slender foot raised on the
+fender. It was perhaps the great thickness and full wave of the hair
+which gave the head its breadth; but the effect was singular, and would
+have been heavy but for the glow of the eyes, which balanced it.
+
+She was thinking, as a _fiancee_ should, of Aldous and their marriage,
+which had been fixed for the end of February. Yet not apparently with
+any rapturous absorption. There was a great deal to plan, and her mind
+was full of business. Who was to look after her various village schemes
+while she and Lady Winterbourne were away in London? Mary Harden had
+hardly brains enough, dear little thing as she was. They must find some
+capable woman and pay her. The Cravens would tell her, of course, that
+she was on the high road to the most degrading of _roles_--the _role_ of
+Lady Bountiful. But there were Lady Bountifuls and Lady Bountifuls. And
+the _role_ itself was inevitable. It all depended upon how it was
+managed--in the interest of what ideas.
+
+She must somehow renew her relations with the Cravens in town. It would
+certainly be in her power now to help them and their projects forward a
+little. Of course they would distrust her, but that she would get over.
+
+All the time she was listening mechanically for the hall door bell,
+which, however, across the distances of the great rambling house it was
+not easy to hear. Their coming guest was not much in her mind. She
+tacitly assumed that her father would look after him. On the two or
+three occasions when they had met during the last three months,
+including his luncheon at Mellor on the day after her engagement, her
+thoughts had been too full to allow her to take much notice of
+him--picturesque and amusing as he seemed to be. Of late he had not been
+much in the neighbourhood. There had been a slack time for both
+candidates, which was now to give way to a fresh period of hard
+canvassing in view of the election which everybody expected at the end
+of February.
+
+But Aldous was to bring Edward Hallin! That interested her. She felt an
+intense curiosity to see and know Hallin, coupled with a certain
+nervousness. The impression she might be able to make on him would be in
+some sense an earnest of her future.
+
+Suddenly, something undefinable--a slight sound, a current of air--made
+her turn her head. To her amazement she saw a young man in the doorway
+looking at her with smiling eyes, and quietly drawing off his gloves.
+
+She sprang up with a feeling of annoyance.
+
+"Mr. Wharton!"
+
+"Oh!--must you?"--he said, with a movement of one hand, as though to
+stop her. "Couldn't you stay like that? At first I thought there was
+nobody in the room. Your servant is grappling with my bags, which are as
+the sand of the sea for multitude, so I wandered in by myself. Then I
+saw you--and the fire--and the room. It was like a bit of music. It was
+mere wanton waste to interrupt it."
+
+Marcella flushed, as she very stiffly shook hands with him.
+
+"I did not hear the front door," she said coldly. "My mother will be
+here directly. May I give you some tea?"
+
+"Thanks. No, I knew you did not hear me. That delighted me. It showed
+what charming things there are in the world that have no spectators!
+What a _delicious_ place this is!--what a heavenly old place--especially
+in these half lights! There was a raw sun when I was here before, but
+now--"
+
+He stood in front of the fire, looking round the great room, and at the
+few small lamps making their scanty light amid the flame-lit darkness.
+His hands were loosely crossed behind his back, and his boyish face, in
+its setting of curls, shone with content and self-possession.
+
+"Well," said Marcella, bluntly, "I should prefer a little more light to
+live by. Perhaps, when you have fallen downstairs here in the dark as
+often as I have, you may too."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"But how much better, after all--don't you think so?--to have too little
+of anything than too much!"
+
+He flung himself into a chair beside the tea-table, looking up with gay
+interrogation as Marcella handed him his cup. She was a good deal
+surprised by him. On the few occasions of their previous meetings, these
+bright eyes, and this pronounced manner, had been--at any rate as
+towards herself--much less free and evident. She began to recover the
+start he had given her, and to study him with a half-unwilling
+curiosity.
+
+"Then Mellor will please you," she said drily, in answer to his remark,
+carrying her own tea meanwhile to a chair on the other side of the fire.
+"My father never bought anything--my father can't. I believe we have
+chairs enough to sit down upon--but we have no curtains to half the
+windows. Can I give you anything?"
+
+For he had risen, and was looking over the tea-tray.
+
+"Oh! but I _must_," he said discontentedly. "I _must_ have enough sugar
+in my tea!"
+
+"I gave you more than the average," she said, with a sudden little leap
+of laughter, as she came to his aid. "Do all your principles break down
+like this? I was going to suggest that you might like some of that fire
+taken away?" And she pointed to the pile of blazing logs which now
+filled up the great chimney.
+
+"That fire!" he said, shivering, and moving up to it. "Have you any idea
+what sort of a wind you keep up here on these hills on a night like
+this? And to think that in this weather, with a barometer that laughs in
+your face when you try to move it, I have three meetings to-morrow
+night!"
+
+"When one loves the 'People,' with a large P," said Marcella, "one
+mustn't mind winds."
+
+He flashed a smile at her, answering to the sparkle of her look, then
+applied himself to his tea and toasted bun again, with the dainty
+deliberation of one enjoying every sip and bite.
+
+"No; but if only the People didn't live so far apart. Some murderous
+person wanted them to have only one neck. I want them to have only one
+ear. Only then unfortunately everybody would speak well--which would
+bring things round to dulness again. Does Mr. Raeburn make you think
+very bad things of me, Miss Boyce?"
+
+He bent forward to her as he spoke, his blue eyes all candour and mirth.
+
+Marcella started.
+
+"How can he?" she said abruptly. "I am not a Conservative."
+
+"Not a Conservative?" he said joyously. "Oh! but impossible! Does that
+mean that you ever read my poor little speeches?"
+
+He pointed to the local newspaper, freshly cut, which lay on a table at
+Marcella's elbow.
+
+"Sometimes--" said Marcella, embarrassed. "There is so little time."
+
+In truth she had hardly given his candidature a thought since the day
+Aldous proposed to her. She had been far too much taken up with her own
+prospects, with Lady Winterbourne's friendship, and her village schemes.
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Of course there is. When is the great event to be?"
+
+"I didn't mean that," said Marcella, stiffly. "Lady Winterbourne and I
+have been trying to start some village workshops. We have been working
+and talking, and writing, morning, noon, and night."
+
+"Oh! I know--yes, I heard of it. And you really think anything is going
+to come out of finicking little schemes of that sort?"
+
+His dry change of tone drew a quick look from her. The fresh-coloured
+face was transformed. In place of easy mirth and mischief, she read an
+acute and half contemptuous attention.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said slowly, after a pause. "Or
+rather--I do know quite well. You told papa--didn't you?--and Mr.
+Raeburn says that you are a Socialist--not half-and-half, as all the
+world is, but the real thing? And of course you want great changes: you
+don't like anything that might strengthen the upper class with the
+people. But that is nonsense. You can't get the changes for a long
+_long_ time. And, meanwhile, people must be clothed and fed and kept
+alive."
+
+She lay back in her high-backed chair and looked at him defiantly. His
+lip twitched, but he kept his gravity.
+
+"You would be much better employed in forming a branch of the
+Agricultural Union," he said decidedly. "What is the good of playing
+Lady Bountiful to a decayed industry? All that is childish; we want _the
+means of revolution_. The people who are for reform shouldn't waste
+money and time on fads."
+
+"I understand all that," she said scornfully, her quick breath rising
+and falling. "Perhaps you don't know that I was a member of the
+Venturist Society in London? What you say doesn't sound very new to me!"
+
+His seriousness disappeared in laughter. He hastily put down his cup
+and, stepping over to her, held out his hand.
+
+"You a Venturist? So am I. Joy! Won't you shake hands with me, as
+comrades should? We are a very mixed set of people, you know, and
+between ourselves I don't know that we are coming to much. But we can
+make an alderman dream of the guillotine--that is always something. Oh!
+but now we can talk on quite a new footing!"
+
+She had given him her hand for an instant, withdrawing it with shy
+rapidity, and he had thrown himself into a chair again, with his arms
+behind his head, and the air of one reflecting happily on a changed
+situation. "Quite a new footing," he repeated thoughtfully. "But it
+is--a little surprising. What does--what does Mr. Raeburn say to it?"
+
+"Nothing! He cares just as much about the poor as you or I, please
+understand! He doesn't choose my way--but he won't interfere with it."
+
+"Ah! that is like him--like Aldous."
+
+Marcella started.
+
+"You don't mind my calling him by his Christian name sometimes? It drops
+out. We used to meet as boys together at the Levens. The Levens are my
+cousins. He was a big boy, and I was a little one. But he didn't like
+me. You see--I was a little beast!"
+
+His air of appealing candour could not have been more engaging.
+
+"Yes, I fear I was a little beast. And he was, even then, and always,
+'the good and beautiful.' You don't understand Greek, do you, Miss
+Boyce? But he was very good to me. I got into an awful scrape once. I
+let out a pair of eagle owls that used to be kept in the courtyard--Sir
+Charles loved them a great deal more than his babies--I let them out at
+night for pure wickedness, and they came to fearful ends in the park. I
+was to have been sent home next day, in the most unnecessary and penal
+hurry. But Aldous interposed--said he would look after me for the rest
+of the holidays."
+
+"And then you tormented him?"
+
+"Oh no!" he said with gentle complacency. "Oh no! I never torment
+anybody. But one must enjoy oneself you know; what else can one do? Then
+afterwards, when we were older--somehow I don't know--but we didn't get
+on. It is very sad--I wish he thought better of me."
+
+The last words were said with a certain change of tone, and sitting up
+he laid the tips of his fingers together on his knees with a little
+plaintive air. Marcella's eyes danced with amusement, but she looked
+away from him to the fire, and would not answer.
+
+"You don't help me out. You don't console me. It's unkind of-you. Don't
+you think it a melancholy fate to be always admiring the people who
+detest you?"
+
+"Don't admire them!" she said merrily.
+
+His eyebrows lifted. "_That_," he said drily, "is disloyal. I call--I
+call your ancestor over the mantelpiece"--he waved his hand towards a
+blackened portrait in front of him--"to witness, that I am all for
+admiring Mr. Raeburn, and you discourage it. Well, but now--_now_"--he
+drew his chair eagerly towards hers, the pose of a minute before thrown
+to the winds--"do let us understand each other a little more before
+people come. You know I have a labour newspaper?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"You read it?"
+
+"Is it the _Labour Clarion_? I take it in."
+
+"Capital!" he cried. "Then I know now why I found a copy in the village
+here. You lent it to a man called Hurd?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Whose wife worships you?--whose good angel you have been? Do I know
+something about you, or do I not? Well, now, are you satisfied with that
+paper? Can you suggest to me means of improving it? It wants some fresh
+blood, I think--I must find it? I bought the thing last year, in a
+moribund condition, with the old staff. Oh! we will certainly take
+counsel together about it--most certainly! But first--I have been
+boasting of knowing something about you--but I should like to ask--do
+you know anything about me?"
+
+Both laughed. Then Marcella tried to be serious.
+
+"Well--I--I believe--you have some land?"
+
+"Eight!" he nodded--"I am a Lincolnshire landowner. I have about five
+thousand acres--enough to be tolerably poor on--and enough to play
+tricks with. I have a co-operative farm, for instance. At present I have
+lent them a goodish sum of money--and remitted them their first
+half-year's rent. Not so far a paying speculation. But it will do--some
+day. Meanwhile the estate wants money--and my plans and I want
+money--badly. I propose to make the _Labour Clarion_ pay--if I can.
+That will give me more time for speaking and organising, for what
+concerns _us_--as Venturists--than the Bar."
+
+"The Bar?" she said, a little mystified, but following every word with a
+fascinated attention.
+
+"I made myself a barrister three years ago, to please my mother. She
+thought I should do better in Parliament--if ever I got in. Did you ever
+hear of my mother?"
+
+There was no escaping these frank, smiling questions.
+
+"No," said Marcella, honestly.
+
+"Well, ask Lord Maxwell," he said, laughing. "He and she came across
+each other once or twice, when he was Home Secretary years ago, and she
+was wild about some woman's grievance or other. She always maintains
+that she got the better of him--no doubt he was left with a different
+impression. Well--my mother--most people thought her mad--perhaps she
+was--but then somehow--I loved her!"
+
+He was still smiling, but at the last words a charming vibration crept
+into the words, and his eyes sought her with a young open demand for
+sympathy.
+
+"Is that so rare?" she asked him, half laughing--instinctively defending
+her own feeling lest it should be snatched from her by any make-believe.
+
+"Yes--as we loved each other--it is rare. My father died when I was ten.
+She would not send me to school, and I was always in her pocket--I
+shared all her interests. She was a wild woman--but she _lived_, as not
+one person in twenty lives."
+
+Then he sighed. Marcella was too shy to imitate his readiness to ask
+questions. But she supposed that his mother must be dead--indeed, now
+vaguely remembered to have heard as much.
+
+There was a little silence.
+
+"Please tell me," she said suddenly, "why do you attack my
+straw-plaiting? Is a co-operative farm any less of a stopgap?"
+
+Instantly his face changed. He drew up his chair again beside her, as
+gay and keen-eyed as before.
+
+"I can't argue it out now. There is so much to say. But do listen! I
+have a meeting in the village here next week to preach land
+nationalisation. We mean to try and form a branch of the Labourers'
+Union. Will you come?"
+
+Marcella hesitated.
+
+"I think so," she said slowly.
+
+There was a pause. Then she raised her eyes and found his fixed upon
+her. A sudden sympathy--of youth, excitement, pleasure--seemed to rise
+between them. She had a quick impression of lightness, grace; of an open
+brow set in curls; of a look more intimate, inquisitive, commanding,
+than any she had yet met.
+
+"May I speak to you, miss?" said a voice at the door.
+
+Marcella rose hastily. Her mother's maid was standing there.
+
+She hurried across the room.
+
+"What is the matter, Deacon?"
+
+"Your mother says, miss," said the maid, retreating into the hall, "I am
+to tell you she can't come down. Your father is ill, and she has sent
+for Dr. Clarke. But you are please not to go up. Will you give the
+gentlemen their tea, and she will come down before they go, if she can."
+
+Marcella had turned pale.
+
+"Mayn't I go, Deacon? What is it?"
+
+"It's a bad fit of pain, your mother says, miss. Nothing can be done
+till the doctor comes. She begged _particular_ that you wouldn't go up,
+miss. She doesn't want any one put out."
+
+At the same moment there was a ring at the outer door.
+
+"Oh, there is Aldous," cried Marcella, with relief, and she ran out into
+the hall to meet him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Aldous advanced into the inner hall at sight of Marcella, leaving his
+companions behind in the vestibule taking off their coats. Marcella ran
+to him.
+
+"Papa is ill!" she said to him hastily. "Mamma has sent for Dr. Clarke.
+She won't let me go up, and wants us to take no notice and have tea
+without her."
+
+"I am so sorry! Can we do anything? The dogcart is here with a fast
+horse. If your messenger went on foot--"
+
+"Oh, no! they are sure to have sent the boy on the pony. I don't know
+why, but I have had a presentiment for a long time past that papa was
+going to be ill."
+
+She looked white and excited. She had turned back to the drawing-room,
+forgetting the other guests, he walking beside her. As they passed along
+the dim hall, Aldous had her hand close in his, and when they passed
+under an archway at the further end he stooped suddenly in the shadows
+and kissed the hand. Touch--kiss--had the clinging, the intensity of
+passion.
+
+They were the expression of all that had lain vibrating at the man's
+inmost heart during the dark drive, while he had been chatting with his
+two companions.
+
+"My darling! I hope not. Would you rather not see strangers? Shall I
+send Hallin and young Leven away? They would understand at once."
+
+"Oh, no! Mr. Wharton is here anyway--staying. Where is Mr. Hallin? I
+had forgotten him."
+
+Aldous turned and called. Mr. Hallin and young Frank Leven, divining
+something unusual, were looking at the pictures in the hall.
+
+Edward Hallin came up and took Marcella's offered hand. Each looked at
+the other with a special attention and interest. "She holds my friend's
+life in her hands--is she worthy of it?" was naturally the question
+hanging suspended in the man's judgment. The girl's manner was proud and
+shy, the manner of one anxious to please, yet already, perhaps, on the
+defensive.
+
+Aldous explained the position of affairs, and Hallin expressed his
+sympathy. He had a singularly attractive voice, the voice indeed of the
+orator, which can adapt itself with equal charm and strength to the most
+various needs and to any pitch. As he spoke, Marcella was conscious of a
+sudden impression that she already knew him and could be herself with
+him at once.
+
+"Oh, I say," broke in young Leven, who was standing behind; "don't you
+be bothered with us, Miss Boyce. Just send us back at once. I'm awfully
+sorry!"
+
+"No; you are to come in!" she said, smiling through her pallor, which
+was beginning to pass away, and putting out her hand to him--the young
+Eton and Oxford athlete, just home for his Christmas vacation, was a
+great favourite with her--"You must come and have tea and cheer me up by
+telling me all the things you have killed this week. Is there anything
+left alive? You had come down to the fieldfares, you know, last
+Tuesday."
+
+He followed her, laughing and protesting, and she led the way to the
+drawing-room. But as her fingers were on the handle she once more caught
+sight of the maid, Deacon, standing on the stairs, and ran to speak to
+her.
+
+"He is better," she said, coming back with a face of glad relief. "The
+attack seems to be passing off. Mamma can't come down, but she begs that
+we will all enjoy ourselves."
+
+"We'll endeavour," said young Leven, rubbing his hands, "by the help of
+tea. Miss Boyce, will you please tell Aldous and Mr. Hallin not to talk
+politics when they're taking me out to a party. They should fight a man
+of their own size. I'm all limp and trampled on, and want you to protect
+me."
+
+The group moved, laughing and talking, into the drawing-room.
+
+"Jiminy!" said Leven, stopping short behind Aldous, who was alone
+conscious of the lad's indignant astonishment; "what the deuce is _he_
+doing here?"
+
+For there on the rug, with his back to the fire, stood Wharton,
+surveying the party with his usual smiling _aplomb_.
+
+"Mr. Hallin, do you know Mr. Wharton?" said Marcella.
+
+"Mr. Wharton and I have met several times on public platforms," said
+Hallin, holding out his hand, which Wharton took with effusion. Aldous
+greeted him with the impassive manner, the "three finger" manner, which
+was with him an inheritance--though not from his grandfather--and did
+not contribute to his popularity in the neighbourhood. As for young
+Leven, he barely nodded to the Radical candidate, and threw himself into
+a chair as far from the fire as possible.
+
+"Frank and I have met before to-day!" said Wharton, laughing.
+
+"Yes, I've been trying to undo some of your mischief," said the boy,
+bluntly. "I found him, Miss Boyce, haranguing a lot of men at the
+dinner-hour at Tudley End--one of our villages, you know--cramming them
+like anything--all about the game laws, and our misdeeds--my father's,
+of course."
+
+Wharton raised a protesting hand.
+
+"Oh--all very well! Of course it was us you meant! Well, when he'd
+driven off, I got up on a cart and had _my_ say. I asked them whether
+they didn't all come out at our big shoots, and whether they didn't have
+almost as much fun as we did--why! the schoolmaster and the postman come
+to ask to carry cartridges, and everybody turns out, down to the
+cripples!--whether they didn't have rabbits given them all the year
+round; whether half of them hadn't brothers and sons employed somehow
+about the game, well-paid, and well-treated; whether any man-jack of
+them would be a ha'porth better off if there were no game; whether many
+of them wouldn't be worse off; and whether England wouldn't be a beastly
+dull place to live in, if people like him"--he pointed to Wharton--"had
+the governing of it! And I brought 'em all round too. I got them
+cheering and laughing. Oh! I can tell you old Dodgson'll have to take
+me on. He says he'll ask me to speak for him at several places. I'm not
+half bad, I declare I'm not."
+
+"I thought they gave you a holiday task at Eton," observed Wharton,
+blandly.
+
+The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself--radiant:--
+
+"I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well. But if it had
+only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn't I have scored--by
+Jove! They gave us a beastly _essay_ instead of a book. _Demagogues_!' I
+sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half. I'd have known
+something about it _now_."
+
+And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust
+some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to
+his candidate cousin.
+
+Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton. Then there was a general
+drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped
+by Aldous. Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant
+and apart.
+
+Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive,
+something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting,
+and glad to be silent. Yet all the time he was observing the girl
+presiding and the man beside her--his friend, her lover. The moment had
+a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him. So close had been the
+bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover's communication of his
+engagement had evoked in the friend that sense--poignant,
+inevitable--which in the realm of the affections always waits on
+something done and finished,--a leaf turned, a chapter closed. "That sad
+word, Joy!" Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn's letter reached him,
+and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor's
+phrase, long familiar and significant to him. His letter to his friend,
+and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost
+him an invalid's contribution of sleep and ease. The girl's answer had
+seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with
+a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken
+as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as
+Aldous was concerned.
+
+Her beauty, of which he had heard much, now that he was face to face
+with it, was certainly striking enough--all the more because of its
+immaturity, the subtlety and uncertainty of its promise.
+_Immaturity_--_uncertainty_--these words returned upon him as he
+observed her manner with its occasional awkwardness, the awkwardness
+which goes with power not yet fully explored or mastered by its
+possessor. How Aldous hung upon her, following every movement,
+anticipating every want! After a while Hallin found himself
+half-inclined to Mr. Boyce's view, that men of Raeburn's type are never
+seen to advantage in this stage--this queer topsy-turvy stage--of first
+passion. He felt a certain impatience, a certain jealousy for his
+friend's dignity. It seemed to him too, every now and then, that
+she--the girl--was teased by all this absorption, this deference. He was
+conscious of watching for something in her that did not appear; and a
+first prescience of things anxious or untoward stirred in his quick
+sense.
+
+"You may all say what you like," said Marcella, suddenly, putting down
+her cup, and letting her hand drop for emphasis on her knee; "but you
+will never persuade me that game-preserving doesn't make life in the
+country much more difficult, and the difference between classes much
+wider and bitterer, than they need be."
+
+The remark cut across some rattling talk of Frank Leven's, who was in
+the first flush of the sportsman's ardour, and, though by no means
+without parts, could at the present moment apply his mind to little else
+than killing of one kind or another, unless it were to the chances of
+keeping his odious cousin out of Parliament.
+
+Leven stared. Miss Boyce's speech seemed to him to have no sort of _a
+propos_. Aldous looked down upon her as he stood beside her, smiling.
+
+"I wish you didn't trouble yourself so much about it," he said.
+
+"How can I help it?" she answered quickly; and then flushed, like one
+who has drawn attention indiscreetly to their own personal situation.
+
+"Trouble herself!" echoed young Leven. "Now, look here Miss Boyce, will
+you come for a walk with me? I'll convince you, as I convinced those
+fellows over there. I know I could, and you won't give me the chance;
+it's too bad."
+
+"Oh, you!" she said, with a little shrug; "what do you know about it?
+One might as well consult a gambler about gambling when he is in the
+middle of his first rush of luck. I have ten times more right to an
+opinion than you have. I can keep my head cool, and notice a hundred
+things that _you_ would never see. I come fresh into your country life,
+and the first thing that strikes me is that the whole machinery of law
+and order seems to exist for nothing in the world but to protect your
+pheasants! There are policemen--to catch poachers; there are
+magistrates--to try them. To judge from the newspapers, at least, they
+have nothing else to do. And if _you_ follow your sporting instincts,
+you are a very fine fellow, and everybody admires you. But if a
+shoemaker's son in Mellor follows his, he is a villain and a thief, and
+the policeman and the magistrate make for him at once."
+
+"But I don't steal his chickens!" cried the lad, choking with arguments
+and exasperation; "and why should he steal my pheasants? I paid for the
+eggs, I paid for the hens to sit on 'em, I paid for the coops to rear
+them in, I paid the men to watch them, I paid for the barley to feed
+them with: why is he to be allowed to take my property, and I am to be
+sent to jail if I take his?"
+
+"_Property_!" said Marcella, scornfully. "You can't settle everything
+nowadays by that big word. We are coming to put the public good before
+property. If the nation should decide to curtail your 'right,' as you
+call it, in the general interest, it will do it, and you will be left to
+scream."
+
+She had flung her arm round the back of her chair, and all her lithe
+young frame was tense with an eagerness, nay, an excitement, which drew
+Hallin's attention. It was more than was warranted by the conversation,
+he thought.
+
+"Well, if you think the abolition of game preserving would be popular in
+the country, Miss Boyce, I'm certain you make a precious mistake," cried
+Leven. "Why, even you don't think it would be, do you, Mr. Hallin?" he
+said, appealing at random in his disgust.
+
+"I don't know," said Hallin, with his quiet smile. "I rather think, on
+the whole, it would be. The farmers put up with it, but a great many of
+them don't like it. Things are mended since the Ground Game Act, but
+there are a good many grievances still left."
+
+"I should think there are!" said Marcella, eagerly, bending forward to
+him. "I was talking to one of our farmers the other day whose land goes
+up to the edge of Lord Winterbourne's woods. '_They_ don't keep their
+pheasants, miss,' he said. '_I_ do. I and my corn. If I didn't send a
+man up half-past five in the morning, when the ears begin to fill,
+there'd be nothing left for _us_.' 'Why don't you complain to the
+agent?' I said. 'Complain! Lor' bless you, miss, you may complain till
+you're black in the face. I've allus found--an' I've been here, man and
+boy, thirty-two year--as how _Winterbournes generally best it.'_ There
+you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It's a tyranny--a tyranny of the
+rich."
+
+Flushed and sarcastic, she looked at Frank Leven; but Hallin had an
+uncomfortable feeling that the sarcasm was not all meant for him. Aldous
+was sitting with his hands on his knees, and his head bent forward a
+little. Once, as the talk ran on, Hallin saw him raise his grey eyes to
+the girl beside him, who certainly did not notice it, and was not
+thinking of him. There was a curious pain and perplexity in the
+expression, but something else too--a hunger, a dependence, a yearning,
+that for an instant gripped the friend's heart.
+
+"Well, I know Aldous doesn't agree with you, Miss Boyce," cried Leven,
+looking about him in his indignation for some argument that should be
+final. "You don't, do you, Aldous? You don't think the country would be
+the better, if we could do away with game to-morrow?"
+
+"No more than I think it would be the better," said Aldous, quietly, "if
+we could do away with gold-plate and false hair to-morrow. There would
+be too many hungry goldsmiths and wig-makers on the streets."
+
+Marcella turned to him, half defiant, half softened.
+
+"Of course, your point lies in _to-morrow,"_ she said. "I accept that.
+We can't carry reform by starving innocent people. But the question is,
+what are we to work towards? Mayn't we regard the game laws as one of
+the obvious crying abuses to be attacked first--in the great
+campaign!--the campaign which is to bring liberty and self-respect back
+to the country districts, and make the labourer feel himself as much of
+a man as the squire?"
+
+"What a head! What an attitude!" thought Hallin, half repelled, half
+fascinated. "But a girl that can talk politics--hostile politics--to her
+lover, and mean them too--or am I inexperienced?--and is it merely that
+she is so much interested in him that she wants to be quarrelling with
+him?"
+
+Aldous looked up. "I am not _sure_," he said, answering her. "That is
+always my difficulty, you know," and he smiled at her. "Game preserving
+is not to me personally an attractive form of private property, but it
+seems to me bound up with other forms, and I want to see where the
+attack is going to lead me. But I would protect your farmer--mind!--as
+zealously as you."
+
+Hallin caught the impatient quiver of the girl's lip. The tea had just
+been taken away, and Marcella had gone to sit upon an old sofa near the
+fire, whither Aldous had followed her. Wharton, who had so far said
+nothing, had left his post of observation on the hearth-rug, and was
+sitting under the lamp balancing a paper-knife with great attention on
+two fingers. In the half light Hallin by chance saw a movement of
+Raeburn's hand towards Marcella's, which lay hidden among the folds of
+her dress--quick resistance on her part, then acquiescence. He felt a
+sudden pleasure in his friend's small triumph.
+
+"Aldous and I have worn these things threadbare many a time," he said,
+addressing his hostess. "You don't know how kind he is to my dreams. I
+am no sportsman and have no landowning relations, so he ought to bid me
+hold my tongue. But he lets me rave. To me the simple fact is that _game
+preserving creates crime_. Agricultural life is naturally simpler--might
+be, it always seems to me, so much more easily moralised and fraternised
+than the industrial form. And you split it up and poison it all by the
+emphasis laid on this class pleasure. It is a natural pleasure, you say.
+Perhaps it is--the survival, perhaps, of some primitive instinct in our
+northern blood--but, if so, why should it be impossible for the rich to
+share it with the poor? I have little plans--dreams. I throw them out
+sometimes to catch Aldous, but he hardly rises to them!"
+
+"Oh! I _say_," broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer.
+"Now look here, Miss Boyce,--what do you think Mr. Hallin wants? It is
+just sheer lunacy--it really is--though I know I'm impertinent, and he's
+a great man. But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common
+there is--oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain--on Lord
+Maxwell's estate, and make a _labourers'_ shoot of it! Now, I ask you!
+And he vows he doesn't see why they shouldn't rear pheasants if they
+choose to club and pay for it. Well, I will say that much for him,
+Aldous didn't see his way to _that_, though he isn't the kind of
+Conservative _I_ want to see in Parliament by a long way. Besides, it's
+such stuff! They say sport brutalises _us_, and then they want to go and
+contaminate the labourer. But we won't take the responsibility. We've
+got our own vices, and we'll stick to them; we're used to them; but we
+won't hand them on: we'd scorn the action."
+
+The flushed young barbarian, driven to bay, was not to be resisted.
+Marcella laughed heartily, and Hallin laid an affectionate hand on the
+boy's shoulder, patting him as though he were a restive horse.
+
+"Yes, I remember I was puzzled as to the details of Hallin's scheme,"
+said Aldous, his mouth twitching. "I wanted to know who was to pay for
+the licences; how game enough for the number of applicants was to be
+got without preserving; and how men earning twelve or fourteen shillings
+a week were to pay a keeper. Then I asked a clergyman who has a living
+near this common what he thought would be the end of it. 'Well,' he
+said, 'the first day they'd shoot every animal on the place; the second
+day they'd shoot each other. Universal carnage--I should say that would
+be about the end of it.' These were trifles, of course--details."
+
+Hallin shook his head serenely.
+
+"I still maintain," he said, "that a little practical ingenuity might
+have found a way."
+
+"And I will support you," said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and
+bending over to Hallin, "with good reason. For three years and a few
+months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own
+estate, and it has not worked badly at all."
+
+"There!" cried Marcella. "There! I knew something could be done, if
+there was a will. I have always felt it."
+
+She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening
+eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and
+eloquent.
+
+"Of course, there was nothing to shoot!" exclaimed Frank Leven.
+
+"On the contrary," said Wharton, smiling, "we are in the middle of a
+famous partridge country."
+
+"How your neighbours must dote on you!" cried the boy. But Wharton took
+no notice.
+
+"And my father preserved strictly," he went on. "It is quite a simple
+story. When I inherited, three years ago, I thought the whole thing
+detestable, and determined I wouldn't be responsible for keeping it up.
+So I called the estate together--farmers and labourers--and we worked
+out a plan. There are keepers, but they are the estate servants, not
+mine. Everybody has his turn according to the rules--I and my friends
+along with the rest. Not everybody can shoot every year, but everybody
+gets his chance, and, moreover, a certain percentage of all the game
+killed is public property, and is distributed every year according to a
+regular order."
+
+"Who pays the keepers?" interrupted Leven.
+
+"I do," said Wharton, smiling again. "Mayn't I--for the present--do what
+I will with mine own? I return in their wages some of my ill-gotten
+gains as a landowner. It is all makeshift, of course."
+
+"I understand!" exclaimed Marcella, nodding to him--"you could not be a
+Venturist and keep up game-preserving?"
+
+Wharton met her bright eye with a half deprecating, reserved air.
+
+"You are right, of course," he said drily. "For a Socialist to be
+letting his keepers run in a man earning twelve shillings a week for
+knocking over a rabbit would have been a little strong. No one can be
+consistent in my position--in any landowner's position--it is
+impossible; still, thank Heaven, one can deal with the most glaring
+matters. As Mr. Raeburn said, however, all this game business is, of
+course, a mere incident of the general land and property system, as you
+will hear me expound when you come to that meeting you promised me to
+honour."
+
+He stooped forward, scanning her with smiling deference. Marcella felt
+the man's hand that held her own suddenly tighten an instant. Then
+Aldous released her, and rising walked towards the fire.
+
+"You're _not_ going to one of his meetings, Miss Boyce!" cried Frank, in
+angry incredulity.
+
+Marcella hesitated an instant, half angry with Wharton. Then she
+reddened and threw back her dark head with the passionate gesture Hallin
+had already noticed as characteristic.
+
+"Mayn't I go where I belong?" she said--"where my convictions lead me?"
+
+There was a moment's awkward silence. Then Hallin got up.
+
+"Miss Boyce, may we see the house? Aldous has told me much of it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently, in the midst of their straggling progress through the
+half-furnished rooms of the garden front, preceded by the shy footman
+carrying a lamp, which served for little more than to make darkness
+visible, Marcella found herself left behind with Aldous. As soon as she
+felt that they were alone, she realised a jar between herself and him.
+His manner was much as usual, but there was an underlying effort and
+difficulty which her sensitiveness caught at once. A sudden wave of
+girlish trouble--remorse--swept over her. In her impulsiveness she moved
+close to him as they were passing through her mother's little
+sitting-room, and put her hand on his arm.
+
+"I don't think I was nice just now," she said, stammering. "I didn't
+mean it. I seem to be always driven into opposition--into a feeling of
+war--when you are so good to me--so much too good to me!"
+
+Aldous had turned at her first word. With a long breath, as it were of
+unspeakable relief, he caught her in his arms vehemently, passionately.
+So far she had been very shrinking and maidenly with him in their
+solitary moments, and he had been all delicate chivalry and respect,
+tasting to the full the exquisiteness of each fresh advance towards
+intimacy, towards lover's privilege, adoring her, perhaps, all the more
+for her reserve, her sudden flights, and stiffenings. But to-night he
+asked no leave, and in her astonishment she was almost passive.
+
+"Oh, do let me go!" she cried at last, trying to disengage herself
+completely.
+
+"No!" he said with emphasis, still holding her hand firmly. "Come and
+sit down here. They will look after themselves."
+
+He put her, whether she would or no, into an arm-chair and knelt beside
+her.
+
+"Did you think it was hardly kind," he said with a quiver of voice he
+could not repress, "to let me hear for the first time, in public, that
+you had promised to go to one of that man's meetings after refusing
+again and again to come to any of mine?"
+
+"Do you want to forbid me to go?" she said quickly. There was a feeling
+in her which would have been almost relieved, for the moment, if he had
+said yes.
+
+"By no means," he said steadily. "That was not our compact. But--guess
+for yourself what I want! Do you think"--he paused a moment--"do you
+think I put nothing of myself into my public life--into these meetings
+among the people who have known me from a boy? Do you think it is all a
+convention--that my feeling, my conscience, remain outside? You can't
+think that! But if not, how can I bear to live what is to be so large a
+part of my life out of your ken and sight? I know--I know--you warned me
+amply--you can't agree with me. But there is much besides intellectual
+agreement possible--much that would help and teach us both--if only we
+are together--not separated--not holding aloof--"
+
+He stopped, watching all the changes of her face. She was gulfed in a
+deep wave of half-repentant feeling, remembering all his generosity, his
+forbearance, his devotion.
+
+"When are you speaking next?" she half whispered. In the dim light her
+softened pose, the gentle sudden relaxation of every line, were an
+intoxication.
+
+"Next week--Friday--at Gairsly. Hallin and Aunt Neta are coming."
+
+"Will Miss Raeburn take me?"
+
+His grey eyes shone upon her, and he kissed her hand.
+
+"Mr. Hallin won't speak for you!" she said, after the silence, with a
+return of mischief.
+
+"Don't be so sure! He has given me untold help in the drafting of my
+Bill. If I didn't call myself a Conservative, he would vote for me
+to-morrow. That's the absurdity of it. Do you know, I hear them coming
+back?"
+
+"One thing," she said hastily, drawing him towards her, and then
+holding him back, as though shrinking always from the feeling she could
+so readily evoke. "I must say it; you oughtn't to give me so much money,
+it is too much. Suppose I use it for things you don't like?"
+
+"You won't," he said gaily.
+
+She tried to push the subject further, but he would not have it.
+
+"I am all for free discussion," he said in the same tone; "but sometimes
+debate must be stifled. I am going to stifle it!"
+
+And stooping, he kissed her, lightly, tremulously. His manner showed her
+once more what she was to him--how sacred, how beloved. First it touched
+and shook her; then she sprang up with a sudden disagreeable sense of
+moral disadvantage--inferiority--coming she knew not whence, and undoing
+for the moment all that buoyant consciousness of playing the
+magnanimous, disinterested part which had possessed her throughout the
+talk in the drawing-room.
+
+The others reappeared, headed by their lamp: Wharton first, scanning the
+two who had lingered behind, with his curious eyes, so blue and
+brilliant under the white forehead and the curls.
+
+"We have been making the wildest shots at your ancestors, Miss Boyce,"
+he said. "Frank professed to know everything about the pictures, and
+turned out to know nothing. I shall ask for some special coaching
+to-morrow morning. May I engage you--ten o'clock?"
+
+Marcella made some evasive answer, and they all sauntered back to the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Shall you be at work to-morrow, Raeburn?" said Wharton.
+
+"Probably," said Aldous drily. Marcella, struck by the tone, looked
+back, and caught an expression and bearing which were as yet new to her
+in the speaker. She supposed they represented the haughtiness natural in
+the man of birth and power towards the intruder, who is also the
+opponent.
+
+Instantly the combative critical mood returned upon her, and the impulse
+to assert herself by protecting Wharton. His manner throughout the talk
+in the drawing-room had been, she declared to herself, excellent--modest,
+and self-restrained, comparing curiously with the boyish egotism and
+self-abandonment he had shown in their _tete-a-tete_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why, there is Mr. Boyce," exclaimed Wharton, hurrying forward as they
+entered the drawing-room.
+
+There, indeed, on the sofa was the master of the house, more ghastly
+black and white than ever, and prepared to claim to the utmost the
+tragic pre-eminence of illness. He shook hands coldly with Aldous, who
+asked after his health with the kindly brevity natural to the man who
+wants no effusions for himself in public or personal matters, and
+concludes therefore that other people desire none.
+
+"You _are_ better, papa?" said Marcella, taking his hand.
+
+"Certainly, my dear--better for morphia. Don't talk of me. I have got my
+death warrant, but I hope I can take it quietly. Evelyn, I _specially_
+asked to have that thin cushion brought down from my dressing-room. It
+is strange that no one pays any attention to my wants."
+
+Mrs. Boyce, almost as white, Marcella now saw, as her husband, moved
+forward from the fire, where she had been speaking to Hallin, took a
+cushion from a chair near, exactly similar to the one he missed, and
+changed his position a little.
+
+"It is just the feather's weight of change that makes the difference,
+isn't it?" said Wharton, softly, sitting down beside the invalid.
+
+Mr. Boyce turned a mollified countenance upon the speaker, and being now
+free from pain, gave himself up to the amusement of hearing his guest
+talk. Wharton devoted himself, employing all his best arts.
+
+"Dr. Clarke is not anxious about him," Mrs. Boyce said in a low voice to
+Marcella as they moved away. "He does not think the attack will return
+for a long while, and he has given me the means of stopping it if it
+does come back."
+
+"How tired you look!" said Aldous, coming up to them, and speaking in
+the same undertone. "Will you not let Marcella take you to rest?"
+
+He was always deeply, unreasonably touched by any sign of stoicism, of
+defied suffering in women. Mrs. Boyce had proved it many times already.
+On the present occasion she put his sympathy by, but she lingered to
+talk with him. Hallin from a distance noticed first of all her tall
+thinness and fairness, and her wonderful dignity of carriage; then the
+cordiality of her manner to her future son-in-law. Marcella stood by
+listening, her young shoulders somewhat stiffly set. Her consciousness
+of her mother's respect and admiration for the man she was to marry was,
+oddly enough, never altogether pleasant to her. It brought with it a
+certain discomfort, a certain wish to argue things out.
+
+Hallin and Aldous parted with Frank Leven at Mellor gate, and turned
+homeward together under a starry heaven already whitening to the coming
+moon.
+
+"Do you know that man Wharton is getting an extraordinary hold upon the
+London working men?" said Hallin. "I have heard him tell that story of
+the game-preserving before. He was speaking for one of the Radical
+candidates at Hackney, and I happened to be there. It brought down
+the house. The _role_ of your Socialist aristocrat, of your
+land-nationalising landlord, is a very telling one."
+
+"And comparatively easy," said Aldous, "when you know that neither
+Socialism nor land-nationalisation will come in your time!"
+
+"Oh! so you think him altogether a windbag?"
+
+Aldous hesitated and laughed.
+
+"I have certainly no reason to suspect him of principles. His conscience
+as a boy was of pretty elastic stuff."
+
+"You may be unfair to him," said Hallin, quickly. Then, after a pause:
+"How long is he staying at Mellor?"
+
+"About a week, I believe," said Aldous, shortly. "Mr. Boyce has taken a
+fancy to him."
+
+They walked on in silence, and then Aldous turned to his friend in
+distress.
+
+"You know, Hallin, this wind is much too cold for you. You are the most
+wilful of men. Why would you walk?"
+
+"Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me. I think your Marcella is
+beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!"
+
+Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.
+
+"You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint.
+
+"Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of
+among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you
+think, Aldous?"
+
+"No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully. "Her sympathies and convictions go with
+them."
+
+Then, as they passed through the village, he began to talk of quite
+other things--college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays,
+and so on. Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be
+the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not
+to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man's reserve. But
+his own mind was full of anxiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+"I _love_ this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with
+his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to
+take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or
+carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper classes are!
+Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save
+our lives."
+
+They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of
+the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had
+been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose
+money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to
+her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to
+match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the
+upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to
+eighteenth-century taste. But the old books in the old latticed shelves
+which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the
+Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that
+worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table
+at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old
+friend--on the wrong side--Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the
+worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay
+in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the
+laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there
+were rotten places in the carpetless floor.
+
+"I have tried my best," said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a
+hole in the floor. "I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to
+mend some of these places myself. But I only broke the rotten wood away;
+and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good. I did get a
+carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn't know where to
+begin. I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but--"
+
+She looked sadly round the musty, forlorn place.
+
+"But not so well, I am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's
+apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's
+maddening to think what duffers we gentlefolks are!"
+
+"Why do you harp on that?" said Marcella, quickly. She had been taking
+him over the house, and was in twenty minds again as to whether and how
+much she liked him.
+
+"Because I have been reading some Board of Trade reports before
+breakfast," said Wharton, "on one or two of the Birmingham industries in
+particular. Goodness! what an amount of knowledge and skill and resource
+these fellows have that I go about calling the 'lower orders.' I wonder
+how long they are going to let me rule over them!"
+
+"I suppose brain-power and education count for something still?" said
+Marcella, half scornfully.
+
+"I am greatly obliged to the world for thinking so," said Wharton with
+emphasis, "and for thinking so about the particular kind of brain-power
+I happen to possess, which is the point. The processes by which a
+Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to
+'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are,
+of course, mere imbecility--compared to my performances in Responsions.
+Lucky for _me_, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a
+good time of it--and the Birmingham jeweller calls me 'sir.'"
+
+"Oh! the skilled labour! that can take care of itself, and won't go on
+calling you 'sir' much longer. But what about the unskilled--the people
+here for instance--the villagers? We talk of their governing themselves;
+we wish it, and work for it. But which of us _really_ believes that they
+are fit for it, or that they are ever going to get along without _our_
+brain-power?"
+
+"No--poor souls!" said Wharton, with a peculiar vibrating emphasis.
+"'_By their stripes we are healed, by their death we have lived_.' Do
+you remember your Carlyle?"
+
+They had entered one of the bays formed by the bookcases which on either
+side of the room projected from the wall at regular intervals, and were
+standing by one of the windows which looked out on the great avenue.
+Beside the window on either side hung a small portrait--in the one case
+of an elderly man in a wig, in the other of a young, dark-haired woman.
+
+"Plenty in general, but nothing in particular," said Marcella, laughing.
+"Quote."
+
+He was leaning against the angle formed by the wall and the bookcase.
+The half-serious, half-provocative intensity of his blue eyes under the
+brow which drooped forward contrasted with the careless, well-appointed
+ease of his general attitude and dress.
+
+"'_Two men I honour, and no third_,'" he said, quoting in a slightly
+dragging, vibrating voice: "'_First, the toil-worn craftsman that with
+earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her
+man's.--Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us
+were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+marred_.' Heavens! how the words swing! But it is great nonsense, you
+know, for you and me--Venturists--to be maundering like this.
+Charity--benevolence--that is all Carlyle is leading up to. He merely
+wants the cash nexus supplemented by a few good offices. But we want
+something much more unpleasant! 'Keep your subscriptions--hand over your
+dividends--turn out of your land--and go to work!' Nowadays society is
+trying to get out of doing what _we_ want, by doing what Carlyle
+wanted."
+
+"_Do_ you want it?" said Marcella.
+
+"I don't know," he said, laughing. "It won't come in our time."
+
+Her lip showed her scorn.
+
+"That's what we all think. Meanwhile you will perhaps admit that a
+little charity greases the wheels."
+
+"_You_ must, because you are a woman; and women are made for
+charity--and aristocracy."
+
+"Do you suppose you know so much about women?" she asked him, rather
+hotly. "I notice it is always the assumption of the people who make most
+mistakes."
+
+"Oh! I know enough to steer by!" he said, smiling, with a little
+inclination of his curly head, as though to propitiate her. "How like
+you are to that portrait!"
+
+Marcella started, and saw that he was pointing to the woman's portrait
+beside the window--looking from it to his hostess with a close
+considering eye.
+
+"That was an ancestress of mine," she said coldly, "an Italian lady. She
+was rich and musical. Her money built these rooms along the garden, and
+these are her music books."
+
+She showed him that the shelves against which she was leaning were full
+of old music.
+
+"Italian!" he said, lifting his eyebrows. "Ah, that explains. Do you
+know--that you have all the qualities of a leader!"--and he moved away a
+yard from her, studying her--"mixed blood--one must always have that to
+fire and fuse the English paste--and then--but no! that won't do--I
+should offend you."
+
+Her first instinct was one of annoyance--a wish to send him about his
+business, or rather to return him to her mother who would certainly keep
+him in order. Instead, however, she found herself saying, as she looked
+carelessly out of window--
+
+"Oh! go on."
+
+"Well, then"--he drew himself up suddenly and wheeled round upon
+her--"you have the gift of compromise. That is invaluable--that will
+take you far."
+
+"Thank you!" she said. "Thank you! I know what that means--from a
+Venturist. You think me a mean insincere person!"
+
+He started, then recovered himself and came to lean against the
+bookshelves beside her.
+
+"I mean nothing of the sort," he said, in quite a different manner, with
+a sort of gentle and personal emphasis. "But--may I explain myself, Miss
+Boyce, in a room with a fire? I can see you shivering under your fur."
+
+For the frost still reigned supreme outside, and the white grass and
+trees threw chill reflected lights into the forsaken library. Marcella
+controlled a pulse of excitement that had begun to beat in her, admitted
+that it was certainly cold, and led the way through a side door to a
+little flagged parlour, belonging to the oldest portion of the house,
+where, however, a great log-fire was burning, and some chairs drawn up
+round it. She took one and let the fur wrap she had thrown about her for
+their promenade through the disused rooms drop from her shoulders. It
+lay about her in full brown folds, giving special dignity to her slim
+height and proud head. Wharton glancing about in his curious inquisitive
+way, now at the neglected pictures, now on the walls, now at the old oak
+chairs and chests, now at her, said to himself that she was a splendid
+and inspiring creature. She seemed to be on the verge of offence with
+him too, half the time, which was stimulating. She would have liked, he
+thought, to play the great lady with him already, as Aldous Raeburn's
+betrothed. But he had so far managed to keep her off that plane--and
+intended to go on doing so.
+
+"Well, I meant this," he said, leaning against the old stone chimney
+and looking down upon her; "only _don't_ be offended with me, please.
+You are a Socialist, and you are going--some day--to be Lady Maxwell.
+Those combinations are only possible to women. They can sustain them,
+because they are imaginative--not logical."
+
+She flushed.
+
+"And you," she said, breathing quickly, "are a Socialist and a landlord.
+What is the difference?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Ah! but I have no gift--I can't ride the two horses, as you will be
+able to--quite honestly. There's the difference. And the consequence is
+that with my own class I am an outcast--they all hate me. But you will
+have power as Lady Maxwell--and power as a Socialist--because you will
+give and take. Half your time you will act as Lady Maxwell should, the
+other half like a Venturist. And, as I said, it will give you power--a
+modified power. But men are less clever at that kind of thing."
+
+"Do you mean to say," she asked him abruptly, "that you have given up
+the luxuries and opportunities of your class?"
+
+He shifted his position a little.
+
+"That is a different matter," he said after a moment. "We Socialists are
+all agreed, I think, that no man can be a Socialist by himself.
+Luxuries, for the present, are something personal, individual. It is
+only a man's 'public form' that matters. And there, as I said before, I
+have no gift!--I have not a relation or an old friend in the world that
+has not turned his back upon me--as you might see for yourself
+yesterday! My class has renounced me already--which, after all, is a
+weakness."
+
+"So you pity yourself?" she said.
+
+"By no means! We all choose the part in life that amuses us--that brings
+us most _thrill_. I get most thrill out of throwing myself into the
+workmen's war--much more than I could ever get, you will admit, out of
+dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me
+to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the
+present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great
+tragi-comedy of the working-class movement. It stirs, pricks, interests
+me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental passions
+in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to
+some great outburst, to scenes and struggles at any rate that will make
+us all look alive. I am like a child with the best of its cake to come,
+but with plenty in hand already. Ah!--stay still a moment, Miss Boyce!"
+
+To her amazement he stooped suddenly towards her; and she, looking down,
+saw that a corner of her light, black dress, which had been overhanging
+the low stone fender, was in flames, and that he was putting it out with
+his hands. She made a movement to rise, alarmed lest the flames should
+leap to her face--her hair. But he, releasing one hand for an instant
+from its task of twisting and rolling the skirt upon itself, held her
+heavily down.
+
+"Don't move; I will have it out in a moment. You won't be burnt."
+
+And in a second more she was looking at a ragged brown hole in her
+dress; and at him, standing, smiling, before the fire, and wrapping a
+handkerchief round some of the fingers of his left hand.
+
+"You have burnt yourself, Mr. Wharton?"
+
+"A little."
+
+"I will go and get something--what would you like?"
+
+"A little olive oil if you have some, and a bit of lint--but don't
+trouble yourself."
+
+She flew to find her mother's maid, calling and searching on her way for
+Mrs. Boyce herself, but in vain. Mrs. Boyce had disappeared after
+breakfast, and was probably helping her husband to dress.
+
+In a minute or so Marcella ran downstairs again, bearing various
+medicaments. She sped to the Stone Parlour, her cheek and eye glowing.
+
+"Let me do it for you."
+
+"If you please," said Wharton, meekly.
+
+She did her best, but she was not skilful with her fingers, and this
+close contact with him somehow excited her.
+
+"There," she said, laughing and releasing him. "Of course, if I were a
+work-girl I should have done it better. They are not going to be very
+bad, I think."
+
+"What, the burns? Oh, no! They will have recovered, I am afraid, long
+before your dress."
+
+"Oh, my dress! yes, it is deplorable. I will go and change it."
+
+She turned to go, but she lingered instead, and said with an odd,
+introductory laugh:
+
+"I believe you saved my life!"
+
+"Well, I am glad I was here. You might have lost self-possession--even
+_you_ might, you know!--and then it would have been serious."
+
+"Anyway"--her voice was still uncertain--"I might have been
+disfigured--disfigured for life!"
+
+"I don't know why you should dwell upon it now it's done with," he
+declared, smiling.
+
+"It would be strange, wouldn't it, if I took it quite for granted--all
+in the day's work?" She held out her hand: "I am grateful--please."
+
+He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which
+might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.
+
+"May I exact a reward?"
+
+"Ask it."
+
+"Will you take me down with you to your village? I know you are going. I
+must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington. I have
+an appointment there at two o'clock. But perhaps you will introduce me
+to one or two of your poor people first?"
+
+Marcella assented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her
+walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother
+to go with them. She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a
+feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and
+indecorously towards whom?--towards Aldous? But how, or why? She did not
+know. But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity,
+combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the
+day. In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.
+
+By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella's uncomfortable
+feelings had all passed away. Without knowing it, she was becoming too
+much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were
+together. It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a
+few hundred yards that he was taking advantage--presuming on what had
+happened. He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred
+ways, she discovered. At the same time it was _she_ who was always on
+the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against
+the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave
+her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy's country. He put her
+through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations,
+the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what
+she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought
+it _possible_ to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her
+pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.
+But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had
+constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not
+mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was
+talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she
+had not even managed to _see_ these people, to interpret their lives
+under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.
+
+Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant
+so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner. He let
+her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still
+pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and
+irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other.
+All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of
+society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior"
+and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to
+these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the
+ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he
+did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so
+much the worse for you when the working class came to its own; if you
+did do them, the burden of debt was hardly diminished, and the rope was
+still left on your neck.
+
+Now Marcella herself had on one or two occasions taken a malicious
+pleasure in flaunting these doctrines, or some of them, under Miss
+Raeburn's eyes. But somehow, as applied to herself, they were
+disagreeable. Each of us is to himself a "special case"; and she saw the
+other side. Hence a constant soreness of feeling; a constant recalling
+of the argument to the personal point of view; and through it all a
+curious growth of intimacy, a rubbing away of barriers. She had felt
+herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we
+know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by
+that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty
+impulse in her to the noblest proportions! Under Wharton's Socratic
+method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish
+desires, worthy of her childhood--to cry, to go into a passion!--and
+when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young,
+dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have
+beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish
+pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his
+doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural
+relations of country life.
+
+They went first to Mrs. Jellison's, to whom Marcella wished to unfold
+her workshop scheme.
+
+"Don't let me keep you," she said to Wharton coldly, as they neared the
+cottage; "I know you have to catch your train."
+
+Wharton consulted his watch. He had to be at a local station some two
+miles off within an hour.
+
+"Oh! I have time," he said. "Do take me in, Miss Boyce. I have made
+acquaintance with these people so far, as my constituents--now show them
+to me as your subjects. Besides, I am an observer. I 'collect' peasants.
+They are my study."
+
+"They are not my subjects, but my friends," she said with the same
+stiffness.
+
+They found Mrs. Jellison having her dinner. The lively old woman was
+sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table
+which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window
+and window-sill whereon lay her coil of "plait" and the simple
+straw-splitting machine she had just been working. When Marcella had
+taken the only other chair the hovel contained, nothing else remained
+for Wharton but to flatten himself as closely against the door as he
+might.
+
+"I'm sorry I can't bid yer take a cheer," said Mrs. Jellison to him,
+"but what yer han't got yer can't give, so I don't trouble my head about
+nothink."
+
+Wharton applauded her with easy politeness, and then gave himself, with
+folded arms, to examining the cottage while Marcella talked. It might be
+ten feet broad, he thought, by six feet in one part and eight feet in
+another. The roof was within little more than an inch of his head. The
+stairway in the corner was falling to pieces; he wondered how the woman
+got up safely to her bed at night; custom, he supposed, can make even
+old bones agile.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella was unfolding the project of the straw-plaiting
+workshop that she and Lady Winterbourne were about to start. Mrs.
+Jellison put on her spectacles apparently that she might hear the
+better, pushed away her dinner in spite of her visitors' civilities, and
+listened with a bright and beady eye.
+
+"An' yer agoin' to pay me one a sixpence a score, where I now gets
+ninepence. And I'll not have to tramp it into town no more--you'll send
+a man round. And who is agoin' to pay me, miss, if you'll excuse me
+asking?"
+
+"Lady Winterbourne and I," said Marcella, smiling. "We're going to
+employ this village and two others, and make as good business of it as
+we can. But we're going to begin by giving the workers better wages, and
+in time we hope to teach them the higher kinds of work."
+
+"Lor'!" said Mrs. Jellison. "But I'm not one o' them as kin do with
+changes." She took up her plait and looked at it thoughtfully.
+"Eighteen-pence a score. It wor that rate when I wor a girl. An' it ha'
+been dibble--dibble--iver sense; a penny off here, an' a penny off
+there, an' a hard job to keep a bite ov anythink in your mouth."
+
+"Then I may put down your name among our workers, Mrs. Jellison?" said
+Marcella, rising and smiling down upon her.
+
+"Oh, lor', no; I niver said that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "I don't
+hold wi' shilly-shallyin' wi' yer means o' livin'. I've took my plait to
+Jimmy Gedge--'im an' 'is son, fust shop on yer right hand when yer git
+into town--twenty-five year, summer and winter--me an' three other
+women, as give me a penny a journey for takin' theirs. If I wor to go
+messin' about wi' Jimmy Gedge, Lor' bless yer, I should 'ear ov it--oh!
+I shoulden sleep o' nights for thinkin' o' how Jimmy ud serve me out
+when I wor least egspectin' ov it. He's a queer un. No, miss, thank yer
+kindly; but I think I'll bide."
+
+Marcella, amazed, began to argue a little, to expound the many
+attractions of the new scheme. Greatly to her annoyance, Wharton came
+forward to her help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new
+partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy
+suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm,
+embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but
+sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity
+but to talk of something else and go--above all, to talk of something
+else before going, lest the would-be benefactor should be thought a
+petty tyrant.
+
+"Oh, Johnnie?--thank yer, miss--'e's an owdacious young villain as iver
+I seed--but _clever_--lor', you'd need 'ave eyes in yer back to look
+after _'im_. An' _coaxin'_! ''Aven't yer brought me no sweeties,
+Gran'ma?' 'No, my dear,' says I. 'But if you was to _look_, Gran'ma--in
+both your pockets, Gran'ma--iv you was to let _me_ look?' It's a sharp
+un Isabella, she don't 'old wi' sweet-stuff, she says, sich a pack o'
+nonsense. She'd stuff herself sick when she wor 'is age. Why shouldn't
+_ee_ be happy, same as her? There ain't much to make a child 'appy in
+_that_ 'ouse. Westall, ee's that mad about them poachers over Tudley
+End; ee's like a wild bull at 'ome. I told Isabella ee'd come to
+knockin' ov her about _some_ day, though ee did speak so oily when ee
+wor a courtin'. Now she knows as I kin see a thing or two," said Mrs.
+Jellison, significantly. Her manner, Wharton noticed, kept always the
+same gay philosophy, whatever subject turned up.
+
+"Why, that's an old story--that Tudley End business--" said Marcella,
+rising. "I should have thought Westall might have got over it by now."
+
+"But bless yer, ee says it's goin' on as lively as iver. Ee says ee
+knows they're set on grabbin' the birds t'other side the estate, over
+beyond Mellor way--ee's got wind of it--an' ee's watchin' night an' day
+to see they don't do him no bad turn _this_ month, bekase o' the big
+shoot they allus has in January. An' lor', ee do speak drefful bad o'
+_soom_ folks," said Mrs. Jellison, with an amused expression. "You know
+some on 'em, miss, don't yer?" And the old woman, who had begun toying
+with her potatoes, slanted her fork over her shoulder so as to point
+towards the Hurds' cottage, whereof the snow-laden roof could be seen
+conspicuously through the little lattice beside her, making sly eyes the
+while at her visitor.
+
+"I don't believe a word of it," said Marcella, impatiently. "Hurd has
+been in good work since October, and has no need to poach. Westall has a
+down on him. You may tell him I think so, if you like."
+
+"That I will," said Mrs. Jellison, cheerfully, opening the door for
+them. "There's nobody makes 'im 'ear the treuth, nobbut me. I _loves_
+naggin' ov 'im, ee's that masterful. But ee don't master _me_!"
+
+"A gay old thing," said Wharton as they shut the gate behind them. "How
+she does enjoy the human spectacle. And obstinate too. But you will find
+the younger ones more amenable."
+
+"Of course," said Marcella, with dignity. "I have a great many names
+already. The old people are always difficult. But Mrs. Jellison will
+come round."
+
+"Are you going in here?"
+
+"Please."
+
+Wharton knocked at the Hurds' door, and Mrs. Hurd opened.
+
+The cottage was thick with smoke. The chimney only drew when the door
+was left open. But the wind to-day was so bitter that mother and
+children preferred the smoke to the draught. Marcella soon made out the
+poor little bronchitic boy, sitting coughing by the fire, and Mrs. Hurd
+busied with some washing. She introduced Wharton, who, as before, stood
+for some time, hat in hand, studying the cottage. Marcella was perfectly
+conscious of it, and a blush rose to her cheek while she talked to Mrs.
+Hurd. For both this and Mrs. Jellison's hovel were her father's property
+and somewhat highly rented.
+
+Minta Hurd said eagerly that she would join the new straw-plaiting, and
+went on to throw out a number of hurried, half-coherent remarks about
+the state of the trade past and present, leaning meanwhile against the
+table and endlessly drying her hands on the towel she had taken up when
+her visitors came in.
+
+Her manner was often nervous and flighty in these days. She never looked
+happy; but Marcella put it down to health or natural querulousness of
+character. Yet both she and the children were clearly better nourished,
+except Willie, in whom the tubercular tendency was fast gaining on the
+child's strength.
+
+Altogether Marcella was proud of her work, and her eager interest in
+this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more
+possessive than ever. Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but
+she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of class
+differences, against which in her own way she was struggling. One thing
+delighted her--that he seemed to take more and more interest in the
+labour questions she discussed with him, and in that fervid, exuberant
+literature she provided him with. Moreover, he now went to all Mr.
+Wharton's meetings that were held within reasonable distance of Mellor;
+and, as she said to Aldous with a little laugh, which, however, was not
+unsweet, _he_ had found her man work--_she_ had robbed his candidate of
+a vote.
+
+Wharton listened a while to her talk with Minta, smiled a little,
+unperceived of Marcella, at the young mother's docilities of manner and
+phrase; then turned his attention to the little hunched and coughing
+object by the fire.
+
+"Are you very bad, little man?"
+
+The white-faced child looked up, a dreary look, revealing a patient,
+melancholy soul. He tried to answer, but coughed instead.
+
+Wharton, moving towards him, saw a bit of ragged white paper lying on
+the ground, which had been torn from a grocery parcel.
+
+"Would you like something to amuse you a bit--Ugh! this smoke! Come
+round here, it won't catch us so much. _Now_, then, what do you say to a
+doggie,--two doggies?"
+
+The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger's knee, and did
+his very utmost to stop coughing. But when he had succeeded his quick
+panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton's knee.
+
+"Hm--Give him two months or thereabouts!" thought Wharton. "What a
+beastly hole!--one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade
+larger. Damp, insanitary, cold--bad water, bad drainage, I'll be
+bound--bad everything. That girl may well try her little best. And I go
+making up to that man Boyce! What for? Old spites?--new
+spites?--which?--or both!"
+
+Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping;
+and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most
+enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears
+and stretching legs.
+
+The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched
+it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most
+exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.
+
+"What? did you like it, grasshopper?" cried Wharton, enchanted by the
+beauty of the look, his own colour mounting. "Then you shall have
+another."
+
+And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside
+the first, stood a second fairy animal--a greyhound this time, with
+arching neck and sharp long nose.
+
+"There's two on 'em at Westall's!" cried the child, hoarsely, clutching
+at his treasures in an ecstasy.
+
+Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the
+name. Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at
+once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court. She understood they
+were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.
+Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. "Oh! he
+didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed
+satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's
+annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm,
+turned his head an instant to listen.
+
+Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs.
+Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it. He had promised her, she thought
+to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the
+word of a working man as different from anybody else's.
+
+So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the
+stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and
+give a smile or two to the sick boy.
+
+But, as she did so, she stood amazed at the spectacle of Wharton and the
+child. Then, moving up to them, she perceived the menagerie--for it had
+grown to one--on Wharton's knee.
+
+"You didn't guess I had such tricks," he said, smiling.
+
+"But they are so good--so artistic!" She took up a little galloping
+horse he had just fashioned and wondered at it.
+
+"A great-aunt taught me--she was a genius--I follow her at a long
+distance. Will you let me go, young man? You may keep all of them."
+
+But the child, with a sudden contraction of the brow, flung a tiny
+stick-like arm round his neck, pressing hard, and looking at him. There
+was a red spot in each wasted cheek, and his eyes were wide and happy.
+Wharton returned the look with one of quiet scrutiny--the scrutiny of
+the doctor or the philosopher. On Marcella's quick sense the contrast of
+the two heads impressed itself--the delicate youth of Wharton's with its
+clustering curls--the sunken contours and the helpless suffering of the
+other. Then Wharton kissed the little fellow, put his animals carefully
+on to a chair beside him, and set him down.
+
+They walked along the snowy street again, in a different relation to
+each other. Marcella had been touched and charmed, and Wharton teased
+her no more. As they reached the door of the almshouse where the old
+Pattons lived, she said to him: "I think I had rather go in here by
+myself, please. I have some things to give them--old Patton has been
+very ill this last week--but I know what you think of doles--and I know
+too what you think, what you must think, of my father's cottages. It
+makes me feel a hypocrite; yet I must do these things; we are different,
+you and I--I am sure you will miss your train!"
+
+But there was no antagonism, only painful feeling in her softened look.
+
+Wharton put out his hand.
+
+"Yes, it is time for me to go. You say I make you feel a hypocrite! I
+wonder whether you have any idea what you make me feel? Do you imagine I
+should dare to say the things I have said except to one of the _elite_?
+Would it be worth my while, as a social reformer? Are you not vowed to
+great destinies? When one comes across one of the tools of the future,
+must one not try to sharpen it, out of one's poor resources, in spite of
+manners?"
+
+Marcella, stirred--abashed--fascinated--let him press her hand. Then he
+walked rapidly away towards the station, a faint smile twitching at his
+lip.
+
+"An inexperienced girl," he said to himself, composedly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Before she went home, Marcella turned into the little rectory garden to
+see if she could find Mary Harden for a minute or two. The intimacy
+between them was such that she generally found entrance to the house by
+going round to a garden door and knocking or calling. The house was very
+small, and Mary's little sitting-room was close to this door.
+
+Her knock brought Mary instantly.
+
+"Oh! come in. You won't mind. We were just at dinner. Charles is going
+away directly. Do stay and talk to me a bit."
+
+Marcella hesitated, but at last went in. The meals at the rectory
+distressed her--the brother and sister showed the marks of them. To-day
+she found their usual fare carefully and prettily arranged on a spotless
+table; some bread, cheese, and boiled rice--nothing else. Nor did they
+allow themselves any fire for meals. Marcella, sitting beside them in
+her fur, did not feel the cold, but Mary was clearly shivering under her
+shawl. They eat meat twice a week, and in the afternoon Mary lit the
+sitting-room fire. In the morning she contented herself with the
+kitchen, where, as she cooked for many sick folk, and had only a girl of
+fourteen whom she was training to help her with the housework, she had
+generally much to do.
+
+The Rector did not stay long after her arrival. He had a distant visit
+to pay to a dying child, and hurried off so as to be home, if possible,
+before dark. Marcella admired him, but did not feel that she understood
+him more as they were better acquainted. He was slight and young, and
+not very clever; but a certain inexpugnable dignity surrounded him,
+which, real as it was, sometimes irritated Marcella. It sat oddly on his
+round face--boyish still, in spite of its pinched and anxious look--but
+there it was, not to be ignored. Marcella thought him a Conservative,
+and very backward and ignorant in his political and social opinions. But
+she was perfectly conscious that she must also think him a saint; and
+that the deepest things in him were probably not for her.
+
+Mr. Harden said a few words to her now as to her straw-plaiting scheme,
+which had his warmest sympathy--Marcella contrasted his tone gratefully
+with that of Wharton, and once more fell happily in love with her own
+ideas--then he went off, leaving the two girls together.
+
+"Have you seen Mrs. Hurd this morning?" said Mary.
+
+"Yes, Willie seems very bad."
+
+Mary assented.
+
+"The doctor says he will hardly get through the winter, especially if
+this weather goes on. But the greatest excitement of the village just
+now--do you know?--is the quarrel between Hurd and Westall. Somebody
+told Charles yesterday that they never meet without threatening each
+other. Since the covers at Tudley End were raided, Westall seems to have
+quite lost his head. He declares Hurd knew all about that, and that he
+is hand and glove with the same gang still. He vows he will catch him
+out, and Hurd told the man who told Charles that if Westall bullies him
+any more he will put a knife into him. And Charles says that Hurd is not
+a bit like he was. He used to be such a patient, silent creature. Now--"
+
+"He has woke up to a few more ideas and a little more life than he had,
+that's all," said Marcella, impatiently. "He poached last winter, and
+small blame to him. But since he got work at the Court in November--is
+it likely? He knows that he was suspected; and what could be his
+interest now, after a hard day's work, to go out again at night, and run
+the risk of falling into Westall's clutches, when he doesn't want either
+the food or the money?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mary, shaking her head. "Charles says, if they once
+do it, they hardly ever leave it off altogether. It's the excitement and
+amusement of it."
+
+"He promised me," said Marcella, proudly.
+
+"They promise Charles all sorts of things," said Mary, slyly; "but they
+don't keep to them."
+
+Warmly grateful as both she and the Rector had been from the beginning
+to Marcella for the passionate interest she took in the place and the
+people, the sister was sometimes now a trifle jealous--divinely
+jealous--for her brother. Marcella's unbounded confidence in her own
+power and right over Mellor, her growing tendency to ignore anybody
+else's right or power, sometimes set Mary aflame, for Charles's sake,
+heartily and humbly as she admired her beautiful friend.
+
+"I shall speak to Mr. Raeburn about it," said Marcella.
+
+She never called him "Aldous" to anybody--a stiffness which jarred a
+little upon the gentle, sentimental Mary.
+
+"I saw you pass," she said, "from one of the top windows. He was with
+you, wasn't he?"
+
+A slight colour sprang to her sallow cheek, a light to her eyes. Most
+wonderful, most interesting was this engagement to Mary, who--strange to
+think!--had almost brought it about. Mr. Raeburn was to her one of the
+best and noblest of men, and she felt quite simply, and with a sort of
+Christian trembling for him, the romance of his great position. Was
+Marcella happy, was she proud of him, as she ought to be? Mary was often
+puzzled by her.
+
+"Oh no!" said Marcella, with a little laugh. "That wasn't Mr. Raeburn. I
+don't know where your eyes were, Mary. That was Mr. Wharton, who is
+staying with us. He has gone on to a meeting at Widrington."
+
+Mary's face fell.
+
+"Charles says Mr. Wharton's influence in the village is very bad," she
+said quickly. "He makes everybody discontented; sets everybody by the
+ears; and, after all, what can he do for anybody?"
+
+"But that's just what he wants to do--to make them discontented," cried
+Marcella. "Then, if they vote for him, that's the first practical step
+towards improving their life."
+
+"But it won't give them more wages or keep them out of the public
+house," said Mary, bewildered. She came of a homely middle-class stock,
+accustomed to a small range of thinking, and a high standard of doing.
+Marcella's political opinions were an amazement, and on the whole a
+scandal to her. She preferred generally to give them a wide berth.
+
+Marcella did not reply. It was not worth while to talk to Mary on these
+topics. But Mary stuck to the subject a moment longer.
+
+"You can't want him to get in, though?" she said in a puzzled voice, as
+she led the way to the little sitting-room across the passage, and took
+her workbasket out of the cupboard. "It was only the week before last
+Mr. Raeburn was speaking at the schoolroom for Mr. Dodgson. You weren't
+there, Marcella?"
+
+"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I thought you knew perfectly well, Mary,
+that Mr. Raeburn and I don't agree politically. Certainly, I hope Mr.
+Wharton will get in!"
+
+Mary opened her eyes in wonderment. She stared at Marcella, forgetting
+the sock she had just slipped over her left hand, and the darning needle
+in her right.
+
+Marcella laughed.
+
+"I know you think that two people who are going to be married ought to
+say ditto to each other in everything. Don't you--you dear old goose?"
+
+She came and stood beside Mary, a stately and beautiful creature in her
+loosened furs. She stroked Mary's straight sandy hair back from her
+forehead. Mary looked up at her with a thrill, nay, a passionate throb
+of envy--soon suppressed.
+
+"I think," she said steadily, "it is very strange--that love should
+oppose and disagree with what it loves."
+
+Marcella went restlessly towards the fire and began to examine the
+things on the mantelpiece.
+
+"Can't people agree to differ, you sentimentalist? Can't they respect
+each other, without echoing each other on every subject?"
+
+"Respect!" cried Mary, with a sudden scorn, which was startling from a
+creature so soft.
+
+"There, she could tear me in pieces!" said Marcella, laughing, though
+her lip was not steady. "I wonder what you would be like, Mary, if you
+were engaged."
+
+Mary ran her needle in and out with lightning speed for a second or two,
+then she said almost under her breath--
+
+"I shouldn't be engaged unless I were in love. And if I were in love,
+why, I would go anywhere--do anything--believe anything--if _he_ told
+me!"
+
+"Believe anything?--Mary--you wouldn't!"
+
+"I don't mean as to religion," said Mary, hastily. "But everything
+else--I would give it all up!--governing one's self, thinking for one's
+self. He should do it, and I would _bless_ him!"
+
+She looked up crimson, drawing a very long breath, as though from some
+deep centre of painful, passionate feeling. It was Marcella's turn to
+stare. Never had Mary so revealed herself before.
+
+"Did you ever love any one like that, Mary?" she asked quickly.
+
+Mary dropped her head again over her work and did not answer
+immediately.
+
+"Do you see--" she said at last, with a change of tone, "do you see
+that we have got our invitation?"
+
+Marcella, about to give the rein to an eager curiosity Mary's manner had
+excited in her, felt herself pulled up sharply. When she chose, this
+little meek creature could put on the same unapproachableness as her
+brother. Marcella submitted.
+
+"Yes, I see," she said, taking up a card on the mantelpiece. "It will be
+a great crush. I suppose you know. They have asked the whole county, it
+seems to me."
+
+The card bore an invitation in Miss Raeburn's name for the Rector and
+his sister to a dance at Maxwell Court--the date given was the
+twenty-fifth of January.
+
+"What fun!" said Mary, her eye sparkling. "You needn't suppose that I
+know enough of balls to be particular. I have only been to one before in
+my life--ever. That was at Cheltenham. An aunt took me--I didn't dance.
+There were hardly any men, but I enjoyed it."
+
+"Well, you shall dance this time," said Marcella, "for I will make Mr.
+Raeburn introduce you."
+
+"Nonsense, you won't have any time to think about me. You will be the
+queen--everybody will want to speak to you. I shall sit in a corner and
+look at you--that will be enough for me."
+
+Marcella went up to her quickly and kissed her, then she said, still
+holding her--
+
+"I know you think I ought to be very happy, Mary!"
+
+"I should think I do!" said Mary, with astonished emphasis, when the
+voice paused--"I should think I do!"
+
+"I _am_ happy--and I want to make him happy. But there are so many
+things, so many different aims and motives, that complicate life, that
+puzzle one. One doesn't know how much to give of one's self, to each--"
+
+She stood with her hand on Mary's shoulder, looking away towards the
+window and the snowy garden, her brow frowning and distressed.
+
+"Well, I don't understand," said Mary, after a pause. "As I said before,
+it seems to me so plain and easy--to be in love, and give one's self
+_all_--to that. But you are so much cleverer than I, Marcella, you know
+so much more. That makes the difference. I can't be like you. Perhaps I
+don't want to be!"--and she laughed. "But I can admire you and love you,
+and think about you. There, now, tell me what you are going to wear?"
+
+"White satin, and Mr. Raeburn wants me to wear some pearls he is going
+to give me, some old pearls of his mother's. I believe I shall find them
+at Mellor when I get back."
+
+There was little girlish pleasure in the tone. It was as though Marcella
+thought her friend would be more interested in her bit of news than she
+was herself, and was handing it on to her to please her.
+
+"Isn't there a superstition against doing that--before you're married?"
+said Mary, doubtfully.
+
+"As if I should mind if there was! But I don't believe there is, or Miss
+Raeburn would have heard of it. She's a mass of such things. Well! I
+hope I shall behave myself to please her at this function. There are
+not many things I do to her satisfaction; it's a mercy we're not going
+to live with her. Lord Maxwell is a dear; but she and I would never get
+on. Every way of thinking she has, rubs me up the wrong way; and as for
+her view of me, I am just a tare sown among her wheat. Perhaps she is
+right enough!"
+
+Marcella leant her cheek pensively on one hand, and with the other
+played with the things on the mantelpiece.
+
+Mary looked at her, and then half smiled, half sighed.
+
+"I think it is a very good thing you are to be married soon," she said,
+with her little air of wisdom, which offended nobody. "Then you'll know
+your own mind. When is it to be?"
+
+"The end of February--after the election."
+
+"Two months," mused Mary.
+
+"Time enough to throw it all up in, you think?" said Marcella,
+recklessly, putting on her gloves for departure. "Perhaps you'll be
+pleased to hear that I _am_ going to a meeting of Mr. Raeburn's next
+week?"
+
+"I _am_ glad. You ought to go to them all."
+
+"Really, Mary! How am I to lift you out of this squaw theory of
+matrimony? Allow me to inform you that the following evening I am going
+to one of Mr. Wharton's--here in the schoolroom!"
+
+She enjoyed her friend's disapproval.
+
+"By yourself, Marcella? It isn't seemly!"
+
+"I shall take a maid. Mr. Wharton is going to tell us how the people
+can--get the land, and how, when they have got it, all the money that
+used to go in rent will go in taking off taxes and making life
+comfortable for the poor." She looked at Mary with a teasing smile.
+
+"Oh! I dare say he will make his stealing sound very pretty," said Mary,
+with unwonted scorn, as she opened the front door for her friend.
+
+Marcella flashed out.
+
+"I know you are a saint, Mary," she said, turning back on the path
+outside to deliver her last shaft. "I am often not so sure whether you
+are a Christian!"
+
+Then she hurried off without another word, leaving the flushed and
+shaken Mary to ponder this strange dictum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella was just turning into the straight drive which led past the
+church on the left to Mellor House, when she heard footsteps behind her,
+and, looking round, she saw Edward Hallin.
+
+"Will you give me some lunch, Miss Boyce, in return for a message? I am
+here instead of Aldous, who is very sorry for himself, and will be over
+later. I am to tell you that he went down to the station to meet a
+certain box. The box did not come, but will come this afternoon; so he
+waits for it, and will bring it over."
+
+Marcella flushed, smiled, and said she understood. Hallin moved on
+beside her, evidently glad of the opportunity of a talk with her.
+
+"We are all going together to the Gairsley meeting next week, aren't we?
+I am so glad you are coming. Aldous will do his best."
+
+There was something very winning in his tone to her. It implied both
+his old and peculiar friendship for Aldous, and his eager wish to find a
+new friend in her--to adopt her into their comradeship. Something very
+winning, too, in his whole personality--in the loosely knit, nervous
+figure, the irregular charm of feature, the benignant eyes and
+brow--even in the suggestions of physical delicacy, cheerfully
+concealed, yet none the less evident. The whole balance of Marcella's
+temper changed in some sort as she talked to him. She found herself
+wanting to please, instead of wanting to conquer, to make an effect.
+
+"You have just come from the village, I think?" said Hallin. "Aldous
+tells me you take a great interest in the people?"
+
+He looked at her kindly, the look of one who saw all his
+fellow-creatures nobly, as it were, and to their best advantage.
+
+"One may take an interest," she said, in a dissatisfied voice, poking at
+the snow crystals on the road before her with the thorn-stick she
+carried, "but one can do so little. And I don't know anything; not even
+what I want myself."
+
+"No; one can do next to nothing. And systems and theories don't matter,
+or, at least, very little. Yet, when you and Aldous are together, there
+will be more chance of _doing_, for you than for most. You will be two
+happy and powerful people! His power will be doubled by happiness; I
+have always known that."
+
+Marcella was seized with shyness, looked away, and did not know what to
+answer. At last she said abruptly--her head still turned to the woods
+on her left--
+
+"Are you sure he is going to be happy?"
+
+"Shall I produce his letter to me?" he said, bantering--"or letters? For
+I knew a great deal about you before October 5" (their engagement-day),
+"and suspected what was going to happen long before Aldous did. No;
+after all, no! Those letters are my last bit of the old friendship. But
+the new began that same day," he hastened to add, smiling: "It may be
+richer than the old; I don't know. It depends on you."
+
+"I don't think--I am a very satisfactory friend," said Marcella, still
+awkward, and speaking with difficulty.
+
+"Well, let me find out, won't you? I don't think Aldous would call me
+exacting. I believe he would give me a decent character, though I tease
+him a good deal. You must let me tell you sometime what he did for
+me--what he was to me--at Cambridge? I shall always feel sorry for
+Aldous's wife that she did not know him at college."
+
+A shock went through Marcella at the word--that tremendous word--wife.
+As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made!
+
+"I should like you to tell me," she said faintly. Then she added, with
+more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, "But you really must
+come in and rest. Aldous told me he thought the walk from the Court was
+too much for you. Shall we take this short way?"
+
+And she opened a little gate leading to a door at the side of the house
+through the Cedar Garden. The narrow path only admitted of single file,
+and Hallin followed her, admiring her tall youth and the fine black and
+white of her head and cheek as she turned every now and then to speak to
+him. He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of
+her beauty, and the truth in Aldous's comparison of her to one of the
+tall women in a Florentine fresco. But he felt himself a good deal
+baffled by her, all the same. In some ways, so far as any man who is not
+the lover can understand such things, he understood why Aldous had
+fallen in love with her; in others, she bore no relation whatever to the
+woman his thoughts had been shaping all these years as his friend's fit
+and natural wife.
+
+Luncheon passed as easily as any meal could be expected to do, of which
+Mr. Boyce was partial president. During the preceding month or two he
+had definitely assumed the character of an invalid, although to
+inexperienced eyes like Marcella's there did not seem to be very much
+the matter. But, whatever the facts might be, Mr. Boyce's adroit use of
+them had made a great difference to his position in his own household.
+His wife's sarcastic freedom of manner was less apparent; and he was
+obviously less in awe of her. Meanwhile he was as sore as ever towards
+the Raeburns, and no more inclined to take any particular pleasure in
+Marcella's prospects, or to make himself agreeable towards his future
+son-in-law. He and Mrs. Boyce had been formally asked in Miss Raeburn's
+best hand to the Court ball, but he had at once snappishly announced his
+intention of staying at home. Marcella sometimes looked back with
+astonishment to his eagerness for social notice when they first came to
+Mellor. Clearly the rising irritability of illness had made it doubly
+unpleasant to him to owe all that he was likely to get on that score to
+his own daughter; and, moreover, he had learnt to occupy himself more
+continuously on his own land and with his own affairs.
+
+As to the state of the village, neither Marcella's entreaties nor
+reproaches had any effect upon him. When it appeared certain that he
+would be summoned for some specially flagrant piece of neglect he would
+spend a few shillings on repairs; otherwise not a farthing. All that
+filial softening towards him of which Marcella had been conscious in the
+early autumn had died away in her. She said to herself now plainly and
+bitterly that it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have
+pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the
+smallest expression of such a feeling. As it was, she was left to wonder
+and chafe at her mother's new-born mildness.
+
+In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a
+corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.
+
+"I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night,"
+he said. "He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that
+you would not agree with it. But I wanted you to see how he does these
+things. He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week. Each
+time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes
+out what he has to say. Then he speaks it entirely without notes. In
+this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself
+gradually an effective and practical speaker. The danger with him, of
+course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical--not simple
+and popular enough."
+
+Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.
+
+"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?" he said to her, but in a lower
+voice, and sitting down beside her.
+
+Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at
+the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder--wonder at
+Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like
+Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her. It was inevitable, of
+course--youth and beauty rule the world. But the mother, under no spell
+herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the
+lowering of standards involved.
+
+"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question,
+fidgeting the papers under her hand. Then his curious confessor's gift,
+his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all
+before him, told upon her.
+
+"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that
+must come," she added hurriedly. "This is all about details,
+palliatives. I want him to be more impatient."
+
+"Great political changes you mean?"
+
+She nodded; then added--
+
+"But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come
+after."
+
+He pondered a moment.
+
+"Aldous has never believed in _great_ changes coming suddenly. He
+constantly looks upon me as rash in the things _I_ adopt and believe in.
+But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part
+of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more
+equitably, I have never seen Aldous's equal--for the steady passion, the
+persistence, of it."
+
+She looked up. His pale face had taken to itself glow and fire; his eyes
+were full of strenuous, nay, severe expression. Her foolish pride
+rebelled a little.
+
+"Of course, I haven't seen much of that yet," she said slowly.
+
+His look for a moment was indignant, incredulous, then melted into a
+charming eagerness.
+
+"But you will! naturally you will!--see everything. I hug myself
+sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather
+and I will know what Aldous is and does. Oh! the people on the estate
+know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going
+into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high
+intelligence have the power I believe. But I am impatient! In the first
+place--I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!--I want Aldous to come out of
+that _manner_ of his to strangers, which is the only bit of the true
+Tory in him; _you_ can get rid of it, no one else can--How long shall I
+give you?--And in the next, I want the world not to be wasting itself on
+baser stuff when it might be praising Aldous!"
+
+"Does he mean Mr. Wharton?" thought Marcella, quickly. "But this
+world--our world--hates him and runs him down."
+
+But she had no time to answer, for the door opened to admit Aldous,
+flushed and bright-eyed, looking round the room immediately for her, and
+bearing a parcel in his left hand.
+
+"Does she love him at all?" thought Hallin, with a nervous stiffening of
+all his lithe frame, as he walked away to talk to Mrs. Boyce, "or, in
+spite of all her fine talk, is she just marrying him for his money and
+position!"
+
+Meanwhile, Aldous had drawn Marcella into the Stone Parlour and was
+standing by the fire with his arm covetously round her.
+
+"I have lost two hours with you I might have had, just because a
+tiresome man missed his train. Make up for it by liking these pretty
+things a little, for my sake and my mother's."
+
+He opened the jeweller's case, took out the fine old pearls--necklace
+and bracelets--it contained, and put them into her hand. They were his
+first considerable gift to her, and had been chosen for association's
+sake, seeing that his mother had also worn them before her marriage.
+
+She flushed first of all with a natural pleasure, the girl delighting in
+her gaud. Then she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed,
+inevitable. Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he
+began to be puzzled by her.
+
+"They are much too good for me. I don't know whether you ought to give
+me such precious things. I am dreadfully careless and forgetful. Mamma
+always says so."
+
+"I shall want you to wear them so often that you won't have a chance of
+forgetting them," he said gaily.
+
+"Will you? Will you want me to wear them so often?" she asked, in an odd
+voice. "Anyway, I should like to have just these, and nothing else. I am
+glad that we know nobody, and have no friends, and that I shall have so
+few presents. You won't give me many jewels, will you?" she said
+suddenly, insistently, turning to him. "I shouldn't know what to do with
+them. I used to have a magpie's wish for them; and now--I don't know,
+but they don't give me pleasure. Not these, of course--not these!" she
+added hurriedly, taking them up and beginning to fasten the bracelets on
+her wrists.
+
+Aldous looked perplexed.
+
+"My darling!" he said, half laughing, and in the tone of the apologist,
+"You know we _have_ such a lot of things. And I am afraid my grandfather
+will want to give them all to you. Need one think so much about it? It
+isn't as though they had to be bought fresh. They go with pretty gowns,
+don't they, and other people like to see them?"
+
+"No, but it's what they imply--the wealth--the _having_ so much while
+other people want so much. Things begin to oppress me so!" she broke
+out, instinctively moving away from him that she might express herself
+with more energy. "I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I
+seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an
+opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having. You must not
+let me like them--you must help me not to care about them!"
+
+Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself. He could of
+course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside. This question she
+had raised, this most thorny of all the personal questions of the
+present--the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and
+its vanities--was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and
+robustly real to him than it was to her. Every word in his few
+sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised
+ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.
+
+But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of
+another tune which she seemed to be perpetually trying to recall and
+piece together. Aldous's slow minor made her impatient.
+
+He turned presently to ask her what she had been doing with her
+morning--asking her with a certain precision, and observing her
+attentively. She replied that she had been showing Mr. Wharton the
+house, that he had walked down with her to the village, and was gone to
+a meeting at Widrington. Then she remarked that he was very good
+company, and very clever, but dreadfully sure of his own opinion.
+Finally she laughed, and said drily:
+
+"There will be no putting him down all the same. I haven't told anybody
+yet, but he saved my life this morning."
+
+Aldous caught her wrists.
+
+"Saved your life! Dear--What do you mean?"
+
+She explained, giving the little incident all--perhaps more than--its
+dramatic due. He listened with evident annoyance, and stood pondering
+when she came to an end.
+
+"So I shall be expected to take quite a different view of him
+henceforward?" he inquired at last, looking round at her, with a very
+forced smile.
+
+"I am sure I don't know that it matters to him what view anybody takes
+of him," she cried, flushing. "He certainly takes the frankest views of
+other people, and expresses them."
+
+And while she played with the pearls in their box she gave a vivid
+account of her morning's talk with the Radical candidate for West
+Brookshire, and of their village expedition.
+
+There was a certain relief in describing the scorn with which her acts
+and ideals had been treated; and, underneath, a woman's curiosity as to
+how Aldous would take it.
+
+"I don't know what business he had to express himself so frankly," said
+Aldous, turning to the fire and carefully putting it together. "He
+hardly knows you--it was, I think, an impertinence."
+
+He stood upright, with his back to the hearth, a strong, capable,
+frowning Englishman, very much on his dignity. Such a moment must surely
+have become him in the eyes of a girl that loved him. Marcella proved
+restive under it.
+
+"No; it's very natural," she protested quickly. "When people are so much
+in earnest they don't stop to think about impertinence! I never met any
+one who dug up one's thoughts by the roots as he does."
+
+Aldous was startled by her flush, her sudden attitude of opposition. His
+intermittent lack of readiness overtook him, and there was an awkward
+silence. Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the
+subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley
+meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said:
+
+"I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not
+liking Mr. Wharton?--other than politics, I mean?"
+
+Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.
+
+He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said:
+
+"I had rather not rake up old scores."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm
+round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.
+
+"Dearest," he said, "you shall put me in charity with all the world. But
+the worst of it is," he added, half laughing, "that I don't see how I am
+to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put
+that fire out instead of me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after
+years, passed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January.
+Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves
+confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by
+a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed
+immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active
+throughout the constituencies, were carried forward with redoubled
+energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a
+somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock--a former
+fag indeed of his at Eton--whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do.
+Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all
+his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most
+stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days
+went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was
+harassed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth
+was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and
+unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations;
+and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying
+there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to
+spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening
+an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him
+as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take
+into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to
+himself but to others.
+
+In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could snatch from
+a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal
+fortunes were all deeply interested. In vain--with a tardy instinct that
+it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for
+Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long
+stay at Mellor was largely owing--did Aldous subdue himself to
+propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long
+accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself
+not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least
+twice in Raeburn's hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as
+it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some
+of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce's
+indignation nor Marcella's discomfort and annoyance could restrain.
+Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions
+to the Radical candidate he was asserting his independence of the
+Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with
+him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns' heir.
+Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards
+with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had
+thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a
+sickly and disappointed man. Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took
+no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton. But it seemed to be
+no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once
+have taken to get rid of him.
+
+In vain, too, did Miss Raeburn do her best for the nephew to whom she
+was still devoted, in spite of his deplorable choice of a wife. She took
+in the situation as a whole probably sooner than anybody else, and she
+instantly made heroic efforts to see more of Marcella, to get her to
+come oftener to the Court, and in many various ways to procure the poor
+deluded Aldous more of his betrothed's society. She paid many chattering
+and fussy visits to Mellor--visits which chafed Marcella--and before
+long, indeed, roused a certain suspicion in the girl's wilful mind.
+Between Miss Raeburn and Mrs. Boyce there was a curious understanding.
+It was always tacit, and never amounted to friendship, still less to
+intimacy. But it often yielded a certain melancholy consolation to
+Aldous Raeburn's great-aunt. It was clear to her that this strange
+mother was just as much convinced as she was that Aldous was making a
+great mistake, and that Marcella was not worthy of him. But the
+engagement being there--a fact not apparently to be undone--both ladies
+showed themselves disposed to take pains with it, to protect it against
+aggression. Mrs. Boyce found herself becoming more of a _chaperon_ than
+she had ever yet professed to be; and Miss Raeburn, as we have said,
+made repeated efforts to capture Marcella and hold her for Aldous, her
+lawful master.
+
+But Marcella proved extremely difficult to manage. In the first place
+she was a young person of many engagements. Her village scheme absorbed
+a great deal of time. She was deep in a varied correspondence, in the
+engagement of teachers, the provision of work-rooms, the collecting and
+registering of workers, the organisation of local committees and so
+forth. New sides of the girl's character, new capacities and
+capabilities were coming out; new forms of her natural power over her
+fellows were developing every day; she was beginning, under the
+incessant stimulus of Wharton's talk, to read and think on social and
+economic subjects, with some system and coherence, and it was evident
+that she took a passionate mental pleasure in it all. And the more
+pleasure these activities gave her, the less she had to spare for those
+accompaniments of her engagement and her position that was to be, which
+once, as Mrs. Boyce's sharp eyes perceived, had been quite normally
+attractive to her.
+
+"Why do you take up her time so, with all these things?" said Miss
+Raeburn impatiently to Lady Winterbourne, who was now Marcella's
+obedient helper in everything she chose to initiate. "She doesn't care
+for anything she _ought_ to care about at this time, and Aldous sees
+nothing of her. As for her trousseau, Mrs. Boyce declares she has had to
+do it all. Marcella won't even go up to London to have her wedding-dress
+fitted!"
+
+Lady Winterbourne looked up bewildered.
+
+"But I can't make her go and have her wedding-dress fitted, Agneta! And
+I always feel you don't know what a fine creature she is. You don't
+really appreciate her. It's splendid the ideas she has about this work,
+and the way she throws herself into it."
+
+"I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, indignantly. "That's just what I object
+to. Why can't she throw herself into being in love with Aldous! That's
+her business, I imagine, just now--if she were a young woman like
+anybody else one had ever seen--instead of holding aloof from everything
+he does, and never being there when he wants her. Oh! I have no patience
+with her. But, of course, I must--" said Miss Raeburn, hastily
+correcting herself--"of course, I must have patience."
+
+"It will all come right, I am sure, when they are married," said Lady
+Winterbourne, rather helplessly.
+
+"That's just what my brother says," cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "He
+won't hear a word--declares she is odd and original, and that Aldous
+will soon know how to manage her. It's all very well; nowadays men
+_don't_ manage their wives; that's all gone with the rest. And I am
+sure, my dear, if she behaves after she is married as she is doing now,
+with that most objectionable person Mr. Wharton--walking, and talking,
+and taking up his ideas, and going to his meetings--she'll be a handful
+for any husband."
+
+"Mr. Wharton!" said Lady Winterbourne, astonished. Her absent black
+eyes, the eyes of the dreamer, of the person who lives by a few intense
+affections, saw little or nothing of what was going on immediately under
+them. "Oh! but that is because he is staying in the house, and he is a
+Socialist; she calls herself one--"
+
+"My _dear_," said Miss Raeburn, interrupting emphatically;
+"if--you--had--now--an unmarried daughter at home--engaged or not--would
+you care to have Harry Wharton hanging about after her?"
+
+"Harry Wharton?" said the other, pondering; "he is the Levens' cousin,
+isn't he? he used to stay with them. I don't think I have seen him since
+then. But yes, I do remember; there was something--something
+disagreeable?"
+
+She stopped with a hesitating, interrogative air. No one talked less
+scandal, no one put the uglinesses of life away from her with a hastier
+hand than Lady Winterbourne. She was one of the most consistent of moral
+epicures.
+
+"Yes, _extremely_ disagreeable," said Miss Raeburn, sitting bolt
+upright. "The man has no principles--never had any, since he was a child
+in petticoats. I know Aldous thinks him unscrupulous in politics and
+everything else. And then, just when you are worked to death, and have
+hardly a moment for your own affairs, to have a man of that type always
+at hand to spend odd times with your lady love--flattering her, engaging
+her in his ridiculous schemes, encouraging her in all the extravagances
+she has got her head twice too full of already, setting her against your
+own ideas and the life she will have to live--you will admit that it is
+not exactly soothing!"
+
+"Poor Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully, looking far ahead
+with her odd look of absent rigidity, which had in reality so little to
+do with a character essentially soft; "but you see he _did_ know all
+about her opinions. And I don't think--no, I really don't think--I could
+speak to her."
+
+In truth, this woman of nearly seventy--old in years, but wholly young
+in temperament--was altogether under Marcella's spell--more at ease with
+her already than with most of her own children, finding in her
+satisfaction for a hundred instincts, suppressed or starved by her own
+environment, fascinated by the girl's friendship, and eagerly grateful
+for her visits. Miss Raeburn thought it all both incomprehensible and
+silly.
+
+"Apparently no one can!" cried that lady in answer to her friend's
+demurrer; "is all the world afraid of her?"
+
+And she departed in wrath. But she knew, nevertheless, that she was just
+as much afraid of Marcella as anybody else. In her own sphere at the
+Court, or in points connected with what was due to the family, or to
+Lord Maxwell especially, as the head of it, this short, capable old lady
+could hold her own amply with Aldous's betrothed, could maintain,
+indeed, a sharp and caustic dignity, which kept Marcella very much in
+order. Miss Raeburn, on the defensive, was strong; but when it came to
+attacking Marcella's own ideas and proceedings, Lord Maxwell's sister
+became shrewdly conscious of her own weaknesses. She had no wish to
+measure her wits on any general field with Marcella's. She said to
+herself that the girl was too clever and would talk you down.
+
+Meanwhile, things went untowardly in various ways. Marcella disciplined
+herself before the Gairsley meeting, and went thither resolved to give
+Aldous as much sympathy as she could. But the performance only repelled
+a mind over which Wharton was every day gaining more influence. There
+was a portly baronet in the chair; there were various Primrose Dames on
+the platform and among the audience; there was a considerable
+representation of clergy; and the labourers present seemed to Marcella
+the most obsequious of their kind. Aldous spoke well--or so the audience
+seemed to think; but she could feel no enthusiasm for anything that he
+said. She gathered that he advocated a Government inspection of
+cottages, more stringent precautions against cattle disease, better
+technical instruction, a more abundant provision of allotments and small
+freeholds, &c.; and he said many cordial and wise-sounding things in
+praise of a progress which should go safely and wisely from step to
+step, and run no risks of dangerous reaction. But the assumptions on
+which, as she told herself rebelliously, it all went--that the rich and
+the educated must rule, and the poor obey; that existing classes and
+rights, the forces of individualism and competition, must and would go
+on pretty much as they were; that great houses and great people, the
+English land and game system, and all the rest of our odious class
+paraphernalia were in the order of the universe; these ideas, conceived
+as the furniture of Aldous's mind, threw her again into a ferment of
+passionate opposition. And when the noble baronet in the chair--to her
+eye, a pompous, frock-coated stick, sacrificing his after-dinner sleep
+for once, that he might the more effectually secure it in the
+future--proposed a vote of confidence in the Conservative candidate;
+when the vote was carried with much cheering and rattling of feet; when
+the Primrose Dames on the platform smiled graciously down upon the
+meeting as one smiles at good children in their moments of pretty
+behaviour; and when, finally, scores of toil-stained labourers, young
+and old, went up to have a word and a hand-shake with "Muster Raeburn,"
+Marcella held herself aloof and cold, with a look that threatened
+sarcasm should she be spoken to. Miss Raeburn, glancing furtively round
+at her, was outraged anew by her expression.
+
+"She will be a thorn in all our sides," thought that lady. "Aldous is a
+fool!--a poor dear noble misguided fool!"
+
+Then on the way home, she and Aldous drove together. Marcella tried to
+argue, grew vehement, and said bitter things for the sake of victory,
+till at last Aldous, tired, worried, and deeply wounded, could bear it
+no longer.
+
+"Let it be, dear, let it be!" he entreated, snatching at her hand as
+they rolled along through a stormy night. "We grope in a dark world--you
+see some points of light in it, I see others--won't you give me credit
+for doing what I can--seeing what I can? I am sure--_sure_--you will
+find it easier to bear with differences when we are quite together--when
+there are no longer all these hateful duties and engagements--and
+persons--between us."
+
+"Persons! I don't know what you mean!" said Marcella.
+
+Aldous only just restrained himself in time. Out of sheer fatigue and
+slackness of nerve he had been all but betrayed into some angry speech
+on the subject of Wharton, the echoes of whose fantastic talk, as it
+seemed to him, were always hanging about Mellor when he went there. But
+he did refrain, and was thankful. That he was indeed jealous and
+disturbed, that he had been jealous and disturbed from the moment Harry
+Wharton had set foot in Mellor, he himself knew quite well. But to play
+the jealous part in public was more than the Raeburn pride could bear.
+There was the dread, too, of defining the situation--of striking some
+vulgar irrevocable note.
+
+So he parried Marcella's exclamation by asking her whether she had any
+idea how many human hands a parliamentary candidate had to shake between
+breakfast and bed; and then, having so slipped into another tone, he
+tried to amuse himself and her by some of the daily humours of the
+contest. She lent herself to it and laughed, her look mostly turned away
+from him, as though she were following the light of the carriage lamps
+as it slipped along the snow-laden hedges, her hand lying limply in his.
+But neither were really gay. His soreness of mind grew as in the pauses
+of talk he came to realise more exactly the failure of the evening--of
+his very successful and encouraging meeting--from his own private point
+of view.
+
+"Didn't you like that last speech?" he broke out suddenly--"that
+labourer's speech? I thought you would. It was entirely his own
+idea--nobody asked him to do it."
+
+In reality Gairsley represented a corner of the estate which Aldous had
+specially made his own. He had spent much labour and thought on the
+improvement of what had been a backward district, and in particular he
+had tried a small profit-sharing experiment upon a farm there which he
+had taken into his own hands for the purpose. The experiment had met
+with fair success, and the labourer in question, who was one of the
+workers in it, had volunteered some approving remarks upon it at the
+meeting.
+
+"Oh! it was very proper and respectful!" said Marcella, hastily.
+
+The carriage rolled on some yards before Aldous replied. Then he spoke
+in a drier tone than he had ever yet used to her.
+
+"You do it injustice, I think. The man is perfectly independent, and an
+honest fellow. I was grateful to him for what he said."
+
+"Of course, I am no judge!" cried Marcella, quickly--repentantly. "Why
+did you ask me? I saw everything crooked, I suppose--it was your
+Primrose Dames--they got upon my nerves. Why did you have them? I didn't
+mean to vex and hurt you--I didn't indeed--it was all the other way--and
+now I have."
+
+She turned upon him laughing, but also half crying, as he could tell by
+the flutter of her breath.
+
+He vowed he was not hurt, and once more changed both talk and tone. They
+reached the drive's end without a word of Wharton. But Marcella went to
+bed hating herself, and Aldous, after his solitary drive home, sat up
+long and late, feverishly pacing and thinking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then next evening how differently things fell!
+
+Marcella, having spent the afternoon at the Court, hearing all the
+final arrangements for the ball, and bearing with Miss Raeburn in a way
+which astonished herself, came home full of a sense of duty done, and
+announced to her mother that she was going to Mr. Wharton's meeting in
+the Baptist chapel that evening.
+
+"Unnecessary, don't you think?" said Mrs. Boyce, lifting her eyebrows.
+"However, if you go, I shall go with you."
+
+Most mothers, dealing with a girl of twenty-one, under the
+circumstances, would have said, "I had rather you stayed at home." Mrs.
+Boyce never employed locutions of this kind. She recognised with perfect
+calmness that Marcella's bringing up, and especially her independent
+years in London, had made it impossible.
+
+Marcella fidgeted.
+
+"I don't know why you should, mamma. Papa will be sure to want you. Of
+course, I shall take Deacon."
+
+"Please order dinner a quarter of an hour earlier, and tell Deacon to
+bring down my walking things to the hall," was all Mrs. Boyce said in
+answer.
+
+Marcella walked upstairs with her head very stiff. So her mother, and
+Miss Raeburn too, thought it necessary to keep watch on her. How
+preposterous! She thought of her free and easy relations with her
+Kensington student-friends, and wondered when a more reasonable idea of
+the relations between men and women would begin to penetrate English
+country society.
+
+Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.
+
+"Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense," he said irritably
+to his wife, "but it's the fellow's power of talk that is so
+astonishing. _He_ isn't troubled with your Raeburn heaviness."
+
+Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.
+
+"If papa goes," she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed
+her, "it will spoil the meeting. The labourers will turn sulky. I
+shouldn't wonder if they did or said something unpleasant. As it is,
+_you_ had much better not come, mamma. They are sure to attack the
+cottages--and other things."
+
+Mrs. Boyce took no notice as far as she herself was concerned, but her
+quiet decision at last succeeded in leaving Mr. Boyce safely settled by
+the fire, provided as usual with a cigarette and a French novel.
+
+The meeting was held in a little iron Baptist chapel, erected some few
+years before on the outskirts of the village, to the grief and scandal
+of Mr. Harden. There were about a hundred and twenty labourers present,
+and at the back some boys and girls, come to giggle and make a
+noise--nobody else. The Baptist minister, a smooth-faced young man,
+possessed, as it turned out, of opinions little short of Wharton's own
+in point of vigour and rigour, was already in command. A few late
+comers, as they slouched in, stole side looks at Marcella and the veiled
+lady in black beside her, sitting in the corner of the last bench; and
+Marcella nodded to one or two of the audience, Jim Hurd amongst them.
+Otherwise no one took any notice of them. It was the first time that
+Mrs. Boyce had been inside any building belonging to the village.
+
+Wharton arrived late. He had been canvassing at a distance, and neither
+of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with
+a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he
+took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for
+half an hour and let them go. Did you ever see such a stolid set?"
+
+"You will rouse them," said Marcella.
+
+Her eyes were animated, her colour high, and she took no account at all
+of his plea of weariness.
+
+"You challenge me? I must rouse them--that was what you came to see? Is
+that it?"
+
+She laughed and made no answer. He left her and went up to the
+minister's desk, the men shuffling their feet a little, and rattling a
+stick here and there as he did so.
+
+The young minister took the chair and introduced the speaker. He had a
+strong Yorkshire accent, and his speech was divided between the most
+vehement attacks, couched in the most Scriptural language, upon capital
+and privilege--that is to say, on landlords and the land system, on
+State churches and the "idle rich," interspersed with quavering returns
+upon himself, as though he were scared by his own invective. "My
+brothers, let us be _calm_!" he would say after every burst of passion,
+with a long deep-voiced emphasis on the last word; "let us, above all
+things, be _calm_!"--and then bit by bit voice and denunciation would
+begin to mount again towards a fresh climax of loud-voiced attack, only
+to sink again to the same lamb-like refrain. Mrs. Boyce's thin lip
+twitched, and Marcella bore the good gentleman a grudge for providing
+her mother with so much unnecessary amusement.
+
+As for Wharton, at the opening of his speech he spoke both awkwardly and
+flatly; and Marcella had a momentary shock. He was, as he said, tired,
+and his wits were not at command. He began with the general political
+programme of the party to which--on its extreme left wing--he proclaimed
+himself to belong. This programme was, of course, by now a newspaper
+commonplace of the stalest sort. He himself recited it without
+enthusiasm, and it was received without a spark, so far as appeared, of
+interest or agreement. The minister gave an "hear, hear," of a loud
+official sort; the men made no sign.
+
+"They might be a set of Dutch cheeses!" thought Marcella, indignantly,
+after a while. "But, after all, why should they care for all this? I
+shall have to get up in a minute and stop those children romping."
+
+But through all this, as it were, Wharton was only waiting for his
+second wind. There came a moment when, dropping his quasi-official and
+high political tone, he said suddenly with another voice and emphasis:
+
+"Well now, my men, I'll be bound you're thinking, 'That's all pretty
+enough!--we haven't got anything against it--we dare say it's all right;
+but we don't care a brass ha'porth about any of it! If that's all you'd
+got to say to us, you might have let us bide at home. We don't have none
+too much time to rest our bones a bit by the fire, and talk to the
+missus and the kids. Why didn't you let us alone, instead of bringing us
+out in the cold?'
+
+"Well, but it _isn't_ all I've got to say--and you know it--because
+I've spoken to you before. What I've been talking about is all true, and
+all important, and you'll see it some day when you're fit. But what can
+men in your position know about it, or care about it? What do any of you
+want, but _bread_--"
+
+--He thundered on the desk--
+
+"--a bit of decent _comfort_--a bit of _freedom_--freedom from tyrants
+who call themselves your betters!--a bit of rest in your old age, a home
+that's something better than a dog-hole, a wage that's something better
+than starvation, an honest share in the wealth you are making every day
+and every hour for other people to gorge and plunder!"
+
+He stopped a moment to see how _that_ took. A knot of young men in a
+corner rattled their sticks vigorously. The older men had begun at any
+rate to look at the speaker. The boys on the back benches instinctively
+stopped scuffling.
+
+Then he threw himself into a sort of rapid question-and-answer. What
+were their wages?--eleven shillings a week?
+
+"Not they!" cried a man from the middle of the chapel. "Yer mus' reckon
+it wet an' dry. I wor turned back two days las' week, an' two days this,
+_fower_ shillin' lost each week--that's what I call skinnin' ov yer."
+
+Wharton nodded at him approvingly. By now he knew the majority of the
+men in each village by name, and never forgot a face or a biography.
+"You're right there, Watkins. Eleven shillings, then, when it isn't
+less, never more, and precious often less; and harvest money--the
+people that are kind enough to come round and ask you to vote Tory for
+them make a deal of that, don't they?--and a few odds and ends here and
+there--precious few of them! There! that's about it for wages, isn't it?
+Thirty pounds a year, somewhere about, to keep a wife and children
+on--and for ten hours a day work, not counting meal times--that's it, I
+think. Oh, you _are_ well off!--aren't you?"
+
+He dropped his arms, folded, on the desk in front of him, and paused to
+look at them, his bright kindling eye running over rank after rank. A
+chuckle of rough laughter, bitter and jeering, ran through the benches.
+Then they broke out and applauded him.
+
+Well, and about their cottages?
+
+His glance caught Marcella, passed to her mother sitting stiffly
+motionless under her veil. He drew himself up, thought a moment, then
+threw himself far forward again over the desk as though the better to
+launch what he had to say, his voice taking a grinding determined note.
+
+He had been in all parts of the division, he said; seen everything,
+inquired into everything. No doubt, on the great properties there had
+been a good deal done of late years--public opinion had effected
+something, the landlords had been forced to disgorge some of the gains
+wrested from labour, to pay for the decent housing of the labourer. But
+did anybody suppose that _enough_ had been done? Why, he had seen
+_dens_--aye, on the best properties--not fit for the pigs that the
+farmers wouldn't let the labourers keep, lest they should steal their
+straw for the littering of them!--where a man was bound to live the
+life of a beast, and his children after him--
+
+A tall thin man of about sixty rose in his place, and pointed a long
+quavering finger at the speaker.
+
+"What is it, Darwin? speak up!" said Wharton, dropping at once into the
+colloquial tone, and stooping forward to listen.
+
+"My sleepin' room's six foot nine by seven foot six. We have to shift
+our bed for the rain's comin' in, an' yer may see for yoursels ther
+ain't much room to shift it in. An' beyont us ther's a room for the
+chillen, same size as ourn, an' no window, nothin' but the door into us.
+Ov a summer night the chillen, three on 'em, is all of a sweat afore
+they're asleep. An' no garden, an' no chance o' decent ways nohow. An'
+if yer ask for a bit o' repairs yer get sworn at. An' that's all that
+most on us can get out of Squire Boyce!"
+
+There was a hasty whisper among some of the men round him, as they
+glanced over their shoulders at the two ladies on the back bench. One or
+two of them half rose, and tried to pull him down. Wharton looked at
+Marcella; it seemed to him he saw a sort of passionate satisfaction on
+her pale face, and in the erect carriage of her head. Then she stooped
+to the side and whispered to her mother. Mrs. Boyce shook her head and
+sat on, immovable. All this took but a second or two.
+
+"Ah, well," said Wharton, "we won't have names; that'll do us no good.
+It's not the _men_ you've got to go for so much--though we shall go for
+them too before long when we've got the law more on our side. It's the
+system. It's the whole way of dividing the wealth that _you_ made, you
+and your children--by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant
+work--between you and those who _don't_ work, who live on your labour
+and grow fat on your poverty! What we want is _a fair division_. There
+_ought_ to be wealth enough--there _is_ wealth enough for all in this
+blessed country. The earth gives it; the sun gives it: labour extracts
+and piles it up. Why should one class take three-fourths of it and leave
+you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which
+is all you have to starve and breed on? Why?--_why_? I say.
+Why!--because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited _cowards_,
+unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a
+pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and
+your class--there, _that's_ why it is, and I tell it you straight out!"
+
+He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at
+them--scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the
+blaze of his blue eye. A murmur ran through the room. Some of the men
+laughed excitedly. Darwin sprang up again.
+
+"You keep the perlice off us, an' gie us the cuttin' up o' their
+bloomin' parks an' we'll do it fast enough," he cried.
+
+"Much good that'll do you, just at present," said Wharton,
+contemptuously. "Now, you just listen to me."
+
+And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the
+room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the
+country districts--the transference of authority within the villages
+from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily
+during the transition time for the provision of house room, water,
+light, education and amusement for the labourer; and ultimately land and
+capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker
+on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and
+interest of the capitalist class relieves him of taxes, and the
+disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master
+in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all. And, as a first
+step to this new Jerusalem--_organisation_!--self-sacrifice enough to
+form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates
+in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.
+
+"Then I suppose you think you'd be turned out of your cottages,
+dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow. Just you try! There
+are people all over the country ready to back you, if you'd only back
+yourselves. But you _won't_. You won't fight--that's the worst of you;
+that's what makes all of us _sick_ when we come down to talk to you. You
+won't spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing--not you!--to
+subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling
+your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men. What's the good of
+your grumbling? I suppose you'll go on like that--grumbling and starving
+and cringing--and talking big of the things you could do if you
+would:--and all the time not one honest effort--not one!--to better
+yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks! By the Lord! I tell you
+it's a _damned_ sort of business talking to fellows like you!"
+
+Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal,
+emphasis. The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden
+movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it.
+Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil. Her
+eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.
+
+As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk
+to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered
+or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His
+blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them,
+his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his
+curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed
+into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even;
+laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the
+sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.
+
+Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these
+cottagers, she had never lived till now--under the blaze of these
+eyes--within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the
+power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the
+weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged,
+dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in
+the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a
+sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on
+his knee, against his breast. "Here," she thought, while her pulses
+leapt, "is the leader for me--for these. Let him call, I will follow."
+
+It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly,
+when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm
+of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement,
+hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate
+practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take
+towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for
+the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but
+put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed
+forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so--with some
+good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise
+instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the
+day of election--came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed,
+and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved
+herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken
+bodily from the _Labour Clarion_ of the preceding week. Then a
+resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was
+passed unanimously amid evident excitement. It was the first time that
+such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect,
+mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony. For one who knew
+her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a
+man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.
+
+As for Marcella, she said little or nothing. But Wharton, in the dark of
+the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that
+her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response
+would have been electric.
+
+When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the
+vestibule--Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall--he said to her,
+his voice hoarse with fatigue:
+
+"Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?"
+
+Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.
+
+"You rated them enough."
+
+"Well, did you disapprove?"
+
+"Oh, no! it seems to be your way."
+
+"My proof of friendship? Well, can there be a greater? Will you show me
+some to-morrow?"
+
+"How can I?"
+
+"Will you criticise?--tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night,
+or a hypocrite? Your mother would."
+
+"I dare say!" said Marcella, her breath quickening; "but don't expect it
+from me."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because--because I don't pretend. I don't know whether you roused them,
+but you roused _me_."
+
+She swept on before him into the dark hall, without giving him a moment
+for reply, took her candle, and disappeared.
+
+Wharton found his own staircase, and went up to bed. The light he
+carried showed his smiling eyes bent on the ground, his mouth still
+moving as though with some pleasant desire of speech.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Wharton was sitting alone in the big Mellor drawing-room, after dinner.
+He had drawn one of the few easy chairs the room possessed to the fire,
+and with his feet on the fender, and one of Mr. Boyce's French novels on
+his knee, he was intensely enjoying a moment of physical ease. The work
+of these weeks of canvassing and speaking had been arduous, and he was
+naturally indolent. Now, beside this fire and at a distance, it amazed
+him that any motive whatever, public or private, should ever have been
+strong enough to take him out through the mire on these winter nights to
+spout himself hoarse to a parcel of rustics. "What did I do it for?" he
+asked himself; "what am I going to do it for again to-morrow?"
+
+Ten o'clock. Mr. Boyce was gone to bed. No more entertaining of _him_ to
+be done; one might be thankful for that mercy. Miss Boyce and her mother
+would, he supposed, be down directly. They had gone up to dress at nine.
+It was the night of the Maxwell Court ball, and the carriage had been
+ordered for half-past ten. In a few minutes he would see Miss Boyce in
+her new dress, wearing Raeburn's pearls. He was extraordinarily
+observant, and a number of little incidents and domestic arrangements
+bearing on the feminine side of Marcella's life had been apparent to
+him from the beginning. He knew, for instance, that the trousseau was
+being made at home, and that during the last few weeks the lady for whom
+it was destined had shown an indifference to the progress of it which
+seemed to excite a dumb annoyance in her mother. Curious woman, Mrs.
+Boyce!
+
+He found himself listening to every opening door, and already, as it
+were, gazing at Marcella in her white array. He was not asked to this
+ball. As he had early explained to Miss Boyce, he and Miss Raeburn had
+been "cuts" for years, for what reason he had of course left Marcella to
+guess. As if Marcella found any difficulty in guessing--as if the
+preposterous bigotries and intolerances of the Ladies' League were not
+enough to account for any similar behaviour on the part of any similar
+high-bred spinster! As for this occasion, she was far too proud both on
+her own behalf and Wharton's to say anything either to Lord Maxwell or
+his sister on the subject of an invitation for her father's guest.
+
+It so happened, however, that Wharton was aware of certain other reasons
+for his social exclusion from Maxwell Court. There was no necessity, of
+course, for enlightening Miss Boyce on the point. But as he sat waiting
+for her, Wharton's mind went back to the past connected with those
+reasons. In that past Raeburn had had the whip-hand of him; Raeburn had
+been the moral superior dictating indignant terms to a young fellow
+detected in flagrant misconduct. Wharton did not know that he bore him
+any particular grudge. But he had never liked Aldous, as a boy, that he
+could remember; naturally he had liked him less since that old affair.
+The remembrance of it had made his position at Mellor particularly sweet
+to him from the beginning; he was not sure that it had not determined
+his original acceptance of the offer made to him by the Liberal
+Committee to contest old Dodgson's seat. And during the past few weeks
+the exhilaration and interest of the general position--considering all
+things--had been very great. Not only was he on the point of ousting the
+Maxwell candidate from a seat which he had held securely for
+years--Wharton was perfectly well aware by now that he was trespassing
+on Aldous Raeburn's preserves in ways far more important, and infinitely
+more irritating! He and Raeburn had not met often at Mellor during these
+weeks of fight. Each had been too busy. But whenever they had come
+across each other Wharton had clearly perceived that his presence in the
+house, his growing intimacy with Marcella Boyce, the free-masonry of
+opinion between them, the interest she took in his contest, the village
+friendships they had in common, were all intensely galling to Aldous
+Raeburn.
+
+The course of events, indeed, had lately produced in Wharton a certain
+excitement--recklessness even. He had come down into these parts to
+court "the joy of eventful living"--politically and personally. But the
+situation had proved to be actually far more poignant and personal than
+he had expected. This proud, crude, handsome girl--to her certainly it
+was largely due that the days had flown as they had. He was perfectly,
+one might almost say gleefully, aware that at the present moment it was
+he and not Aldous Raeburn who was intellectually her master. His mind
+flew back at first with amusement, then with a thrill of something else,
+over their talks and quarrels. He smiled gaily as he recalled her fits
+of anger with him, her remonstrances, appeals--and then her awkward
+inevitable submissions when he had crushed her with sarcasm or with
+facts. Ah! she would go to this ball to-night; Aldous Raeburn would
+parade her as his possession; but she would go with thoughts, ambitions,
+ideals, which, as they developed, would make her more and more difficult
+for a Raeburn to deal with. And in those thoughts and ambitions the man
+who had been her tormentor, teacher, and companion during six rushing
+weeks knew well that he already counted for much. He had cherished in
+her all those "divine discontents" which were already there when he
+first knew her; taught her to formulate them, given her better reasons
+for them; so that by now she was a person with a far more defined and
+stormy will than she had been to begin with. Wharton did not
+particularly know why he should exult; but he did exult. At any rate, he
+was prodigiously tickled--by the whole position.
+
+A step, a rustle outside--he hastily shut his book and listened.
+
+The door opened, and Marcella came in--a white vision against the heavy
+blue of the walls. With her came, too, a sudden strong scent of flowers,
+for she carried a marvellous bunch of hot-house roses, Aldous's gift,
+which had just arrived by special messenger.
+
+Wharton sprang up and placed a chair for her.
+
+"I had begun to believe the ball only existed in my own imagination!"
+he said gaily. "Surely you are very late."
+
+Then he saw that she looked disturbed.
+
+"It was papa," she said, coming to the fire, and looking down into it.
+"It has been another attack of pain--not serious, mamma says; she is
+coming down directly. But I wonder why they come, and why he thinks
+himself so ill--do you know?" she added abruptly, turning to her
+companion.
+
+Wharton hesitated, taken by surprise. During the past weeks, what with
+Mr. Boyce's confidence and his own acuteness, he had arrived at a very
+shrewd notion of what was wrong with his host. But he was not going to
+enlighten the daughter.
+
+"I should say your father wants a great deal of care--and is nervous
+about himself," he said quietly. "But he will get the care--and your
+mother knows the whole state of the case."
+
+"Yes, she knows," said Marcella. "I wish I did."
+
+And a sudden painful expression--of moral worry, remorse--passed across
+the girl's face. Wharton knew that she had often been impatient of late
+with her father, and incredulous of his complaints. He thought he
+understood.
+
+"One can often be of more use to a sick person if one is not too well
+acquainted with what ails them," he said. "Hope and cheerfulness are
+everything in a case like your father's. He will do well."
+
+"If he does he won't owe any of it--"
+
+She stopped as impulsively as she had begun. "To me," she meant to have
+said; then had retreated hastily, before her own sense of something
+unduly intimate and personal. Wharton stood quietly beside her, saying
+nothing, but receiving and soothing her self-reproach just as surely as
+though she had put it into words.
+
+"You are crushing your flowers, I think," he said suddenly.
+
+And indeed her roses were dangling against her dress, as if she had
+forgotten all about them.
+
+She raised them carelessly, but he bent to smell them, and she held them
+out.
+
+"Summer!" he said, plunging his face into them with a long breath of
+sensuous enjoyment. "How the year sweeps round in an instant! And all
+the effect of a little heat and a little money. Will you allow me a
+philosopher's remark?"
+
+He drew back from her. His quick inquisitive but still respectful eye
+took in every delightful detail.
+
+"If I don't give you leave, my experience is that you will take it!" she
+said, half laughing, half resentful, as though she had old aggressions
+in mind.
+
+"You admit the strength of the temptation? It is very simple, no one
+could help making it. To be spectator of the _height_ of anything--the
+best, the climax--makes any mortal's pulses run. Beauty, success,
+happiness, for instance?"
+
+He paused smiling. She leant a thin hand on the mantelpiece and looked
+away; Aldous's pearls slipped backwards along her white arm.
+
+"Do you suppose to-night will be the height of happiness?" she said at
+last with a little scorn. "These functions don't present themselves to
+_me_ in such a light."
+
+Wharton could have laughed out--her pedantry was so young and
+unconscious. But he restrained himself.
+
+"I shall be with the majority to-night," he said demurely. "I may as
+well warn you."
+
+Her colour rose. No other man had ever dared to speak to her with this
+assurance, this cool scrutinising air. She told herself to be indignant;
+the next moment she _was_ indignant, but with herself for remembering
+conventionalities.
+
+"Tell me one thing," said Wharton, changing his tone wholly. "I know you
+went down hurriedly to the village before dinner. Was anything wrong?"
+
+"Old Patton is very ill," she said, sighing. "I went to ask after him;
+he may die any moment. And the Hurds' boy too."
+
+He leant against the mantelpiece, talking to her about both cases with a
+quick incisive common-sense--not unkind, but without a touch of
+unnecessary sentiment, still less of the superior person--which
+represented one of the moods she liked best in him. In speaking of the
+poor he always took the tone of comradeship, of a plain equality, and
+the tone was, in fact, genuine.
+
+"Do you know," he said presently, "I did not tell you before, but I am
+certain that Hurd's wife is afraid of you, that she has a secret from
+you?"
+
+"From me! how could she? I know every detail of their affairs."
+
+"No matter. I listened to what she said that day in the cottage when I
+had the boy on my knee. I noticed her face, and I am quite certain. She
+has a secret, and above all a secret from you."
+
+Marcella looked disturbed for a moment, then she laughed.
+
+"Oh, no!" she said, with a little superior air. "I assure you I know her
+better than you."
+
+Wharton said no more.
+
+"Marcella!" called a distant voice from the hall.
+
+The girl gathered up her white skirts and her flowers in haste.
+
+"Good-night!"
+
+"Good-night! I shall hear you come home and wonder how you have sped.
+One word, if I may! Take your _role_ and play it. There is nothing
+subjects dislike so much as to see royalty decline its part."
+
+She laughed, blushed, a little proudly and uncertainly, and went without
+reply. As she shut the door behind her, a sudden flatness fell upon her.
+She walked through the dark Stone Parlour outside, seeing still the
+firmly-knit lightly-made figure--boyish, middle-sized, yet never
+insignificant--the tumbled waves of fair hair, the eyes so keenly blue,
+the face with its sharp mocking lines, its powers of sudden charm. Then
+self-reproach leapt, and possessed her. She quickened her pace, hurrying
+into the hall, as though from something she was ashamed or afraid of.
+
+In the hall a new sensation awaited her. Her mother, fully dressed,
+stood waiting by the old billiard-table for her maid, who had gone to
+fetch her a cloak.
+
+Marcella stopped an instant in surprise and delight, then ran up to her.
+"Mamma, how _lovely_ you look! I haven't seen you like that, not since I
+was a child. I remember you then once, in a low dress, a white dress,
+with flowers, coming into the nursery. But that black becomes you so
+well, and Deacon has done your hair beautifully!"
+
+She took her mother's hand and kissed her cheek, touched by an emotion
+which had many roots. There was infinite relief in this tender natural
+outlet; she seemed to recover possession of herself.
+
+Mrs. Boyce bore the kiss quietly. Her face was a little pinched and
+white. But the unusual display Deacon had been allowed to make of her
+pale golden hair, still long and abundant; the unveiling of the shapely
+shoulders and neck, little less beautiful than her daughter's; the
+elegant lines of the velvet dress, all these things, had very nobly
+transformed her. Marcella could not restrain her admiration and delight.
+Mrs. Boyce winced, and, looking upward to the gallery, which ran round
+the hall, called Deacon impatiently.
+
+"Only, mamma," said Marcella, discontentedly, "I don't like that little
+chain round your neck. It is not equal to the rest, not worthy of it."
+
+"I have nothing else, my dear," said Mrs. Boyce, drily. "Now, Deacon,
+don't be all night!"
+
+Nothing else? Yet, if she shut her eyes, Marcella could perfectly recall
+the diamonds on the neck and arms of that white figure of her
+childhood--could see herself as a baby playing with the treasures of her
+mother's jewel-box.
+
+Nowadays, Mrs. Boyce was very secretive and reserved about her personal
+possessions. Marcella never went into her room unless she was asked, and
+would never have thought of treating it or its contents with any
+freedom.
+
+The mean chain which went so ill with the costly hoarded dress--it
+recalled to Marcella all the inexorable silent miseries of her mother's
+past life, and all the sordid disadvantages and troubles of her own
+youth. She followed Mrs. Boyce out to the carriage in silence--once more
+in a tumult of sore pride and doubtful feeling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Four weeks to her wedding-day! The words dinned in her ears as they
+drove along. Yet they sounded strange to her, incredible almost. How
+much did she know of Aldous, of her life that was to be--above all, how
+much of herself? She was not happy--had not been happy or at ease for
+many days. Yet in her restlessness she could think nothing out.
+Moreover, the chain that galled and curbed her was a chain of character.
+In spite of her modernness, and the complexity of many of her motives,
+there was certain inherited simplicities of nature at the bottom of her.
+In her wild demonic childhood you could always trust Marcie Boyce, if
+she had given you her word--her schoolfellows knew that. If her passions
+were half-civilised and southern, her way of understanding the point of
+honour was curiously English, sober, tenacious. So now. Her sense of
+bond to Aldous had never been in the least touched by any of her
+dissatisfactions and revolts. Yet it rushed upon her to-night with
+amazement, and that in four weeks she was going to marry him! Why?
+how?--what would it really _mean_ for him and for her? It was as though
+in mid-stream, she were trying to pit herself for an instant against the
+current which had so far carried them all on, to see what it might be
+like to retrace a step, and could only realise with dismay the force
+and rapidity of the water.
+
+Yet all the time another side of her was well aware that she was at that
+moment the envy of half a county, that in another ten minutes hundreds
+of eager and critical eyes would be upon her; and her pride was rising
+to her part. The little incident of the chain had somehow for the moment
+made the ball and her place in it more attractive to her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had no sooner stepped from their carriage than Aldous, who was
+waiting in the outer hall, joyously discovered them. Till then he had
+been walking aimlessly amid the crowd of his own guests, wondering when
+she would come, how she would like it. This splendid function had been
+his grandfather's idea; it would never have entered his own head for a
+moment. Yet he understood his grandfather's wish to present his heir's
+promised bride in this public ceremonious way to the society of which
+she would some day be the natural leader. He understood, too, that there
+was more in the wish than met the ear; that the occasion meant to Lord
+Maxwell, whether Dick Boyce were there or no, the final condoning of
+things past and done with, a final throwing of the Maxwell shield over
+the Boyce weakness, and full adoption of Marcella into her new family.
+
+All this he understood and was grateful for. But how would _she_
+respond? How would she like it--this parade that was to be made of
+her--these people that must be introduced to her? He was full of
+anxieties.
+
+Yet in many ways his mind had been easier of late. During the last week
+she had been very gentle and good to him--even Miss Raeburn had been
+pleased with her. There had been no quoting of Wharton when they met;
+and he had done his philosopher's best to forget him. He trusted her
+proudly, intensely; and in four weeks she would be his wife.
+
+"Can you bear it?" he said to her in a laughing whisper as she and her
+mother emerged from the cloak-room.
+
+"Tell me what to do," she said, flushing. "I will do my best. What a
+crowd! Must we stay very long?"
+
+"Ah, my dear Mrs. Boyce," cried Lord Maxwell, meeting them on the steps
+of the inner quadrangular corridor--"Welcome indeed! Let me take you in.
+Marcella! with Aldous's permission!" he stooped his white head gallantly
+and kissed her on the cheek--"Remember I am an old man; if I choose to
+pay you compliments, you will have to put up with them!"
+
+Then he offered Mrs. Boyce his arm, a stately figure in his ribbon and
+cross of the Bath. A delicate red had risen to that lady's thin cheek in
+spite of her self-possession. "Poor thing," said Lord Maxwell to himself
+as he led her along--"poor thing!--how distinguished and charming still!
+One sees to-night what she was like as a girl."
+
+Aldous and Marcella followed. They had to pass along the great corridor
+which ran round the quadrangle of the house. The antique marbles which
+lined it were to-night masked in flowers, and seats covered in red had
+been fitted in wherever it was possible, and were now crowded with
+dancers "sitting out." From the ball-room ahead came waves of
+waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with
+the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the
+swaying rhythms of the band. Beyond the windows of the corridor, which
+had been left uncurtained because of the beauty of the night, the stiff
+Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was
+gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of
+lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls
+of the corridor--here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca--and
+the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in cold,
+whitish relief.
+
+Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were
+streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that
+every eye was fixed upon her and her mother. "Look, there she is," she
+heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library,
+now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest. "Come, quick! There--I
+told you she was lovely!"
+
+Every now and then some old friend, man or woman, rose smiling from the
+seats along the side, and Aldous introduced his bride.
+
+"On her dignity!" said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they
+had passed. "Shy, no doubt--very natural! But nowadays girls, when
+they're shy, don't giggle and blush as they used to in _my_ young days;
+they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren't going to
+allow it! Oh, very handsome--very handsome--of course. But you can see
+she's advanced--peculiar--or what d'ye call it?--woman's rights, I
+suppose, and all that kind of thing? Like to see you go in for it,
+Nettie, eh!"
+
+"She's _awfully_ handsome," sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant
+little daughter, still craning her neck to look--"very simply dressed
+too, except for those lovely pearls. She does her hair very oddly, so
+low down--in those plaits. Nobody does it like that nowadays."
+
+"That's because nobody has such a head," said her brother, a young
+Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship. "By
+George, she's ripping--she's the best-looking girl I've seen for a good
+long time. But she's a Tartar, I'll swear--looks it, anyway."
+
+"Every one says she has the most extraordinary opinions," said the girl,
+eagerly. "She'll manage him, don't you think? I'm sure he's very meek
+and mild."
+
+"Don't know that," said the young man, twisting his moustache with the
+air of exhaustive information. "Raeburn's a very good fellow--excellent
+fellow--see him shooting, you know--that kind of thing. I expect he's
+got a will when he wants it. The mother's handsome, too, and looks a
+lady. The father's kept out of the way, I see. Rather a blessing for the
+Raeburns. Can't be pleasant, you know, to get a man like that in the
+family. Look after your spoons--that kind of thing."
+
+Meanwhile Marcella was standing beside Miss Raeburn, at the head of the
+long ball-room, and doing her best to behave prettily. One after
+another she bowed to, or shook hands with, half the magnates of the
+county--the men in pink, the women in the new London dresses, for which
+this brilliant and long-expected ball had given so welcome an excuse.
+They knew little or nothing of her, except that she was clearly
+good-looking, that she was that fellow Dick Boyce's daughter and was
+reported to be "odd." Some, mostly men, who said their conventional few
+words to her, felt an amused admiration for the skill and rapidity with
+which she had captured the _parti_ of the county; some, mostly women,
+were already jealous of her. A few of the older people here and there,
+both men and women--but after all they shook hands like the rest!--knew
+perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were
+touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back
+at her with kind eyes.
+
+But of these last Marcella realised nothing. What she was saying to
+herself was that, if they knew little of her, she knew a great deal of
+many of them. In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton
+had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his
+division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the
+knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book--one
+of the numberless!--recently issued, on the state of the midland
+labourer. He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly
+on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the
+working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner.
+Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county
+before she met it in the flesh. She knew that a great many of these men
+who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their
+lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending. But
+there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly
+present to her than the improvements. In general, the people who
+thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members
+of a useless class. The nation would do away with them in time!
+Meanwhile it might at least be asked of them that they should practise
+their profession of landowning, such as it was, with greater conscience
+and intelligence--that they should not shirk its opportunities or idle
+them away. And she could point out those who did both--scandalously,
+intolerably. Once or twice she thought passionately of Minta Hurd,
+washing and mending all day, in her damp cottage; or of the Pattons in
+"the parish house," thankful after sixty years of toil for a hovel where
+the rain came through the thatch, and where the smoke choked you,
+unless, with the thermometer below freezing-point, you opened the door
+to the blast. Why should _these_ people have all the gay clothes, the
+flowers, the jewels, the delicate food--all the delight and all the
+leisure? And those, nothing! Her soul rose against what she saw as she
+stood there, going through her part. Wharton's very words, every
+inflection of his voice was in her ears, playing chorus to the scene.
+
+But when these first introductions, these little empty talks of three or
+four phrases apiece, and all of them alike, were nearly done with,
+Marcella looked eagerly round for Mary Harden. There she was, sitting
+quietly against the wall in a remote corner, her plain face all smiles,
+her little feet dancing under the white muslin frock which she had
+fashioned for herself with so much pain under Marcella's directions.
+Miss Raeburn was called away to find an arm-chair for some dowager of
+importance; Marcella took advantage of the break and of the end of a
+dance to hurry down the room to Mary. Aldous, who was talking to old Sir
+Charles Leven, Frank's father, a few steps off, nodded and smiled to her
+as he saw her move.
+
+"Have you been dancing, Mary?" she said severely.
+
+"I wouldn't for worlds! I never was so much amused in my life. Look at
+those girls--those sisters--in the huge velvet sleeves, like coloured
+balloons!--and that old lady in the pink tulle and diamonds.--I do so
+want to get her her cloak! _And_ those Lancers!--I never could have
+imagined people danced like that. They didn't dance them--they romped
+them! It wasn't beautiful--was it?"
+
+"Why do you expect an English crowd to do anything beautiful? If we
+could do it, we should be too ashamed."
+
+"But it _is_ beautiful, all the same, you scornful person!" cried Mary,
+dragging her friend down beside her. "How pretty the girls are! And as
+for the diamonds, I never saw anything so wonderful. I wish I could have
+made Charles come!"
+
+"Wouldn't he?"
+
+"No"--she looked a little troubled--"he couldn't think it would be
+quite right. But I don't know--a sight like this takes me off my feet,
+shakes me up, and does _me_ a world of good!"
+
+"You dear, simple thing!" said Marcella, slipping her hand into Mary's
+as it lay on the bench.
+
+"Oh, you needn't be so superior!" cried Mary,--"not for another year at
+least. I don't believe you are much more used to it than I am!"
+
+"If you mean," said Marcella, "that I was never at anything so big and
+splendid as this before, you are quite right."
+
+And she looked round the room with that curious, cold air of personal
+detachment from all she saw, which had often struck Mary, and to-night
+made her indignant.
+
+"Then enjoy it!" she said, laughing and frowning at the same time.
+"That's a much more plain duty for _you_ than it was for Charles to stay
+at home--there! Haven't you been dancing?"
+
+"No, Mr. Raeburn doesn't dance. But he thinks he can get through the
+next Lancers if I will steer him."
+
+"Then I shall find a seat where I can look at you," said Mary,
+decidedly. "Ah, there is Mr. Raeburn coming to introduce somebody to
+you. I knew they wouldn't let you sit here long."
+
+Aldous brought up a young Guardsman, who boldly asked Miss Boyce for the
+pleasure of a dance. Marcella consented; and off they swept into a room
+which was only just beginning to fill for the new dance, and where,
+therefore, for the moment the young grace of both had free play.
+Marcella had been an indefatigable dancer in the old London days at
+those students' parties, with their dyed gloves and lemonade suppers,
+which were running in her head now, as she swayed to the rhythm of this
+perfect band. The mere delight in movement came back to her; and while
+they danced, she danced with all her heart. Then in the pauses she would
+lean against the wall beside her partner, and rack her brain to find a
+word to say to him. As for anything that _he_ said, every word--whether
+of Ascot, or the last Academy, or the new plays, or the hunting and the
+elections--sounded to her more vapid than the last.
+
+Meanwhile Aldous stood near Mary Harden and watched the dancing figure.
+He had never seen her dance before. Mary shyly stole a look at him from
+time to time.
+
+"Well," he said at last, stooping to his neighbour, "what are you
+thinking of?"
+
+"I think she is a dream!" said Mary, flushing with the pleasure of being
+able to say it. They were great friends, he and she, and to-night
+somehow she was not a bit afraid of him.
+
+Aldous's eye sparkled a moment; then he looked down at her with a kind
+smile.
+
+"If you suppose I am going to let you sit here all night, you are very
+much mistaken. Marcella gave me precise instructions. I am going off
+this moment to find somebody."
+
+"Mr. Raeburn--don't!" cried Mary, catching at him. But he was gone, and
+she was left in trepidation, imagining the sort of formidable young man
+who was soon to be presented to her, and shaking at the thought of him.
+
+When the dance was over Marcella returned to Miss Raeburn, who was
+standing at the door into the corridor and had beckoned to her. She went
+through a number of new introductions, and declared to herself that she
+was doing all she could. Miss Raeburn was not so well satisfied.
+
+"Why can't she smile and chatter like other girls?" thought Aunt Neta,
+impatiently. "It's her 'ideas,' I suppose. What rubbish! There,
+now--just see the difference!"
+
+For at the moment Lady Winterbourne came up, and instantly Marcella was
+all smiles and talk, holding her friend by both hands, clinging to her
+almost.
+
+"Oh, do come here!" she said, leading her into a corner. "There's such a
+crowd, and I say all the wrong things. There!" with a sigh of relief.
+"Now I feel myself protected."
+
+"I mustn't keep you," said Lady Winterbourne, a little taken aback by
+her effusion. "Everybody is wanting to talk to you."
+
+"Oh, I know! There is Miss Raeburn looking at me severely already. But I
+must do as I like a little."
+
+"You ought to do as Aldous likes," said Lady Winterbourne, suddenly, in
+her deepest and most tragic voice. It seemed to her a moment had come
+for admonition, and she seized it hastily.
+
+Marcella stared at her in surprise. She knew by now that when Lady
+Winterbourne looked most forbidding she was in reality most shy. But
+still she was taken aback.
+
+"Why do you say that, I wonder?" she asked, half reproachfully. "I have
+been behaving myself quite nicely--I have indeed; at least, as nicely as
+I knew how."
+
+Lady Winterbourne's tragic air yielded to a slow smile.
+
+"You look very well, my dear. That white becomes you charmingly; so do
+the pearls. I don't wonder that Aldous always knows where you are."
+
+Marcella raised her eyes and caught those of Aldous fixed upon her from
+the other side of the room. She blushed, smiled slightly, and looked
+away.
+
+"Who is that tall man just gone up to speak to him?" she asked of her
+companion.
+
+"That is Lord Wandle," said Lady Winterbourne, "and his plain second
+wife behind him. Edward always scolds me for not admiring him. He says
+women know nothing at all about men's looks, and that Lard Wandle was
+the most splendid man of his time. But I always think it an unpleasant
+face."
+
+"Lord Wandle!" exclaimed Marcella, frowning. "Oh, _please_ come with me,
+dear Lady Winterbourne! I know he is asking Aldous to introduce him, and
+I won't--no I will _not_--be introduced to him."
+
+And laying hold of her astonished companion, she drew her hastily
+through a doorway near, walked quickly, still gripping her, through two
+connected rooms beyond, and finally landed her and herself on a sofa in
+Lord Maxwell's library, pursued meanwhile through all her hurried course
+by the curious looks of an observant throng.
+
+"That man!--no, that would really have been _too_ much!" said Marcella,
+using her large feather fan with stormy energy.
+
+"What _is_ the matter with you, my dear?" said Lady Winterbourne in her
+amazement; "and what is the matter with Lord Wandle?"
+
+"You must know!" said Marcella, indignantly. "Oh, you _must_ have seen
+that case in the paper last week--that _shocking_ case! A woman and two
+children died in one of his cottages of blood-poisoning--nothing in the
+world but his neglect--his _brutal_ neglect!" Her breast heaved; she
+seemed almost on the point of weeping. "The agent was appealed to--did
+nothing. Then the clergyman wrote to him direct, and got an answer. The
+answer was published. For cruel insolence I never saw anything like it!
+He ought to be in prison for manslaughter--and he comes _here_! And
+people laugh and talk with him!"
+
+She stopped, almost choked by her own passion. But the incident, after
+all, was only the spark to the mine.
+
+Lady Winterbourne stared at her helplessly.
+
+"Perhaps it isn't true," she suggested. "The newspapers put in so many
+lies, especially about _us_--the landlords. Edward says one ought never
+to believe them. Ah, here comes Aldous."
+
+Aldous, indeed, with some perplexity on his brow, was to be seen
+approaching, looking for his betrothed. Marcella dropped her fan and sat
+erect, her angry colour fading into whiteness.
+
+"My darling! I couldn't think what had become of you. May I bring Lord
+Wandle and introduce him to you? He is an old friend here, and my
+godfather. Not that I am particularly proud of the relationship," he
+said, dropping his voice as he stooped over her. "He is a soured,
+disagreeable fellow, and I hate many of the things he does. But it is an
+old tie, and my grandfather is tender of such things. Only a word or
+two; then I will get rid of him."
+
+"Aldous, I _can't_," said Marcella, looking up at him. "How could I? I
+saw that case. I must be rude to him."
+
+Aldous looked considerably disturbed.
+
+"It was very bad," he said slowly. "I didn't know you had seen it. What
+shall I do? I promised to go back for him."
+
+"Lord Wandle--Miss Boyce!" said Miss Raeburn's sharp little voice behind
+Aldous. Aldous, moving aside in hasty dismay, saw his aunt, looking very
+determined, presenting her tall neighbour, who bowed with old-fashioned
+deference to the girl on the sofa.
+
+Lady Winterbourne looked with trepidation at Marcella. But the social
+instinct held, to some extent. Ninety-nine women can threaten a scene of
+the kind Lady Winterbourne dreaded, for one that can carry it through.
+Marcella wavered; then, with her most forbidding air, she made a
+scarcely perceptible return of Lord Wandle's bow.
+
+"Did you escape in here out of the heat?" he asked her. "But I am afraid
+no one lets you escape to-night. The occasion is too interesting."
+
+Marcella made no reply. Lady Winterbourne threw in a nervous remark on
+the crowd.
+
+"Oh, yes, a great crush," said Lord Wandle. "Of course, we all come to
+see Aldous happy. How long is it, Miss Boyce, since you settled at
+Mellor?"
+
+"Six months."
+
+She looked straight before her and not at him as she answered, and her
+tone made Miss Raeburn's blood boil.
+
+Lord Wandle--a battered, coarsened, but still magnificent-looking man of
+sixty--examined the speaker an instant from half-shut eyes, then put up
+his hand to his moustache with a half-smile.
+
+"You like the country?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+As she spoke her reluctant monosyllable, the girl had really no
+conception of the degree of hostility expressed in her manner. Instead
+she was hating herself for her own pusillanimity.
+
+"And the people?"
+
+"Some of them."
+
+And straightway she raised her fierce black eyes to his, and the man
+before her understood, as plainly as any one need understand, that,
+whoever else Miss Boyce might like, she did not like Lord Wandle, and
+wished for no more conversation with him.
+
+Her interrogator turned to Aldous with smiling _aplomb_.
+
+"Thank you, my dear Aldous. Now let me retire. No one must _monopolise_
+your charming lady."
+
+And again he bowed low to her, this time with an ironical emphasis not
+to be mistaken, and walked away.
+
+Lady Winterbourne saw him go up to his wife, who had followed him at a
+distance, and speak to her roughly with a frown. They left the room, and
+presently, through the other door of the library which opened on the
+corridor, she saw them pass, as though they were going to their
+carriage.
+
+Marcella rose. She looked first at Miss Raeburn--then at Aldous.
+
+"Will you take me away?" she said, going up to him; "I am tired--take me
+to your room."
+
+He put her hand inside his arm, and they pushed their way through the
+crowd. Outside in the passage they met Hallin. He had not seen her
+before, and he put out his hand. But there was something distant in his
+gentle greeting which struck at this moment like a bruise on Marcella's
+quivering nerves. It came across her that for some time past he had made
+no further advances to her; that his first eager talk of friendship
+between himself and her had dropped; that his _acceptance_ of her into
+his world and Aldous's was somehow suspended--in abeyance. She bit her
+lip tightly and hurried Aldous along. Again the same lines of gay,
+chatting people along the corridor, and on either side of the wide
+staircase--greetings, introduction--a nightmare of publicity.
+
+"Rather pronounced--to carry him off like that," said a clergyman to his
+wife with a kindly smile, as the two tall figures disappeared along the
+upper gallery. "She will have him all to herself before long."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aldous shut the door of his sitting-room behind them. Marcella quickly
+drew her hand out of his arm, and going forward to the mantelpiece
+rested both elbows upon it and hid her face.
+
+He looked at her a moment in distress and astonishment, standing a
+little apart. Then he saw that she was crying. The colour flooded into
+his face, and going up to her he took her hand, which was all she would
+yield him, and, holding it to his lips, said in her ear every soothing
+tender word that love's tutoring could bring to mind. In his emotion he
+told himself and her that he admired and loved her the more for the
+incident downstairs, for the temper she had shown! She alone among them
+all had had the courage to strike the true stern Christian note. As to
+the annoyance such courage might bring upon him and her in the
+future--even as to the trouble it might cause his own dear folk--what
+real matter? In these things she should lead.
+
+What could love have asked better than such a moment? Yet Marcella's
+weeping was in truth the weeping of despair. This man's very sweetness
+to her, his very assumption of the right to comfort and approve her,
+roused in her a desperate stifled sense of bonds that should never have
+been made, and that now could not be broken. It was all plain to her at
+last. His touch had no thrill for her; his frown no terror. She had
+accepted him without loving him, coveting what he could give her. And
+now it seemed to her that she cared nothing for anything he could
+give!--that the life before her was to be one series of petty conflicts
+between her and a surrounding circumstance which must inevitably in the
+end be too strong for her, conflicts from which neither heart nor
+ambition could gain anything. She had desired a great position for what
+she might do with it. But could she do with it! She would be
+subdued--oh! very quickly!--to great houses and great people, and all
+the vapid pomp and idle toil of wealth. All that picture of herself,
+stooping from place and power, to bind up the wounds of the people, in
+which she had once delighted, was to her now a mere flimsy vulgarity.
+She had been shown other ideals--other ways--and her pulses were still
+swaying under the audacity--the virile inventive force of the showman.
+Everything she had once desired looked flat to her; everything she was
+not to have, glowed and shone. Poverty, adventure, passion, the joys of
+self-realisation--these she gave up. She would become Lady Maxwell, make
+friends with Miss Raeburn, and wear the family diamonds!
+
+Then, in the midst of her rage with herself and fate, she drew herself
+away, looked up, and caught full the eyes of Aldous Raeburn. Conscience
+stung and burned. What was this life she had dared to trifle with--this
+man she had dared to treat as a mere pawn in her own game? She gave way
+utterly, appalled at her own misdoing, and behaved like a penitent
+child. Aldous, astonished and alarmed by her emotions and by the wild
+incoherent things she said, won his way at last to some moments of
+divine happiness, when, leaving her trembling hand in his, she sat
+submissively beside him, gradually quieting down, summoning back her
+smiles and her beauty, and letting him call her all the fond names he
+would.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the
+drive home. Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella's imagination
+would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what
+spirit her mother had taken the evening--the first social festivity in
+which Richard Boyce's wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact,
+Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first public
+entry on Lord Maxwell's arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note
+of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several old
+acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first
+married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She had
+received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone
+away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to
+society by this great match that her daughter was making. Lady
+Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and
+both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in
+smoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watched
+Marcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did
+not see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to
+Hallin.
+
+Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxious
+to get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticing
+Marcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in the
+ball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done. Yet the mother
+_had_ observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhat
+different from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had been
+gentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken some
+pains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her. Lord
+Maxwell--ignorant of the Wandle incident--was charmed with her, and
+openly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his hearty
+old man's way. Only Miss Raeburn held indignantly aloof, and would not
+pretend, even to Mrs. Boyce.
+
+And now Marcella was tired--dead tired, she said to herself, both in
+mind and body. She lay back in the carriage, trying to sink herself in
+her own fatigue, to forget everything, to think of nothing. Outside the
+night was mild, and the moon clear. For some days past, after the break
+up of the long frost, there had been heavy rain. Now the rain had
+cleared away, and in the air there was already an early promise of
+spring. As she walked home from the village that afternoon she had felt
+the buds and the fields stirring.
+
+When they got home, Mrs. Boyce turned to her daughter at the head of the
+stairs, "Shall I unlace your dress, Marcella?"
+
+"Oh no, thank you. Can I help you?"
+
+"No. Good-night."
+
+"Mamma!" Marcella turned and ran after her. "I should like to know how
+papa is. I will wait here if you will tell me."
+
+Mrs. Boyce looked surprised. Then she went into her room and shut the
+door. Marcella waited outside, leaning against the old oak gallery which
+ran round the hall, her candle the one spot of light and life in the
+great dark house.
+
+"He seems to have slept well," said Mrs. Boyce, reappearing, and
+speaking under her breath. "He has not taken the opiate I left for him,
+so he cannot have been in pain. Good-night."
+
+Marcella kissed her and went. Somehow, in her depression of nerve and
+will, she was loth to go away by herself. The loneliness of the night,
+and of her wing of the house, weighed upon her; the noises made by the
+old boards under her steps, the rustling draughts from the dark passages
+to right and left startled and troubled her; she found herself
+childishly fearing lest her candle should go out.
+
+Yet, as she descended the two steps to the passage outside her door, she
+could have felt little practical need of it, for the moonlight was
+streaming in through its uncovered windows, not directly, but reflected
+from the Tudor front of the house which ran at right angles to this
+passage, and was to-night a shining silver palace, every battlement,
+window, and moulding in sharpest light and shade under the radiance of
+the night. Beneath her feet, as she looked out into the Cedar Garden,
+was a deep triangle of shadow, thrown by that part of the building in
+which she stood; and beyond the garden the barred black masses of the
+cedars closing up the view lent additional magic to the glittering
+unsubstantial fabric of the moonlit house, which was, as it were,
+embosomed and framed among them. She paused a moment, struck by the
+strangeness and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air of
+some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird
+gathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatiently
+longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and
+tumble into sleep.
+
+Yet she made no hurry. She fell on the first chair that offered. Her
+candle behind her had little power over the glooms of the dark
+tapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her own
+form, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straight
+in front of her. She sat with her hands round her knees, absently
+looking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of the
+darkness. But she was conscious of nothing save one mounting
+overwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.
+
+Mr. Wharton must go away--he _must_--or she could not bear it.
+
+Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender,
+rose and broke upon her. At last, physical weariness recalled her. She
+put up her hands to take off her pearls.
+
+As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head.
+Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her
+corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and
+opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.
+
+Steps surely--light steps--along the corridor outside, and on the
+staircase. Nor did they die away. She could still hear them,--as she
+sat, arrested, straining her ears,--pacing slowly along the lower
+passage.
+
+Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life. This room of
+hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that
+part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most
+persistently. Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor
+date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with
+some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century
+front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan.
+Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who
+was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least
+forty years before the staircase was made. None the less, no servant
+would go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark;
+and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep where
+she did. Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic,
+of steps, groans, lights in the library, and the rest. Marcella had
+consistently laughed at her.
+
+Yet all the same she had made in secret a very diligent pursuit of this
+ghost, settling in the end to a certain pique with him that he would not
+show himself to so ardent a daughter of the house. She had sat up
+waiting for him; she had lingered in the corridor outside, and on the
+stairs, expecting him. By the help of a favourite carpenter she had made
+researches into roofs, water-pipes, panelling, and old cupboards, in the
+hope of finding a practical clue to him. In vain.
+
+Yet here were the steps--regular, soft, unmistakable. The colour rushed
+back into her cheeks! Her eager healthy youth forgot its woes, flung off
+its weariness, and panted for an adventure, a discovery. Springing up,
+she threw her fur wrap round her again, and gently opened the door,
+listening.
+
+For a minute, nothing--then a few vague sounds as of something living
+and moving down below--surely in the library? Then the steps again.
+Impossible that it should be any one breaking in. No burglar would walk
+so leisurely. She closed her door behind her, and, gathering her white
+satin skirts about her, she descended the staircase.
+
+The corridor below was in radiant moonlight, chequered by the few pieces
+of old furniture it contained, and the black and white of the old
+portrait prints hanging on the walls. At first her seeking, excited eyes
+could make out nothing. Then in a flash they perceived the figure of
+Wharton at the further end near the garden door, leaning against one of
+the windows. He was apparently looking out at the moonlit house, and she
+caught the faint odour of a cigarette.
+
+Her first instinct was to turn and fly. But Wharton had seen her. As he
+looked about him at the sound of her approach, the moon, which was just
+rounding the corner of the house, struck on her full, amid the shadows
+of the staircase, and she heard his exclamation.
+
+Dignity--a natural pride--made her pause. She came forward slowly--he
+eagerly.
+
+"I heard footsteps," she said, with a coldness under which he plainly
+saw her embarrassment. "I could not suppose that anybody was still up,
+so I came down to see."
+
+He was silent a moment, scanning her with laughing eyes. Then he shook
+his head. "Confess you took me for the ghost?" he said.
+
+She hesitated; then must laugh too. She herself had told him the
+stories, so that his guess was natural.
+
+"Perhaps I did," she said. "One more disappointment! Good-night."
+
+He looked after her a quick undecided moment as she made a step in front
+of him, then at the half-burnt cigarette he held in his hand, threw the
+end away with a hasty gesture, overtook her and walked beside her along
+the corridor.
+
+"I heard you and your mother come in," he said, as though explaining
+himself. "Then I waited till I thought you must both be asleep, and came
+down here to look at that wonderful effect on the old house." He pointed
+to the silver palace outside. "I have a trick of being sleepless--a
+trick, too, of wandering at night. My own people know it, and bear with
+me, but I am abashed that you should have found me out. Just tell me--in
+one word--how the ball went?"
+
+He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenly
+wide-awake as though it were three o'clock in the afternoon instead of
+three in the morning.
+
+Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.
+
+"It went very well," she said perversely, putting her satin-slippered
+foot on the first step. "There were six hundred people upstairs, and
+four hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man.
+Everybody said it was splendid."
+
+His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her. As he had often frankly
+warned her, he was a man in quest of sensations. Certainly, in this
+strange meeting with Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, in the midst of the
+sleep-bound house, he had found one. Her eyes were heavy, her cheek
+pale. But in this soft vague light--white arms and neck now hidden, now
+revealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin--she was
+more enchanting than he had ever seen her. His breath quickened.
+
+He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him.
+What harm--to her or to Raeburn? Raeburn would have chances enough
+before long. Why admit his monopoly before the time? She was not in love
+with him! As to Mrs. Grundy--absurd! What in the true reasonableness of
+things was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well as
+by day?
+
+"One moment"--he said, delaying her. "You must be dead tired--too tired
+for romance. Else I should say to you, turn aside an instant and look at
+the library. It is a sight to remember."
+
+Inevitably she glanced behind her, and saw that the library door was
+ajar. He flung it open, and the great room showed wide, its high domed
+roof lost in shadow, while along the bare floor and up the latticed
+books crept, here streaks and fingers, and there wide breadths of light
+from the unshuttered and curtainless windows.
+
+"Isn't it the very poetry of night and solitude?" he said, looking in
+with her. "You love the place; but did you ever see it so lovable? The
+dead are here; you did right to come and seek them! Look at your
+namesake, in that ray. To-night she lives! She knows that is her husband
+opposite--those are her books beside her. And the rebel!"--he pointed
+smiling to the portrait of John Boyce. "When you are gone I shall shut
+myself up here--sit in his chair, invoke him--and put my speech
+together. I am nervous about to-morrow" (he was bound, as she knew, to a
+large Labour Congress in the Midlands, where he was to preside), "and
+sleep will make no terms with me. Ah!--how strange! Who can that be
+passing the avenue?"
+
+He made a step or two into the room, and put up his hand to his brow,
+looking intently. Involuntarily, yet with a thrill, Marcella followed.
+They walked to the window.
+
+"It is _Hurd_!" she cried in a tone of distress, pressing her face
+against the glass. "Out at this time, and with a gun! Oh, dear, dear!"
+
+There could be no question that it was Hurd. Wharton had seen him linger
+in the shadowy edge of the avenue, as though reconnoitring, and now, as
+he stealthily crossed the moonlit grass, his slouching dwarf's figure,
+his large head, and the short gun under his arm, were all plainly
+visible.
+
+"What do you suppose he is after?" said Wharton, still gazing, his hands
+in his pockets.
+
+"I don't know; he wouldn't poach on _our_ land; I'm sure he wouldn't!
+Besides, there is nothing to poach."--Wharton smiled.--"He must be
+going, after all, to Lord Maxwell's coverts! They are just beyond the
+avenue, on the side of the hill. Oh! it is too disappointing! Can we do
+anything?"
+
+She looked at her companion with troubled eyes. This incursion of
+something sadly and humanly real seemed suddenly to have made it natural
+to be standing beside him there at that strange hour. Her conscience was
+soothed.
+
+Wharton shook his head.
+
+"I don't see what we could do. How strong the instinct is! I told you
+that woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form--the squalid
+peasant's form--of the same instinct which sends the young fellows of
+our class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is the
+instinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one's
+innings against the powers that be--Nature, or the law, or convention."
+
+"I know all that--I never blame them!"--cried Marcella--"but just now it
+is so monstrous--so dangerous! Westall specially alert--and this gang
+about! Besides, I got him work from Lord Maxwell, and made him promise
+me--for the wife and children's sake."
+
+Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I should think Westall is right, and that the gang have got hold of
+him. It is what always happens. The local man is the catspaw.--So you
+are sorry for him--this man?" he said in another tone, facing round upon
+her.
+
+She looked astonished, and drew herself up nervously, turning at the
+same time to leave the room. But before she could reply he hurried on:
+
+"He--may escape his risk. Give your pity, Miss Boyce, rather to
+one--who has not escaped!"
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said, unconsciously laying a hand on
+one of the old chairs beside her to steady herself. "But it is too late
+to talk. Good-night, Mr. Wharton."
+
+"Good-bye," he said quietly, yet with a low emphasis, at the same time
+moving out of her path. She stopped, hesitating. Beneath the lace and
+faded flowers on her breast he could see how her heart beat.
+
+"Not good-bye? You are coming back after the meeting?"
+
+"I think not. I must not inflict myself--on Mrs. Boyce--any more. You
+will all be very busy during the next three weeks. It would be an
+intrusion if I were to come back at such a time--especially--considering
+the fact"--he spoke slowly--"that I am as distasteful as I now know
+myself to be, to your future husband. Since you all left to-night the
+house has been very quiet. I sat over the fire thinking. It grew clear
+to me. I must go, and go at once. Besides--a lonely man as I am must not
+risk his nerve. His task is set him, and there are none to stand by him
+if he fails."
+
+She trembled all over. Weariness and excitement made normal self-control
+almost impossible.
+
+"Well, then, I must say thank you," she said indistinctly, "for you have
+taught me a great deal."
+
+"You will unlearn it!" he said gaily, recovering his self-possession, so
+it seemed, as she lost hers. "Besides, before many weeks are over you
+will have heard hard things of me. I know that very well. I can say
+nothing to meet them. Nor should I attempt anything. It may sound
+brazen, but that past of mine, which I can see perpetually present in
+Aldous Raeburn's mind, for instance, and which means so much to his good
+aunt, means to me just nothing at all! The doctrine of identity must be
+true--I must be the same person I was then. But, all the same, what I
+did then does not matter a straw to me now. To all practical purposes I
+am another man. I was then a youth, idle, _desoeuvre_, playing with all
+the keys of life in turn. I have now unlocked the path that suits me.
+Its quest has transformed me--as I believe, ennobled me. I do not ask
+Raeburn or any one else to believe it. It is my own affair. Only, if we
+ever meet again in life, you and I, and you think you have reason to ask
+humiliation of me, do not ask it, do not expect it. The man you will
+have in your mind has nothing to do with me. I will not be answerable
+for his sins."
+
+As he said these things he was leaning lightly forward, looking up at
+her, his arms resting on the back of one of the old chairs, one foot
+crossed over the other. The attitude was easy calm itself. The
+tone--indomitable, analytic, reflective--matched it. Yet, all the same,
+her woman's instinct divined a hidden agitation, and, woman-like,
+responded to that and that only.
+
+"Mr. Raeburn will never tell me old stories about anybody," she said
+proudly. "I asked him once, out--out of curiosity--about you, and he
+would tell me nothing."
+
+"Generous!" said Wharton, drily. "I am grateful."
+
+"No!" cried Marcella, indignantly, rushing blindly at the outlet for
+emotion. "No!--you are not grateful; you are always judging him
+harshly--criticising, despising what he does."
+
+Wharton was silent a moment. Even in the moonlight she could see the
+reddening of his cheek.
+
+"So be it," he said at last. "I submit. You must know best. But you? are
+you always content? Does this _milieu_ into which you are passing always
+satisfy you? To-night, did your royalty please you? will it soon be
+enough for you?"
+
+"You know it is not enough," she broke out, hotly; "it is insulting that
+you should ask in that tone. It means that you think me a
+hypocrite!--and I have given you no cause--"
+
+"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed, interrupting her, and speaking in a
+low, hurried voice. "I had no motive, no reason for what I
+said--none--but this, that you are going--that we are parting. I spoke
+in gibes to make you speak--somehow to strike--to reach you. To-morrow
+it will be too late!"
+
+And before, almost, she knew that he had moved, he had stooped forward,
+caught a fold of her dress, pressed it to his lips, and dropped it.
+
+"Don't speak," he said brokenly, springing up, and standing before her
+in her path. "You shall forgive me--I will compel it! See! here we are
+on this moonlit space of floor, alone, in the night. Very probably we
+shall never meet again, except as strangers. Put off convention, and
+speak to me, soul to soul! You are not happy altogether in this
+marriage. I know it. You have as good as confessed it. Yet you will go
+through with it. You have given your word--your honour holds you. I
+recognise that it holds you. I say nothing, not a syllable, against your
+bond! But here, to-night, tell me, promise me that you will make this
+marriage of yours serve _our_ hopes and ends, the ends that you and I
+have foreseen together--that it shall be your instrument, not your
+chain. We have been six weeks together. You say you have learnt from me;
+you have! you have given me your mind, your heart to write on, and I
+have written. Henceforward you will never look at life as you might have
+done if I had not been here. Do you think I triumph, that I boast? Ah!"
+he drew in his breath--"What if in helping you, and teaching you--for I
+have helped and taught you!--I have undone myself? What if I came here
+the slave of impersonal causes, of ends not my own? What if I
+leave--maimed--in face of the battle? Not your fault? No, perhaps not!
+but, at least, you owe me some gentleness now, in these last words--some
+kindness in farewell."
+
+He came closer, held out his hands. With one of her own she put his
+back, and lifted the other dizzily to her forehead.
+
+"Don't come near me!" she said, tottering. "What is it? I cannot see.
+Go!"
+
+And guiding herself, as though blindfold, to a chair, she sank upon it,
+and her head dropped. It was the natural result of a moment of intense
+excitement coming upon nerves already strained and tried to their
+utmost. She fought desperately against her weakness; but there was a
+moment when all around her swam, and she knew nothing.
+
+Then came a strange awakening. What was this room, this weird light,
+these unfamiliar forms of things, this warm support against which her
+cheek lay? She opened her eyes languidly. They met Wharton's half in
+wonder. He was kneeling beside her, holding her. But for an instant she
+realised nothing except his look, to which her own helplessly replied.
+
+"Once!" she heard him whisper. "Once! Then nothing more--for ever."
+
+And stooping, slowly, deliberately, he kissed her.
+
+In a stinging flow, life, shame, returned upon her. She struggled to her
+feet, pushing him from her.
+
+"You dared," she said, "_dared_ such a thing!"
+
+She could say no more; but her attitude, fiercely instinct, through all
+her physical weakness, with her roused best self, was speech enough. He
+did not venture to approach her. She walked away. He heard the door
+close, hurrying steps on the little stairs, then silence.
+
+He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wall
+for some time. When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhair
+which had dropped from her dress.
+
+"That was a scene!" he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of his
+own hand. "It carries one back to the days of the Romantics. Was I
+Alfred de Musset?--and she George Sand? Did any of them ever taste a
+more poignant moment than I--when she--lay upon my breast? To be
+helpless--yet yield nothing--it challenged me! Yet I took no
+advantage--none. When she _looked_--when her eye, her _soul_, was, for
+that instant, mine, then!--Well!--the world has rushed with me since I
+saw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a quality
+again. What did I say?--how much did I mean? My God! how can I tell? I
+began as an actor, did I finish as a man?"
+
+He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron will
+quieting down each rebellious pulse.
+
+"That poacher fellow did me a good turn. _Dare_! the word galled. But,
+after all, what woman could say less? And what matter? I have held her
+in my arms, in a setting--under a moon--worthy of her. Is not life
+enriched thereby beyond robbery? And what harm? Raeburn is not injured.
+_She_ will never tell--and neither of us will ever forget. Ah!--what was
+that?"
+
+He walked quickly to the window. What he had heard had been a dull
+report coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of the
+avenue. As he reached the window it was followed by a second.
+
+"That poacher's gun?--no doubt!"--he strained his eyes in
+vain--"Collision perhaps--and mischief? No matter! I have nothing to do
+with it. The world is all lyric for me to-night. I can hear in it no
+other rhythm."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The night passed away. When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lying
+with wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it. Her candle still
+burnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallest
+desire for sleep. She had gone through shame and anguish. But she would
+have scorned to pity herself. Was it not her natural, inevitable
+portion?
+
+"I will tell Aldous everything--_everything_," she said to herself for
+the hundredth time, as the light penetrated. "Was _that_ only seven
+striking--_seven_--impossible!"
+
+She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the
+hours that must pass before she could see Aldous--put all to the touch.
+
+Suddenly she remembered Hurd--then old Patton.
+
+"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment--her
+passion to get away from herself. "Is he gone? This is the hour when old
+people die--the dawn. I will go and see--go at once."
+
+She sprang up. To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance,
+of social amends, however small, however futile--to propitiate herself,
+if but by a hairbreadth--this, no doubt, was the instinct at work. She
+dressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to make
+against the stiffness of her own young bones--glad of her hunger and
+faintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought and
+conquered.
+
+In a very short time she had passed quietly downstairs and through the
+hall, greatly to the amazement of William, who opened the front door for
+her. Once in the village road the damp raw air revived her greatly. She
+lifted her hot temples to it, welcoming the waves of wet mist that swept
+along the road, feeling her youth come back to her.
+
+Suddenly as she was nearing the end of a narrow bit of lane between
+high hedges, and the first houses of the village were in sight, she was
+stopped by a noise behind her--a strange unaccountable noise as of
+women's voices, calling and wailing. It startled and frightened her, and
+she stood in the middle of the road waiting.
+
+Then she saw coming towards her two women running at full speed, crying
+and shouting, their aprons up to their faces.
+
+"What is it? What is the matter?" she asked, going to meet them, and
+recognising two labourers' wives she knew.
+
+"Oh! miss--oh! miss!" said the foremost, too wrapt up in her news to be
+surprised at the sight of her. "They've just found him--they're bringin'
+ov 'im home; they've got a shutter from Muster Wellin! 'im at Disley
+Farm. It wor close by Disley wood they found 'em. And there's one ov 'is
+men they've sent off ridin' for the inspector--here he come, miss! Come
+out o' th' way!"
+
+They dragged her back, and a young labourer galloped past them on a farm
+colt, urging it on to its full pace, his face red and set.
+
+"Who is found?" cried Marcella--"What is it?"
+
+"Westall, miss--Lor' bless you--Shot him in the head they did--blowed
+his brains right out--and Charlie Dynes--oh! he's knocked about
+shamful--the doctor don't give no hopes of him. Oh deary--deary me! And
+we're goin' for Muster Harden--ee must tell the widder--or Miss
+Mary--none on us can!"
+
+"And who did it?" said Marcella, pale with horror, holding her.
+
+"Why the poachers, miss. Them as they've bin waitin' for all along--and
+they do say as Jim Hurd's in it. Oh Lord, oh Lord!"
+
+Marcella stood petrified, and let them hurry on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The lane was still again, save for the unwonted sounds coming from the
+groups which had gathered round the two women, and were now moving
+beside them along the village street a hundred yards ahead.
+
+Marcella stood in a horror of memory--seeing Hurd's figure cross the
+moonlit avenue from dark to dark. Where was he? Had he escaped? Suddenly
+she set off running, stung by the thought of what might have already
+happened under the eyes of that unhappy wife, those wretched children.
+
+As she entered the village, a young fellow ran up to her in breathless
+excitement. "They've got 'im, miss. He'd come straight home--'adn't made
+no attempt to run. As soon as Jenkins" (Jenkins was the policeman)
+"heared of it, ee went straight across to 'is house, an' caught 'im. Ee
+wor goin' to make off--'is wife 'ad been persuadin' ov 'im all night.
+But they've got him, miss, sure enough!"
+
+The lad's exultation was horrible. Marcella waved him aside and ran on.
+A man on horseback appeared on the road in front of her leading from
+Widrington to the village. She recognised Aldous Raeburn, who had
+checked his horse in sudden amazement as he saw her talking to the boy.
+
+"My darling! what are you here for? Oh! go home--go _home_!--out of
+this horrible business. They have sent for me as a magistrate. Dynes is
+alive--I _beg_ you!--go home!"
+
+She shook her head, out of breath and speechless with running. At the
+same moment she and he, looking to the right, caught sight of the crowd
+standing in front of Hurd's cottage.
+
+A man ran out from it, seeing the horse and its rider.
+
+"Muster Raeburn! Muster Raeburn! They've cotched 'im; Jenkins has got
+'im."
+
+"Ah!" said Aldous, drawing a long, stern breath; "he didn't try to get
+off then? Marcella!--you are not going there--to that house!"
+
+He spoke in a tone of the strongest remonstrance. Her soul rose in anger
+against it.
+
+"I am going to _her_" she said panting;--"don't wait."
+
+And she left him and hurried on.
+
+As soon as the crowd round the cottage saw her coming, they divided to
+let her pass.
+
+"She's quiet now, miss," said a woman to her significantly, nodding
+towards the hovel. "Just after Jenkins got in you could hear her crying
+out pitiful."
+
+"That was when they wor a-handcuffin' him," said a man beside her.
+
+Marcella shuddered.
+
+"Will they let me in?" she asked.
+
+"They won't let none ov _us_ in," said the man. "There's Hurd's sister,"
+and he pointed to a weeping woman supported by two others. "They've kep'
+her out. But here's the inspector, miss; you ask him."
+
+The inspector, a shrewd officer of long experience, fetched in haste
+from a mile's distance, galloped up, and gave his horse to a boy.
+
+Marcella went up to him.
+
+He looked at her with sharp interrogation. "You are Miss Boyce? Miss
+Boyce of Mellor?"
+
+"Yes, I want to go to the wife; I will promise not to get in your way."
+
+He nodded. The crowd let them pass. The inspector knocked at the door,
+which was cautiously unlocked by Jenkins, and the two went in together.
+
+"She's a queer one," said a thin, weasel-eyed man in the crowd to his
+neighbour. "To think o' her bein' in it--at this time o' day. You could
+see Muster Raeburn was a tellin' of her to go 'ome. But she's allus
+pampered them Hurds."
+
+The speaker was Ned Patton, old Patton's son, and Hurd's companion on
+many a profitable night-walk. It was barely a week since he had been out
+with Hurd on another ferreting expedition, some of the proceeds of which
+were still hidden in Patton's outhouse. But at the present moment he was
+one of the keenest of the crowd, watching eagerly for the moment when he
+should see his old comrade come out, trapped and checkmated, bound
+safely and surely to the gallows. The natural love of incident and
+change which keeps life healthy had been starved in him by his
+labourer's condition. This sudden excitement had made a brute of him.
+
+The man next him grimaced, and took his pipe out of his mouth a moment.
+
+"_She_ won't be able to do nothin' for 'im! There isn't a man nor boy
+in this 'ere place as didn't know as ee hated Westall like pison, and
+would be as like as not to do for 'im some day. That'll count agen 'im
+now terrible strong! Ee wor allus one to blab, ee wor."
+
+"Well, an' Westall said jus' as much!" struck in another voice; "theer
+wor sure to be a fight iv ever Westall got at 'im--on the job. You
+see--they may bring it in manslarter after all."
+
+"'Ow does any one know ee wor there at all? who seed him?" inquired a
+white-haired elderly man, raising a loud quavering voice from the middle
+of the crowd.
+
+"Charlie Dynes seed 'im," cried several together.
+
+"How do yer know ee seed 'im?"
+
+From the babel of voices which followed the white-haired man slowly
+gathered the beginnings of the matter. Charlie Dynes, Westall's
+assistant, had been first discovered by a horsekeeper in Farmer Wellin's
+employment as he was going to his work. The lad had been found under a
+hedge, bleeding and frightfully injured, but still alive. Close beside
+him was the dead body of Westall with shot-wounds in the head. On being
+taken to the farm and given brandy, Dynes was asked if he had recognised
+anybody. He had said there were five of them, "town chaps"; and then he
+had named Hurd quite plainly--whether anybody else, nobody knew. It was
+said he would die, and that Mr. Raeburn had gone to take his deposition.
+
+"An' them town chaps got off, eh?" said the elderly man.
+
+"Clean!" said Patton, refilling his pipe. "Trust them!"
+
+Meanwhile, inside this poor cottage Marcella was putting out all the
+powers of the soul. As the door closed behind her and the inspector, she
+saw Hurd sitting handcuffed in the middle of the kitchen, watched by a
+man whom Jenkins, the local policeman, had got in to help him, till some
+more police should arrive. Jenkins was now upstairs searching the
+bedroom. The little bronchitic boy sat on the fender, in front of the
+untidy fireless grate, shivering, his emaciated face like a yellowish
+white mask, his eyes fixed immovably on his father. Every now and then
+he was shaken with coughing, but still he looked--with the dumb devoted
+attention of some watching animal.
+
+Hurd, too, was sitting silent. His eyes, which seemed wider open and
+more brilliant than usual, wandered restlessly from thing to thing about
+the room; his great earth-stained hands in their fetters twitched every
+now and then on his knee. Haggard and dirty as he was, there was a
+certain aloofness, a dignity even, about the misshapen figure which
+struck Marcella strangely. Both criminal and victim may have it--this
+dignity. It means that a man feels himself set apart from his kind.
+
+Hurd started at sight of Marcella. "I want to speak to her," he said
+hoarsely, as the inspector approached him--"to that lady"--nodding
+towards her.
+
+"Very well," said the inspector; "only it is my duty to warn you that
+anything you say now will be taken down and used as evidence at the
+inquest."
+
+Marcella came near. As she stood in front of him, one trembling ungloved
+hand crossed over the other, the diamond in her engagement ring
+catching the light from the window sparkled brightly, diverting even for
+the moment the eyes of the little fellow against whom her skirts were
+brushing.
+
+"Ee might ha' killed me just as well as I killed 'im," said Hurd,
+bending over to her and speaking with difficulty from the dryness of his
+mouth. "I didn't mean nothink o' what happened. He and Charlie came on
+us round Disley Wood. He didn't take no notice o' them. It was they as
+beat Charlie. But he came straight on at me--all in a fury--a
+blackguardin' ov me, with his stick up. I thought he was for beatin' my
+brains out, an' I up with my gun and fired. He was so close--that was
+how he got it all in the head. But ee might 'a' killed me just as well."
+
+He paused, staring at her with a certain anguished intensity, as though
+he were watching to see how she took it--nay, trying its effect both on
+her and himself. He did not look afraid or cast down--nay, there was a
+curious buoyancy and steadiness about his manner for the moment which
+astonished her. She could almost have fancied that he was more alive,
+more of a _man_ than she had ever seen him--mind and body better fused,
+more at command.
+
+"Is there anything more you wish to say to me?" she asked him, after
+waiting.
+
+Then suddenly his manner changed. Their eyes met. Hers, with all their
+subtle inheritance of various expression, their realised character, as
+it were, searched his, tried to understand them--those peasant eyes, so
+piercing to her strained sense in their animal urgency and shame. _Why_
+had he done this awful thing?--deceived her--wrecked his wife?--that was
+what her look asked. It seemed to her too _childish_--too _stupid_ to be
+believed.
+
+"I haven't made nobbut a poor return to _you_, miss," he said in a
+shambling way, as though the words were dragged out of him. Then he
+threw up his head again. "But I didn't mean nothink o' what happened,"
+he repeated, doggedly going off again into a rapid yet, on the whole,
+vivid and consecutive account of Westall's attack, to which Marcella
+listened, trying to remember every word.
+
+"Keep that for your solicitor," the inspector said at last, interrupting
+him; "you are only giving pain to Miss Boyce. You had better let her go
+to your wife."
+
+Hurd looked steadily once more at Marcella. "It be a bad end I'm come
+to," he said, after a moment. "But I thank you kindly all the same.
+_They'll_ want seein' after." He jerked his head towards the boy, then
+towards the outhouse or scullery where his wife was. "She takes it
+terr'ble hard. She wanted me to run. But I said, 'No, I'll stan' it
+out.' Mr. Brown at the Court'll give you the bit wages he owes me. But
+they'll have to go on the Union. Everybody'll turn their backs on them
+now."
+
+"I will look after them," said Marcella, "and I will do the best I can
+for you. Now I will go to Mrs. Hurd."
+
+Minta Hurd was sitting in a corner of the outhouse on the clay floor,
+her head leaning against the wall. The face was turned upward, the eyes
+shut, the mouth helplessly open. When Marcella saw her, she knew that
+the unhappy woman had already wept so much in the hours since her
+husband came back to her that she could weep no more. The two little
+girls in the scantiest of clothing, half-fastened, sat on the floor
+beside her, shivering and begrimed--watching her. They had been crying
+at the tops of their voices, but were now only whimpering miserably, and
+trying at intervals to dry their tear-stained cheeks with the skirts of
+their frocks. The baby, wrapped in an old shawl, lay on its mother's
+knee, asleep and unheeded. The little lean-to place, full of odds and
+ends of rubbish, and darkened overhead by a string of damp clothes--was
+intolerably cold in the damp February dawn. The children were blue; the
+mother felt like ice as Marcella stooped to touch her. Outcast misery
+could go no further.
+
+The mother moaned as she felt Marcella's hand, then started wildly
+forward, straining her thin neck and swollen eyes that she might see
+through the two open doors of the kitchen and the outhouse.
+
+"They're not taking him away?" she said fiercely. "Jenkins swore to me
+they'd give me notice."
+
+"No, he's still there," said Marcella, her voice shaking. "The
+inspector's come. You shall have notice."
+
+Mrs. Hurd recognised her voice, and looked up at her in amazement.
+
+"You must put this on," said Marcella, taking off the short fur cape she
+wore. "You are perished. Give me the baby, and wrap yourself in it."
+
+But Mrs. Hurd put it away from her with a vehement hand.
+
+"I'm not cold, miss--I'm burning hot. He made me come in here. He said
+he'd do better if the children and I ud go away a bit. An' I couldn't go
+upstairs, because--because--" she hid her face on her knees.
+
+Marcella had a sudden sick vision of the horrors this poor creature must
+have gone through since her husband had appeared to her, splashed with
+the blood of his enemy, under that same marvellous moon which--
+
+Her mind repelled its own memories with haste. Moreover, she was aware
+of the inspector standing at the kitchen door and beckoning to her. She
+stole across to him so softly that Mrs. Hurd did not hear her.
+
+"We have found all we want," he said in his official tone, but under his
+breath--"the clothes anyway. We must now look for the gun. Jenkins is
+first going to take him off to Widrington. The inquest will be held
+to-morrow here, at 'The Green Man.' We shall bring him over." Then he
+added in another voice, touching his hat, "I don't like leaving you,
+miss, in this place. Shall Jenkins go and fetch somebody to look after
+that poor thing? They'll be all swarming in here as soon as we've gone."
+
+"No, I'll stay for a while. I'll look after her. They won't come in if
+I'm here. Except his sister--Mrs. Mullins--she may come in, of course,
+if she wants."
+
+The inspector hesitated.
+
+"I'm going now to meet Mr. Raeburn, miss. I'll tell him that you're
+here."
+
+"He knows," said Marcella, briefly. "Now are you ready?"
+
+He signed assent, and Marcella went back to the wife.
+
+"Mrs. Hurd," she said, kneeling on the ground beside her, "they're
+going."
+
+The wife sprang up with a cry and ran into the kitchen, where Hurd was
+already on his feet between Jenkins and another policeman, who were to
+convey him to the gaol at Widrington. But when she came face to face
+with her husband something--perhaps the nervous appeal in his strained
+eyes--checked her, and she controlled herself piteously. She did not
+even attempt to kiss him. With her eyes on the ground, she put her hand
+on his arm. "They'll let me come and see you, Jim?" she said, trembling.
+
+"Yes; you can find out the rules," he said shortly. "Don't let them
+children cry. They want their breakfast to warm them. There's plenty of
+coal. I brought a sack home from Jellaby's last night myself. Good-bye."
+
+"Now, march," said the inspector, sternly, pushing the wife back.
+
+Marcella put her arm round the shaking woman. The door opened; and
+beyond the three figures as they passed out, her eye passed to the
+waiting crowd, then to the misty expanse of common and the dark woods
+behind, still wrapped in fog.
+
+When Mrs. Hurd saw the rows of people waiting within a stone's throw of
+the door she shrank back. Perhaps it struck her, as it struck Marcella,
+that every face was the face of a foe. Marcella ran to the door as the
+inspector stepped out, and locked it after him. Mrs. Hurd, hiding
+herself behind a bit of baize curtain, watched the two policemen mount
+with Hurd into the fly that was waiting, and then followed it with her
+eyes along the bit of straight road, uttering sounds the while of low
+anguish, which wrung the heart in Marcella's breast. Looking back in
+after days it always seemed to her that for this poor soul the true
+parting, the true wrench between life and life, came at this moment.
+
+She went up to her, her own tears running over.
+
+"You must come and lie down," she said, recovering herself as quickly as
+possible. "You and the children are both starved, and you will want your
+strength if you are to help him. I will see to things."
+
+She put the helpless woman on the wooden settle by the fireplace,
+rolling up her cloak to make a pillow.
+
+"Now, Willie, you sit by your mother. Daisy, where's the cradle? Put the
+baby down and come and help me make the fire."
+
+The dazed children did exactly as they were told, and the mother lay
+like a log on the settle. Marcella found coal and wood under Daisy's
+guidance, and soon lit the fire, piling on the fuel with a lavish hand.
+Daisy brought her water, and she filled the kettle and set it on to
+boil, while the little girl, still sobbing at intervals like some little
+weeping automaton, laid the breakfast. Then the children all crouched
+round the warmth, while Marcella rubbed their cold hands and feet, and
+"mothered" them. Shaken as she was with emotion and horror, she was yet
+full of a passionate joy that this pity, this tendance was allowed to
+her. The crushing weight of self-contempt had lifted. She felt morally
+free and at ease.
+
+Already she was revolving what she could do for Hurd. It was as clear
+as daylight to her that there had been no murder but a free fight--an
+even chance between him and Westall. The violence of a hard and
+tyrannous man had provoked his own destruction--so it stood, for her
+passionate protesting sense. That at any rate must be the defence, and
+some able man must be found to press it. She thought she would write to
+the Cravens and consult them. Her thoughts carefully avoided the names
+both of Aldous Raeburn and of Wharton.
+
+She was about to make the tea when some one knocked at the door. It
+proved to be Hurd's sister, a helpless woman, with a face swollen by
+crying, who seemed to be afraid to come into the cottage, and afraid to
+go near her sister-in-law. Marcella gave her money, and sent her for
+some eggs to the neighbouring shop, then told her to come back in half
+an hour and take charge. She was an incapable, but there was nothing
+better to be done. "Where is Miss Harden?" she asked the woman. The
+answer was that ever since the news came to the village the rector and
+his sister had been with Mrs. Westall and Charlie Dyne's mother. Mrs.
+Westall had gone into fit after fit; it had taken two to hold her, and
+Charlie's mother, who was in bed recovering from pneumonia, had also
+been very bad.
+
+Again Marcella's heart contracted with rage rather than pity. Such wrack
+and waste of human life, moral and physical! for what? For the
+protection of a hateful sport which demoralised the rich and their
+agents, no less than it tempted and provoked the poor!
+
+When she had fed and physically comforted the children, she went and
+knelt down beside Mrs. Hurd, who still lay with closed eyes in
+heavy-breathing stupor.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Hurd," she said, "I want you to drink this tea and eat
+something."
+
+The half-stupefied woman signed refusal. But Marcella insisted.
+
+"You have got to fight for your husband's life," she said firmly, "and
+to look after your children. I must go in a very short time, and before
+I go you must tell me all that you can of this business. Hurd would tell
+you to do it. He knows and you know that I am to be trusted. I want to
+save him. I shall get a good lawyer to help him. But first you must take
+this--and then you must talk to me."
+
+The habit of obedience to a "lady," established long ago in years of
+domestic service, held. The miserable wife submitted to be fed, looked
+with forlorn wonder at the children round the fire, and then sank back
+with a groan. In her tension of feeling Marcella for an impatient moment
+thought her a poor creature. Then with quick remorse she put her arms
+tenderly round her, raised the dishevelled grey-streaked head on her
+shoulder, and stooping, kissed the marred face, her own lips quivering.
+
+"You are not alone," said the girl with her whole soul. "You shall never
+be alone while I live. Now tell me."
+
+She made the white and gasping woman sit up in a corner of the settle,
+and she herself got a stool and established herself a little way off,
+frowning, self-contained, and determined to make out the truth.
+
+"Shall I send the children upstairs?" she asked.
+
+"No!" said the boy, suddenly, in his husky voice, shaking his head with
+energy, "I'm not a-going."
+
+"Oh! he's safe--is Willie," said Mrs. Hurd, looking at him, but
+strangely, and as it were from a long distance, "and the others is too
+little."
+
+Then gradually Marcella got the story out of her--first, the misery of
+alarm and anxiety in which she had lived ever since the Tudley End raid,
+owing first to her knowledge of Hurd's connection with it, and with the
+gang that had carried it out; then to her appreciation of the quick and
+ghastly growth of the hatred between him and Westall; lastly, to her
+sense of ingratitude towards those who had been kind to them.
+
+"I knew we was acting bad towards you. I told Jim so. I couldn't hardly
+bear to see you come in. But there, miss,--I couldn't do anything. I
+tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried! There was never no happiness between
+us at last, I talked so. But I don't believe he could help himself--he's
+not made like other folks, isn't Jim--"
+
+Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech.
+Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and
+clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close. Gradually she
+made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his
+night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford
+gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over
+Westall's discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his
+restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth
+out of him by degrees. Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and
+estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his,
+lest affection should lose its miserable all.
+
+As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to
+Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had
+long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it
+than--suddenly--she would allow herself to say. For in the midst of her
+out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm
+herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell
+silent.
+
+"I don't know nothing about it, miss," she stubbornly declared at last,
+with an inconsequent absurdity which smote Marcella's pity afresh. "How
+am I to know? There was seven o' them Oxford fellows at Tudley End--that
+I know. Who's to say as Jim was with 'em at all last night? Who's to say
+as it wasn't them as--"
+
+She stopped, shivering. Marcella held her reluctant hand.
+
+"You don't know," she said quietly, "that I saw your husband in here for
+a minute before I came in to you, and that he told me, as he had already
+told Jenkins, that it was in a struggle with him that Westall was shot,
+but that he had fired in self-defence because Westall was attacking him.
+You don't know, too, that Charlie Dynes is alive, and says he saw
+Hurd--"
+
+"Charlie Dynes!" Mrs. Hurd gave a shriek, and then fell to weeping and
+trembling again, so that Marcella had need of patience.
+
+"If you can't help me more," she said at last in despair, "I don't know
+what we shall do. Listen to me. Your husband will be charged with
+Westall's murder. That I am sure of. He says it was not murder--that it
+happened in a fight. I believe it. I want to get a lawyer to prove it. I
+am your friend--you know I am. But if you are not going to help me by
+telling me what you know of last night I may as well go home--and get
+your sister-in-law to look after you and the children."
+
+She rose as she spoke. Mrs. Hurd clutched at her.
+
+"Oh, my God!" she said, looking straight before her vacantly at the
+children, who at once began to cry again. "_Oh, my God_! Look here,
+miss"--her voice dropped, her swollen eyes fixed themselves on
+Marcella--the words came out in a low, hurried stream--"It was just
+after four o'clock I heard that door turn; I got up in my nightgown and
+ran down, and there was Jim. 'Put that light out,' he says to me, sharp
+like. 'Oh, Jim,' says I, 'wherever have you been? You'll be the death o'
+me and them poor children!' 'You go to bed,' says he to me, 'and I'll
+come presently.' But I could see him, 'cos of the moon, almost as plain
+as day, an' I couldn't take my eyes off him. And he went about the
+kitchen so strange like, puttin' down his hat and takin' it up again,
+an' I saw he hadn't got his gun. So I went up and caught holt on him.
+An' he gave me a push back. 'Can't you let me alone?' he says; 'you'll
+know soon enough.' An' then I looked at my sleeve where I'd touched
+him--oh, my God! my God!"
+
+Marcella, white to the lips and shuddering too, held her tight. She had
+the _seeing_ faculty which goes with such quick, nervous natures, and
+she saw the scene as though she had been there--the moonlit cottage, the
+miserable husband and wife, the life-blood on the woman's sleeve.
+
+Mrs. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments
+of remembered talk. She told her husband's story of the encounter with
+the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and
+modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she
+described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide
+them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across
+country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business
+was known. But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of
+his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out.
+Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his
+deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so. But
+she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was
+coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he
+should go to bed and get some sleep. She would make a fool of him, and
+he should want all his wits. She followed him up the steep ladder to
+their room, weeping. And there was little Willie sitting up in bed,
+choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because
+of the voices below.
+
+"And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs
+and feet to warm them, an' I could hear him groanin'. And I says to him,
+'Jim, if you won't go for my sake, will you go for the boy's?' For you
+see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an' I thought he'd
+hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps,
+and off to the States. An' it seemed as though my head would burst with
+listening for people comin', and him taken up there like a rat in a
+trap, an' no way of provin' the truth, and everybody agen him, because
+of the things he'd said. And he burst out a-cryin', an' Willie cried.
+An' I came an' entreated of him. An' he kissed me; an' at last he said
+he'd go. An' I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an'
+just as he'd got to the foot of the stairs, an' I was holding little
+Willie in my arms an' saying good-bye to him--"
+
+She let her head sink against the settle. There was no more to say, and
+Marcella asked no more questions--she sat thinking. Willie stood, a
+wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoarse
+breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.
+
+Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door. She got up and looked
+through the casement window. The crowd had mostly dispersed, but a few
+people stood about on the green, and a policeman was stationed outside
+the cottage. On the steps stood Aldous Raeburn, his horse held behind
+him by a boy.
+
+She went and opened the door.
+
+"I will come," she said at once. "There--I see Mrs. Mullins crossing the
+common. Now I can leave her."
+
+Aldous, taking off his hat, closed the door behind him and stood with
+his hand on Marcella's arm, looking at the huddled woman on the settle,
+at the pale children. There was a solemnity in his expression, a mixture
+of judgment and pity which showed that the emotion of other scenes
+also--scenes through which he had just passed--was entering into it.
+
+"Poor unhappy souls," he said slowly, under his breath. "You say that
+you have got some one to see after her. She looks as though it might
+kill her, too."
+
+Marcella nodded. Now that her task, for the moment, was nearly over, she
+could hardly restrain herself nervously or keep herself from crying.
+Aldous observed her with disquiet as she put on her hat. His heart was
+deeply stirred. She had chosen more nobly for herself than he would have
+chosen for her, in thus daring an awful experience for the sake of
+mercy. His moral sense, exalted and awed by the sight of death,
+approved, worshipped her. His man's impatience pined to get her away, to
+cherish and comfort hen Why, she could hardly have slept three hours
+since they parted on the steps of the Court, amidst the crowd of
+carriages!
+
+Mrs. Mullins came in still scared and weeping, and dropping frightened
+curtseys to "Muster Raeburn." Marcella spoke to her a little in a
+whisper, gave some counsels which filled Aldous with admiration for the
+girl's practical sense and thoughtfulness, and promised to come again
+later. Mrs. Hurd neither moved nor opened her eyes.
+
+"Can you walk?" said Aldous, bending over her, as they stood outside the
+cottage. "I can see that you are worn out. Could you sit my horse if I
+led him?"
+
+"No, let us walk."
+
+They went on together, followed by the eyes of the village, the boy
+leading the horse some distance behind.
+
+"Where have you been?" said Marcella, when they had passed the village.
+"Oh, _please_ don't think of my being tired! I had so much rather know
+it all. I must know it all."
+
+She was deathly pale, but her black eyes flashed impatience and
+excitement. She even drew her hand out of the arm where Aldous was
+tenderly holding it, and walked on erect by herself.
+
+"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his
+deposition. He died while I was there."
+
+"He died?"
+
+"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he
+lived long enough, thank God, to give the information which will, I
+think, bring them to justice!"
+
+The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella's quivering
+nerves.
+
+"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in
+protecting your tame pheasants?"
+
+A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter
+sigh--the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as
+it were, one long scruple.
+
+"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not
+ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's
+bedside."
+
+They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep,
+inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack.
+At last he resumed:
+
+"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present
+case is surely clear--horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns
+among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition.
+They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing
+but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot
+dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and
+threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not
+brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"
+
+Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.
+
+"It was _not_ deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in
+Hurd's case. I have heard it all from his own mouth. It was a
+_struggle_--he might have been killed instead of Westall--Westall
+attacked, Hurd defended himself."
+
+Aldous shook his head.
+
+"Of course Hurd would tell you so," he said sadly, "and his poor wife.
+He is not a bad or vicious fellow, like the rest of the rascally pack.
+Probably when he came to himself, after the moment of rage, he could not
+simply believe what he had done. But that makes no difference. It was
+murder; no judge or jury could possibly take any other view. Dynes's
+evidence is clear, and the proof of motive is overwhelming."
+
+Then, as he saw her pallor and trembling, he broke off in deep distress.
+"My dear one, if I could but have kept you out of this!"
+
+They were alone in the misty road. The boy with the horse was out of
+sight. He would fain have put his arm round her, have consoled and
+supported her. But she would not let him.
+
+"Please understand," she said in a sort of gasp, as she drew herself
+away, "that I do _not_ believe Hurd is guilty--that I shall do my very
+utmost to defend him. He is to me the victim of unjust, abominable laws!
+If _you_ will not help me to protect him--then I must look to some one
+else."
+
+Aldous felt a sudden stab of suspicion--presentiment.
+
+"Of course he will be well defended; he will have every chance; that you
+may be sure of," he said slowly.
+
+Marcella controlled herself, and they walked on. As they entered the
+drive of Mellor, Aldous thought passionately of those divine moments in
+his sitting-room, hardly yet nine hours old. And now--_now_!--she walked
+beside him as an enemy.
+
+The sound of a step on the gravel in front of them made them look up.
+Past, present, and future met in the girl's bewildered and stormy sense
+as she recognised Wharton.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+The first sitting of the Birmingham Labour Congress was just over, and
+the streets about the hall in which it had been held were beginning to
+fill with the issuing delegates. Rain was pouring down and umbrellas
+were plentiful.
+
+Harry Wharton, accompanied by a group of men, left the main entrance of
+the hall,--releasing himself with difficulty from the friendly crowd
+about the doors--and crossed the street to his hotel.
+
+"Well, I'm glad you think I did decently," he said, as they mounted the
+hotel stairs. "What a beastly day, and how stuffy that hall was! Come in
+and have something to drink."
+
+He threw open the door of his sitting-room as he spoke. The four men
+with him followed him in.
+
+"I must go back to the hall to see two or three men before everybody
+disperses," said the one in front. "No refreshment for me, thank you,
+Mr. Wharton. But I want to ask a question--what arrangements have you
+made for the reporting of your speech?"
+
+The man who spoke was thin and dark, with a modest kindly eye. He wore a
+black frock coat, and had the air of a minister.
+
+"Oh, thank you, Bennett, it's all right. The _Post_, the _Chronicle_,
+and the _Northern Guardian_ will have full copies. I sent them off
+before the meeting. And my own paper, of course. As to the rest they may
+report it as they like. I don't care."
+
+"They'll all have it," said another man, bluntly. "It's the best speech
+you've ever made--the best president's speech we've had yet, I
+say,--don't you think so?"
+
+The speaker, a man called Casey, turned to the two men behind him. Both
+nodded.
+
+"Hallin's speech last year was first-rate," he continued, "but somehow
+Hallin damps you down, at least he did me last year; what you want just
+now is _fight_--and, my word! Mr. Wharton let 'em have it!"
+
+And standing with his hands on his sides, he glanced round from one to
+another. His own face was flushed, partly from the effects of a crowded
+hall and bad air, but mostly with excitement. All the men present
+indeed--though it was less evident in Bennett and Wharton than in the
+rest--had the bright nervous look which belongs to leaders keenly
+conscious of standing well with the led, and of having just emerged
+successfully from an agitating ordeal. As they stood together they went
+over the speech to which they had been listening, and the scene which
+had followed it, in a running stream of talk, laughter, and gossip.
+Wharton took little part, except to make a joke occasionally at his own
+expense, but the pleasure on his smiling lip, and in his roving,
+contented eye was not to be mistaken. The speech he had just delivered
+had been first thought out as he paced the moonlit library and corridor
+at Mellor. After Marcella had left him, and he was once more in his own
+room, he had had the extraordinary self-control to write it out, and
+make two or three machine-copies of it for the press. Neither its range
+nor its logical order had suffered for that intervening experience. The
+programme of labour for the next five years had never been better
+presented, more boldly planned, more eloquently justified. Hallin's
+presidential speech of the year before, as Casey said, rang flat in the
+memory when compared with it. Wharton knew that he had made a mark, and
+knew also that his speech had given him the whip-hand of some fellows
+who would otherwise have stood in his way.
+
+Casey was the first man to cease talking about the speech. He had
+already betrayed himself about it more than he meant. He belonged to the
+New Unionism, and affected a costume in character--fustian trousers,
+flannel shirt, a full red tie and work-man's coat, all well calculated
+to set off a fine lion-like head and broad shoulders. He had begun life
+as a bricklayer's labourer, and was now the secretary of a recently
+formed Union. His influence had been considerable, but was said to be
+already on the wane; though it was thought likely that he would win a
+seat in the coming Parliament.
+
+The other two men were Molloy, secretary to the congress, short,
+smooth-faced, and wiry, a man whose pleasant eye and manner were often
+misleading, since he was in truth one of the hottest fighting men of a
+fighting movement; and Wilkins, a friend of Casey's--ex-iron worker,
+Union official, and Labour candidate for a Yorkshire division--an
+uneducated, passionate fellow, speaking with a broad, Yorkshire accent,
+a bad man of affairs, but honest, and endowed with the influence which
+comes of sincerity, together with a gift for speaking and superhuman
+powers of physical endurance.
+
+"Well, I'm glad it's over," said Wharton, throwing himself into a chair
+with a long breath, and at the same time stretching out his hand to ring
+the bell. "Casey, some whisky? No? Nor you, Wilkins? nor Molloy? As for
+you, Bennett, I know it's no good asking you. By George! our
+grandfathers would have thought us a poor lot! Well, some coffee at any
+rate you must all of you have before you go back. Waiter! coffee. By the
+way, I have been seeing something of Hallin, Bennett, down in the
+country."
+
+He took out his cigarette case as he spoke, and offered it to the
+others. All refused except Molloy. Casey took his half-smoked pipe out
+of his pocket and lit up. He was not a teetotaler as the others were,
+but he would have scorned to drink his whisky and water at the expense
+of a "gentleman" like Wharton, or to smoke the "gentleman's" cigarettes.
+His class-pride was irritably strong. Molloy, who was by nature
+anybody's equal, took the cigarette with an easy good manners, which
+made Casey look at him askance.
+
+Mr. Bennett drew his chair close to Wharton's. The mention of Hallin had
+roused a look of anxiety in his quick dark eyes.
+
+"How is he, Mr. Wharton? The last letter I had from him he made light of
+his health. But you know he only just avoided a breakdown in that strike
+business. We only pulled him through by the skin of his teeth--Mr.
+Raeburn and I."
+
+"Oh, he's no constitution; never had, I suppose. But he seemed much as
+usual. He's staying with Raeburn, you know, and I've been staying with
+the father of the young lady whom Raeburn 's going to marry."
+
+"Ah! I've heard of that," said Bennett, with a look of interest. "Well,
+Mr. Raeburn isn't on our side, but for judgment and fair dealing there
+are very few men of his class and circumstances I would trust as I would
+him. The lady should be happy."
+
+"Of course," said Wharton, drily. "However, neither she nor Raeburn are
+very happy just at this moment. A horrible affair happened down there
+last night. One of Lord Maxwell's gamekeepers and a 'helper,' a lad of
+seventeen, were killed last night in a fight with poachers. I only just
+heard the outlines of it before I came away, but I got a telegram just
+before going into congress, asking me to defend the man charged with the
+murder."
+
+A quick expression of repulsion and disgust crossed Bennett's face.
+
+"There have been a whole crop of such cases lately," he said. "How shall
+we ever escape from the _curse_ of this game system?"
+
+"We shan't escape it," said Wharton, quietly, knocking the end off his
+cigarette, "not in your lifetime or mine. When we get more Radicals on
+the bench we shall lighten the sentences; but that will only exasperate
+the sporting class into finding new ways of protecting themselves. Oh!
+the man will be hung--that's quite clear to me. But it will be a good
+case--from the public point of view--will work up well--"
+
+He ran his hand through his curls, considering.
+
+"Will work up admirably," he added in a lower tone of voice, as though
+to himself, his eyes keen and brilliant as ever, in spite of the marks
+of sleeplessness and fatigue visible in the rest of the face, though
+only visible there since he had allowed himself the repose of his
+cigarette and arm-chair.
+
+"Are yo' comin' to dine at the 'Peterloo' to-night, Mr. Wharton?" said
+Wilkins, as Wharton handed him a cup of coffee; "but of coorse you
+are--part of yower duties, I suppose?"
+
+While Molloy and Casey were deep in animated discussion of the great
+meeting of the afternoon he had been sitting silent against the edge of
+the table--a short-bearded sombre figure, ready at any moment to make a
+grievance, to suspect a slight.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't," said Wharton, bending forward and speaking in a
+tone of concern; "that was just what I was going to ask you all--if you
+would make my excuses to-night? I have been explaining to Bennett. I
+have an important piece of business in the country--a labourer has been
+getting into trouble for shooting a keeper; they have asked me to defend
+him. The assizes come on in little more than a fortnight, worse luck! so
+that the time is short--"
+
+And he went on to explain that, by taking an evening train back to
+Widrington, he could get the following (Saturday) morning with the
+solicitor in charge of the case, and be back in Birmingham, thanks to
+the convenience of a new line lately opened, in time for the second
+meeting of the congress, which was fixed for the early afternoon.
+
+He spoke with great cordiality and persuasiveness. Among the men who
+surrounded him, his youth, good looks, and easy breeding shone out
+conspicuous. In the opinion of Wilkins, indeed, who followed his every
+word and gesture, he was far too well dressed and too well educated. A
+day would soon come when the labour movement would be able to show these
+young aristocrats the door. Not yet, however.
+
+"Well, I thowt you wouldn't dine with us," he said, turning away with a
+blunt laugh.
+
+Bennett's mild eye showed annoyance. "Mr. Wharton has explained himself
+very fully, I think," he said, turning to the others. "We shall miss him
+at dinner--but this matter seems to be one of life and death. And we
+mustn't forget anyway that Mr. Wharton is fulfilling this engagement at
+great inconvenience to himself. We none of us knew when we elected him
+last year that he would have to be fighting his election at the same
+time. Next Saturday, isn't it?"
+
+Bennett rose as he spoke and carefully buttoned his coat. It was curious
+to contrast his position among his fellows--one of marked ascendency and
+authority--with his small insignificant physique. He had a gentle
+deprecating eye, and the heart of a poet. He played the flute and
+possessed the gift of repeating verse--especially Ebenezer Eliot's Corn
+Law Rhymes--so as to stir a great audience to enthusiasm or tears. The
+Wesleyan community of his native Cheshire village owned no more
+successful class-leader, and no humbler Christian. At the same time he
+could hold a large business meeting sternly in check, was the secretary
+of one of the largest and oldest Unions in the country, had been in
+Parliament for years, and was generally looked upon even by the men who
+hated his "moderate" policy, as a power not to be ignored.
+
+"Next Saturday. Yes!" said Wharton, nodding in answer to his inquiry.
+
+"Well, are you going to do it?" said Casey, looking round at him.
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Wharton, cheerfully; "oh, yes! we shall do it. We shall
+settle old Dodgson, I think."
+
+"Are the Raeburns as strong as they were?" asked Molloy, who knew
+Brookshire.
+
+"What landlord is? Since '84 the ground is mined for them all--good and
+bad--and they know it."
+
+"The mine takes a long time blowing up--too long for my patience," said
+Wilkins, gruffly. "How the country can go on year after year paying its
+tribute to these plunderers passes my comprehension. But you may attack
+them as you please. You will never get any forrarder so long as
+Parliament and the Cabinet is made up of them and their hangers on."
+
+Wharton looked at him brightly, but silently, making a little assenting
+inclination of the head. He was not surprised that anything should pass
+Wilkins's comprehension, and he was determined to give him no opening
+for holding forth.
+
+"Well, we'll let you alone," said Bennett. "You'll have very little time
+to get off in. We'll make your excuses, Mr. Wharton. You may be sure
+everybody is so pleased with your speech we shall find them all in a
+good temper. It was grand!--let me congratulate you again. Good-night--I
+hope you'll get your poacher off!"
+
+The others followed suit, and they all took leave in character;--Molloy,
+with an eager business reference to the order of the day for
+Saturday,--"Give me your address at Widrington; I'll post you everything
+to-night, so that you may have it all under your eye"--Casey, with the
+off-hand patronage of the man who would not for the world have his
+benevolence mistaken for servility,--and Wilkins with as gruff a nod and
+as limp a shake of the hand as possible. It might perhaps have been read
+in the manner of the last two, that although this young man had just
+made a most remarkable impression, and was clearly destined to go far,
+they were determined not to yield themselves to him a moment before they
+must. In truth, both were already jealous of him; whereas Molloy,
+absorbed in the business of the congress, cared for nothing except to
+know whether in the next two days' debates Wharton would show himself as
+good a chairman as he was an orator; and Bennett, while saying no word
+that he did not mean, was fully conscious of an inner judgment, which
+pronounced five minutes of Edward Hallin's company to be worth more to
+him than anything which this brilliant young fellow could do or say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wharton saw them out, then came back and threw himself again into his
+chair by the window. The venetian blinds were not closed, and he looked
+out on a wide and handsome street of tall red-brick houses and shops,
+crowded with people and carriages, and lit with a lavishness of gas
+which overcame even the February dark and damp. But he noticed nothing,
+and even the sensation of his triumph was passing off. He was once more
+in the Mellor drive; Aldous Raeburn and Marcella stood in front of him;
+the thrill of the moment beat once more in his pulse.
+
+He buried his head in his hands and thought. The news of the murder had
+reached him from Mr. Boyce. The master of Mellor had heard the news from
+William, the man-servant, at half-past seven, and had instantly knocked
+up his guest, by way of sharing the excitement with which his own feeble
+frame was throbbing.
+
+"By Gad! I never heard such an _atrocious_ business," said the invalid,
+his thin hand shaking against his dressing-gown. "That's what your
+Radical notions bring us to! We shall have them plundering and burning
+the country houses next."
+
+"I don't think my Radical notions have much to do with it," said
+Wharton, composedly.
+
+But there was a red spot in his cheeks which belied his manner. So when
+he--_they_--saw Hurd cross the avenue he was on his way to this deed of
+blood. The shot that he, Wharton, had heard had been the shot which slew
+Westall? Probably. Well, what was the bearing of it? Could she keep her
+own counsel or would they find themselves in the witness box? The idea
+quickened his pulse amazingly.
+
+"Any clue? Any arrests?" he asked of his host. "Why, I told you," said
+Boyce, testily, though as a matter of fact he had said nothing. "They
+have got that man Hurd. The ruffian has been a marked man by the keepers
+and police, they tell me, for the last year or more. And there's my
+daughter has been pampering him and his wife all the time, and
+_preaching_ to me about them! She got Raeburn even to take him on at the
+Court. I trust it will be a lesson to her."
+
+Wharton drew a breath of relief. So the man was in custody, and there
+was other evidence. Good! There was no saying what a woman's conscience
+might be capable of, even against her friends and herself.
+
+When Mr. Boyce at last left him free to dress and make his preparations
+for the early train, by which the night before, after the ladies'
+departure for the ball, he had suddenly made up his mind to leave
+Mellor, it was some time before Wharton could rouse himself to action.
+The situation absorbed him. Miss Boyce's friend was now in imminent
+danger of his neck, and Miss Boyce's thoughts must be of necessity
+concentrated upon his plight and that of his family. He foresaw the
+passion, the _saeva indignatio_, that she must ultimately throw--the
+general situation being what it was--into the struggle for Hurd's life.
+Whatever the evidence might be, he would be to her either victim or
+champion--and Westall, of course, merely the Holofernes of the piece.
+
+How would Raeburn take it? Ah, well! the situation must develop. It
+occurred to him, however, that he would catch an earlier train to
+Widrington than the one he had fixed on, and have half an hour's talk
+with a solicitor who was a good friend of his before going on to
+Birmingham. Accordingly, he rang for William--who came, all staring and
+dishevelled, fresh from the agitation of the servants' hall--gave orders
+for his luggage to be sent after him, got as much fresh information as
+he could from the excited lad, plunged into his bath, and finally
+emerged, fresh and vigorous in every nerve, showing no trace whatever of
+the fact that two hours of broken sleep had been his sole portion for a
+night, in which he had gone through emotions and sustained a travail of
+brain either of which would have left their mark on most men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the meeting in the drive! How plainly he saw them both--Raeburn
+grave and pale, Marcella in her dark serge skirt and cap, with an eye
+all passion and a cheek white as her hand.
+
+"A tragic splendour enwrapped her!--a fierce heroic air. She was the
+embodiment of the moment--of the melancholy morning with its rain and
+leafless woods--of the human anguish throbbing in the little village.
+And I, who had seen her last in her festal dress, who had held her warm
+perfumed youth in my arms, who had watched in her white breast the
+heaving of the heart that I--_I_ had troubled!--how did I find it
+possible to stand and face her? But I did. It rushed through me at once
+_how_ I would make her forgive me--how I would regain possession of her.
+I had thought the play was closed: it was suddenly plain to me that the
+second act was but just beginning. She and Raeburn had already come to
+words--I knew it directly I saw them. This business will divide them
+more and more. His _conscience_ will come in--and a Raeburn's conscience
+is the devil!
+
+"By now he hates me; every word I speak to him--still more every word
+to her--galls him. But he controlled himself when I made him tell me the
+story--I had no reason to complain--though every now and then I could
+see him wince under the knowledge I must needs show of the persons and
+places concerned--a knowledge I could only have got from _her_. And she
+stood by meanwhile like a statue. Not a word, not a look, so far, though
+she had been forced to touch my hand. But my instinct saved me. I roused
+her--I played upon her! I took the line that I was morally certain
+_she_ had been taking in their _tete-a-tete_. Why not a scuffle?--a
+general scrimmage?--in which it was matter of accident who fell? The man
+surely was inoffensive and gentle, incapable of deliberate murder. And
+as to the evidence of hatred, it told both ways. He stiffened and was
+silent. What a fine brow he has--a look sometimes, when he is moved, of
+antique power and probity! But she--she trembled--animation came back.
+She would almost have spoken to me--but I did well not to prolong it--to
+hurry on."
+
+Then he took the telegram out of his pocket which had been put into his
+hands as he reached the hotel, his mouth quivering again with the
+exultation which he had felt when he had received it. It recalled to his
+ranging memory all the details of his hurried interview with the little
+Widrington solicitor, who had already scented a job in the matter of
+Hurd's defence. This man--needy, shrewd, and well equipped with local
+knowledge--had done work for Wharton and the party, and asked nothing
+better than to stand well with the future member for the division.
+"There is a lady," Wharton had said, "the daughter of Mr. Boyce of
+Mellor, who is already very much interested in this fellow and his
+family. She takes this business greatly to heart. I have seen her this
+morning, but had no time to discuss the matter with her. She will, I
+have little doubt, try to help the relations in the arrangements for the
+defence. Go to her this morning--tell her that the case has my
+sympathy--that, as she knows, I am a barrister, and, if she wishes it, I
+will defend Hurd. I shall be hard put to it to get up the case with the
+election coming on, but I will do it--for the sake of the public
+interest involved. You understand? Her father is a Tory--and she is just
+about to marry Mr. Raeburn. Her position, therefore, is difficult.
+Nevertheless, she will feel strongly--she does feel strongly about this
+case, and about the whole game system--and I feel moved to support her.
+She will take her own line, whatever happens. See her--see the wife,
+too, who is entirely under Miss Boyce's influence--and wire to me at my
+hotel at Birmingham. If they wish to make other arrangements, well and
+good. I shall have all the more time to give to the election."
+
+Leaving this commission behind him, he had started on his journey. At
+the end of it a telegram had been handed to him on the stairs of his
+hotel:
+
+"Have seen the lady, also Mrs. Hurd. You are urgently asked to undertake
+defence."
+
+He spread it out before him now, and pondered it. The bit of flimsy
+paper contained for him the promise of all he most coveted,--influence,
+emotion, excitement. "She will have returns upon herself," he thought
+smiling, "when I see her again. She will be dignified, resentful; she
+will suspect everything I say or do--still more, she will suspect
+herself. No matter! The situation is in my hands. Whether I succeed or
+fail, she will be forced to work with me, to consult with me--she will
+owe me gratitude. What made her consent?--she must have felt it in some
+sort a humiliation. Is it that Raeburn has been driving her to strong
+measures--that she wants, woman-like, to win, and thought me after all
+her best chance, and put her pride in her pocket? Or is it?--ah! one
+should put _that_ out of one's head. It's like wine--it unsteadies one.
+And for a thing like this one must go into training. Shall I write to
+her--there is just time now, before I start--take the lofty tone, the
+equal masculine tone, which I have noticed she likes?--ask her pardon
+for an act of madness--before we go together to the rescue of a life? It
+might do--it might go down. But no, I think not! Let the situation
+develop itself. Action and reaction--the unexpected--I commit myself to
+that. _She_--marry Aldous Raeburn in a month? Well, she may--certainly
+she may. But there is no need for me, I think, to take it greatly into
+account. Curious! twenty-four hours ago I thought it all done with--dead
+and done with. 'So like Provvy,' as Bentham used to say, when he heard
+of anything particularly unseemly in the way of natural catastrophe. Now
+to dine, and be off! How little sleep can I do with in the next
+fortnight?"
+
+He rang, ordered his cab, and then went to the coffee-room for some
+hasty food. As he was passing one of the small tables with which the
+room was filled, a man who was dining there with a friend recognised him
+and gave him a cold nod. Wharton walked on to the further end of the
+room, and, while waiting for his meal, buried himself in the local
+evening paper, which already contained a report of his speech.
+
+"Did you see that man?" asked the stranger of his friend.
+
+"The small young fellow with the curly hair?"
+
+"Small young fellow, indeed! He is the wiriest athlete I
+know--extraordinary physical strength for his size--and one of the
+cleverest rascals out as a politician. I am a neighbour of his in the
+country. His property joins mine. I knew his father--a little, dried-up
+old chap of the old school--very elegant manners and very
+obstinate--worried to death by his wife--oh, my goodness! such a woman!"
+
+"What's the name?" said the friend, interrupting.
+
+"Wharton--H.S. Wharton. His mother was a daughter of Lord Westgate, and
+_her_ mother was an actress whom the old lord married in his dotage.
+Lady Mildred Wharton was like Garrick, only natural when she was acting,
+which she did on every possible occasion. A preposterous woman! Old
+Wharton ought to have beaten her for her handwriting, and murdered her
+for her gowns. Her signature took a sheet of note-paper, and as for her
+dress I never could get out of her way. Whatever part of the room I
+happened to be in I always found my feet tangled in her skirts.
+Somehow, I never could understand how she was able to find so much stuff
+of one pattern. But it was only to make you notice her, like all the
+rest. Every bit of her was a pose, and the maternal pose was the worst
+of all."
+
+"H.S. Wharton?" said the other. "Why, that's the man who has been
+speaking here to-day. I've just been reading the account of it in the
+_Evening Star_. A big meeting--called by a joint committee of the
+leading Birmingham trades to consider the Liberal election programme as
+it affects labour--that's the man--he's been at it hammer and
+tongs--red-hot--all the usual devices for harrying the employer out of
+existence, with a few trifles--graduated income-tax and land
+nationalisation--thrown in. Oh! that's the man, is it?--they say he had
+a great reception--spoke brilliantly--and is certainly going to get into
+Parliament next week."
+
+The speaker, who had the air of a shrewd and prosperous manufacturer,
+put up his eyeglass to look at this young Robespierre. His
+_vis-a-vis_--a stout country gentleman who had been in the army and
+knocked about the world before coming into his estate--shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"So I hear--he daren't show his nose as a candidate in _our_ part of the
+world, though of course he does us all the harm he can. I remember a
+good story of his mother--she quarrelled with her husband and all her
+relations, his and hers, and then she took to speaking in public,
+accompanied by her dear boy. On one occasion she was speaking at a
+market town near us, and telling the farmers that as far as she was
+concerned she would like to see the big properties cut up to-morrow. The
+sooner her father's and husband's estates were made into small holdings
+stocked with public capital the better. After it was all over, a friend
+of mine, who was there, was coming home in a sort of omnibus that ran
+between the town and a neighbouring village. He found himself between
+two fat farmers, and this was the conversation--broad Lincolnshire, of
+course: 'Did tha hear Lady Mildred Wharton say them things, Willum?'
+'Aye, a did.' 'What did tha think, Willum?' 'What did _tha_ think,
+George?' 'Wal, _aa_ thowt Laady Mildred Wharton wor a graaet fule,
+Willum, if tha asks me.' 'I'll uphowd tha, George! I'll uphowd tha!'
+said the other, and then they talked no more for the rest of the
+journey."
+
+The friend laughed.
+
+"So it was from the dear mamma that the young man got his opinions?"
+
+"Of course. She dragged him into every absurdity she could from the time
+he was fifteen. When the husband died she tried to get the servants to
+come in to meals, but the butler struck. So did Wharton himself, who,
+for a Socialist, has always showed a very pretty turn for comfort. I am
+bound to say he was cut up when she died. It was the only time I ever
+felt like being civil to him--in those months after she departed. I
+suppose she was devoted to him--which after all is something."
+
+"Good heavens!" said the other, still lazily turning over the pages of
+the newspaper as they sat waiting for their second course, "here is
+another poaching murder--in Brookshire--the third I have noticed within
+a month. On Lord Maxwell's property--you know them?"
+
+"I know the old man a little--fine old fellow! They'll make him
+President of the Council, I suppose. He can't have much work left in
+him; but it is such a popular, respectable name. Ah! I'm sorry; the sort
+of thing to distress him terribly."
+
+"I see the grandson is standing."
+
+"Oh yes; will get in too. A queer sort of man--great ability and high
+character. But you can't imagine him getting on in politics, unless it's
+by sheer weight of wealth and family influence. He'll find a scruple in
+every bush--never stand the rough work of the House, or get on with the
+_men_. My goodness! you have to pull with some queer customers nowadays.
+By the way, I hear he is making an unsatisfactory marriage--a girl very
+handsome, but with no manners, and like nobody else--the daughter, too,
+of an extremely shady father. It's surprising; you'd have thought a man
+like Aldous Raeburn would have looked for the pick of things."
+
+"Perhaps it was she looked for the pick of things!" said the other, with
+a blunt laugh. "Waiter, another bottle of champagne."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Marcella was lying on the sofa in the Mellor drawing-room. The February
+evening had just been shut out, but she had told William not to bring
+the lamps till they were rung for. Even the fire-light seemed more than
+she could bear. She was utterly exhausted both in body and mind; yet, as
+she lay there with shut eyes, and hands clasped under her cheek, a start
+went through her at every sound in the house, which showed that she was
+not resting, but listening. She had spent the morning in the Hurds'
+cottage, sitting by Mrs. Hurd and nursing the little boy. Minta Hurd,
+always delicate and consumptive, was now generally too ill from shock
+and misery to be anywhere but in her bed, and Willie was growing
+steadily weaker, though the child's spirit was such that he would insist
+on dressing, on hearing and knowing everything about his father, and on
+moving about the house as usual. Yet every movement of his wasted bones
+cost him the effort of a hero, and the dumb signs in him of longing for
+his father increased the general impression as of some patient creature
+driven by Nature to monstrous and disproportionate extremity.
+
+The plight of this handful of human beings worked in Marcella like some
+fevering torture. She was wholly out of gear physically and morally.
+Another practically sleepless night, peopled with images of horror, had
+decreased her stock of sane self-control, already lessened by long
+conflict of feeling and the pressure of self-contempt. Now, as she lay
+listening for Aldous Raeburn's ring and step, she hardly knew whether to
+be angry with him for coming so late, or miserable that he should come
+at all. That there was a long score to settle between herself and him
+she knew well. Shame for an experience which seemed to her maiden sense
+indelible--both a weakness and a treachery--lay like a dull weight on
+heart and conscience. But she would not realise it, she would not act
+upon it. She shook the moral debate from her impatiently. Aldous should
+have his due all in good time--should have ample opportunity of deciding
+whether he would, after all, marry such a girl as she. Meanwhile his
+attitude with regard to the murder exasperated her. Yet, in some strange
+way it relieved her to be angry and sore with him--to have a grievance
+she could avow, and on which she made it a merit to dwell. His gentle,
+yet firm difference of opinion with her on the subject struck her as
+something new in him. It gave her a kind of fierce pleasure to fight it.
+He seemed somehow to be providing her with excuses--to be coming down to
+her level--to be equalling wrong with wrong.
+
+The door handle turned. At last! She sprang up. But it was only William
+coming in with the evening post. Mrs. Boyce followed him. She took a
+quiet look at her daughter, and asked if her headache was better, and
+then sat down near her to some needlework. During these two days she
+had been unusually kind to Marcella. She had none of the little feminine
+arts of consolation. She was incapable of fussing, and she never
+caressed. But from the moment that Marcella had come home from the
+village that morning, a pale, hollow-eyed wreck, the mother had asserted
+her authority. She would not hear of the girl's crossing the threshold
+again; she had put her on the sofa and dosed her with sal-volatile. And
+Marcella was too exhausted to rebel. She had only stipulated that a note
+should be sent to Aldous, asking him to come on to Mellor with the news
+as soon as the verdict of the coroner's jury should be given. The jury
+had been sitting all day, and the verdict was expected in the evening.
+
+Marcella turned over her letters till she came to one from a London firm
+which contained a number of cloth patterns. As she touched it she threw
+it aside with a sudden gesture of impatience, and sat upright.
+
+"Mamma! I have something to say to you."
+
+"Yes, my dear."
+
+"Mamma, the wedding must be put off!--it _must_!--for some weeks. I have
+been thinking about it while I have been lying here. How _can_ I?--you
+can see for yourself. That miserable woman depends on me altogether. How
+can I spend my time on clothing and dressmakers? I feel as if I could
+think of nothing else--nothing else in the world--but her and her
+children." She spoke with difficulty, her voice high and strained. "The
+assizes may be held that very week--who knows?--the very day we are
+married."
+
+She stopped, looking at her mother almost threateningly. Mrs. Boyce
+showed no sign of surprise. She put her work down.
+
+"I had imagined you might say something of the kind," she said after a
+pause. "I don't know that, from your point of view, it is unreasonable.
+But, of course, you must understand that very few people will see it
+from your point of view. Aldous Raeburn may--you must know best. But his
+people certainly won't; and your father will think it--"
+
+"Madness," she was going to say, but with her usual instinct for the
+moderate fastidious word she corrected it to "foolish."
+
+Marcella's tired eyes were all wilfulness and defiance.
+
+"I can't help it. I couldn't do it. I will tell Aldous at once. It must
+be put off for a month. And even that," she added with a shudder, "will
+be bad enough."
+
+Mrs. Boyce could not help an unperceived shrug of the shoulders, and a
+movement of pity towards the future husband. Then she said drily,--
+
+"You must always consider whether it is just to Mr. Raeburn to let a
+matter of this kind interfere so considerably with his wishes and his
+plans. He must, I suppose, be in London for Parliament within six
+weeks."
+
+Marcella did not answer. She sat with her hands round her knees lost in
+perplexities. The wedding, as originally fixed, was now three weeks and
+three days off. After it, she and Aldous were to have spent a short
+fortnight's honeymoon at a famous house in the north, lent them for the
+occasion by a Duke who was a cousin of Aldous's on the mother's side,
+and had more houses than he knew what to do with. Then they were to go
+immediately up to London for the opening of Parliament. The furnishing
+of the Mayfair house was being pressed on. In her new-born impatience
+with such things, Marcella had hardly of late concerned herself with it
+at all, and Miss Raeburn, scandalised, yet not unwilling, had been doing
+the whole of it, subject to conscientious worryings of the bride,
+whenever she could be got hold of, on the subject of papers and
+curtains.
+
+As they sat silent, the unspoken idea in the mother's mind was--"Eight
+weeks more will carry us past the execution." Mrs. Boyce had already
+possessed herself very clearly of the facts of the case, and it was her
+perception that Marcella was throwing herself headlong into a hopeless
+struggle--together with something else--a confession perhaps of a touch
+of greatness in the girl's temper, passionate and violent as it was,
+that had led to this unwonted softness of manner, this absence of
+sarcasm.
+
+Very much the same thought--only treated as a nameless horror not to be
+recognised or admitted--was in Marcella's mind also, joined however with
+another, unsuspected even by Mrs. Boyce's acuteness. "Very likely--when
+I tell him--he will not want to marry me at all--and of course I shall
+tell him."
+
+But not yet--certainly not yet. She had the instinctive sense that
+during the next few weeks she should want all her dignity with Aldous,
+that she could not afford to put herself at a disadvantage with him. To
+be troubled about her own sins at such a moment would be like the
+meanness of the lazy and canting Christian, who whines about saving his
+soul while he ought to be rather occupied with feeding the bodies of his
+wife and children.
+
+A ring at the front door. Marcella rose, leaning one hand on the end of
+the sofa--a long slim figure in her black dress--haggard and pathetic.
+
+When Aldous entered, her face was one question. He went up to her and
+took her hand.
+
+"In the case of Westall the verdict is one of 'Wilful Murder' against
+Hurd. In that of poor Charlie Dynes the court is adjourned. Enough
+evidence has been taken to justify burial. But there is news to-night
+that one of the Widrington gang has turned informer, and the police say
+they will have their hands on them all within the next two or three
+days."
+
+Marcella withdrew herself from him and fell back into the corner of the
+sofa. Shading her eyes with her hand she tried to be very composed and
+business-like.
+
+"Was Hurd himself examined?"
+
+"Yes, under the new Act. He gave the account which he gave to you and to
+his wife. But the Court--"
+
+"Did not believe it?"
+
+"No. The evidence of motive was too strong. It was clear from his own
+account that he was out for poaching purposes, that he was leading the
+Oxford gang, and that he had a gun while Westall was unarmed. He
+admitted too that Westall called on him to give up the bag of pheasants
+he held, and the gun. He refused. Then he says Westall came at him, and
+he fired. Dick Patton and one or two others gave evidence as to the
+language he has habitually used about Westall for months past."
+
+"Cowards--curs!" cried Marcella, clenching both her hands, a kind of sob
+in her throat.
+
+Aldous, already white and careworn, showed, Mrs. Boyce thought, a ray of
+indignation for an instant. Then he resumed steadily--
+
+"And Brown, our steward, gave evidence as to his employment since
+October. The coroner summed up carefully, and I think fairly, and the
+verdict was given about half-past six."
+
+"They took him back to prison?"
+
+"Of course. He comes before the magistrates on Thursday."
+
+"And you will be one!"
+
+The girl's tone was indescribable.
+
+Aldous started. Mrs. Boyce reddened with anger, and checking her
+instinct to intervene began to put away her working materials that she
+might leave them together. While she was still busy Aldous said:
+
+"You forget; no magistrate ever tries a case in which he is personally
+concerned. I shall take no part in the trial. My grandfather, of course,
+must prosecute."
+
+"But it will be a bench of landlords," cried Marcella; "of men with whom
+a poacher is already condemned."
+
+"You are unjust to us, I think," said Aldous, slowly, after a pause,
+during which Mrs. Boyce left the room--"to some of us, at any rate.
+Besides, as of course you know, the case will be simply sent on for
+trial at the assizes. By the way "--his tone changed--"I hear to-night
+that Harry Wharton undertakes the defence."
+
+"Yes," said Marcella, defiantly. "Is there anything to say against it?
+You wouldn't wish Hurd not to be defended, I suppose?"
+
+"Marcella!"
+
+Even her bitter mood was pierced by the tone. She had never wounded him
+so deeply yet, and for a moment he felt the situation intolerable; the
+surging grievance and reproach, with which his heart was really full,
+all but found vent in an outburst which would have wholly swept away his
+ordinary measure and self-control. But then, as he looked at her, it
+struck his lover's sense painfully how pale and miserable she was. He
+could not scold! But it came home to him strongly that for her own sake
+and his it would be better there should be explanations. After all
+things had been going untowardly for many weeks. His nature moved slowly
+and with much self-doubt, but it was plain to him now that he must make
+a stand.
+
+After his cry, her first instinct was to apologise. Then the words stuck
+in her throat. To her, as to him, they seemed to be close on a trial of
+strength. If she could not influence him in this matter--so obvious, as
+it seemed to her, and so near to her heart--what was to become of that
+lead of hers in their married life, on which she had been reckoning from
+the beginning? All that was worst in her and all that was best rose to
+the struggle.
+
+But, as he did not speak, she looked up at last.
+
+"I was waiting," he said in a low voice.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Waiting till you should tell me you did not mean what you said."
+
+She saw that he was painfully moved; she also saw that he was
+introducing something into their relation, an element of proud
+self-assertion, which she had never felt in it before. Her own vanity
+instantly rebelled.
+
+"I ought not to have said exactly what I did," she said, almost stifled
+by her own excitement, and making great efforts not to play the mere
+wilful child; "that I admit. But it has been clear to me from the
+beginning that--that"--her words hurried, she took up a book and
+restlessly lifted it and let it fall--"you have never looked at this
+thing justly. You have looked at the crime as any one must who is a
+landowner; you have never allowed for the provocation; you have not let
+yourself feel pity--"
+
+He made an exclamation.
+
+"Do you know where I was before I went into the inquest?"
+
+"No," she said defiantly, determined not to be impressed, feeling a
+childish irritation at the interruption.
+
+"I was with Mrs. Westall. Harden and I went in to see her. She is a
+hard, silent woman. She is clearly not popular in the village, and no
+one comes in to her. Her"--he hesitated--"her baby is expected before
+long. She is in such a state of shock and excitement that Clarke thinks
+it quite possible she may go out of her mind. I saw her sitting by the
+fire, quite silent, not crying, but with a wild eye that means mischief.
+We have sent in a nurse to help Mrs. Jellison watch her. She seems to
+care nothing about her boy. Everything that that woman most desired in
+life has been struck from her at a blow. Why? That a man who was in no
+stress of poverty, who had friends and employment, should indulge
+himself in acts which he knew to be against the law, and had promised
+you and his wife to forego, and should at the same time satisfy a wild
+beast's hatred against the man, who was simply defending his master's
+property. Have _you_ no pity for Mrs. Westall or her child?"
+
+He spoke as calmly as he could, making his appeal to reason and moral
+sense; but, in reality, every word was charged with electric feeling.
+
+"I _am_ sorry for her!" cried Marcella, passionately. "But, after all,
+how can one feel for the oppressor, or those connected with him, as one
+does for the victim?" He shook his head, protesting against the word,
+but she rushed on. "You do know--for I told you yesterday--how under the
+shelter of this _hateful_ game system Westall made Kurd's life a burden
+to him when he was a young man--how he had begun to bully him again this
+past year. We had the same sort of dispute the other day about that
+murder in Ireland. You were shocked that I would not condemn the
+Moonlighters who had shot their landlord from behind a hedge, as you
+did. You said the man had tried to do his duty, and that the murder was
+brutal and unprovoked. But I thought of the _system_--of the _memories_
+in the minds of the murderers. There _were_ excuses--he suffered for his
+father--I am not going to judge that as I judge other murders. So, when
+a Czar of Russia is blown up, do you expect one to think only of his
+wife and children? No! I will think of the tyranny and the revolt; I
+will pray, yes, _pray_ that I might have courage to do as they did! You
+may think me wild and mad. I dare say. I am made so. I shall always feel
+so!"
+
+She flung out her words at him, every limb quivering under the emotion
+of them. His cool, penetrating eye, this manner she had never yet known
+in him, exasperated her.
+
+"Where was the tyranny in this case?" he asked her quietly. "I agree
+with you that there are murders and murders. But I thought your point
+was that here was neither murder nor attack, but only an act of
+self-defence. That is Hurd's plea."
+
+She hesitated and stumbled. "I know," she said, "I know. I believe it.
+But, even if the attack had been on Hurd's part, I should still find
+excuses, because of the system, and because of Westall's hatefulness."
+
+He shook his head again.
+
+"Because a man is harsh and masterful, and uses stinging language, is he
+to be shot down like a dog?"
+
+There was a silence. Marcella was lashing herself up by thoughts of the
+deformed man in his cell, looking forward after the wretched,
+unsatisfied life, which was all society had allowed him, to the violent
+death by which society would get rid of him--of the wife yearning her
+heart away--of the boy, whom other human beings, under the name of law,
+were about to separate from his father for ever. At last she broke out
+thickly and indistinctly:
+
+"The terrible thing is that I cannot count upon you--that now I cannot
+make you feel as I do--feel with me. And by-and-by, when I shall want
+your help desperately, when your help might be everything--I suppose it
+will be no good to ask it."
+
+He started, and bending forward he possessed himself of both her
+hands--her hot trembling hands--and kissed them with a passionate
+tenderness.
+
+"What help will you ask of me that I cannot give? That would be hard to
+bear!"
+
+Still held by him, she answered his question by another:
+
+"Give me your idea of what will happen. Tell me how you think it will
+end."
+
+"I shall only distress you, dear," he said sadly.
+
+"No; tell me. You think him guilty. You believe he will be convicted."
+
+"Unless some wholly fresh evidence is forthcoming," he said reluctantly,
+"I can see no other issue."
+
+"Very well; then he will be sentenced to death. But, after sentence--I
+know--that man from Widrington, that solicitor told me--if--if strong
+influence is brought to bear--if anybody whose word counts--if Lord
+Maxwell and you, were to join the movement to save him--There is sure to
+be a movement--the Radicals will take it up. Will you do it--will you
+promise me now--for my sake?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+She looked at him, all her heart burning in her eyes, conscious of her
+woman's power too, and pressing it.
+
+"If that man is hung," she said pleadingly, "it will leave a mark on my
+life nothing will ever smooth out. I shall feel myself somehow
+responsible. I shall say to myself, if I had not been thinking about my
+own selfish affairs--about getting married--about the straw-plaiting--I
+might have seen what was going on. I might have saved these people, who
+have been my friends--my _real_ friends--from this horror."
+
+She drew her hands away and fell back on the sofa, pressing her
+handkerchief to her eyes. "If you had seen her this morning!" she said
+in a strangled voice. "She was saying, 'Oh, miss, if they do find him
+guilty, they can't hang him--not my poor deformed Jim, that never had a
+chance of being like the others. Oh, we'll beg so hard. I know there's
+many people will speak for him. He was mad, miss, when he did it. He'd
+never been himself, not since last winter, when we all sat and starved,
+and he was driven out of his senses by thinking of me and the children.
+You'll get Mr. Raeburn to speak--won't you, miss?--and Lord Maxwell? It
+was their game. I know it was their game. But they'll forgive him.
+They're such great people, and so rich--and we--we've always had such a
+struggle. Oh, the bad times we've had, and no one know! They'll try and
+get him off, miss? Oh, I'll go and _beg_ of them.'"
+
+She stopped, unable to trust her voice any further. He stooped over her
+and kissed her brow. There was a certain solemnity in the moment for
+both of them. The pity of human fate overshadowed them. At last he said
+firmly, yet with great feeling:
+
+"I will not prejudge anything, that I promise you. I will keep my mind
+open to the last. But--I should like to say--it would not be any easier
+to me to throw myself into an agitation for reprieve because this man
+was tempted to crime by _my_ property--on _my_ land. I should think it
+right to look at it altogether from the public point of view. The
+satisfaction of my own private compunctions--of my own private
+feelings--is not what I ought to regard. My own share in the
+circumstances, in the conditions which made such an act possible does
+indeed concern me deeply. You cannot imagine but that the moral problem
+of it has possessed me ever since this dreadful thing happened. It
+troubled me much before. Now, it has become an oppression--a torture. I
+have never seen my grandfather so moved, so distressed, in all my
+remembrance of him. Yet he is a man of the old school, with the old
+standards. As for me, if ever I come to the estate I will change the
+whole system, I will run no risks of such human wreck and ruin as
+this--"
+
+His voice faltered.
+
+"But," he resumed, speaking steadily again, "I ought to warn you that
+such considerations as these will not affect my judgment of this
+particular case. In the first place, I have no quarrel with capital
+punishment as such. I do not believe we could rightly give it up. Your
+attitude properly means that wherever we can legitimately feel pity for
+a murderer, we should let him escape his penalty. I, on the other hand,
+believe that if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would
+himself _claim_ his own death, as his best chance, his only chance--in
+this mysterious universe!--of self-recovery. Then it comes to this--was
+the act murder? The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears
+to me to be substantially just, and guided by it--"
+
+"You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the
+world," she interrupted wildly; "as if law were not made and
+administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the
+lawbreaker!"
+
+He looked troubled.
+
+"Ah, but _law_ is something beyond laws or those who administer them,"
+he said in a lower tone; "and the law--the _obligation-sense_--of our
+own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because
+it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to
+what it is, out of our own best life--ours, yet not ours--the best proof
+we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in
+ourselves of some diviner power than our own will--our best clue to what
+that power may be!"
+
+He spoke at first, looking away--wrestling out his thought, as it were,
+by himself--then turning back to her, his eyes emphasised the appeal
+implied, though not expressed, in what he said--intense appeal to her
+for sympathy, forbearance, mutual respect, through all acuteness of
+difference. His look both promised and implored.
+
+He bad spoken to her but very rarely or indirectly as yet of his own
+religious or philosophical beliefs. She was in a stage when such things
+interested her but little, and reticence in personal matters was so much
+the law of his life that even to her expansion was difficult. So
+that--inevitably--she was arrested, for the moment, as any quick
+perception must be, by the things that unveil character.
+
+Then an upheaval of indignant feeling swept the impression away. All
+that he said might be ideally, profoundly true--_but_--the red blood of
+the common life was lacking in every word of it! He ought to be
+incapable of saying it _now_. Her passionate question was, how could he
+_argue_--how could he hold and mark the ethical balance--when a _woman_
+was suffering, when _children_ were to be left fatherless? Besides--the
+ethical balance itself--does it not alter according to the hands that
+hold it--poacher or landlord, rich or poor?
+
+But she was too exhausted to carry on the contest in words. Both felt it
+would have to be renewed. But she said to herself secretly that Mr.
+Wharton, when he got to work, would alter the whole aspect of affairs.
+And she knew well that her vantage-ground as towards Aldous was strong.
+
+Then at last he was free to turn his whole attention for a little to her
+and her physical state, which made him miserable. He had never imagined
+that any one, vigorous and healthy as she was, could look so worn out in
+so short a time. She let him talk to her--lament, entreat, advise--and
+at last she took advantage of his anxiety and her admissions to come to
+the point, to plead that the marriage should be put off.
+
+She used the same arguments that she had done to her mother.
+
+"How can I bear to be thinking of these things?"--she pointed a shaking
+finger at the dress patterns lying scattered on the table--"with this
+agony, this death, under my eyes?"
+
+It was a great blow to him, and the practical inconveniences involved
+were great. But the fibre of him--of which she had just felt the
+toughness--was delicate and sensitive as her own, and after a very short
+recoil he met her with great chivalry and sweetness, agreeing that
+everything should be put off for six weeks, till Easter in fact. She
+would have been very grateful to him but that something--some secret
+thought--checked the words she tried to say.
+
+"I must go home then," he said, rising and trying to smile. "I shall
+have to make things straight with Aunt Neta, and set a great many
+arrangements in train. Now, you will _try_ to think of something else?
+Let me leave you with a book that I can imagine you will read."
+
+She let herself be tended and thought for. At the last, just as he was
+going, he said:
+
+"Have you seen Mr. Wharton at all since this happened?"
+
+His manner was just as usual. She felt that her eye was guilty, but the
+darkness of the firelit room shielded her.
+
+"I have not seen him since we met him in the drive. I saw the solicitor
+who is working up the case for him yesterday. He came over to see Mrs.
+Hurd and me. I had not thought of asking him, but we agreed that, if he
+would undertake it, it would be the best chance."
+
+"It _is_ probably the best chance," said Aldous, thoughtfully. "I
+believe Wharton has not done much at the Bar since he was called, but
+that, no doubt, is because he has had so much on his hands in the way of
+journalism and politics. His ability is enough for anything, and he will
+throw himself into this. I do not think Hurd could do better."
+
+She did not answer. She felt that he was magnanimous, but felt it
+coldly, without emotion.
+
+He came and stooped over her.
+
+"Good-night--good-night--tired child--dear heart! When I saw you in that
+cottage this morning I thought of the words, 'Give, and it shall be
+given unto you.' All that my life can do to pour good measure, pressed
+down, running over, into yours, I vowed you then!"
+
+When the door closed upon him, Marcella, stretched in the darkness, shed
+the bitterest tears that had ever yet been hers--tears which transformed
+her youth--which baptised her, as it were, into the fulness of our
+tragic life.
+
+She was still weeping when she heard the door softly opened. She sprang
+up and dried her eyes, but the little figure that glided in was not one
+to shrink from. Mary Harden came and sat down beside her.
+
+"I knew you would be miserable. Let me come and cry too. I have been my
+round--have seen them all--and I came to bring you news."
+
+"How has she taken--the verdict?" asked Marcella, struggling with her
+sobs, and succeeding at last in composing herself.
+
+"She was prepared for it. Charlie told her when he saw her after you
+left this afternoon that she must expect it."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"I shall soon hear, I suppose," said Marcella, in a hardening voice, her
+hands round her knees, "what Mr. Wharton is doing for the defence. He
+will appear before the magistrates, I suppose."
+
+"Yes; but Charlie thinks the defence will be mainly reserved. Only a
+little more than a fortnight to the assizes! The time is so short. But
+now this man has turned informer, they say the case is quite
+straightforward. With all the other evidence the police have there will
+be no difficulty in trying them all. Marcella!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Had there been light enough to show it, Mary's face would have revealed
+her timidity.
+
+"Marcella, Charlie asked me to give you a message. He begs you not
+to--not to make Mrs. Hurd hope too much. He himself believes there is no
+hope, and it is not kind."
+
+"Are you and he like all the rest," cried Marcella, her passion breaking
+out again, "only eager to have blood for blood?"
+
+Mary waited an instant.
+
+"It has almost broken Charlie's heart," she said at last; "but he thinks
+it was murder, and that Hurd will pay the penalty; nay, more "--she
+spoke with a kind of religious awe in her gentle voice--"that he ought
+to be glad to pay it. He believes it to be God's will, and I have heard
+him say that he would even have executions in public again--under
+stricter regulations of course--that we may not escape, as we always do
+if we can--from all sight and thought of God's justice and God's
+punishments."
+
+Marcella shuddered and rose. She almost threw Mary's hand away from her.
+
+"Tell your brother from me, Mary," she said, "that his God is to _me_
+just a constable in the service of the English game-laws! If He _is_
+such a one, I at least will fling my Everlasting No at him while I
+live."
+
+And she swept from the room, leaving Mary aghast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile there was consternation and wrath at Maxwell Court, where
+Aldous, on his return from Mellor, had first of all given his great-aunt
+the news of the coroner's verdict, and had then gone on to break to her
+the putting-off of the marriage. His championship of Marcella in the
+matter, and his disavowal of all grievance were so quiet and decided,
+that Miss Raeburn had been only able to allow herself a very modified
+strain of comment and remonstrance, so long as he was still there to
+listen. But she was all the more outspoken when he was gone, and Lady
+Winterbourne was sitting with her. Lady Winterbourne, who was at home
+alone, while her husband was with a married daughter on the Riviera, had
+come over to dine _tete-a-tete_ with her friend, finding it impossible
+to remain solitary while so much was happening.
+
+"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, shortly, as her guest entered the
+room, "I may as well tell you at once that Aldous's marriage is put
+off."
+
+"Put off!" exclaimed Lady Winterbourne, bewildered. "Why it was only
+Thursday that I was discussing it all with Marcella, and she told me
+everything was settled."
+
+"Thursday!--I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, stitching away with fiery
+energy, "but since then a poacher has murdered one of our gamekeepers,
+which makes all the difference."
+
+"What _do_ you mean, Agneta?"
+
+"What I say, my dear. The poacher was Marcella's friend, and she cannot
+now distract her mind from him sufficiently to marry Aldous, though
+every plan he has in the world will be upset by her proceedings. And as
+for his election, you may depend upon it she will never ask or know
+whether he gets in next Monday or no. That goes without saying. She is
+meanwhile absorbed with the poacher's defence, _Mr. Wharton_, of course,
+conducting it. This is your modern young woman, my dear--typical, I
+should think."
+
+Miss Raeburn turned her buttonhole in fine style, and at lightning
+speed, to show the coolness of her mind, then with a rattling of all her
+lockets, looked up and waited for Lady Winterbourne's reflections.
+
+"She has often talked to me of these people--the Hurds," said Lady
+Winterbourne, slowly. "She has always made special friends with them.
+Don't you remember she told us about them that day she first came back
+to lunch?"
+
+"Of course I remember! That day she lectured Maxwell, at first sight,
+on his duties. She began well. As for these people," said Miss Raeburn,
+more slowly, "one is, of course, sorry for the wife and children, though
+I am a good deal sorrier for Mrs. Westall, and poor, poor Mrs. Dynes.
+The whole affair has so upset Maxwell and me, we have hardly been able
+to eat or sleep since. I thought it made Maxwell look dreadfully old
+this morning, and with all that he has got before him too! I shall
+insist on sending for Clarke to-morrow morning if he does not have a
+better night. And now this postponement will be one more trouble--all
+the engagements to alter, and the invitations. _Really_! that girl."
+
+And Miss Raeburn broke off short, feeling simply that the words which
+were allowed to a well-bred person were wholly inadequate to her state
+of mind.
+
+"But if she feels it--as you or I might feel such a thing about some one
+we knew or cared for, Agneta?"
+
+"How can she feel it like that?" cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "How
+can she know any one of--of that class well enough? It is not seemly, I
+tell you, Adelaide, and I don't believe it is sincere. It's just done to
+make herself conspicuous, and show her power over Aldous. For other
+reasons too, if the truth were known!"
+
+Miss Raeburn turned over the shirt she was making for some charitable
+society and drew out some tacking threads with a loud noise which
+relieved her. Lady Winterbourne's old and delicate cheek had flushed.
+
+"I'm sure it's sincere," she said with emphasis. "Do you mean to say,
+Agneta, that one can't sympathise, in such an awful thing, with people
+of another class, as one would with one's own flesh and blood?"
+
+Miss Raeburn winced. She felt for a moment the pressure of a democratic
+world--a hated, formidable world--through her friend's question. Then
+she stood to her guns.
+
+"I dare say you'll think it sounds bad," she said stoutly; "but in my
+young days it would have been thought a piece of posing--of
+sentimentalism--something indecorous and unfitting--if a girl had put
+herself in such a position. Marcella _ought_ to be absorbed in her
+marriage; that is the natural thing. How Mrs. Boyce can allow her to mix
+herself with such things as this murder--to _live_ in that cottage, as I
+hear she has been doing, passes my comprehension."
+
+"You mean," said Lady Winterbourne, dreamily, "that if one had been very
+fond of one's maid, and she died, one wouldn't put on mourning for her.
+Marcella would."
+
+"I dare say," said Miss Raeburn, snappishly. "She is capable of anything
+far-fetched and theatrical."
+
+The door opened and Hallin came in. He had been suffering of late, and
+much confined to the house. But the news of the murder had made a deep
+and painful impression upon him, and he had been eagerly acquainting
+himself with the facts. Miss Raeburn, whose kindness ran with unceasing
+flow along the channels she allowed it, was greatly attached to him in
+spite of his views, and she now threw herself upon him for sympathy in
+the matter of the wedding. In any grievance that concerned Aldous she
+counted upon him, and her shrewd eyes had plainly perceived that he had
+made no great friendship with Marcella.
+
+"I am very sorry for Aldous," he said at once; "but I understand _her_
+perfectly. So does Aldous."
+
+Miss Raeburn was angrily silent. But when Lord Maxwell, who had been
+talking with Aldous, came in, he proved, to her final discomfiture, to
+be very much of the same opinion.
+
+"My dear," he said wearily as he dropped into his chair, his old face
+grey and pinched, "this thing is too terrible--the number of widows and
+orphans that night's work will make before the end breaks my heart to
+think of. It will be a relief not to have to consider festivities while
+these men are actually before the courts. What I am anxious about is
+that Marcella should not make herself ill with excitement. The man she
+is interested in will be hung, must be hung; and with her somewhat
+volatile, impulsive nature--"
+
+He spoke with old-fashioned discretion and measure. Then quickly he
+pulled himself up, and, with some trivial question or other, offered his
+arm to Lady Winterbourne, for Aldous had just come in, and dinner was
+ready.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Nearly three weeks passed--short flashing weeks, crowded with
+agitations, inward or outward, for all the persons of this story.
+
+After the inquiry before the magistrates--conducted, as she passionately
+thought, with the most marked animus on the part of the bench and police
+towards the prisoners--had resulted in the committal for trial of Hurd
+and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Raeburn a letter which
+hurt him sorely.
+
+"Don't come over to see me for a little while," it ran. "My mind is all
+given over to feelings which must seem to you--which, I know, do seem to
+you--unreasonable and unjust. But they are my life, and when they are
+criticised, or even treated coldly, I cannot bear it. When you are not
+there to argue with, I can believe, most sincerely, that you have a
+right to see this matter as you do, and that it is monstrous of me to
+expect you to yield to me entirely in a thing that concerns your sense
+of public duty. But don't come now--not before the trial. I will appeal
+to you if I think you can help me. I _know_ you will if you can. Mr.
+Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters,
+which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of
+the evidence."
+
+Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and difficulty.
+
+"I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a burden to
+you. You can hardly imagine that it is not grievous to me to think of
+any trouble of yours as being made worse by my being with you. But still
+I understand. One thing only I ask--that you should not imagine the
+difference between us greater than it is. The two letters you enclose
+have given me much to ponder. If only the course of the trial enables me
+with an honest heart to throw myself into your crusade of mercy, with
+what joy shall I come and ask you to lead me, and to forgive my own
+slower sense and pity!
+
+"I should like you to know that Hallin is very much inclined to agree
+with you, to think that the whole affair was a 'scrimmage,' and that
+Hurd at least ought to be reprieved. He would have come to talk it over
+with you himself, but that Clarke forbids him anything that interests or
+excites him for the present. He has been very ill and suffering for the
+last fortnight, and, as you know, when these attacks come on we try to
+keep everything from him that could pain or agitate him. But I see that
+this whole affair is very much on his mind, in spite of my efforts.
+
+"... Oh, my darling! I am writing late at night, with your letter open
+before me and your picture close to my hand. So many things rise in my
+mind to say to you. There will come a time--there _must!_--when I may
+pour them all out. Meanwhile, amid all jars and frets, remember this,
+that I have loved you better each day since first we met.
+
+"I will not come to Mellor then for a little while. My election, little
+heart as I have for it, will fill up the week. The nomination-day is
+fixed for Thursday and the polling for Monday."
+
+Marcella read the letter with a confusion of feeling so great as to be
+in itself monstrous and demoralising. Was she never to be simple, to see
+her way clearly again?
+
+As for him, as he rode about the lanes and beechwoods in the days that
+followed, alone often with that nature for which all such temperaments
+as Aldous Raeburn's have so secret and so observant an affection, he was
+perpetually occupied with this difficulty which had arisen between
+Marcella and himself, turning it over and over in the quiet of the
+morning, before the turmoil of the day began.
+
+He had followed the whole case before the magistrates with the most
+scrupulous care. And since then, he had twice run across the Widrington
+solicitor for the defence, who was now instructing Wharton. This man,
+although a strong Radical, and employed generally by his own side, saw
+no objection at all to letting Lord Maxwell's heir and representative
+understand how in his opinion the case was going. Aldous Raeburn was a
+person whom everybody respected; confidences were safe with him; and he
+was himself deeply interested in the affair. The Raeburns being the
+Raeburns, with all that that implied for smaller people in Brookshire,
+little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall's
+employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the
+defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was
+still his, Burridge's opinion, that everything that could be advanced
+would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came
+into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the
+only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can
+always be got up in a game-preserving case.
+
+"And is as a rule political and anti-landlord," thought Aldous, on one
+of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down. He foresaw
+exactly what would happen. As he envisaged the immediate future, he saw
+one figure as the centre of it--not Marcella, but Wharton! Wharton was
+defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for
+his own support and his grandfather's, through Marcella. To Wharton
+would belong not only the popular _kudos_ of the matter, but much more,
+and above all, Marcella's gratitude.
+
+Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the
+road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had
+asked Marcella to be his wife. The pale February sunlight was spreading
+from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant
+shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk
+plain. Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter
+birds from the branches round him. The place, the time, raised in him
+all the intensest powers of consciousness. He saw himself as the man
+_standing midway_ in everything--speculation, politics, sympathies--as
+the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the
+perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world. Wharton!
+He knew him--had read him long ago--read him afresh of late. Raeburn's
+lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not
+repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover. Here was he, banished
+from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and
+sympathies, busily forging a link--
+
+"It shall be _broken!_" said Raeburn to himself with a sudden fierce
+concentration of will. "So much I will claim--and enforce."
+
+But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence. He gathered
+himself together with a long breath, and went his way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in
+this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The
+moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane
+and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that
+they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like
+avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates crime"
+left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole
+rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had suffered
+all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he,
+more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was
+natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on
+Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and
+limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and
+responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.
+
+But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line
+between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life
+and action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers
+destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no
+difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the
+circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to
+be a murderer, no employer's interest, no landlord's desire for
+vengeance, would have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as
+he emphatically did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind
+more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would
+have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and
+compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere
+with a duty to justice and society.
+
+Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and
+compunctions.
+
+Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was
+conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of
+trouble of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment.
+Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal
+humility, and interfused with all--determining all--elements of
+judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which
+he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance
+and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the
+whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a
+strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed
+it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and
+distorted; none the less, _reality_ wins the day. So Hallin read it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a
+bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with,
+and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings,
+committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either
+man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything
+outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of
+intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a
+tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of
+anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.
+
+The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and
+jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after
+Easter--without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in
+village and county. And when the reason was known--that it was because
+Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that
+until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or
+reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there
+was curiously little sympathy with Marcella. Most of her own class
+thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss
+Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance
+anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive
+English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the
+bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.
+
+"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said
+old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his
+open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside.
+"_Not_ what I'd call lover-y. She don't want to run in harness, she
+don't, no sooner than, she need. She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."
+
+"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife, with her gentle
+sigh, "to hear summat o' that new straw-plaitin' she talk about. But
+nary a word. They do say as it's give up althegither."
+
+"No, she's took up wi' nursin' Minta Hurd--wonderful took up," said
+another woman. "They do say as Ann Mullins can't abear her. When she's
+there nobody can open their mouth. When that kind o' thing happens in
+the fambly it's bad enoof without havin' a lady trailin' about you all
+day long, so that you have to be mindin' yersel', an' thinkin' about
+givin' her a cheer, an' the like."
+
+One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella,
+coming from the Hurds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going
+home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.
+
+Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her
+relations, mainly, to do her justice, from fear lest she might somehow
+hurt or offend them. She had been to see Charlie Dynes's mother, but she
+had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary
+Harden to the keeper's widow.
+
+Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella
+came up with her.
+
+"Oh, she's _puddlin'_ along," she said in answer to Marcella's inquiry,
+using a word very familiar in the village. "She'll not do herself a
+mischief while there's Nurse Ellen an' me to watch her like a pair o'
+cats. She's dreadful upset, is Isabella--shouldn't ha' thought it of
+her. That fust day"--a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face--"no, I'm
+not a-goin' to think about that fust day, I'm not, 'tain't a ha'porth o'
+good," she added resolutely; "but she was all right when they'd let her
+get 'im 'ome, and wash an' settle 'im, an' put 'im comfortable like in
+his coffin. He wor a big man, miss, when he wor laid out! Searle, as
+made the coffin, told her as ee 'adn't made one such an extry size since
+old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen year ago. Ee'd soon a done for
+Jim Hurd if it 'ad been fists o' both sides. But guns is things as yer
+can't reckon on.".
+
+"Why didn't he let Hurd alone," said Marcella, sadly, "and prosecute him
+next day? It's attacking men when their blood is up that brings these
+awful hings about."
+
+"Wal, I don't see that," said Mrs. Jellison, pugnaciously; "he wor paid
+to do 't--an' he had the law on his side. 'Ow 's she?" she said,
+lowering her voice and jerking her thumb in the direction of the Hurds'
+cottage.
+
+"She's very ill," replied Marcella, with a contraction of the brow.
+"Dr. Clarke says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't."
+
+"They're a-goin' to try 'im Thursday?" said Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' Muster Wharton be a-goin' to defend 'im. Muster Wharton may be
+cliver, ee may--they do say as ee can see the grass growin', ee's that
+knowin'--but ee'll not get Jim Hurd off; there's nobody in the village
+as b'lieves for a moment as 'ow he will. They'll best 'im. Lor' bless
+yer, they'll best 'im. I was a-sayin' it to Isabella this
+afternoon--ee'll not save 'is neck, don't you be afeared."
+
+Marcella drew herself up with a shiver of repulsion.
+
+"Will it mend your daughter's grief to see another woman's heart broken?
+Don't you suppose it might bring her some comfort, Mrs. Jellison, if she
+were to try and forgive that poor wretch? She might remember that her
+husband gave him provocation, and that anyway, if his life is spared,
+his punishment and their misery will be heavy enough!"
+
+"Oh, lor' no!" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly. "She don't want to be
+forgivin' of 'im. Mr. Harden ee come talkin' to 'er, but she isn't one
+o' that sort, isn't Isabella. I'm sartin sure she'll be better in
+'erself when they've put 'im out o' the way. It makes her all ov a fever
+to think of Muster Wharton gettin' 'im off. _I_ don't bear Jim Hurd no
+pertickler malice. Isabella may talk herself black i' the face, but she
+and Johnnie'll have to come 'ome and live along o' me, whatever she may
+say. She can't stay in that cottage, cos they'll be wantin' it for
+another keeper. Lord Maxwell ee's givin' her a fine pension, my word ee
+is! an' says ee'll look after Johnnie. And what with my bit
+airnins--we'll do, yer know, miss--we'll do!"
+
+The old woman looked up with a nod, her green eyes sparkling with the
+queer inhuman light that belonged to them.
+
+Marcella could not bring herself to say good-night to her, and was
+hurrying on without a word, when Mrs. Jellison stopped her.
+
+"An' 'ow about that straw-plaitin', miss?" she said slyly.
+
+"I have had to put it on one side for a bit," said Marcella, coldly,
+hating the woman's society. "I have had my hands full and Lady
+Winterbourne has been away, but we shall, of course, take it up again
+later."
+
+She walked away quickly, and Mrs. Jellison hobbled after her, grinning
+to herself every now and then as she caught the straight, tall figure
+against the red evening sky.
+
+"I'll go in ter town termorrer," she thought, "an' have a crack wi'
+Jimmy Gedge; _ee_ needn't be afeard for 'is livin'. An' them great fules
+as ha' bin runnin' in a string arter 'er, an' cacklin' about their
+eighteen-pence a score, as I've told 'em times, I'll eat my apron the
+fust week as iver they get it. I don't hold wi' ladies--no, nor passons
+neither--not when it comes to meddlin' wi' your wittles, an' dictatin'
+to yer about forgivin' them as ha' got the better ov yer. That young
+lady there, what do she matter? That sort's allus gaddin' about? What'll
+she keer about us when she's got 'er fine husband? Here o' Saturday,
+gone o' Monday--that's what she is. Now Jimmy Gedge, yer kin allus count
+on '_im._ Thirty-six year ee ha' set there in that 'ere shop, and I
+guess ee'll set there till they call 'im ter kingdom come. Be's a
+cheatin', sweatin', greedy old skinflint is Jimmy Gedge; but when yer
+wants 'im yer _kin_ find 'im."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella hurried home, she was expecting a letter from Wharton, the
+third within a week. She had not set eyes on him since they had met that
+first morning in the drive, and it was plain to her that he was as
+unwilling as she was that there should be any meeting between them.
+Since the moment of his taking up the case, in spite of the pressure of
+innumerable engagements, he had found time to send her, almost daily,
+sheets covered with his small even writing, in which every detail and
+prospect of the legal situation, so far as it concerned James Hurd, were
+noted and criticised with a shrewdness and fulness which never wavered,
+and never lost for a moment the professional note.
+
+"Dear Miss Boyce"--the letters began--leading up to a "Yours
+faithfully," which Marcella read as carefully as the rest. Often, as she
+turned them over, she asked herself whether that scene in the library
+had not been a mere delusion of the brain, whether the man whose wild
+words and act had burnt themselves into her life could possibly be
+writing her these letters, in this key, without a reference, without an
+allusion. Every day, as she opened them, she looked them through quietly
+with a shaking pulse; every day she found herself proudly able to hand
+them on to her mother, with the satisfaction of one who has nothing to
+conceal, whatever the rest of the world may suspect. He was certainly
+doing his best to replace their friendship on that level of high
+comradeship in ideas and causes which, as she told herself, it had once
+occupied. His own wanton aggression and her weakness had toppled it down
+thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know
+him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He
+assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more
+be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!
+
+Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one
+long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted
+none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which
+she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
+Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and
+consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony,
+peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with
+the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse
+her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and
+body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to
+this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity
+in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards
+all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and
+sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and
+gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all
+comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when
+the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken
+his neck--and buried him"--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid
+pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in
+prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on
+Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they
+brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always
+thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings
+paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of
+a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a
+voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous
+things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of
+instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her
+to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would
+like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin'
+capital" for him; but she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he
+didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him;
+the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one
+can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming
+again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his
+chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a
+kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still
+survived. But it made _her_ life faint within her to talk of the
+murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's
+realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.
+When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was
+locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the
+bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this
+awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she
+left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once,
+and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann
+Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free
+heaven.
+
+As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the doctor
+said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an
+infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but
+always patient, always struggling to say his painful "thank you" when
+she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell
+Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and
+understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided
+from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his
+state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was
+strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.
+
+After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the
+February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole
+upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the
+swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and
+out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face
+kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.
+More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved
+upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its
+significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.
+Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion
+and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of
+all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid
+their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease;
+she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of
+soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the
+spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and
+tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or God? She would hardly let
+herself think of Aldous--though she _must_ think of him by-and-by! He
+and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in
+her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day,
+stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous
+would not help her--or not with any help worth having--in consoling this
+misery--binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a
+crime against him to confess--but she felt herself his superior none the
+less. If he cast her off--why then surely they would be quits, quits for
+good and all.
+
+As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled
+cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.
+
+Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and
+her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door
+William touched his cap to her.
+
+"Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss."
+
+She stopped sharply.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?"
+
+"In the drawing-room, miss."
+
+She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.
+Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent air
+Marcella knew so well.
+
+When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands,
+then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business
+errand and has no time to waste.
+
+"I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of spare
+hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going. You
+understand that the case comes on at the assizes next Thursday?"
+
+Marcella assented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the
+fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made
+Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her--but it was
+the only sign.
+
+"I should like to warn you," he said gravely, "that I entertain no hope
+whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best, but the verdict
+will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure to take a
+severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I believe it
+to be extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the judge,
+according to what I hear, will probably be against us. The prosecution
+have got together extremely strong evidence--as to Hurd's long
+connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness--as to his
+repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends
+were interrupted--and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and
+Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it."
+
+He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition
+and at some length; then he paused.
+
+"This being so," he resumed, "the question is, what can be done? There
+must be a petition. Amongst my own party I shall be, of course, able to
+do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without some at least
+of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one word--do you
+imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell to sign?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.
+
+"I will try," she said at last, with deliberation.
+
+"Then"--he took up his gloves--"there may be a chance for us. If you
+cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can
+be secured, others will easily follow. Their names--especially under all
+the circumstances--will carry a peculiar weight. I may say everything,
+in the first instance--the weight, the first effect of the
+petition--depends on them. Well, then, I leave it in your hands. No time
+should be lost after the sentence. As to the grounds of our plea, I
+shall, of course, lay them down in court to the best of my ability."
+
+"I shall be there," she interrupted.
+
+He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no
+comment.
+
+"Well, then," he resumed after a pause, "I need say no more for the
+present. How is the wife?"
+
+She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment
+passed between them.
+
+"And your election?" said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile
+eyes, as he got up to take leave.
+
+"To-morrow!" He threw up his hands with a little gesture of impatience.
+"That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the way, whatever
+happens. I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can carry me.
+Good-bye, Miss Boyce."
+
+Marcella went slowly upstairs. The scene which had just passed was
+unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering. Then the sound of the
+front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature. The first
+sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness. The next--her mind
+threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, "Can I, by any
+means, get my way with Aldous?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+"And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!" The deep-pitched words fell
+slowly on Marcella's ears, as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of
+the Widrington Assize Court. Women were sobbing beside and behind her.
+Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon against her sister-in-law,
+her face buried in Ann's black shawl. For an instant after Hurd's death
+sentence had been spoken Marcella's nerves ceased to throb--the long
+exhaustion of feeling stopped. The harsh light and shade of the ill-lit
+room; the gas-lamps in front of the judge, blanching the ranged faces of
+the jury; the long table of reporters below, some writing, but most
+looking intently towards the dock; the figure of Wharton opposite, in
+his barrister's gown and wig--that face of his, so small, nervous,
+delicate--the frowning eyebrows a dark bar under the white of the
+wig--his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon the judge; the heads and
+attitudes of the condemned men, especially the form of a fair-haired
+youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who stood a little in
+front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his dwarf's
+stature--these things Marcella saw indeed; for years after she could
+have described them point by point; but for some seconds or minutes her
+eyes stared at them without conscious reaction of the mind on the
+immediate spectacle.
+
+In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting
+there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the
+stream of impressions and images. The crushing accumulation of hostile
+evidence--witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning
+weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence--Wharton's irritation
+under it--the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his
+cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the
+personal success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical
+accomplishment of the manner, as one wrestling before his
+equals--nothing left here of the garrulous vigour and brutality of the
+labourers' meeting!--the masterly use of all that could avail, the few
+quiet words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by
+implication to the larger ethical sense of the community,--all this she
+thought of with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous
+voice rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity
+were alike weary; the brain asserted itself.
+
+The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and
+during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been
+largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the
+gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for
+East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer,
+sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only
+Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's
+murderer.
+
+On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh
+coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up
+sternly--"I cannot conceive why men and women--women especially--should
+come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but if I hear another
+laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose whole conscious nature
+was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw Aldous flush and shrink
+as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the court, she caught the
+eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county magistrate. At the
+judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where she and Aldous sat;
+then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly looked away again. She
+perfectly--passionately--understood that Brookshire was very sorry for
+Aldous Raeburn that day.
+
+The death sentences--three in number--were over. The judge was a very
+ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries with
+it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on voice
+and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could be
+felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women
+broke from the gallery.
+
+"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed, amid stifled
+sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly alive to
+everything around it.
+
+The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly
+pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about
+face towards a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed
+out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, stopped an
+instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery.
+Hurd also turned irresolutely.
+
+"Look!" exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside
+her, "he's goin'."
+
+Marcella bent forward. She, rather than the wife, caught the last look
+on his large dwarf's face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under
+the gas.
+
+Aldous touched her softly on the arm.
+
+"Yes," she said quickly, "yes, we must get her out. Ann, can you lift
+her?"
+
+Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman: Ann Mullins held her on
+the other. Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her
+long black cloak. The gallery made way for them; every one looked and
+whispered till they had passed. Below, at the foot of the stairs, they
+found themselves in a passage crowded with people--lawyers, witnesses,
+officials, mixed with the populace. Again a road was opened for Aldous
+and his charges.
+
+"This way, Mr. Raeburn," said a policeman, with alacrity. "Stand back,
+please! Is your carriage there, sir?"
+
+"Let Ann Mullins take her--put them into the cab--I want to speak to Mr.
+Wharton," said Marcella in Aldous's ear.
+
+"Get me a cab at once," he said to the policeman, "and tell my carriage
+to wait."
+
+"Miss Boyce!"
+
+Marcella turned hastily and saw Wharton beside her. Aldous also saw
+him, and the two men interchanged a few words.
+
+"There is a private room close by," said Wharton, "I am to take you
+there, and Mr. Raeburn will join us at once."
+
+He led her along a corridor, and opened a door to the left. They entered
+a small dingy room, looking through a begrimed window on a courtyard.
+The gas was lit, and the table was strewn with papers.
+
+"Never, never more beautiful!" flashed through Wharton's mind, "with
+that knit, strenuous brow--that tragic scorn for a base world--that
+royal gait--"
+
+Aloud he said:
+
+"I have done my best privately among the people I can get at, and I
+thought, before I go up to town to-night--you know Parliament meets on
+Monday?--I would show you what I had been able to do, and ask you to
+take charge of a copy of the petition." He pointed to a long envelope
+lying on the table. "I have drafted it myself--I think it puts all the
+points we can possibly urge--but as to the names--"
+
+He took out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
+
+"It won't do," he said, looking down at it, and shaking his head. "As I
+said to you, it is so far political merely. There is a very strong
+Liberal and Radical feeling getting up about the case. But that won't
+carry us far. This petition with these names is a demonstration against
+game preserving and keepers' tyranny. What we want is the co-operation
+of a _neighbourhood_, especially of its leading citizens. However, I
+explained all this to you--there is no need to discuss it. Will you look
+at the list?"
+
+Still holding it, he ran his finger over it, commenting here and there.
+She stood beside him; the sleeve of his gown brushed her black cloak;
+and under his perfect composure there beat a wild exultation in his
+power--without any apology, any forgiveness--to hold her there, alone
+with him, listening--her proud head stooped to his--her eye following
+his with this effort of anxious attention.
+
+She made a few hurried remarks on the names, but her knowledge of the
+county was naturally not very serviceable. He folded up the paper and
+put it back.
+
+"I think we understand," he said. "You will do what you can in the only
+quarter"--he spoke slowly--"that can really aid, and you will
+communicate with me at the House of Commons? I shall do what I can, of
+course, when the moment comes, in Parliament, and meanwhile I shall
+start the matter in the Press--our best hope. The Radical papers are
+already taking it up."
+
+There was a sound of steps in the passage outside. A policeman opened
+the door, and Aldous Raeburn entered. His quick look ran over the two
+figures standing beside the table.
+
+"I had some difficulty in finding a cab," he explained, "and we had to
+get some brandy; but she came round, and we got her off. I sent one of
+our men with her. The carriage is here."
+
+He spoke--to Marcella--with some formality. He was very pale, but there
+was both authority and tension in his bearing.
+
+"I have been consulting with Miss Boyce," said Wharton, with equal
+distance of manner, "as to the petition we are sending up to the Home
+Office."
+
+Aldous made no reply.
+
+"One word, Miss Boyce,"--Wharton quietly turned to her. "May I ask you
+to read the petition carefully, before you attempt to do anything with
+it? It lays stress on the _only_ doubt that can reasonably be felt after
+the evidence, and after the judge's summing up. That particular doubt I
+hold to be entirely untouched by the trial; but it requires careful
+stating--the issues may easily be confused."
+
+"Will you come?" said Aldous to Marcella. What she chose to think the
+forced patience of his tone exasperated her.
+
+"I will do everything I can," she said in a low, distinct voice to
+Wharton. "Good-bye."
+
+She held out her hand. To both the moment was one of infinite meaning;
+to her, in her high spiritual excitement, a sacrament of pardon and
+gratitude--expressed once for all--by this touch--in Aldous Raeburn's
+presence.
+
+The two men nodded to each other. Wharton was already busy, putting his
+papers together.
+
+"We shall meet next week, I suppose, in the House?" said Wharton,
+casually. "Good-night."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Will you take me to the Court?" said Marcella to Aldous, directly the
+door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping crowd that
+almost filled the little market-place of Widrington, the horses moved
+off. "I told mamma, that, if I did not come home, I should be with you,
+and that I should ask you to send me back from the Court to-night."
+
+She still held the packet Wharton had given her in her hand. As though
+for air, she had thrown back the black gauze veil she had worn all
+through the trial, and, as they passed through the lights of the town,
+Aldous could see in her face the signs--the plain, startling signs--of
+the effect of these weeks upon her. Pale, exhausted, yet showing in
+every movement the nervous excitement which was driving her on--his
+heart sank as he looked at her--foreseeing what was to come.
+
+As soon as the main street had been left behind, he put his head out of
+the window, and gave the coachman, who had been told to go to Mellor,
+the new order.
+
+"Will you mind if I don't talk?" said Marcella, when he was again beside
+her. "I think I am tired out, but I might rest now a little. When we get
+to the Court, will you ask Miss Raeburn to let me have some food in her
+sitting-room? Then, at nine o'clock or so, may I come down and see Lord
+Maxwell and you--together?"
+
+What she said, and the manner in which she said it, could only add to
+his uneasiness; but he assented, put a cushion behind her, wrapped the
+rugs round her, and then sat silent, train after train of close and
+anxious thought passing through his mind as they rolled along the dark
+roads.
+
+When they arrived at Maxwell Court, the sound of the carriage brought
+Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn at once into the hall.
+
+Aldous went forward in front of Marcella. "I have brought Marcella," he
+said hastily to his aunt. "Will you take her upstairs to your
+sitting-room, and let her have some food and rest? She is not fit for
+the exertion of dinner, but she wishes to speak to my grandfather
+afterwards."
+
+Lord Maxwell had already hurried to meet the black-veiled figure
+standing proudly in the dim light of the outer hall.
+
+"My dear! my dear!" he said, drawing her arm within his, and patting her
+hand in fatherly fashion. "How worn-out you look!--Yes,
+certainly--Agneta, take her up and let her rest--And you wish to speak
+to me afterwards? Of course, my dear, of course--at any time."
+
+Miss Raeburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of Aldous's
+manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest upstairs
+straightway, put her on the sofa in a cheerful sitting-room with a
+bright fire, and then, shrewdly guessing that she herself could not
+possibly be a congenial companion to the girl at such a moment, whatever
+might have happened or might be going to happen, she looked at her
+watch, said that she must go down to dinner, and promptly left her to
+the charge of a kind elderly maid, who was to do and get for her
+whatever she would.
+
+Marcella made herself swallow some food and wine. Then she said that she
+wished to be alone and rest for an hour, and would come downstairs at
+nine o'clock. The maid, shocked by her pallor, was loth to leave her,
+but Marcella insisted.
+
+When she was left alone she drew herself up to the fire and tried hard
+to get warm, as she had tried to eat. When in this way a portion of
+physical ease and strength had come back to her, she took out the
+petition from its envelope and read it carefully. As she did so her lip
+relaxed, her eye recovered something of its brightness. All the points
+that had occurred to her confusedly, amateurishly, throughout the day,
+were here thrown into luminous and admirable form. She had listened to
+them indeed, as urged by Wharton in his concluding speech to the jury,
+but it had not, alas! seemed so marvellous to her then, as it did now,
+that, _after_ such a plea, the judge should have summed up as he did.
+
+When she had finished it and had sat thinking awhile over the declining
+fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss Raeburn's
+desk, and wrote on it:
+
+"Will you read this--and Lord Maxwell--before I come down? I forgot that
+you had not seen it.--M."
+
+A ring at the bell brought the maid.
+
+"Will you please get this taken to Mr. Raeburn? And then, don't disturb
+me again for half an hour."
+
+And for that time she lay in Miss Raeburn's favourite chair, outwardly
+at rest. Inwardly she was ranging all her arguments, marshalling all her
+forces.
+
+When the chiming clock in the great hall below struck nine, she got up
+and put the lamp for a moment on the mantelpiece, which held a mirror.
+She had already bathed her face and smoothed her hair. But she looked at
+herself again with attention, drew down the thick front waves of hair a
+little lower on the white brow, as she liked to have them, and once
+more straightened the collar and cuffs which were the only relief to her
+plain black dress.
+
+The house as she stepped out into it seemed very still. Perfumed breaths
+of flowers and pot-pourri ascended from the hall. The pictures along the
+walls as she passed were those same Caroline and early Georgian beauties
+that had so flashingly suggested her own future rule in this domain on
+the day when Aldous proposed to her.
+
+She felt suddenly very shrinking and lonely as she went downstairs. The
+ticking of a large clock somewhere--the short, screaming note of Miss
+Raeburn's parrot in one of the ground-floor rooms--these sounds and the
+beating of her own heart seemed to have the vast house to themselves.
+
+No!--that was a door opening--Aldous coming to fetch her. She drew a
+childish breath of comfort.
+
+He sprang up the stairs, two or three steps at a time, as he saw her
+coming.
+
+"Are you rested--were they good to you? Oh! my precious one!--how pale
+you are still! Will you come and see my--grandfather now? He is quite
+ready."
+
+She let him lead her in. Lord Maxwell was standing by his writing-table,
+leaning over the petition which was open before him--one hand upon it.
+At sight of her he lifted his white head. His fine aquiline face was
+grave and disturbed. But nothing could have been kinder or more courtly
+than his manner as he came towards her.
+
+"Sit down in that chair. Aldous, make her comfortable. Poor child, how
+tired she looks! I hear you wished to speak to me on this most unhappy,
+most miserable business."
+
+Marcella, who was sitting erect on the edge of the chair into which
+Aldous had put her, lifted her eyes with a sudden confidence. She had
+always liked Lord Maxwell.
+
+"Yes," she said, struggling to keep down eagerness and emotion. "Yes, I
+came to bring you this petition, which is to be sent up to the Home
+Secretary on behalf of Jim Hurd, and--and--to _beg_ of you and Aldous to
+sign it, if in any way you can. I know it will be difficult, but I
+thought I might--I might be able to suggest something to you--to
+convince you--as I have known these people so well--and it is very
+important to have your signatures."
+
+How crude it sounded--how mechanical! She felt that she had not yet
+command of herself. The strange place, the stately room, the
+consciousness of Aldous behind her--Aldous, who should have been on her
+side and was not--all combined to intimidate her.
+
+Lord Maxwell's concern was evident. In the first place, he was
+painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker. Why, what
+had Aldous been about? So thin! so frail and willowy in her black
+dress--monstrous!
+
+"My dear," he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly hand on her
+shoulder, "my dear, I wish I could make you understand how gladly I
+would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably could. I would
+do it for your sake and for your grandfather's sake. But--this is a
+matter of conscience, of public duty, both for Aldous and myself. You
+will not surely _wish_ even, that we should be governed in our relations
+to it by any private feeling or motive?"
+
+"No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about it--and I
+take such a different view from Aldous. He knows--everybody must
+know--that there is another side, another possible view from that which
+the judge took. You weren't in court to-day, were you, at all?"
+
+"No. But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great care,
+and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed
+everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of
+Mr. Wharton's speeches."
+
+"Aldous!"--her voice broke irrepressibly into another note--"I thought
+he would have let me speak to you first!--to-night!"
+
+Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.
+Aldous bent over her chair.
+
+"You remember," he said, "you sent down the petition. I thought that
+meant that we were to read and discuss it. I am very sorry."
+
+She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow. But already
+she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.
+
+"The whole point lies in this," she said, looking up: "_Can_ we believe
+Hurd's own story? There is no evidence to corroborate it. I grant
+that--the judge did not believe it--and there is the evidence of hatred.
+But is it not possible and conceivable all the same? He says that he did
+not go out with any thought whatever of killing Westall, but that when
+Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him,
+as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him.
+Surely, _surely_ that is conceivable? There _is_--there _must_ be a
+doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite
+different from other kinds and degrees of murder."
+
+Now she possessed herself. The gift of flowing persuasive speech which
+was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had
+been maturing, came to her call. She leant forward and took up the
+petition. One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and
+there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's life--presenting
+it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of
+emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the "tears of things." To
+her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole matter--so sordid, commonplace,
+brutal in Lord Maxwell's eyes!--had become a tragic poem, a thing of
+fear and pity, to which her whole being vibrated. And as she conceived
+it, so she reproduced it. Wharton's points were there indeed, but so
+were Hurd's poverty, Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a
+tyrant's insults, the miserable wife, the branded children--emphasised,
+all of them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the
+girl's voice.
+
+Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one
+knee crossed over the other. Aldous still hung over her chair. Neither
+interrupted her. Once the eyes of the two men met over her head--a
+distressed, significant look. Aldous heard all she said, but what
+absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close
+below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that
+moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed.
+
+When her voice broke--when she had said all she could think of--she
+remained looking imploringly at Lord Maxwell.
+
+He was silent a little; then he stooped forward and took her hand.
+
+"You have spoken," he said with great feeling, "most nobly--most
+well--like a good woman, with a true compassionate heart. But all these
+things you have said are not new to me, my dear child. Aldous warned me
+of this petition--he has pressed upon me, still more I am sure upon
+himself, all that he conceived to be your view of the case--the view of
+those who are now moving in the matter. But with the best will in the
+world I cannot, and I believe that he cannot--though he must speak for
+himself--I cannot take that view. In my belief Hurd's act was murder,
+and deserves the penalty of murder. I have paid some attention to these
+things. I was a practising barrister in my youth, and later I was for
+two years Home Secretary. I will explain to you my grounds very
+shortly."
+
+And, bending forward, he gave the reasons for his judgment of the case
+as carefully and as lucidly as though he were stating them to a
+fellow-expert, and not to an agitated girl of twenty-one. Both in words
+and manner there was an implied tribute, not only to Marcella, but
+perhaps to that altered position of the woman in our moving world which
+affects so many things and persons in unexpected ways.
+
+Marcella listened, restlessly. She had drawn her hand away, and was
+twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. The flush that had sprung
+up while she was talking had died away. She grew whiter and whiter. When
+Lord Maxwell ceased, she said quickly, and as he thought unreasonably--
+
+"So you will not sign?"
+
+"No," he replied firmly, "I cannot sign. Holding the conviction about
+the matter I do, I should be giving my name to statements I do not
+believe; and in order to give myself the pleasure of pleasing you, and
+of indulging the pity that every man must feel for every murderer's wife
+and children, I should be not only committing a public wrong, but I
+should be doing what I could to lessen the safety and security of one
+whole class of my servants--men who give me honourable service--and two
+of whom have been so cruelly, so wantonly hurried before their Maker!"
+
+His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the
+matter. Marcella shivered.
+
+"Then," she said slowly, "Hurd will be executed."
+
+Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.
+
+"Let me tell you," he said, "that that does not follow at all. There is
+_some_ importance in signatures--or rather in the local movement that
+the signatures imply. It enables a case to be reopened, which, in any
+event, this case is sure to be. But any Home Secretary who could decide
+a murder case on any other grounds whatever than those of law and his
+own conscience would not deserve his place a day--an hour! Believe me,
+you mistake the whole situation."
+
+He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and
+authority. Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to
+throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice,
+which was in itself an agony.
+
+"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.
+
+"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly. "Won't you try and believe
+what it costs me to refuse?"
+
+It was a heavy blow to her. Amply as she had been prepared for it, there
+had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end
+she would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before
+that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly
+conscious. Yet it had not availed her here--not even with the man who
+loved her.
+
+Lord Maxwell looked at the two--the man's face of suffering, the girl's
+struggling breath.
+
+"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave you a minute. Do
+make Marcella rest--get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little.
+Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above all, persuade her
+that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a
+matter of this kind she must leave us to do--as before God!--what we
+think right."
+
+He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity--nay,
+a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the room.
+
+Marcella sprang up.
+
+"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled voice. "I will go
+upstairs."
+
+"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me, if it is
+impossible for you to be generous?"
+
+"Just!" she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him
+back from her. "_You_ can talk of justice!"
+
+He tried to speak, stammered, and failed. That strange paralysis of the
+will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must
+either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never
+loved her more passionately--but as he stood there looking at her,
+something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable
+dawned.
+
+"_You_," she said again, walking stormily to and fro, and catching at
+her breath--"_You_, in this house, with this life--to talk of
+justice--the justice that comes of slaying a man like Hurd! And I must
+go back to that cottage, to that woman, and tell her there is _no_
+hope--none! Because _you_ must follow your conscience--you who have
+everything! Oh! I would not have your conscience--I wish you a
+heart--rather! Don't come to me, please! Oh! I must think how it can be.
+Things cannot go on so. I should kill myself, and make you miserable.
+But now I must go to _her_--to the _poor_--to those whom I _love_, whom
+I carry in my heart!"
+
+She broke off sobbing. He saw her, in her wild excitement, look round
+the splendid room as though she would wither it to ruin with one fiery,
+accusing glance.
+
+"You are very scornful of wealth," he said, catching her wrists, "but
+one thing you have no right to scorn!--the man who has given you his
+inmost heart--and now only asks you to believe in this, that he is not
+the cruel hypocrite you are determined to make him!"
+
+His face quivered in every feature. She was checked a moment--checked by
+the moral compulsion of his tone and manner, as well as by his words.
+But again she tore herself away.
+
+"_Please_ go and order the carriage," she said. "I cannot bear any more.
+I _must_ go home and rest. Some day I will ask your pardon--oh! for
+this--and--and--" she was almost choked again--"other things. But now I
+must go away. There is some one who will help me. I must not forget
+that!"
+
+The reckless words, the inflection, turned Aldous to stone.
+Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect--their eyes met. Then he
+went up to the bell and rang it.
+
+"The brougham at once, for Miss Boyce. Will you have a maid to go with
+you?" he asked, motioning the servant to stay till Miss Boyce had given
+her answer.
+
+"No, thank you. I must go and put on my things. Will you explain to Miss
+Raeburn?"
+
+The footman opened the door for her. She went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+"But this is unbearable!" said Aldous. "Do you mean to say that she is
+at home and that she will not see me?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed
+humiliation of the man before her.
+
+"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly. "I remonstrated with
+Marcella, but I could do nothing. I think, if you are wise, you will not
+for the present attempt to see her."
+
+Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor. After a
+few moments' silence he looked up again.
+
+"And she gave you no message for me?"
+
+"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly. "Only that she could not bear to see
+anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter was still
+undecided."
+
+Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was arrested by
+a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of
+which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some black
+silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair;
+the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter. She had
+been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled before him. The door
+into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.
+
+He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the
+writing. Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside
+her.
+
+"Will you tell me," he said steadily--"I think you will admit I have a
+right to know--is Marcella in constant correspondence now with Henry
+Wharton?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.
+
+"I believe so," she quickly replied. "So far as I can judge, he writes
+to her almost every other day."
+
+"Does she show you his letters?"
+
+"Very often. They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews and
+efforts on Hurd's behalf."
+
+"Would you not say," he asked, after another pause, raising his clear
+grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December Marcella's
+whole views and thoughts have been largely--perhaps vitally--influenced
+by this man?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind--had, indeed, often
+marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before. Now
+that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them
+with common sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both
+parties. The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and
+oppressed the mother. For herself she asked to see things in a dry
+light. Yet she knew well that the moment was critical. Her feeling was
+more mixed than it had been. On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's
+side--with qualifications and impatiences, however.
+
+She took up her embroidery again before she answered him. In her
+opinion the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the
+diplomatist.
+
+"Yes, certainly," she said at last. "He has done a great deal to form
+her opinions. He has made her both read and think on all those subjects
+she has so long been fond of talking about."
+
+She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with him.
+
+"Has there been nothing else than that in it?" said Aldous, in an odd
+voice.
+
+Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions. She looked at him straight, her slight,
+energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind
+her.
+
+"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real truth. I _think_
+there is nothing else. But let me tell you what more I think."
+
+Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant. In his pity and liking for
+her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.
+
+"If you would," he entreated.
+
+"Leave Marcella quite alone--for the present. She is not herself--not
+normal, in any way. Nor will she be till this dreadful thing is over.
+But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a little,
+_then_"--her thin voice expressed all the emphasis it could--"_then_
+assert yourself! Ask her that question you have asked me--and get your
+answer."
+
+He understood. Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she
+had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past.
+But there was a proud and sensitive instinct in him which both told him
+that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.
+
+"You have come from London to-day?" said Mrs. Boyce, changing the
+subject. All intimate and personal conversation was distasteful to her,
+and she admitted few responsibilities. Her daughter hardly counted among
+them.
+
+"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said, trying to smile.
+"I must get back to-night."
+
+"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs. Boyce.
+
+He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and trouble I
+am, he must be spared. Indeed, since the night of the trial, I feel as
+though I had been of very little use to any human being."
+
+He spoke simply, but every word touched her. What an inconceivable
+entanglement the whole thing was! Yet she was no longer merely
+contemptuous of it.
+
+"Look!" she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the ground beside
+the chair which held the envelope; "she is already making the mourning
+for the children. I can see she despairs."
+
+He made a sound of horror.
+
+"Can you do nothing?" he cried reproachfully. "To think of her dwelling
+upon this--nothing but this, day and night--and I, banished and
+powerless!"
+
+He buried his head in his hands.
+
+"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately. Then, after a
+pause, "You do not imagine there is any chance of success for her?"
+
+He looked up and shook his head.
+
+"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know. Wharton is managing it
+with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the House. But I
+happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I certainly
+gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm. There
+may be some delay. The new ministry will not kiss hands till Saturday.
+But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home
+Secretary.--By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my seeing
+Judge Cartwright," he added hastily--almost imploringly. "I could not
+bear that she should suppose--"
+
+Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have
+imagined such a man in such a plight.
+
+"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from me," he added
+slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to
+let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty--without
+a word?"
+
+"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.
+"Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton, in his letter
+this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which
+were important to him. She specially wished you to be thanked for it."
+
+His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was
+genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget
+that the world yields itself only to the "violent."
+
+He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from,
+her window, watched him go.
+
+"How _could_ she see him?" she asked herself passionately, both then
+and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days. His turn
+would come, and it should be amply given him. But _now_ the very thought
+of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears.
+The time for entreaty--for argument--was gone by, so far as he was
+concerned. He might have been her champion, and would not. She threw
+herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man
+who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her
+lover's. It had become to her a _fight_--with society, with the law,
+with Aldous--in which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of
+the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter
+offence to her.
+
+How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the
+newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line;
+she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters;
+she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been
+started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd
+and her children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector,
+because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with
+her father were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of
+alarm as to how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but
+that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was,
+notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon
+discovered, that he really desired. During six months he had taken it
+for granted; so had the county. He, of all men, could not afford to be
+made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of
+the matter. He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was
+not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had
+had a good deal to do with it. So that between him and his daughter
+there were now constant sparrings--sparrings which degraded Marcella in
+her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from
+home.
+
+The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course,
+was in Minta Hurd's kitchen. Side by side with that piteous plaintive
+misery, her own fierceness dwindled. She would sit with little Willie on
+her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and
+crying silently. She never suspected that her presence was often a
+burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the
+wife herself. While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs.
+Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and
+simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.
+
+The last week arrived. Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and
+despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause
+became more desperate. On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man,
+who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope.
+Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament. Friday was
+the day fixed for the execution.
+
+The question in Parliament came on late. The Home Secretary's answer,
+though not final in form, was final in substance. Wharton went out
+immediately and wrote to Marcella. "She will not sleep if I telegraph
+to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for
+physical detail, which had in it something of the woman. But, knowing
+that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of
+eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn
+the news first from the papers.
+
+Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an
+oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might
+reach her any hour.
+
+She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the
+house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind
+her. William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of
+understanding. Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out
+of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.
+
+"All over. The Home Secretary's official refusal to interfere with
+sentence sent to Widrington to-day. Accept my sorrow and sympathy."
+
+She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically. Before her
+lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her father's
+big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied his ferrets
+in the winter nights. But to-day the spring worked in it, and breathed
+upon it. The young corn was already green in the furrows; the
+hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air,
+daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the
+flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the
+wide treeless basin.
+
+Human helplessness, human agony--set against the careless joy of
+nature--there is no new way of feeling these things. But not to have
+felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled
+Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full
+stature of our kind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Marcella, it is my strong wish--my command--that you do _not_ go out to
+the village to-night."
+
+"I must go, papa."
+
+It was Thursday night--the night before the Friday morning fixed for
+Hurd's execution. Dinner at Mellor was just over. Mr. Boyce, who was
+standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own
+inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter. She
+had not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black
+cloak and black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks.
+Mr. Boyce detested the garb.
+
+"You are making yourself _ridiculous_, Marcella. Pity for these wretched
+people is all very well, but you have no business to carry it to such a
+point that you--and we--become the talk, the laughing-stock of the
+county. And I should like to see you, too, pay some attention to Aldous
+Raeburn's feelings and wishes."
+
+The admonition, in her father's mouth, would almost have made her laugh,
+if she could have laughed at anything. But, instead, she only repeated:
+
+"I must go, I have explained to mamma."
+
+"Evelyn! why do you permit it?" cried Mr. Boyce, turning aggressively to
+his wife.
+
+"Marcella explained to me, as she truly said," replied Mrs. Boyce,
+looking up calmly. "It is not her habit to ask permission of any one."
+
+"Mamma," exclaimed the girl, in her deep voice, "you would not wish to
+stop me?"
+
+"No," said Mrs. Boyce, after a pause, "no. You have gone so far, I
+understand your wish to do this. Richard,"--she got up and went to
+him,--"don't excite yourself about it; shall I read to you, or play a
+game with you?"
+
+He looked at her, trembling with anger. But her quiet eye warned him
+that he had had threatenings of pain that afternoon. His anger sank into
+fear. He became once more irritable and abject.
+
+"Let her gang her gait," he said, throwing himself into a chair. "But I
+tell you I shall not put up with this kind of thing much longer,
+Marcella."
+
+"I shall not ask you, papa," she said steadily, as she moved towards the
+door. Mrs. Boyce paused where she stood, and looked after her daughter,
+struck by her words. Mr. Boyce simply took them as referring to the
+marriage which would emancipate her before long from any control of his,
+and fumed, without finding a reply.
+
+The maid-servant who, by Mrs. Boyce's orders, was to accompany Marcella
+to the village, was already at the front door. She carried a basket
+containing invalid food for little Willie, and a lighted lantern.
+
+It was a dark night and raining fast. Marcella was fastening up her
+tweed skirt in the hall, when she saw Mrs. Boyce hurry along the gallery
+above, and immediately afterwards her mother came across the hall to
+her.
+
+"You had better take the shawl, Marcella: it is cold and raw. If you are
+going to sit up most of the night you will want it."
+
+She put a wrap of her own across Marcella's arm.
+
+"Your father is quite right," she went on. "You have had one horrible
+experience to-day already--"
+
+"Don't, mamma!" exclaimed Marcella, interrupting her. Then suddenly she
+threw her arms round her mother.
+
+"Kiss me, mamma! please kiss me!"
+
+Mrs. Boyce kissed her gravely, and let herself even linger a moment in
+the girl's strong hold.
+
+"You are extraordinarily wilful," she said. "And it is so strange to me
+that you think you do any good. Are you sure even that she wants to have
+you?"
+
+Marcella's lip quivered. She could not speak, apparently. Waving her
+hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two
+disappeared into the blackness.
+
+"But _does_ it do any good?" Mrs. Boyce repeated to herself as she went
+back to the drawing-room. "_Sympathy!_ who was ever yet fed, warmed,
+comforted by _sympathy_? Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that
+the human being should want at such a moment--solitude. Why should we
+force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?"
+
+Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the
+warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this
+horror which was beneath them.
+
+At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the
+little maid.
+
+"Now, Ruth, you can go home. Run quick, it is so dark, Ruth!"
+
+"Yes, miss."
+
+The young country girl trembled. Miss Boyce's tragic passion in this
+matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she
+lived.
+
+"Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the
+poor,--and to punish the cruel!"
+
+"Yes, miss," said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry. The lantern she
+held flashed its light on Miss Boyce's white face and tall form. Till
+her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark eye, so
+wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.
+
+On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused. She heard voices inside--or
+rather the rector's voice reading.
+
+A thought of scorn rose in her heart. "How long will the poor endure
+this religion--this make-believe--which preaches patience, _patience_!
+when it ought to be urging war?"
+
+But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt. The rector looked up and
+made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade
+any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose
+makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and
+the reading went on.
+
+Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that
+afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for. He had
+bade them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a
+mattress had been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it.
+Her huddled form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed
+eyelids, thrown out against the dark oak of the settle, and the
+disordered mass of grizzled hair, made the centre of the cottage.
+
+Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough
+hand she held, her eyes red with weeping. Fronting them, beside a little
+table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his
+Testament in his hand, his slight boy's figure cast in sharp shadow on
+the cottage wall. He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light
+of the lamp from the wife's eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a
+chair to keep it from little Willie. Between mother and child sat Ann
+Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from
+time to time--a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children
+and much poverty--of whom Marcella was often impatient.
+
+"_And he said, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom. And
+He said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me
+in Paradise."_
+
+The rector's voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt insistently on each
+word, then paused. "_To-day_," whispered Mary, caressing Minta's hand,
+while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the
+Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."
+
+Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the
+cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and
+sent a start through Willie's wasted body. The reader resumed; but
+perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
+Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling leaven.
+
+Nevertheless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on
+every pang of the Passion, putting together every sacred and sublime
+word. For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held
+up the Man of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had
+come, his moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he
+accepted it with the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.
+
+"_And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they
+beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their breasts_."
+
+He closed the book, and bent forward, so as to bring his voice close to
+the wife's ear.
+
+"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your husband. He has
+passed through death--through cruel death; and where He has gone, we
+poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to Him. No sin, however
+black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His hand in the dark
+waters, if it be only repented,--thrown upon His Cross. Let us pray for
+your husband, let us implore the Lord's mercy this night--this
+hour!--upon his soul."
+
+A shudder of remembrance passed through Marcella. The rector knelt; Mrs.
+Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at
+intervals; Ann Mullins sobbed loudly; and Mary Harden wept as she
+prayed, lost in a mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there
+on the cottage floor--stretching hands of pity over the woman beside
+her, showing His marred side and brow.
+
+Marcella alone sat erect, her whole being one passionate protest against
+a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities of
+this too real earth on the shadowy head of one far-off Redeemer. "This
+very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort an accomplice of
+those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and killing, because they
+know of nothing better to do with the life they themselves have made
+outcast."
+
+And she hardened her heart.
+
+When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for
+some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the
+boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother
+and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager,
+concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she
+perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the
+rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of
+pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and
+moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better. The
+child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton
+hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little, all--with
+just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had
+fascinated Wharton. Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could
+have wept.
+
+At last the rector and his sister rose.
+
+"God be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; "God
+support you!"
+
+His voice trembled. Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Harden!" she cried with a sudden wail. "Mr. Harden!"
+
+Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with
+quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."
+
+The rector turned to Marcella.
+
+"You are staying the night with her?" he asked, under his breath.
+
+"Yes. Mrs. Mullins was up all last night. I offered to come to-night."
+
+"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did you see Hurd?"
+
+"For a very few minutes."
+
+"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?" he asked anxiously. "Is he
+penitent?"
+
+"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce humanness in her
+unfriendly eyes. "I promised him that when the child died, he should be
+buried respectably--not by the parish. And I told him I would always
+look after the little girls."
+
+The rector sighed. He moved away. Then unexpectedly he came back again.
+
+"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as not to be
+heard by any one else in the cottage. "You are taking a great
+responsibility here to-night. Let me implore you not to fill that poor
+woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her
+life. That _you_ feel bitterly, I know. Mary has explained to me--but
+ask yourself, I beg of you!--how is _she_ to be helped through her
+misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission
+to the will of God?"
+
+He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of
+his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.
+
+"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella, coldly. She
+felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which
+his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her. That
+hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell
+once for all.
+
+Mary did not venture to kiss her friend. They all went. Ann Mulling, who
+was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last. When she
+was going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the
+skirt, saying incoherent things.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her, "won't you
+let Ann go? I am going to spend the night here, and take care of you and
+Willie."
+
+Mrs. Hurd gave a painful start.
+
+"You're very good, miss," she said half-consciously, "very good, I'm
+sure. But she's his own flesh and blood is Ann--his own flesh and blood.
+Ann!"
+
+The two women clung together, the rough, ill-tempered sister-in-law
+muttering what soothing she could think of. When she was gone, Minta
+Hurd turned her face to the back of the settle and moaned, her hands
+clenched under her breast.
+
+Marcella went about her preparations for the night. "She is extremely
+weak," Dr. Clarke had said; "the heart in such a state she may die of
+syncope on very small provocation. If she is to spend the night in
+crying and exciting herself, it will go hard with her. Get her to sleep
+if you possibly can."
+
+And he had left a sleeping draught. Marcella resolved that she would
+persuade her to take it. "But I will wake her before eight o'clock," she
+thought. "No human being has the right to rob her of herself through
+that last hour."
+
+And tenderly she coaxed Minta to take the doctor's "medicine." Minta
+swallowed it submissively, asking no questions. But the act of taking it
+roused her for the time, and she would talk. She even got up and
+tottered across to Willie.
+
+"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he's got his animals--he don't think
+of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won't you think of your father?--you'll
+never have a father, Willie, not after to-night!"
+
+The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his haggard,
+dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the face,
+and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He
+looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not
+speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it
+struck her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and
+there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced
+Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had
+fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same
+as it had been for days; she reassured herself.
+
+And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching
+limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed
+the shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of
+the watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.
+
+Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself
+with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock
+showed that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she
+drew it upon her knee; but it lay unopened.
+
+A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes
+of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on
+her cloak.
+
+A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the
+chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside
+her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of
+ear, and imagined more.
+
+All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look
+round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn
+across one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the
+light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without
+at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door
+of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came
+out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on
+the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon
+him.
+
+She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something
+else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman's face!--the
+powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline features--the mad
+keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes looked in hungrily
+at the prostrate form on the settle--at the sleeping child. Another
+figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path. There was a slight
+scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the curtain close with a
+hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The woman who had
+looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was becoming more
+and more difficult to manage and to watch.
+
+Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a
+sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it
+haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.
+
+The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and
+struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more
+piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours passed, as all
+sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence
+settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to
+repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with
+shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife.
+"He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information
+which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant
+sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.
+"Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal
+_knows_--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us
+something as against the _nothing_ of death--and a man wastes them in
+sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily
+struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no
+husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may
+well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity!
+Oh, why are we here--why am _I_ here--to ache like this--to hate good
+people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to
+madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot
+forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"
+
+She sat over the fire, Willie's hand clasped in hers. He alone in this
+forlorn household _loved_ her. Mrs. Hurd and the other children feared
+and depended on her. This creature of thistle-down--this little thread
+and patch of humanity--felt no fear of her. It was as though his
+weakness divined through her harshness and unripeness those maternal and
+protecting powers with which her nature was in truth so richly dowered.
+He confided himself to her with no misgivings. He was at ease when she
+was there.
+
+Little piteous hand!--its touch was to her symbolic, imperative.
+
+Eight months had she been at Mellor? And that Marcella, who had been
+living and moving amid these woods and lanes all this time--that foolish
+girl, delighting in new grandeurs, and flattered by Aldous Raeburn's
+attentions--that hot, ambitious person who had meant to rule a county
+through a husband--what had become of her? Up to the night of Hurd's
+death sentence she had still existed in some sort, with her obligations,
+qualms, remorses. But since then--every day, every hour had been
+grinding, scorching her away--fashioning in flame and fever this new
+Marcella who sat here, looking impatiently into another life, which
+should know nothing of the bonds of the old.
+
+Ah, yes!--her _thought_ could distinguish between the act and the man,
+between the man and his class; but in her _feeling_ all was confounded.
+This awful growth of sympathy in her--strange irony!--had made all
+sympathy for Aldous Raeburn impossible to her. Marry him?--no!
+no!--never! But she would make it quite easy to him to give her up.
+Pride should come in--he should feel no pain in doing it. She had in her
+pocket the letter she had received from him that afternoon. She had
+hardly been able to read it. Ear and heart were alike dull to it.
+
+From time to time she probably slept in her chair. Or else it was the
+perpetual rush of images and sensations through the mind that hastened
+the hours. Once when the first streaks of the March dawn were showing
+through the curtains Minta Hurd sprang up with a loud cry:
+
+"Oh, my God! Jim, _Jim!_ Oh, no!--take that off. Oh, _please_, sir,
+please! Oh, for God's sake, sir!"
+
+Agony struggled with sleep. Marcella, shuddering, held and soothed her,
+and for a while sleep, or rather the drug in her veins, triumphed again.
+For another hour or two she lay restlessly tossing from side to side,
+but unconscious.
+
+Willie hardly moved all night. Again and again Marcella held beef-tea or
+milk to his mouth, and tried to rouse him to take it, but she could make
+no impression on the passive lips; the sleeping serenity of the brow
+never changed.
+
+At last, with a start, Marcella looked round and saw that the morning
+was fully there. A cold light was streaming through the curtains; the
+fire was still glowing; but her limbs were stiff and chilled under her
+shawl. She sprang up, horror descending on her. Her shaking fingers
+could hardly draw out the watch in her belt.
+
+_Ten minutes to eight_!
+
+For the first time the girl felt nerve and resolution fail her. She
+looked at Mrs. Hurd and wrung her hands. The mother was muttering and
+moving, but not yet fully awake; and Willie lay as before. Hardly
+knowing what she was doing, she drew the curtains back, as though
+inspiration might come with the light. The rain-clouds trailed across
+the common; water dripped heavily from the thatch of the cottage; and a
+few birds twittered from some bedraggled larches at the edge of the
+common. Far away, beyond and beneath those woods to the right,
+Widrington lay on the plain, with that high-walled stone building at its
+edge. She saw everything as it must now be happening as plainly as
+though she were bodily present there--the last meal--the pinioning--the
+chaplain.
+
+Goaded by the passing seconds, she turned back at last to wake that poor
+sleeper behind her. But something diverted her. With a start she saw
+that Willie's eyes were open.
+
+"Willie," she said, running to him, "how are you, dear? Shall I lift
+your head a little?"
+
+He did not answer, though she thought he tried, and she was struck by
+the blueness under the eyes and nose. Hurriedly she felt his tiny feet.
+They were quite cold.
+
+"Mrs. Hurd!" she cried, rousing her in haste; "dear Mrs. Hurd, come and
+see Willie!"
+
+The mother sprang up bewildered, and, hurrying across the room, threw
+herself upon him.
+
+"Willie, what is it ails you, dear? Tell mother! Is it your feet are so
+cold? But we'll rub them--we'll get you warm soon. And here's something
+to make you better." Marcella handed her some brandy. "Drink it, dear;
+drink it, sweetheart!" Her voice grew shrill.
+
+"He can't," said Marcella. "Do not let us plague him; it is the end. Dr.
+Clarke said it would come in the morning."
+
+They hung over him, forgetting everything but him for the moment--the
+only moment in his little life he came first even with his mother.
+
+There was a slight movement of the hand.
+
+"He wants his animals," said Marcella, the tears pouring down her
+cheeks. She lifted them and put them on his breast, laying the cold
+fingers over them.
+
+Then he tried to speak.
+
+"Daddy!" he whispered, looking up fully at his mother; "take 'em to
+Daddy!"
+
+She fell on her knees beside him with a shriek, hiding her face, and
+shaking from head to foot. Marcella alone saw the slight, mysterious
+smile, the gradual sinking of the lids, the shudder of departing life
+that ran through the limbs.
+
+A heavy sound swung through the air--a heavy repeated sound. Mrs. Hurd
+held up her head and listened. The church clock tolled eight. She knelt
+there, struck motionless by terror--by recollection.
+
+"Oh, Jim!" she said, under her breath--"my Jim!"
+
+The plaintive tone--as of a creature that has not even breath and
+strength left wherewith to chide the fate that crushes it--broke
+Marcella's heart. Sitting beside the dead son, she wrapt the mother in
+her arms, and the only words that even her wild spirit could find
+wherewith to sustain this woman through the moments of her husband's
+death were words of prayer--the old shuddering cries wherewith the human
+soul from the beginning has thrown itself on that awful encompassing
+Life whence it issued, and whither it returns.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+Two days later, in the afternoon, Aldous Raeburn found himself at the
+door of Mellor. When he entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Boyce, who had
+heard his ring, was hurrying away.
+
+"Don't go," he said, detaining her with a certain peremptoriness. "I
+want all the light on this I can get. Tell me, she has _actually_
+brought herself to regard this man's death as in some sort my doing--as
+something which ought to separate us?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce saw that he held an opened letter from Marcella crushed in
+his hand. But she did not need the explanation. She had been expecting
+him at any hour throughout the day, and in just this condition of mind.
+
+"Marcella must explain for herself," she said, after a moment's thought.
+"I have no right whatever to speak for her. Besides, frankly, I do not
+understand her, and when I argue with her she only makes me realise that
+I have no part or lot in her--that I never had. It is just enough. She
+was brought up away from me. And I have no natural hold. I cannot help
+you, or any one else, with her."
+
+Aldous had been very tolerant and compassionate in the past of this
+strange mother's abdication of her maternal place, and of its probable
+causes. But it was not in human nature that he should be either to-day.
+He resumed his questioning, not without sharpness.
+
+"One word, please. Tell me something of what has happened since
+Thursday, before I see her. I have written--but till this morning I have
+had not one line from her."
+
+They were standing by the window, he with his frowning gaze, in which
+agitation struggled against all his normal habits of manner and
+expression, fixed upon the lawn and the avenue. She told him briefly
+what she knew of Marcella's doings since the arrival of Wharton's
+telegram--of the night in the cottage, and the child's death. It was
+plain that he listened with a shuddering repulsion.
+
+"Do you know," he exclaimed, turning upon her, "that she may never
+recover this? Such a strain, such a horror! rushed upon so wantonly, so
+needlessly."
+
+"I understand. You think that I have been to blame? I do not wonder. But
+it is not true--not in this particular case. And anyway your view is not
+mine. Life--and the iron of it--has to be faced, even by women--perhaps,
+most of all, by women. But let me go now. Otherwise my husband will come
+in. And I imagine you would rather see Marcella before you see him or
+any one."
+
+That suggestion told. He instantly gathered himself together, and
+nervously begged that she would send Marcella to him at once. He could
+think of nothing, talk of nothing, till he had seen her. She went, and
+Aldous was left to walk up and down the room planning what he should
+say. After the ghastly intermingling of public interests and private
+misery in which he had lived for these many weeks there was a certain
+relief in having reached the cleared space--the decisive moment--when he
+might at last give himself wholly to what truly concerned him. He would
+not lose her without a struggle. None the less he knew, and had known
+ever since the scene in the Court library, that the great disaster of
+his life was upon him.
+
+The handle of the door turned. She was there.
+
+He did not go to meet her. She had come in wrought up to face
+attack--reproaches, entreaties--ready to be angry or to be humble, as he
+should give her the lead. But he gave her no lead. She had to break
+through that quivering silence as best she could.
+
+"I wanted to explain everything to you," she said in a low voice, as she
+came near to him. "I know my note last night was very hard and abrupt. I
+didn't mean to be hard. But I am still so tired--and everything that one
+says, and feels, hurts so."
+
+She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not
+been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he
+looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into
+which she had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a
+passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.
+
+"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you read my letter
+that I wrote you the day before--?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your
+grief--your suffering--or to the suffering of any human being for whom
+you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"
+
+"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking
+sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have
+done."
+
+"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat
+beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you
+desire so passionately for others--freedom of conscience--freedom of
+judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all
+my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have
+refused me the commonest right of love--the right to show you myself, to
+prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion--misery,
+much more, oh, much more to me than to you!--I was in truth bent on the
+same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same
+goal."
+
+"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what
+burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry--that there was a
+struggle in your mind--that you pitied me--pitied _them_. But you judged
+it all _from above_--you looked down--and I could not see that you had
+any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I
+was below--in the midst--_close_ to the horror and anguish of them."
+
+"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I
+not offer--entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed
+to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented
+us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke
+deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement
+which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?
+You owe it to me to answer."
+
+She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's
+mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last
+in this white heat of an accusing passion. In return she began to forget
+her own resolve to bear herself gently.
+
+"You don't remember," she cried, "that what divided us was
+your--your--incapacity to put the human pity first; to think of the
+surrounding circumstances--of the debt that you and I and everybody like
+us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had been stunted and starved by
+life as he had been."
+
+Her lip began to tremble.
+
+"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I had been a poor
+man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my judgment of right and
+wrong--in such a matter. You would have let me remember that I was a
+citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice! You would have let
+me plead that Hurd's sin was not against me, but against the community,
+and that in determining whether to do what you wished or no, I must
+think of the community and its good before even I thought of pleasing
+you. If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this would have been
+permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of my _money_,"--she
+shrank before the accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest
+moral rights. _My_ scruple, _my_ feeling, were nothing to you. Your
+pride was engaged as well as your pity, and I must give way. Marcella!
+you talk of justice--you talk of equality--is the only man who can get
+neither at your hands--the man whom you promised to marry!"
+
+His voice dwelt on that last word, dwelt and broke. He leant over her in
+his roused strength, and tried to take her hand. But she moved away from
+him with a cry.
+
+"It is no use! Oh, don't--don't! It may be all true. I was vain, I dare
+say, and unjust, and hard. But don't you see--don't you understand--if
+we _could_ take such different views of such a case--if it could divide
+us so deeply--what chance would there be if we were married? I ought
+never--never--to have said 'Yes' to you--even as I was then. But _now_,"
+she turned to him slowly, "can't you see it for yourself? I am a changed
+creature. Certain things in me are gone--_gone_--and instead there is a
+fire--something driving, tormenting--which must burn its way out. When I
+think of what I liked so much when you asked me to marry you--being
+rich, and having beautiful things, and dresses, and jewels, and
+servants, and power--social power--above all _that_--I feel sick and
+choked. I couldn't breathe now in a house like Maxwell Court. The poor
+have come to mean to me the only people who really _live_, and really
+_suffer_. I must live with them, work for them, find out what I can do
+for them. You must give me up--you must indeed. Oh! and you will! You
+will be glad enough, thankful enough, when--when--you know what I _am_!"
+
+He started at the words. Where was the prophetess? He saw that she was
+lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the
+chair.
+
+In an instant he was on his knees beside her.
+
+"Marcella!" he could hardly command his voice, but he held her
+struggling hand against his lips. "You think that suffering belongs to
+one class? Have you really no conception of what you will be dealing to
+me if you tear yourself away from me?"
+
+She withdrew her hand, sobbing.
+
+"Don't, don't stay near me!" she said; "there is--more--there is
+something else."
+
+Aldous rose.
+
+"You mean," he said in an altered voice, after a pause of silence, "that
+another influence--another man--has come between us?"
+
+She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.
+
+"If I could say to you only this," she began at last, with long pauses,
+"'I mistook myself and my part in life. I did wrong, but forgive me, and
+let me go for both our sakes'--that would be--well!--that would be
+difficult,--but easier than this! Haven't you understood at all?
+When--when Mr. Wharton came, I began to see things very soon, not in my
+own way, but in his way. I had never met any one like him--not any one
+who showed me such possibilities in _myself_--such new ways of using
+one's life, and not only one's possessions--of looking at all the great
+questions. I thought it was just friendship, but it made me critical,
+impatient of everything else. I was never myself from the beginning.
+Then,--after the ball,"--he stooped over her that he might hear her the
+more plainly,--"when I came home I was in my room and I heard
+steps--there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house.
+I went out to see. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts--oh, I can't tell, I
+can't tell!--anyway, he was there. We went into the library, and we
+talked. He did not want to touch our marriage,--but he said all sorts of
+mad things,--and at last--he kissed me."
+
+The last words were only breathed. She had often pictured herself
+confessing these things to him. But the humiliation in which she
+actually found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of,
+more than she could bear. All those great words of pity and mercy--all
+that implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never
+attain--to end in this story! The effect of it, on herself, rather than
+on him, was what she had not foreseen.
+
+Aldous raised himself slowly.
+
+"And when did this happen?" he asked after a moment.
+
+"I told you--the night of the ball--of the murder," she said with a
+shiver; "we saw Hurd cross the avenue. I meant to have told you
+everything at once."
+
+"And you gave up that intention?" he asked her, when he had waited a
+little for more, and nothing came.
+
+She turned upon him with a flash of the old defiance.
+
+"How could I think of my own affairs?"
+
+"Or of mine?" he said bitterly.
+
+She made no answer.
+
+Aldous got up and walked to the chimney-piece. He was very pale, but his
+eyes were bright and sparkling. When she looked up at him at last she
+saw that her task was done. His scorn--his resentment--were they not the
+expiation, the penalty she had looked forward to all along?--and with
+that determination to bear them calmly? Yet, now that they were there in
+front of her, they stung.
+
+"So that--for all those weeks--while you were letting me write as I did,
+while you were letting me conceive you and your action as I did, you had
+this on your mind? You never gave me a hint; you let me plead; you let
+me regard you as wrapped up in the unselfish end; you sent me those
+letters of his--those most misleading letters!--and all the time--"
+
+"But I meant to tell you--I always meant to tell you," she cried
+passionately. "I would never have gone on with a secret like that--not
+for your sake--but for my own."
+
+"Yet you did go on so long," he said steadily; "and my agony of mind
+during those weeks--my feeling towards you--my--"
+
+He broke off, wrestling with himself. As for her, she had fallen back in
+her chair, physically incapable of anything more.
+
+He walked over to her side and took up his hat.
+
+"You have done me wrong," he said, gazing down upon her. "I pray God you
+may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future! Give me leave to
+write to you once more, or to send my friend Edward Hallin to see you.
+Then I will not trouble you again."
+
+He waited, but she could give him no answer. Her form as she lay there
+in this physical and moral abasement printed itself upon his heart. Yet
+he felt no desire whatever to snatch the last touch--the last kiss--that
+wounded passion so often craves. Inwardly, and without words, he said
+farewell to her. She heard his steps across the room; the door shut; she
+was alone--and free.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+"O Neigung, sage, wie hast du so tief
+  Im Herzen dich verstecket?
+Wer hat dich, die verborgen schlief,
+  Gewecket?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+"Don't suppose that I feel enthusiastic or sentimental about the 'claims
+of Labour,'" said Wharton, smiling to the lady beside him. "You may get
+that from other people, but not from me. I am not moral enough to be a
+fanatic. My position is simplicity itself. When things are inevitable, I
+prefer to be on the right side of them, and not on the wrong. There is
+not much more in it than that. I would rather be on the back of the
+'bore' for instance, as it sweeps up the tidal river, than the swimmer
+caught underneath it."
+
+"Well, that is intelligible," said Lady Selina Farrell, looking at her
+neighbour, as she crumbled her dinner-roll. To crumble your bread at
+dinner is a sign of nervousness, according to Sydney Smith, who did it
+with both hands when he sat next an Archbishop; yet no one for a good
+many years past had ever suspected Lady Selina of nervousness, though
+her powers had probably been tried before now by the neighbourhood of
+many Primates, Catholic and Anglican. For Lady Selina went much into
+society, and had begun it young.
+
+"Still, you know," she resumed after a moment's pause--"you _play_
+enthusiasm in public--I suppose you must."
+
+"Oh! of course," said Wharton, indifferently. "That is in the game."
+
+"Why should it be--always? If you are a leader of the people, why don't
+you educate them? My father says that bringing feeling into politics is
+like making rhymes in one's account book."
+
+"Well, when you have taught the masses how _not_ to feel," said Wharton,
+laughing, "we will follow your advice. Meanwhile it is our brains and
+their feelings that do the trick. And by the way, Lady Selina, are _you_
+always so cool? If you saw the Revolution coming to-morrow into the
+garden of Alresford House, would you go to the balcony and argue?"
+
+"I devoutly hope there would be somebody ready to do something more to
+the point," said Lady Selina, hastily. "But of course _we_ have
+enthusiasms too."
+
+"What, the Flag--and the Throne--that kind of thing?"
+
+The ironical attention which Wharton began at this moment to devote to
+the selection of an olive annoyed his companion.
+
+"Yes," she repeated emphatically, "the Flag and the Throne--all that has
+made England great in the past. But we know very well that they are not
+_your_ enthusiasms."
+
+Wharton's upper lip twitched a little.
+
+"And you are quite sure that Busbridge Towers has nothing to do with
+it?" he said suddenly, looking round upon her.
+
+Busbridge Towers was the fine ancestral seat which belonged to Lady
+Selina's father, that very respectable and ancient peer, Lord Alresford,
+whom an ungrateful party had unaccountably omitted--for the first
+time--from the latest Conservative administration.
+
+"Of course we perfectly understand," replied Lady Selina, scornfully,
+"that your side--and especially your Socialist friends, put down all
+that _we_ do and say to greed and selfishness. It is our
+misfortune--hardly our fault."
+
+"Not at all," said Wharton, quietly, "I was only trying to convince you
+that it is a little difficult to drive feeling out of politics. Do you
+suppose our host succeeds? You perceive?--this is a Radical house--and a
+Radical banquet?"
+
+He pushed the _menu_ towards her significantly. Then his eye travelled
+with its usual keen rapidity over the room, over the splendid
+dinner-table, with its display of flowers and plate, and over the
+assembled guests. He and Lady Selina were dining at the hospitable board
+of a certain rich manufacturer, who drew enormous revenues from the
+west, had formed part of the Radical contingent of the last Liberal
+ministry, and had especially distinguished himself by a series of
+uncompromising attacks on the ground landlords of London.
+
+Lady Selina sighed.
+
+"It is all a horrible tangle," she said, "and what the next twenty years
+will bring forth who can tell? Oh! one moment, Mr. Wharton, before I
+forget. Are you engaged for Saturday week?"
+
+He drew a little note-book out of his pocket and consulted it. It
+appeared that he was not engaged.
+
+"Then will you dine with us?" She lightly mentioned the names of four or
+five distinguished guests, including the Conservative Premier of the
+day. Wharton made her a little ceremonious bow.
+
+"I shall be delighted. Can you trust me to behave?"
+
+Lady Selina's smile made her his match for the moment.
+
+"Oh! we can defend ourselves!" she said. "By the way I think you told me
+that Mr. Raeburn was not a friend of yours."
+
+"No," said Wharton, facing her look with coolness. "If you have asked
+Mr. Raeburn for the 23rd, let me crave your leave to cancel that note in
+my pocket-book. Not for my sake, you understand, at all."
+
+She had difficulty in concealing her curiosity. But his face betrayed
+nothing. It always seemed to her that his very dark and straight
+eyebrows, so obtrusive and unusual as compared with the delicacy of the
+features, of the fair skin and light brown curls, made it easy for him
+to wear any mask he pleased. By their mere physical emphasis they drew
+attention away from the subtler and more revealing things of expression.
+
+"They say," she went on, "that he is sure to do well in the House, if
+only he can be made to take interest enough in the party. But one of his
+admirers told me that he was not at all anxious to accept this post they
+have just given him. He only did it to please his grandfather. My father
+thinks Lord Maxwell much aged this year. He is laid up now, with a chill
+of some sort I believe. Mr. Raeburn will have to make haste if he is to
+have any career in the Commons. But you can see he cares very little
+about it. All his friends tell me they find him changed since that
+unlucky affair last year. By the way, did you ever see that girl?"
+
+"Certainly. I was staying in her father's house while the engagement
+was going on."
+
+"Were you!" said Lady Selina, eagerly, "and what did you think of her?"
+
+"Well, in the first place," said Wharton, slowly, "she is beautiful--you
+knew that?"
+
+Lady Selina nodded.
+
+"Yes. Miss Raeburn, who has told me most of what I know, always throws
+in a shrug and a 'but' when you ask about her looks. However, I have
+seen a photograph of her, so I can judge for myself. It seemed to me a
+beauty that men perhaps would admire more than women."
+
+Wharton devoted himself to his green peas, and made no reply. Lady
+Selina glanced at him sharply. She herself was by no means a beauty. But
+neither was she plain. She had a long, rather distinguished face, with a
+marked nose and a wide thin-lipped mouth. Her plentiful fair hair, a
+little dull and ashy in colour, was heaped up above her forehead in
+infinitesimal curls and rolls which did great credit to her maid, and
+gave additional height to the head and length to a thin white neck. Her
+light blue eyes were very direct and observant. Their expression implied
+both considerable knowledge of the world and a natural inquisitiveness.
+Many persons indeed were of opinion that Lady Selina wished to know too
+much about you and were on their guard when she approached.
+
+"You admired her very much, I see," she resumed, as Wharton still
+remained silent.
+
+"Oh, yes. We talked Socialism, and then I defended her poacher for her."
+
+"Oh, I remember. And it is really true, as Miss Raeburn says, that she
+broke it off because she could not get Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn to
+sign the petition for the poacher?"
+
+"Somewhere about true," said Wharton, carelessly.
+
+"Miss Raeburn always gives the same account; you can never get anything
+else out of her. But I sometimes wonder whether it is the _whole_ truth.
+_You_ think she was sincere?"
+
+"Well, she gave up Maxwell Court and thirty thousand a year," he replied
+drily. "I should say she had at least earned the benefit of the doubt."
+
+"I mean," said Lady Selina, "was she in love with anybody else, and was
+the poacher an excuse?"
+
+She turned upon him as she spoke--a smiling, self-possessed person--a
+little spoilt by those hard, inquisitive eyes.
+
+"No, I think not," said Wharton, throwing his head back to meet her
+scrutiny. "If so, nothing has been heard of him yet. Miss Boyce has been
+at St. Edward's Hospital for the last year."
+
+"To learn nursing? It is what all the women do nowadays, they tell me,
+who can't get on with their relations or their lovers. Do you suppose it
+is such a very hard life?"
+
+"I don't want to try!" said Wharton. "Do you?"
+
+She evaded his smile.
+
+"What is she going to do when she has done her training?"
+
+"Settle down and nurse among the poor, I believe."
+
+"Magnificent, no doubt, but hardly business, from her point of view. How
+much more she might have done for the poor with thirty thousand a year!
+And any woman could put up with Aldous Raeburn."
+
+Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"We come back to those feelings, Lady Selina, you think so badly of."
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Well, but feelings must be intelligible. And this seems so small a
+cause. However, were you there when it was broken off?"
+
+"No; I have never seen her since the day of the poacher's trial."
+
+"Oh! So she has gone into complete seclusion from all her friends?"
+
+"That I can't answer for. I can only tell you my own experience."
+
+Lady Selina bethought herself of a great many more questions to ask, but
+somehow did not ask them. The talk fell upon politics, which lasted till
+the hostess gave the signal, and Lady Selina, gathering up her fan and
+gloves, swept from the room next after the Countess at the head of the
+table, while a host of elderly ladies, wives of ministers and the like,
+stood meekly by to let her pass.
+
+As he sat down again, Wharton made the entry of the dinner at Alresford
+House, to which he had just promised himself, a little plainer. It was
+the second time in three weeks that Lady Selina had asked him, and he
+was well aware that several other men at this dinner-table, of about the
+same standing and prospects as himself, would be very glad to be in his
+place. Lady Selina, though she was unmarried, and not particularly
+handsome or particularly charming, was a personage--and knew it. As the
+mistress of her father's various fine houses, and the kinswoman of half
+the great families of England, she had ample social opportunities, and
+made, on the whole, clever use of them. She was not exactly popular, but
+in her day she had been extremely useful to many, and her invitations
+were prized. Wharton had been introduced to her at the beginning of
+this, his second session, had adopted with her the easy, aggressive,
+"personal" manner--which, on the whole, was his natural manner towards
+women--and had found it immediately successful.
+
+When he had replaced his pocket-book, he found himself approached by a
+man on his own side of the table, a member of Parliament like himself,
+with whom he was on moderately friendly terms.
+
+"Your motion comes on next Friday, I think," said the new-comer.
+
+Wharton nodded.
+
+"It'll be a beastly queer division," said the other--"a precious lot of
+cross-voting."
+
+"That'll be the way with that kind of question for a good while to
+come--don't you think"--said Wharton, smiling, "till we get a complete
+reorganisation of parties?"
+
+As he leaned back in his chair, enjoying his cigarette, his half-shut
+eyes behind the curls of smoke made a good-humoured but contemptuous
+study of his companion.
+
+Mr. Bateson was a young manufacturer, recently returned to Parliament,
+and newly married. He had an open, ruddy face, spoilt by an expression
+of chronic perplexity, which was almost fretfulness. Not that the
+countenance was without shrewdness; but it suggested that the man had
+ambitions far beyond his powers of performance, and already knew himself
+to be inadequate.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you get a considerable vote," he resumed,
+after a pause; "it's like women's suffrage. People will go on voting for
+this kind of thing, till there seems a chance of getting it. _Then_!"
+
+"Ah, well!" said Wharton, easily, "I see we shan't get _you_."
+
+"_I_!--vote for an eight-hours day, by local and trade option! In my
+opinion I might as well vote for striking the flag on the British Empire
+at once! It would be the death-knell of all our prosperity."
+
+Wharton's artistic ear disliked the mixture of metaphor, and he frowned
+slightly.
+
+Mr. Bateson hurried on. He was already excited, and had fallen upon
+Wharton as a prey.
+
+"And you really desire to make it _penal_ for us manufacturers--for me
+in my industry--in spite of all the chances and changes of the market,
+to work my men more than eight hours a day--_even_ if they wish it!"
+
+"We must get our decision, our majority of the adult workers in any
+given district in favour of an eight-hours day," said Wharton, blandly;
+"then when they have voted for it, the local authority will put the Act
+in motion."
+
+"And my men--conceivably--may have voted in the minority, against any
+such tomfoolery; yet, when the vote is given, it will be a punishable
+offence for them, and me, to work overtime? You _actually_ mean that;
+how do you propose to punish us?"
+
+"Well," said Wharton, relighting his cigarette, "that is a much debated
+point. Personally, I am in favour of imprisonment rather than fine."
+
+The other bounded on his chair.
+
+"You would imprison me for working overtime--with _willing men!_"
+
+Wharton eyed him with smiling composure. Two or three other men--an old
+general, the smart private secretary of a cabinet minister, and a
+well-known permanent official at the head of one of the great spending
+departments--who were sitting grouped at the end of the table a few feet
+away, stopped their conversation to listen.
+
+"Except in cases of emergency, which are provided for under the Act,"
+said Wharton. "Yes, I should imprison you, with the greatest pleasure in
+life. Eight hours _plus_ overtime is what we are going to stop, _at all
+hazards!_"
+
+A flash broke from his blue eyes. Then he tranquilly resumed his
+smoking.
+
+The young manufacturer flushed with angry agitation.
+
+"But you must know, it is inconceivable that you should not know, that
+the whole thing is stark staring lunacy. In our business, trade is
+declining, the export falling every year, the imports from France
+steadily advancing. And you are going to make us fight a country where
+men work eleven hours a day, for lower wages, with our hands tied behind
+our backs by legislation of this kind? Well, you know," he threw
+himself back in his chair with a contemptuous laugh, "there can be only
+one explanation. You and your friends, of course, have banished
+political economy to Saturn--and you suppose that by doing so you get
+rid of it for all the rest of the world. But I imagine it will beat you,
+all the same!"
+
+He stopped in a heat. As usual what he found to say was not equal to
+what he wanted to say, and beneath his anger with Wharton was the
+familiar fuming at his own lack of impressiveness.
+
+"Well, I dare say," said Wharton, serenely. "However, let's take your
+'political economy' a moment, and see if I can understand what you mean
+by it. There never were two words that meant all things to all men so
+disreputably!"
+
+And thereupon to the constant accompaniment of his cigarette, and with
+the utmost composure and good temper, he began to "heckle" his
+companion, putting questions, suggesting perfidious illustrations,
+extracting innocent admissions, with a practised shrewdness and malice,
+which presently left the unfortunate Bateson floundering in a sea of his
+own contradictions, and totally unable for the moment to attach any
+rational idea whatever to those great words of his favourite science,
+wherewith he was generally accustomed to make such triumphant play, both
+on the platform and in the bosom of the family.
+
+The permanent official round the corner watched the unequal fight with
+attentive amusement. Once when it was a question of Mill's doctrine of
+cost of production as compared with that of a leading modern
+collectivist, he leant forward and supplied a correction of something
+Wharton had said. Wharton instantly put down his cigarette and addressed
+him in another tone. A rapid dialogue passed between them, the dialogue
+of experts, sharp, allusive, elliptical, in the midst of which the host
+gave the signal for joining the ladies.
+
+"Well, all I know is," said Bateson, as he got up, "that these kinds of
+questions, if you and your friends have your way, will _wreck_ the
+Liberal party before long--far more effectually than anything Irish has
+ever done. On these things some of us will fight, if it must come to
+that."
+
+Wharton laughed.
+
+"It would be a national misfortune if you didn't give us a stiff job,"
+he said, with an airy good-humour which at once made the other's
+blustering look ridiculous.
+
+"I wonder what that fellow is going to do in the House," said the
+permanent official to his companion as they went slowly upstairs,
+Wharton being some distance ahead. "People are all beginning to talk of
+him as a coming man, though nobody quite knows why, as yet. They tell me
+he frames well in speaking, and will probably make a mark with his
+speech next Friday. But his future seems to me very doubtful. He can
+only become a power as the head of a new Labour party. But where is the
+party? They all want to be kings. The best point in his favour is that
+they are likely enough to take a gentleman if they must have a leader.
+But there still remains the question whether he can make anything out of
+the material."
+
+"I hope to God he can't!" said the old general, grimly; "it is these
+town-chatterers of yours that will bring the Empire about our heads
+before we've done. They've begun it already, wherever they saw a
+chance."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the drawing-room Wharton devoted himself for a few minutes to his
+hostess, a little pushing woman, who confided to his apparently
+attentive ear a series of grievances as to the bad manners of the great
+ladies of their common party, and the general evil plight of Liberalism
+in London from the social point of view.
+
+"Either they give themselves airs--_rediculous_ airs!--or they admit
+everybody!" she said, with a lavish use of white shoulders and scarlet
+fan by way of emphasis. "My husband feels it just as much as I do. It is
+a real misfortune for the party that its social affairs should be so
+villainously managed. Oh! I dare say _you_ don't mind, Mr. Wharton,
+because you are a Socialist. But, I assure you, those of us who still
+believe in the influence of the best people don't like it."
+
+A point whence Wharton easily led her through a series of spiteful
+anecdotes bearing on her own social mishaps and rebuffs, which were none
+the less illuminating because of the teller's anxious effort to give
+them a dignified and disinterested air. Then, when neither she nor her
+plight were any longer amusing, he took his leave, exchanging another
+skirmishing word or two on the staircase with Lady Selina, who it
+appeared was "going on" as he was, and to the same house.
+
+In a few minutes his hansom landed him at the door of a great mansion
+in Berkeley Square, where a huge evening party was proceeding, given by
+one of those Liberal ladies whom his late hostess had been so freely
+denouncing. The lady and the house belonged to a man who had held high
+office in the late Administration.
+
+As he made his way slowly to the top of the crowded stairs, the stately
+woman in white satin and diamonds who was "receiving" on the landing
+marked him, and when his name was announced she came forward a step or
+two. Nothing could have been more flattering than the smile with which
+she gave him her gloved hand to touch.
+
+"Have you been out of town all these Sundays?" she said to him, with the
+slightest air of soft reproach. "I am always at home, you know--I told
+you so!"
+
+She spoke with the ease of one who could afford to make whatever social
+advances she pleased. Wharton excused himself, and they chatted a little
+in the intervals of her perpetual greetings to the mounting crowd. She
+and he had met at a famous country house in the Easter recess, and her
+aristocrat's instinct for all that gives savour and sharpness to the
+dish of life had marked him at once.
+
+"Sir Hugh wants you to come down and see us in Sussex," she said,
+stretching her white neck a little to speak after him, as he was at last
+carried through the drawing-room door by the pressure behind him. "Will
+you?"
+
+He threw back an answer which she rather took for granted than heard,
+for she nodded and smiled through it--stiffening her delicate-face the
+moment afterwards to meet the timid remarks of one of her husband's
+constituents--asked by Sir Hugh in the streets that afternoon--who
+happened to present her with the next hand to shake.
+
+Inside, Wharton soon found himself brought up against the ex-Secretary
+of State himself, who greeted him cordially, and then bantered him a
+little on his coming motion.
+
+"Oh, I shall be interested to see what you make of it. But, you know, it
+has no _actuality_--never can have--till you can agree among yourselves.
+You _say_ you want the same thing--I dare say you'll all swear it on
+Friday--but _really_--"
+
+The statesman shook his head pleasantly.
+
+"The details are a little vague still, I grant you," said Wharton,
+smiling.
+
+"And you think the principle matters twopence without the details? I
+have always found that the difficulty with the Christian command, 'Be ye
+perfect.' The principle doesn't trouble me at all!"
+
+The swaying of the entering throng parted the two speakers, and for a
+second or two the portly host followed with his eye the fair profile and
+lightly-built figure of the younger man as they receded from him in the
+crowd. It was in his mind that the next twenty years, whether this man
+or that turned out to be important or no, must see an enormous
+quickening of the political pace. He himself was not conscious of any
+jealousy of the younger men; but neither did he see among them any
+commanding personality. This young fellow, with his vivacity, his
+energy, and his Socialist whims, was interesting enough; and his
+problem was interesting--the problem of whether he could make a party
+out of the heterogeneous group of which he was turning out to be
+indisputably the ablest member. But what was there _certain_ or
+_inevitable_ about his future after all? And it was the same with all
+the rest. Whereas the leaders of the past had surely announced
+themselves beyond mistake from the beginning. He was inclined to think,
+however, that we were levelling up rather than levelling down. The world
+grew too clever, and leadership was more difficult every day.
+
+Meanwhile Wharton found his progress through these stately rooms
+extremely pleasant. He was astonished at the multitude of people he
+knew, at the numbers of faces that smiled upon him. Presently, after
+half an hour of hard small talk, he found himself for a moment without
+an acquaintance, leaning against an archway between two rooms, and free
+to watch the throng. Self-love, "that froward presence, like a
+chattering child within us," was all alert and happy. A feeling of
+surprise, too, which had not yet worn away. A year before he had told
+Marcella Boyce, and with conviction, that he was an outcast from his
+class. He smiled now at that past _naivete_ which had allowed him to
+take the flouts of his country neighbours and his mother's unpopularity
+with her aristocratic relations for an index of the way in which
+"society" in general would be likely to treat him and his opinions. He
+now knew, on the contrary, that those opinions had been his best
+advertisement. Few people, it appeared, were more in demand among the
+great than those who gave it out that they would, if they could, abolish
+the great.
+
+"It's because they're not enough afraid of us--yet," he said to himself,
+not without spleen. "When we really get to business--if we ever do--I
+shall not be coming to Lady Cradock's parties."
+
+"Mr. Wharton, do you ever do such a frivolous thing as go to the
+theatre?" said a pretty, languishing creature at his elbow, the wife of
+a London theatrical manager. "Suppose you come and see us in 'The
+Minister's Wooing,' first night next Saturday. I've got _one_ seat in my
+box, for somebody _very_ agreeable. Only it must be somebody who can
+appreciate my frocks!"
+
+"I should be charmed," said Wharton. "Are the frocks so adorable?"
+
+"Adorable! Then I may write you a note? You don't have your horrid
+Parliament that night, do you?" and she fluttered on.
+
+"I think you don't know my younger daughter, Mr. Wharton?" said a severe
+voice at his elbow.
+
+He turned and saw an elderly matron with the usual matronly cap and
+careworn countenance putting forward a young thing in white, to whom he
+bowed with great ceremony. The lady was the wife of a north-country
+magnate of very old family, and one of the most exclusive of her kind in
+London. The daughter, a vision of young shyness and bloom, looked at him
+with frightened eyes as he leant against the wall beside her and began
+to talk. She wished he would go away and let her get to the girl friend
+who was waiting for her and signalling to her across the room. But in a
+minute or two she had forgotten to wish anything of the kind. The
+mixture of audacity with a perfect self-command in the manner of her new
+acquaintance, that searching half-mocking look, which saw everything in
+detail, and was always pressing beyond the generalisations of talk and
+manners, the lightness and brightness of the whole aspect, of the curls,
+the eyes, the flexible determined mouth, these things arrested her. She
+began to open her virgin heart, first in protesting against attack, then
+in confession, till in ten minutes her white breast was heaving under
+the excitement of her own temerity and Wharton knew practically all
+about her, her mingled pleasure and remorse in "going out," her
+astonishment at the difference between the world as it was this year,
+and the world as it had been last, when she was still in the
+school-room--her Sunday-school--her brothers--her ideals--for she was a
+little nun at heart--her favourite clergyman--and all the rest of it.
+
+"I say, Wharton, come and dine, will you, Thursday, at the House--small
+party--meet in my room?"
+
+So said one of the party whips, from behind into his ear. The speaker
+was a popular young aristocrat who in the preceding year had treated the
+member for West Brookshire with chilliness. Wharton turned--to consider
+a moment--then gave a smiling assent.
+
+"All right!" said the other, withdrawing his hand from Wharton's
+shoulder--"good-night!--two more of these beastly crushes to fight
+through till I can get to my bed, worse luck! Are any of your fellows
+here to-night?"
+
+Wharton shook his head.
+
+"Too austere, I suppose?"
+
+"A question of dress coats, I should think," said Wharton, drily.
+
+The other shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"And this calls itself a party gathering--in a radical and democratic
+house--what a farce it all is!"
+
+"Agreed! good-night."
+
+And Wharton moved on, just catching as he did so the eyes of his new
+girl acquaintance looking back at him from a distant door. Their shy
+owner withdrew them instantly, coloured, and passed out of sight.
+
+At the same moment a guest entered by the same door, a tall grave man in
+the prime of life, but already grey haired. Wharton, to his surprise,
+recognised Aldous Raeburn, and saw also that the master of the house had
+him by the arm. They came towards him, talking. The crowd prevented him
+from getting effectually out of their way, but he turned aside and took
+up a magazine lying on a bookcase near.
+
+"And you really think him a trifle better?" said the ex-minister.
+
+"Oh, yes, better--certainly better--but I am afraid he will hardly get
+back to work this session--the doctors talk of sending him away at
+once."
+
+"Ah, well," said the other, smiling, "we don't intend it seems to let
+you send anything important up to the Lords yet awhile, so there will be
+time for him to recruit."
+
+"I wish I was confident about the recruiting," said Raeburn, sadly. "He
+has lost much strength. I shall go with them to the Italian lakes at the
+end of next week, see them settled and come back at once."
+
+"Shall you miss a sitting of the commission?" asked his host. Both he
+and Raeburn were members of an important Labour Commission appointed the
+year before by the new Conservative government.
+
+"Hardly, I think," said Raeburn, "I am particularly anxious not to miss
+D----'s evidence."
+
+And they fell talking a little about the Commission and the witnesses
+recently examined before it. Wharton, who was wedged in by a group of
+ladies, and could not for the moment move, heard most of what they were
+saying, much against his will. Moreover Raeburn's tone of quiet and
+masterly familiarity with what he and his companion were discussing
+annoyed him. There was nothing in the world that he himself would more
+eagerly have accepted than a seat on that Commission.
+
+"Ah! there is Lady Cradock!" said Raeburn, perceiving his hostess across
+a sea of intervening faces, and responding to her little wave of the
+hand. "I must go and get a few words with her, and then take my aunt
+away."
+
+As he made his way towards her, he suddenly brushed against Wharton, who
+could not escape. Raeburn looked up, recognised the man he had touched,
+flushed slightly and passed on. A bystander would have supposed them
+strangers to each other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Two or three minutes later, Wharton was walking down a side street
+towards Piccadilly. After all the flattering incidents of the evening,
+the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly.
+Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been
+thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome
+pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in
+the library at Mellor to her _fiance_ at the moment of giving him his
+dismissal--and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached
+him about the broken engagement, by the help still more of the look, or
+rather the entire absence of look wherewith Raeburn had walked past his
+greeting and his outstretched hand in a corridor of the House, on the
+first occasion of their meeting after the news had become public
+property, Wharton was inclined to think she _had_--what then? No doubt
+the stern moralist might have something to say on the subject of taking
+advantage of a guest's position to tamper with another man's betrothed.
+If so, the stern moralist would only show his usual incapacity to grasp
+the actual facts of flesh and blood. What chance would he or any one
+else have had with Marcella Boyce, if she had happened to be in love
+with the man she had promised to marry? That little trifle had been left
+out in the arrangement. It might have worked through perfectly well
+without; as it happened it had broken down. _Realities_ had broken it
+down. Small blame to them!
+
+"I stood for _truth_!" he said to himself with a kind of rage--"that
+moment when I held her in the library, she _lived_.--Raeburn offered her
+a platform, a position; _I_ made her think, and feel. I helped her to
+know herself. Our relation was not passion; it stood on the
+threshold--but it was real--a true relation so far as it went. That it
+went no farther was due again to circumstances--realities--of another
+kind. That _he_ should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is
+natural enough. If we were in France he would call me out and I should
+give him satisfaction with all the pleasure in life. But what am _I_
+about? Are his ways mine? I should have nothing left but to shoot myself
+to-morrow if they were!"
+
+He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a
+merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in
+him by contact with Aldous Raeburn.
+
+"Has he not interfered with my freedom--stamped his pedantic foot on
+me--ever since we were boys together! I have owed him one for many
+years--now I have paid it. Let him take the chances of war!"
+
+Then, driven on by an irritation not to be quieted, he began against his
+will to think of those various occasions on which he and Aldous Raeburn
+had crossed each other in the past--of that incident in particular which
+Miss Raeburn had roughly recalled to Lady Winterbourne's reluctant
+memory.
+
+Well, and what of it? It had occurred when Wharton was a lad of
+twenty-one, and during an interval of some months when Aldous Raeburn,
+who had left Cambridge some three years before, and was already the man
+of importance, had shown a decided disposition to take up the brilliant,
+unmanageable boy, whom the Levens, among other relations, had already
+washed their hands of.
+
+"What did he do it for?" thought Wharton. "Philanthropic motives of
+course. He is one of the men who must always be saving their souls, and
+the black sheep of the world come in handy for the purpose. I remember I
+was flattered then. It takes one some time to understand the workings of
+the Hebraistic conscience!"
+
+Yes--as it galled him to recollect--he had shown great plasticity for a
+time. He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and Raeburn's
+letters and Raeburn's influence had certainly pulled him through various
+scrapes that might have been disastrous. Then--a little later--he could
+see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch Etive, where he and
+Raeburn, Lord Maxwell, Miss Raeburn, and a small party had spent the
+August of his twenty-first birthday. Well--that surly keeper, and his
+pretty wife who had been Miss Raeburn's maid--could anything be more
+inevitable? A hard and jealous husband, and one of the softest, most
+sensuous natures that ever idleness made love to. The thing was in the
+air!--in the summer, in the blood--as little to be resisted as the
+impulse to eat when you are hungry, or drink when you thirst. Besides,
+what particular harm had been done, what particular harm _could_ have
+been done with such a Cerberus of a husband? As to the outcry which had
+followed one special incident, nothing could have been more uncalled
+for, more superfluous. Aldous had demanded contrition, had said strong
+things with the flashing eyes, the set mouth of a Cato. And the culprit
+had turned obstinate--would repent nothing--not for the asking.
+Everything was arguable, and Renan's doubt as to whether he or Theophile
+Gautier were in the right of it, would remain a doubt to all time--that
+was all Raeburn could get out of him. After which the Hebraist friend of
+course had turned his back on the offender, and there was an end of it.
+
+That incident, however, had belonged to a stage in his past life, a
+stage marked by a certain prolonged tumult of the senses, on which he
+now looked back with great composure. That tumult had found vent in
+other adventures more emphatic a good deal than the adventure of the
+keeper's wife. He believed that one or two of them had been not unknown
+to Raeburn.
+
+Well, that was done with! His mother's death--that wanton stupidity on
+the part of fate--and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first
+drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he
+now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of travel, and
+the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of
+adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the intellectual
+stimulus which comes of perpetual change, of new heavens, new seas, new
+societies, had loosened the yoke of the flesh and saved him from
+himself. The deliverance so begun had been completed at home, by the
+various chances and opportunities which had since opened to him a solid
+and tempting career in that Labour movement his mother had linked him
+with, without indeed ever understanding either its objects or its men.
+The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the
+vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things
+had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with
+the thrill of increasing personal success. Passion would require to
+present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession of him
+again.
+
+As to his relation to Raeburn, he well remembered that when, after that
+long break in his life, he and Aldous had met casually again, in London
+or elsewhere, Aldous had shown a certain disposition to forget the old
+quarrel, and to behave with civility, though not with friendliness. As
+to Wharton he was quite willing, though at the same time he had gone
+down to contest West Brookshire, and, above all, had found himself in
+the same house as Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, with an even livelier
+sense than usual of the excitement to be got out of mere living.
+
+No doubt when Raeburn heard that story of the library--if he had heard
+it--he recognised in it the man and the character he had known of old,
+and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in bitter
+and insurmountable disgust. A mere Hebraist's mistake!
+
+"That girl's attraction for me was not an attraction of the
+senses--except so far that for every normal man and woman charm is
+charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be! What I played
+for with her was _power_--power over a nature that piqued and yet by
+natural affinity belonged to me. I could not have retained that power,
+as it happened, by any bait of passion. Even without the Hurd affair, if
+I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have
+risen against me and her own treachery. I knew that perfectly well, and
+took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting,
+too interesting, to give up. For the moment! then a few days,--a few
+weeks later--Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!"
+
+And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own
+idiosyncrasies. It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of
+mental emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him
+within the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the
+Hurd agitation was over. That agitation had brought him vigorously and
+profitably into public notice at a convenient moment. But what had
+originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became
+in the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation. Wharton
+had no sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself
+strangely at home there. He had the instinct for debate, the instinct
+for management, together with a sensitive and contriving ambition. He
+found himself possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance
+that astonished him--a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for
+drudgery, and for making the best of dull men. The omens were all
+favourable, sometimes startlingly so. He was no longer hampered by the
+ill-will of a county or a family connection. Here in this new world,
+every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was
+worth. Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two
+preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House,
+from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still
+loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise. The anxieties
+and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.
+
+The quick, elastic nature adjusted itself at once. To some kinds of
+success, nothing is so important as the ability to forget--to sweep the
+mind free of everything irrelevant and superfluous. Marcella Boyce, and
+all connected with her, passed clean out of Wharton's consciousness.
+Except that once or twice he said to himself with a passing smile that
+it was a good thing he had not got himself into a worse scrape at
+Mellor. Good heavens! in what plight would a man stand--a man with his
+career to make--who had given Marcella Boyce claims upon him! As well
+entangle oneself with the Tragic Muse at once as with that stormy,
+unmanageable soul!
+
+So much for a year ago. To-night, however, the past had been thrust back
+upon him, both by Lady Selina's talk and by the meeting with Raeburn. To
+smart indeed once more under that old ascendency of Raeburn's, was to
+be provoked into thinking of Raeburn's old love.
+
+Where was Miss Boyce? Surely her year of hospital training must be up by
+now?
+
+He turned into St. James Street, stopped at a door not far from the
+Palace end, let himself in, and groped his way to the second floor. A
+sleepy man-servant turned out of his room, and finding that his master
+was not inclined to go to bed, brought lights and mineral water. Wharton
+was practically a teetotaller. He had taken a whim that way as a boy,
+and a few experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had
+only confirmed what had been originally perhaps a piece of
+notoriety-hunting. He had, as a rule, flawless health; and the
+unaccustomed headaches and nausea which followed these occasional
+excesses had disgusted and deterred him. He shook himself easily free of
+a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and had ever since found
+his abstinence a source both of vanity and of distinction. Nothing
+annoyed him more than to hear it put down to any ethical motive. "If I
+liked the beastly stuff, I should swim in it to-morrow," he would say
+with an angry eye when certain acquaintance--not those he made at Labour
+Congresses--goaded him on the point. "As it is, why should I make it, or
+chloral, or morphia, or any other poison, my master! What's the
+inducement--eh, you fellows?"
+
+_En revanche_ he smoked inordinately.
+
+"Is that all, sir," said his servant, pausing behind his chair, after
+candles, matches, cigarettes, and Apollinaris had been supplied in
+abundance.
+
+"Yes; go to bed, Williams, but don't lock up. Good-night."
+
+The man departed, and Wharton, going to the window which opened on a
+balcony looking over St. James Street, threw it wide, and smoked a
+cigarette leaning against the wall. It was on the whole a fine night and
+warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air. In the
+street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only
+just past midnight and the clubs were not yet empty. To his right the
+turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky
+covered with light, windy cloud. Beyond it his eye sought instinctively
+for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless--like some
+one in a stupid silence. That light of the sitting House had become to
+him one of the standing pleasures of life. He had never yet been
+honestly glad of its extinction.
+
+"I'm a precious raw hand," he confessed to himself with a shake of the
+head as he stood there smoking. "And it can't last--nothing does."
+
+Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the edge of the
+balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a
+little, and finally took out a letter. He stooped over the lamp to read
+it. It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had written him some two or
+three days after the breach of her engagement. That fact was barely
+mentioned at the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any
+kind. Then the letter continued:
+
+"I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and
+attempted through these many weeks. But for them it must have been plain
+to us both that we could never rightly meet again. I am very destitute
+just now--and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing
+left me. But that scene in the past, which put us both wrong with
+honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out--_thought--suffered_
+away. I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other
+co-worker and co-thinker--if in the future you ever want my work, if you
+can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could
+do--ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.
+
+"But for the present I am going quite away into another world. I have
+been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and
+they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go. As
+soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year's training at a
+London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and
+nurse. This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife from
+seeing Hurd the day before the execution. I knew then that all was over
+for me at Mellor.
+
+"As for the wretched break-down of everything--of all my schemes and
+friendships here--I had better not speak of it. I feel that I have given
+these village-folk, whom I had promised to help, one more reason to
+despair of life. It is not pleasant to carry such a thought away with
+one. But if the tool breaks and blunts, how can the task be done? It can
+be of no use till it has been re-set.
+
+"I should like to know how your plans prosper. But I shall see your
+paper and follow what goes on in Parliament. For the present I want
+neither to write nor get letters. They tell me that as a probationer I
+shall spend my time at first in washing glasses, and polishing
+bath-taps, on which my mind rests!
+
+"If you come across my friends of whom I have spoken to you--Louis,
+Anthony, and Edith Craven--and could make any use of Louis for the
+_Labour Clarion_, I should be grateful. I hear they have had bad times
+of late, and Louis has engaged himself, and wants to be married. You
+remember I told you how we worked at the South Kensington classes
+together, and how they made me a Venturist?
+
+  "Yours very truly,
+
+  "MARCELLA BOYCE."
+
+Wharton laid down the letter, making a wry mouth over some of its
+phrases.
+
+"'_Put us both wrong with honour and conscience.' 'One more reason for
+despair of life'--'All was over for me at Mellor_'--dear! dear!--how
+women like the big words--the emphatic pose. All those little odds and
+ends of charities--that absurd straw-plaiting scheme! Well, perhaps one
+could hardly expect her to show a sense of humour just then. But why
+does nature so often leave it out in these splendid creatures?"
+
+"Hullo!" he added, as he bent over the table to look for a pen; "why
+didn't that idiot give me these?"
+
+For there, under an evening paper which he had not touched, lay a pile
+of unopened letters. His servant had forgotten to point them out to him.
+On the top was a letter on which Wharton pounced at once. It was
+addressed in a bold inky hand, and he took it to be from Nehemiah
+Wilkins, M.P., his former colleague at the Birmingham Labour Congress,
+of late a member of the _Labour Clarion_ staff, and as such a daily
+increasing plague and anxiety to the _Clarion's_ proprietor.
+
+However, the letter was not from Wilkins. It was from the secretary of
+a Midland trades-union, with whom Wharton had already been in
+communication. The union was recent, and represented the as yet feeble
+organisation of a metal industry in process of transition from the
+home-workshop to the full factory, or Great Industry stage. The
+conditions of work were extremely bad, and grievances many; wages were
+low, and local distress very great. The secretary, a young man of
+ability and enthusiasm, wrote to Wharton to say that certain alterations
+in the local "payment lists" lately made by the employers amounted to a
+reduction of wages; that the workers, beginning to feel the heartening
+effects of their union, were determined not to submit; that bitter and
+even desperate agitation was spreading fast, and that a far-reaching
+strike was imminent. Could they count on the support of the _Clarion_?
+The _Clarion_ had already published certain letters on the industry from
+a Special Commissioner--letters which had drawn public attention, and
+had been eagerly read in the district itself. Would the _Clarion_ now
+"go in" for them? Would Mr. Wharton personally support them, in or out
+of Parliament, and get his friends to do the same? To which questions,
+couched in terms extremely flattering to the power of the _Clarion_ and
+its owner, the secretary appended a long and technical statement of the
+situation.
+
+Wharton looked up from the letter with a kindling eye. He foresaw an
+extremely effective case, both for the newspaper and the House of
+Commons. One of the chief capitalists involved was a man called Denny,
+who had been long in the House, for whom the owner of the _Clarion_
+entertained a strong personal dislike. Denny had thwarted him
+vexatiously--had perhaps even made him ridiculous--on one or two
+occasions; and Wharton saw no reason whatever for forgiving one's
+enemies until, like Narvaez, one had "shot them all." There would be
+much satisfaction in making Denny understand who were his masters. And
+with these motives there mingled a perfectly genuine sympathy with the
+"poor devils" in question, and a desire to see them righted.
+
+"Somebody must be sent down at once," he said to himself. "I suppose,"
+he added, with discontent, "it must be Wilkins."
+
+For the man who had written the articles for the _Labour Clarion_, as
+Special Commissioner, had some three weeks before left England to take
+command of a colonial newspaper.
+
+Still pondering, he took up the other letters, turned them
+over--childishly pleased for the thousandth time by the M.P. on each
+envelope and the number and variety of his correspondence--and eagerly
+chose out three--one from his bankers, one from his Lincolnshire agent,
+and one from the _Clarion_ office, undoubtedly this time in Wilkins's
+hand.
+
+He read them, grew a little pale, swore under his breath, and, angrily
+flinging the letters away from him, he took up his cigarette again and
+thought.
+
+The letter from his bankers asked his attention in stiff terms to a
+largely overdrawn account, and entirely declined to advance a sum of
+money for which he had applied to them without the guarantee of two
+substantial names in addition to his own. The letter from his agent
+warned him that the extraordinary drought of the past six weeks,
+together with the general agricultural depression, would certainly mean
+a large remission of rents at the June quarter day, and also informed
+him that the holders of his co-operative farm would not be able to pay
+their half-yearly interest on the capital advanced to them by the
+landlord.
+
+As to the third letter, it was in truth much more serious than the two
+others. Wilkins, the passionate and suspicious workman, of great natural
+ability, who had been in many ways a thorn in Wharton's side since the
+beginning of his public career, was now member for a mining
+constituency. His means of support were extremely scanty, and at the
+opening of the new Parliament Wharton had offered him well-paid work on
+the _Clarion_ newspaper. It had seemed to the proprietor of the
+_Clarion_ a way of attaching a dangerous man to himself, perhaps also of
+controlling him. Wilkins had grudgingly accepted, understanding
+perfectly well what was meant.
+
+Since then the relation between the two men had been one of perpetual
+friction. Wilkins's irritable pride would yield nothing, either in the
+House or in the _Clarion_ office, to Wharton's university education and
+class advantages, while Wharton watched with alarm the growing influence
+of this insubordinate and hostile member of his own staff on those
+labour circles from which the _Clarion_ drew its chief support.
+
+In the letter he had just read Wilkins announced to the proprietor of
+the _Clarion_ that in consequence of the "scandalous mismanagement" of
+that paper's handling of a certain trade arbitration which had just
+closed, he, Wilkins, could no longer continue to write for it, and
+begged to terminate his engagement at once, there being no formal
+agreement between himself and Wharton as to length of notice on either
+side. A lively attack on the present management and future prospects of
+the _Clarion_ followed, together with the threat that the writer would
+do what in him lay henceforward to promote the cause of a certain rival
+organ lately started, among such working men as he might be able to
+influence.
+
+"_Brute_! jealous, impracticable brute!" exclaimed Wharton aloud, as he
+stood chafing and smoking by the window. All the difficulties which this
+open breach was likely to sow in his path stood out before him in clear
+relief.
+
+"_Personal_ leadership, there is the whole problem," he said to himself
+in moody despair. "Can I--like Parnell--make a party and keep it
+together? Can I through the _Clarion_--and through influence _outside_
+the House--coerce the men _in_ the House? If so, we can do something,
+and Lady Cradock will no longer throw me her smiles. If not the game is
+up, both for me and for them. They have no cohesion, no common
+information, no real power. Without leaders they are a mere set of
+half-educated firebrands whom the trained mind of the country humours
+because it must, and so far as they have brute force behind them.
+Without _leadership_, _I_ am a mere unit of the weakest group in the House.
+Yet, by Jove! it looks as though I had not the gifts."
+
+And he looked back with passionate chagrin on the whole course of his
+connection with Wilkins, his unavailing concessions and small
+humiliations, his belief in his own tact and success, all the time that
+the man dealt with was really slipping out of his hands.
+
+"Damn the fellow!" he said at last, flinging his cigarette away. "Well,
+that's done with. All the same, he would have liked that Midland job! He
+has been hankering after a strike there for some time, and might have
+ranted as he pleased. I shall have the satisfaction of informing him he
+has lost his opportunity. Now then--who to send? By Jove! what about
+Miss Boyce's friend?"
+
+He stood a moment twisting the quill-pen he had taken up, then he
+hastily found a sheet of paper and wrote:
+
+"Dear Miss Boyce,--It is more than a year since I have heard of you, and
+I have been wondering with much interest lately whether you have really
+taken up a nursing life. You remember speaking to me of your friends the
+Cravens? I come across them sometimes at the Venturist meetings, and
+have always admired their ability. Last year I could do nothing
+practical to meet your wishes. This year, however, there is an opening
+on the _Clarion_, and I should like to discuss it with you. Are you in
+town or to be found? I could come any afternoon next week, _early_--I go
+down to the House at four--or on Saturdays. But I should like it to be
+Tuesday or Wednesday, that I might try and persuade you to come to our
+Eight Hours debate on Friday night. It would interest you, and I think I
+could get you a seat. We Labour members are like the Irishmen--we can
+always get our friends in.
+
+"I must send this round by Mellor, so it may not reach you till Tuesday.
+Perhaps you will kindly telegraph. The _Clarion_ matter is pressing.
+
+  "Yours sincerely,
+
+  "H.S. WHARTON."
+
+When he had finished he lingered a moment over the letter, the play of
+conflicting motives and memories bringing a vague smile to the lips.
+
+Reverie, however, was soon dispersed. He recollected his other
+correspondents, and springing up he began to pace his room, gloomily
+thinking over his money difficulties, which were many. He and his mother
+had always been in want of money ever since he could remember. Lady
+Mildred would spend huge sums on her various crotchets and campaigns,
+and then subside for six months into wretched lodgings in a back street
+of Southsea or Worthing, while the Suffolk house was let, and her son
+mostly went abroad. This perpetual worry of needy circumstances had
+always, indeed, sat lightly on Wharton. He was unmarried, and so far
+scarcity had generally passed into temporary comfort before he had time
+to find it intolerable. But now the whole situation was becoming more
+serious. In the first place, his subscriptions and obligations as a
+member of Parliament, and as one of the few propertied persons in a
+moneyless movement, were considerable. Whatever Socialism might make of
+money in the future, he was well aware that money in the present was no
+less useful to a Socialist politician than to any one else. In the next
+place, the starting and pushing of the _Clarion_ newspaper--originally
+purchased by the help of a small legacy from an uncle--had enormously
+increased the scale of his money transactions and the risks of life.
+
+How was it that, with all his efforts, the _Clarion_ was not making, but
+losing money? During the three years he had possessed it he had raised
+it from the position of a small and foul-mouthed print, indifferently
+nourished on a series of small scandals, to that of a Labour organ of
+some importance. He had written a weekly signed article for it, which
+had served from the beginning to bring both him and the paper into
+notice; he had taken pains with the organisation and improvement of the
+staff; above all, he had spent a great deal more money upon it, in the
+way of premises and appliances, than he had been, as it turned out, in
+any way justified in spending.
+
+Hence, indeed, these tears. Rather more than a year before, while the
+_Clarion_ was still enjoying a first spurt of success and notoriety, he
+had, with a certain recklessness which belonged to his character,
+invested in new and costly machinery, and had transferred the paper to
+larger offices. All this had been done on borrowed money.
+
+Then, for some reason or other, the _Clarion_ had ceased to answer to
+the spur--had, indeed, during the past eight months been flagging
+heavily. The outside world was beginning to regard the _Clarion_ as an
+important paper. Wharton knew all the time that its advertisements were
+falling off, and its circulation declining. Why? Who can say? If it is
+true that books have their fates, it is still more true of newspapers.
+Was it that a collectivist paper--the rival organ mentioned by
+Wilkins--recently started by a group of young and outrageously clever
+Venturists and more closely in touch than the _Clarion_ with two or
+three of the great unions, had filched the _Clarion's_ ground? Or was it
+simply that, as Wharton put it to himself in moments of rage and
+despondency, the majority of working men "are either sots or
+block-heads, and will read and support _nothing_ but the low racing or
+police-court news, which is all their intelligences deserve?" Few people
+had at the bottom of their souls a more scornful distrust of the
+"masses" than the man whose one ambition at the present moment was to be
+the accepted leader of English labour.
+
+Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was
+liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept
+waiting. On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great
+indulgence.
+
+He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his
+curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back. Presently
+he stopped--absently--in front of the inner wall of the room, where,
+above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolnshire house, a
+number of large framed photographs were hung close together.
+
+His eye caught one and brightened. With an impatient gesture, like that
+of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.
+
+"If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will
+take me out of it! What a _gorgeous_ time we had on that glacier!"
+
+He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan
+Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had spent
+four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very grain
+and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could
+_feel_ the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind. The man
+seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself. And
+there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and
+that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they
+had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of
+the glacier. Ah, those had been years of _life_, those _Wanderjahre_! He
+ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing
+itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores
+with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and
+fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the
+wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever
+of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.
+
+"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,'" he thought.
+"Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?"
+
+And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a
+flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how
+indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we
+choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! _Somewhere_, while we
+toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is _air_, there is _sea_, the joy
+of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying! This
+interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or
+altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose--why! they
+could be shaken off at a moment's notice!
+
+"However"--he turned on his heel--"suppose we try a few other trifles
+first. What time? those fellows won't have gone to bed yet!"
+
+He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way
+to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped
+before a well-known fashionable club, extremely small, and extremely
+select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had
+introduced him when he was young and tender, and his mother's relations
+still cherished hopes of snatching him as a brand from the burning.
+
+The front rooms of the club were tolerably full still. He passed on to
+the back. A door-keeper stationed in the passage stepped back and
+silently opened a door. It closed instantly behind him, and Wharton
+found himself in a room with some twenty other young fellows playing
+baccarat, piles of shining money on the tables, the electric lamps hung
+over each, lighting every detail of the scene with the same searching
+disenchanting glare.
+
+"I say!" cried a young dark-haired fellow, like a dishevelled Lord
+Byron. "Here comes the Labour leader--make room!"
+
+And amid laughter and chaffing he was drawn down to the baccarat table,
+where a new deal was just beginning. He felt in his pockets for money;
+his eyes, intent and shining, followed every motion of the dealer's
+hand. For three years now, ever since his return from his travels, the
+gambler's passion had been stealing on him. Already this season he had
+lost and won--on the whole lost--large sums. And the fact was--so
+far--absolutely unknown except to the men with whom he played in this
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+"If yer goin' downstairs, Nuss, you'd better take that there scuttle
+with yer, for the coals is gittin' low an' it ull save yer a journey!"
+
+Marcella looked with amusement at her adviser--a small bandy-legged boy
+in shirt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly
+featured face. He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding,
+his sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his
+expression sharp and keen as a hawk's.
+
+"Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I'm gone, and don't
+let any one in but the doctor."
+
+And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick
+woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.
+
+"I aint a goin' ter," said the boy, shortly, beginning to sweep again
+with energy, "an' if this 'ere baby cries, give it the bottle, I
+s'pose?"
+
+"No, certainly not," said Marcella, firmly; "it has just had one. You
+sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone."
+
+Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and
+ran a general's eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the room.
+
+"Now look 'ere, Nuss," he said in a tone of pitying remonstrance, "yer
+never a goin' down to that 'ere coal cellar without a light. Yer'll 'ave
+to come runnin' up all them stairs again--sure as I'm alive yer will!"
+
+And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end
+of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the
+coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still
+masterfully considering her, let her go.
+
+Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar
+all over the poorer parts of West Central London--the eighteenth-century
+house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now
+parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air,
+water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its
+chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic
+art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.
+
+Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling
+on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade.
+Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors
+of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and
+dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that
+the house added one more to the standing shames of the district--an
+opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings
+among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again
+with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.
+
+The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed
+a sleepless night. The evening before she had been sent for in haste to
+a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a
+ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women
+friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation
+of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the
+patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been
+Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had
+done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an
+instant. The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman
+among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse;
+while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as
+best she could, in the midst of the poor thing's wild shrieks and
+wrestlings.
+
+It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their
+utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the day's
+work. Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband
+looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged
+suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had
+not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and
+night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and
+that--she could hardly have told how.
+
+"_Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!_" said the husband, rising and shaking
+himself. He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race,
+a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter. Yet,
+after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of
+perspiration.
+
+"You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again,"
+said Marcella.
+
+The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the
+nurse.
+
+"You will not go away, mees," he implored, "you will not leaf me alone?"
+
+Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.
+
+"No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes.
+You had better go to bed."
+
+It was close on three o'clock. The man demurred a little, but he was in
+truth too worn out to resist. He went into the back room and lay down
+with the children.
+
+Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her
+patient. Her quick ear caught every sound about her--the heavy breaths
+of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the
+sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the
+crowded house. Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances
+for pulling the woman through--for it was what a nurse calls "a good
+case," one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty--partly on the
+extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and
+mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman's
+illness; and partly--in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought--on
+the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in
+this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother
+and her child!
+
+The year in hospital had _rushed_--dreamless sleep by night, exhausting
+fatigue of mind and body by day. A hospital nurse, if her work _seizes_
+her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself. Now, for some
+six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse,
+under the control of a central office and superintendent. Her work lay
+in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind. The life was
+freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to self-consciousness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now the night was over. The husband had gone off to work at a
+factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children
+had been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself
+had been home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office
+asking that her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in
+sole charge, with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.
+
+When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found
+Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.
+
+"Well, Benny!" she said as she entered, "how have you got on?"
+
+"Yer can't move the dirt on them boards with sweepin'," said Benny,
+looking at them with disgust; "an' I ain't a goin' to try it no more."
+
+"You're about right there, Benny," said Marcella, mournfully, as she
+inspected them; "well, we'll get Mrs. Levi to come in and scrub--as soon
+as your mother can bear it."
+
+She stepped up to the bed and looked at her patient, who seemed to be
+passing into a state of restless prostration, more or less under the
+influence of morphia. Marcella fed her with strong beef tea made by
+herself during the night, and debated whether she should give brandy.
+No--either the doctor would come directly, or she would send for him.
+She had not seen him yet, and her lip curled at the thought of him. He
+had ordered a nurse the night before, but had not stayed to meet her,
+and Marcella had been obliged to make out his instructions from the
+husband as best she could.
+
+Benny looked up at her with a wink as she went back to the fire.
+
+"I didn't let none o' _them_ in," he said, jerking his thumb over his
+shoulder. "They come a whisperin' at the door, an' a rattlin' ov the
+handle as soon as ever you gone downstairs. But I tole 'em just to take
+theirselves off, an' as 'ow you didn't want 'em. Sillies!"
+
+And taking a crust smeared with treacle out of his pocket, Benny
+returned with a severe air to the sucking of it.
+
+Marcella laughed.
+
+"Clever Benny," she said, patting his head; "but why aren't you at
+school, sir?"
+
+Benjamin grinned.
+
+"'Ow d'yer s'pose my ma's goin' to git along without me to do for 'er
+and the babby?" he replied slily.
+
+"Well, Benny, you'll have the Board officer down on you."
+
+At this the urchin laughed out.
+
+"Why, 'e wor here last week! Ee can't be troublin' 'isself about this
+'ere bloomin' street _ev_ery day in the week."
+
+There was a sharp knock at the door.
+
+"The doctor," she said, as her face dismissed the frolic brightness
+which had stolen upon it for a moment. "Run away, Benny."
+
+Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then
+withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with
+him.
+
+The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair
+moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the
+fire.
+
+"You come from the St. Martin's Association?"
+
+Marcella stiffly replied. He took her temperature-chart from her hand
+and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time
+to time with eyes that displeased her. Presently she came to an account
+of the condition in which she had found her patient. The edge on the
+words, for all their professional quiet, was unmistakable. She saw him
+flush.
+
+He moved towards the bed, and she went with him. The woman moaned as he
+approached her. He set about his business with hands that shook.
+Marcella decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his
+proceedings with increasing disgust and amazement. Presently she could
+bear it no longer.
+
+"I think," she said, touching his arm, "that you had better leave it to
+me--and--go away!"
+
+He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying,
+and faced her fiercely.
+
+"What do you mean?" he said, "don't you know your place?"
+
+The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.
+
+"Yes--I know my place!"
+
+Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she
+had to say. She knew--and he could not deny--that he had endangered his
+patient's life. She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it
+again. Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse.
+His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.
+
+Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for
+an instant he would have struck her. Finally he turned down his
+shirt-cuffs and walked away.
+
+"You understand," he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his
+hand, "that I shall not attend this case again till your Association can
+send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the
+doctor. I shall now write a report to your superintendent."
+
+"As you please," said Marcella, quietly. And she went to the door and
+opened it.
+
+He passed her sneering:
+
+"A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say.
+I'd sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!"
+
+Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening. "Will you go?" she
+said.
+
+He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside,
+breathing threats.
+
+Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.
+There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth
+and strain.
+
+Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to
+fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking. In another
+minute or two she would be besieged by them. She called sharply,
+"Benny!"
+
+Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses
+to right and left.
+
+"What is it you want, Nuss? No, she don't want none o' _you_--_there_!"
+
+And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in
+all their faces, but that Marcella said to him--
+
+"Let in Mrs. Levi, please."
+
+The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was
+admitted, and then the key was turned. Marcella scribbled a line on a
+half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with
+it.
+
+"I have sent for a new doctor," she explained, still frowning and white,
+to Mrs. Levi. "That one was not fit."
+
+The woman's olive-skinned face lightened all over. "Thanks to the Lord!"
+she said, throwing up her hands. "But how in the world did you do 't,
+miss? There isn't a single soul in this house that doesn't go all of a
+tremble at the sight of 'im. Yet all the women has 'im when they're
+ill--bound to. They thinks he must be clever, 'cos he's such a brute. I
+do believe sometimes it's that. He _is_ a brute!"
+
+Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set
+her straight and comfortable again. But the woman had begun to mutter
+once more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did not understand,
+and could no longer be kept still. The temperature was rising again, and
+another fit of delirium was imminent. Marcella could only hope that she
+and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor
+came. When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the
+poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could,
+while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman's
+illness and of Dr. Blank's conduct of it. Marcella's feeling, as she
+listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity! The sufferings
+of the poor, _because_ they were poor--these things often, still,
+darkened earth and heaven for her. That wretch would have been quite
+capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently,
+if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do
+squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.
+
+"Hullo, nurse!" said a cheery voice; "you seem to have got a bad case."
+
+The sound was as music in Marcella's ears. The woman she held was fast
+becoming unmanageable--had just shrieked, first for "poison," then for a
+"knife," to kill herself with, and could hardly be prevented by the
+combined strength of her nurse and Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself
+madly out of bed, and now from tearing out her black hair in handfuls.
+The doctor--a young Scotchman with spectacles, and stubbly red
+beard--came quickly up to the bed, asked Marcella a few short questions,
+shrugged his shoulders over her dry report of Dr. Blank's proceedings,
+then took out a black case from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe
+together.
+
+For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by any treatment.
+The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and
+nurse, in the intervals of his wife's paroxysms, not to leave him alone.
+
+Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the
+passage of time. Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out
+with a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected
+his professional sense. Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an
+instant, struck out with a wild right hand. The blow caught Marcella on
+the cheek, and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.
+
+"You are hurt," said Dr. Angus, running up to her.
+
+"No, no," she said, smiling through the tears that the shock had called
+into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside; "it is nothing.
+You said you wanted some fresh ice."
+
+And she went into the back room to get it.
+
+The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the patient.
+
+"You will have to send her to the infirmary," he said to the husband;
+"there is nothing else for it."
+
+Marcella came back with the ice, and was able to apply it to the head.
+The patient was quieter--was, in fact, now groaning herself into a fresh
+period of exhaustion.
+
+The doctor's sharp eyes took note of the two figures, the huddled
+creature on the pillows and the stately head bending over her, with the
+delicately hollowed cheek, whereon the marks of those mad fingers stood
+out red and angry. He had already had experience of this girl in one or
+two other cases.
+
+"Well," he said, taking up his hat, "it is no good shilly-shallying. I
+will go and find Dr. Swift." Dr. Swift was the parish doctor.
+
+When he had gone, the big husband broke down and cried, with his head
+against the iron of the bed close to his wife. He put his great hand on
+hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois. They had been
+eight years married, and she had never had a day's serious illness till
+now. Marcella's eyes filled with tears as she moved about the room,
+doing various little tasks.
+
+At last she went up to him.
+
+"Won't you go and have some dinner?" she said to him kindly. "There's
+Benjamin calling you," and she pointed to the door of the back room,
+where stood Benny, his face puckered with weeping, forlornly holding out
+a plate of fried fish, in the hope of attracting his father's attention.
+
+The man, who in spite of his size and strength was in truth childishly
+soft and ductile, went as he was bid, and Marcella and Mrs. Levi set
+about doing what they could to prepare the wife for her removal.
+
+Presently parish doctor and sanitary inspector appeared, strange and
+peremptory invaders who did but add to the terror and misery of the
+husband. Then at last came the ambulance, and Dr. Angus with it. The
+patient, now once more plunged in narcotic stupor, was carried
+downstairs by two male nurses, Dr. Angus presiding. Marcella stood in
+the doorway and watched the scene,--the gradual disappearance of the
+helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat
+of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by
+step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and
+browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and
+landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr.
+Angus could hardly make his directions heard, angrily as he bade them
+stand back; and on the top stair, the big husband, following the form of
+his departing and unconscious wife with his eyes, his face convulsed
+with weeping, the whimpering children clinging about his knees.
+
+How hot it was!--how stifling the staircase smelt, and how the sun beat
+down from that upper window on the towzled unkempt women with their
+large-eyed children.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Marcella on her way home turned into a little street leading to a great
+block of model dwellings, which rose on the right hand side and made
+everything else, the mews entrance opposite, the lines of squalid shops
+on either side, look particularly small and dirty. The sun was beating
+fiercely down, and she was sick and tired.
+
+As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the
+large asphalted court round which they ran--blazing heat on one side of
+it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with
+chalk marks for wickets--she was seized with depression. The tall yet
+mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of
+packed and crowded humanity--these things, instead of offering her rest,
+only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more
+endurance, more making the best of it.
+
+But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her,
+and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of
+her own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her
+children, who had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In
+sets 7 and 8, on either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two
+widows, each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.
+
+Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside the
+"home" of the district on certain conditions, which had been fulfilled
+in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her old friends in
+these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable though poor
+class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her to make a
+temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that she
+could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for
+their companionship, as she pleased.
+
+As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or
+entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the
+living room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back
+kitchen.
+
+The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's training
+showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak flap
+tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three cane
+chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the
+varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books
+on the tables--there was not one of these things that was not in its
+degree a pleasure to her young senses, that did not help her to live her
+life. This afternoon as she opened the door and looked in, the pretty
+colours and forms in the tiny room were as water to the thirsty. Her
+mother had sent her some flowers the day before. There they were on the
+tables, great bunches of honey-suckles, of blue-bells, and Banksia
+roses. And over the mantelpiece was a photograph of the place where such
+flowers as Mellor possessed mostly grew--the unkempt lawn, the old
+fountain and grey walls of the Cedar Garden.
+
+The green blind over the one window which looked into the court, had
+been drawn down against the glare of the sun, as though by a careful
+hand. Beside a light wooden rocking chair, which was Marcella's
+favourite seat, a tray of tea things had been put out. Marcella drew a
+long breath of comfort as she put down her bag.
+
+"Now, _can_ I wait for my tea till I have washed and dressed?"
+
+She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy
+child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door
+between her rooms and the Hurds.
+
+"Minta!"
+
+A voice responded.
+
+"Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there's a good soul! I will be
+back directly."
+
+And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room,
+daintily fresh and clean but very pale. She had taken off her nurse's
+dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung
+about her in cool folds.
+
+But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her
+disapprovingly.
+
+"Whatever are you so late for?" she asked a little peevishly. "You'll
+get ill if you go missing your dinner."
+
+"I couldn't help it, Minta, it was such a bad case."
+
+Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased. Her mind was
+constantly full of protest against this nursing. Why should Miss Boyce
+do such "funny things"--why should she live as she did, at all?
+
+Their relation to each other was a curious one. Marcella, knowing that
+the life of Hurd's widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent for
+her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering
+her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service. Minta
+already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her.
+It was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine
+that one of the "gentlemen" who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve
+Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out
+of pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce
+would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling,
+and leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from
+Mellor. Her first instinct after her husband's execution had been to
+hide herself from all the world. But for a long time her precarious
+state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary
+Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village. It was not till
+Marcella's proposal came that her way was clear. She sold her bits of
+things at once, took her children and went up to Brown's buildings.
+
+Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from
+which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often
+shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at
+thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with
+almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps
+there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open
+mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the
+result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed
+mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of
+their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never
+have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask
+of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression
+that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and
+distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man,
+Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not
+pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the
+children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic
+pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss
+Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and
+Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she
+came in and found him sitting there.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through
+this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not
+call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening,
+had declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be
+that of servant in any sense, but of friend and sister; and on her and
+her children Marcella had spent from the beginning a number of new
+womanish wiles which, strangely enough, this hard, strenuous life had
+been developing in her. She would come and help put the children to bed;
+she would romp with them in their night-gowns; she would bend her
+imperious head over the anxious endeavour to hem a pink cotton pinafore
+for Daisy, or dress a doll for the baby. But the relation jarred and
+limped perpetually, and Marcella wistfully thought it her fault.
+
+Just now, however, as she sat gently swaying backwards and forwards in
+the rocking-chair, enjoying her tea, her mood was one of nothing but
+content.
+
+"Oh, Minta, give me another cup. I want to have a sleep so badly, and
+then I am going to see Miss Hallin, and stay to supper with them."
+
+"Well, you mustn't go out in them nursin' things again," said Minta,
+quickly; "I've put you in some lace in your black dress, an' it looks
+beautiful."
+
+"Oh, thank you, Minta; but that black dress always seems to me too smart
+to walk about these streets in."
+
+"It's just _nice_," said Minta, with decision. "It's just what everybody
+that knows you--what your mamma--would like to see you in. I can't abide
+them nursin' clothes--nasty things!"
+
+"I declare!" cried Marcella, laughing, but outraged; "I never like
+myself so well in anything."
+
+Minta was silent, but her small mouth took an obstinate look. What she
+really felt was that it was absurd for ladies to wear caps and aprons
+and plain black bonnets, when there was no need for them to do anything
+of the kind.
+
+"Whatever have you been doing to your cheek?" she exclaimed, suddenly,
+as Marcella handed her the empty cup to take away.
+
+Marcella explained shortly, and Minta looked more discontented than
+ever. "A lot of low people as ought to look after themselves," that was
+how in her inmost mind she generally defined Marcella's patients. She
+had been often kind and soft to her neighbours at Mellor, but these
+dirty, crowded Londoners were another matter.
+
+"Where is Daisy?" asked Marcella as Minta was going away with the tea;
+"she must have come back from school."
+
+"Here I am," said Daisy, with a grin, peeping in through the door of the
+back kitchen. "Mother, baby's woke up."
+
+"Come here, you monkey," said Marcella; "come and go to sleep with me.
+Have you had your tea?"
+
+"Yes, lots," said Daisy, climbing up into Marcella's lap. "Are you going
+to be asleep a long time?"
+
+"No--only a nap. Oh! Daisy, I'm so tired. Come and cuddlie a bit! If you
+don't go to sleep you know you can slip away--I shan't wake."
+
+The child, a slight, red-haired thing, with something of the ethereal
+charm that her dead brother had possessed, settled herself on Marcella's
+knees, slipped her left thumb into her mouth, and flung her other arm
+round Marcella's neck. They had often gone to sleep so. Mrs. Hurd came
+back, drew down the blind further, threw a light shawl over them both,
+and left them.
+
+An hour and a half later Minta came in again as she had been told.
+Daisy had slipped away, but Marcella was still lying in the perfect
+gentleness and relaxation of sleep.
+
+"You said I was to come and wake you," said Minta, drawing up the blind;
+"but I don't believe you're a bit fit to be going about. Here's some hot
+water, and there's a letter just come."
+
+Marcella woke with a start, Minta put the letter on her knee, and dream
+and reality flowed together as she saw her own name in Wharton's
+handwriting.
+
+She read the letter, then sat flushed and thinking for a while with her
+hands on her knees.
+
+A little while later she opened the Hurds' front-door.
+
+"Minta, I am going now. I shall be back early after supper, for I
+haven't written my report."
+
+"There--now you look something like!" said Minta, scanning her
+approvingly--the wide hat and pretty black dress. "Shall Daisy run out
+with that telegram?"
+
+"No, thanks. I shall pass the post. Good-bye."
+
+And she stooped and kissed the little withered woman. She wished,
+ardently wished, that Minta would be more truly friends with her!
+
+After a brisk walk through the June evening she stopped--still within
+the same district--at the door of a house in a long, old-fashioned
+street, wherein the builder was busy on either hand, since most of the
+long leases had just fallen in. But the house she entered was still
+untouched. She climbed a last-century staircase, adorned with panels of
+stucco work--slender Italianate reliefs of wreaths, ribbons, and
+medallions on a pale green ground. The decoration was clean and cared
+for, the house in good order. Eighty years ago it was the home of a
+famous judge, who entertained in its rooms the legal and literary
+celebrities of his day. Now it was let out to professional people in
+lodgings or unfurnished rooms. Edward Hallin and his sister occupied the
+top floor.
+
+Miss Hallin, a pleasant-looking, plain woman of about thirty-five, came
+at once in answer to Marcella's knock, and greeted her affectionately.
+Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.
+
+"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had forgotten
+us!"
+
+"I didn't get home till four, and then I had to have a sleep," she
+explained, half shyly.
+
+"What! you haven't been night-nursing?"
+
+"Yes, for once."
+
+"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let's look after her."
+
+He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window--the charming
+circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of the room
+and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of back
+gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane trees
+here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs of
+another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities
+of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their
+blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of
+the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of line against the blue
+and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur
+that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were
+sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.
+
+Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The walls,
+indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by
+photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to
+be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a
+few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had
+chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a
+piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one
+side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair,
+the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its
+knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she
+sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching
+over her brother.
+
+"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled
+herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have
+rested you more."
+
+"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly
+hoped to find them alone.
+
+"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you
+were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away.
+Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There
+are some anxious things going on."
+
+He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly
+wrenched himself from what were evidently recurrent thoughts.
+
+"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said, bending forward
+to her. "You don't know how much I have thought of what you have told me
+already."
+
+"I'm doing just the same," she said, laughing. "Don't take so much
+interest in it. It's the fashion just now to admire nurses; but it's
+ridiculous. We do our work like other people--sometimes badly, sometimes
+well. And some of us wouldn't do it if we could help it."
+
+She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager
+to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her
+kindly.
+
+"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?" he asked.
+
+"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more character. But
+there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for you--every
+hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And the 'off'
+times were no trouble--I never did anything else but walk up and down
+the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National Gallery if it was
+wet."
+
+"And it was the monotony you liked?"
+
+She made a sign of assent.
+
+"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen it?"
+
+She flushed.
+
+"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said, not without a little
+impatience. "But I didn't like it all at once. I hated a great deal of
+it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and
+wash--the things they set me to at first--I thought I should have been
+quite happy. To see my table full of glasses without a spot, and my
+brass-taps shining, made me as proud as a peacock! But then of course I
+had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."
+
+"How? Morally?"
+
+She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes--it seemed to me all
+topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather a
+stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn't have spoken two
+words to her. And here she was ordering me about--rating me as I had
+never rated a house-maid--laughing at me for not knowing this or that,
+and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the
+things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well
+that she had said to herself, 'Now then I must take that proud girl down
+a peg, or she will be no use to anybody;' and I had somehow to put up
+with it."
+
+"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort yourself by
+reflecting that it was everybody's fate?"
+
+Her lip twitched with amusement.
+
+"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd ideas!--sometimes
+looking back I can hardly believe it--perhaps it was partly a queer
+state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a passion I used to try
+and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces.
+And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive
+sort of way that they _couldn't_ know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor,
+and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village--or
+they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it
+came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and
+had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment
+all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming
+to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course;
+but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the
+patient's elbow in two places. Oh! the _fuss_, and the scolding, and the
+humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home
+next day."
+
+"But you didn't?"
+
+"If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have
+gone. But I couldn't think it out--I was too _dead_ tired. That is the
+chief feature of your first months in hospital--the utter helpless
+fatigue at night. You go to bed aching and you wake up aching. If you
+are healthy as I was, it doesn't hurt you; but, when your time comes to
+sleep, sleep you _must_. Even that miserable night my head was no sooner
+on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the
+routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty. Then
+when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went
+out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so grateful to her! I could
+have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with
+delight. And--then--somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of
+the work seized me--I grew ambitious--they pushed me on
+rapidly--everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my
+enemy--and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and
+engrossing place in the whole world."
+
+"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you had never obeyed any
+one in your life before?"
+
+"Not since I was at school--and then--not much!"
+
+Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the
+face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but
+that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with
+her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than
+the woman, had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in
+something new--something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the
+pathos and the pain of growth.
+
+"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.
+
+"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this afternoon."
+
+Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"
+
+"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?" she asked
+him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air. "And don't
+suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a very rare thing for us to
+undertake night-nursing at all."
+
+"Can you tell me what the case was?"
+
+She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with
+Dr. Blank.
+
+"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless look, "and
+that I shall be blamed."
+
+"I should think your second doctor will take care of that!" said Hallin.
+
+"I don't know. I couldn't help it. But it is one of our first principles
+not to question a doctor. And last week too I got the Association into
+trouble. A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got quite fond of
+had to be removed to hospital. She asked me to cut her hair. It was
+matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to the
+ward. So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at one
+to meet the doctor and help get her off. When I came, I found the whole
+court in an uproar. The sister of the woman, who had been watching for
+me, stood on the doorstep, and implored me to go away. The husband had
+gone out of his senses with rage because I had cut his wife's hair
+without his consent. 'He'll murder you, Nuss!' said the sister, 'if he
+sees you! Don't come in!--he's mad--he's _been going round on 'is 'ands
+and knees on the floor_!'"--Hallin interrupted with a shout of laughter.
+Marcella laughed too; but to his amazement he saw that her hand shook,
+and that there were tears in her eyes.
+
+"It's all very well," she said with a sigh, "but I had to come away in
+disgrace, all the street looking on. And he made such a fuss at the
+office as never was. It was unfortunate--we don't want the people set
+against the nurses. And now Dr. Blank!--I seem to be always getting into
+scrapes. It is different from hospital, where everything is settled for
+one."
+
+Hallin could hardly believe his ears. Such womanish terrors and
+depressions from Marcella Boyce! Was she, after all, too young for the
+work, or was there some fret of the soul reducing her natural force? He
+felt an unwonted impulse of tenderness towards her--such as one might
+feel towards a tired child--and set himself to cheer and rest her.
+
+He had succeeded to some extent, when he saw her give a little start,
+and following her eyes he perceived that unconsciously his arm, which
+was resting on the table, had pushed into her view a photograph in a
+little frame, which had been hitherto concealed from her by a glass of
+flowers. He would have quietly put it out of sight again, but she sat up
+in her chair.
+
+"Will you give it me?" she said, putting out her hand.
+
+He gave it her at once.
+
+"Alice brought it home from Miss Raeburn the other day. His aunt made
+him sit to one of the photographers who are always besieging public men.
+We thought it good."
+
+"It is very good," she said, after a pause. "Is the hair really--as grey
+as that?" She pointed to it.
+
+"Quite. I am very glad that he is going off with Lord Maxwell to Italy.
+It will be ten days' break for him at any rate. His work this last year
+has been very heavy. He has had his grandfather's to do really, as well
+as his own; and this Commission has been a stiff job too. I am rather
+sorry that he has taken this new post."
+
+"What post?"
+
+"Didn't you hear? They have made him Under-secretary to the Home
+Department. So that he is now in the Government."
+
+She put back the photograph, and moved her chair a little so as to see
+more of the plane trees and the strips of sunset cloud.
+
+"How is Lord Maxwell?" she asked presently.
+
+"Much changed. It might end in a sudden break-up at any time."
+
+Hallin saw a slight contraction pass over her face. He knew that she had
+always felt an affection for Lord Maxwell. Suddenly Marcella looked
+hastily round her. Miss Hallin was busy with a little servant at the
+other end of the room making arrangements for supper.
+
+"Tell me," she said, bending over the arm of her chair and speaking in a
+low, eager voice, "he is beginning to forget it?"
+
+Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile
+suggested an answer from which she turned away.
+
+"If he only would!" she said, speaking almost to herself, with a kind of
+impatience. "He ought to marry, for everybody's sake."
+
+"I see no sign of his marrying--at present," said Hallin, drily.
+
+He began to put some papers under his hand in order. There was a cold
+dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood. Ever since that
+day--that never-forgotten day--when he had come to her the morning after
+her last interview with Aldous Raeburn--come with reluctance and
+dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him--and had gone away her
+friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had ever been in
+the days of the engagement, their relation on this subject had been the
+same. His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life
+during the past eighteen months, had been very great. In that first
+interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on
+the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry,
+something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly
+difficult task--its simplicity, its delicate respect for her
+personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than
+anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the
+stress of emotion--this something had suddenly broken down his pale,
+proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and
+to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as
+amazed them both.
+
+Experiences of this kind were not new to him. His life consecrated to
+ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a
+crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him
+off from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially
+cut him off from marriage--together with the ardent temperament, the
+charm, the imaginative insight which had been his cradle-gifts--these
+things ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide
+and prop of natures stronger and stormier than his own. Often the
+unwilling guide; for he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of
+the man who has set himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will
+have power and time to finish it. The claims made upon him seemed to him
+often to cost him physical and brain energy he could ill spare.
+
+But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey
+in such matters. Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and
+there was no help for it. Since their first memorable interview, at long
+intervals, he had written to her and she to him. Of her hospital life,
+till to-night, she had never told him much. Her letters had been the
+passionate outpourings of a nature sick of itself, and for the moment of
+living; full of explanations which really explained little; full too of
+the untaught pangs and questionings of a mind which had never given any
+sustained or exhaustive effort to any philosophical or social question,
+and yet was in a sense tortured by them all--athirst for an impossible
+justice, and aflame for ideals mocked first and above all by the
+writer's own weakness and defect. Hallin had felt them interesting, sad,
+and, in a sense, fine; but he had never braced himself to answer them
+without groans. There were so many other people in the world in the same
+plight!
+
+Nevertheless, all through the growth of friendship one thing had never
+altered between them from the beginning--Hallin's irrevocable judgment
+of the treatment she had bestowed on Aldous Raeburn. Never throughout
+the whole course of their acquaintance had he expressed that judgment to
+her in so many words. Notwithstanding, she knew perfectly well both the
+nature and the force of it. It lay like a rock in the stream of their
+friendship. The currents of talk might circle round it, imply it, glance
+off from it; they left it unchanged. At the root of his mind towards
+her, at the bottom of his gentle sensitive nature, there was a
+sternness which he often forgot--she never.
+
+This hard fact in their relation had insensibly influenced her greatly,
+was constantly indeed working in and upon her, especially since the
+chances of her nursing career had brought her to settle in this
+district, within a stone's throw of him and his sister, so that she saw
+them often and intimately. But it worked in different ways.
+Sometimes--as to-night--it evoked a kind of defiance.
+
+A minute or two after he had made his remark about Aldous, she said to
+him suddenly,
+
+"I had a letter from Mr. Wharton to-day. He is coming to tea with me
+to-morrow, and I shall probably go to the House on Friday with Edith
+Craven to hear him speak."
+
+Hallin gave a slight start at the name. Then he said nothing; but went
+on sorting some letters of the day into different heaps. His silence
+roused her irritation.
+
+"Do you remember," she said, in a low, energetic voice, "that I told you
+I could never be ungrateful, never forget what he had done?"
+
+"Yes, I remember," he said, not without a certain sharpness of tone.
+"You spoke of giving him help if he ever asked it of you--has he asked
+it?"
+
+She explained that what he seemed to be asking was Louis Craven's help,
+and that his overtures with regard to the _Labour Clarion_ were
+particularly opportune, seeing that Louis was pining to be able to
+marry, and was losing heart, hope, and health for want of some fixed
+employment. She spoke warmly of her friends and their troubles, and
+Hallin's inward distaste had to admit that all she said was plausible.
+Since the moment in that strange talk which had drawn them together,
+when she had turned upon him with the passionate cry--"I see what you
+mean, perfectly! but I am not going to marry Mr. Wharton, so don't
+trouble to warn me--for the matter of that he has warned me
+himself:--but my _gratitude_ he _has_ earned, and if he asks for it I
+will _never_ deny it him "--since that moment there had been no word of
+Wharton between them. At the bottom of his heart Hallin distrusted her,
+and was ashamed of himself because of it. His soreness and jealousy for
+his friend knew no bounds. "If that were to come on again"--he was
+saying to himself now, as she talked to him--"I could not bear it, I
+could not forgive her!"
+
+He only wished that she would give up talking about Wharton altogether.
+But, on the contrary, she would talk of him--and with a curious
+persistence. She must needs know what Hallin thought of his career in
+Parliament, of his prospects, of his powers as a speaker. Hallin
+answered shortly, like some one approached on a subject for which he
+cares nothing.
+
+"Yet, of course, it is not that; it is injustice!" she said to herself,
+with vehemence. "He _must_ care; they are his subjects, his interests
+too. But he will not look at it dispassionately, because--"
+
+So they fell out with each other a little, and the talk dragged. Yet,
+all the while, Marcella's inner mind was conscious of quite different
+thoughts. How good it was to be here, in this room, beside these two
+people! She must show herself fractious and difficult with Hallin
+sometimes; it was her nature. But in reality, that slight and fragile
+form, that spiritual presence were now shrined in the girl's eager
+reverence and affection. She felt towards him as many a Catholic has
+felt towards his director; though the hidden yearning to be led by him
+was often oddly covered, as now, by an outer self-assertion. Perhaps her
+quarrel with him was that he would not lead her enough--would not tell
+her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with
+each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.
+
+"I say, Hallin--is this all right?"
+
+The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the
+door, and cautiously put in a curly head.
+
+"Frank!--is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.
+
+Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the
+window.
+
+"Well, I _am_ glad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking
+Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends
+were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what--"
+
+He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair
+boy's face.
+
+"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to
+pretend he did."
+
+"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twice
+as--I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"--this in a stage aside to
+Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studying
+Marcella.
+
+"Well, _I_ think she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at
+a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain
+danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was
+very welcome.
+
+The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to
+it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three
+others--over-driven and over-pressed, all of them--responded with a kind
+of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all
+his budget--his peacock's pride at having been just put into the
+'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with
+his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just
+scraped through his Mods.
+
+"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared,
+with a child's complacency. "_Brutes!_ I couldn't remember them. I
+learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards--but it was no good;
+they nearly dished me!"
+
+"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain
+person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure
+year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to
+last, without a hitch."
+
+"The winner of the _Derby_!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with
+his hands on his knees; "why, I should rather think so! That isn't
+memory; that's _knowledge_!--Goodness! who's this?"
+
+The last remark was addressed _sotto voce_ to Marcella. Supper was just
+over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had returned to the window, while
+Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and
+set all straight.
+
+Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking.
+Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to
+Hallin and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others
+were Bennett, Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders,
+and Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and
+Leven; but the new-comers took little notice of any one but their host,
+and were soon seated about him discussing a matter already apparently
+familiar to them, and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with
+that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative field,
+replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong
+disagreement with the rest--a disagreement which troubled himself and
+irritated them.
+
+Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was
+sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven
+turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.
+
+"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it
+rum! isn't it _rum_! Look at Hallin,--those are the people whom he
+_cares_ to talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left--really an
+awfully cute fellow--and this man in front, I think he told me he was a
+mason, a Socialist of course--would like to string _me_ up to-morrow.
+Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think
+we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would pray
+over us first and shoot us afterwards--which isn't the case, I
+understand, with many of 'em. Then the others--you know them? That's
+Bennett--regular good fellow--always telling his pals not to make fools
+of themselves--for which of course they love him no more than they are
+obliged--And Wilkins--oh! _Wilkins_"--he chuckled--"they say it'll come
+to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my
+charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."
+
+Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a
+little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and
+looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him.
+Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head
+in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to
+anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that,
+notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.
+
+"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with
+a little scorn.
+
+"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't
+know anything about anything!--Miss Boyce!"
+
+He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at
+once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside
+her.
+
+Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several
+times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of
+his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she
+recognised the old symptoms.
+
+"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said--"how many
+since we met last?"
+
+"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his
+fingers--"you're like all the rest."
+
+Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a
+flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.
+
+"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk!
+And yet I did want to tell you about it--you were awfully kind to me
+down at home. I want to tell you--and I don't want to tell you--perhaps
+I _oughtn't_ to tell you--you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an
+ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all--and yet somehow--"
+
+The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a
+hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at
+Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by
+its two years or so of time!
+
+"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."
+
+"No--really?--shall I?"
+
+Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to
+some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A
+pretty girl--or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some
+relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again
+at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and
+adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking
+her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not
+to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed
+like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or
+family; yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of
+them--how familiar it all was!--and how many more of them there seemed
+to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!
+
+"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's so _frightfully_
+pretty--well, frightfully fetching, rather--and well dressed and all the
+rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed
+girls--not she. She's read a _lot_ of things--a lot! I'm sure, Miss
+Boyce"--he looked at her confidently,--"if _you_ were to see her you'd
+think her awfully clever. And yet she's so little--and so dainty--and
+she dances--my goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I
+mean--Letty Lind isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her
+mother's a most dreadful old bore--well, no, I didn't mean that--of
+course I didn't mean that!--but she's fussy, you know, and invalidy, and
+has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged about in bath chairs, and
+Betty's an angel to her--she is really--though her mother's always
+snapping her head off. And as to the _poor_--"
+
+Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval,
+sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to
+restrain this plunging lover.
+
+"Look here--do come to the point--have you proposed to her?"
+
+"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently. "About once a
+week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me--that sort always
+does--but I think I might really have a chance with her, if it weren't
+for her mother--horrible old--no, of _course_ I don't mean that! But
+now it comes in--what I oughtn't to tell you--I _know_ I oughtn't to
+tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't
+help talking of it!"
+
+And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red
+cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.
+
+Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in
+riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?--of course you must
+tell me."
+
+"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could
+mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you
+about--about--You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the
+Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's
+taken a fancy to her lately--and her mother's treated me like dirt ever
+since they asked her to go to Italy--and naturally a fellow sees what
+_that_ means--and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty
+_would_; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"--this time he
+smote his knee in real desperation--"now I _have_ done it. I'm simply
+_bursting_ always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say.
+Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"
+
+"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience--"that her mother wants her
+to marry Mr. Raeburn?"
+
+He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair,
+her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the
+pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night
+with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into
+his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist
+the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the
+Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He
+knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but
+all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the
+headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a
+burning curiosity as to how she would take it--what she would say.
+
+Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his
+chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and
+self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.
+
+"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him
+steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr.
+Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't
+matter what I suppose--that _you_ think--about my present state of mind.
+It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved
+badly. I know it--and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living
+one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for
+you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about
+Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."
+
+Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.
+
+"I never thought of that," he said.
+
+"Well, you might, mightn't you?"
+
+For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush
+of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.
+
+Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy
+and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.
+
+"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him, smiling, and in
+her most ordinary voice.
+
+The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on
+chattering.
+
+"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mrs.
+Macdonald--that's Betty's mother--she hasn't got a father--had talked it
+over. And now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too
+for ten days--and when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me
+as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death.
+It's sickening!"
+
+"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"
+
+"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said despondently. "She's
+always teasing and amusing him. When she's there she never lets him
+alone. She harries him out. She makes him read to her and ride with her.
+She makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'd _never_ think
+Aldous would discuss--her lovers and her love affairs, and being in
+love!--it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she
+and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me
+she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so
+flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to
+Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said; 'this'll never do! you've
+got to come and dance with me, and _push_ those chairs and tables
+aside'--I can fancy the little stamp she'd give--'and make those other
+people dance too.' And she made him--she positively made him. Aldous
+declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And
+presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of
+it--and of course the evening went like smoke."
+
+Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on
+the speaker.
+
+"And Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded
+incredulous.
+
+"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that,
+and he told her everything--oh, well," said the lad, embarrassed, and
+clutching at his usual formula--"of course, I didn't mean that. And
+she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she
+adores him--that he's the only great man she's ever known--that I'm not
+fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to
+me--and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall
+have to shoot myself--I declare I shall!"
+
+"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't
+clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over
+there to listen to that talk. But--first--come and see me whenever you
+like--3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street--and tell me how this
+goes on?"
+
+She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half
+sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts
+had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was
+suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away
+from him.
+
+"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself
+discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of
+course she'll get rid of _them_. Just like my luck!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from
+her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of
+listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was
+reflecting how little men knew of each other!--even the most intimate
+friends--and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like,
+married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her
+meant, of course, the attraction of contraries--one of the most
+promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's
+chances were poor.
+
+Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she
+discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion
+of his present position and prospects in the Labour party--a discussion,
+however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the
+air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for
+treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his
+chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in
+these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had
+no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and
+made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind
+to send all her guests away.
+
+The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an
+organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They
+referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish
+fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to
+learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and
+strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to
+smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation,
+separate place in the House, separate Whips--they were ready, nay
+clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry
+Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the _Clarion_ with enthusiasm, and
+declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was,
+moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.
+
+The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one
+or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to
+nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of
+the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this
+big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair,
+and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with
+these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!
+
+Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some
+of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two
+workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably--Wilkins's dialect getting
+more pronounced with each step of the argument.
+
+"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself
+and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at
+_home_, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be
+the People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong
+ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak _use_ of us
+all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an'
+ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he?
+Is he a man of _us_--bone of our bone? He's a _landlord_, and an
+aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns
+in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have
+they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of
+years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o' _them_--living
+on his rent and interest--grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound
+if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do--is goin' to lead
+_me_, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords!
+Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for
+us? Let him go to his own class--I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of
+countesses, and they of him!--or let him set up as the friend of the
+working man just as he likes--I'm quite agreeable!--I shan't make any
+bones about takin' his _vote_; but I'm not goin' to make him master over
+me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of
+Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"
+
+Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a
+worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in
+and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason,
+with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of
+the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.
+
+"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly,
+"and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd
+have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our
+business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"
+
+"I'm not saying we shouldn't _organise_," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What
+I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working class--a man who has the _wants_
+of the working class--a man whom the working class can get a hold on--to
+do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or
+capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the
+coontry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"
+
+The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it
+yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold
+his own with the swells--and quite right too!"
+
+"And if Mr. Wharton _is_ a landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the
+shoemaker--a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many
+on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about
+the land, and the co-operative farming. E's _straight_ is Mr. Wharton.
+We 'aven't got Socialism yet--an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord.
+Ee was born it."
+
+"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the
+red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek--"he's runnin' that paper for
+his own hand--Haven't I had experience of him? I know it--And I'll prove
+it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton--and
+when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for
+any good we're iver likely to get out o' _him. He_ go agen the landlords
+when it coom to the real toossle,--I know 'em--I tell tha--I know 'em!"
+
+A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.
+
+"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on
+groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small
+attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been
+re-housed in our generation by these same landlords--no fuss about
+it--and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and
+fourpence a week!"
+
+Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker--amazed!
+
+Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like
+women--least of all, ladies.
+
+He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she
+said--which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe--it was done
+for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or
+just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize
+cattle must have prize cottages of course--"with a race of slaves
+inside 'em!"
+
+Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee,
+went avengingly into facts--the difference between landlords' villages
+and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great
+landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point
+of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for
+the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the
+French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.
+
+Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.
+
+"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her
+head or am I?"
+
+After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen
+joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous
+silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence
+of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox,
+everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.
+
+"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said
+Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd
+take a lot of beating."
+
+"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I _am_."
+
+He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.
+
+When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.
+
+"Are there many of these Labour members like _that_?"
+
+Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.
+
+"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he
+has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular
+audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,--it's his
+tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for
+the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"
+
+And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of
+expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.
+
+"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics
+is one thing--slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her
+head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in
+the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and
+Wharton had scored his first point.
+
+He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their
+ways.
+
+"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it
+teases.' _We_ know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you
+get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid
+Radical in the House I'm always having rows with--and upon my word I
+didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"
+
+Marcella flushed.
+
+"Never mind where I got it!" she said.
+
+In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had
+worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much
+angry zest, and to such different purpose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort
+her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for
+a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.
+
+His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."
+
+"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of
+exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into
+sleeping trim. But you go, Alice--good-night."
+
+When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the
+thought--"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! _She_--and
+justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last
+year--"
+
+He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection,
+oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep.
+Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh
+sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four
+men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in
+his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the
+night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either
+to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.
+
+He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which
+so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped
+activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since
+he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content,
+cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite
+compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The
+study of economical and historical questions; the expression through
+them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as
+few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty,
+and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the
+power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world
+on whom all his thoughts centred--these things had been his joy, and had
+led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of
+every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.
+
+And now he had come upon opposition--the first cooling of friendships,
+the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.
+
+Early in the spring of this year a book called _To-morrow and the Land_
+had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great
+ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not
+offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the
+question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It
+showed--or tried to show--in picturesque detail what might be the
+consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land
+into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and
+transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and
+the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from
+_Progress and Poverty_, which also powerfully and directly affected the
+English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great
+apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the
+landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average
+working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style,
+and--by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly
+from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of
+London--treated with abundant humour.
+
+The thing had an enormous success--in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon
+Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the
+working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were
+touched--nay, possessed--by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic
+newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the
+working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness--an
+infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense
+sale, and was in every one's hands.
+
+To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled
+problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of
+extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction,
+intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its
+success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to
+battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his
+openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen
+to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.
+
+And he had been saying his say--throwing into it all his energies, all
+his finest work. With the result that--for the first time in eleven
+years--he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath
+his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in
+place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness
+to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged
+to the inner circle and the trusted few--these bitter ghosts, with their
+hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist
+effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could
+not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul--it had been the
+source of his power--and every economical or social conviction was in
+some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his
+being--his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain,
+his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other
+men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a
+question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw
+himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with
+some prescience of the martyr's fate.
+
+Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent
+over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought
+bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him
+through so many lesser contests. It was _impossible_ that Bennett
+should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the
+honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most
+clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him.
+Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was
+so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent,
+while all his friends were talking language which was almost the
+language of a new faith!
+
+He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great
+debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He
+had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked
+forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of
+hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken
+friendships. Oh, for _sleep_--for the power to rest--to escape this
+corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled
+nothing!
+
+"_The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of
+man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it_."
+These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his
+own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or
+the hidden evil, but the hidden _wisdom_. Could one die and still
+believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven.
+"This is Friday--say Monday?"
+
+Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little
+sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the
+door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that
+the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had
+gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the
+_Labour Clarion_, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with
+special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose
+tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he
+had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the
+man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and
+had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was
+abundantly satisfied.
+
+"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper _goes in_ for the
+strike, that you will fight it through?"
+
+He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven
+was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face,
+delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in
+appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a
+courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had
+never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the
+old days of Venturist debates.
+
+"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with
+emphasis--"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now
+hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have
+been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up. There
+are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should say, belonged quite
+to the worst type of employer going."
+
+He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air
+of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.
+
+"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just
+one according to his lights. There are plenty worse than he."
+
+Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never
+accepting anything that was said quite as it stood--of not, even in
+small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was conscious of
+the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought
+to have been enough for Craven.
+
+"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his
+stick--"you see there is talk of arbitration."
+
+"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind. The men have
+been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig from the
+neighbourhood--not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it--and, of
+course, the award goes against the men."
+
+"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"
+
+Craven took out a note-book.
+
+"No!--The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men are asking
+for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all
+these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them! I
+mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you read the
+evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let them
+live first!"
+
+Craven looked up absently.
+
+"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address?" Mr. Thorpe
+was the secretary.
+
+Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it
+was not for Craven to take no notice.
+
+Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as
+anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's
+grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep
+disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of
+self-advertisement, held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an
+amazing disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.
+
+Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt
+directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave
+the minutest attention.
+
+"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.
+
+"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. "Business
+is up and I am off!"
+
+He took up his hat as he spoke.
+
+"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said
+Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy
+who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea-table.
+
+Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her
+_tete-a-tete_ before Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the
+House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so
+easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this
+disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began
+at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a
+chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and
+armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head,
+and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He
+hesitated and stayed.
+
+"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed Louis Craven
+on her way to get some cake.
+
+He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all
+gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.
+
+The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat
+among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a
+Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the
+occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven
+said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his
+arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and
+Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose
+plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded.
+Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some
+presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?
+
+"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than
+spent.--"You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven
+comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you.
+Good-bye!--good-bye!"
+
+And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen
+glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in
+which they had been sitting, he went.
+
+He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother,
+who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.
+
+"Well--any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.
+
+"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton
+had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley
+strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a salary--two hundred a
+year. Oh! it'll do."
+
+He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide
+his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the
+pinched and worn face.
+
+"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" said
+Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.
+
+"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing.
+"Anna's got to work out her shirt-making time. She only left the
+tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago. And she was to
+have a month at each."
+
+Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen
+Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a
+better authority on many Labour questions than he.
+
+Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the
+benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her
+last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he
+had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on
+to shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this
+heat.
+
+"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith pensively. "Louis
+was lodging on the second floor, she in the third floor back, and they
+used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him imploring the little
+slavey to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavey tossed her head,
+and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs,
+calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey under her thumb, got
+them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When Louis came home he
+discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course he
+wept--whatever he may say. But next morning Miss Anna found her shoes
+outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a
+note inside one of them. Affecting! wasn't it? Thenceforward, as long as
+they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked.
+Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."
+
+Marcella laughed.
+
+"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.
+
+"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can get hold of her.
+But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or trying to set up Unions.
+She does the work of six. She'll earn nearly as much as I do when we're
+married. Oh! we shall swim!"
+
+Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect--so unlike the gentle or satirical
+detachment which made his ordinary manner--with a darkening eye, as
+though annoyed by his effusion.
+
+"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what Mr. Harry Wharton
+spends on his clothes, I should think. The Labour men tell me he is
+superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his clothes,
+he is able to buy _you_, Louis, body and soul, and you seem inclined to
+be grateful."
+
+"Never mind," said Louis recklessly. "He didn't buy some one else--and I
+_am_ grateful!"
+
+"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of
+tone. "_You_ the dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to
+put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your
+becoming dependent on him."
+
+Marcella gave an angry start. Louis protested.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have to bear it from me, I
+tell you--unless you muzzle me too with an Anna."
+
+"But I don't see why _I_ should bear it," said Marcella, turning upon
+him. "I think you know that I owe Mr. Wharton a debt. Please remember
+it!"
+
+Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A question crossed his
+mind concerning her. Then he made her a little clumsy bow.
+
+"I am dumb," he said. "My manners, you perceive, are what they always
+were."
+
+"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming. "How can a
+man who has reached the position he has in so short a time--in so many
+different worlds--be disposed of by calling him an ugly name? It is more
+than unjust--it is absurd! Besides, what can you know of him?"
+
+"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread
+and butter, "that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton
+joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all. I watched his
+beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did.
+And most of them--as he knows!--have pretty strong opinions by now about
+the man."
+
+"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a man of that type to
+be the pure-eyed patriot. But neither you nor I can deny that he has
+done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my bosom? Not at all!
+He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me. I like the job, and mean
+to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a
+bit of decent work."
+
+"_You_--use Harry Wharton!" said the cripple, with a sarcasm that
+brought the colour to Louis's thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than
+before. She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal
+prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough, that a man of Anthony
+Craven's type--poor, unsuccessful, and embittered--should dislike a
+popular victorious personality.
+
+"Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?" she said with emphasis, and
+Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself
+back in his chair, and was silent.
+
+It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her
+friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men,
+especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into
+a mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art, and
+devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that
+he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle,
+Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative
+design. Yet he was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist
+of the two. Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the
+whole with Anthony a counsel of despair. He loathed wealth more
+passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in
+his kind. Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would
+probably remain a sorry spot.
+
+In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the
+hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly--though
+with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn's name--what had happened to her
+at Mellor. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it
+a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil--the lover! To fall a victim
+to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard.
+And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of
+it. At any rate he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty
+was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor
+in her fate. He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years'
+interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.
+
+After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their
+chat with an abrupt--
+
+"What _is_ this job, Louis?"
+
+"I told you. I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley
+strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."
+
+"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are too strong. I had a
+talk with Denny yesterday."
+
+The Denny he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the House,
+but his son--a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one of the
+most stiff-backed and autocratic of capitalists, had developed socialist
+opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a member of the
+"intellectual proletariat," as they have been called, the free-lances of
+the Collectivist movement. He had lately joined the Venturists. Anthony
+had taken a fancy to him. Louis as yet knew little or nothing of him.
+
+"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I don't know. I think the
+_Clarion can_ do something. The press grows more and more powerful in
+these things."
+
+And he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made--that
+Wharton always did make, in talking of the _Clarion_--as to its growth
+under his hands, and increasing influence in Labour disputes.
+
+"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum! My own belief is
+that the _Clarion_ is a rotten property, and that he knows it!"
+
+At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance after a
+certain point becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony
+for the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious
+person whom one humours but does not argue with. He accepted the part,
+saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing
+from one to the other.
+
+However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell. It
+was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and
+her pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the
+right to be rude.
+
+"How are you getting on?" he said to her abruptly as he dropped her
+hand.
+
+"Oh, very well! my superintendent leaves me almost alone now, which is a
+compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good woman,' and a
+sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice.
+Those are my chief grievances, I think."
+
+"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"
+
+She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her
+say:--
+
+"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"How like a woman! A few ill-housed villagers made you a democrat. A few
+well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class. Your
+people were wise to let you take this work."
+
+"Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans?" she asked him,
+mocking. "And I didn't say 'money' or 'comfort,' did I? but 'happiness.'
+As for my 'democracy,' you are not perhaps the best judge."
+
+She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an
+attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of
+storm in her great eyes.
+
+"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+"Because I have every right to be! I joined a society, pledged to work
+'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what poor work I can
+in that spirit."
+
+"_You_ are not a Socialist. Half the things you say, or imply, show it.
+And we _are_ Socialists."
+
+She hesitated, looking at him steadily.
+
+"No!--so far as Socialism means a political system--the trampling out of
+private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it--I find
+myself slipping away from it more and more. No!--as I go about among
+these wage-earners, the emphasis--do what I will--comes to lie less and
+less on possession--more and more on character. I go to two tenements in
+the same building. One is Hell--the other Heaven. Why? Both belong to
+well-paid artisans with equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see,
+might have a decent and pleasant life of it. But one is a man--the
+other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not
+all, I know--oh! don't trouble to tell me so!--but it is more than I
+thought. No!--my sympathies in this district where I work are not so
+much with the Socialists that I know here--saving your presence!
+but--with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation!
+and get all the abuse from all sides."
+
+Anthony laughed scornfully.
+
+"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she invariably prefers
+the tinkers to the reformers."
+
+"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the thought of many
+days finding defiant expression--"it seems to me like all other
+interesting and important things--destined to help something else!
+Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods--it becomes the
+great bulwark of property and the feudal state. The Crusades--they set
+out to recover the tomb of the Lord!--what they did was to increase
+trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It talks of a new
+order--what it _will_ do is to help to make the old sound!"
+
+Anthony clapped her ironically.
+
+"Excellent! When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold
+of you--ask me to come and hear!"
+
+Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in
+his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome
+half-taught girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or
+desired to have it.
+
+Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for
+him, rare effusion. Two years before, for the space of some months, he
+had been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything
+warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed
+him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of
+all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt
+as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her
+by that moment of passionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly!--she
+had given him his Anna.
+
+When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment
+to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Louis's thanks
+had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a child's
+brightness. The old passion for ruling and influencing was all alive and
+happy.
+
+"I will see it is all right," she was saying to herself. "I will look
+after them."
+
+What she meant was, "I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after them!" and
+through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to that
+_tete-a-tete_ with him which had preceded the Cravens' arrival.
+
+How changed he was, yet how much the same! He had not sat beside her for
+ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of
+the other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious
+claim to confidence, to intimacy--on the other hand a new atmosphere, a
+new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties
+of power, a great position--everything fitted to touch such an
+imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was noble, both
+in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had
+gained lines that pleased her--lines that a woman marks, because she
+thinks they mean experience an I mastery.
+
+Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was
+pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was
+pleasure; so too was his new connection with her old friends. And a
+pleasure which took nothing from self-respect; which was open,
+honourable, eager. As for that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at
+the thought of it, only to thrust the remembrance passionately away.
+That _he_ should remember or allude to it, would put an end to
+friendship. Otherwise friends they would and should be; and the personal
+interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping
+influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and
+suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between men and women grow
+more possible every day. While, as for Hallin's distrust, and Anthony
+Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either
+of them? Could any one suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's
+would be congenial to Hallin or to Craven--or--to yet another person, of
+whom she did not want to think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of
+him? It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made
+its force.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this
+pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the
+dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who
+came to clear away the tea.
+
+"Why, it is close on the half-hour!" cried Marcella, springing up.
+"Where are my things?"
+
+She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag
+contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.
+
+Suddenly--the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the
+tea--by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on
+Hallin's table flashed into her mind--its look--the grizzled hair. With
+an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings
+of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her--a dumb gesture of
+contrition and of grief.
+
+She!--she talk of social reform and "character," she give her opinion,
+as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main
+achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something
+belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her
+pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Her first case was in Brown's Buildings itself--a woman suffering from
+bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated
+foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks. She lived on
+the top floor of one of the easterly blocks, with two daughters and a
+son of eighteen.
+
+When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean
+and smelt of flowers. The windows were open, and a young woman was busy
+shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her
+mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then, they introduced
+her with some ceremony to a "lady," who was sitting beside the patient,
+a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen
+handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy.
+The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as "the
+young person," but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not
+have been surpassed.
+
+Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale
+transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off;
+but between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and
+grateful to her nurse. "I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle as
+you--" or--"I _do_ take it kind of you, Nurse, to do it so _slow_--oh!
+there were a young person before you--" or "hasn't she got nice hands,
+Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem to _jar_ yer."
+
+"Poor foot! but I think it is looking better," said Marcella, getting up
+at last from her work, when all was clean and comfortable and she had
+replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it--for its
+owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old armchair. "And
+how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?"
+
+"Oh! it's very bad, nights," said Mrs. Jervis, mildly--"disturbs Emily
+dreadful. But I always pray every night, when she lifts me into bed, as
+I may be took before the morning, an' God ull do it soon."
+
+"Mother!" cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, "you know you oughtn't to
+say them things."
+
+Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face
+was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the
+frail form there breathed an indomitable air of _life_, a gay courage
+indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.
+
+"Well, yer not to take 'em to heart, Em'ly. It ull be when it will
+be--for the Lord likes us to pray, but He'll take his own time--an'
+she's got troubles enough of her own, Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off
+her ring?"
+
+Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over,
+and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.
+
+"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last two days," she said
+with low vehemence--"as I'm _never_ goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn
+me!"
+
+Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had
+married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her
+baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the
+brutal ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her
+feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time
+in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no
+effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could
+what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven
+shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen,
+had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some
+six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled
+branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the
+prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from
+his earnings enough to teach Emily "the shirt-ironing," denying himself
+every indulgence till her training was over.
+
+Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back; her
+earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease;
+while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they
+lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness
+and care.
+
+Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's speech.
+
+"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that
+held down the shirt on the board.
+
+Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's eyes glowed with
+things unsaid and inexpressible--the "eternal passion, eternal pain,"
+which in half the human race have no voice.
+
+"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband," said Mrs. Jervis, in her
+delicate thoughtful voice--"a very uncultivated man."
+
+Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But
+the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them
+apparently to express what had to be said.
+
+"It's a sad thing is want of edication," Mrs. Jervis went on in the same
+tone. "Now there's that lady there"--with a little courtly wave of her
+hand towards Mrs. Burton--"she can't read yer know, Nurse, and I'm that
+sorry for her! But I've been reading to her, an' Emily--just while my
+cough's quiet--one of my ole tracks."
+
+She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use. It was called "A
+Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?" Marcella looked at it in
+respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in her
+line.
+
+"I do _love_ a track!" said Mrs. Jervis, pensively. "That's why I don't
+like these buildings so well as them others, Em'ly. Here you never get
+no tracks; and there, what with one person and another, there was a new
+one most weeks. But"--her voice dropped, and she looked timidly first at
+her friend, and then at Marcella--"she isn't a Christian, Nurse. Isn't
+it sad?"
+
+Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich mahogany complexion, with a black
+"front," and a mouth which turned down decisively at the corners,
+looked up from her embroidery with severe composure.
+
+"No, Nurse, I'm not a Christian," she said in the tone of one stating a
+disagreeable fact for which they are noways responsible. "My brother
+is--and my sisters--real good Christian people. One of my sisters
+married a gentleman up in Wales. She 'as two servants, an' fam'ly
+prayers reg'lar. But I've never felt no 'call,' and I tell 'em I can't
+purtend. An' Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no
+different."
+
+She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of
+probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked
+at her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a
+churchwoman.
+
+"Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton," she said indignantly. "What
+she means, Nurse, is she isn't a 'member' of any chapel, like mother.
+But she's been baptised and confirmed, for I asked her. And of course
+she's a Christian."
+
+"Em'ly!" said Mrs. Jervis, with energy.
+
+Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt
+upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The
+glances of the two women crossed; there seemed to be a mute struggle
+between them. Then Emily laid down her iron, stepped quickly across to
+her mother, and kneeling beside her, threw her arms around her.
+
+"Have it your own way, mother," she said, while her lip quivered; "I
+wasn't a-goin' to cross you."
+
+Mrs. Jervis laid her waxen cheek against her daughter's tangle of brown
+hair with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and
+panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a
+terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might
+kill out the struggling flame of life.
+
+"You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis," said Marcella, with gentle
+authority. "You know the dressing must tire you, though you won't
+confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There; aren't the pillows easier
+so? Now rest--and good-bye."
+
+But Mrs. Jervis held her, while Emily slipped away.
+
+"I shall rest soon," she said significantly. "An' it hurts me when Emily
+talks like that. It's the only thing that ever comes atween us. She
+thinks o' forms an' ceremonies; an' _I_ think o' _grace_."
+
+Her old woman's eyes, so clear and vivid under the blanched brow,
+searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood, shy and
+wondering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so
+little. So narrow a life, in these poor rooms, under these crippling
+conditions of disease!--and all this preoccupation with, this passion
+over, the things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of
+the spirit--wonderful!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On coming out from Brown's Buildings, she turned her steps reluctantly
+towards a street some distance from her own immediate neighbourhood,
+where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion and an
+unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman who often availed himself of
+the help of the St. Martin's nurses had asked the superintendent to
+undertake for him "a difficult case." Would one of their nurses go
+regularly to visit a certain house, ostensibly for the sake of a little
+boy of five just come back from the hospital, who required care at home
+for a while, _really_ for the sake of his young mother, who had suddenly
+developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin?
+
+Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She
+somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or
+three visits, always dressing the child's sore leg, and endeavouring to
+make acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not
+had much success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty, with a flighty,
+restless manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella, and
+grateful to her apparently for the ease she gave the boy. But she
+offered no confidences; the rooms she and her husband occupied showed
+them to be well-to-do; Marcella had so far found them well-kept; and
+though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious,
+she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her
+that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about
+her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others;
+and neither alternative pleased her.
+
+To-day, however, as she stopped at the Vincents' door, she noticed that
+the doorstep, which was as a rule shining white, was muddy and
+neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang
+repeatedly. At last a neighbour, who had been watching the strange
+nurse through her own parlour window, came out to the street.
+
+"I think, miss," she said, with an air of polite mystery, "as you'd
+better walk in. Mrs. Vincent 'asn't been enjyin' very good 'ealth this
+last few days."
+
+Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after
+six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the back
+of the house. But in the Vincents' front parlour the blinds were all
+pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of a
+child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door.
+
+The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent
+sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The
+elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a
+wretched silence; but the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly
+throwing himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts,
+now crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice, for "Mama! din-din!
+Mama! din-din!"
+
+Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She
+sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of
+words. She was dirty and unkempt; the room was covered with litter; the
+breakfast things were still on the table; and the children were
+evidently starving.
+
+Marcella, seized with pity, and divining what had happened, tried to
+rouse and comfort her. But she got no answer. Then she asked for
+matches. Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but
+subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them
+herself, lit a tire of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put
+on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of
+the children--the only eatables she could find--and after she had
+dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea things and tidy the
+room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute
+to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her.
+
+In the midst of her labours, an elderly woman cautiously opened the door
+and beckoned to her.
+
+Marcella went out into the passage.
+
+"I'm her mother, miss! I 'eered you were 'ere, an' I follered yer. Oh!
+such a business as we 'ad, 'er 'usband an' me, a gettin' of 'er 'ome
+last night. There's a neighbour come to me, an' she says: 'Mrs. Lucas,
+there's your daughter a drinkin' in that public 'ouse, an' if I was you
+I'd go and fetch her out; for she's got a lot o' money, an' she's
+treatin' everybody all round.' An' Charlie--that's 'er 'usband--ee come
+along too, an' between us we got holt on her. An' iver sence we brought
+her 'ome last night, she set there in that cheer, an' niver a word to
+nobody! Not to me 't any rate, nor the chillen. I believe 'er 'usband
+an' 'er 'ad words this mornin'. But she won't tell me nothin'. She sits
+there--just heart-broke"--the woman put up her apron to her eyes and
+began crying. "She ain't eatin' nothink all day, an' I dursen't leave
+the 'ouse out o' me sight--I lives close by, miss--for fear of 'er doing
+'erself a mischief."
+
+"How long has she been like this?" said Marcella, drawing the door
+cautiously to behind her.
+
+"About fourteen month," said the woman, hopelessly. "An' none of us
+knows why. She was such a neat, pretty girl when she married 'im--an' ee
+such a steady fellow. An' I've done _my_ best. I've talked to 'er, an'
+I've 'id 'er 'at an' her walking things, an' taken 'er money out of 'er
+pockets. An', bless yer, she's been all right now for seven weeks--till
+last night. Oh, deary, deary, me! whatever 'ull become o' them--'er, an'
+'im, an' the children!"
+
+The tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face.
+
+"Leave her to me a little longer," said Marcella, softly; "but come back
+to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be alone."
+
+The woman nodded, and went away.
+
+Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke
+for the first time:
+
+"That was my mother you were talkin' to?"
+
+"Yes," said Marcella, quietly, as she took the kettle off the fire. "Now
+I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will you, if I make
+it?"
+
+The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's movements
+with her weary eyes. At last when Marcella knelt down beside her holding
+out a cup of tea and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry.
+Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked
+out of her hand.
+
+"He struck me this morning!--Charlie did--the first time in seven years.
+Look here!"
+
+She pulled up her sleeve, and on her white, delicate arm she showed a
+large bruise. As she pointed to it her eyes filled with miserable tears;
+her lips quivered; anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even in this
+abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her
+refined air. This woman drinking and treating in a low public-house at
+midnight!--rescued thence by a decent husband!
+
+She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making
+the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into
+her, she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before
+which she quailed. The woman clung to her, moaning about her husband,
+about the demon instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew
+how--by means it seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and
+small self-indulgences--and she felt herself powerless to fight; about
+the wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who
+was the respected, well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the
+neighbourhood. All through it came back to him.
+
+"We had words, Nurse, this morning, when he went out to his work. He
+said he'd nearly died of shame last night; that he couldn't bear it no
+more; that he'd take the children from me. And I was all queer in the
+head still, and I sauced him--and then--he looked like a devil--and he
+took me by the arm--and _threw_ me down--as if I'd been a sack. An' he
+never, _never,_--touched me--before--in all his life. An' he's never
+come in all day. An' perhaps I shan't ever see him again. An' last
+time--but it wasn't so bad as this--he said he'd try an' love me again
+if I'd behave. An' he did try--and I tried too. But now it's no good,
+an' perhaps he'll not come back. Oh, what shall I do? what shall I do!"
+she flung her arms above her head. "Won't _anybody_ find him? won't
+_anybody_ help me?"
+
+She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching it, her wild eyes
+seeking her companion's.
+
+But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a
+cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could
+do nothing--that there was nothing in her adequate to such an
+appeal--nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human life thus
+flung upon her.
+
+She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried
+still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home--took
+hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and
+touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a
+barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and
+poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in
+her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no
+efficacy--no power.
+
+At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came
+in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the
+wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached
+the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her
+at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what
+to say.
+
+"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and
+miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"
+
+The husband looked at her, and then turned away.
+
+"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went without another word, and
+with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being
+which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's
+death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards--saying that
+she must write some letters and reports--she shut herself up, and bade
+good-night to Minta and the children.
+
+But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time,
+watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and
+even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread
+out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the
+floor, with her head against a chair--an attitude of her stormy
+childhood--she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known
+for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis--the saint--so near to death, so
+satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the
+poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay.
+Both experiences had this in common--that each had had some part in
+plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.
+
+What had come to her? Daring the past weeks there had been something
+wrestling in her--some new birth--some "conviction of sin," as Mrs.
+Jervis would have said. As she looked back over all her strenuous youth
+she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to Anthony Craven
+returned upon her, mocked her--made now a scourge for her own pride, not
+a mere, measure of blame for others. Aldous Raeburn, her father and
+mother, her poor--one and all rose against her--plucked at
+her--reproached her. "Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?" cried
+a voice, which was the voice of them all; "what are opinions--what is
+influence, beauty, cleverness?--what is anything worth but
+_character_--but _soul?_"
+
+And character--soul--can only be got by self-surrender; and
+self-surrender comes not of knowledge but of love.
+
+A number of thoughts and phrases, hitherto of little meaning to her,
+floated into her mind--sank and pressed there. That strange word "grace"
+for instance!
+
+A year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first
+inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school
+years, the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that
+religion was played out, that Socialism and Science were enough for
+mankind.
+
+But nobody could live in hospital--nobody could go among the
+poor--nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward
+Hallin and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in
+the world--this "grace" that "sustaineth"--however variously
+interpreted, still living and working, as it worked of old, among the
+little Galilean towns, in Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallin it did
+not mean the same, perhaps, as it meant to the hard-worked clergymen she
+knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But to all it meant the motive power of
+life--something subduing, transforming, delivering--something that
+to-night she envied with a passion and a yearning that amazed herself.
+
+How many things she craved, as an eager child craves them! First some
+moral change, she knew not what--then Aldous Raeburn's pardon and
+friendship--then and above all, the power to lose herself--the power to
+_love_.
+
+Dangerous significant moment in a woman's life--moment at once of
+despair and of illusion!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of
+Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him,
+and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon;
+questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the
+last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there,
+and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that
+he might verify a quotation.
+
+An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been
+in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a
+speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar
+House-of-Commons acquaintance.
+
+"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first
+Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.
+
+Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.
+
+Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a
+dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at
+all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's
+remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.
+
+When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly
+and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same
+general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for
+pleasure--their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way.
+What had he been about all this time? _Forget_?--such a creature? Why,
+it was the merest wantonness! As if such women--with such a brow, such
+vitality, such a gait--passed in every street!
+
+What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to
+recover the old intimacy--and as to what might come out of it, let the
+gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at
+Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her
+then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.
+
+As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it
+was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be
+all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge
+soon. To rule and shine was as much her _metier_ as it was the _metier_
+of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady
+Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be
+brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch
+Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for
+her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and
+pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and _live_ democracy
+instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. _Il
+ne faut pas sortir de son caractere_.
+
+The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.
+
+Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.
+
+"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. "Talks of
+his conscience--and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it
+with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much harm."
+
+"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitterness. "Goodness! let's
+leave him alone!"
+
+He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics.
+Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the _enfant terrible_
+of a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day
+to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of to-night's
+debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution,
+pledging the House to a Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at
+the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear
+practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in
+fact gained greatly in significance and interest since it was first
+heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable
+proposals--a moderate tone--and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony
+and a united front among the representatives of labour--if so much at
+least could be attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that
+not only the cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the
+House would be found to have gained enormously.
+
+"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said Bennett, as he was
+going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be
+till half-past ten at earliest."
+
+Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his
+pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him
+what line Bennett would take--with regard to one or two points. After a
+long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor
+indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As
+to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and
+hear a famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far
+from the House. The streets were full of placards.
+
+Well!--to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at
+his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind
+him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his
+springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.
+
+The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference.
+Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.
+
+"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front--oh! not
+very full yet, sir--will be directly."
+
+Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in.
+Yes!--there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the
+grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of
+Commons puts its ladies--as though its owner were already absorbed in
+what was passing before her.
+
+She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.
+
+"Oh! now, come and tell us everything--and who everybody is. Why don't
+we see the Speaker?--and which is the Government side?--oh, yes, I see.
+And who's this speaking now?"
+
+"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting
+to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair
+for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"
+
+"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella,
+impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's
+names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!--he's just
+come in!--oh, don't be so superior, though you _have_ been here
+before--you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"
+
+Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.
+
+"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's
+no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!--do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the
+Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you
+sit?--I see--and there's Mr. Bennett--and that black-faced man, Mr.
+Wilkins, I met at the Hallins--you don't like him, do you?" she said,
+drawing back and looking at him sharply.
+
+"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said
+Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a
+fool of himself and us to-night--we shall see! It's kind of you to wish
+us an Irish row!--considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall
+never get another!"
+
+"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh,
+that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"--a pause--"Dear me,
+how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a
+Democrat, Mr. Wharton--I find myself terribly in love with the
+Government. But who's that?"
+
+She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew
+hurriedly back.
+
+"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."
+
+A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was
+giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the
+first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw
+Aldous Raeburn.
+
+She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick
+glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as
+the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.
+
+"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to
+take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much--they don't get any
+change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under
+the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night
+the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over
+to a friend if I may--a Staffordshire member, who has his wife
+here--Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you.
+Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion;
+but they will look after you."
+
+The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said
+about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was
+Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.
+
+"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty
+minutes. Wish me well through!"
+
+Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for
+the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the
+fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn
+ghost should walk this particular evening.
+
+Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long
+silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was
+lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well
+that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she
+shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and
+singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the
+light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.
+
+"_All that my life can do to pour good measure_--_down_--_running
+over_--_into yours, I vowed you then!_"
+
+The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain.
+Was it indeed this man under her eyes--so listless, so unconscious--who
+had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think
+of.
+
+And now--never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them
+again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"--separate, estranged, for
+ever? It was like the touch of death--the experience brought with it
+such a chill--such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to
+be broken through.
+
+Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To
+have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in
+one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank
+Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It
+was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of
+family than he. And as for the girl--the little dancing, flirting
+girl!--why the thing happened every day. _His_ wife should not be too
+strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should
+cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with
+the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at
+least was clear to her--the curious recognition that never before had
+she considered Aldous Raeburn, _in and for himself_, as an independent
+human being.
+
+"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to
+herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"
+
+But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn,
+after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared
+suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her
+with the same fascination as before.
+
+The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the
+speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both
+inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was
+fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters
+were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had
+been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their
+paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government--all
+were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.
+
+"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of
+excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the
+crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his
+hat.
+
+In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and
+crowded House in a voice--clear, a little hard, but capable of the most
+accomplished and subtle variety--which for the first moment sent a
+shudder of memory through Marcella.
+
+Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as
+though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on
+the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an
+_irritable_ sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible
+for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any
+effect upon such a crowd!--so irresponsive, individualist, unfused--so
+lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and
+excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below,
+under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were
+those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call
+"_cheers_"?
+
+But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the
+atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one
+wholly different--nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent
+sense--informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the
+memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had
+been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader--awoke to the peculiar
+conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its
+performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the
+House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion
+offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand
+to succeed in it.
+
+Why? Because here after all is power--here is the central machine. Here
+are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have
+for their span of life the leading--or the wrecking?--of this great
+fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our country. Here things
+are not only debated, but done--lamely or badly, perhaps, but still
+_done_--which will affect our children's children; which link us to the
+Past; which carry us on safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods
+know. And in this passage, this chequered, doubtful passage from
+thinking to doing, an infinite savour and passion of life is somehow
+disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure,
+public and personal; it enwraps the spectacle and the actors; it carries
+and supports patriot and adventurer alike.
+
+Ideas, perceptions of this kind--the first chill over--stole upon and
+conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into
+Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It
+would be a success this speech--it was a success! The House was gained,
+was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments,
+which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was
+being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent--with
+brilliancy, moderation, practical detail--moderation above all! From the
+slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English
+"working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts--through
+the general description of the present situation, of the workman's
+present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for
+State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the
+effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the
+great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the
+economic future of England--the speaker carried his thread of luminous
+speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point
+he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the
+propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of
+detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist
+terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions
+of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the
+regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated
+to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life,
+possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of
+leisure, knowledge, and delight--the crowded benches before and behind
+him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of
+"flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had
+earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the
+Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in
+the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a
+deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in
+the utterances of the Labour men.
+
+"'The mildest mannered man' _et cetera!_" said a smiling member of the
+late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton
+sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up
+of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are
+eager to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance
+on anything last year."
+
+"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled
+the man addressed.
+
+"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put
+up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his
+hat again which he had taken up.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her
+chair with a long breath.
+
+"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she
+sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very
+competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government
+side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she
+possessed--and she was full of them--had been stirred and satisfied by
+the speech and the speaker.
+
+But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his
+peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact
+the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley
+personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the
+poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same
+time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to
+measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A
+year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of
+pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time
+conscious of a curious growth--independence.
+
+But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as
+it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon
+her--in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in
+the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.
+
+Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her
+brothers were typical Venturists--a little cynical, therefore, towards
+all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and
+a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it
+down--through him--as a first law, that sentiment in public is the
+abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was
+little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.
+
+"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That
+man _Wilkins_!"
+
+Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's
+Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting
+down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and
+frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.
+
+With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to
+have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short
+stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an
+important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of
+the bill which had been sketched by Wharton--personal jealousy and
+distrust of the mover of the resolution--denial of his representative
+place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which
+he had nothing to do--the most violent protest against the servility
+with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and
+political enfranchisement--and the most passionate assertion that
+between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great
+parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred,
+unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and
+landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its
+heel--all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness
+from the torrent of north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah
+Wilkins rioted in one of the best "times" of his life. That he was an
+orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again;
+and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.
+
+The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words
+rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady
+Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench,
+caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!--you haven't
+even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final
+attack upon the Liberals--who, after ruining their own chances and the
+chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man
+whining for his support as their only hope of recovery--was delivered to
+a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an
+angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.
+
+Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech in a
+state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting
+erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had come to
+sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down,
+and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government _non
+possumus_, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour
+which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened
+with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity as to which hand
+to shake and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of
+compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the
+Opposition under the ferocities of some others of its nominal friends.
+
+Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, the _habitue_.
+While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come
+back again to his seat next to the Speaker, who was his official chief.
+Every now and then the Minister turned to him, and Raeburn handed him a
+volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the
+great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the
+Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once
+more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver
+of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far
+turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other--and
+she, once more, looking on!
+
+When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with
+thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun--when it was seen
+that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who
+were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House,
+a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity
+felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be
+leader had been for some time considerable.
+
+When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire,
+both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A
+man who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the
+unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had
+hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had
+given Wharton the warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals,
+to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous
+though still perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he
+personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during
+the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour
+members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young
+and brilliant man beside him.
+
+Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of
+religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an
+imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its
+expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong
+conviction that the time had come when the Labour party _must_ have
+separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to
+this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might
+have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy
+of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He
+threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the
+phrase, in the direction of Wilkins--who in the middle of the speech
+abruptly walked out--and before he sat down, the close attention, the
+looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about
+him,--amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in
+Parliament--made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch
+not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary
+history of the great industrial movement.
+
+The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out
+to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one
+man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with
+his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt
+a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him--perfectly white,
+with a lip he in vain tried to steady.
+
+"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."
+
+Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the
+out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of
+the Englishman.
+
+Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an
+ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the
+Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the
+spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience
+behind him!--and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How
+could he get her to himself somehow for a moment--and dispose of that
+Craven girl?
+
+"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of
+the Gallery.
+
+But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw,
+the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.
+
+"Don't let's talk here," she said. "Can't we go out? I am melted!"
+
+"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we
+shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested?"
+
+Edith smiled demurely.
+
+"I thought it a good debate," she said.
+
+"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward remark as he led
+the way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+"How enchanting!" cried Marcella, as they emerged on the terrace, and
+river, shore, and sky opened upon them in all the thousand-tinted light
+and shade of a still and perfect evening. "Oh, how hot we were--and how
+badly you treat us in those dens!"
+
+Those confident eyes of Wharton's shone as they glanced at her.
+
+She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff--it seemed to him he
+remembered it of old--and on the waving masses of hair lay a little
+bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied
+demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the
+beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing--the rich arresting
+note of the voice--the inimitable carriage of the head--Wharton realised
+them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in
+some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was in
+his power, his possession.
+
+The terrace was full of people, and alive with a Babel of talk. Yet, as
+he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that
+Marcella was instantly marked. Every one who passed them, or made way
+for them, looked and looked again.
+
+The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew
+nothing of her own effect. She was drinking in the sunset light--the
+poetic mystery of the river--the lovely line of the bridge--the
+associations of the place where she stood, of this great building
+overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror
+lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Raeburn; then when a
+stranger showed himself she gave herself up again to her young pleasure
+in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed;
+Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so
+well-fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh
+homage to itself; and she had more and more glamour for him in the
+reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment.
+
+"Ah, here are the Lanes!" he said, detecting at last a short lady in
+black amid a group of men.
+
+Marcella and Edith were introduced. Then Edith found a friend in a young
+London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him
+till dinner should be announced.
+
+"I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace," said Wharton to
+Mr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet awhile. What a crowd! The
+Alresfords not come yet, I see."
+
+Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round.
+
+"Raeburn has a party to-night. And there are at least three or four
+others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be
+equally scarce!"
+
+Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella. But she was talking to Mrs. Lane,
+and had heard nothing.
+
+"Let me just show you the terrace," he said to her. "No chance of dinner
+for another twenty minutes."
+
+They strolled away together. As they moved along, a number of men
+waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and congratulations--glancing
+the while at the lady on his left. But presently they were away from the
+crowd which hung about the main entrance to the terrace, and had reached
+the comparatively quiet western end, where were only a few pairs and
+groups walking up and down.
+
+"Shall I see Mr. Bennett?" she asked him eagerly, as they paused by the
+parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing under the fast
+incoming tide. "I want to."
+
+"I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a
+prayer-meeting--at least I guess so. There is a famous American
+evangelist speaking in Westminster to-night--I am as certain as I ever
+am of anything that Bennett is there--dining on Moody and Sankey. Men
+are a medley, don't you think?--So you liked his speech?"
+
+"How coolly you ask!" she said, laughing. "Did _you_?"
+
+He was silent a moment, his smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he
+turned to her.
+
+"How much gratitude do you think I owe him?"
+
+"As much as you can pay," she said with emphasis. "I never heard
+anything more complete, more generous."
+
+"So you were carried away?"
+
+She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity--a touch of defiance.
+
+"No!--neither by him, nor by you. I don't believe in your Bill--and I am
+_sure_ you will never carry it!"
+
+Wharton lifted his eyebrows.
+
+"Perhaps you'll tell me where you are," he said, "that I may know how to
+talk? When we last discussed these things at Mellor, I _think_--you were
+a Socialist?"
+
+"What does it matter what I was last year?" she asked him gaily, yet
+with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay; "I was a baby!
+_Now_ perhaps I have earned a few poor, little opinions--but they are a
+ragged bundle--and I have never any time to sort them."
+
+"Have you left the Venturists?"
+
+"No!--but I am full of perplexities; and the Cravens, I see, will soon
+be for turning me out. You understand--I _know_ some working folk now!"
+
+"So you did last year."
+
+"No!"--she insisted, shaking her head--"that was all different. But now
+I am _in_ their world--I live with them--and they talk to me. One
+evening in the week I am 'at home' for all the people I know in our
+Buildings--men and women. Mrs. Hurd--you know who I mean?"--her brow
+contracted a moment--"she comes with her sewing to keep me company; so
+does Edith Craven; and sometimes the little room is packed. The men
+smoke--when we can have the windows open!--and I believe I shall soon
+smoke too--it makes them talk better. We get all sorts--Socialists,
+Conservatives, Radicals--"
+
+"--And you don't think much of the Socialists?"
+
+"Well! they are the interesting, dreamy fellows," she said, laughing,
+"who don't save, and muddle their lives. And as for argument, the
+Socialist workman doesn't care twopence for facts--that don't suit him.
+It's superb the way he treats them!"
+
+"I should like to know who does care!" said Wharton, with a shrug. Then
+he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command her. He
+had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the crisp
+curls of hair. "But tell me"--he went on--"who has been tampering with
+you? Is it Hallin? You told me you saw him often."
+
+"Perhaps. But what if it's everything?--_living?_--saving your presence!
+A year ago at any rate the world was all black--_or_ white--to me. Now I
+lie awake at night, puzzling my head about the shades between--which
+makes the difference. A compulsory Eight Hours' Day for all men in all
+trades!" Her note of scorn startled him. "You _know_ you won't get it!
+And all the other big exasperating things you talk about--public
+organisation of labour, and the rest--you won't get them till all the
+world is a New Jerusalem--and when the world is a New Jerusalem nobody
+will want them!"
+
+Wharton made her an ironical bow.
+
+"Nicely said!--though we have heard it before. Upon my word, you have
+marched!--or Edward Hallin has carried you. So now you think the poor
+are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible worlds--is that
+the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in fact? the man who
+got up after me?"
+
+His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a
+recollection that brought a frown.
+
+"That was the man, then, you attacked in the _Clarion_ this morning!"
+
+"Ah! you read me!" said Wharton, with sudden pleasure. "Yes--that opened
+the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven has gone down, and the
+strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two batteries to bear, he
+letting fly as correspondent, and I from the office. I enjoyed writing
+that article."
+
+"So I should think," she said drily; "all I know is, it made _one_
+reader passionately certain that there was another side to the matter!
+There may not be. I dare say there isn't; but on me at least that was
+the effect. Why is it"--she broke out with vehemence--"that not a single
+Labour paper is ever capable of the simplest justice to an opponent?"
+
+"You think any other sort of paper is any better?" he asked her
+scornfully.
+
+"I dare say not. But that doesn't matter to me! it is _we_ who talk of
+justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to man, and then we go and
+blacken the men who don't agree with us--whole classes, that is to say,
+of our fellow-countrymen, not in the old honest slashing style,
+Tartuffes that we are!--but with all the delicate methods of a new art
+of slander, pursued almost for its own sake. We know so much
+better--always--than our opponents, we hardly condescend even to be
+angry. One is only 'sorry'--'obliged to punish'--like the priggish
+governess of one's childhood!"
+
+In spite of himself, Wharton flushed.
+
+"My best thanks!" he said. "Anything more? I prefer to take my drubbing
+all at once."
+
+She looked at him steadily.
+
+"Why did you write, or allow that article on the West Brookshire
+landlords two days ago?"
+
+Wharton started.
+
+"Well! wasn't it true?"
+
+"No!" she said with a curling lip; "and I think you know it wasn't
+true."
+
+"What! as to the Raeburns? Upon my word, I should have imagined," he
+said slowly, "that it represented your views at one time with tolerable
+accuracy."
+
+Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet, and, taking
+up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river.
+He saw the hand shake.
+
+"Look here," he said, turning round so that he too leant over the river,
+his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear. "Are you always
+going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you know that there is no one
+in the world I would sooner please if I could?"
+
+She did not speak.
+
+"In the first place," he said, laughing, "as to my speech, do you
+suppose that I believe in that Bill which I described just now?"
+
+"I don't know," she said indignantly, once more playing with the stones
+on the wall. "It sounded like it."
+
+"That is my gift--my little _carillon_, as Renan would say. But do you
+imagine I want you or any one else to tell me that we shan't get such a
+Bill for generations? Of course we shan't!"
+
+"Then why do you make farcical speeches, bamboozling your friends and
+misleading the House of Commons?"
+
+He saw the old storm-signs with glee--the lightning in the eye, the rose
+on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry.
+
+"Because, my dear lady--_we must generate our force_. Steam must be got
+up--I am engaged in doing it. We shan't get a compulsory eight hours'
+day for all trades--but in the course of the agitation for that precious
+illusion, and by the help of a great deal of beating of tom-toms, and
+gathering of clans, we shall get a great many other things by the way
+that we _do_ want. Hearten your friends, and frighten your
+enemies--there is no other way of scoring in politics--and the
+particular score doesn't matter. Now don't look at me as if you would
+like to impeach me!--or I shall turn the tables. _I_ am still fighting
+for my illusions in my own way--_you_, it seems, have given up yours!"
+
+But for once he had underrated her sense of humour. She broke into a low
+merry laugh which a little disconcerted him.
+
+"You mock me?" he said quickly--"think me insincere,
+unscrupulous?--Well, I dare say! But you have no right to mock me. Last
+year, again and again, you promised me guerdon. Now it has come to
+paying--and I claim!"
+
+His low distinct voice in her ear had a magnetising effect upon her. She
+slowly turned her face to him, overcome by--yet fighting
+against--memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference
+to that scene she hated to think of, he would have probably lost this
+hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but
+a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all
+those tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things
+of pity and fear, which had so often seemed to her the atonement for,
+the washing away of that old baseness.
+
+He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly--
+
+"I promised to be grateful. So I am."
+
+"No, no!" he said, still in the same low tone. "You promised me a
+friend. Where is she?"
+
+She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and
+her eyes were fixed on the haze opposite, whence emerged the blocks of
+the great hospital and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But
+his gaze compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an
+expression half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could
+speak.
+
+"Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life?" he said drily. "It is
+not the life for you; it does not fit you in the least."
+
+"You test your friends!" she cried, her cheek flaming again at the
+provocative change of voice. "What possible right have you to that
+remark?"
+
+"I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You can't serve
+them where you are. Nursing is not for you; you are wanted among your
+own class--among your equals--among the people who are changing and
+shaping England. It is absurd. You are masquerading."
+
+She gave him a little sarcastic nod.
+
+"Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in my
+life."
+
+He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or posing.
+
+"You are just what you were in one respect--terribly in the right! Be a
+little humble to-night for a change. Come, condescend to the classes! Do
+you see Mr. Lane calling us?"
+
+And, in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning
+to them from the distance.
+
+"Do you know Lady Selina Farrell?" he asked her, as they walked quickly
+back to the dispersing crowd.
+
+"No; who is she?"
+
+Wharton laughed.
+
+"Providence should contrive to let Lady Selina overhear that question
+once a week--in your tone! Well, she is a personage--Lord Alresford's
+daughter--unmarried, rich, has a _salon_, or thinks she has--manipulates
+a great many people's fortunes and lives, or thinks she does, which,
+after all, is what matters--to Lady Selina. She wants to know you,
+badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is--you will let
+me introduce you? She dines with us."
+
+In another moment Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a
+very fashionable black and pink bonnet, who held out a gracious hand.
+
+"I have heard so much of you!" said Lady Selina, as they walked along
+the passage to the dining-room together. "It must be so wonderful, your
+nursing!"
+
+Marcella laughed rather restively.
+
+"No, I don't think it is," she said; "there are so many of us."
+
+"Oh, but the things you do--Mr. Wharton told me--so interesting!"
+
+Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady
+Selina thought her a very handsome but very _gauche_ young woman. Still,
+_gauche_ or no, she had thrown over Aldous Raeburn and thirty thousand a
+year; an act which, as Lady Selina admitted, put you out of the common
+run.
+
+"Do you know most of the people dining?" she enquired in her blandest
+voice. "But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton's, I
+think?"
+
+"He stayed at our house last year," said Marcella, abruptly. "No, I
+don't know anybody."
+
+"Then shall I tell you? It makes it more interesting, doesn't it? It
+ought to be a pleasant little party."
+
+And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella
+that most of them were very "smart" or very important. Some of the smart
+names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn's talk of last year;
+and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and two or
+three prominent members. It was all rather surprising.
+
+At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the
+young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were
+agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown
+beauty. The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing
+with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that
+story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong
+to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.
+
+Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she
+could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lady
+Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella's
+minister on his left. At the other end of the table sat Mrs. Lane, doing
+her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a blind old age,
+gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and possible premier.
+But the talk, on the whole, was general--a gay and careless
+give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball
+flying from one accustomed hand to another.
+
+And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in
+it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as
+her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor--the solitary, eccentric figure
+pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate--bringing the enmity
+of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead.
+Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot and of
+Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour
+of country-house "sets," with a patter of names which sounded in her
+scornful ear like a paragraph from the _World_; above all, a general air
+of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate, seemed
+inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the
+"idle rich," whereof--in the popular idea--he was held to be one of the
+very particular foes!--
+
+No doubt, as the dinner moved on, this first impression changed
+somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost
+upon her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself
+had so often fumed; she watched the occasional recoil of the women about
+him, as though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal, and
+had been suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things
+puzzled, partly propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and
+hostile. How was it possible--from such personal temporising--such a
+frittering of the forces and sympathies--to win the single-mindedness
+and the power without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk
+with him--reproach him!
+
+"Well--I must go--worse luck," said Wharton at last, laying down his
+napkin and rising. "Lane, will you take charge? I will join you outside
+later."
+
+"If he ever finds us!" said her neighbour to Marcella. "I never saw the
+place so crowded. It is odd how people enjoy these scrambling meals in
+these very ugly rooms."
+
+Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee-tavern
+place, in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the
+end, while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space
+below.
+
+"Are there any other rooms than this?" she asked idly.
+
+"One more," said a young man across the table, who had been introduced
+to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to
+look at him, as he desired. "But there is another big party there
+to-night--Raeburn--you know," he went on innocently, addressing the
+minister; "he has got the Winterbournes and the Macdonalds--quite a
+gathering--rather an unusual thing for him."
+
+The minister glanced quickly at his companion. But she had turned to
+answer a question from Lady Selina, and thenceforward, till the party
+rose, she gave him little opportunity of observing her.
+
+As the outward-moving stream of guests was once more in the corridor
+leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane.
+
+"I think," she said--"I am afraid--we ought to be going--my friend and
+I. Perhaps Mr. Lane--perhaps he would just show us the way out; we can
+easily find a cab."
+
+There was an imploring, urgent look in her face which struck Mrs. Lane.
+But Mr. Lane's loud friendly voice broke in from behind.
+
+"My dear Miss Boyce!--we can't possibly allow it--no! no--just half an
+hour--while they bring us our coffee--to do your homage, you know, to
+the terrace--and the river--and the moon!--And then--if you don't want
+to go back to the House for the division, we will see you safely into
+your cab. Look at the moon!--and the tide"--they had come to the wide
+door opening on the terrace--"aren't they doing their very best for
+you?"
+
+Marcella looked behind her in despair. _Where_ was Edith? Far in the
+rear!--and fully occupied apparently with two or three pleasant
+companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on, with Mr.
+Lane chatting beside her--though the sight of the shining terrace, with
+its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she
+could hardly control.
+
+"Come and look at the water," she said to Mr. Lane; "I would rather not
+walk up and down if you don't mind."
+
+He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or
+promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now
+trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and
+sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for
+the voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Lady Winterbourne, above
+all! How unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a
+forwarded letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her
+address.
+
+"Well, how did you like the speech to-night--_the_ speech?" said Mr.
+Lane, a genial Gladstonian member, more heavily weighted with estates
+than with ideas. "It was splendid, wasn't it?--in the way of speaking.
+Speeches like that are a safety-valve--that's my view of it. Have 'em
+out--all these ideas--get 'em discussed!"--with a good-humoured shake of
+the head for emphasis. "Does nobody any harm and may do good. I can tell
+you, Miss Boyce, the House of Commons is a capital place for taming
+these clever young men!--you must give them their head--and they make
+excellent fellows after a bit. Why--who's this?--My dear Lady
+Winterbourne!--this _is_ a sight for sair een!"
+
+And the portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately
+lady in black, whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight.
+
+"_Marcella_!" cried a woman's voice.
+
+Yes--there he was!--close behind Lady Winterbourne. In the soft darkness
+he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over the wall
+without an idea--a suspicion.
+
+She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winterbourne, hesitated a
+second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She
+could not see his face in the darkness; but she was suddenly and
+strangely conscious of the whole scene--of the great dark building with
+its lines of fairy-lit gothic windows--the blue gulf of the river
+crossed by lines of wavering light--the swift passage of a steamer with
+its illuminated saloon and crowded deck--of the wonderful mixture of
+moonlight and sunset in the air and sky--of this dark figure in front of
+her.
+
+Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not
+know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She
+threw herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a
+tremor almost equal to her own.
+
+"Oh! do come with me--come away!--I want to talk to you!" she said
+incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winterbourne with a strong
+hand.
+
+Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the terrace.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elder lady--"to think of finding _you_
+here! How astonishing--how--how dreadful! No!--I don't mean that. Of
+course you and he must meet--but it was only yesterday he told me he
+had never seen you again--since--and it gave me a turn. I was very
+foolish just now. There now--stay here a moment--and tell me about
+yourself."
+
+And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind
+her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne
+recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic
+severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same
+delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling.
+She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed
+it in the dark so that no one saw.
+
+"I _am_ glad to see you again," she said passionately, "so glad!"
+
+Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.
+
+"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child! And I
+have heard so little of you--your mother never seemed to know. When will
+you come and see me--or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we
+were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to
+a ball. How _strange_"--she broke off--"how very strange that you and he
+should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with
+Lord Maxwell."
+
+"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily. "Will you come to tea
+with me next week?--Oh, I will write.--And we must go too--where _can_
+my friend be?"
+
+She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.
+
+"I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway," said Lady Winterbourne;
+"or shall we look after you?"
+
+"No! no! Take me back to the Lanes."
+
+"Mamma, are you coming?" said a voice like a softened version of Lady
+Winterbourne's. Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl's
+voice said piteously:
+
+"_Dear_ Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take so long to do! _I_
+shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend. Ermyntrude will be
+sorry she ever knew me. _Do_ come!"
+
+"Don't cry, Betty. I certainly shan't take you if you do!" said Lady
+Ermyntrude, laughing. "Mamma, is this Miss Boyce--_your_ Miss Boyce?"
+
+She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude
+under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall
+stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had
+little notion of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the
+girlish form hanging on Lady Winterbourne's arm than she was of her own
+words, of "Betty's" beautiful soft eyes--also shyly and gravely fixed
+upon herself--under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the long,
+pointed chin; the whimsical little face.
+
+"Well, none of _you_ are any good!" said Betty at last, in a tragic
+voice. "I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and 'ask a
+p'leeceman.' Mr. Raeburn!"
+
+He disengaged himself from a group behind and came--with no alacrity.
+Betty ran up to him.
+
+"Mr. Raeburn! Ermyntrude and Lady Winterbourne are going to sleep here,
+if you don't mind making arrangements. But _I_ want a hansom."
+
+At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along
+towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world
+had never rolled more evenly.
+
+"Oh! there she is--there is my friend!" cried Marcella to Lady
+Winterbourne. "Good-night--good-night!"
+
+She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a
+moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to "collect"
+another straying member of the party.
+
+An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort--even
+her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes. She walked up to
+him.
+
+"Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?" she said in a tremulous hurry. "I
+am so sorry he is ill--I hadn't heard--I--"
+
+She dared not look up. Was that _his_ voice answering?
+
+"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day
+give a rather better report. We take him abroad to-morrow."
+
+"Marcella! at last!" cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend;
+"you lost me? Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way. But look, there is
+Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go--come and say good-night--everybody is
+departing."
+
+Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of
+humiliation--pain--sore resentment. That cold, strange tone--those
+unwilling words!--She had gone up to him--as undisciplined in her
+repentance as she had been in aggression--full of a passionate yearning
+to make friends--somehow to convey to him that she "was sorry," in the
+old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little.
+There could be no misunderstanding possible! He of all men knew best how
+irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and
+you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another
+human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and
+go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the
+promises of ethics and religion _ought_ to bring peace--peace and a
+soothed conscience?
+
+But she had been repulsed--put aside, so she took it--and by one of the
+kindest and most generous of men! She moved along the terrace in a maze,
+seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All that
+obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her--which had
+found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once
+loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike, her--was
+beating and swelling stormlike within her. She had taken being loved so
+easily, so much as a matter of course! How was it that it hurt her now
+so much to have lost love, and power, and consideration? She had never
+felt any passion for Aldous Raeburn--had taken him lightly and shaken
+him off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from
+him--the proud manner of a moment--had inflicted a smart upon her she
+could hardly bear. They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy,
+uncared for!
+
+But, on the contrary, she _must_ be happy!--_must_ be loved! To this,
+and this only, had she been brought by the hard experience of this
+strenuous year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Lane, _be_ an angel!" exclaimed Wharton's voice. "Just one
+turn--five minutes! The division will be called directly, and then we
+will all thank our stars and go to bed!"
+
+In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bare-headed, radiant,
+reckless even, as he was wont to be in moments of excitement. He had
+seen her speak to Raeburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind
+was too full for any perception of other people's situations--even hers.
+He was absorbed with himself, and with her, as she fitted his present
+need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his
+lips; and his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and
+the pleasure of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to
+homage; his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference,
+a flattery, to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the
+evening had lent a new prestige.
+
+She, too, in his eyes, had triumphed--had made her mark. His ears were
+full of the comments made upon her to-night by the little world on the
+terrace. If it were not for money--_hateful_ money!--what more brilliant
+wife could be desired for any rising man?
+
+So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division
+was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of
+herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment,
+had given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet to
+think her kind and fair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I.
+Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all
+these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than--"
+
+"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give
+you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us
+weaklings? Do you think I _want_ to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing
+too much,' my good friend!"
+
+Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by
+Hallin's "chaff."
+
+"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out
+with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more
+unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now,
+rest, and begin again in the winter?"
+
+Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly
+joined in front of him.
+
+"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.
+
+Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed
+it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.
+
+"Why you should behave as though you _wished_ to make such a prophecy
+true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.
+
+Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in
+front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked
+unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had
+possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its
+clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes--_coeli lucida
+templa_--the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under
+its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been
+something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and
+movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between
+the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.
+
+"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting
+up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I _shall_ give up soon.
+Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with
+their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures.
+I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead,
+and--I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh
+when no man can work."
+
+They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the political
+situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive
+now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind.
+Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with
+positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have
+passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain
+current _isms_ and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years
+had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs,
+indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.
+
+He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his
+early friends by his passionate democracy--his belief in, and trust of,
+the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and
+manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for
+Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest
+remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith,
+but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among
+the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the
+friendship of these two in the least.
+
+But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his
+working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he
+had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all
+kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the
+prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had
+grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and
+the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which
+logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human
+powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away
+with--say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller
+human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his
+life. And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of
+the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future
+enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to
+distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private
+possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them
+already. And that not for wealth's sake--though a more equal
+distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably
+tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that
+continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual
+heritage.
+
+How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have
+answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of the land."
+Not, of course, by violence--which only means the worst form of waste
+known to history--but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating
+legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other
+kinds of property--by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of
+communal initiative and control--and above all by the continuous private
+effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all
+sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student--or
+the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of
+rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a
+vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A
+nation is not saved so cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to
+land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which
+might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men,
+women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his
+profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a
+growing despair.
+
+The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and
+Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other
+European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the
+community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more
+and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified
+will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a
+state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for
+effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and
+decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external
+conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and
+pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for
+ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him,
+could never do without them, if man was to be man.
+
+So that he saw it all _sub specie aeternitatis_, as a matter not of
+economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank
+in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled
+speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry
+Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was
+spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not
+with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to
+Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!--to be exhausting in him the very
+springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at
+last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What
+help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to
+discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and
+affections as any _homoousion_ of old? Had they not already cost him
+love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ah, dear old fellow--enough!" said Hallin at last--"take me back to
+Italy! You have told me so little--such a niggardly little!"
+
+"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous;
+"the first rain in Northern Italy for four months--worse luck! 'Rain at
+Reggio, rain at Parma.--At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'--that might about
+stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty
+Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."
+
+"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"
+
+Aldous laughed.
+
+"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in
+Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a
+kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a
+deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was
+pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with
+the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got
+his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in
+hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him
+round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the
+spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt
+Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff--and then positively skipped
+for joy in the street outside--the amazed officer looking on. And as for
+her career over the roof of the Duomo--the agitation of it nearly
+brought my aunt to destruction--and even I heaved a sigh of relief when
+I got them both down safe."
+
+"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of
+her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a
+barrel organ."
+
+"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as
+every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it
+makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across,
+especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old
+maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel _salon_ at
+night--a perfect ring of them--and the men outside, totally neglected,
+and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody
+she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade--a governess, or a
+schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy--that she did not devote herself to that
+somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is
+nature or art."
+
+He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the
+thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign
+or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the
+over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the
+place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.
+
+"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes
+to his friend, "that I had seen her again."
+
+Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:
+
+"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she
+dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you--but she
+said nothing."
+
+"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and
+I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's
+party. She spoke to me afterwards--I believe now--she meant to be
+kind"--his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all--"but I
+saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own
+manner, but I could not help myself."
+
+His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow.
+Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce,
+but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that
+Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his
+life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in
+him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had
+not perhaps expected.
+
+"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a
+pause, "that she is going to marry him?"
+
+"No--no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly,
+perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more
+likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success--of a
+kind--in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come
+rapidly to the front."
+
+"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that
+group are too unmanageable. If he _were_ a Parnell! But he lacks just
+the qualities that matter--the reticence, the power of holding
+himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard
+self-concentration."
+
+Aldous raised his shoulders.
+
+"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds
+himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him everywhere."
+
+"What!--among the smart people?"
+
+Aldous nodded.
+
+"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do
+it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all
+at once."
+
+"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody
+supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well
+overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and
+its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the
+_Clarion?_"
+
+"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I
+might not be able to go on giving to the strike."
+
+Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked
+back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest
+friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella
+Boyce--never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything
+connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let
+him follow his own conviction.
+
+"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have
+been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.
+
+Aldous hesitated; then he said--
+
+"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"
+
+Hallin made a little face.
+
+"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with
+anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she
+comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I
+could cry over her!"
+
+Aldous started.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand
+on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to
+talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than
+Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But
+this--this--" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for
+a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he
+could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day,
+'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had
+thrown me over except _with ill-will._' The word astonished me, but
+sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of _anger_ to the most
+futile, the most ridiculous degree!"
+
+He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his
+own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's
+shoulders, and there was a short pause.
+
+"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands
+dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?--I forget."
+
+Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again,
+meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning
+visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the
+investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury
+Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and
+regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had
+finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of
+things in two or three selected streets.
+
+It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt
+strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly
+directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he
+thought the Government could really do good.
+
+Then Raeburn turned to go.
+
+"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he
+opened the door.
+
+"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have
+my jaunt."
+
+Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common
+Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one
+or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see
+some sight.
+
+"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand
+them over to me."
+
+"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane
+hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the
+squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic
+of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering
+in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already
+disappeared from the too short London summer.
+
+For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness
+in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun
+or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of
+tune--whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested
+him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome
+estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He
+was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty
+that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely
+intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him
+now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an
+object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was still
+free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for
+those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his
+transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all
+the ceremonial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense
+and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him
+from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less
+happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men
+felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.
+
+He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street,
+and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and
+box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention
+of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner
+crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a
+fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a
+trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital
+worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas
+out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight
+preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two
+walked on together talking.
+
+The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of
+all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were
+already marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a peculiarly
+vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the
+worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's
+notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.
+
+After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its
+condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow
+roadway strewn with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by
+costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken
+pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most
+of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat,
+seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and
+decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the
+street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human
+type.
+
+A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they
+had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.
+
+"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's
+interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after.
+The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of
+respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the
+worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it
+at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and
+stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be
+as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor
+of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."
+
+And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left,
+he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of
+some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly
+peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"--that is
+to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering,
+the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been
+slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every
+circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and
+revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to
+light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was,
+of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners;
+the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men,
+and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for
+themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.
+
+When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further
+end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil
+of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and
+heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great
+enough. But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of
+"big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of affairs,
+courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of
+preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.
+
+Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood
+still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had
+been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged
+from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the
+skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive
+before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.
+
+"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"
+
+Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air.
+The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling them, yet
+too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some ten or
+twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.
+
+"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds
+like murder. You go back for that policeman!"
+
+And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way
+through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by,
+had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and
+screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the
+house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there
+before him. The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans,
+uproar--all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the
+second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a
+voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before,
+crying piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"
+
+Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were
+trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be
+shot out from the dark passage inside--two wrestling with the third, a
+wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed
+with blood.
+
+"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister
+too!"
+
+"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous--it's the nuss he means! I
+sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer
+_blackguard_, you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a
+frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.
+
+"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's
+call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.
+
+Aldous was already upstairs.
+
+"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the
+first landing--for all sounds from above had ceased.
+
+"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us _begged_ and
+_implored_ of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we,
+Betsy?--didn't we, Doll?"
+
+Aldous ran up.
+
+On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on
+the ground, apparently beaten to death.
+
+By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two
+or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity.
+Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left
+arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was
+doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag
+stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her
+what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on
+Raeburn's heart.
+
+In such an exaltation of nerve _she_ could be surprised at nothing.
+When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.
+
+"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her--speaking with pauses, as
+though to get her breath--"he has--killed her. But there--is a chance.
+Are the--police there--and a stretcher?"
+
+Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly
+sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's
+nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.
+
+"Did you see it, miss?"
+
+"I--I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same
+difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other
+side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the
+bandage she was applying. "But he was--such a great--powerful brute."
+
+Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried
+to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.
+
+"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his
+note-book, "attending a child--that's ill--when I heard the screams.
+They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room--then rushed
+after her--I _think_--to throw her downstairs--I stopped that. Then he
+took up something--oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken
+piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink--I
+couldn't--do much."
+
+Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.
+
+"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.
+
+"It's not broken--it's wrenched; I can't use it. There--that's all we
+can do--till she gets--to hospital."
+
+Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he
+could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and
+was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and
+quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the
+deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little.
+Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing
+at the woman's marred face--indescribably patient in its deep
+unconsciousness--at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their
+wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair--with tears that ran
+unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched
+a chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once
+before--beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.
+
+At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had
+cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse
+before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names
+and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.
+
+"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her.
+"Won't you let me take you home?--you want it sorely. The police are
+trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They
+will remove her with every care--he will see to it."
+
+Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he
+was--where they were--how they had last met. And with the remembrance
+came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness.
+She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her
+anymore--after this! When at the White House she had got herself into
+disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would
+silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and
+so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now.
+No!--after this he _must_ be friends with her.
+
+"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a
+quivering, appealing accent--and so they fell silent.
+
+Aldous looked round the room--at the miserable filthy garret with its
+begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its
+heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty
+gin-bottles here and there--all the familiar, one might almost say
+conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation--then at this
+breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling
+was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance--against her
+mother!--against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the
+finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a
+hopeless struggle with devildom.
+
+"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint
+voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not
+much worse than others--though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a
+little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in
+the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing--used to
+come in and out--when I was nursing him--Oh, I wish--I _wish_ they would
+come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form--"every
+moment is of importance!"
+
+As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it
+opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the
+lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and
+skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently
+the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole
+street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.
+
+Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police,
+who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her
+as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning
+against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and
+seemed to him on the point of fainting.
+
+"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then
+going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few
+words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.
+
+"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They
+will not trouble you any more for the present."
+
+He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the
+cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street
+as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she
+recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab.
+Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to
+control herself and not to faint.
+
+He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the
+exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was
+this what her new career--her enthusiasms--meant, or might mean!
+Twenty-three!--in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable
+waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.
+
+Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made
+impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such
+scenes--such gross physical abominations. Amazing!--how meanly,
+passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman! He
+himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern
+joy of the fight. But she!--let her leave the human brute and his
+unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne--it was never meant--that
+she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in
+such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed
+him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in
+the cottage.
+
+In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely.
+Presently, as he watched her--hating the man for driving and the cab for
+shaking--he saw her white lips suddenly smile.
+
+"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing
+is all like that!"
+
+"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.
+
+"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again.
+"Nobody is ever rude to us--I often pine for experiences!"
+
+How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.
+
+"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your
+arm hurt you much?"
+
+"Yes,--but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up
+work for a bit.--Mr. Raeburn!"
+
+"Yes." His heart beat.
+
+"We may meet often--mayn't we?--at Lady Winterbourne's--or in the
+country? Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often--" She turned
+away her weary head a moment--gathered strength to begin again--"--how
+often I have regretted--last year. I see now--that I behaved--more
+unkindly"--her voice was almost a whisper--"than I thought then. But it
+is all done with--couldn't we just be good friends--understand each
+other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"
+
+She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.
+
+As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was
+really in his mind was the Terrace--was Wharton's advancing figure. But
+her state--the moment--coerced him.
+
+"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with
+astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She
+knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.
+
+She put out her hand.
+
+"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh
+no!"
+
+Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant
+against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her
+self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been
+able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But
+she hardly heard him.
+
+At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of
+Brown's Buildings.
+
+"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know
+you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs--then I shan't
+be any more trouble."
+
+So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the
+court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of children.
+Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him
+with a wan smile.
+
+"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"
+
+Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed. Then
+he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and
+implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best
+cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.
+
+After which he spent--poor Aldous!--one of the most restless and
+miserable nights of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window
+of Lady Winterbourne's drawing-room. The house--in James Street,
+Buckingham Gate--looked out over the exercising ground of the great
+barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James's Park to the
+left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things,
+and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of
+sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's
+Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie
+still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let
+alone.
+
+Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still
+out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon.
+Marcella had her thoughts to herself.
+
+But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In
+the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady
+Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained
+service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so
+pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic
+temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had
+been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood
+was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort
+and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place
+among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these
+parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay
+the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her
+heart was somehow wrestling--must somehow wrestle--its passionate way.
+But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover,
+under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could
+neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her
+nursing--a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent
+and moody.
+
+On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she
+paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she _had_ saved--probably
+at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed
+through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and--as
+Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their
+minds--would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.
+
+Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest.
+She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of
+that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge
+of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her
+and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been
+with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable
+appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible;
+the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in
+common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had
+been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she
+had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange
+if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had
+let it count with him so little.
+
+Childishly, angrily--_she wanted him to be friends!_ Why shouldn't he?
+He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin
+might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future
+lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the
+same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her
+father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day,
+whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable
+though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must
+go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a
+situation?--make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not
+simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was
+inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.
+
+Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to
+whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him
+with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his
+private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle;
+and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and
+colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a
+number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the
+information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined
+ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of
+Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious
+surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained
+his place in Brookshire--by the mere accidents of birth. After all,
+aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men
+by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays
+is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by
+what he has--so far at least has "progress" brought us.
+
+She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of
+temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of
+"consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political
+contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the
+future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried;
+while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public.
+Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and
+various sources--mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men
+already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work
+of England. Above all things did she love and admire power--the power of
+personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the
+secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly
+different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a
+kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her
+imagination.
+
+Then--apart from the political world and its judgments--the intimacy
+between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new
+aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend, he
+was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the
+affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little
+oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the
+memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady
+Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were
+both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no
+one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or
+agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to
+regard him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not
+easily yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by
+strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and
+sweetness of disposition had full play; and although, now that Marcella
+was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than
+usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were all so
+kind and indulgent to _her_, seeing that they cared so much for him and
+all that affected him.
+
+Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain
+irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement
+she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her
+conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as
+combative as ever.
+
+Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more
+soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that
+nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the
+lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of
+course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual
+adornments of the "New Journalism."
+
+The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them--comparatively a large
+world--fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names. To lose
+your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come across
+her again in this manner and in these circumstances--there was a
+dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us
+too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would
+have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in
+particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she
+had claims, and was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and
+see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention
+whatever of playing the lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and
+fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once
+or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for
+the wounded arm that its owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane
+lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly, just across
+the Green Park.
+
+Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession
+a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller
+sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had
+been no craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally
+indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the
+attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry
+Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever.
+She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady
+Winterbourne neither knew him, nor apparently wished to know him--a fact
+which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate.
+
+Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and
+again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women,
+with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them
+he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent
+lived their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening
+returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new
+friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the
+young demagogue had yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least
+as much duped as he. Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he
+was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to
+his interest to break them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these
+people--the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his
+mind--seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished
+eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something
+she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.
+
+Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her
+from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that
+he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of
+appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and
+Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between
+them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great
+friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread
+of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On
+the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed
+him, as a lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be
+sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes,
+she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious
+little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great
+lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself
+flushing from brow to chin at the thought--"He does not want any one to
+suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!"
+
+It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects
+of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that
+she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When
+it _did_ enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his--and
+that he was full of doubts! The perception had given to her manner an
+increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into
+efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not
+refrain, if he was to preserve his power.
+
+So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in
+it neither simplicity nor joy. She was conscious of a certain dull and
+baffled feeling--a sense of humiliation--which hurt. Moreover, the scene
+of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination
+perpetually. She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her--the pity,
+the ugliness, the confusion of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The muslin curtain beside her suddenly swelled out in a draught of air,
+and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it
+should swing to. Some one had opened the door of the room.
+
+"_Did_ I blow you out of window?" said a girl's voice; and there behind
+her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty Macdonald, a vision of white
+muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed
+face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big shady hat.
+
+"Oh, do come in!" said Marcella, shyly; "Lady Winterbourne will be in
+directly."
+
+"So Panton told me," said Betty, sinking down on a high stool beside
+Marcella's chair, and taking off her hat; "and Panton doesn't tell _me_
+any stories _now_--I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in the
+day? Don't you think there will be a special little corner of purgatory
+for London butlers? I hope Panton will get off easy!"
+
+Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand, and studied Marcella.
+Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved; her pale
+face and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis.
+When Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain
+story, she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet, if only
+to prick her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she
+saw her close she felt herself near to falling in love with her.
+Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had
+thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little
+merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the
+thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have
+already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her heart, and by
+contrast honesty despising--for the moment--that very happy and popular
+person, Betty Macdonald!
+
+"Do you like being alone?" she asked Marcella, abruptly.
+
+Marcella coloured.
+
+"Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company," she said. "I
+was very glad to see you come in."
+
+"Were you?" said Betty, joyously, with a little gleam in her pretty
+eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. "May I kiss you?" she
+said, in the wistfullest, eagerest voice.
+
+Marcella smiled, and, laying her hand on Betty's, shyly drew her.
+
+"That's better!" said Betty, with a long breath. "That's the second
+milestone; the first was when I saw you on the Terrace. Couldn't you
+mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the
+horrid thing is when you have to mark them back again! Nobody ever did
+that with you!"
+
+"Because I have no friends," said Marcella, quickly; then, when Betty
+clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added quickly with
+a smile, "except a few I make poultices for."
+
+"There!" said Betty, enviously, "to think of being really _wanted_--for
+poultices--or, anything! I never was wanted in my life! When I die
+they'll put on my poor little grave--
+
+  "She's buried here--that hizzie Betty;
+  She did na gude--so don't ee fret ye!
+
+"--oh, there they are!"--she ran to the window--"Lady Winterbourne and
+Ermyntrude. Doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterbourne doing her
+duties? She gets into her carriage after lunch as one might mount a
+tumbril. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to the scaffold
+at Hyde Park Corner.' She looks the unhappiest woman in England--and all
+the time Ermyntrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her
+season for the world! She gives Ermyntrude a lot of trouble, but she
+_is_ a dear--a naughty dear--and mothers are _such_ a chance!
+Ermyntrude! _where_ did you get that bonnet? You got it without me--and
+my feelings won't stand it!"
+
+Lady Ermyntrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together,
+chattering and laughing. Lady Winterbourne came up to Marcella and
+enquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves, when
+the drawing-room door opened again.
+
+"Tea, Panton!" said Lady Winterbourne, without turning her head, and in
+the tone of Lady Macbeth. But the magnificent butler took no notice.
+
+"Lady Selina Farrell!" he announced in a firm voice.
+
+Lady Winterbourne gave a nervous start; then, with the air of a person
+cut out of wood, made a slight advance, and held out a limp hand to her
+visitor.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" she said.
+
+Anybody who did not know her would have supposed that she had never seen
+Lady Selina before. In reality she and the Alresfords were cousins. But
+she did not like Lady Selina, and never took any pains to conceal it--a
+fact which did not in the smallest degree interfere with the younger
+lady's performance of her family duties.
+
+Lady Selina found a seat with easy aplomb, put up her bejewelled fingers
+to draw off her veil, and smilingly prepared herself for tea. She
+enquired of Betty how she was enjoying herself, and of Lady Ermyntrude
+how her husband and baby in the country were getting on without her. The
+tone of this last question made the person addressed flush and draw
+herself up. It was put as banter, but certainly conveyed that Lady
+Ermyntrude was neglecting her family for the sake of dissipations. Betty
+meanwhile curled herself up in a corner of the sofa, letting one pretty
+foot swing over the other, and watching the new-comer with a malicious
+eye, which instantly and gleefully perceived that Lady Selina thought
+her attitude ungraceful.
+
+Marcella, of course, was greeted and condoled with--Lady Selina,
+however, had seen her since the tragedy--and then Lady Winterbourne,
+after every item of her family news, and every symptom of her own and
+her husband's health had been rigorously enquired into, began to attempt
+some feeble questions of her own--how, for instance, was Lord
+Alresford's gout?
+
+Lady Selina replied that he was well, but much depressed by the
+political situation. No doubt Ministers had done their best, but he
+thought two or three foolish mistakes had been made during the session.
+Certain blunders ought at all hazards to have been avoided. He feared
+that the party and the country might have to pay dearly for them. But
+_he_ had done his best.
+
+Lady Winterbourne, whose eldest son was a junior whip, had been the
+recipient, since the advent of the new Cabinet, of so much rejoicing
+over the final exclusion of "that vain old idiot, Alresford," from any
+further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selina's talk
+made her at once nervous and irritable. She was afraid of being
+indiscreet; yet she longed to put her visitor down. In her odd
+disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving
+idealist nature--mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at
+her, yet had made her happy--was always trying to reconcile the ends of
+eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of
+Sisyphus; but she would not let it alone.
+
+"I do not agree with you," she said with cold shyness in answer to Lady
+Selina's concluding laments--"I am told--our people say--we are doing
+very well--except that the session is likely to be dreadfully long."
+
+Lady Selina raised both her eyebrows and her shoulders.
+
+"_Dear_ Lady Winterbourne! you really mean it?" she said with the
+indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded--"But just think!
+The session will go on, every one says, till _quite_ the end of
+September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented?
+_All_ our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believes
+so _much_ of the friction might have been avoided. He is all in favour
+of doing more for Labour. He thinks these Labour men might have been
+easily propitiated without anything revolutionary. It's no good
+supposing that these poor starving people will wait for ever!"
+
+"Oh!" said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor. To those
+who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more
+expressive. Lady Winterbourne's sense of humour had no voice, but
+inwardly it was busy with Lord Alresford as the "friend of the poor."
+_Alresford_!--the narrowest and niggardliest tyrant alive, so far as his
+own servants and estate were concerned. And as to Lady Selina, it was
+well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a
+maid to stay with her six months.
+
+"What did _you_ think of Mr. Wharton's speech the other night?" said
+Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella.
+
+"It was very interesting," said Marcella, stiffly--perfectly conscious
+that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and
+angry with her cheeks for reddening.
+
+"Wasn't it?" said Lady Selina, heartily. "You can't _do_ those things,
+of course! But you should show every sympathy to the clever enthusiastic
+young men--the men like that--shouldn't you? That's what my father says.
+He says we've got to win them. We've got somehow to make them feel us
+their friends--or we shall _all_ go to ruin! They have the voting
+power--and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only
+lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our cause--and at
+the same time give them our help--in reason--show them we want to be
+their friends--wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it
+rightly--you know so much about these things! But we can't undo '67--can
+we? We must get round it somehow--mustn't we? And my father thinks
+Ministers so unwise! But perhaps"--and Lady Selina drew herself back
+with a more gracious smile than ever--"I ought not to be saying these
+things to you--of course I know you _used_ to think us Conservatives
+very bad people--but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think
+_quite_ so hardly of us as you used?"
+
+Lady Selina's head in its Paris bonnet fell to one side in a gentle
+interrogative sort of way.
+
+Something roused in Marcella.
+
+"Our cause?" she repeated, while the dark eye dilated--"I wonder what
+you mean?"
+
+"Well, I mean--" said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in
+the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl--"I mean, of course, the
+cause of the educated--of the people who have made the country."
+
+"I think," said Marcella, quietly, "you mean the cause of the rich,
+don't you?"
+
+"Marcella!" cried Lady Winterbourne, catching at the tone rather than
+words--"I thought you didn't feel like that any more--not about the
+distance between the poor and the rich--and our tyranny--and its being
+hopeless--and the poor always hating us--I thought you changed."
+
+And forgetting Lady Selina, remembering only the old talks at Mellor,
+Lady Winterbourne bent forward and laid an appealing hand on Marcella's
+arm.
+
+Marcella turned to her with an odd look.
+
+"If you only knew," she said, "how much more possible it is to think
+well of the rich, when you are living amongst the poor!"
+
+"Ah! you must be at a distance from us to do us justice?" enquired Lady
+Selina, settling her bracelets with a sarcastic lip.
+
+"_I_ must," said Marcella, looking, however, not at her, but at Lady
+Winterbourne. "But then, you see,"--she caressed her friend's hand with
+a smile--"it is so easy to throw some people into opposition!"
+
+"Dreadfully easy!" sighed Lady Winterbourne.
+
+The flush mounted again in the girl's cheek. She hesitated, then felt
+driven to explanations.
+
+"You see--oddly enough"--she pointed away for an instant to the
+north-east through the open window--"it's when I'm over there--among the
+people who have nothing--that it does me good to remember that there
+are persons who live in James Street, Buckingham Gate!"
+
+"My dear! I don't understand," said Lady Winterbourne, studying her with
+her most perplexed and tragic air.
+
+"Well, isn't it simple?" said Marcella, still holding her hand and
+looking up at her. "It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those
+streets and houses, among people who live in one room--with not a bit of
+prettiness anywhere--and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come
+home and _gloat_ over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I
+can think of!"
+
+"But don't you _hate_ the people that have them?" said Betty, again on
+her stool, chin in hand.
+
+"No! it doesn't seem to matter to me then what kind of people they are.
+And I don't so much want to take from them and give to the others. I
+only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness
+are _some_where--not lost out of the world."
+
+"How strange!--in a life like yours--that one should think so much of
+the _ugliness_ of being poor--more than of suffering or pain," said
+Betty, musing.
+
+"Well--in some moods--you do--_I_ do!" said Marcella; "and it is in
+those moods that I feel least resentful of wealth. If I say to myself
+that the people who have all the beauty and the leisure are often
+selfish and cruel--after all they die out of their houses and their
+parks, and their pictures, in time, like the shell-fish out of its
+shell. The beauty and the grace which they created or inherited remain.
+And why should one be envious of _them_ personally? They have had the
+best chances in the world and thrown them away--are but poor animals at
+the end! At any rate I can't hate them--they seem to have a
+function--when I am moving about Drury Lane!" she added with a smile.
+
+"But how can one help being ashamed?" said Lady Winterbourne, as her
+eyes wandered over her pretty room, and she felt herself driven somehow
+into playing devil's advocate.
+
+"No! No!" said Marcella, eagerly, "don't be ashamed! As to the people
+who make beauty more beautiful--who share it and give it--I often feel
+as if I could say to them on my knees, Never, _never_ be ashamed merely
+of being rich--of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy
+them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a
+cripple, or having two eyes rather than one!"
+
+"Oh, but, my dear!" cried Lady Winterbourne, piteous and bewildered,
+"when one has all the beauty and the freedom--and other people must
+_die_ without any--"
+
+"Oh, I know, I _know_!" said Marcella, with a quick gesture of despair;
+"that's what makes the world the world. And one begins with thinking it
+can be changed--that it _must_ and _shall_ be changed!--that everybody
+could have wealth--could have beauty and rest, and time to think, that
+is to say--if things were different--if one could get Socialism--if one
+could beat down the capitalist--if one could level down, and level up,
+till everybody had 200 _l._ a year. One turns and fingers the puzzle all
+day long. It seems so _near_ coming right--one guesses a hundred ways in
+which it might be done! Then after a while one stumbles upon doubt--one
+begins to see that it never _will_, never _can_ come right--not in any
+mechanical way of that sort--that _that_ isn't what was meant!"
+
+Her voice dropped drearily. Betty Macdonald gazed at her with a girl's
+nascent adoration. Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy,
+but absorbed like Betty in Marcella. Lady Selina, studying the three
+with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful
+attention to fringe and hairpins. As for Ermyntrude, she was no longer
+on the sofa; she had risen noiselessly, finger on lip, almost at the
+beginning of Marcella's talk, to greet a visitor. She and he were
+standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory,
+unnoticed by any of the group in the bow window.
+
+"Don't you think," said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still
+busy with her bonnet, "that it would be a very good thing to send all
+the Radicals--the well-to-do Radicals I mean--to live among the poor? It
+seems to teach people such extremely useful things!"
+
+Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her
+impertinently. She looked round quickly.
+
+"I wonder what you suppose it teaches?"
+
+"Well," said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; "well! I
+suppose it teaches a person to be content--and not to cry for the moon!"
+
+"You _think_," said Marcella, slowly, "that to live among the poor can
+teach any one--any one that's _human_--to be _content_!"
+
+Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force
+that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could
+hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation--without pose.
+At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of
+either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.
+
+Lady Selina's feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by
+her social inferior. She drew herself up.
+
+"As I understand you," she said stiffly, "you yourself confessed that to
+live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth."
+
+Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude's made the speaker turn her head.
+She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.
+
+"Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great
+discussion? Most consoling, wasn't it--on the whole--to us West End
+people?"
+
+She threw back a keen glance at Marcella. Lady Ermyntrude and Raeburn
+came forward.
+
+"I made him be quiet," said Ermyntrude, not looking, however, quite at
+her ease; "it would have been a shame to interrupt."
+
+"I think so, indeed!" said Lady Selina, with emphasis. "Good-bye, dear
+Lady Winterbourne; good-bye, Miss Boyce! You have comforted me very
+much! Of _course_ one is sorry for the poor; but it is a great thing to
+hear from anybody who knows as much about it as _you_ do, that--after
+all--it is no crime--to possess a little!"
+
+She stood smiling, looking from the girl to the man--then, escorted by
+Raeburn in his very stiffest manner, she swept out of the room.
+
+When Aldous came back, with a somewhat slow and hesitating step, he
+approached Marcella, who was standing silent by the window, and asked
+after the lame arm. He was sorry, he said, to see that it was still in
+its sling. His tone was a little abrupt. Only Lady Winterbourne saw the
+quick nervousness of the eyes,
+
+"Oh! thank you," said Marcella, coldly, "I shall get back to work next
+week."
+
+She stooped and took up her book.
+
+"I must please go and write some letters," she said, in answer to Lady
+Winterbourne's flurried look.
+
+And she walked away. Betty and Lady Ermyntrude also went to take off
+their things.
+
+"Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, holding out her hand to him.
+
+He took it, glanced unwillingly at her wistful, agitated face, pressed
+the hand, and let it go.
+
+"Isn't it sad," said his old friend, unable to help herself, "to see her
+battling like this with life--with thought--all alone? Isn't it sad,
+Aldous?"
+
+"Yes," he said. Then, after a pause, "Why _doesn't_ she go home? My
+patience gives out when I think of Mrs. Boyce."
+
+"Oh! it isn't Mrs. Boyce's fault," said Lady Winterbourne, hopelessly.
+"And I don't know why one should be sorry for her particularly--why one
+should want her to change her life again. She does it splendidly. Only
+I never, _never_ feel that she is a bit happy in it."
+
+It was Hallin's cry over again.
+
+He said nothing for a moment; then he forced a smile.
+
+"Well! neither you nor I can help it, can we?" he said. The grey eyes
+looked at her steadily--bitterly. Lady Winterbourne, with the sensation
+of one who, looking for softness, has lit on granite, changed the
+subject.
+
+Meanwhile, Marcella upstairs was walking restlessly up and down. She
+could hardly keep herself from rushing off--back to Brown's Buildings at
+once. _He_ in the room while she was saying those things! Lady Selina's
+words burnt in her ears. Her morbid, irritable sense was all one
+vibration of pride and revolt. Apology--appeal--under the neatest comedy
+guise! Of course!--now that Lord-Maxwell was dying, and the ill-used
+suitor was so much the nearer to his earldom. A foolish girl had
+repented her of her folly--was anxious to make those concerned
+understand--what more simple?
+
+Her nerves were strained and out of gear. Tears came in a proud,
+passionate gush; and she must needs allow herself the relief of them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, Lady Selina had gone home full of new and uncomfortable
+feelings. She could not get Marcella Boyce out of her head--neither as
+she had just seen her, under the wing of "that foolish woman, Madeleine
+Winterbourne," nor as she had seen her first, on the terrace with Harry
+Wharton. It did not please Lady Selina to feel herself in any way
+eclipsed or even rivalled by such an unimportant person as this strange
+and ridiculous girl. Yet it crossed her mind with a stab, as she lay
+resting on the sofa in her little sitting-room before dinner, that never
+in all her thirty-five years had any human being looked into _her_ face
+with the same alternations of eagerness and satisfied pleasure she had
+seen on Harry Wharton's, as he and Miss Boyce strolled the terrace
+together--nor even with such a look as that silly baby Betty Macdonald
+had put on, as she sat on the stool at the heroine's feet.
+
+There was to be a small dinner-party at Alresford House that night.
+Wharton was to be among the guests. He was fast becoming one of the
+_habitues_ of the house, and would often stay behind to talk to Lady
+Selina when the guests were gone, and Lord Alresford was dozing
+peacefully in a deep arm-chair.
+
+Lady Selina lay still in the evening light, and let her mind, which
+worked with extraordinary shrewdness and force in the grooves congenial
+to it, run over some possibilities of the future.
+
+She was interrupted by the entrance of her maid, who, with the quickened
+breath and heightened colour she could not repress when speaking to her
+formidable mistress, told her that one of the younger housemaids was
+very ill. Lady Selina enquired, found that the doctor who always
+attended the servants had been sent for, and thought that the illness
+_might_ turn to rheumatic fever.
+
+"Oh, send her off to the hospital at once!" said Lady Selina. "Let Mrs.
+Stewart see Dr. Briggs first thing in the morning, and make
+arrangements. You understand?"
+
+The girl hesitated, and the candles she was lighting showed that she had
+been crying.
+
+"If your ladyship would but let her stay," she said timidly, "we'd all
+take our turns at nursing her. She comes from Ireland, perhaps you'll
+remember, my lady. She's no friends in London, and she's frightened to
+death of going to the hospital."
+
+"That's nonsense!" said Lady Selina, sternly. "Do you think I can have
+all the work of the house put out because some one is ill? She might die
+even--one never knows. Just tell Mrs. Stewart to arrange with her about
+her wages, and to look out for somebody else at once."
+
+The girl's mouth set sullenly as she went about her work--put out the
+shining satin dress, the jewels, the hairpins, the curling-irons, the
+various powders and cosmetics that were wanted for Lady Selina's
+toilette, and all the time there was ringing in her ears the piteous cry
+of a little Irish girl, clinging like a child to her only friend: "O
+Marie! dear Marie! do get her to let me stay--I'll do everything the
+doctor tells me--I'll make _haste_ and get well--I'll give no trouble.
+And it's all along of the work--and the damp up in these rooms--the
+doctor said so."
+
+An hour later Lady Selina was in the stately drawing-room of Alresford
+House, receiving her guests. She was out of sorts and temper, and though
+Wharton arrived in due time, and she had the prospect to enliven her
+during dinner--when he was of necessity parted from her by people of
+higher rank--of a _tete-a-tete_ with him before the evening was over,
+the dinner went heavily. The Duke on her right hand, and the Dean on her
+left, were equally distasteful to her. Neither food nor wine had savour;
+and once, when in an interval of talk she caught sight of her father's
+face and form at the further end, growing more vacant and decrepit week
+by week, she was seized with a sudden angry pang of revolt and
+repulsion. Her father wearied and disgusted her. Life was often triste
+and dull in the great house. Yet, when the old man should have found his
+grave, she would be a much smaller person than she was now, and the days
+would be so much the more tedious.
+
+Wharton, too, showed less than his usual animation. She said to herself
+at dinner that he had the face of a man in want of sleep. His young
+brilliant look was somewhat tarnished, and there was worry in the
+restless eye. And, indeed, she knew that things had not been going so
+favourably for him in the House of late--that the stubborn opposition
+of the little group of men led by Wilkins was still hindering that
+concentration of the party and definition of his own foremost place in
+it which had looked so close and probable a few weeks before. She
+supposed he had been exhausting himself, too, over that shocking Midland
+strike. The _Clarion_ had been throwing itself into the battle of the
+men with a monstrous violence, for which she had several times
+reproached him.
+
+When all the guests had gone but Wharton, and Lord Alresford, duly
+placed for the sake of propriety in his accustomed chair, was safely
+asleep, Lady Selina asked what was the matter.
+
+"Oh, the usual thing!" he said, as he leant against the mantelpiece
+beside her. "The world's a poor place, and my doll's stuffed with
+sawdust. Did you ever know any doll that wasn't?"
+
+She looked up at him a moment without speaking.
+
+"Which means," she said, "that you can't get your way in the House?"
+
+"No," said Wharton, meditatively, looking down at his boots. "No--not
+yet."
+
+"You think you will get it some day?"
+
+He raised his eyes.
+
+"Oh yes!" he said; "oh dear, yes!--some day."
+
+She laughed.
+
+"You had better come over to us."
+
+"Well, there is always that to think of, isn't there? You can't deny you
+want all the new blood you can get!"
+
+"If you only understood your moment and your chance," she said quickly,
+"you would make the opportunity and do it at once."
+
+He looked at her aggressively.
+
+"How easy it comes to you Tories to rat!" he said.
+
+"Thank you! it only means that we are the party of common sense. Well, I
+have been talking to your Miss Boyce."
+
+He started.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"At Lady Winterbourne's. Aldous Raeburn was there. Your beautiful
+Socialist was very interesting--and rather surprising. She talked of the
+advantages of wealth; said she had been converted--by living among the
+poor--had changed her mind, in fact, on many things. We were all much
+edified--including Mr. Raeburn. How long do you suppose that business
+will remain 'off'? To my mind I never saw a young woman more eager to
+undo a mistake." Then she added slowly, "The accounts of Lord Maxwell
+get more and more unsatisfactory."
+
+Wharton stared at her with sparkling eyes. "How little you know her!" he
+said, not without a tone of contempt.
+
+"Oh! very well," said Lady Selina, with the slightest shrug of her white
+shoulders.
+
+He turned to the mantelpiece and began to play with some ornaments upon
+it.
+
+"Tell me what she said," he enquired presently.
+
+Lady Selina gave her own account of the conversation. Wharton recovered
+himself.
+
+"Dear me!" he said, when she stopped. "Yes--well--we may see another
+act. Who knows? Well, good-night, Lady Selina."
+
+She gave him her hand with her usual aristocrat's passivity, and he
+went. But it was late indeed that night before she ceased to speculate
+on what the real effect of her words had been upon him.
+
+As for Wharton, on his walk home he thought of Marcella Boyce and of
+Raeburn with a certain fever of jealous vanity which was coming, he told
+himself, dangerously near to passion. He did not believe Lady Selina,
+but nevertheless he felt that her news might drive him into rash steps
+he could ill afford, and had indeed been doing his best to avoid.
+Meanwhile it was clear to him that the mistress of Alresford House had
+taken an envious dislike to Marcella. How plain she had looked to-night
+in spite of her gorgeous dress! and how intolerable Lord Alresford grew!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+But what right had Wharton to be thinking of such irrelevant matters as
+women and love-making at all? He had spoken of public worries to Lady
+Selina. In reality his public prospects in themselves were, if anything,
+improved. It was his private affairs that were rushing fast on
+catastrophe, and threatening to drag the rest with them.
+
+He had never been so hard pressed for money in his life. In the first
+place his gambling debts had mounted up prodigiously of late. His
+friends were tolerant and easy-going. But the more tolerant they were
+the more he was bound to frequent them. And his luck for some time had
+been monotonously bad. Before long these debts must be paid, and some of
+them--to a figure he shrank from dwelling upon--were already urgent.
+
+Then as to the _Clarion_, it became every week a heavier burden. The
+expenses of it were enormous; the returns totally inadequate.
+Advertisements were falling off steadily; and whether the working cost
+were cut down, or whether a new and good man like Louis Craven, whose
+letters from the strike district were being now universally read, were
+put on, the result financially seemed to be precisely the same. It was
+becoming even a desperate question how the weekly expenses were to be
+met; so that Wharton's usual good temper now deserted him entirely as
+soon as he had crossed the _Clarion_ threshold; bitterness had become
+the portion of the staff, and even the office boys walked in gloom.
+
+Yet, at the same time, withdrawing from the business, was almost as
+difficult as carrying it on. There were rumours in the air which had,
+already seriously damaged the paper as a saleable concern. Wharton,
+indeed, saw no prospect whatever of selling except at ruinous loss.
+Meanwhile, to bring the paper to an abrupt end would have not only
+precipitated a number of his financial obligations; it would have been
+politically, a dangerous confession of failure made at a very critical
+moment. For what made the whole thing the more annoying was that the
+_Clarion_ had never been so important politically, never so much read by
+the persons on whom Wharton's parliamentary future depended, as it was
+at this moment. The advocacy of the Damesley strike had been so far a
+stroke of business for Wharton as a Labour Member.
+
+It was now the seventh week of the strike, and Wharton's "leaders,"
+Craven's letters from the seat of war, and the _Clarion_ strike fund,
+which articles and letters had called into existence, were as vigorous
+as ever. The struggle itself had fallen into two chapters. In the first
+the metal-workers concerned, both men and women, had stood out for the
+old wages unconditionally and had stoutly rejected all idea of
+arbitration. At the end of three or four weeks, however, when grave
+suffering had declared itself among an already half-starved population,
+the workers had consented to take part in the appointment of a board of
+conciliation. This board, including the workmen's delegates, overawed
+by the facts of foreign competition as they were disclosed by the
+masters, recommended terms which would have amounted to a victory for
+the employers.
+
+The award was no sooner known in the district than the passionate
+indignation of the great majority of the workers knew no bounds.
+Meetings were held everywhere; the men's delegates at the board were
+thrown over, and Craven, who with his new wife was travelling
+incessantly over the whole strike area, wrote a letter to the _Clarion_
+on the award which stated the men's case with extreme ability, was
+immediately backed up by Wharton in a tremendous "leader," and was
+received among the strikers with tears almost of gratitude and
+enthusiasm.
+
+Since then all negotiations had been broken off. The _Clarion_ had gone
+steadily against the masters, against the award, against further
+arbitration. The theory of the "living wage," of which more recent days
+have heard so much, was preached in other terms, but with equal vigour;
+and the columns of the _Clarion_ bore witness day by day in the long
+lists of subscriptions to the strike fund, to the effects of its
+eloquence on the hearts and pockets of Englishmen.
+
+Meanwhile there were strange rumours abroad. It was said that the trade
+was really on the eve of a complete and striking revolution in its whole
+conditions--could this labour war be only cleared out of the way. The
+smaller employers had been for long on the verge of ruin; and the larger
+men, so report had it, were scheming a syndicate on the American plan
+to embrace the whole industry, cut down the costs of production, and
+regulate the output.
+
+But for this large capital would be wanted. Could capital be got? The
+state of things in the trade, according to the employers, had been
+deplorable for years; a large part of the market had been definitely
+forfeited, so they declared, for good, to Germany and Belgium. It would
+take years before even a powerful syndicate could work itself into a
+thoroughly sound condition. Let the men accept the award of the
+conciliation board; let there be some stable and reasonable prospect of
+peace between masters and men, say, for a couple of years; and a certain
+group of bankers would come forward; and all would be well. The men
+under the syndicate would in time get more than their old wage. _But the
+award first_; otherwise the plan dropped, and the industry must go its
+own way to perdition.
+
+"'Will you walk into my parlour?'" said Wharton, scornfully, to the
+young Conservative member who, with a purpose, was explaining these
+things to him in the library of the House of Commons, "the merest trap!
+and, of course, the men will see it so. Who is to guarantee them even
+the carrying through, much less the success, of your precious syndicate?
+And, in return for your misty millennium two years hence, the men are to
+join at once in putting the employers in a stronger position than ever?
+Thank you! The 'rent of ability' in the present state of things is, no
+doubt, large. But in this particular case the _Clarion_ will go on doing
+its best--I promise you--to nibble some of it away!"
+
+The Conservative member rose in indignation.
+
+"I should be sorry to have as many starving people on my conscience as
+you'll have before long!" he said as he took up his papers.
+
+At that moment Denny's rotund and square-headed figure passed along the
+corridor, to which the library door stood open.
+
+"Well, if I thrive upon it as well as Denny does, I shall do!" returned
+Wharton, with his usual caustic good-humour, as his companion departed.
+
+And it delighted him to think as he walked home that Denny, who had
+again of late made himself particularly obnoxious in the House of
+Commons, on two or three occasions, to the owner of the _Clarion_, had
+probably instigated the quasi-overtures he had just rejected, and must
+be by now aware of their result.
+
+Then he sent for Craven to come and confer with him.
+
+Craven accordingly came up from the Midlands, pale, thin, and exhausted,
+with the exertions and emotions of seven weeks' incessant labour. Yet
+personally Wharton found him, as before, dry and unsympathetic; and
+disliked him, and his cool, ambiguous manner, more than ever. As to the
+strike, however, they came to a complete understanding. The _Clarion_,
+or rather the _Clarion_ fund, which was doing better and better, held
+the key of the whole situation. If that fund could be maintained, the
+men could hold out. In view of the possible formation of the syndicate,
+Craven denounced the award with more fierceness than ever, maintaining
+the redoubled importance of securing the men's terms before the
+syndicate was launched. Wharton promised him with glee that he should be
+supported to the bitter end.
+
+_If_, that is to say--a proviso he did not discuss with Craven--the
+_Clarion_ itself could be kept going. In August a large sum, obtained
+two years before on the security of new "plant," would fall due. The
+time for repayment had already been extended; and Wharton had
+ascertained that no further extension was possible.
+
+Well! bankruptcy would be a piquant interlude in his various social and
+political enterprises! How was it to be avoided? He had by now plenty of
+rich friends in the City or elsewhere, but none, as he finally decided,
+likely to be useful to him at the present moment. For the amount of
+money that he required was large--larger, indeed, than he cared to
+verify with any strictness, and the security that he could offer, almost
+nil.
+
+As to friends in the City, indeed, the only excursion of a business kind
+that he had made into those regions since his election was now adding
+seriously to his anxieties--might very well turn out, unless the matter
+were skilfully managed, to be one of the blackest spots on his horizon.
+
+In the early days of his parliamentary life, when, again, mostly for the
+_Clarion's_ sake, money happened to be much wanted, he had become
+director of what promised to be an important company, through the
+interest and good nature of a new and rich acquaintance, who had taken a
+liking to the young member. The company had been largely "boomed," and
+there had been some very profitable dealing in the original shares.
+Wharton had made two or three thousand pounds, and contributed both
+point and finish to some of the early prospectuses.
+
+Then, after six months, he had withdrawn from the Board, under
+apprehensions that had been gradually realised with alarming accuracy.
+Things, indeed, had been going very wrong indeed; there were a number of
+small investors; and the annual meeting of the company, to be held now
+in some ten days, promised a storm. Wharton discovered, partly to his
+own amazement, for he was a man who quickly forgot, that during his
+directorate he had devised or sanctioned matters that were not at all
+likely to commend themselves to the shareholders, supposing the past
+were really sifted. The ill-luck of it was truly stupendous; for on the
+whole he had kept himself financially very clean since he had become a
+member; having all through a jealous eye to his political success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the political situation, nothing could be at once more promising
+or more anxious!
+
+An important meeting of the whole Labour group had been fixed for August
+10, by which time it was expected that a great measure concerning Labour
+would be returned from the House of Lords with highly disputable
+amendments. The last six weeks of the session would be in many ways more
+critical for Labour than its earlier months had been; and it would be
+proposed by Bennett, at the meeting on the 10th, to appoint a general
+chairman of the party, in view of a campaign which would fill the
+remainder of the session and strenuously occupy the recess.
+
+That Bennett would propose the name of the member for West Brookshire
+was perfectly well known to Wharton and his friends. That the nomination
+would meet with the warmest hostility from Wilkins and a small group of
+followers was also accurately forecast.
+
+To this day, then, Wharton looked forward as to the crisis of his
+parliamentary fortunes. All his chances, financial or social, must now
+be calculated with reference to it. Every power, whether of combat or
+finesse, that he commanded must be brought to bear upon the issue.
+
+What was, however, most remarkable in the man and the situation at the
+moment was that, through all these gathering necessities, he was by no
+means continuously anxious or troubled in his mind. During these days of
+July he gave himself, indeed, whenever he could, to a fatalist oblivion
+of the annoyances of life, coupled with a passionate pursuit of all
+those interests where his chances were still good and the omens still
+with him.
+
+Especially--during the intervals of ambition, intrigue, journalism, and
+unsuccessful attempts to raise money--had he meditated the beauty of
+Marcella Boyce and the chances and difficulties of his relation to her.
+As he saw her less, he thought of her more, instinctively looking to her
+for the pleasure and distraction that life was temporarily denying him
+elsewhere.
+
+At the same time, curiously enough, the stress of his financial position
+was reflected even in what, to himself, at any rate, he was boldly
+beginning to call his "passion" for her. It had come to his knowledge
+that Mr. Boyce had during the past year succeeded beyond all expectation
+in clearing the Mellor estate. He had made skilful use of a railway
+lately opened on the edge of his property; had sold building land in
+the neighbourhood of a small country town on the line, within a
+convenient distance of London; had consolidated and improved several of
+his farms and relet them at higher rents; was, in fact, according to
+Wharton's local informant, in a fair way to be some day, if he lived,
+quite as prosperous as his grandfather, in spite of old scandals and
+invalidism. Wharton knew, or thought he knew, that he would not live,
+and that Marcella would be his heiress. The prospect was not perhaps
+brilliant, but it was something; it affected the outlook.
+
+Although, however, this consideration counted, it was, to do him
+justice, _Marcella_, the creature herself, that he desired. But for her
+presence in his life he would probably have gone heiress-hunting with
+the least possible delay. As it was, his growing determination to win
+her, together with his advocacy of the Damesley workers--amply sufficed,
+during the days that followed his evening talk with Lady Selina, to
+maintain his own illusions about himself and so to keep up the zest of
+life.
+
+Yes!--to master and breathe passion into Marcella Boyce, might safely be
+reckoned on, he thought, to hurry a man's blood. And after it had gone
+so far between them--after he had satisfied himself that her fancy, her
+temper, her heart, were all more or less occupied with him--was he to
+see her tamely recovered by Aldous Raeburn--by the man whose advancing
+parliamentary position was now adding fresh offence to the old grievance
+and dislike? No! not without a dash--a throw for it!
+
+For a while, after Lady Selina's confidences, jealous annoyance,
+together with a certain reckless state of nerves, turned him almost into
+the pining lover. For he could not see Marcella. She came no more to
+Mrs. Lane; and the house in James Street was not open to him. He
+perfectly understood that the Winterbournes did not want to know him.
+
+At last Mrs. Lane, a shrewd little woman with a half contemptuous liking
+for Wharton, let him know--on the strength of a chance meeting with Lady
+Ermyntrude--that the Winterbournes would be at the Masterton party on
+the 26th. They had persuaded Miss Boyce to stay for it, and she would go
+back to her work the Monday after. Wharton carelessly replied that he
+did not know whether he would be able to put in an appearance at the
+Mastertons'. He might be going out of town.
+
+Mrs. Lane looked at him and said, "Oh, really!" with a little laugh.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lady Masterton was the wife of the Colonial Secretary, and her grand
+mansion in Grosvenor Square was the principal rival to Alresford House
+in the hospitalities of the party. Her reception on July 25 was to be
+the last considerable event of a protracted but now dying season.
+Marcella, detained in James Street day after day against her will by the
+weakness of the injured arm and the counsels of her doctor, had at last
+extracted permission to go back to work on the 27th; and to please Betty
+Macdonald she had promised to go with the Winterbournes to the Masterton
+party on the Saturday. Betty's devotion, shyly as she had opened her
+proud heart to it, had begun to mean a good deal to her. There was balm
+in it for many a wounded feeling; and, besides, there was the constant,
+half eager, half painful interest of watching Betty's free and childish
+ways with Aldous Raeburn, and of speculating upon what would ultimately
+come out of them.
+
+So, when Betty first demanded to know what she was going to wear, and
+then pouted over the dress shown her, Marcella submitted humbly to being
+"freshened up" at the hands of Lady Ermyntrude's maid, bought what Betty
+told her, and stood still while Betty, who had a genius for such things,
+chattered, and draped, and suggested.
+
+"I wouldn't make you fashionable for the world!" cried Betty, with a
+mouthful of pins, laying down masterly folds of lace and chiffon the
+while over the white satin with which Marcella had provided her. "What
+was it Worth said to me the other day?--Ce qu'on porte, Mademoiselle? O
+pas grand'chose!--presque pas de corsage, et pas du tout de
+manches!'--No, that kind of thing wouldn't suit you. But _distinguished_
+you shall be, if I sit up all night to think it out!"
+
+In the end Betty was satisfied, and could hardly be prevented from
+hugging Marcella there and then, out of sheer delight in her own
+handiwork, when at last the party emerged from the cloak-room into the
+Mastertons' crowded hall. Marcella too felt pleasure in the reflections
+of herself as they passed up the lavishly bemirrored staircase. The
+chatter about dress in which she had been living for some days had
+amused and distracted her; for there were great feminine potentialities
+in her; though for eighteen months she had scarcely given what she wore
+a thought, and in her pre-nursing days had been wont to waver between a
+kind of proud neglect, which implied the secret consciousness of beauty,
+and an occasional passionate desire to look well. So that she played her
+part to-night very fairly; pinched Betty's arm to silence the elf's
+tongue; and held herself up as she was told, that Betty's handiwork
+might look its best. But inwardly the girl's mood was very tired and
+flat. She was pining for her work; pining even for Minta Hurd's peevish
+look, and the children to whom she was so easily an earthly providence.
+
+In spite of the gradual emptying of London, Lady Masterton's rooms were
+very full. Marcella found acquaintances. Many of the people whom she had
+met at Mrs. Lane's, the two Cabinet Ministers of the House of Commons
+dinner, Mr. Lane himself--all were glad or eager to recall themselves to
+her as she stood by Lady Winterbourne, or made her way half absently
+through the press. She talked, without shyness--she had never been shy,
+and was perhaps nearer now to knowing what it might mean than she had
+been as a schoolgirl--but without heart; her black eye wandering
+meanwhile, as though in quest. There was a gay sprinkling of uniforms in
+the crowd, for the Speaker was holding a _levee_, and as it grew late
+his guests began to set towards Lady Masterton. Betty, who had been
+turning up her nose at the men she had so far smiled upon, all of whom
+she declared were either bald or seventy, was a little propitiated by
+the uniforms; otherwise, she pronounced the party very dull.
+
+"Well, upon my word!" she cried suddenly, in a tone that made Marcella
+turn upon her. The child was looking very red and very upright--was
+using her fan with great vehemence, and Frank Leven was humbly holding
+out his hand to her.
+
+"I don't like being startled," said Betty, pettishly. "Yes, you _did_
+startle me--you did--you did! And then you begin to contradict before
+I've said a word! I'm sure you've been contradicting all the way
+upstairs--and why don't you say 'How do you do?' to Miss Boyce?"
+
+Frank, looking very happy, but very nervous, paid his respects rather
+bashfully to Marcella--she laughed to see how Betty's presence subdued
+him--and then gave himself up wholly to Betty's tender mercies.
+
+Marcella observed them with an eager interest she could not wholly
+explain to herself. It was clear that all thought of anything or anybody
+else had vanished for Frank Leven at the sight of Betty. Marcella
+guessed, indeed knew, that they had not met for some little time; and
+she was touched by the agitation and happiness on the boy's handsome
+face. But Betty? what was the secret of her kittenish, teasing ways--or
+was there any secret? She held her little head very high and chattered
+very fast--but it was not the same chatter that she gave to Marcella,
+nor, so far as Marcella could judge, to Aldous Raeburn. New elements of
+character came out in it. It was self-confident, wilful, imperious.
+Frank was never allowed to have an opinion; was laughed at before his
+words were out of his mouth; was generally heckled, played with, and
+shaken in a way which seemed alternately to enrage and enchant him. In
+the case of most girls, such a manner would have meant encouragement;
+but, as it was Betty, no one could be sure. The little thing was a great
+puzzle to Marcella, who had found unexpected reserves in her. She might
+talk of her love affairs to Aldous Raeburn; she had done nothing of the
+sort with her new friend. And in such matters Marcella herself was far
+more reserved than most modern women.
+
+"Betty!" cried Lady Winterbourne, "I am going on into the next room."
+
+Then in a lower tone she said helplessly to Marcella:
+
+"Do make her come on!"
+
+Marcella perceived that her old friend was in a fidget. Stooping her
+tall head, she said with a smile:
+
+"But look how she is amusing herself!"
+
+"My dear!--that's just it! If you only knew how her mother--tiresome
+woman--has talked to me! And the young man has behaved so beautifully
+till now--has given neither Ermyntrude nor me any trouble."
+
+Was that why Betty was leading him such a life? Marcella wondered,--then
+suddenly--was seized with a sick distaste for the whole scene--for
+Betty's love affairs--for her own interest in them--for her own self and
+personality above all. Her great black eyes gazed straight before them,
+unseeing, over the crowd, the diamonds, the lights; her whole being
+gave itself to a quick, blind wrestle with some vague overmastering
+pain, some despair of life and joy to which she could give no name.
+
+She was roused by Betty's voice:
+
+"Mr. Raeburn! will _you_ tell me who people are? Mr. Leven's no more use
+than my fan. Just imagine--I asked him who that lady in the tiara
+is--and he vows he doesn't know! Why, it just seems that when you go to
+Oxford, you leave the wits you had before, behind! And then--of
+course"--Betty affected a delicate hesitation--"there's the difficulty
+of being quite sure that you'll ever get any new ones!--But
+there--look!--I'm in despair!--she's vanished--and I shall _never_
+know!"
+
+"One moment!" said Raeburn, smiling, "and I will take you in pursuit.
+She has only gone into the tea-room."
+
+His hand touched Marcella's.
+
+"Just a _little_ better," he said, with a sudden change of look, in
+answer to Lady Winterbourne's question. "The account to-night is
+certainly brighter. They begged me not to come, or I should have been
+off some days ago. And next week, I am thankful to say, they will be
+home."
+
+Why should she be standing there, so inhumanly still and
+silent?--Marcella asked herself. Why not take courage again--join
+in--talk--show sympathy? But the words died on her lips. After
+to-night--thank heaven!--she need hardly see him again.
+
+He asked after herself as usual. Then, just as he was turning away with
+Betty, he came back to her, unexpectedly.
+
+"I should like to tell you about Hallin," he said gently. "His sister
+writes to me that she is happier about him, and that she hopes to be
+able to keep him away another fortnight. They are at Keswick."
+
+For an instant there was pleasure in the implication of common ground, a
+common interest--here if no-where else. Then the pleasure was lost in
+the smart of her own strange lack of self-government as she made a
+rather stupid and awkward reply.
+
+Raeburn's eyes rested on her for a moment. There was in them a flash of
+involuntary expression, which she did not notice--for she had turned
+away--which no one saw--except Betty. Then the child followed him to the
+tea-room, a little pale and pensive.
+
+Marcella looked after them.
+
+In the midst of the uproar about her, the babel of talk fighting against
+the Hungarian band, which was playing its wildest and loudest in the
+tea-room, she was overcome by a sudden rush of memory. Her eyes were
+tracing the passage of those two figures through the crowd; the man in
+his black court suit, stooping his refined and grizzled head to the girl
+beside him, or turning every now and then to greet an acquaintance, with
+the manner--cordial and pleasant, yet never quite gay even when he
+smiled--that she, Marcella, had begun to notice of late as a new thing;
+the girl lifting her small face to him, the gold of her hair showing
+against his velvet sleeve. But the inward sense was busy with a number
+of other impressions, past, and, as it now seemed, incredible.
+
+The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long
+ago--why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his
+arm about her!--the drive home after the Gairsley meeting--that poignant
+moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball--his face, his anxious,
+tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him
+on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather
+in vain:--had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part
+of the living world? Impossible! Why, there he was--not ten yards from
+her--and yet more irrevocably separate from her than if the Sahara
+stretched between them. The note of cold distance in his courteous
+manner put her further from him than the merest stranger.
+
+Marcella felt a sudden terror rush through her as she blindly followed
+Lady Winterbourne; her limbs trembled under her; she took advantage of a
+conversation between her companion and the master of the house to sink
+down for a moment on a settee, where she felt out of sight and notice.
+
+What was this intolerable sense of loss and folly, this smarting
+emptiness, this rage with herself and her life? She only knew that
+whereas the touch, the eye of Aldous Raeburn had neither compelled nor
+thrilled her, so long as she possessed his whole heart and
+life--_now_--that she had no right to either look or caress; now that he
+had ceased even to regard her as a friend, and was already perhaps
+making up that loyal and serious mind of his to ask from another woman
+the happiness she had denied him; now, when it was absurdly too late,
+she could--
+
+Could what? Passionate, wilful creature that she was!--with that breath
+of something wild and incalculable surging through the inmost places of
+the soul, she went through a moment of suffering as she sat pale and
+erect in her corner--brushed against by silks and satins, chattered
+across by this person and that--such as seemed to bruise all the
+remaining joy and ease out of life.
+
+But only a moment! Flesh and blood rebelled. She sprang up from her
+seat; told herself that she was mad or ill; caught sight of Mr. Lane
+coming towards them, and did her best by smile and greeting to attract
+him to her.
+
+"You look very white, my dear Miss Boyce," said that cheerful and
+fatherly person. "Is it that tiresome arm still? Now, don't please go
+and be a heroine any more!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+Meanwhile, in the tea-room, Betty was daintily sipping her claret-cup,
+while Aldous stood by her.
+
+"No," said Betty, calmly, looking straight at the lady in the tiara who
+was standing by the buffet, "she's not beautiful, and I've torn my dress
+running after her. There's only one beautiful person here to-night!"
+
+Aldous found her a seat, and took one himself beside her, in a corner
+out of the press. But he did not answer her remark.
+
+"Don't you think so, Mr. Aldous?" said Betty, persisting, but with a
+little flutter of the pulse.
+
+"You mean Miss Boyce?" he said quietly, as he turned to her.
+
+"Of course!" cried Betty, with a sparkle in her charming eyes; "what
+_is_ it in her face? It excites me to be near her. One feels that she
+will just have lived _twice_ as much as the rest of us by the time she
+comes to the end. You don't mind my talking of her, Mr. Aldous?"
+
+There was an instant's silence on his part. Then he said in a
+constrained voice, looking away from his companion, "I don't _mind_ it,
+but I am not going to pretend to you that I find it easy to talk of
+her."
+
+"It would be a shame of you to pretend anything," said Betty, fervently,
+"after all I've told you! I confessed all my scrapes to you, turned out
+all my rubbish bag of a heart--well, nearly all"--she checked herself
+with a sudden flush--"And you've been as kind to me as any big brother
+could be. But you're dreadfully lofty, Mr. Aldous! You keep yourself to
+yourself. I don't think it's fair!"
+
+Aldous laughed.
+
+"My dear Miss Betty, haven't you found out by now that I am a good
+listener and a bad talker? I don't talk of myself or"--he
+hesitated--"the things that have mattered most to me--because, in the
+first place, it doesn't come easy to me--and, in the next, I can't, you
+see, discuss my own concerns without discussing other people's."
+
+"Oh, good gracious!" said Betty, "what you must have been thinking about
+me! I declare I'll never tell you anything again!"--and, beating her
+tiny foot upon the ground, she sat, scarlet, looking down at it.
+
+Aldous made all the smiling excuses he could muster. He had found Betty
+a most beguiling and attaching little companion, both at the Court in
+the Easter recess, and during the Italian journey. Her total lack of
+reserve, or what appeared so, had been first an amazement to him, and
+then a positive pleasure and entertainment. To make a friend of
+him--difficult and scrupulous as he was, and now more than ever--a woman
+must be at the cost of most of the advances. But, after the first
+evening with him, Betty had made them in profusion, without the smallest
+demur, though perfectly well aware of her mother's ambitions. There was
+a tie of cousinship between them, and a considerable difference of age.
+Betty had decided at once that a mother was a dear old goose, and that
+great friends she and Aldous Raeburn should be--and, in a sense, great
+friends they were.
+
+Aldous was still propitiating her, when Lady Winterbourne came into the
+tea-room, followed by Marcella. The elder lady threw a hurried and not
+very happy glance at the pair in the corner. Marcella appeared to be in
+animated talk with a young journalist whom Raeburn knew, and did not
+look their way.
+
+"Just _one_ thing!" said Betty, bending forward and speaking eagerly in
+Aldous's ear. "It was all a mistake--wasn't it? Now I know her I feel
+sure it was. You don't--you don't--really think badly of her?"
+
+Aldous heard her unwillingly. He was looking away from her towards the
+buffet, when she saw a change in the eyes--a tightening of the lip--a
+something keen and hostile in the whole face.
+
+"Perhaps Miss Boyce will be less of a riddle to all of us before long!"
+he said hastily, as though the words escaped him. "Shall we get out of
+this very uncomfortable corner?"
+
+Betty looked where he had looked, and saw a young man greeting Marcella
+with a manner so emphatic and intimate, that the journalist had
+instantly moved out of his way. The young man had a noticeable pile of
+fair curls above a very white and rounded forehead.
+
+"Who is that talking to Miss Boyce?" she asked of Aldous; "I have seen
+him, but I can't remember the name."
+
+"That is Mr. Wharton, the member for one of our divisions," said
+Aldous, as he rose from his chair.
+
+Betty gave a little start, and her brow puckered into a frown. As she
+too rose, she said resentfully to Aldous:
+
+"Well, you _have_ snubbed me!"
+
+As usual, he could not find the effective or clever thing to say.
+
+"I did not mean to," he replied simply; but Betty, glancing at him, saw
+something in his face which gripped her heart. A lump rose in her
+throat.
+
+"Do let's go and find Ermyntrude!" she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Wharton had barely begun his talk with Marcella when a gentleman, on
+his way to the buffet with a cup to set down, touched him on the arm.
+Wharton turned in some astonishment and annoyance. He saw a youngish,
+good-looking man, well known to him as already one of the most important
+solicitors in London, largely trusted by many rich or eminent persons.
+
+"May I have a word with you presently?" said Mr. Pearson, in a pleasant
+undertone. "I have something of interest to say to you, and it occurred
+to me that I might meet you to-night. Excuse my interrupting you."
+
+He glanced with admiration at Marcella, who had turned away.
+
+Wharton had a momentary qualm. Then it struck him that Mr. Pearson's
+manner was decidedly friendly.
+
+"In a moment," he said. "We might find a corner, I think, in that
+further room."
+
+He made a motion of the head towards a little boudoir which lay beyond
+the tea-room.
+
+Mr. Pearson nodded and passed on.
+
+Wharton returned to Marcella, who had fallen back on Frank Leven. At the
+approach of the member for West Brookshire, Lady Winterbourne and her
+daughter had moved severely away to the further end of the buffet.
+
+"A tiresome man wants me on business for a moment," he said; then he
+dropped his voice a little; "but I have been looking forward to this
+evening, this chance, for days--shall I find you here again in five
+minutes?"
+
+Marcella, who had flushed brightly, said that would depend on the time
+and Lady Winterbourne. He hurried away with a little gesture of despair.
+Frank followed him with a sarcastic eye.
+
+"Any one would think he was prime minister already! I never met him yet
+anywhere that he hadn't some business on hand. Why does he behave as
+though he had the world on his shoulders? Your _real_ swells always seem
+to have nothing to do."
+
+"Do you know so many busy people?" Marcella asked him sweetly.
+
+"Oh, you shan't put me down, Miss Boyce!" said the boy, sulkily
+thrusting his hands into his pockets. "I am going to work like blazes
+this winter, if only my dons will let a fellow alone. I say, isn't she
+_ripping_ to-night--Betty?"
+
+And, pulling his moustache in helpless jealousy and annoyance, he stared
+at the Winterbourne group across the room, which had been now joined by
+Aldous Raeburn and Betty, standing side by side.
+
+"What do you want me to say?" said Marcella, with a little cold laugh.
+"I shall make you worse if I praise her. Please put my cup down."
+
+At the same moment she saw Wharton coming back to her--Mr. Pearson
+behind him, smiling, and gently twirling the seals of his watch-chain.
+She was instantly struck by Wharton's look of excitement, and by the
+manner in which--with a momentary glance aside at the Winterbourne
+party--he approached her.
+
+"There is such a charming little room in there," he said, stooping his
+head to her, "and so cool after this heat. Won't you try it?"
+
+The energy of his bright eye took possession of her. He led the way; she
+followed. Her dress almost brushed Aldous Raeburn as she passed.
+
+He took her into a tiny room. There was no one else there, and he found
+a seat for her by an open window, where they were almost hidden from
+view by a stand of flowers.
+
+As he sat down again by her, she saw that a decisive moment had come,
+and blanched almost to the colour of her dress. Oh! what to do! Her
+heart cried out vaguely to some power beyond itself for guidance, then
+gave itself up again to the wayward thirst for happiness.
+
+He took her hand strongly in both his own, and bending towards her as
+she sat bowered among the scent and colours of the flowers, he made her
+a passionate declaration. From the first moment that he had seen her
+under the Chiltern beeches, so he vowed, he had felt in her the supreme,
+incomparable attraction which binds a man to one woman, and one only.
+His six weeks under her father's roof had produced in him feelings
+which he knew to be wrong, without thereby finding in himself any power
+to check them. They had betrayed him into a mad moment, which he had
+regretted bitterly because it had given her pain. Otherwise--his voice
+dropped and shook, his hand pressed hers--"I lived for months on the
+memory of that one instant." But he had respected her suffering, her
+struggle, her need for rest of mind and body. For her sake he had gone
+away into silence; he had put a force upon himself which had alone
+enabled him to get through his parliamentary work.
+
+Then, with his first sight of her in that little homely room and
+dress--so changed, but so lovely!--everything--admiration, passion--had
+revived with double strength. Since that meeting he must have often
+puzzled her, as he had puzzled himself. His life had been a series of
+perplexities. He was not his own master; he was the servant of a cause,
+in which--however foolishly a mocking habit might have led him at times
+to be-little his own enthusiasms and hers--his life and honour were
+engaged; and this cause and his part in it had been for long hampered,
+and all his clearness of vision and judgment dimmed by the pressure of a
+number of difficulties and worries he could not have discussed with
+her--worries practical and financial, connected with the _Clarion_, with
+the experiments he had been carrying out on his estate, and with other
+troublesome matters. He had felt a thousand times that his fortunes,
+political or private, were too doubtful and perilous to allow him to ask
+any woman to share them.--Then, again, he had seen her--and his
+resolution, his scruple, had melted in his breast!
+
+Well! there were still troubles in front! But he was no longer cowed by
+them. In spite of them, he dared now to throw himself at her feet, to
+ask her to come and share a life of combat and of labour, to bring her
+beauty and her mind to the joint conduct of a great enterprise. To _her_
+a man might show his effort and his toil,--from _her_ he might claim a
+sympathy it would be vain to ask of any smaller woman.
+
+Then suddenly he broke down. Speech seemed to fail him. Only his
+eyes--more intense and piercing under their straight brows than she had
+ever known them--beseeched her--his hand sought hers.
+
+She meanwhile sat in a trance of agitation, mistress neither of reason
+nor of feeling. She felt his spell, as she had always done. The woman in
+her thrilled at last to the mere name and neighbourhood of love. The
+heart in her cried out that pain and loss could only be deadened so--the
+past could only be silenced by filling the present with movement and
+warm life.
+
+Yet what tremors of conscience--what radical distrust of herself and
+him! And the first articulate words she found to say to him were very
+much what she had said to Aldous so long ago--only filled with a
+bitterer and more realised content.
+
+"After all, what do we know of each other! You don't know me--not as I
+am. And I feel--"
+
+"Doubts?" he said, smiling. "Do you imagine that that seems anything but
+natural to me? _I_ can have none; but _you_--After all, we are not quite
+boy and girl, you and I; we have lived, both of us! But ask
+yourself--has not destiny brought us together? Think of it all!"
+
+Their eyes met again. Hers sank under the penetration, the flame of his.
+Yet, throughout, he was conscious of the doorway to his right, of the
+figures incessantly moving across it. His own eloquence had convinced
+and moved himself abundantly. Yet, as he saw her yielding, he was filled
+with the strangest mixture of passion--and a sort of disillusion--almost
+contempt! If she had turned from him with the dignity worthy of that
+head and brow, it flashed across him that he could have tasted more of
+the _abandonment_ of love--have explored his own emotion more perfectly.
+
+Still, the situation was poignant enough--in one sense complete. Was
+Raeburn still there--in that next room?
+
+"My answer?" he said to her, pressing her hand as they sat in the
+shelter of the flowers. For _he_ was aware of the practical facts--the
+hour, the place--if she was not.
+
+She roused herself.
+
+"I can't," she said, making a movement to rise, which his strong grasp,
+however, prevented. "I _can't_ answer you to-night, Mr. Wharton. I
+should have much to think over--so much! It might all look quite
+different to me. You must give me time."
+
+"To-morrow?" he said quietly.
+
+"No!" she said impetuously, "not to-morrow; I go back to my work, and I
+must have quiet and time. In a fortnight--not before. I will write."
+
+"Oh, impossible!" he said, with a little frown.
+
+And still holding her, he drew her towards him. His gaze ran over the
+face, the warm whiteness under the lace of the dress, the beautiful
+arms. She shrank from it--feeling a sudden movement of dislike and fear;
+but before she could disengage herself he had pressed his lips on the
+arm nearest to him.
+
+"I gave you no leave!" she said passionately, under her breath, as he
+let her go.
+
+He met her flashing look with tender humbleness.
+
+"_Marcella_!"
+
+The word was just breathed into the air. She wavered--yet a chill had
+passed over her. She could not recover the moment of magic.
+
+"_Not_ to-morrow," she repeated steadily, though dreading lest she
+should burst into tears, "and not till I see clearly--till I can--" She
+caught her breath. "Now I am going back to Lady Winterbourne."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+For some hours after he reached his own room, Wharton sat in front of
+his open window, sunk in the swift rushing of thought, as a bramble
+sways in a river. The July night first paled, then flushed into morning;
+the sun rose above the empty street and the light mists enwrapping the
+great city, before he threw himself on his bed, exhausted enough at last
+to fall into a restless sleep.
+
+The speculation of those quick-pulsed hours was in the end about equally
+divided between Marcella and the phrases and turns of his interview with
+Mr. Pearson. It was the sudden leap of troubled excitement stirred in
+him by that interview--heightened by the sight of Raeburn--that had
+driven him past recall by the most natural of transitions, into his
+declaration to Marcella.
+
+But he had no sooner reached his room than, at first with iron will, he
+put the thought of Marcella, of the scene which had just passed, away
+from him. His pulses were still quivering. No matter! It was the brain
+he had need of. He set it coolly and keenly to work.
+
+Mr. Pearson? Well!--Mr. Pearson had offered him a _bribe_; there could
+be no question as to that. His clear sense never blinked the matter for
+an instant. Nor had he any illusions as to his own behaviour. Even now
+he had no further right to the sleep of the honest man.
+
+Let him realise, however, what had happened. He had gone to Lady
+Masterton's party, in the temper of a man who knows that ruin is upon
+him, and determined, like the French criminal, to exact his cigar and
+_eau de vie_ before the knife falls. Never had things looked so
+desperate; never had all resource seemed to him so completely exhausted.
+Bankruptcy must come in the course of a few weeks; his entailed property
+would pass into the hands of a receiver; and whatever recovery might be
+ultimately possible, by the end of August he would be, for the moment,
+socially and politically undone.
+
+There could be no question of his proposing seriously to Marcella Boyce.
+Nevertheless, he had gone to Lady Masterton's on purpose to meet her;
+and his manner on seeing her had asserted precisely the same intimate
+claim upon her, which, during the past six weeks, had alternately
+attracted and repelled her.
+
+Then Mr. Pearson had interrupted.
+
+Wharton, shutting his eyes, could see the great man lean against the
+window-frame close to the spot where, a quarter of an hour later,
+Marcella had sat among the flowers--the dapper figure, the long, fair
+moustaches, the hand playing with the eye-glass.
+
+"I have been asked--er--er--" What a conceited manner the fellow
+had!--"to get some conversation with you, Mr. Wharton, on the subject of
+the Damesley strike. You give me leave?"
+
+Whereupon, in less than ten minutes, the speaker had executed an
+important commission, and, in offering Wharton a bribe of the most
+bare-faced kind, had also found time for supplying him with a number of
+the most delicate and sufficient excuses for taking it.
+
+The masters, in fact, sent an embassy. They fully admitted the power of
+the _Clarion_ and its owner. No doubt, it would not be possible for the
+paper to keep up its strike fund indefinitely; there were perhaps
+already signs of slackening. Still it had been maintained for a
+considerable time; and so long as it was reckoned on, in spite of the
+wide-spread misery and suffering now prevailing, the men would probably
+hold out.
+
+In these circumstances, the principal employers concerned had thought it
+best to approach so formidable an opponent and to put before him
+information which might possibly modify his action. They had authorised
+Mr. Pearson to give him a full account of what was proposed in the way
+of re-organisation of the trade, including the probable advantages which
+the work-people themselves would be likely to reap from it in the
+future.
+
+Mr. Pearson ran in a few sentences through the points of the scheme.
+Wharton stood about a yard away from him, his hands in his pockets, a
+little pale and frowning--looking intently at the speaker.
+
+Then Mr. Pearson paused and cleared his throat.
+
+Well!--that was the scheme. His principals believed that, when both it
+and the employers' determination to transfer their business to the
+Continent rather than be beaten by the men were made fully known to the
+owner of the _Clarion_, it must affect his point of view. Mr. Pearson
+was empowered to give him any details he might desire. Meanwhile--so
+confident were they in the reasonableness of the case that they even
+suggested that the owner of the _Clarion_ himself should take part in
+the new Syndicate. On condition of his future co-operation--it being
+understood that the masters took their stand irrevocably on the
+award--the men at present responsible for the formation of the Syndicate
+proposed to allot Mr. Wharton ten Founder's Shares in the new
+undertaking.
+
+Wharton, sitting alone, recalling these things, was conscious again of
+that start in every limb, that sudden rush of blood to the face, as
+though a lash had struck him.
+
+For in a few seconds his mind took in the situation. Only the day
+before, a city acquaintance had said to him, "If you and your confounded
+paper were out of the way, and this thing could be placed properly on
+the market, there would be a boom in it at once. I am told that in
+twenty-four hours the Founder's Shares would be worth 2,000 _l._
+apiece!"
+
+There was a pause of silence. Then Wharton threw a queer dark look at
+the solicitor, and was conscious that his pulse was thumping.
+
+"There can be no question I think, Mr. Pearson--between you and me--as
+to the nature of such a proposal as that!"
+
+"My dear sir," Mr. Pearson had interrupted hastily, "let me, above all,
+ask you to take _time_--time enough, at any rate, to turn the matter
+well over in your mind. The interests of a great many people, besides
+yourself, are concerned. Don't give me an answer to-night; it is the
+last thing I desire. I have thrown out my suggestion. Consider it.
+To-morrow is Sunday. If you are disposed to carry it further, come and
+see me Monday morning--that's all. I will be at your service at any
+hour, and I can then give you a much more complete outline of the
+intentions of the Company. Now I really must go and look for Mrs.
+Pearson's carriage."
+
+Wharton followed the great man half mechanically across the little room,
+his mind in a whirl of mingled rage and desire. Then suddenly he stopped
+his companion:
+
+"Has George Denny anything to do with this proposal, Mr. Pearson?"
+
+Mr. Pearson paused, with a little air of vague cogitation.
+
+"George Denny? Mr. George Denny, the member for Westropp? I have had no
+dealings whatever with that gentleman in the matter."
+
+Wharton let him pass.
+
+Then as he himself entered the tea-room, he perceived the bending form
+of Aldous Raeburn chatting to Lady Winterbourne on his right, and that
+tall whiteness close in front, waiting for him.
+
+His brain cleared in a flash. He was perfectly conscious that a bribe
+had just been offered him, of the most daring and cynical kind, and that
+he had received the offer in the tamest way. An insult had been put upon
+him which had for ever revealed the estimate held of him by certain
+shrewd people, for ever degraded him in his own eyes.
+
+Nevertheless, he was also conscious that the thing was done. The bribe
+would be accepted, the risk taken. So far as his money-matters were
+concerned he was once more a free man. The mind had adjusted itself,
+reached its decision in a few minutes.
+
+And the first effect of the mingled excitement and self-contempt which
+the decision brought with it had been to drive him into the scene with
+Marcella. Instinctively he asked of passion to deliver him quickly from
+the smart of a new and very disagreeable experience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well! why should he not take these men's offer?
+
+He was as much convinced as they that this whole matter of the strike
+had of late come to a deadlock. So long as the public would give, the
+workers, passionately certain of the justice of their own cause, and
+filled with new ambitions after more decent living, would hold out. On
+the other hand, he perfectly understood that the masters had also in
+many ways a strong case, that they had been very hard hit by the strike,
+and that many of them would rather close their works or transfer them
+bodily to the Continent than give way. Some of the facts Pearson had
+found time to mention had been certainly new and striking.
+
+At the same time he never disguised from himself for an instant that but
+for a prospective 20,000 _l._ the facts concerned would not have
+affected him in the least. Till to-night it had been to his interest to
+back the strike, and to harass the employers. Now things were changed;
+and he took a curious satisfaction in the quick movements of his own
+intelligence, as his thought rapidly sketched the "curve" the _Clarion_
+would have to take, and the arguments by which he would commend it.
+
+As to his shares, they would be convertible of course into immediate
+cash. Some man of straw would be forthcoming to buy what he would
+possess in the name of another man of straw. It was not supposed--he
+took for granted--by the men who had dared to tempt him, that he would
+risk his whole political reputation and career for anything less than a
+bird in the hand.
+
+Well! what were the chances of secrecy?
+
+Naturally _they_ stood to lose less by disclosure, a good deal, than he
+did. And Denny, one of the principal employers, was his personal enemy.
+He would be likely enough for the present to keep his name out of the
+affair. But no man of the world could suppose that the transaction would
+pass without his knowledge. Wharton's own hasty question to Mr. Pearson
+on the subject seemed to himself now, in cold blood, a remarkably
+foolish one.
+
+He walked up and down thinking this point out. It was the bitter pill of
+the whole affair.
+
+In the end, with a sudden recklessness of youth and resource, he
+resolved to dare it. There would _not_ be much risk. Men of business do
+not as a rule blazon their own dirty work, and public opinion would be
+important to the new Syndicate.
+
+_Some_ risk, of course, there would be. Well! his risks, as they stood,
+were pretty considerable. He chose the lesser--not without something of
+a struggle, some keen personal smart. He had done a good many mean and
+questionable things in his time, but never anything as gross as this.
+The thought of what his relation to a certain group of men--to Denny
+especially--would be in the future, stung sharply. But it is the part
+of the man of action to put both scruple and fear behind him on
+occasion. His career was in question.
+
+Craven? Well, Craven would be a difficulty. He would telegraph to him
+first thing in the morning before the offices closed, and see him on
+Monday. For Marcella's sake the man must be managed--somehow.
+
+And--Marcella! How should she ever know, ever suspect! She already
+disliked the violence with which the paper had supported the strike. He
+would find no difficulty whatever in justifying all that she or the
+public would see, to her.
+
+Then insensibly he let his thoughts glide into thinking of the money.
+Presently he drew a sheet of paper towards him and covered it with
+calculations as to his liabilities. By George! how well it worked out!
+By the time he threw it aside, and walked to the window for air, he
+already felt himself a _bona-fide_ supporter of the Syndicate--the
+promoter in the public interest of a just and well-considered scheme.
+
+Finally, with a little joyous energetic movement which betrayed the
+inner man, he flung down his cigarette, and turned to write an ardent
+letter to Marcella, while the morning sun stole into the dusty room.
+
+Difficult? of course! Both now and in the future. It would take him half
+his time yet--and he could ill afford it--to bring her bound and
+captive. He recognised in her the southern element, so strangely mated
+with the moral English temper. Yet he smiled over it. The subtleties of
+the struggle he foresaw enchanted him.
+
+And she would be mastered! In this heightened state of nerve his man's
+resolution only rose the more fiercely to the challenge of her
+resistance.
+
+Nor should she cheat him with long delays. His income would be his own
+again, and life decently easy. He already felt himself the vain showman
+of her beauty.
+
+A thought of Lady Selina crossed his mind, producing amusement and
+compassion--indulgent amusement, such as the young man is apt to feel
+towards the spinster of thirty-five who pays him attention. A certain
+sense of re-habilitation, too, which at the moment was particularly
+welcome. For, no doubt, he might have married her and her fortune had he
+so chosen. As it was, why didn't she find some needy boy to take pity on
+her? There were plenty going, and she must have abundance of money. Old
+Alresford, too, was fast doddering off the stage, and then where would
+she be--without Alresford House, or Busbridge, or those various other
+pedestals which had hitherto held her aloft?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early on Sunday morning Wharton telegraphed to Craven, directing him to
+"come up at once for consultation." The rest of the day the owner of the
+_Clarion_ spent pleasantly on the river with Mrs. Lane and a party of
+ladies, including a young Duchess, who was pretty, literary, and
+socialistic. At night he went down to the _Clarion_ office, and produced
+a leader on the position of affairs at Damesley which, to the practised
+eye, contained one paragraph--but one only--wherein the dawn of a new
+policy might have been discerned.
+
+Naturally the juxtaposition of events at the moment gave him
+considerable anxiety. He knew very well that the Damesley bargain could
+not be kept waiting. The masters were losing heavily every day, and were
+not likely to let him postpone the execution of his part of the contract
+for a fortnight or so to suit his own convenience. It was like the sale
+of an "old master." His influence must be sold now--at the ripe
+moment--or not at all.
+
+At the same time it was very awkward. In one short fortnight the meeting
+of the party would be upon him. Surrender on the Damesley question would
+give great offence to many of the Labour members. It would have to be
+very carefully managed--very carefully thought out.
+
+By eleven o'clock on Monday he was in Mr. Pearson's office. After the
+first involuntary smile, concealed by the fair moustaches, and instantly
+dismissed, with which the eminent lawyer greeted the announcement of his
+visitor's name, the two augurs carried through their affairs with
+perfect decorum. Wharton realised, indeed, that he was being firmly
+handled. Mr. Pearson gave the _Clarion_ a week in which to accomplish
+its retreat and drop its strike fund. And the fund was to be "checked"
+as soon as possible.
+
+A little later, when Wharton abruptly demanded a guarantee of secrecy,
+Mr. Pearson allowed himself his first--visible--smile.
+
+"My dear sir, are such things generally made public property? I can
+give you no better assurance than you can extract yourself from the
+circumstances. As to writing--well!--I should advise you very strongly
+against anything of the sort. A long experience has convinced me that in
+any delicate negotiation the less that is _written_ the better."
+
+Towards the end Wharton turned upon his companion sharply, and asked:
+
+"How did you discover that I wanted money?"
+
+Mr. Pearson lifted his eyebrows pleasantly.
+
+"Most of the things in this world, Mr. Wharton, that one wants to know,
+can be found out. Now--I have no wish to hurry you--not in the least,
+but I may perhaps mention that I have an important appointment directly.
+Don't you think--we might settle our business?"
+
+Wharton was half-humorously conscious of an inward leap of fury with the
+necessities which had given this man--to whom he had taken an
+instantaneous dislike--the power of dealing thus summarily with the
+member for West Brookshire. However, there was no help for it; he
+submitted, and twenty minutes afterwards he left Lincoln's Inn carrying
+documents in the breast-pocket of his coat which, when brought under his
+bankers' notice, would be worth to him an immediate advance of some
+eight thousand pounds. The remainder of the purchase-money for his
+"shares" would be paid over to him as soon as his part of the contract
+had been carried out.
+
+He did not, however, go to his bank, but straight to the _Clarion_
+office, where he had a mid-day appointment with Louis Craven.
+
+At first sight of the tall, narrow-shouldered form and anxious face
+waiting for him in his private room, Wharton felt a movement of
+ill-humour.
+
+Craven had the morning's _Clarion_ in his hand.
+
+"This _cannot_ mean"--he said, when they had exchanged a brief
+salutation--"that the paper is backing out?"
+
+He pointed to the suspicious paragraph in Wharton's leader, his delicate
+features quivering with an excitement he could ill repress.
+
+"Well, let us sit down and discuss the thing," said Wharton, closing the
+door, "that's what I wired to you for."
+
+He offered Craven a cigarette, which was refused, took one himself, and
+the two men sat confronting each other with a writing-table between
+them. Wharton was disagreeably conscious at times of the stiff papers in
+his coat-pocket, and was perhaps a little paler than usual. Otherwise he
+showed no trace of mental disturbance; and Craven, himself jaded and
+sleepless, was struck with a momentary perception of his companion's
+boyish good looks--the tumbling curls, that Wharton straightened now and
+then, the charming blue eyes, the athlete's frame. Any stranger would
+have taken Craven for the older man; in reality it was the other way.
+
+The conversation lasted nearly an hour. Craven exhausted both argument
+and entreaty, though when the completeness of the retreat resolved upon
+had been disclosed to him, the feeling roused in him was so fierce that
+he could barely maintain his composure. He had been living among scenes
+of starvation and endurance, which, to his mind, had all the character
+of martyrdom. These men and women were struggling for two objects--the
+power to live more humanly, and the free right of combination--to both
+of which, if need were, he would have given his own life to help them
+without an instant's hesitation. Behind his blinking manner he saw
+everything with the idealist's intensity, the reformer's passion. To be
+fair to an employer was not in his power. To spend his last breath, were
+it called for, in the attempt to succour the working-man against his
+capitalist oppressors, would have seemed to him the merest matter of
+course.
+
+And his mental acuteness was quite equal to his enthusiasm, and far more
+evident. In his talk with Wharton, he for a long time avoided, as
+before, out of a certain inner disdain, the smallest touch of sentiment.
+He pointed out--what, indeed, Wharton well knew--that the next two or
+three weeks of the strike would be the most critical period in its
+history; that, if the work-people could only be carried through them,
+they were almost sure of victory. He gave his own reasons for believing
+that the employers could ultimately be coerced, he offered proof of
+yielding among them, proof also that the better men in their ranks were
+fully alive to and ashamed of the condition of the workers. As to the
+Syndicate, he saw no objection to it, _provided_ the workers' claims
+were first admitted. Otherwise it would only prove a more powerful
+engine of oppression.
+
+Wharton's arguments may perhaps be left to the imagination. He would
+have liked simply to play the proprietor and the master--to say, "This
+is my decision, those are my terms--take my work or leave it." But
+Craven was Miss Boyce's friend; he was also a Venturist. Chafing under
+both facts, Wharton found that he must state his case.
+
+And he did state it with his usual ability. He laid great stress on
+"information from a private source which I cannot disregard," to the
+effect that, if the resistance went on, the trade would be broken up;
+that several of the largest employers were on the point of making
+arrangements for Italian factories.
+
+"I know," he said finally, "that but for the _Clarion_ the strike would
+drop. Well! I have come to the conclusion that the responsibility is too
+heavy. I shall be doing the men themselves more harm than good. There is
+the case in a nutshell. We differ--I can't help that. The responsibility
+is mine."
+
+Craven rose with a quick, nervous movement. The prophet spoke at last.
+
+"You understand," he said, laying a thin hand on the table, "that the
+condition of the workers in this trade is _infamous_!--that the award
+and your action together plunge them back into a state of things which
+is a _shame_ and a _curse_ to England!"
+
+Wharton made no answer. He, too, had risen, and was putting away some
+papers in a drawer. A tremor ran through Craven's tall frame; and for an
+instant, as his eye rested on his companion, the idea of foul play
+crossed his mind. He cast it out, that he might deal calmly with his own
+position.
+
+"Of course, you perceive," he said, as he took up his hat, "that I can
+no longer on these terms remain the _Clarion's_ correspondent. Somebody
+else must be found to do this business."
+
+"I regret your decision, immensely," said Wharton, with perfect
+suavity, "but of course I understand it. I trust, however, that you will
+not leave us altogether. I can give you plenty of work that will suit
+you. Here, for instance"--he pointed to a pile of Blue Books from the
+Labour Commission lying on the table--"are a number of reports that want
+analysing and putting before the public. You could do them in town at
+your leisure."
+
+Craven struggled with himself. His first instinct was to fling the offer
+in Wharton's face. Then he thought of his wife; of the tiny new
+household just started with such small, happy, self-denying shifts; of
+the woman's inevitable lot, of the hope of a child.
+
+"Thank you," he said, in a husky voice. "I will consider, I will write."
+
+Wharton nodded to him pleasantly, and he went.
+
+The owner of the _Clarion_ drew a long breath.
+
+"Now I think on the whole it would serve my purpose best to sit down and
+write to _her_--after that. It would be well that _my_ account should
+come first."
+
+A few hours later, after an interview with his bankers and a further
+spell of letter-writing, Wharton descended the steps of his club in a
+curious restless state. The mortgage on the _Clarion_ had been arranged
+for, his gambling debts settled, and all his other money matters were
+successfully in train. Nevertheless, the exhilaration of the morning had
+passed into misgiving and depression.
+
+Vague presentiments hung about him all day, whether in the House of
+Commons or elsewhere, and it was not till he found himself on his legs
+at a crowded meeting at Rotherhithe, violently attacking the Government
+Bill and the House of Lords, that he recovered that easy confidence in
+the general favourableness of the universe to Harry Wharton, and Harry
+Wharton's plans, which lent him so much of his power.
+
+A letter from Marcella--written before she had received either of
+his--reached him at the House just before he started for his meeting. A
+touching letter!--yet with a certain resolution in it which disconcerted
+him.
+
+"Forget, if you will, everything that you said to me last night. It
+might be--I believe it would be--best for us both. But if you will
+not--if I must give my answer, then, as I said, I must have time. It is
+only quite recently that I have _realised_ the enormity of what I did
+last year. I must run no risks of so wrenching my own life--or
+another's--a second time. Not to be _sure_ is for me torment. Why
+perfect simplicity of feeling--which would scorn the very notion of
+questioning itself--seems to be beyond me, I do not know. That it is so
+fills me with a sort of shame and bitterness. But I must follow my
+nature.
+
+"So let me think it out. I believe you know, for one thing, that your
+'cause,' your life-work, attracts me strongly. I should not any longer
+accept all you say, as I did last year. But mere opinion matters
+infinitely less to me than it did. I can imagine now agreeing with a
+friend 'in everything except opinion.' All that would matter to me now
+would be to feel that _your_ heart was wholly in your work, in your
+public acts, so that I might still admire and love all that I might
+differ from. But there--for we must be frank with each other--is just my
+difficulty. _Why_ do you do so many contradictory things? Why do you
+talk of the poor, of labour, of self-denial, and live whenever you can
+with the idle rich people, who hate all three in their hearts? You talk
+their language; you scorn what they scorn, or so it seems; you accept
+their standards. Oh!--to the really 'consecrate' in heart and thought I
+could give my life so easily, so slavishly even! There is no one weaker
+than I in the world. I must have strength to lean upon--and a strength,
+pure at the core, that I can respect and follow.
+
+"Here in this nursing life of mine, I go in and out among people to the
+best of whom life is very real and simple--and often, of course, very
+sad. And I am another being in it from what I was at Lady
+Winterbourne's. Everything looks differently to me. No, no! you must
+please wait till the inner voice speaks so that I can hear it
+plainly--for your sake at least as much as for mine. If you persisted in
+coming to see me now, I should have to put an end to it all."
+
+"Strange is the modern woman!" thought Wharton to himself, not without
+sharp pique, as he pondered that letter in the course of his drive home
+from the meeting. "I talk to her of passion, and she asks me in return
+why I do things inconsistent with my political opinions! puts me through
+a moral catechism, in fact! What is the meaning of it all--confound it!
+--her state of mind and mine? Is the good old _ars amandi_ perishing out
+of the world? Let some Stendhal come and tell us why!"
+
+But he sat up to answer her, and could not get free from an inward
+pleading or wrestle with her, which haunted him through all the
+intervals of these rapid days.
+
+Life while they lasted was indeed a gymnast's contest of breath and
+endurance. The _Clarion_ made its retreat in Wharton's finest style, and
+the fact rang through labouring England. The strike-leaders came up from
+the Midlands; Wharton had to see them. He was hotly attacked in the
+House privately, and even publicly by certain of his colleagues. Bennett
+showed concern and annoyance. Meanwhile the Conservative papers talked
+the usual employers' political economy; and the Liberal papers, whose
+support of the strike had been throughout perfunctory, and of no
+particular use to themselves or to other people, took a lead they were
+glad to get, and went in strongly for the award.
+
+Through it all Wharton showed extraordinary skill. The columns of the
+_Clarion_ teemed with sympathetic appeals to the strikers, flanked by
+long statements of "hard fact"--the details of foreign competition and
+the rest, the plans of the masters--freely supplied him by Mr. Pearson.
+With Bennett and his colleagues in the House he took a bold line;
+admitted that he had endangered his popularity both inside Parliament
+and out of it at a particularly critical moment; and implied, though he
+did not say, that some men were still capable of doing independent
+things to their own hurt. Meanwhile he pushed a number of other matters
+to the front, both in the paper and in his own daily doings. He made at
+least two important speeches in the provinces, in the course of these
+days, on the Bill before the House of Lords; he asked questions in
+Parliament on the subject of the wages paid to Government employes; and
+he opened an attack on the report of a certain Conservative Commission
+which had been rousing the particular indignation of a large mass of
+South London working men.
+
+At the end of ten days the strike was over; the workers, sullen and
+enraged, had submitted, and the plans of the Syndicate were in all the
+papers. Wharton, looking round him, realised to his own amazement that
+his political position had rather gained than suffered. The general
+impression produced by his action had been on the whole that of a man
+strong enough to take a line of his own, even at the risk of
+unpopularity. There was a new tone of respect among his opponents, and,
+resentful as some of the Labour members were, Wharton did not believe
+that what he had done would ultimately damage his chances on the 10th at
+all. He had vindicated his importance, and he held his head high,
+adopting towards his chances of the leadership a strong and careless
+tone that served him well.
+
+Meanwhile there were, of course, clever people behind the scenes who
+looked on and laughed. But they held their tongues, and Wharton, who had
+carefully avoided the mention of names during the negotiations with
+Pearson, did his best to forget them. He felt uncomfortable, indeed,
+when he passed the portly Denny in the House or in the street. Denny had
+a way of looking at the member for West Brookshire out of the corner of
+a small, slit-like eye. He did it more than usual during these days,
+and Wharton had only to say to himself that for all things there is a
+price--which the gods exact.
+
+Wilkins, since the first disclosure of the _Clarion_ change of policy,
+had been astonishingly quiet. Wharton had made certain of violent attack
+from him. On the contrary, Wilkins wore now in the House a subdued and
+pre-occupied air that escaped notice even with his own party in the
+general fulness of the public mind. A few caustic north-countryisms on
+the subject of the _Clarion_ and its master did indeed escape him now
+and then, and were reported from mouth to mouth; but on the whole he lay
+very low.
+
+Still, whether in elation or anxiety, Wharton seemed to himself
+throughout the whole period to be a _fighter_, straining every muscle,
+his back to the wall and his hand against every man. There at the end of
+the fortnight stood the three goal-posts that must be passed, in victory
+or defeat; the meeting that would for the present decide his
+parliamentary prospects, his interview with Marcella, and--the
+confounded annual meeting of the "People's Banking Company," with all
+its threatened annoyances.
+
+He became, indeed, more and more occupied with this latter business as
+the days went on. But he could see no way of evading it. He would have
+to fight it; luckily, now, he had the money.
+
+The annual meeting took place two days before that fixed for the
+committee of the Labour party. Wharton was not present at it, and in
+spite of ample warning he gave way to certain lively movements of
+disgust and depression when at his club he first got hold of the
+evening papers containing the reports. His name, of course, figured
+amply in the denunciations heaped upon the directors of all dates; the
+sums which he with others were supposed to have made out of the first
+dealings with the shares on the Stock Exchange were freely mentioned;
+and the shareholders as a body had shown themselves most uncomfortably
+violent. He at once wrote off a letter to the papers disclaiming all
+responsibility for the worst irregularities which had occurred, and
+courting full enquiry--a letter which, as usual, both convinced and
+affected himself.
+
+Then he went, restless and fuming, down to the House. Bennett passed him
+in the lobby with an uneasy and averted eye. Whereupon Wharton seized
+upon him, carried him into the Library, and talked to him, till Bennett,
+who, in spite of his extraordinary shrewdness and judgment in certain
+departments, was a babe in matters of company finance, wore a somewhat
+cheered countenance.
+
+They came out into the lobby together, Wharton holding his head very
+high.
+
+"I shall deal with the whole thing in my speech on Thursday!" he said
+aloud, as they parted.
+
+Bennett gave him a friendly nod and smile.
+
+There was in this little man, with his considerable brain and his poet's
+heart, something of the "imperishable child." Like a wholesome child, he
+did not easily "think evil"; his temper towards all men--even the owners
+of "way-leaves" and mining royalties--was optimist. He had the most
+naive admiration for Wharton's ability, and for the academic
+attainments he himself secretly pined for; and to the young complex
+personality itself he had taken from the beginning an unaccountable
+liking. The bond between the two, though incongruous and recent, was
+real; Wharton was as glad of Bennett's farewell kindness as Bennett had
+been of the younger man's explanations.
+
+So that during that day and the next, Bennett went about contradicting,
+championing, explaining; while Wharton, laden with parliamentary
+business, vivid, unabashed, and resourceful, let it be known to all whom
+it concerned that in his solicitor's opinion he had a triumphant answer
+to all charges; and that meanwhile no one could wonder at the soreness
+of those poor devils of shareholders.
+
+The hours passed on. Wednesday was mainly spent by Wharton in a series
+of conferences and intrigues either at the House or at his club; when he
+drove home exhausted at night he believed that all was arranged--the
+train irrevocably laid, and his nomination to the chairmanship of the
+party certain.
+
+Wilkins and six or seven others would probably prove irreconcilable; but
+the vehemence and rancour shown by the great Nehemiah during the summer
+in the pursuit of his anti-Wharton campaign had to some extent defeated
+themselves. A personal grudge in the hands of a man of his type is not a
+formidable weapon. Wharton would have felt perfectly easy on the subject
+but for some odd bits of manner on Wilkins's part during the last
+forty-eight hours--whenever, in fact, the two men had run across each
+other in the House--marked by a sort of new and insolent good humour,
+that puzzled him. But there is a bravado of defeat. Yes!--he thought
+Wilkins was disposed of.
+
+From his present point of ease--debts paid, banker propitiated, income
+assured--it amazed him to look back on his condition of a fortnight
+before. Had the Prince of Darkness himself offered such a bargain it
+must have been accepted. After all his luck had held! Once get through
+this odious company business--as to which, with a pleasing
+consciousness of turning the tables, he had peremptorily instructed Mr.
+Pearson himself--and the barque of his fortunes was assured.
+
+Then, with a quick turn of the mind, he threw the burden of affairs from
+him. His very hopefulness and satisfaction had softened his mood. There
+stole upon him the murmurs and voices of another world of thought--a
+world well known to his versatility by report, though he had as a rule
+small inclination to dwell therein. But he was touched and shaken
+to-night by his own achievement. The heavenly powers had been
+unexpectedly kind to him, and he was half moved to offer them something
+in return.
+
+"Do as you are done by"--that was an ethic he understood. And in moments
+of feeling he was as ready to apply it to great Zeus himself as to his
+friends or enemies in the House of Commons. He had done this doubtful
+thing--but why should it ever be necessary for him to do another? Vague
+philosophic yearnings after virtue, moderation, patriotism, crossed his
+mind. The Pagan ideal sometimes smote and fired him, the Christian
+never. He could still read his Plato and his Cicero, whereas gulfs of
+unfathomable distaste rolled between him and the New Testament. Perhaps
+the author of all authors for whom he had most relish was Montaigne. He
+would have taken him down to-night had there been nothing more kindling
+to think of.
+
+_Marcella_!--ah! Marcella! He gave himself to the thought of her with a
+new and delightful tenderness which had in it elements of compunction.
+After those disagreeable paragraphs in the evening papers, he had
+instantly written to her. "Every public man"--he had said to her,
+finding instinctively the note of dignity that would appeal to her--"is
+liable at some period of his career to charges of this sort. They are at
+once exaggerated and blackened, because he is a public man. To you I owe
+perfect frankness, and you shall have it. Meanwhile I do not ask--I
+know--that you will be just to me, and put the matter out of your
+thoughts till I can discuss it with you. Two days more till I see your
+face! The time is long!"
+
+To this there had been no answer. Her last letter indeed had rung sadly
+and coldly. No doubt Louis Craven had something to do with it. It would
+have alarmed him could he simply have found the time to think about it.
+Yet she was ready to see him on the 11th; and his confidence in his own
+powers of managing fate was tougher than ever. What pleasant lies he had
+told her at Lady Masterton's! Well! What passion ever yet but had its
+subterfuges? One more wrestle, and he would have tamed her to his wish,
+wild falcon that she was. Then--pleasure and brave living! And she also
+should have her way. She should breathe into him the language of those
+great illusions he had found it of late so hard to feign with her; and
+they two would walk and rule a yielding world together. Action, passion,
+affairs--life explored and exploited--and at last--"_que la mort me
+treuve plantant mes choulx--mais nonchalant d'elle!--et encore plus de
+mon jardin imparfaict_!"
+
+He declaimed the words of the great Frenchman with something of the same
+temper in which the devout man would have made an act of faith. Then,
+with a long breath and a curious emotion, he went to try and sleep
+himself into the new day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+The following afternoon about six o'clock Marcella came in from her
+second round. After a very busy week, work happened to be slack; and she
+had been attending one or two cases in and near Brown's Buildings rather
+because they were near than because they seriously wanted her. She
+looked to see whether there was any letter or telegram from the office
+which would have obliged her to go out again. Nothing was to be seen;
+and she put down her bag and cloak, childishly glad of the extra hour of
+rest.
+
+She was, indeed, pale and worn. The moral struggle which had filled the
+past fortnight from end to end had deepened all the grooves and strained
+the forces of life; and the path, though glimmering, was not wholly
+plain.
+
+A letter lay unfinished in her drawer--if she sent it that night, there
+would be little necessity or inducement for Wharton to climb those
+stairs on the morrow. Yet, if he held her to it, she must see him.
+
+As the sunset and the dusk crept on she still sat silent and alone, sunk
+in a depression which showed itself in every line of the drooping form.
+She was degraded in her own eyes. The nature of the impulses which had
+led her to give Wharton the hold upon her she had given him had become
+plain to her. What lay between them, and the worst impulses that poison
+the lives of women, but differences of degree, of expression? After
+those wild hours of sensuous revolt, a kind of moral terror was upon
+her.
+
+What had worked in her? What was at the root of this vehemence of moral
+reaction, this haunting fear of losing for ever the _best_ in
+life--self-respect, the comradeship of the good, communion with things
+noble and unstained--which had conquered at last the mere _woman_, the
+weakness of vanity and of sex? She hardly knew. Only there was in her a
+sort of vague thankfulness _for her daily work_. It did not seem to be
+possible to see one's own life solely under the aspects of selfish
+desire while hands and mind were busy with the piteous realities of
+sickness and of death. From every act of service--from every contact
+with the patience and simplicity of the poor--_something_ had spoken to
+her, that divine ineffable something for ever "set in the world," like
+beauty, like charm, for the winning of men to itself. "Follow truth!" it
+said to her in faint mysterious breathings--"the truth of your own
+heart. The sorrow to which it will lead you is the only _joy_ that
+remains to you."
+
+Suddenly she looked round her little room with a rush of tenderness. The
+windows were open to the evening and the shouts of children playing in
+the courtyard came floating up. A bowl of Mellor roses scented the air;
+the tray for her simple meal stood ready, and beside it a volume of "The
+Divine Comedy," one of her mother's very rare gifts to her, in her
+motherless youth--for of late she had turned thirstily to poetry. There
+was a great peace and plainness about it all; and, besides, touches of
+beauty--tokens of the soul. Her work spoke in it; called to her;
+promised comfort and ennobling. She thought with yearning, too, of her
+parents; of the autumn holiday she was soon to spend with them. Her
+heart went out--sorely--to all the primal claims upon it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nevertheless, clear as was the inner resolution, the immediate future
+filled her with dread. Her ignorance of herself--her excitable
+folly--had given Wharton rights which her conscience admitted. He would
+not let her go without a struggle, and she must face it.
+
+As to the incidents which had happened during the fortnight--Louis
+Craven's return, and the scandal of the "People's Banking Company"--they
+had troubled and distressed her; but it would not be true to say that
+they had had any part in shaping her slow determination. Louis Craven
+was sore and bitter. She was very sorry for him; and his reports of the
+Damesley strikers made her miserable. But she took Wharton's "leaders"
+in the _Clarion_ for another equally competent opinion on the same
+subject; and told herself that she was no judge. As for the Company
+scandal, she had instantly and proudly responded to the appeal of his
+letter, and put the matter out of her thoughts, till at least he should
+give his own account. So much at any rate she owed to the man who had
+stood by her through the Hurd trial. Marcella Boyce would not readily
+believe in his dishonour! She did not in fact believe it. In spite of
+later misgivings, the impression of his personality, as she had first
+conceived it, in the early days at Mellor, was still too strong.
+
+No--rather--she had constantly recollected throughout the day what was
+going on in Parliament. These were for him testing and critical hours,
+and she felt a wistful sympathy. Let him only rise to his part--take up
+his great task.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An imperious knocking on her thin outer door roused her. She went to
+open it and saw Anthony Craven,--the perspiration standing on his brow,
+his delicate cripple's face white and fierce.
+
+"I want to talk to you," he said without preface. "Have you seen the
+afternoon papers?"
+
+"No," she said in astonishment, "I was just going to send for them. What
+is wrong?"
+
+He followed her into the sitting-room without speaking; and then he
+unfolded the _Pall Mall_ he had in his hand and pointed to a large-print
+paragraph on the central page with a shaking hand.
+
+Marcella read:
+
+"EXCITING SCENES IN THE HOUSE.--MEETING OF THE LABOUR MEMBERS.--A
+committee of the Labour representatives in Parliament met this afternoon
+at 2 o'clock for the purpose of electing a chairman, and appointing
+whips to the party, thus constituting a separate parliamentary group.
+Much interest was felt in the proceedings, which it was universally
+supposed would lead to the appointment of Mr. H. S. Wharton, the member
+for West Brookshire, as chairman and leader of the Labour party. The
+excitement of the meeting and in the House may be imagined when--after a
+short but very cordial and effective speech from Mr. Bennett, the member
+for North Whinwick, in support of Mr. Wharton's candidature--Mr.
+Wilkins, the miner's member for Derlingham, rose and made a series of
+astounding charges against the personal honour of the member for West
+Brookshire. Put briefly, they amount to this: that during the recent
+strike at Damesley the support of the _Clarion_ newspaper, of which Mr.
+Wharton is owner and practically editor, was _bought_ by the employers
+in return for certain shares in the new Syndicate; that the money for
+these shares--which is put as high as 20,000 _l._--had already gone into
+Mr. Wharton's private pocket; and that the change of policy on the part
+of the _Clarion_, which led to the collapse of the strike, was thus
+entirely due to what the Labour members can only regard under the
+circumstances as a bribe of a most disgraceful kind. The effect produced
+has been enormous. The debate is still proceeding, and reporters have
+been excluded. But I hope to send a fuller account later."
+
+Marcella dropped the paper from her hand.
+
+"What does it mean?" she said to her companion.
+
+"Precisely what it says," replied Anthony, with a nervous impatience he
+could not repress. "Now," he added, as his lameness forced him to sit
+down, "will you kindly allow me some conversation with you? It was
+you--practically--who introduced Louis to that man. You meant well to
+Louis, and Mr. Wharton has been your friend. We therefore feel that we
+owe you some explanation. For that paragraph"--he pointed to the
+paper--"is, substantially--Louis's doing, and mine."
+
+"_Yours?_" she said mechanically. "But Louis has been going on working
+for the paper--I persuaded him."
+
+"I know. It was not we who actually discovered the thing. But we set a
+friend to work. Louis has had his suspicions all along. And at last--by
+the merest chance--we got the facts."
+
+Then he told the story, staring at her the while with his sparkling
+eyes, his thin invalid's fingers fidgeting with his hat. If there was in
+truth any idea in his mind that the relations between his companion and
+Harry Wharton were more than those of friendship, it did not avail to
+make him spare her in the least. He was absorbed in vindictive feeling,
+which applied to her also. He might _say_ for form's sake that she had
+meant well; but in fact he regarded her at this moment as a sort of
+odious Canidia whose one function had been to lure Louis to misfortune.
+Cut off himself, by half a score of peculiarities, physical and other,
+from love, pleasure, and power, Anthony Craven's whole affections and
+ambitions had for years centred in his brother. And now Louis was not
+only violently thrown out of employment, but compromised by the
+connection with the _Clarion_; was, moreover, saddled with a wife--and
+in debt.
+
+So that his explanation was given with all the edge he could put upon
+it. Let her stop him, if she pleased!--but she did not stop him.
+
+The facts were these:
+
+Louis had, indeed, been persuaded by Marcella, for the sake of his wife
+and bread and butter, to go on working for the _Clarion_, as a reviewer.
+But his mind was all the time feverishly occupied with the apostasy of
+the paper and its causes. Remembering Wharton's sayings and letters
+throughout the struggle, he grew less and less able to explain the
+incident by the reasons Wharton had himself supplied, and more and more
+convinced that there was some mystery behind.
+
+He and Anthony talked the matter over perpetually. One evening Anthony
+brought home from a meeting of the Venturists that George Denny, the son
+of one of the principal employers in the Damesley trade, whose name he
+had mentioned once before in Marcella's ears. Denny was by this time the
+candidate for a Labour constituency, an ardent Venturist, and the
+laughing-stock of his capitalist family, with whom, however, he was
+still on more or less affectionate terms. His father thought him an
+incorrigible fool, and his mother wailed over him to her friends. But
+they were still glad to see him whenever he would condescend to visit
+them; and all friction on money matters was avoided by the fact that
+Denny had for long refused to take any pecuniary help from his father,
+and was nevertheless supporting himself tolerably by lecturing and
+literature.
+
+Denny was admitted into the brothers' debate, and had indeed puzzled
+himself a good deal over the matter already. He had taken a lively
+interest in the strike, and the articles in the _Clarion_ which led to
+its collapse had seemed to him both inexplicable and enraging.
+
+After his talk with the Cravens, he went away, determined to dine at
+home on the earliest possible opportunity. He announced himself
+accordingly in Hertford Street, was received with open arms, and then
+deliberately set himself, at dinner and afterwards, to bait his father
+on social and political questions, which, as a rule, were avoided
+between them.
+
+Old Denny fell into the trap, lost his temper and self-control
+completely, and at a mention of Harry Wharton--skilfully introduced at
+the precisely right moment--as an authority on some matter connected
+with the current Labour programme, he threw himself back in his chair
+with an angry laugh.
+
+"Wharton? _Wharton_? You quote that fellow to _me?_"
+
+"Why shouldn't I?" said the son, quietly.
+
+"Because, my good sir,--he's a _rogue_,--that's all!--a common rogue,
+from my point of view even--still more from yours."
+
+"I know that any vile tale you can believe about a Labour leader you do,
+father," said George Denny, with dignity.
+
+Whereupon the older man thrust his hand into his coat-pocket, and
+drawing out a small leather case, in which he was apt to carry important
+papers about with him, extracted from it a list containing names and
+figures, and held it with a somewhat tremulous hand under his son's
+eyes.
+
+"Read it, sir! and hold your tongue! Last week my friends and I _bought_
+that man--and his precious paper--for a trifle of 20,000 _l._ or
+thereabouts. It paid us to do it, and we did it. I dare say _you_ will
+think the preceding questionable. In my eyes it was perfectly
+legitimate, a piece of _bonne guerre_. The man was ruining a whole
+industry. Some of us had taken his measure, had found out too--by good
+luck!--that he was in sore straits for money--mortgages on the paper,
+gambling debts, and a host of other things--discovered a shrewd man to
+play him, and made our bid! He rose to it like a gudgeon--gave us no
+trouble whatever. I need not say, of course"--he added, looking up at
+his son--"that I have shown you that paper in the _very strictest
+confidence_. But it seemed to me it was my duty as a father to warn you
+of the nature of some of your associates!"
+
+"I understand," said George Denny, as, after a careful study of the
+paper--which contained, for the help of the writer's memory, a list of
+the sums paid and founders' shares allotted to the various "promoters"
+of the new Syndicate--he restored it to its owner. "Well, I, father,
+have _this_ to say in return. I came here to-night in the hope of
+getting from you this very information, and in the public interest I
+hold myself not only free but _bound_ to make public use of it, at the
+earliest possible opportunity!"
+
+The family scene may be imagined. But both threats and blandishments
+were entirely lost upon the son. There was in him an idealist obstinacy
+which listened to nothing but the cry of a _cause_, and he declared that
+nothing would or should prevent him from carrying the story of the bribe
+direct to Nehemiah Wilkins, Wharton's chief rival in the House, and so
+saving the country and the Labour party from the disaster and disgrace
+of Wharton's leadership. There was no time to lose, the party meeting in
+the House was only two days off.
+
+At the end of a long struggle, which exhausted everybody concerned, and
+was carried on to a late hour of the night, Denny _pere_, influenced by
+a desire to avoid worse things--conscious, too, of the abundant evidence
+he possessed of Wharton's acceptance and private use of the money--and,
+probably, when it came to the point, not unwilling,--under
+compulsion!--to tumble such a hero from his pedestal, actually wrote,
+under his son's advice, a letter to Wilkins. It was couched in the most
+cautious language, and professed to be written in the interests of
+Wharton himself, to put an end "to certain ugly and unfounded rumours
+that have been brought to my knowledge." The negotiation itself was
+described in the driest business terms. "Mr. Wharton, upon cause shown,
+consented to take part in the founding of the Syndicate, and in return
+for his assistance, was allotted ten founders' shares in the new
+company. The transaction differed in nothing from those of ordinary
+business"--a last sentence slily added by the Socialist son, and
+innocently accepted by one of the shrewdest of men.
+
+After which Master George Denny scarcely slept, and by nine o'clock next
+morning was in a hansom on his way to Wilkins's lodgings in Westminster.
+The glee of that black-bearded patriot hardly needs description. He
+flung himself on the letter with a delight and relief so exuberant that
+George Denny went off to another more phlegmatic member of the
+anti-Wharton "cave," with entreaties that an eye should be kept on the
+member for Derlingham, lest he should do or disclose anything before the
+dramatic moment.
+
+Then he himself spent the next forty-eight hours in ingenious efforts to
+put together certain additional information as to the current value of
+founders' shares in the new company, the nature and amount of Wharton's
+debts, and so on. Thanks to his father's hints he was able in the end
+to discover quite enough to furnish forth a supplementary statement. So
+that, when the 10th arrived, the day rose upon a group of men
+breathlessly awaiting a play within a play--with all their parts
+rehearsed, and the prompter ready.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such in substance, was Anthony's story. So carried away was he by the
+excitement and triumph of it, that he soon ceased to notice what its
+effect might be upon his pale and quick-breathing companion.
+
+"And now what has happened?" she asked him abruptly, when at last he
+paused.
+
+"Why, you saw!" he said in astonishment, pointing to the evening
+paper--"at least the beginning of it. Louis is at the House now. I
+expect him every moment. He said he would follow me here."
+
+Marcella pressed her hands upon her eyes a moment as though in pain.
+Anthony looked at her with a tardy prick of remorse.
+
+"I hear Louis's knock!" he said, springing up. "May I let him in?" And,
+without waiting for reply, he hobbled as fast as his crutch would carry
+him to the outer door. Louis came in. Marcella rose mechanically. He
+paused on the threshold, his short sight trying to make her out in the
+dusk. Then his face softened and quivered. He walked forward quickly.
+
+"I know you have something to forgive us," he said, "and that this will
+distress you. But we could not give you warning. Everything was so
+rapid, and the public interests involved so crushing."
+
+He was flushed with vengeance and victory, but as he approached her his
+look was deprecating--almost timid. Only the night before, Anthony for
+the first time had suggested to him an idea about her. He did not
+believe it--had had no time in truth to think of it in the rush of
+events. But now he saw her, the doubt pulled at his heart. Had he indeed
+stabbed the hand that had tried to help him?
+
+Anthony touched him impatiently on the arm. "What has happened, Louis? I
+have shown Miss Boyce the first news."
+
+"It is all over," said Louis, briefly. "The meeting was breaking up as I
+came away. It had lasted nearly five hours. There was a fierce fight, of
+course, between Wharton and Wilkins. Then Bennett withdrew his
+resolution, refused to be nominated himself--nearly broke down, in fact,
+they say; he had always been attached to Wharton, and had set his heart
+upon making him leader--and finally, after a long wrangle, Molloy was
+appointed chairman of the party."
+
+"Good!" cried Anthony, not able to suppress the note of exultation.
+
+Louis did not speak. He looked at Marcella.
+
+"Did he defend himself?" she asked in a low, sharp voice.
+
+Louis shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, yes. He spoke--but it did him no good. Everybody agreed that the
+speech was curiously ineffective. One would have expected him to do it
+better. But he seemed to be knocked over. He said, of course, that he
+had satisfied himself, and given proof in the paper, that the strike
+could not be maintained, and that being so he was free to join any
+syndicate he pleased. But he spoke amid dead silence, and there was a
+general groan when he sat down. Oh, it was not this business only!
+Wilkins made great play in part of his speech with the Company scandal
+too. It is a complete smash all round."
+
+"Which he will never get over?" said Marcella, quickly.
+
+"Not with our men. What he may do elsewhere is another matter. Anthony
+has told you how it came out?"
+
+She made a sign of assent. She was sitting erect and cold, her hands
+round her knees.
+
+"I did not mean to keep anything from you," he said in a low voice,
+bending to her. "I know--you admired him--that he had given you cause.
+But--my mind has been on _fire_--ever since I came back from those
+Damesley scenes!"
+
+She offered no reply. Silence fell upon all three for a minute or two;
+and in the twilight each could hardly distinguish the others. Every now
+and then the passionate tears rose in Marcella's eyes; her heart
+contracted. That very night when he spoke to her, when he used all those
+big words to her about his future, those great ends for which he had
+claimed her woman's help--he had these things in his mind.
+
+"I think," said Louis Craven presently, touching her gently on the
+arm--he had tried once in vain to attract her attention--"I think I hear
+some one asking for you outside on the landing--Mrs. Hurd seems to be
+bringing them in."
+
+As he spoke, Anthony suddenly sprang to his feet, and the outer door
+opened.
+
+"Louis!" cried Anthony, "it is _he_!"
+
+"Are yer at home, miss?" said Minta Hurd, putting in her head; "I can
+hardly see, it's so dark. Here's a gentleman wants to see you."
+
+As she spoke, Wharton passed her, and stood--arrested--by the sight of
+the three figures. At the same moment Mrs. Hurd lit the gas in the
+little passage. The light streamed upon his face, and showed him the
+identity of the two men standing beside Marcella.
+
+Never did Marcella forget that apparition--the young grace and power of
+the figure--the indefinable note of wreck, of catastrophe--the Lucifer
+brightness of the eyes in the set face. She moved forward. Anthony
+stopped her.
+
+"Good-night, Miss Boyce!"
+
+She shook hands unconsciously with him and with Louis. The two Cravens
+turned to the door. Wharton advanced into the room, and let them pass.
+
+"You have been in a hurry to tell your story!" he said, as Louis walked
+by him.
+
+Contemptuous hate breathed from every feature, but he was perfectly
+self-controlled.
+
+"Yes--" said Craven, calmly--"Now it is your turn."
+
+The door was no sooner shut than Wharton strode forward and caught her
+hand.
+
+"They have told you everything? Ah!--"
+
+His eye fell upon the evening paper. Letting her go, he felt for a chair
+and dropped into it. Throwing himself back, his hands behind his head,
+he drew a long breath and his eyes closed. For the first time in his
+life or hers she saw him weak and spent like other men. Even his nerve
+had been worn down by the excitement of these five fighting hours. The
+eyes were lined and hollow--the brow contracted; the young roundness of
+the cheek was lost in the general pallor and patchiness of the skin; the
+lower part of the face seemed to have sharpened and lengthened,--and
+over the whole had passed a breath of something aging and withering the
+traces of which sent a shiver through Marcella. She sat down near him,
+still in her nurse's cloak, one trembling hand upon her lap.
+
+"Will you tell me what made you do this?" she asked, not being able to
+think of anything else to say.
+
+He opened his eyes with a start.
+
+In that instant's quiet the scene he had just lived through had been
+rushing before him again--the long table in the panelled committee-room,
+the keen angry faces gathered about it. Bennett, in his blue tie and
+shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable--Molloy,
+small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the
+midst of tumult--and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering
+on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out
+Denny's letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some
+thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.
+
+"_Spies,_ yo call us?" with a finger like a dart, threatening the
+enemy--"Aye; an' yo're aboot reet! I and my friends--we _have_ been
+trackin' and spyin' for weeks past. We _knew_ those men, those starvin'
+women and bairns, were bein' _sold_, but we couldn't prove it. Now
+we've come at the how and the why of it! And we'll make it harder for
+men like you to _sell 'em again_! Yo call it infamy?--well, _we_ call it
+detection."
+
+Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which
+followed on the director of "The People's Banking Association," the
+injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous
+finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year--and finally the
+last dramatic cry:
+
+"But it's noa matter, yo say! Mester Wharton has nobbut played his party
+and the workin' man a dirty trick or two--_an' yo mun have a gentleman!_
+Noa--the workin' man isn't fit _himself_ to speak wi' his own enemies i'
+th' gate--_yo mun have a gentleman_!--an' Mester Wharton, he says he'll
+tak' the post, an' dea his best for yo--an', remember, _yo mun have a
+gentleman_! Soa now--Yes! or No!--wull yo?--or _woan't yo_?"
+
+And at that, the precipitation of the great unwieldy form half across
+the table towards Wharton's seat--the roar of the speaker's immediate
+supporters thrown up against the dead silence of the rest!
+
+As to his own speech--he thought of it with a soreness, a disgust which
+penetrated to bones and marrow. He had been too desperately taken by
+surprise--had lost his nerve--missed the right tone throughout. Cool
+defiance, free self-justification, might have carried him through.
+Instead of which--faugh!
+
+All this was the phantom-show of a few seconds' thought. He roused
+himself from a miserable reaction of mind and body to attend to
+Marcella's question.
+
+"Why did I do it?" he repeated; "why--"
+
+He broke off, pressing both his hands upon his brow. Then he suddenly
+sat up and pulled himself together.
+
+"Is that tea?" he said, touching the tray. "Will you give me some?"
+
+Marcella went into the back kitchen and called Minta. While the boiling
+water was brought and the tea was made, Wharton sat forward with his
+face on his hands and saw nothing. Marcella whispered a word in Minta's
+ear as she came in. The woman paused, looked at Wharton, whom she had
+not recognised before in the dark--grew pale--and Marcella saw her hands
+shaking as she set the tray in order. Wharton knew nothing and thought
+nothing of Kurd's widow, but to Marcella the juxtaposition of the two
+figures brought a wave of complex emotion.
+
+Wharton forced himself to eat and drink, hardly speaking the while.
+Then, when the tremor of sheer exhaustion had to some extent abated, he
+suddenly realised who this was that was sitting opposite to him
+ministering to him.
+
+She felt his hand--his quick powerful hand--on hers.
+
+"To _you_ I owe the whole truth--let me tell it!"
+
+She drew herself away instinctively--but so softly that he did not
+realise it. He threw himself back once more in the chair beside her--one
+knee over the other, the curly head so much younger to-night than the
+face beneath it supported on his arms, his eyes closed again for
+rest--and plunged into the story of the _Clarion_.
+
+It was admirably told. He had probably so rehearsed it to himself
+several times already. He described his action as the result of a double
+influence working upon him--the influence of his own debts and
+necessities, and the influence of his growing conviction that the
+maintenance of the strike had become a blunder, even a misfortune for
+the people themselves.
+
+"Then--just as I was at my wit's end, conscious besides that the paper
+was on a wrong line, and must somehow be got out of it--came the
+overtures from the Syndicate. I knew perfectly well I ought to have
+refused them--of _course_ my whole career was risked by listening to
+them. But at the same time they gave me assurances that the workpeople
+would ultimately gain--they proved to me that I was helping to
+extinguish the trade. As to the _money_--when a great company has to be
+launched, the people who help it into being get _paid_ for it--it is
+invariable--it happens every day. I like the system no more than you may
+do--or Wilkins. But consider. I was in such straits that _bankruptcy_
+lay between me and my political future. Moreover--I had lost nerve,
+sleep, balance. I was scarcely master of myself when Pearson first
+broached the matter to me--"
+
+"Pearson!" cried Marcella, involuntarily. She recalled the figure of the
+solicitor; had heard his name from Frank Leven. She remembered Wharton's
+impatient words--"There is a tiresome man wants to speak to me on
+business--"
+
+It was _then I_--that evening! Something sickened her.
+
+Wharton raised himself in his chair and looked at her attentively with
+his young haggard eyes. In the faint lamplight she was a pale vision of
+the purest and noblest beauty. But the lofty sadness of her face filled
+him with a kind of terror. Desire--impotent pain--violent resolve, swept
+across him. He had come to her, straight from the scene of his ruin, as
+to the last bulwark left him against a world bent on his destruction,
+and bare henceforward of all delights.
+
+"Well, what have you to say to me?" he said, suddenly, in a low changed
+voice--"as I speak--as I look at you--I see in your face that you
+distrust--that you have judged me; those two men, I suppose, have done
+their work! Yet from you--_you_ of all people--I might look not only for
+justice--but--I will dare say it--for kindness!"
+
+She trembled. She understood that he appealed to the days at Mellor, and
+her lips quivered.
+
+"No," she exclaimed, almost timidly--"I try to think the best. I see the
+pressure was great."
+
+"And consider, please," he said proudly, "what the reasons were for that
+pressure."
+
+She looked at him interrogatively--a sudden softness in her eyes. If at
+that moment he had confessed himself fully, if he had thrown himself
+upon her in the frank truth of his mixed character--and he could have
+done it, with a Rousseau-like completeness--it is difficult to say what
+the result of this scene might have been. In the midst of shock and
+repulsion, she was filled with pity; and there were moments when she was
+more drawn to his defeat and undoing, than she had ever been to his
+success.
+
+Yet how question him? To do so, would be to assume a right, which in
+turn would imply _his_ rights. She thought of that mention of "gambling
+debts," then of his luxurious habits, and extravagant friends. But she
+was silent. Only, as she sat there opposite to him, one slim hand
+propping the brow, her look invited him.
+
+He thought he saw his advantage.
+
+"You must remember," he said, with the same self-assertive bearing,
+"that I have never been a rich man, that my mother spent my father's
+savings on a score of public objects, that she and I started a number of
+experiments on the estate, that my expenses as a member of Parliament
+are very large, and that I spent thousands on building up the _Clarion_.
+I have been ruined by the _Clarion_, by the cause the _Clarion_
+supported. I got no help from my party--where was it to come from? They
+are all poor men. I had to do everything myself, and the struggle has
+been more than flesh and blood could bear! This year, often, I have not
+known how to move, to breathe, for anxieties of every sort. Then came
+the crisis--my work, my usefulness, my career, all threatened. The men
+who hated me saw their opportunity. I was a fool and gave it them. And
+my enemies have used it--to the bitter end!"
+
+Tone and gesture were equally insistent and strong. What he was saying
+to himself was that, with a woman of Marcella's type, one must "bear it
+out." This moment of wreck was also with him the first moment of
+all-absorbing and desperate desire. To win her--to wrest her from the
+Cravens' influence--that had been the cry in his mind throughout his
+dazed drive from the House of Commons. Her hand in his--her strength,
+her beauty, the romantic reputation that had begun to attach to her, at
+his command--and he would have taken the first step to recovery, he
+would see his way to right himself.
+
+Ah! but he had missed his chance! Somehow, every word he had been saying
+rang false to her. She could have thrown herself as a saving angel on
+the side of weakness and disaster which had spoken its proper language,
+and with a reckless and confiding truth had appealed to the largeness of
+a woman's heart. But this patriot--ruined so nobly--for such
+disinterested purposes--left her cold! She began to think even--hating
+herself--of the thousands he was supposed to have made in the gambling
+over that wretched company--no doubt for the "cause" too!
+
+But before she could say a word he was kneeling beside her.
+
+"_Marcella_ I give me my answer!--I am in trouble and defeat--be a
+woman, and come to me!"
+
+He had her hands. She tried to recover them.
+
+"No!" she said, with passionate energy, "_that_ is impossible. I had
+written to you before you came, before I had heard a word of this.
+Please, _please_ let me go!"
+
+"Not till you explain!"--he said, still holding her, and roused to a
+white heat of emotion--"_why_ is it impossible? You said to me once,
+with all your heart, that you thanked me, that I had taught you, helped
+you. You cannot ignore the bond between us! And you are free. I have a
+right to say to you--you thirst to save, to do good--come and save a
+man that cries to you!--he confesses to _you_, freely enough, that he
+has made a hideous mistake--help him to redeem it!"
+
+She rose suddenly with all her strength, freeing herself from him, so
+that he rose too, and stood glowering and pale.
+
+"When I said that to you," she cried, "I was betraying "--her voice
+failed her an instant--"we were both false--to the obligation that
+should have held us--restrained us. No! _no!_ I will never be your wife!
+We should hurt each other--poison each other!"
+
+Her eyes shone with wild tears. As he stood there before her she was
+seized with a piteous sense of contrast--of the irreparable--of what
+might have been.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, roughly.
+
+She was silent.
+
+His passion rose.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, approaching her again, "that you have given
+me cause to hope? It is those two fanatics that have changed
+you--possessed your mind."
+
+She looked at him with a pale dignity.
+
+"My letters must have warned you," she said simply. "If you had come
+to-morrow--in prosperity--you would have got the same answer, at once.
+To-day--now--I have had weak moments, because--because I did not know
+how to add pain to pain. But they are gone--I see my way! _I do not love
+you_--that is the simple, the whole truth--I could not follow you!"
+
+He stared at her an instant in a bitter silence.
+
+"I have been warned,"--he said slowly, but in truth losing control of
+himself, "not only by you--and I suppose I understand! You repent last
+year. Your own letter said as much. You mean to recover, the ground--the
+place you lost. Ah, well!--most natural!--most fitting! When the time
+comes--and my bones are less sore--I suppose I shall have my second
+congratulations ready! Meanwhile--"
+
+She gave a low cry and burst suddenly into a passion of weeping, turning
+her face from him. But when in pale sudden shame he tried to excuse
+himself--to appease her--she moved away, with a gesture that overawed
+him.
+
+"_You_ have not confessed yourself"--she said, and his look wavered
+under the significance of hers--"but you drive me to it. Yes, _I
+repent!_"--her breast heaved, she caught her breath. "I have been trying
+to cheat myself these last few weeks--to run away from grief--and the
+other night when you asked me--I would have given all I have and am to
+feel like any happy girl, who says 'Yes' to her lover. I tried to feel
+so. But even then, though I was miserable and reckless, I knew in my
+heart--it was impossible! If you suppose--if you like to suppose--that
+I--I have hopes or plans--as mean as they would be silly--you must--of
+course. But I have given no one any _right_ to think so or say so. Mr.
+Wharton--"
+
+Gathering all her self-control, she put out her white hand to him.
+"Please--please say good-bye to me. It has been hideous vanity--and
+mistake--and wretchedness--our knowing each other--from the beginning.
+I _am_ grateful for all you did, I shall always be grateful. I hope--oh!
+I hope--that--that you will find a way through this trouble. I don't
+want to make it worse by a word. If I could do anything! But I can't.
+You must please go. It is late. I wish to call my friend, Mrs. Hurd."
+
+Their eyes met--hers full of a certain stern yet quivering power, his
+strained and bloodshot, in his lined young face.
+
+Then, with a violent gesture--as though he swept her out of his path--he
+caught up his hat, went to the door, and was gone.
+
+She fell on her chair almost fainting, and sat there for long in the
+summer dark, covering her face. But it was not his voice that haunted
+her ears.
+
+"_You have done me wrong--I pray God you may not do yourself a greater
+wrong in the future!_"
+
+Again and again, amid the whirl of memory, she pressed the sad
+remembered words upon the inward wound and fever--tasting, cherishing
+the smart of them. And as her trance of exhaustion and despair gradually
+left her, it was as though she crept close to some dim beloved form in
+whom her heart knew henceforward the secret and sole companion of its
+inmost life.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+
+"You and I--
+Why care by what meanders we are here
+I' the centre of the labyrinth? Men have died
+Trying to find this place which we have found."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Ah! how purely, cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long
+hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of
+London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty
+delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the
+ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul of yearning and of memory into
+the pearly silence of the morning.
+
+High up on the distant hill to the left, beyond the avenue, the pale
+apricots and golds of the newly-shorn stubbles caught the mounting
+light. The beeches of the avenue were turning fast, and the chestnuts
+girdling the church on her right hand were already thin enough to let
+the tower show through. That was the bell--the old bell given to the
+church by Hampden's friend, John Boyce--striking half-past five; and
+close upon it came the call of a pheasant in the avenue. There he was,
+fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, redeemed all at once by the
+sudden whirr of towering flight.
+
+To-day Mary Harden and the Rector would be at work in the church, and
+to-morrow was to be the Harvest Festival. Was it two years?--or in an
+hour or two would she be going with her basket from the Cedar Garden, to
+find that figure in the brown shooting-coat standing with the Hardens on
+the altar steps?
+
+Alas!--alas!--her head dropped on her hands as she knelt by the open
+window. How changed were all the aspects of the world! Three weeks
+before, the bell in that little church had tolled for one who, in the
+best way and temper of his own generation, had been God's servant and
+man's friend--who had been Marcella's friend--and had even, in his last
+days, on a word from Edward Hallin, sent her an old man's kindly
+farewell.
+
+"Tell her," Lord Maxwell had written with his own hand to Hallin, "she
+has taken up a noble work, and will make, I pray God, a noble woman. She
+had, I think, a kindly liking for an old man, and she will not disdain
+his blessing."
+
+He had died at Geneva, Aldous and Miss Raeburn with him. For instead of
+coming home in August, he had grown suddenly worse, and Aldous had gone
+out to him. They had brought him to the Court for burial, and the new
+Lord Maxwell, leaving his aunt at the Court, had almost immediately
+returned to town,--because of Edward Hallin's state of health.
+
+Marcella had seen much of Hallin since he and his sister had come back
+to London in the middle of August. Hallin's apparent improvement had
+faded within a week or two of his return to his rooms; Aldous was at
+Geneva; Miss Hallin was in a panic of alarm; and Marcella found herself
+both nurse and friend. Day after day she would go in after her nursing
+rounds, share their evening meal, and either write for Hallin, or help
+the sister--by the slight extra weight of her professional voice--to
+keep him from writing and thinking.
+
+He would not himself admit that he was ill at all, and his whole
+energies at the time were devoted to the preparation of a series of
+three addresses on the subject of Land Reform, which were to be
+delivered in October to the delegates of a large number of working-men's
+clubs from all parts of London. So strong was Hallin's position among
+working-men reformers, and so beloved had been his personality, that as
+soon as his position towards the new land nationalising movement, now
+gathering formidable strength among the London working men, had come to
+be widely understood, a combined challenge had been sent him by some
+half-dozen of the leading Socialist and Radical clubs, asking him to
+give three weekly addresses in October to a congress of London
+delegates, time to be allowed after the lecture for questions and
+debate.
+
+Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an
+intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often
+seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical
+strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell
+message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure. For all the
+time he was struggling with cardiac weakness and brain irritability
+which would have overwhelmed any one less accustomed to make his account
+with illness, or to balance against feebleness of body a marvellous
+discipline of soul.
+
+Lord Maxwell was still alive, and Hallin, in the midst of his work, was
+looking anxiously for the daily reports from Aldous, living in his
+friend's life almost as much as in his own--handing on the reports, too,
+day by day to Marcella, with a manner which had somehow slipped into
+expressing a new and sure confidence in her sympathy--when she one
+evening found Minta Hurd watching for her at the door with a telegram
+from her mother: "Your father suddenly worse. Please come at once." She
+arrived at Mellor late that same night.
+
+On the same day Lord Maxwell died. Less than a week later he was buried
+in the little Gairsley church. Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and
+Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from
+time to time of what was passing three miles away--of the great house in
+its mourning--of the figures round the grave. Hallin, of course, would
+be there. It was a dripping September day, and she passed easily from
+moments of passionate yearning and clairvoyance to worry herself about
+the damp and the fatigue that Hallin must be facing.
+
+Since then she had heard occasionally from Miss Hallin. Everything was
+much as it had been, apparently. Edward was still hard at work, still
+ill, still serene. "Aldous"--Miss Hallin could not yet reconcile herself
+to the new name--was alone in the Curzon Street house, much occupied and
+harassed apparently by the legal business of the succession, by the
+election presently to be held in his own constituency, and by the
+winding-up of his work at the Home Office. He was to resign his
+under-secretaryship; but with the new session and a certain
+rearrangement of offices it was probable that he would be brought back
+into the Ministry. Meanwhile he was constantly with them; and she
+thought that his interest in Edward's work and anxiety about his health
+were perhaps both good for him as helping to throw off something of his
+own grief and depression.
+
+Whereby it will be noticed that Miss Hallin, like her brother, had by
+now come to speak intimately and freely to Marcella of her old lover and
+their friend.
+
+Now for some days, however, she had received no letter from either
+brother or sister, and she was particularly anxious to hear. For this
+was the fourth of October, and on the second he was to have delivered
+the first of his addresses. How had the frail prophet sped? She had her
+fears. For her weekly "evenings" in Brown's Buildings had shown her a
+good deal of the passionate strength of feeling developed during the
+past year in connection with this particular propaganda. She doubted
+whether the London working man at the present moment was likely to give
+even Hallin a fair hearing on the point. However, Louis Craven was to be
+there. And he had promised to write even if Susie Hallin could find no
+time. Some report ought to reach Mellor by the evening.
+
+Poor Cravens! The young wife, who was expecting a baby, had behaved with
+great spirit through the _Clarion_ trouble; and, selling their bits of
+furniture to pay their debts, they had gone to lodge near Anthony. Louis
+had got some odds and ends of designing and artistic work to do through
+his brother's influence; and was writing where he could, here and there.
+Marcella had introduced them to the Hallins, and Susie Hallin was taking
+a motherly interest in the coming child. Anthony, in his gloomy way, was
+doing all he could for them. But the struggle was likely to be a hard
+one, and Marcella had recognised of late that in Louis as in Anthony
+there were dangerous possibilities of melancholy and eccentricity. Her
+heart was often sore over their trouble and her own impotence.
+
+Meantime for some wounds, at any rate, time had brought swift cautery!
+Not three days after her final interview with Wharton, while the
+catastrophe in the Labour party was still in every one's mouth, and the
+air was full of bitter speeches and recriminations, Hallin one evening
+laid down his newspaper with a sudden startled gesture, and then pushed
+it over to Marcella. There, in the columns devoted to personal news of
+various sorts, appeared the announcement:
+
+"A marriage has been arranged between Mr. H.S. Wharfon, M.P. for West
+Brookshire, and Lady Selina Farrell, only surviving daughter of Lord
+Alresford. The ceremony will probably take place somewhere about Easter
+next. Meanwhile Mr. Wharton, whose health has suffered of late from his
+exertions in and out of the House, has been ordered to the East for rest
+by his medical advisers. He and his friend Sir William Ffolliot start
+for French Cochin China in a few days. Their object is to explore the
+famous ruined temples of Angkor in Cambodia, and if the season is
+favourable they may attempt to ascend the Mekong. Mr. Wharton is paired
+for the remainder of the session."
+
+"Did you know anything of this?" said Hallin, with that careful
+carelessness in which people dress a dubious question.
+
+"Nothing," she said quietly.
+
+Then an impulse not to be stood against, springing from very mingled
+depths of feeling, drove her on. She, too, put down the paper, and
+laying her finger-tips together on her knee she said with an odd slight
+laugh:
+
+"But I was the last person to know. About a fortnight ago Mr. Wharton
+proposed to me."
+
+Hallin sprang from his chair, almost with a shout. "And you refused
+him?"
+
+She nodded, and then was angrily aware that, totally against her will or
+consent, and for the most foolish and remote reasons, those two eyes of
+hers had grown moist.
+
+Hallin went straight over to her.
+
+"Do you mind letting me shake hands with you?" he said, half ashamed of
+his outburst, a dancing light of pleasure transforming the thin face.
+"There--I am an idiot! We won't say a word more--except about Lady
+Selina. Have you seen her?"
+
+"Three or four times."
+
+"What is she like?"
+
+Marcella hesitated.
+
+"Is she fat--and forty?" said Hallin, fervently--she beat him?"
+
+"Not at all. She is very thin--thirty-five, elegant, terribly of her own
+opinion--and makes a great parade of 'papa.'"
+
+She looked round at him, unsteadily, but gaily.
+
+"Oh! I see," said Hallin, with disappointment, "she will only take care
+he doesn't beat her--which I gather from your manner doesn't matter. And
+her politics?"
+
+"Lord Alresford was left out of the Ministry," said Marcella slily. "He
+and Lady Selina thought it a pity."
+
+"Alresford--_Alresford_? Why, of course! He was Lord Privy Seal in their
+last Cabinet--a narrow-minded old stick!--did a heap of mischief in the
+Lords. _Well!_"--Hallin pondered a moment--"Wharton will go over!"
+
+Marcella was silent. The tremor of that wrestler's hour had not yet
+passed away. The girl could find no words in which to discuss Wharton
+himself, this last amazing act, or its future.
+
+As for Hallin, he sat lost in pleasant dreams of a whitewashed Wharton,
+comfortably settled at last below the gangway on the Conservative side,
+using all the old catch-words in slightly different connections, and
+living gaily on his Lady Selina. Fragments from the talk of
+Nehemiah--Nehemiah the happy and truculent, that new "scourge of God"
+upon the parasites of Labour--of poor Bennett, of Molloy, and of various
+others who had found time to drop in upon him since the Labour smash,
+kept whirling in his mind. The same prediction he had just made to
+Marcella was to be discerned in several of them. He vowed to himself
+that he would write to Raeburn that night, congratulate him and the
+party on the possibility of so eminent a recruit--and hint another item
+of news by the way. She had trusted her confidence to him without any
+pledge--an act for which he paid her well thenceforward, in the coin of
+a friendship far more intimate, expansive, and delightful than anything
+his sincerity had as yet allowed him to show her.
+
+But these London incidents and memories, near as they were in time,
+looked many of them strangely remote to Marcella in this morning
+silence. When she drew back from the window, after darkening the now
+sun-flooded room in a very thorough business-like way, in order that she
+might have four or five hours' sleep, there was something symbolic in
+the act. She gave back her mind, her self, to the cares, the anxieties,
+the remorses of the past three weeks. During the night she had been
+sitting up with her father that her mother might rest. Now, as she lay
+down, she thought with the sore tension which had lately become habitual
+to her, of her father's state, her mother's strange personality, her own
+short-comings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the middle of the morning she was downstairs again, vigorous and
+fresh as ever. Mrs. Boyce's maid was for the moment in charge of the
+patient, who was doing well. Mrs. Boyce was writing some household notes
+in the drawing-room. Marcella went in search of her.
+
+The bare room, just as it ever was--with its faded antique charm--looked
+bright and tempting in the sun. But the cheerfulness of it did but
+sharpen the impression of that thin form writing in the window. Mrs.
+Boyce looked years older. The figure had shrunk and flattened into that
+of an old woman; the hair, which two years before had been still young
+and abundant, was now easily concealed under the close white cap she had
+adopted very soon after her daughter had left Mellor. The dress was
+still exquisitely neat; but plainer and coarser. Only the beautiful
+hands and the delicate stateliness of carriage remained--sole relics of
+a loveliness which had cost its owner few pangs to part with.
+
+Marcella hovered near her--a little behind her--looking at her from time
+to time with a yearning compunction--which Mrs. Boyce seemed to be aware
+of, and to avoid.
+
+"Mamma, can't I do those letters for you? I am quite fresh."
+
+"No, thank you. They are just done."
+
+When they were all finished and stamped, Mrs. Boyce made some careful
+entries in a very methodical account-book, and then got up, locking the
+drawers of her little writing-table behind her.
+
+"We can keep the London nurse another week I think," she said.
+
+"There is no need," said Marcella, quickly. "Emma and I could divide the
+nights now and spare you altogether. You see I can sleep at any time."
+
+"Your father seems to prefer Nurse Wenlock," said Mrs. Boyce.
+
+Marcella took the little blow in silence. No doubt it was her due.
+During the past two years she had spent two separate months at Mellor;
+she had gone away in opposition to her father's wish; and had found
+herself on her return more of a stranger to her parents than ever. Mr.
+Boyce's illness, involving a steady extension of paralytic weakness,
+with occasional acute fits of pain and danger, had made steady though
+very gradual progress all the time. But it was not till some days after
+her return home that Marcella had realised a tenth part of what her
+mother had undergone since the disastrous spring of the murder.
+
+She passed now from the subject of the nurse with a half-timid remark
+about "expense."
+
+"Oh! the expense doesn't matter!" said Mrs. Boyce, as she stood absently
+before the lately kindled fire, warming her chilled fingers at the
+blaze.
+
+"Papa is more at ease in those ways?" Marcella ventured. And kneeling
+down beside her mother she gently chafed one of the cold hands.
+
+"There seems to be enough for what is wanted," said Mrs. Boyce, bearing
+the charing with patience. "Your father, I believe, has made great
+progress this year in freeing the estate. Thank you, my dear. I am not
+cold now."
+
+And she gently withdrew her hand.
+
+Marcella, indeed, had already noticed that there were now no weeds on
+the garden-paths, that instead of one gardener there were three, that
+the old library had been decently patched and restored, that there was
+another servant, that William, grown into a very--tolerable footman,
+wore a reputable coat, and that a plain but adequate carriage and horse
+had met her at the station. Her pity even understood that part of her
+father's bitter resentment of his ever-advancing disablement came from
+his feeling that here at last--just as death was in sight--he, that
+squalid failure, Dick Boyce, was making a success of something.
+
+Presently, as she knelt before the fire, a question escaped her, which,
+when it was spoken, she half regretted.
+
+"Has papa been able to do anything for the cottages yet?"
+
+"I don't think so," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly. After a minute's pause she
+added, "That will be for your reign, my dear."
+
+Marcella looked up with a sharp thrill of pain.
+
+"Papa is better, mamma, and--and I don't know what you mean. I shall
+never reign here without you."
+
+Mrs. Boyce began to fidget with the rings on her thin left hand.
+
+"When Mellor ceases to be your father's it will be yours," she said, not
+without a certain sharp decision; "that was settled long ago. I must be
+free--and if you are to do anything with this place, you must give your
+youth and strength to it. And your father is not better--except for the
+moment. Dr. Clarke exactly foretold the course of his illness to me two
+years ago, on my urgent request. He may live four months--six, if we can
+get him to the South. More is impossible."
+
+There was something ghastly in her dry composure. Marcella caught her
+hand again and leant her trembling young cheek against it.
+
+"I could not live here without you, mamma!"
+
+Mrs. Boyce could not for once repress the inner fever which in general
+her will controlled so well.
+
+"I hardly think it would matter to you so much, my dear."
+
+Marcella shrank.
+
+"I don't wonder you say that!" she said in a low voice. "Do you think it
+was all a mistake, mamma, my going away eighteen months ago--a wrong
+act?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce grew restless.
+
+"I judge nobody, my dear!--unless I am obliged. As you know, I am for
+liberty--above all"--she spoke with emphasis--"for letting the past
+alone. But I imagine you must certainly have learnt to do without us.
+Now I ought to go to your father."
+
+But Marcella held her.
+
+"Do you remember in the _Purgatorio_, mamma, the lines about the loser
+in the game: 'When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers
+sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and _learning by his grief_'?
+Do you remember?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a
+little nervous, but assenting. It was one of the inconsistencies of her
+strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante
+student. The taste for the most strenuous and passionate of poets had
+developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of
+her middle life. Like everything else personal to herself she never
+spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to
+Marcella from a child.
+
+"_E tristo impara?_" repeated Marcella, her voice wavering. "Mamma
+"--she laid her face against her mother's dress again--"I have lost more
+throws than you think in the last two years. Won't you believe I may
+have learnt a little?"
+
+She raised her eyes to her mother's pinched and mask-like face. Mrs.
+Boyce's lips moved as though she would have asked a question. But she
+did not ask it. She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew
+well--the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of
+endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into
+alien fields of emotion.
+
+"Well, but one expects persons like you to learn," she said, with a
+light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention. There was
+silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just
+touched her daughter's hair. "Now, will you come up in half an hour?
+That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his
+food."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella went to her father at the hour named. She found him in his
+wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the
+Cedar Garden. The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old
+house. It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and
+red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a
+carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an
+array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring
+wall a rack of old swords and rapiers. The needlework hangings of the
+bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed
+or tattered. But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity
+of his sleeping-room were a bitter satisfaction to Richard Boyce, even
+in his sickness. After all said and done, he was king here in his
+father's and grandfather's place; ruling where they ruled, and--whether
+they would or no--dying where they died, with the same family faces to
+bear him witness from the walls, and the same vault awaiting him.
+
+When his daughter entered, he turned his head, and his eyes, deep and
+black still as ever, but sunk in a yellow relic of a face, showed a
+certain agitation. She was disagreeably aware that his thoughts were
+much occupied with her; that he was full of grievance towards her, and
+would probably before long bring the pathos of his situation as well as
+the weight of his dying authority to bear upon her, for purposes she
+already suspected with alarm.
+
+"Are you a little easier, papa?" she said, as she came up to him.
+
+"I should think as a nurse you ought to know better, my dear, than to
+ask," he said testily. "When a person is in my condition, enquiries of
+that sort are a mockery!"
+
+"But one may be in less or more pain," she said gently. "I hoped Dr.
+Clarke's treatment yesterday might have given you some relief."
+
+He did not vouchsafe an answer. She took some work and sat down by him.
+Mrs. Boyce, who had been tidying a table of food and medicine, came and
+asked him if he would be wheeled into another room across the gallery,
+which had been arranged as a sitting-room. He shook his head irritably.
+
+"I am not fit for it. Can't you see? And I want to speak to Marcella."
+
+Mrs. Boyce went away. Marcella waited, not without a tremor. She was
+sitting in the sun, her head bent over the muslin strings she was
+hemming for her nurse's bonnet. The window was wide open; outside, the
+leaves under a warm breeze were gently drifting down into the Cedar
+Garden, amid a tangled mass of flowers, mostly yellow or purple. To one
+side rose the dark layers of the cedars; to the other, the grey front
+of the library wing.
+
+Mr. Boyce looked at her with the frown which had now become habitual to
+him, moved his lips once or twice without speaking; and at last made his
+effort.
+
+"I should think, Marcella, you must often regret by now the step you
+took eighteen months ago!"
+
+She grew pale.
+
+"How regret it, papa?" she said, without looking up.
+
+"Why, good God!" he said angrily; "I should think the reasons for regret
+are plain enough. You threw over a man who was devoted to you, and could
+have given you the finest position in the county, for the most
+nonsensical reasons in the world--reasons that by now, I am certain, you
+are ashamed of."
+
+He saw her wince, and enjoyed his prerogative of weakness. In his normal
+health he would never have dared so to speak to her. But of late, during
+long fits of feverish brooding--intensified by her return home--he had
+vowed to himself to speak his mind.
+
+"Aren't you ashamed of them?" he repeated, as she was silent.
+
+She looked up.
+
+"I am not ashamed of anything I did to save Hurd, if that is what you
+mean, papa."
+
+Mr. Boyce's anger grew.
+
+"Of course you know what everybody said?"
+
+She stooped over her work again, and did not reply.
+
+"It's no good being sullen over it," he said in exasperation; "I'm your
+father, and I'm dying. I have a right to question you. It's my duty to
+see something settled, if I can, before I go. Is it _true_ that all the
+time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and
+what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved,
+with Harry Wharton?"
+
+He gave out the words with sharp emphasis, and, bending towards her, he
+laid an emaciated hand upon her arm.
+
+"What use is there, papa, in going back to these things?" she said,
+driven to bay, her colour going and coming. "I may have been wrong in a
+hundred ways, but you never understood that the real reason for it all
+was that--that--I never was in love with Mr. Raeburn."
+
+"Then why did you accept him?" He fell back against his pillows with a
+jerk.
+
+"As to that, I will confess my sins readily enough," she said, while her
+lip trembled, and he saw the tears spring into her eyes. "I accepted him
+for what you just now called his position in the county, though not
+quite in that way either."
+
+He was silent a little, then he began again in a voice which gradually
+became unsteady from self-pity.
+
+"Well, now look here! I have been thinking about this matter a great
+deal--and God knows I've time to think and cause to think, considering
+the state I'm in--and I see no reason whatever why I should not
+try--before I die--to put this thing _straight_. That man was head over
+ears in love with you, _madly_ in love with you. I used to watch him,
+and I know. Of course you offended and distressed him greatly. He could
+never have expected such conduct from you or any one else. But _he's_
+not the man to change round easily, or to take up with any one else.
+Now, if you regret what you did or the way in which you did it, why
+shouldn't I--a dying man may be allowed a little licence I should
+think!--give him a hint?"
+
+"_Papa!_" cried Marcella, dropping her work, and looking at him with a
+pale, indignant passion, which a year ago would have quelled him
+utterly. But he held up his hand.
+
+"Now just let me finish. It would be no good my doing a thing of this
+kind without saying something to you first, because you'd find it out,
+and your pride would be the ruin of it. You always had a demoniacal
+pride, Marcella, even when you were a tiny child; but if you make up
+your mind now to let me tell him you regret what you did--just
+that--you'll make him happy, and yourself, for you know very well he's a
+man of the highest character--and your poor father, who never did _you_
+much harm anyway!" His voice faltered. "I'd manage it so that there
+should be nothing humiliating to you in it whatever. As if there could
+be anything humiliating in confessing such a mistake as that; besides,
+what is there to be ashamed of? You're no pauper. I've pulled Mellor out
+of the mud for you, though you and your mother do give me credit for so
+precious little!"
+
+He lay back, trembling with fatigue, yet still staring at her with
+glittering eyes, while his hand on the invalid table fixed to the side
+of his chair shook piteously. Marcella dreaded the effect the whole
+scene might have upon him; but, now they were in the midst of it, both
+feeling for herself and prudence for him drove her into the strongest
+speech she could devise.
+
+"Papa, if _anything_ of that sort were done, I should take care Mr.
+Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it--in such a way that it
+would be _impossible_ for him to carry it further. Dear papa, don't
+think of such a thing any more. Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly
+last year, are we now to harass and persecute him? I would sooner
+disappear from everybody I know--from you and mamma, from England--and
+never be heard of again."
+
+She stopped a moment--struggling for composure--that she might not
+excite him too much.
+
+"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr.
+Raeburn lately--while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has
+entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that
+plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright,
+fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street--a
+Miss Macdonald."
+
+"Miss how--much?" he asked roughly.
+
+She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of
+confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter--half
+conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself
+and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner
+mind--but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all
+the same.
+
+He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet
+also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of
+death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised
+the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some
+way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.
+
+Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous
+things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the
+Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly--
+
+"And that other fellow--Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him
+in London. Has he been making love to you?"
+
+"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no
+more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as
+good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina
+Farrell--a distant cousin of the Winterbournes--was announced, in
+several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."
+
+At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and
+half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral
+fibre, got up to go.
+
+Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the
+room drew her father's eyes after her, and for the time his feeling
+towards her softened curiously. Well, _she_ had not made very much of
+her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty,
+and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished
+her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain
+balm in the idea that she too--her mother's daughter--with her Merritt
+blood--could be unlucky.
+
+Marcella went about all day under a vague sense of impending
+trouble--the result, no doubt, of that intolerable threat of her
+father's, against which she was, after all, so defenceless.
+
+But whatever it was, it made her all the more nervous and sensitive
+about the Hallins; about her one true friend, to whom she was slowly
+revealing herself, even without speech; whose spiritual strength had
+been guiding and training her; whose physical weakness had drawn to him
+the maternal, the _spending_ instincts which her nursing life had so
+richly developed.
+
+She strolled down the drive to meet the post. But there were no letters
+from London, and she came in, inclined to be angry indeed with Louis
+Craven for deserting her, but saying to herself at the same time that
+she must have heard if anything had gone wrong.
+
+An hour or so later, just as the October evening was closing in, she was
+sitting dreaming over a dim wood-fire in the drawing-room. Her father,
+as might have been expected, had been very tired and comatose all day.
+Her mother was with him; the London nurse was to sit up, and Marcella
+felt herself forlorn and superfluous.
+
+Suddenly, in the silence of the house, she heard the front-door bell
+ring. There was a step in the hall--she sprang up--the door opened, and
+William, with fluttered emphasis, announced--
+
+"Lord Maxwell!"
+
+In the dusk she could just see his tall form--the short pause as he
+perceived her--then her hand was in his, and the paralysing astonishment
+of that first instant had disappeared under the grave emotion of his
+look.
+
+"Will you excuse me," he said, "for coming at this hour? But I am
+afraid you have heard nothing yet of our bad news--and Hallin himself
+was anxious I should come and tell you. Miss Hallin could not write, and
+Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You
+haven't then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?"
+
+"No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was
+nothing--"
+
+"Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it.
+But when we got down here this afternoon, and there was nothing from
+you, both Miss Hallin and Edward felt sure you had not heard--and I
+walked over. It was a most painful, distressing scene, and he--is very
+ill."
+
+"But you have brought him to the Court?" she said trembling, lost in the
+thought of Hallin, her quick breath coming and going. "He was able to
+bear the journey? Will you tell me?--will you sit down?"
+
+He thanked her hurriedly, and took a seat opposite to her, within the
+circle of the firelight, so that she saw his deep mourning and the look
+of repressed suffering.
+
+"The whole thing was extraordinary--I can hardly now describe it," he
+said, holding his hat in his hands and staring into the fire. "It began
+excellently. There was a very full room. Bennett was in the chair--and
+Edward seemed much as usual. He had been looking desperately ill, but he
+declared that he was sleeping better, and that his sister and I coddled
+him. Then,--directly he was well started!--I felt somehow that the
+audience was very hostile. And _he_ evidently felt it more and more.
+There was a good deal of interruption and hardly any cheers--and I saw
+after a little--I was sitting not far behind him--that he was
+discouraged--that he had lost touch. It was presently clear, indeed,
+that the real interest of the meeting lay not in the least in what he
+had to say, but in the debate that was to follow. They meant to let him
+have his hour--but not a minute more. I watched the men about me, and I
+could see them following the clock--thirsting for their turn. Nothing
+that he said seemed to penetrate them in the smallest degree. He was
+there merely as a ninepin to be knocked over. I never saw a meeting so
+_possessed_ with a madness of fanatical conviction--it was amazing!"
+
+He paused, looking sadly before him. She made a little movement, and he
+roused himself instantly.
+
+"It was just a few minutes before he was to sit down--I was
+thankful!--when suddenly--I heard his voice change. I do not know now
+what happened--but I believe he completely lost consciousness of the
+scene before him--the sense of strain, of exhaustion, of making no way,
+must have snapped something. He began a sort of confession--a reverie in
+public--about himself, his life, his thoughts, his prayers, his
+hopes--mostly his religious hopes--for the working man, for England--I
+_never_ heard anything of the kind from him before--you know his
+reserve. It was so intimate--so painful--oh! so painful!"--he drew
+himself together with an involuntary shudder--"before this crowd, this
+eager hostile crowd which was only pining for him to sit down--to get
+out of their way. The men near me began to look at each other and
+titter. They wondered what he meant by maundering on like that--'damned
+canting stuff'--I heard one man near me call it. I tore off a bit of
+paper, and passed a line to Bennett asking him to get hold of Edward, to
+stop it. But I think Bennett had rather lost his presence of mind, and I
+saw him look back at me and shake his head. Then time was up, and they
+began to shout him down."
+
+Marcella made an exclamation of horror. He turned to her.
+
+"I think it was the most tragic scene I ever saw," he said with a
+feeling as simple as it was intense. "This crowd so angry and
+excited--without a particle of understanding or sympathy--laughing, and
+shouting at him--and he in the midst--white as death--talking this
+strange nonsense--his voice floating in a high key, quite unlike itself.
+At last just as I was getting up to go to him, I saw Bennett rise. But
+we were both too late. He fell at our feet!"
+
+Marcella gave an involuntary sob! "What a horror!" she said, "what a
+martyrdom!"
+
+"It was just that," he answered in a low voice--"It was a martyrdom. And
+when one thinks of the way in which for years past he has held these big
+meetings in the hollow of his hand, and now, because he crosses their
+passion, their whim,--no kindness!--no patience--nothing but a blind
+hostile fury! Yet _they_ thought him a traitor, no doubt. Oh! it was all
+a tragedy!"
+
+There was silence an instant. Then he resumed:
+
+"We got him into the back room. Luckily there was a doctor on the
+platform. It was heart failure, of course, with brain prostration. We
+managed to get him home, and Susie Hallin and I sat up. He was delirious
+all night; but yesterday he rallied, and last night he begged us to move
+him out of London if we could. So we got two doctors and an invalid
+carriage, and by three this afternoon we were all at the Court. My aunt
+was ready for him--his sister is there--and a nurse. Clarke was there to
+meet him. He thinks he cannot possibly live more than a few
+weeks--possibly even a few days. The shock and strain have been
+irreparable."
+
+Marcella lay back in her chair, struggling with her grief, her head and
+face turned away from him, her eyes hidden by her handkerchief. Then in
+some mysterious way she was suddenly conscious that Aldous was no longer
+thinking of Hallin, but of her.
+
+"He wants very much to see you," he said, bending towards her; "but I
+know that you have yourself serious illness to nurse. Forgive me for not
+having enquired after Mr. Boyce. I trust he is better?"
+
+She sat up, red-eyed, but mistress of herself. The tone had been all
+gentleness, but to her quivering sense some slight indefinable
+change--coldness--had passed into it.
+
+"He _is_ better, thank you--for the present. And my mother does not let
+me do very much. We have a nurse too. When shall I come?"
+
+He rose.
+
+"Could you--come to-morrow afternoon? There is to be a consultation of
+doctors in the morning, which will tire him. About six?--that was what
+he said. He is very weak, but in the day quite conscious and rational.
+My aunt begged me to say how glad she would be--"
+
+He paused. An invincible awkwardness took possession of both of them.
+She longed to speak to him of his grandfather but could not find the
+courage.
+
+When he was gone, she, standing alone in the firelight, gave one
+passionate thought to the fact that so--in this tragic way--they had met
+again in this room where he had spoken to her his last words as a lover;
+and then, steadily, she put everything out of her mind but her
+friend--and death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Mrs. Boyce received Marcella's news with more sympathy than her daughter
+had dared to hope for, and she made no remark upon Aldous himself and
+his visit, for which Marcella was grateful to her.
+
+As they left the dining-room, after their short evening meal, to go up
+to Mr. Boyce, Marcella detained her mother an instant.
+
+"Mamma, will you please not tell papa that--that Lord Maxwell came here
+this afternoon? And will you explain to him why I am going there
+to-morrow?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's fair cheek flushed. Marcella saw that she understood.
+
+"If I were you, I should not let your father talk to you any more about
+those things," she said with a certain proud impatience.
+
+"If I can help it!" exclaimed Marcella. "Will you tell him,
+mamma,--about Mr. Hallin?--and how good he has been to me?"
+
+Then her voice failed her, and, hurriedly leaving her mother at the top
+of the stairs, she went away by herself to struggle with a grief and
+smart almost unbearable.
+
+That night passed quietly at the Court. Hallin was at intervals slightly
+delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning
+the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as
+calmer and a little stronger. But the heart mischief was hopeless, and
+might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.
+
+He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and
+difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous's sitting-room,
+drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide
+range of wood and plain that it commanded. After a very wet September,
+the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny
+peace. The great woods of the Chilterns, just yellowing towards that
+full golden moment--short, like all perfection,--which only beeches
+know, rolled down the hill-slopes to the plain, their curving lines cut
+here and there by straight fir stems, drawn clear and dark on the pale
+background of sky and lowland. In the park, immediately below the
+window, groups of wild cherry and of a slender-leaved maple made spots
+of "flame and amethyst" on the smooth falling lawns; the deer wandered
+and fed, and the squirrels were playing and feasting among the beech
+nuts.
+
+Since Aldous and his poor sister had brought him home from the Bethnal
+Green hall in which the Land Reform Conference had been held, Hallin had
+spoken little, except in delirium, and that little had been marked by
+deep and painful depression. But this morning, when Aldous was summoned
+by the nurse, and found him propped up by the window, in front of the
+great view, he saw gracious signs of change. Death, indeed, already in
+possession, looked from the blue eyes so plainly that Aldous, on his
+first entrance, had need of all his own strength of will to keep his
+composure. But with the certainty of that great release, and with the
+abandonment of all physical and mental struggle--the struggle of a
+lifetime--Hallin seemed to-day to have recovered something of his
+characteristic serenity and blitheness--the temper which had made him
+the leader of his Oxford contemporaries, and the dear comrade of his
+friend's life.
+
+When Aldous came in, Hallin smiled and lifted a feeble hand towards the
+park and the woods.
+
+"Could it have greeted me more kindly," he said, in his whispering
+voice, "for the end?"
+
+Aldous sat down beside him, pressing his hand, and there was silence
+till Hallin spoke again.
+
+"You will keep this sitting-room, Aldous?"
+
+"Always."
+
+"I am glad. I have known you in it so long. What good talks we have had
+here in the old hot days! I was hot, at least, and you bore with me.
+Land Reform--Church Reform--Wages Reform--we have threshed them all out
+in this room. Do you remember that night I kept you up till it was too
+late to go to bed, talking over my Church plans? How full I was of
+it!--the Church that was to be the people--reflecting their life, their
+differences--governed by them--growing with them. You wouldn't join it,
+Aldous--our poor little Association!"
+
+Aldous's strong lip quivered.
+
+"Let me think of something I _did_ join in," he said.
+
+Hallin's look shone on him with a wonderful affection.
+
+"Was there anything else you didn't help in? I don't remember it. I've
+dragged you into most things. You never minded failure. And I have not
+had so much of it--not till this last. This has been failure--absolute
+and complete."
+
+But there was no darkening of expression. He sat quietly smiling.
+
+"Do you suppose anybody who could look beyond the moment would dream of
+calling it failure?" said Aldous, with difficulty.
+
+Hallin shook his head gently, and was silent for a little time,
+gathering strength and breath again.
+
+"I ought to suffer"--he said, presently. "Last week I dreaded my own
+feeling if I should fail or break down--more than the failure itself.
+But since yesterday--last night--I have no more regrets. I see that my
+power is gone--that if I were to live I could no longer carry on the
+battle--or my old life. I am out of touch. Those whom I love and would
+serve, put me aside. Those who invite me, I do not care to join. So I
+drop--into the gulf--and the pageant rushes on. But the curious thing is
+now--I have no suffering. And as to the future--do you remember Jowett
+in the Introduction to the Phaedo--"
+
+He feebly pointed to a book beside him, which Aldous took up. Hallin
+guided him and he read--
+
+"_Most persons when the last hour comes are resigned to the order of
+nature and the will of God. They are not thinking of Dante's 'Inferno'
+or 'Paradiso,' or of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Heaven and Hell are not
+realities to them, but words or ideas_--_the outward symbols of some
+great mystery, they hardly know what_."
+
+"It is so with me," said Hallin, smiling, as, at his gesture, Aldous
+laid the book aside; "yet not quite. To my _mind_, that mystery indeed
+is all unknown and dark--but to the heart it seems unveiled--with the
+heart, I see."
+
+A little later Aldous was startled to hear him say, very clearly and
+quickly:
+
+"Do you remember that this is the fifth of October?"
+
+Aldous drew his chair closer, that he might not raise his voice.
+
+"Yes, Ned."
+
+"Two years, wasn't it, to-day? Will you forgive me if I speak of her?"
+
+"You shall say anything you will."
+
+"Did you notice that piece of news I sent you, in my last letter to
+Geneva? But of course you did. Did it please you?"
+
+"Yes, I was glad of it," said Aldous, after a pause, "extremely glad. I
+thought she had escaped a great danger."
+
+Hallin studied his face closely.
+
+"She is free, Aldous--and she is a noble creature--she has learnt from
+life--and from death--this last two years. And--you still love her. Is
+it right to make no more effort?"
+
+Aldous saw the perspiration standing on the wasted brow--would have
+given the world to be able to content or cheer him--yet would not, for
+the world, at such a moment be false to his own feeling or deceive his
+questioner.
+
+"I think it is right," he said deliberately, "--for a good many reasons,
+Edward. In the first place I have not the smallest cause--not the
+fraction of a cause--to suppose that I could occupy with her now any
+other ground than that I occupied two years ago. She has been kind and
+friendly to me--on the whole--since we met in London. She has even
+expressed regret for last year--meaning, of course, as I understood, for
+the pain and trouble that may be said to have come from her not knowing
+her own mind. She wished that we should be friends. And"--he turned his
+head away--"no doubt I could be, in time.... But, you see--in all that,
+there is nothing whatever to bring me forward again. My fatal mistake
+last year, I think now, lay in my accepting what she gave me--accepting
+it so readily, so graspingly even. That was my fault, my blindness,
+and--it was as unjust to her--as it was hopeless for myself. For hers is
+a nature"--his eyes came back to his friend; his voice took a new force
+and energy--"which, in love at any rate, will give all or nothing--and
+will never be happy itself, or bring happiness, till it gives all. That
+is what last year taught me. So that even if she--out of kindness or
+remorse for giving pain--were willing to renew the old tie--I should be
+her worst enemy and my own if I took a single step towards it. Marriage
+on such terms as I was thankful for last year, would be humiliation to
+me, and bring no gain to her. It will never serve a man with her"--his
+voice broke into emotion--"that he should make no claims! Let him claim
+the uttermost far-thing--her whole self. If she gives it, _then_ he may
+know what love means!"
+
+Hallin had listened intently. At Aldous's last words his expression
+showed pain and perplexity. His mind was full of vague impressions,
+memories, which seemed to argue with and dispute one of the chief things
+Aldous had been saying. But they were not definite enough to be put
+forward. His sensitive chivalrous sense, even in this extreme weakness,
+remembered the tragic weight that attaches inevitably to dying words.
+Let him not do more harm than good.
+
+He rested a little. They brought him food; and Aldous sat beside him
+making pretence to read, so that he might be encouraged to rest. His
+sister came and went; so did the doctor. But when they were once more
+alone, Hallin put out his hand and touched his companion.
+
+"What is it, dear Ned?"
+
+"Only one thing more, before we leave it. Is that _all_ that stands
+between you now--the whole? You spoke to me once in the summer of
+feeling _angry_, more angry than you could have believed. Of course, I
+felt the same. But just now you spoke of its all being your fault. Is
+there anything changed in your mind?"
+
+Aldous hesitated. It was extraordinarily painful to him to speak of the
+past, and it troubled him that at such a moment it should trouble
+Hallin.
+
+"There is nothing changed, Ned, except that perhaps time makes _some_
+difference always. I don't want now"--he tried to smile--"as I did then,
+to make anybody else suffer for my suffering. But perhaps I marvel even
+more than I did at first, that--that--she could have allowed some things
+to happen as she did!"
+
+The tone was firm and vibrating; and, in speaking, the whole face had
+developed a strong animation most passionate and human.
+
+Hallin sighed.
+
+"I often think," he said, "that she was extraordinarily immature--much
+more immature than most girls of that age--as to feeling. It was really
+the brain that was alive."
+
+Aldous silently assented; so much so that Hallin repented himself.
+
+"But not now," he said, in his eager dying whisper; "not now. The plant
+is growing full and tall, into the richest life."
+
+Aldous took the wasted hand tenderly in his own. There was something
+inexpressibly touching in this last wrestle of Hallin's affection with
+another's grief. But it filled Aldous with a kind of remorse, and with
+the longing to free him from that, as from every other burden, in these
+last precious hours of life. And at last he succeeded, as he thought, in
+drawing his mind away from it. They passed to other things. Hallin,
+indeed, talked very little more during the day. He was very restless and
+weak, but not in much positive suffering. Aldous read to him at
+intervals, from Isaiah or Plato, the bright sleepless eyes following
+every word.
+
+At last the light began to sink. The sunset flooded in from the
+Berkshire uplands and the far Oxford plain, and lay in gold and purple
+on the falling woods and the green stretches of the park. The distant
+edges of hill were extraordinarily luminous and clear, and Aldous,
+looking into the west with the eye of one to whom every spot and line
+were familiar landmarks, could almost fancy he saw beyond the invisible
+river, the hill, the "lovely tree against the western sky," which keep
+for ever the memory of one with whose destiny it had often seemed to him
+that Hallin's had something in common. To him, as to Thyrsis, the same
+early joy, the same "happy quest," the same "fugitive and gracious
+light" for guide and beacon, that--
+
+  does not come with houses or with gold,
+  With place, with honour and a flattering crew;
+
+and to him, too, the same tasked pipe and tired throat, the same
+struggle with the "life of men unblest," the same impatient tryst with
+death.
+
+The lovely lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief,
+beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every
+change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene
+with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane
+into the evening haze. His soul followed the quiet deer, the homing
+birds, loosening itself gently the while from pain and from desire,
+saying farewell to country, to the poor, to the work left undone, and
+the hopes unrealised--to everything except to love.
+
+It had just struck six when he bent forward to the window beneath which
+ran the wide front terrace.
+
+"That was her step!" he said, while his face lit up, "will you bring her
+here?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella rang the bell at the Court with a fast beating heart. The old
+butler who came gave what her shrinking sense thought a forbidding
+answer to her shy greeting of him, and led her first into the
+drawing-room. A small figure in deep black rose from a distant chair and
+came forward stiffly. Marcella found herself shaking hands with Miss
+Raeburn.
+
+"Will you sit and rest a little before you go upstairs?" said that lady
+with careful politeness, "or shall I send word at once? He is hardly
+worse--but as ill as he can be."
+
+"I am not the least tired," said Marcella, and Miss Raeburn rang.
+
+"Tell his lordship, please, that Miss Boyce is here."
+
+The title jarred and hurt Marcella's ear. But she had scarcely time to
+catch it before Aldous entered, a little bent, as it seemed to her, from
+his tall erectness, and speaking with an extreme quietness, even
+monotony of manner.
+
+"He is waiting for you--will you come at once?"
+
+He led her up the central staircase and along the familiar passages,
+walking silently a little in front of her. They passed the long line of
+Caroline and Jacobean portraits in the upper gallery, till just outside
+his own door Aldous paused.
+
+"He ought not to talk long," he said, hesitating, "but you will know--of
+course--better than any of us."
+
+"I will watch him," she said, almost inaudibly, and he gently opened the
+door and let her pass, shutting it behind her.
+
+The nurse, who was sitting beside her patient, got up as Marcella
+entered, and pointed her to a low chair on his further side. Susie
+Hallin rose too, and kissed the new-comer hurriedly, absently, without
+a word, lest she should sob. Then she and the nurse disappeared through
+an inner door. The evening light was still freely admitted; and there
+were some candles. By the help of both she could only see him
+indistinctly. But in her own mind, as she sat down, she determined that
+he had not even days to live.
+
+Yet as she bent over him she saw a playful gleam on the cavernous face.
+
+"You won't scold me?" said the changed voice--"you did warn me--you and
+Susie--but--I was obstinate. It was best so!"
+
+She pressed her lips to his hand and was answered by a faint pressure
+from the cold fingers.
+
+"If I could have been there!" she murmured.
+
+"No--I am thankful you were not. And I must not think of it--or of any
+trouble. Aldous is very bitter--but he will take comfort by and by--he
+will see it--and them--more justly. They meant me no unkindness. They
+were full of an idea, as I was. When I came back to myself--first--all
+was despair. I was in a blank horror of myself and life. Now it has
+gone--I don't know how. It is not of my own will--some hand has lifted a
+weight. I seem to float--without pain."
+
+He closed his eyes, gathering strength again in the interval, by a
+strong effort of will--calling up in the dimming brain what he had to
+say. She meanwhile, spoke to him in a low voice, mainly to prevent his
+talking, telling him of her father, of her mother's strain of
+nursing--of herself--she hardly knew what. Hew grotesque to be giving
+him these little bits of news about strangers--to him, this hovering,
+consecrated soul, on the brink of the great secret!
+
+In the intervals, while he was still silent, she could not sometimes
+prevent the pulse of her own life from stirring. Her eye wandered round
+the room--Aldous's familiar room. There, on the writing-table with its
+load of letters and books, stood the photograph of Hallin; another, her
+own, used to stand beside it; it was solitary now.
+
+Otherwise, all was just as it had been--flowers, books, newspapers--the
+signs of familiar occupation, the hundred small details of character and
+personality which in estrangement take to themselves such a smarting
+significance for the sad and craving heart. The date--the
+anniversary--echoed in her mind.
+
+Then, with a rush of remorseful pain, her thoughts came back to the
+present and to Hallin. At the same moment she saw that his eyes were
+open, and fixed upon her with a certain anxiety and expectancy. He made
+a movement as though to draw her towards him; and she stooped to him.
+
+"I feel," he said, "as though my strength were leaving me fast. Let me
+ask you one question--because of my love for you--and _him_. I have
+fancied--of late--things were changed. Can you tell me--will you?--or is
+it unfair?"--the words had all their bright, natural intonation--"Is
+your heart--still where it was?--or, could you ever--undo the past--"
+
+He held her fast, grasping the hand she had given him with unconscious
+force. She had looked up startled, her lip trembling like a child's.
+Then she dropped her head against the arm of her chair, as though she
+could not speak.
+
+He moved restlessly, and sighed.
+
+"I should not," he said to himself; "I should not--it was wrong. The
+dying are tyrannous."
+
+He even began a word of sweet apology. But she shook her head.
+
+"Don't!" she said, struggling with herself; "don't say that! It would do
+me good to speak--to you--"
+
+An exquisite smile dawned on Hallin's face.
+
+"Then!"--he said--"confess!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few minutes later they were still sitting together. She strongly
+wished to go; but he would not yet allow it. His face was full of a
+mystical joy--a living faith, which must somehow communicate itself in
+one last sacramental effort.
+
+"How strange that you--and I--and he--should have been so mixed together
+in this queer life. Now I seem to regret nothing--I _hope_ everything.
+One more little testimony let me bear!--the last. We disappear one by
+one--into the dark--but each may throw his comrades--a token--before he
+goes. You have been in much trouble of mind and spirit--I have seen it.
+Take my poor witness. There is one clue, one only--_goodness_--_the
+surrendered will_. Everything is there--all faith--all religion--all
+hope for rich or poor.--Whether we feel our way through consciously to
+the Will--that asks our will--matters little. Aldous and I have differed
+much on this--in words--never at heart! I could use words, symbols he
+cannot--and they have given me peace. But half my best life I owe to
+him."
+
+At this he made a long pause--but, still, through that weak grasp,
+refusing to let her go--till all was said. Day was almost gone; the
+stars had come out over the purple dusk of the park.
+
+"That Will--we reach--through duty and pain," he whispered at last, so
+faintly she could hardly hear him, "is the root, the source. It leads us
+in living--it--carries us in death. But our weakness and vagueness--want
+help--want the human life and voice--to lean on--to drink from. We
+Christians--are orphans--without Christ! There again--what does it
+matter what we think--_about_ him--if only we think--_of_ him. In _one_
+such life are all mysteries, and all knowledge--and our fathers have
+chosen for us--"
+
+The insistent voice sank lower and lower into final silence--though the
+lips still moved. The eyelids too fell. Miss Hallin and the nurse came
+in. Marcella rose and stood for one passionate instant looking down upon
+him. Then, with a pressure of the hand to the sister beside her, she
+stole out. Her one prayer was that she might see and meet no one. So
+soft was her step that even the watching Aldous did not hear her. She
+lifted the heavy latch of the outer door without the smallest noise, and
+found herself alone in the starlight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Marcella left him, Hallin remained for some hours in what seemed
+to those about him a feverish trance. He did not sleep, but he showed no
+sign of responsive consciousness. In reality his mind all through was
+full of the most vivid though incoherent images and sensations. But he
+could no longer distinguish between them and the figures and movements
+of the real people in his room. Each passed into and intermingled with
+the other. In some vague, eager way he seemed all the time to be waiting
+or seeking for Aldous. There was the haunting impression of some word to
+say--some final thing to do--which would not let him rest. But something
+seemed always to imprison him, to hold him back, and the veil between
+him and the real Aldous watching beside him grew ever denser.
+
+At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the
+half-sitting posture in which he had passed the day. Death had come too
+near. His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him
+from London watched with him. The curtains were drawn back from both the
+windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent
+moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.
+
+Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of
+purpose and of strength. He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to
+be alone with him. But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of
+his showed no change. Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of
+anguish and of struggle. Three words to say--only three words; but those
+he _must_ say! He tried again, but Aldous's dumb grief still sat
+motionless. Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, "Speech is gone;
+I shall speak no more!"
+
+It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt. But something checked both,
+and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.
+
+What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it
+asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking
+fingers, and Hallin's latest movement--which death stopped half-way--was
+to raise it to his lips.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Marcella's confession--made in the abandonment, the blind passionate
+trust, of a supreme moment--bore no fruit. It went with Hallin to the
+grave.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+"I think I saw the letters arrive," said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter.
+"And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us."
+
+"Let me go for them, mamma."
+
+"No, thank you, I must go in."
+
+And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel.
+Marcella watched her widow's cap and black dress as they passed along
+the _pergola_ of the hotel garden, between bright masses of geraniums
+and roses on either side.
+
+They had been sitting in the famous garden of the Cappucini Hotel at
+Amalfi. To Marcella's left, far below the high terrace of the hotel, the
+green and azure of the Salernian gulf shone and danced in the sun, to
+her right a wood of oak and arbutus stretched up into a purple cliff--a
+wood starred above with gold and scarlet berries, and below with
+cyclamen and narcissus. From the earth under the leafy oaks--for the
+oaks at Amalfi lose and regain their foliage in winter and spring by
+imperceptible gradations--came a moist English smell. The air was damp
+and warm. A convent bell tolled from invisible heights above the garden;
+while the olives and vines close at hand were full of the chattering
+voices of gardeners and children, and broken here and there by clouds of
+pink almond-blossom. March had just begun, and the afternoons were fast
+lengthening. It was little more than a fortnight since Mr. Boyce's
+death. In the November of the preceding year Mrs. Boyce and Marcella had
+brought him to Naples by sea, and there, at a little villa on Posilippo,
+he had drawn sadly to his end. It had been a dreary time, from which
+Marcella could hardly hope that her mother would ever fully recover. She
+herself had found in the long months of nursing--nursing of which, with
+quiet tenacity, she had gradually claimed and obtained her full share--a
+deep moral consolation. They had paid certain debts to conscience, and
+they had for ever enshrined her father's memory in the silence of an
+unmeasured and loving pity.
+
+But the wife? Marcella sorely recognised that to her mother these last
+days had brought none of the soothing, reconciling influences they had
+involved for herself. Between the husband and wife there had been dumb
+friction and misery--surely also a passionate affection!--to the end.
+The invalid's dependence on her had been abject, her devotion wonderful.
+Yet, in her close contact with them, the daughter had never been able to
+ignore the existence between them of a wretched though tacit
+debate--reproach on his side, self-defence or spasmodic effort on
+hers--which seemed to have its origin deep in the past, yet to be
+stimulated afresh by a hundred passing incidents of the present. Under
+the blight of it, as under the physical strain of nursing, Mrs. Boyce
+had worn and dwindled to a white-haired shadow; while he had both clung
+to life and feared death more than would normally have been the case.
+At the end he had died in her arms, his head on her breast; she had
+closed his eyes and performed every last office without a tear; nor had
+Marcella ever seen her weep from then till now. The letters she had
+received, mostly, Marcella believed, from her own family, remained
+unopened in her travelling-bag. She spoke very little, and was
+constantly restless, nor could Marcella as yet form any idea of the
+future.
+
+After the funeral at Naples Mrs. Boyce had written immediately to her
+husband's solicitor for a copy of his will and a statement of affairs.
+She had then allowed herself to be carried off to Amalfi, and had there,
+while entirely declining to admit that she was ill, been clearly doing
+her best to recover health and nerve sufficient to come to some
+decision, to grapple with some crisis which Marcella also felt to be
+impending--though as to why it should be impending, or what the nature
+of it might be, she could only dread and guess.
+
+There was much bitter yearning in the girl's heart as she sat, breathed
+on by the soft Italian wind blowing from this enchanted sea. The inner
+cry was that her mother did not love her, had never loved her, and might
+even now--weird, incredible thought!--be planning to desert her. Hallin
+was dead--who else was there that cared for her or thought of her? Betty
+Macdonald wrote often, wild, "_schwaermerisch_" letters. Marcella looked
+for them with eagerness, and answered them affectionately. But Betty
+must soon marry, and then all that would be at an end. Meanwhile
+Marcella knew well it was Betty's news that made Betty's adoration
+doubly welcome. Aldous Raeburn--she never did or could think of him
+under his new name--was apparently in London, much occupied in politics,
+and constantly, as it seemed, in Betty's society. What likelihood was
+there that her life and his would ever touch again? She thought often of
+her confession to Hallin, but in great perplexity of feeling. She had,
+of course, said no word of secrecy to him at the time. Such a demand in
+a man's last hour would have been impossible. She had simply followed a
+certain mystical love and obedience in telling him what he asked to
+know, and in the strong spontaneous impulse had thought of nothing
+beyond. Afterwards her pride had suffered fresh martyrdom. Could he,
+with his loving instinct, have failed to give his friend some sign? If
+so, it had been unwelcome, for since the day of Hallin's funeral she and
+Aldous had been more complete strangers than before. Lady Winterbourne,
+Betty, Frank Leven, had written since her father's death; but from him,
+nothing.
+
+By the way, Frank Leven had succeeded at Christmas, by old Sir Charles
+Leven's unexpected death, to the baronetcy and estates. How would that
+affect his chances with Betty?--if indeed there were any such chances
+left.
+
+As to her own immediate future, Marcella knew from many indications that
+Mellor would be hers at once. But in her general tiredness of mind and
+body she was far more conscious of the burden of her inheritance than of
+its opportunities. All that vivid castle-building gift which was
+specially hers, and would revive, was at present in abeyance. She had
+pined once for power and freedom, that she might make a Kingdom of
+Heaven of her own, quickly. Now power and freedom, up to a certain
+point, were about to be put into her hands; and instead of plans for
+acting largely and bountifully on a plastic outer world, she was saying
+to herself, hungrily, that unless she had something close to her to love
+and live for, she could do nothing. If her mother would end these
+unnatural doubts, if she would begin to make friends with her own
+daughter, and only yield herself to be loved and comforted, why _then_
+it might be possible to think of the village and the straw-plaiting!
+Otherwise--the girl's attitude as she sat dreaming in the sun showed her
+despondency.
+
+She was roused by her mother's voice calling her from the other end of
+the _pergola_.
+
+"Yes, mamma."
+
+"Will you come in? There are some letters."
+
+"It is the will," thought Marcella, as Mrs. Boyce turned back to the
+hotel, and she followed.
+
+Mrs. Boyce shut the door of their sitting-room, and then went up to her
+daughter with a manner which suddenly struck and startled Marcella.
+There was natural agitation and trouble in it.
+
+"There is something in the will, Marcella, which will, I fear, annoy and
+distress you. Your father inserted it without consulting me. I want to
+know what you think ought to be done. You will find that Lord Maxwell
+and I have been appointed joint executors."
+
+Marcella turned pale.
+
+"Lord Maxwell!" she said, bewildered. "_Lord Maxwell--Aldous_! What do
+you mean, mamma?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce put the will into her hands, and, pointing the way among the
+technicalities she had been perusing while Marcella was still lingering
+in the garden, showed her the paragraph in question. The words of the
+will were merely formal: "I hereby appoint," &c., and no more; but in a
+communication from the family solicitor, Mr. French, which Mrs. Boyce
+silently handed to her daughter after she had read the legal
+disposition, the ladies were informed that Mr. Boyce had, before
+quitting England, written a letter to Lord Maxwell, duly sealed and
+addressed, with instructions that it should be forwarded to its
+destination immediately after the writer's burial. "Those instructions,"
+said Mr. French, "I have carried out. I understand that Lord Maxwell was
+not consulted as to his appointment as executor prior to the drawing up
+of the will. But you will no doubt hear from him at once, and as soon as
+we know that he consents to act, we can proceed immediately to probate."
+
+"Mamma, how _could_ he?" said Marcella, in a low, suffocated voice,
+letting will and letter fall upon her knee.
+
+"Did he give you no warning in that talk you had with him at Mellor?"
+said Mrs. Boyce, after a minute's silence.
+
+"Not the least," said Marcella, rising restlessly and beginning to walk
+up and down. "He spoke to me about wishing to bring it on again--asked
+me to let him write. I told him it was all done with--for ever! As to my
+own feelings, I felt it was no use to speak of them; but I thought--I
+_believed_, I had proved to him that Lord Maxwell had absolutely given
+up all idea of such a thing; and that it was already probable he would
+marry some one else. I told him I would rather disappear from every one
+I knew than consent to it--he could only humiliate us all by saying a
+word. And _now_, after that!--"
+
+She stopped in her restless walk, pressing her hands miserably together.
+
+"What _does_ he want with us and our affairs?" she broke out. "He
+wishes, of course, to have no more to do with me. And now we force
+him--_force_ him into these intimate relations. What can papa have said
+in that letter to him? What _can_ he have said? Oh! it is unbearable!
+Can't we write at once?"
+
+She pressed her hands over her eyes in a passion of humiliation and
+disgust. Mrs. Boyce watched her closely.
+
+"We must wait, anyway, for his letter," she said. "It ought to be here
+by to-morrow morning."
+
+Marcella sank on a chair by an open glass door, her eyes wandering,
+through the straggling roses growing against the wall of the stone
+balcony outside, to the laughing purples and greens of the sea.
+
+"Of course," she said unhappily, "it is most probable he will consent.
+It would not be like him to refuse. But, mamma, you must write. _I_ must
+write and beg him not to do it. It is quite simple. We can manage
+everything for ourselves. Oh! how _could_ papa?" she broke out again in
+a low wail, "how could he?"
+
+Mrs. Boyce's lips tightened sharply. It seemed to her a foolish
+question. _She_, at least, had had the experience of twenty years out of
+which to answer it. Death had made no difference. She saw her husband's
+character and her own seared and broken life with the same tragical
+clearness; she felt the same gnawing of an affection not to be plucked
+out while the heart still beat. This act of indelicacy and injustice was
+like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion
+and concealment towards herself. No matter. She had made her account
+with it all twenty years before. What astonished her was, that the force
+of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within
+the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.
+
+"Have you read the rest of the will?" she asked, after a long pause.
+
+Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.
+
+"Mamma!" she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into
+her face, "I find no mention of you in it throughout. There seems to be
+no provision for you."
+
+"There is none," said Mrs. Boyce, quietly. "There was no need. I have my
+own income. We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to
+Mellor. It is therefore amply sufficient for me now."
+
+"You cannot imagine," cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, "that I
+am going to take the whole of my father's estate, and leave
+nothing--_nothing_ for his wife. It would be impossible--unseemly. It
+would be to do _me_ an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself," she added
+proudly.
+
+"No, I think not," said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of
+emotion. "You do not yet understand the situation. Your father's
+misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time. Your grandfather went
+through great trouble, and raised large sums to--" she paused for the
+right phrase--"to free us from the consequences of your father's
+actions. I benefited, of course, as much as he did. Those sums crippled
+all your grandfather's old age. He was a man to whom I was
+attached--whom I respected. Mellor, I believe, had never been
+embarrassed before. Well, your uncle did a little towards recovery--but
+on the whole he was a fool. Your father has done much more, and you, no
+doubt, will complete it. As for me, I have no claim to anything more
+from Mellor. The place itself is"--again she stopped for a word of which
+the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her--"hateful to me. I shall
+feel freer if I have no tie to it. And at last I persuaded your father
+to let me have my way."
+
+Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room,
+and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.
+
+"Mamma, are you still determined--now that we two are alone in the
+world--to act towards me, to treat me as though I were not your
+daughter--not your child at all, but a stranger?"
+
+It was a cry of anguish. A sudden slight tremor swept over Mrs. Boyce's
+thin and withered face. She braced herself to the inevitable.
+
+"Don't let us make a tragedy of it, my dear," she said, with a light
+touch on Marcella's hands. "Let us discuss it reasonably. Won't you sit
+down? I am not proposing anything very dreadful. But, like you, I have
+some interests of my own, and I should be glad to follow them--now--a
+little. I wish to spend some of the year in London; to make that,
+perhaps, my headquarters, so as to see something of some old friends
+whom I have had no intercourse with for years--perhaps also of my
+relations." She spoke of them with a particular dryness. "And I should
+be glad--after this long time--to be somewhat taken out of oneself, to
+read, to hear what is going on, to feed one's mind a little."
+
+Marcella, looking at her, saw a kind of feverish light, a sparkling
+intensity in the pale blue eyes, that filled her with amazement. What,
+after all, did she know of this strange individuality from which her own
+being had taken its rise? The same flesh and blood--what an irony of
+nature!
+
+"Of course," continued Mrs. Boyce, "I should go to you, and you would
+come to me. It would only be for part of the year. Probably we should
+get more from each other's lives so. As you know, I long to see things
+as they are, not conventionally. Anyway, whether I were there or no, you
+would probably want some companion to help you in your work and plans. I
+am not fit for them. And it would be easy to find some one who could act
+as chaperon in my absence."
+
+The hot tears sprang to Marcella's eyes. "Why did you send me away from
+you, mamma, all my childhood," she cried. "It was wrong--cruel. I have
+no brother or sister. And you put me out of your life when I had no
+choice, when I was too young to understand."
+
+Mrs. Boyce winced, but made no reply. She sat with her delicate hand
+across her brow. She was the white shadow of her former self; but her
+fragility had always seemed to Marcella more indomitable than anybody
+else's strength.
+
+Sobs began to rise in Marcella's throat.
+
+"And now," she said, in half-coherent despair, "do you know what you are
+doing? You are cutting yourself off from me--refusing to have any real
+bond to me just when I want it most. I suppose you think that I shall be
+satisfied with the property and the power, and the chance of doing what
+I like. But"--she tried her best to gulp back her pain, her outraged
+feeling, to speak quietly--"I am not like that really any more. I can
+take it all up, with courage and heart, if you will stay with me, and
+let me--let me--love you and care for you. But, by myself, I feel as if
+I could not face it! I am not likely to be happy--for a long
+time--except in doing what work I can. It is very improbable that I
+shall marry. I dare say you don't believe me, but it is true. We are
+both sad and lonely. We have no one but each other. And then you talk in
+this ghastly way of separating from me--casting me off."
+
+Her voice trembled and broke, she looked at her mother with a frowning
+passion.
+
+Mrs. Boyce still sat silent, studying her daughter with a strange,
+brooding eye. Under her unnatural composure there was in reality a
+half-mad impatience, the result of physical and moral reaction. This
+beauty, this youth, talk of sadness, of finality! What folly! Still, she
+was stirred, undermined in spite of herself.
+
+"There!" she said, with a restless gesture, "let us, please, talk of it
+no more. I will come back with you--I will do my best. We will let the
+matter of my future settlement alone for some months, at any rate, if
+that will satisfy you or be any help to you."
+
+She made a movement as though to rise from her low chair. But the great
+waters swelled in Marcella--swelled and broke. She fell on her knees
+again by her mother, and before Mrs. Boyce could stop her she had thrown
+her young arms close round the thin, shrunken form.
+
+"Mother!" she said. "Mother, be good to me--love me--you are all I
+have!"
+
+And she kissed the pale brow and cheek with a hungry, almost a violent
+tenderness that would not be gainsaid, murmuring wild incoherent things.
+
+Mrs. Boyce first tried to put her away, then submitted, being physically
+unable to resist, and at last escaped from her with a sudden sob that
+went to the girl's heart. She rose, went to the window, struggled hard
+for composure, and finally left the room.
+
+But that evening, for the first time, she let Marcella put her on the
+sofa, tend her, and read to her. More wonderful still, she went to sleep
+while Marcella was reading. In the lamplight her face looked piteously
+old and worn. The girl sat for long with her hands clasped round her
+knees, gazing down upon it, in a trance of pain and longing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marcella was awake early next morning, listening to the full voice of
+the sea as it broke three hundred feet below, against the beach and
+rocky walls of the little town. She was lying in a tiny white room, one
+of the cells of the old monastery, and the sun as it rose above the
+Salernian mountains--the mountains that hold Paestum in their blue and
+purple shadows--danced in gold on the white wall. The bell of the
+cathedral far below tolled the hour. She supposed it must be six
+o'clock. Two hours more or so, and Lord Maxwell's letter might be looked
+for.
+
+She lay and thought of it--longed for it, and for the time of answering
+it, with the same soreness that had marked all the dreams of a restless
+night. If she could only see her father's letter! It was inconceivable
+that he should have mentioned _her_ name in his plea. He might have
+appealed to the old friendship between the families. That was possible,
+and would have, at any rate, an _appearance_ of decency. But who could
+answer for it--or for him? She clasped her hands rigidly behind her
+head, her brows frowning, bending her mind with an intensity of will to
+the best means of assuring Aldous Raeburn that she and her mother would
+not encroach upon him. She had a perpetual morbid vision of herself as
+the pursuer, attacking him now through his friend, now through her
+father. Oh! when would that letter come, and let her write her own!
+
+She tried to read, but in reality listened for every sound of awakening
+life in the hotel. When at last her mother's maid came in to call her,
+she sprang up with a start.
+
+"Deacon, are the letters come?"
+
+"There are two for your mother, miss; none for you."
+
+Marcella threw on her dressing-gown, watched her opportunity, and
+slipped in to her mother, who occupied a similar cell next door.
+
+Mrs. Boyce was sitting up in bed, with a letter before her, her pale
+blue eyes fixed absently on the far stretch of sea.
+
+She looked round with a start as Marcella entered. "The letter is to me,
+of course," she said.
+
+Marcella read it breathlessly.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Boyce,--I have this morning received from your solicitor, Mr.
+French, a letter written by Mr. Boyce to myself in November of last
+year. In it he asks me to undertake the office of executor, to which, I
+hear from Mr. French, he has named me in his will. Mr. French also
+enquires whether I shall be willing to act, and asks me to communicate
+with you.
+
+"May I, then, venture to intrude upon you with these few words? Mr.
+Boyce refers in his touching letter to the old friendship between our
+families, and to the fact that similar offices have often been performed
+by his relations for mine, or _vice versa_. But no reminder of the kind
+was in the least needed. If I can be of any service to yourself and to
+Miss Boyce, neither your poor husband nor you could do me any greater
+kindness than to command me.
+
+"I feel naturally some diffidence in the matter. I gather from Mr.
+French that Miss Boyce is her father's heiress, and comes at once into
+the possession of Mellor. She may not, of course, wish me to act, in
+which case I should withdraw immediately; but I sincerely trust that she
+will not forbid me the very small service I could so easily and gladly
+render.
+
+"I cannot close my letter without venturing to express the deep
+sympathy I have felt for you and yours during the past six months. I
+have been far from forgetful of all that you have been going through,
+though I may have seemed so. I trust that you and your daughter will not
+hurry home for any business cause, if it is still best for your health
+to stay in Italy. With your instructions Mr. French and I could arrange
+everything.
+
+  "Believe me,
+
+  "Yours most sincerely,
+
+  "MAXWELL."
+
+"You will find it difficult, my dear, to write a snub in answer to that
+letter," said Mrs. Boyce, drily, as Marcella laid it down.
+
+Marcella's face was, indeed, crimson with perplexity and feeling.
+
+"Well, we can think it over," she said as she went away.
+
+Mrs. Boyce pondered the matter a good deal when she was left alone. The
+signs of reaction and change in Marcella were plain enough. What they
+precisely meant, and how much, was another matter. As to him, Marcella's
+idea of another attachment might be true, or might be merely the
+creation of her own irritable pride. Anyway, he was in the mood to write
+a charming letter. Mrs. Boyce's blanched lip had all its natural irony
+as she thought it over. To her mind Aldous Raeburn's manners had always
+been a trifle too good, whether for his own interests or for this wicked
+world. And if he had any idea now of trying again, let him, for
+Heaven's sake, not be too yielding or too eager! "It was always the
+way," thought Mrs. Boyce, remembering a child in white frock and baby
+shoes--"if you wished to make her want anything, you had to take it away
+from her."
+
+Meanwhile the mere thought that matters might even yet so settle
+themselves drew from the mother a long breath of relief. She had spent
+an all but sleepless night, tormented by Marcella's claim upon her.
+After twenty years of self-suppression this woman of forty-five,
+naturally able, original, and independent, had seen a glimpse of
+liberty. In her first youth she had been betrayed as a wife, degraded as
+a member of society. A passion she could not kill, combined with some
+stoical sense of inalienable obligation, had combined to make her both
+the slave and guardian of her husband up to middle life; and her family
+and personal pride, so strong in her as a girl, had found its only
+outlet in this singular estrangement she had achieved between herself
+and every other living being, including her own daughter. Now her
+husband was dead, and all sorts of crushed powers and desires, mostly of
+the intellectual sort, had been strangely reviving within her. Just
+emerged, as she was, from the long gloom of nursing, she already wished
+to throw it all behind her--to travel, to read, to make
+acquaintances--she who had lived as a recluse for twenty years! There
+was in it a last clutch at youth, at life. And she had no desire to
+enter upon this new existence--in comradeship with Marcella. They were
+independent and very different human beings. That they were mother and
+daughter was a mere physical accident.
+
+Moreover, though she was amply conscious of the fine development in
+Marcella during the past two years, it is probable that she felt her
+daughter even less congenial to her now than of old. For the rich,
+emotional nature had, as we have seen, "suffered conviction," had turned
+in the broad sense to "religion," was more and more sensitive,
+especially since Hallin's death, to the spiritual things and symbols in
+the world. At Naples she had haunted churches; had read, as her mother
+knew, many religious books.
+
+Now Mrs. Boyce in these matters had a curious history. She had begun
+life as an ardent Christian, under evangelical influences. Her husband,
+on the other hand, at the time she married him was a man of purely
+sceptical opinions, a superficial disciple of Mill and Comte, and fond
+of an easy profanity which seemed to place him indisputably with the
+superior persons of this world. To the amazement and scandal of her
+friends, Evelyn Merritt had not been three months his wife before she
+had adopted his opinions _en bloc_, and was carrying them out to their
+logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher.
+Thenceforward her conception of things--of which, however, she seldom
+spoke--had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had
+been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that,
+in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk
+to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things
+orthodox and established.
+
+Then, in his last illness, he had finally broken away from her, and his
+own past. "Evelyn, I should like to see a clergyman," he had said to
+her in his piteous voice, "and I shall ask him to give me the
+Sacrament." She had made every arrangement accordingly; but her bitter
+soul could see nothing in the step but fear and hypocrisy; and he knew
+it. And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two
+or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been
+conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy. Had not the hard devotion of
+twenty years made him at least her own? And here was this black-coated
+reciter of incredible things stepping into her place. Only in death she
+recovered him wholly. No priest interfered while he drew his last breath
+upon her bosom.
+
+And now Marcella! Yet the girl's voice and plea tugged at her withered
+heart. She felt a dread of unknown softnesses--of being invaded and
+weakened by things in her akin to her daughter, and so captured afresh.
+Her mind fell upon the bare idea of a revival of the Maxwell engagement,
+and caressed it.
+
+Meanwhile Marcella stood dressing by the open window in the sunlight,
+which filled the room with wavy reflections caught from the sea.
+Fishing-boats were putting off from the beach, three hundred feet below
+her; she could hear the grating of the keels, the songs of the boatmen.
+On the little breakwater to the right an artist's white umbrella shone
+in the sun; and a half-naked boy, poised on the bows of a boat moored
+beside the painter, stood bent in the eager attitude of one about to
+drop the bait into the blue wave below. His brown back burnt against the
+water. Cliff, houses, sea, glowed in warmth and light; the air was full
+of roses and orange-blossom; and to an English sense had already the
+magic of summer.
+
+And Marcella's hands, as she coiled and plaited her black hair, moved
+with a new lightness; for the first time since her father's death her
+look had its normal fire, crossed every now and then by something that
+made her all softness and all woman. No! as her mother said, one could
+not snub that letter or its writer. But how to answer it! In imagination
+she had already penned twenty different replies. How not to be grasping
+or effusive, and yet to show that you could feel and repay
+kindness--there was the problem!
+
+Meanwhile, from that letter, or rather in subtle connection with it, her
+thoughts at last went wandering off with a natural zest to her new realm
+of Mellor, and to all that she would and could do for the dwellers
+therein.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+It was a bleak east-wind day towards the end of March. Aldous was at
+work in the library at the Court, writing at his grandfather's table,
+where in general he got through his estate and county affairs, keeping
+his old sitting-room upstairs for the pursuits that were more
+particularly his own.
+
+All the morning he had been occupied with a tedious piece of local
+business, wading through endless documents concerning a dispute between
+the head-master of a neighbouring grammar-school and his governing body,
+of which Aldous was one. The affair was difficult, personal, odious. To
+have wasted nearly three hours upon it was, to a man of Aldous's type,
+to have lost a day. Besides he had not his grandfather's knack in such
+things, and was abundantly conscious of it.
+
+However, there it was, a duty which none but he apparently could or
+would do, and he had been wrestling with it. With more philosophy than
+usual, too, since every tick of the clock behind him bore him nearer to
+an appointment which, whatever it might be, would not be tedious.
+
+At last he got up and went to the window to look at the weather. A
+cutting wind, clearly, but no rain. Then he walked into the
+drawing-room, calling for his aunt. No one was to be seen, either there
+or in the conservatory, and he came back to the library and rang.
+
+"Roberts, has Miss Raeburn gone out?"
+
+"Yes, my lord," said the old butler addressed. "She and Miss Macdonald
+have gone out driving, and I was to tell your lordship that Miss Raeburn
+would drop Miss Macdonald at Mellor on her way home."
+
+"Is Sir Frank anywhere about?"
+
+"He was in the smoking-room a little while ago, my lord."
+
+"Will you please try and find him?"
+
+"Yes, my lord."
+
+Aldous's mouth twitched with impatience as the old servant shut the
+door.
+
+"How many times did Roberts manage to be-lord me in a minute?" he asked
+himself; "yet if I were to remonstrate, I suppose I should only make him
+unhappy."
+
+And walking again to the window, he thrust his hands into his pockets
+and stood looking out with a far from cheerful countenance.
+
+One of the things that most tormented him indeed in this recent
+existence was a perpetual pricking sense of the contrast between this
+small world of his ancestral possessions and traditions, with all its
+ceremonial and feudal usage, and the great rushing world outside it of
+action and of thought. Do what he would, he could not un-king himself
+within the limits of the Maxwell estate. To the people living upon it he
+was the man of most importance within their ken, was inevitably their
+potentate and earthly providence. He confessed that there was a real
+need of him, if he did his duty. But on this need the class-practice of
+generations had built up a deference, a sharpness of class-distinction,
+which any modern must find more and more irksome in proportion to his
+modernness. What was in Aldous's mind, as he stood with drawn brows
+looking out over the view which showed him most of his domain, was a
+sort of hot impatience of being made day by day, in a hundred foolish
+ways, to play at greatness.
+
+Yet, as we know, he was no democrat by conviction, had no comforting
+faith in what seemed to him the rule of a multitudinous ignorance. Still
+every sane man of to-day knows, at any rate, that the world has taken
+the road of democracy, and that the key to the future, for good or ill,
+lies not in the revolts and speculations of the cultivated few, but in
+the men and movements that can seize the many. Aldous's temper was
+despondently critical towards the majority of these, perhaps; he had,
+constitutionally, little of that poet's sympathy with the crowd, as
+such, which had given Hallin his power. But, at any rate, they filled
+the human stage--these men and movements--and his mind as a beholder.
+Beside the great world-spectacle perpetually in his eye and thought, the
+small old-world pomps and feudalisms of his own existence had a way of
+looking ridiculous to him. He constantly felt himself absurd. It was
+ludicrously clear to him, for instance, that in this kingdom he had
+inherited it would be thought a huge condescension on his part if he
+were to ask the secretary of a trades union to dine with him at the
+Court. Whereas, in his own honest opinion, the secretary had a far more
+important and interesting post in the universe than he.
+
+So that, in spite of a strong love of family, rigidly kept to himself,
+he had very few of the illusions which make rank and wealth delightful.
+On the other hand, he had a tyrannous sense of obligation, which kept
+him tied to his place and his work--to such work as he had been spending
+the morning on. This sense of obligation had for the present withdrawn
+him from any very active share in politics. He had come to the
+conclusion early in the year, just about the time when, owing to some
+rearrangements in the _personnel_ of the Government, the Premier had
+made him some extremely flattering overtures, that he must for the
+present devote himself to the Court. There were extensive changes and
+reforms going on in different parts of the estate: some of the schools
+which he owned and mainly supported were being rebuilt and enlarged; and
+he had a somewhat original scheme for the extension of adult education
+throughout the property very much on his mind--a scheme which must be
+organised and carried through by himself apparently, if it was to thrive
+at all.
+
+Much of this business was very dreary to him, some of it altogether
+distasteful. Since the day of his parting with Marcella Boyce his only
+real _pleasures_ had lain in politics or books. Politics, just as they
+were growing absorbing to him, must, for a while at any rate, be put
+aside; and even books had not fared as well as they might have been
+expected to do in the country quiet. Day after day he walked or rode
+about the muddy lanes of the estate, doing the work that seemed to him
+to be his, as best he could, yet never very certain of its value;
+rather, spending his thoughts more and more, with regard to his own
+place and function in the world, on a sort of mental apologetic which
+was far from stimulating; sorely conscious the while of the unmatched
+charm and effectiveness with which his grandfather had gone about the
+same business; and as lonely at heart as a man can well be--the wound of
+love unhealed, the wound of friendship still deep and unconsoled. To
+bring social peace and progress, as he understood them, to this bit of
+Midland England a man of first-rate capacities was perhaps sacrificing
+what ambition would have called his opportunities. Yet neither was he a
+hero to himself nor to the Buckinghamshire farmers and yokels who
+depended on him. They had liked the grandfather better, and had become
+stolidly accustomed to the grandson's virtues.
+
+The only gleam in the grey of his life since he had determined about
+Christmas-time to settle down at the Court had come from Mr. French's
+letter. That letter, together with Mr. Boyce's posthumous note, which
+contained nothing, indeed, but a skilful appeal to neighbourliness and
+old family friendship, written in the best style of the ex-Balkan
+Commissioner, had naturally astonished him greatly. He saw at once what
+_she_ would perceive in it, and turned impatiently from speculation as
+to what Mr. Boyce might actually have meant, to the infinitely more
+important matter, how she would take her father's act. Never had he
+written anything with greater anxiety than he devoted to his letter to
+Mrs. Boyce. There was in him now a craving he could not stay, to be
+brought near to her again, to know how her life was going. It had first
+raised its head in him since he knew that her existence and Wharton's
+were finally parted, and had but gathered strength from the
+self-critical loneliness and tedium of these later months.
+
+Mrs. Boyce's reply couched in terms at once stately and grateful, which
+accepted his offer of service on her own and her daughter's behalf, had
+given him extraordinary pleasure. He turned it over again and again,
+wondering what part or lot Marcella might have had in it, attributing to
+her this cordiality or that reticence; picturing the two women together
+in their black dresses--the hotel, the _pergola_, the cliff--all of
+which he himself knew well. Finally, he went up to town, saw Mr. French,
+and acquainted himself with the position and prospects of the Mellor
+estate, feeling himself a sort of intruder, yet curiously happy in the
+business. It was wonderful what that poor sickly fellow had been able to
+do in the last two years; yet his thoughts fell rather into amused
+surmise as to what _she_ would find it in her restless mind to do in the
+_next_ two years.
+
+Nevertheless, all the time, the resolution of which he had spoken to
+Hallin seemed to himself unshaken. He recognised and adored the womanly
+growth and deepening which had taken place in her; he saw that she
+wished to show him kindness. But he thought he could trust himself now
+and henceforward not to force upon her a renewed suit for which there
+was in his eyes no real or abiding promise of happiness.
+
+Marcella and her mother had now been at home some three or four days,
+and he was just about to walk over to Mellor for his first interview
+with them. A great deal of the merely formal business consequent on Mr.
+Boyce's death had been already arranged by himself and Mr. French. Yet
+he had to consult Marcella as to certain investments, and in a pleasant
+though quite formal little note he had that morning received from her
+she had spoken of asking his advice as to some new plans for the estate.
+It was the first letter she herself had as yet written to him; hitherto
+all his correspondence had been carried on with Mrs. Boyce. It had
+struck him, by the way, as remarkable that there was no mention of the
+wife in the will. He could only suppose that she was otherwise provided
+for. But there had been some curious expressions in her letters.
+
+Where was Frank? Aldous looked impatiently at the clock, as Roberts did
+not reappear. He had invited Leven to walk with him to Mellor, and the
+tiresome boy was apparently not to be found. Aldous vowed he would not
+wait a minute, and going into the hall, put on coat and hat with most
+business-like rapidity.
+
+He was just equipped when Roberts, somewhat breathless with long
+searching, arrived in time to say that Sir Frank was on the front
+terrace.
+
+And there Aldous caught sight of the straight though somewhat heavily
+built figure, in its grey suit with the broad band of black across the
+arm.
+
+"Hullo, Frank! I thought you were to look me up in the library. Roberts
+has been searching the house for you."
+
+"You said nothing about the library," said the boy, rather sulkily, "and
+Roberts hadn't far to search. I have been in the smoking-room till this
+minute."
+
+Aldous did not argue the point, and they set out. It was presently
+clear to the elder man that his companion was not in the best of
+tempers. The widowed Lady Leven had sent her firstborn over to the Court
+for a few days that Aldous might have some discussion as to his
+immediate future with the young man. She was a silly, frivolous woman;
+but it was clear, even to her, that Frank was not doing very well for
+himself in the world; and advice she would not have taken from her son's
+Oxford tutor seemed cogent to her when it came from a Raeburn. "Do at
+least, for goodness' sake, get him to give up his absurd plan of going
+to America!" she wrote to Aldous; "if he can't take his degree at
+Oxford, I suppose he must get on without it, and certainly his dons seem
+very unpleasant. But at least he might stay at home and do his duty to
+me and his sisters till he marries, instead of going off to the
+'Rockies' or some other ridiculous place. He really never seems to think
+of Fanny and Rachel, or what he might do to help me to get them settled
+now that his poor father is gone."
+
+No; certainly the young man was not much occupied with "Fanny and
+Rachel!" He spoke with ill-concealed impatience, indeed, of both his
+sisters and his mother. If his people would get in the way of everything
+he wanted to do, they needn't wonder if he cut up rough at home. For the
+present it was settled that he should at any rate go back to Oxford till
+the end of the summer term--Aldous heartily pitying the unfortunate dons
+who might have to do with him--but after that he entirely declined to be
+bound. He swore he would not be tied at home like a girl; he must and
+would see the world. This in itself, from a lad who had been accustomed
+to regard his home as the centre of all delights, and had on two
+occasions stoutly refused to go with his family to Rome, lest he should
+miss the best month for his father's trout-stream, was sufficiently
+surprising.
+
+However, of late some tardy light had been dawning upon Aldous! The
+night after Frank's arrival at the Court Betty Macdonald came down to
+spend a few weeks with Miss Raeburn, being for the moment that lady's
+particular pet and _protegee_. Frank, whose sulkiness during the
+twenty-four hours before she appeared had been the despair of both his
+host and hostess, brightened up spasmodically when he heard she was
+expected, and went fishing with one of the keepers, on the morning
+before her arrival, with a fair imitation of his usual spirits. But
+somehow, since that first evening, though Betty had chattered, and
+danced, and frolicked her best, though her little figure running up and
+down the big house gave a new zest to life in it, Frank's manners had
+gone from bad to worse. And at last Aldous, who had not as yet seen the
+two much together, and was never an observant man in such matters, had
+begun to have an inkling. Was it _possible_ that the boy was in love,
+and with Betty? He sounded Miss Raeburn; found that she did not rise to
+his suggestion at all--was, in fact, annoyed by it--and with the usual
+stupidity of the clever man failed to draw any reasonable inference from
+the queerness of his aunt's looks and sighs.
+
+As to the little minx herself, she was inscrutable. She teased them all
+in turns, Frank, perhaps, less than the others. Aldous, as usual, found
+her a delightful companion. She would walk all over the estate with him
+in the most mannish garments and boots conceivable, which only made her
+childish grace more feminine and more provocative than ever. She took an
+interest in all his tenants; she dived into all his affairs; she
+insisted on copying his letters. And meanwhile, on either side were Miss
+Raeburn, visibly recovering day by day her old cheeriness and bustle,
+and Frank--Frank, who ate nothing, or nothing commensurate to his bulk,
+and, if possible, said less.
+
+Aldous had begun to feel that the situation must be probed somehow, and
+had devised this walk, indeed, with some vague intention of plying
+remonstrances and enquiries. He had an old affection for the boy, which
+Lady Leven had reckoned upon.
+
+The first difficulty, of course, was to make him talk at all. Aldous
+tried various sporting "gambits" with very small success. At last, by
+good-luck, the boy rose to something like animation in describing an
+encounter he had had the week before with a piebald weasel in the course
+of a morning's ferreting.
+
+"All at once we saw the creature's head poke out of the hole--_pure
+white_, with a brown patch on it. When it saw us, back it scooted!--and
+we sent in another ferret after the one that was there already. My
+goodness! there _was_ a shindy down in the earth--you could hear them
+rolling and kicking like anything. We had our guns ready,--but all of a
+sudden everything stopped--not a sound or a sign of anything! We threw
+down our guns and dug away like blazes. Presently we came on the two
+ferrets gorging away at a dead rabbit,--nasty little beasts!--that
+accounted for _them_; but where on earth was the weasel? I really began
+to think we had imagined the creature, when, whish! came a flash of
+white lightning, and out the thing bolted--pure white with a splash of
+brown--its winter coat, of course. I shot at it, but it was no go. If
+I'd only put a bag over the hole, and not been an idiot, I should have
+caught it."
+
+The boy swung along, busily ruminating for a minute or two, and
+forgetting his trouble.
+
+"I've seen one something like it before," he went on--"ages ago, when I
+was a little chap, and Harry Wharton and I were out rabbiting. By the
+way--" he stopped short--"do you see that that fellow's come back?"
+
+"I saw the paragraph in the _Times_ this morning," said Aldous, drily.
+
+"And I've got a letter from Fanny this morning, to say that he and Lady
+Selina are to be married in July, and that she's going about making a
+martyr and a saint of him, talking of the 'persecution' he's had to put
+up with, and the vulgar fellows who couldn't appreciate him, and
+generally making an ass of herself. Oh! he won't ask any of us to his
+wedding--trust him. It is a rum business. You know Willie Ffolliot--that
+queer dark fellow--that used to be in the 10th Hussars--did all those
+wild things in the Soudan?"
+
+"Yes--slightly."
+
+"I heard all about it from him. He was one of that gambling set at
+Harry's club there's been all that talk about you know, since Harry came
+to grief. Well!--he was going along Piccadilly one night last summer,
+quite late, between eleven and twelve, when Harry caught hold of him
+from behind. Willie thought he was out of his mind, or drunk. He told me
+he never saw anybody in such a queer state in his life. 'You come along
+with me,' said Harry, 'come and talk to me, or I shall shoot myself!' So
+Willie asked him what was up. 'I'm engaged to be married,' said Harry.
+Whereupon Willie remarked that, considering his manner and his
+appearance, he was sorry for the young lady. '_Young_!' said Harry as
+though he would have knocked him down. And then it came out that he had
+just--that moment!--engaged himself to Lady Selina. And it was the very
+same day that he got into that precious mess in the House--the _very
+same night_! I suppose he went to her to be comforted, and thought he'd
+pull something off, anyway! Why she took him! But of course she's no
+chicken, and old Alresford may die any day. And about the bribery
+business--I suppose he made her think him an injured innocent. Anyway,
+he talked to Willie, when they got to his rooms, like a raving lunatic,
+and you know he was always such a cool hand. 'Ffolliot,' he said, 'can
+you come with me to Siam next week?' 'How much?' said Will. 'I thought
+you were engaged to Lady Selina.' Then he swore little oaths, and vowed
+he had told her he must have a year. 'We'll go and explore those temples
+in Siam,' he said, and then he muttered something about 'Why should I
+ever come back?' Presently he began to talk of the strike--and the
+paper--and the bribe, and all the rest of it, making out a long
+rigmarole story. Oh! of course he'd done everything for the best--trust
+him!--and everybody else was a cur and a slanderer. And Ffolliot
+declared he felt quite pulpy--the man was such a wreck; and he said he'd
+go with him to Siam, or anywhere else, if he'd only cheer up. And they
+got out the maps, and Harry began to quiet down, and at last Will got
+him to bed. Fanny says Ffolliot reports he had great difficulty in
+dragging him home. However, Lady Selina has no luck!--there he is."
+
+"Oh! he will be one of the shining lights of our side before long," said
+Aldous, with resignation. "Since he gave up his seat here, there has
+been some talk of finding him one in the Alresfords' neighbourhood, I
+believe. But I don't suppose anybody's very anxious for him. He is to
+address a meeting, I see, on the Tory Labour Programme next week. The
+_Clarion_, I suppose, will go round with him."
+
+"Beastly rag!" said Frank, fervently. "It's rather a queer thing, isn't
+it, that such a clever chap as that should have made such a mess of his
+chances. It almost makes one not mind being a fool."
+
+He laughed, but bitterly, and at the same moment the cloud that for some
+twenty minutes or so seemed to have completely rolled away descended
+again on eye and expression.
+
+"Well, there are worse things than being a fool," said Aldous, with
+insidious emphasis--"sulking, and shutting up with your best friends,
+for instance."
+
+Frank flushed deeply, and turned upon him with a sort of uncertain fury.
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+Whereupon Aldous slipped his arm inside the boy's, and prepared himself
+with resignation for the scene that had to be got through somehow, when
+Frank suddenly exclaimed:
+
+"I say, there's Miss Boyce!"
+
+Never was a man more quickly and completely recalled from altruism to
+his own affairs. Aldous dropped his companion's arm, straightened
+himself with a thrill of the whole being, and saw Marcella some distance
+ahead of them in the Mellor drive, which they had just entered. She was
+stooping over something on the ground, and was not apparently aware of
+their approach. A ray of cold sun came out at the moment, touched the
+bending figure and the grass at her feet--grass starred with primroses,
+which she was gathering.
+
+"I didn't know you were going to call," said Frank, bewildered. "Isn't
+it too soon?"
+
+And he looked at his companion in astonishment.
+
+"I came to speak to Miss Boyce and her mother on business," said Aldous,
+with all his habitual reserve. "I thought you wouldn't mind the walk
+back by yourself."
+
+"Business?" the boy echoed involuntarily.
+
+Aldous hesitated, then said quietly:
+
+"Mr. Boyce appointed me executor under his will."
+
+Frank lifted his eyebrows, and allowed himself at least an inward "By
+Jove!"
+
+By this time Marcella had caught sight of them, and was advancing. She
+was in deep mourning, but her hands were full of primroses, which shone
+against the black; and the sun, penetrating the thin green of some
+larches to her left, danced in her eyes and on a face full of sensitive
+and beautiful expression.
+
+They had not met since they stood together beside Hallin's grave. This
+fact was in both their minds. Aldous felt it, as it were, in the touch
+of her hand. What he could not know was, that she was thinking quite as
+much of his letter to her mother and its phrases.
+
+They stood talking a little in the sunshine. Then, as Frank was taking
+his leave, Marcella said:
+
+"Won't you wait for--for Lord Maxwell, in the old library? We can get at
+it from the garden, and I have made it quite habitable. My mother, of
+course, does not wish to see anybody."
+
+Frank hesitated, then, pushed by a certain boyish curiosity, and by the
+angry belief that Betty had been carried off by Miss Raeburn, and was
+out of his reach till luncheon-time, said he would wait. Marcella led
+the way, opened the garden-door of the lower corridor, close to the spot
+where she had seen Wharton standing in the moonlight on a
+never-to-be-forgotten night, and then ushered them into the library. The
+beautiful old place had been decently repaired, though in no sense
+modernised. The roof had no holes, and its delicate stucco-work,
+formerly stained and defaced by damp, had been whitened, so that the
+brown and golden tones of the books in the latticed cases told against
+it with delightful effect. The floor was covered with a cheap matting,
+and there were a few simple chairs and tables. A wood fire burnt on the
+old hearth. Marcella's books and work lay about, and some shallow
+earthenware pans filled with home-grown hyacinths scented the air. What
+with the lovely architecture of the room itself, its size, its books
+and old portraits, and the signs it bore of simple yet refined use, it
+would have been difficult to find a gentler, mellower place. Aldous
+looked round him with delight.
+
+"I hope to make a village drawing-room of it in time," she said casually
+to Frank as she stooped to put a log on the fire. "I think we shall get
+them to come, as it has a separate door, and scraper, and mat all to
+itself."
+
+"Goodness!" said Frank, "they won't come. It's too far from the
+village."
+
+"Don't you be so sure," said Marcella, laughing. "Mr. Craven has all
+sorts of ideas."
+
+"Who's Mr. Craven?"
+
+"Didn't you meet him at my rooms?"
+
+"Oh! I remember," ejaculated the boy--"a frightful Socialist!"
+
+"And his wife's worse," said Marcella, merrily. "They've come down to
+settle here. They're going to help me."
+
+"Then for mercy's sake keep them to yourself," cried Frank, "and don't
+let them go loose over the county. We don't want them at our place."
+
+"Oh! your turn will come. Lord Maxwell"--her tone changed--became shy
+and a little grave. "Shall we go into the Stone Parlour? My mother will
+come down if you wish to see her, but she thought that--that--perhaps we
+could settle things."
+
+Aldous had been standing by, hat in hand, watching her as she chattered
+to Frank. As she addressed him he gave a little start.
+
+"Oh! I think we can settle everything," he said.
+
+"Well, this is rum!" said Frank to himself, as the door closed behind
+them, and instead of betaking himself to the chair and the newspaper
+with which Marcella had provided him, he began to walk excitedly up and
+down. "Her father makes him executor--he manages her property for
+her--and they behave nicely to each other, as though nothing had ever
+happened at all. What the deuce does it mean? And all the time
+Betty--why, Betty's devoted to him!--and it's as plain as a pikestaff
+what that old cat, Miss Raeburn, is thinking of from morning till night!
+Well, I'm beat!"
+
+And throwing himself down on a stool by the fire, his chin between his
+hands, he stared dejectedly at the burning logs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Meanwhile Marcella and her companion were sitting in the Stone Parlour
+side by side, save for a small table between them, which held the
+various papers Aldous had brought with him. At first, there had been on
+her side--as soon as they were alone--a feeling of stifling
+embarrassment. All the painful, proud sensations with which she had
+received the news of her father's action returned upon her; she would
+have liked to escape; she shrank from what once more seemed an
+encroachment, a situation as strange as it was embarrassing.
+
+But his manner very soon made it impossible, indeed ridiculous, to
+maintain such an attitude of mind. He ran through his business with his
+usual clearness and rapidity. It was not complicated; her views proved
+to be the same as his; and she was empowered to decide for her mother.
+Aldous took notes of one or two of her wishes, left some papers with her
+for her mother's signature, and then his work was practically done.
+Nothing, throughout, could have been more reassuring or more everyday
+than his demeanour.
+
+Then, indeed, when the end of their business interview approached, and
+with it the opportunity for conversation of a different kind, both were
+conscious of a certain tremor. To him this old parlour was torturingly
+full of memories. In this very place where they sat he had given her
+his mother's pearls, and taken a kiss in return from the cheek that was
+once more so near to him. With what free and exquisite curves the hair
+set about the white brow! How beautiful was the neck--the hand! What
+ripened, softened charm in every movement! The touching and rebuking
+thought rose in his mind that from her nursing experience, and its frank
+contact with the ugliest realities of the physical life--a contact he
+had often shrunk from realising--there had come to her, not so much
+added strength, as a new subtlety and sweetness, some delicate,
+vibrating quality, that had been entirely lacking to her first splendid
+youth.
+
+Suddenly she said to him, with a certain hesitation:
+
+"There was one more point I wanted to speak to you about. Can you advise
+me about selling some of those railway shares?"
+
+She pointed to an item in a short list of investments that lay beside
+them.
+
+"But why?" said Aldous, surprised. "They are excellent property already,
+and are going up in value."
+
+"Yes, I know. But I want some ready money immediately--more than we
+have--to spend on cottage-building in the village. I saw a builder
+yesterday and came to a first understanding with him. We are altering
+the water-supply too. They have begun upon it already, and it will cost
+a good deal."
+
+Aldous was still puzzled.
+
+"I see," he said. "But--don't you suppose that the income of the estate,
+now that your father has done so much to free it, will be enough to meet
+expenses of that kind, without trenching on investments? A certain
+amount, of course, should be systematically laid aside every year for
+rebuilding, and estate improvements generally."
+
+"Yes; but you see I only regard half of the income as mine."
+
+She looked up with a little smile.
+
+He was now standing in front of her, against the fire, his grey eyes,
+which could be, as she well knew, so cold and inexpressive, bent upon
+her with eager interest.
+
+"Only half the income?" he repeated. "Ah!"--he smiled kindly--"is that
+an arrangement between you and your mother?"
+
+Marcella let her hand fall with a little despairing gesture.
+
+"Oh no!" she said--"oh no! Mamma--mamma will take nothing from me or
+from the estate. She has her own money, and she will live with me part
+of the year."
+
+The intonation in the words touched Aldous profoundly.
+
+"Part of the year?" he said, astonished, yet not knowing how to question
+her. "Mrs. Boyce will not make Mellor her home?"
+
+"She would be thankful if she had never seen it," said Marcella,
+quickly--"and she would never see it again if it weren't for me. It's
+dreadful what she went through last year, when--when I was in London."
+
+Her voice fell. Glancing up at him involuntarily, her eye looked with
+dread for some chill, some stiffening in him. Probably he condemned her,
+had always condemned her for deserting her home and her parents. But
+instead she saw nothing but sympathy.
+
+"Mrs. Boyce has had a hard life," he said, with grave feeling.
+
+Marcella felt a tear leap, and furtively raised her handkerchief to
+brush it away. Then, with a natural selfishness, her quick thought took
+another turn. A wild yearning rose in her mind to tell him much more
+than she had ever done in old days of the miserable home-circumstances
+of her early youth; to lay stress on the mean unhappiness which had
+depressed her own child-nature whenever she was with her parents, and
+had withered her mother's character. Secretly, passionately, she often
+made the past an excuse. Excuse for what? For the lack of delicacy and
+loyalty, of the best sort of breeding, which had marked the days of her
+engagement?
+
+Never--_never_ to speak of it with him!--to pour out everything--to ask
+him to judge, to understand, to forgive!--
+
+She pulled herself together by a strong effort, reminding herself in a
+flash of all that divided them:--of womanly pride--of Betty Macdonald's
+presence at the Court--of that vain confidence to Hallin, of which her
+inmost being must have been ashamed, but that something calming and
+sacred stole upon her whenever she thought of Hallin, lifting everything
+concerned with him into a category of its own.
+
+No; let her selfish weakness make no fettering claim upon the man before
+her. Let her be content with the friendship she had, after all,
+achieved, that was now doing its kindly best for her.
+
+All these images, like a tumultuous procession, ran through the mind in
+a moment. He thought, as she sat there with her bent head, the hands
+clasped round the knee in the way he knew so well, that she was full of
+her mother, and found it difficult to put what she felt into words.
+
+"But tell me about your plan," he said gently, "if you will."
+
+"Oh! it is nothing," she said hurriedly. "I am afraid you will think it
+impracticable--perhaps wrong. It's only this: you see, as there is no
+one depending on me--as I am practically alone--it seemed to me I might
+make an experiment. Four thousand a year is a great deal more than I
+need ever spend--than I _ought_, of course, to spend on myself. I don't
+think altogether what I used to think. I mean to keep up this house--to
+make it beautiful, to hand it on, perhaps _more_ beautiful than I found
+it, to those that come after. And I mean to maintain enough service in
+it both to keep it in order and to make it a social centre for all the
+people about--for everybody of all classes, so far as I can. I want it
+to be a place of amusement and delight and talk to us all--especially to
+the very poor. After all"--her cheek flushed under the quickening of her
+thought--"_everybody_ on the estate, in their different degree, has
+contributed to this house, in some sense, for generations. I want it to
+come into their lives--to make it _their_ possession, _their_ pride,--as
+well as mine. But then that isn't all. The people here can enjoy
+nothing, use nothing, till they have a worthier life of their own. Wages
+here, you know, are terribly low, much lower"--she added timidly--"than
+with you. They are, as a rule, eleven or twelve shillings a week. Now
+there seem to be about one hundred and sixty labourers on the estate
+altogether, in the farmers' employment and in our own. Some, of course,
+are boys, and some old men earning a half-wage. Mr. Craven and I have
+worked it out, and we find that an average weekly increase of five
+shillings per head--which would give the men of full age and in full
+work about a pound a week--would work out at about two thousand a year."
+
+She paused a moment, trying to put her further statement into its best
+order.
+
+"Your farmers, you know," he said, smiling, after a pause, "will be your
+chief difficulty."
+
+"Of course! But I thought of calling a meeting of them. I have discussed
+it with Mr. French--of course he thinks me mad!--but he gave me some
+advice. I should propose to them all fresh leases, with certain small
+advantages that Louis Craven thinks would tempt them, at a reduced
+rental exactly answering to the rise in wages. Then, in return they must
+accept a sort of fair-wage clause, binding them to pay henceforward the
+standard wage of the estate."
+
+She looked up, her face expressing urgent though silent interrogation.
+
+"You must remember," he said quickly, "that though the estate is
+recovering, and rents have been fairly paid about here during the last
+eighteen months, you may be called upon at any moment to make the
+reductions which hampered your uncle. These reductions will, of course,
+fall upon you as before, seeing that the farmers, in a different way,
+will be paying as much as before. Have you left margin enough?"
+
+"I think so," she said eagerly. "I shall live here very simply, and
+accumulate all the reserve fund I can. I have set all my heart upon it.
+I know there are not many people _could_ do such a thing--other
+obligations would, must, come first. And it may turn out a mistake.
+But--whatever happens--whatever any of us, Socialists or not, may hope
+for in the future--here one _is_ with one's conscience, and one's money,
+and these people, who like oneself have but the one life? In all labour,
+it is the modern question, isn't it?--_how much_ of the product of
+labour the workman can extract from the employer? About here there is no
+union to act for the labourers--they have practically no power. But _in
+the future_, we must surely _hope_ they will combine, that they will be
+stronger--strong enough to _force_ a decent wage. What ought to prevent
+my free will anticipating a moment--since I _can_ do it--that we all
+want to see?"
+
+She spoke with a strong feeling; but his ear detected a new
+note--something deeper and wistfuller than of old.
+
+"Well--as you say, you are for experiments!" he replied, not finding it
+easy to produce his own judgment quickly. Then, in another tone--"it was
+always Hallin's cry."
+
+She glanced up at him, her lips trembling.
+
+"I know. Do you remember how he used to say--'the big changes may
+come--the big Collectivist changes. But neither you nor I will see them.
+I pray _not_ to see them. Meanwhile--all still hangs upon, comes back
+to, the individual, Here are you with your money and power; there are
+those men and women whom you can share with--in new and honourable
+ways--_to-day_.'"
+
+Then she checked herself suddenly.
+
+"But now I want you to tell me--will you tell me?--all the objections
+you see. You must often have thought such things over."
+
+She was looking nervously straight before her. She did not see the flash
+of half-bitter, half-tender irony that crossed his face. Her tone of
+humility, of appeal, was so strange to him, remembering the past.
+
+"Yes, very often," he answered. "Well, I think these are the kind of
+arguments you will have to meet."
+
+He went through the objections that any economist would be sure to weigh
+against a proposal of the kind, as clearly as he could, and at some
+length--but without zest. What affected Marcella all through was not so
+much the matter of what he said, as the manner of it. It was so
+characteristic of the two voices in him--the voice of the idealist
+checked and mocked always by the voice of the observer and the student.
+A year before, the little harangue would have set her aflame with
+impatience and wrath. Now, beneath the speaker, she felt and yearned
+towards the man.
+
+Yet, as to the scheme, when all demurs were made, she was "of the same
+opinion still"! His arguments were not new to her; the inward eagerness
+over-rode them.
+
+"In my own case"--he said at last, the tone passing instantly into
+reserve and shyness, as always happened when he spoke of himself--"my
+own wages are two or three shillings higher than those paid generally by
+the farmers on the estate; and we have a pension fund. But so far, I
+have felt the risks of any wholesale disturbance of labour on the
+estate, depending, as it must entirely in my case, on the individual
+life and will, to be too great to let me go further. I sometimes believe
+that it is the farmers who would really benefit most by experiments of
+the kind!"
+
+She protested vehemently, being at the moment, of course, not at all in
+love with mankind in general, but only with those members of mankind who
+came within the eye of imagination. He was enchanted to see the old self
+come out again--positive, obstinate, generous; to see the old confident
+pose of the head, the dramatic ease of gesture.
+
+Meanwhile something that had to be said, that must, indeed, be said, if
+he were to give her serious and official advice, pressed uncomfortably
+on his tongue.
+
+"You know," he said, not looking at her, when at last she had for the
+moment exhausted argument and prophecy, "you have to think of those who
+will succeed you here; still more you have to think--of marriage--before
+you pledge yourself to the halving of your income."
+
+Now he must needs look at her intently, out of sheer nervousness. The
+difficulty he had had in compelling himself to make the speech at all
+had given a certain hardness and stiffness to his voice. She felt a
+sudden shock and chill--resented what he had dismally felt to be an
+imperative duty.
+
+"I do not think I have any need to think of it--in this connection," she
+said proudly. And getting up, she began to gather her papers together.
+
+The spell was broken, the charm gone. He felt that he was dismissed.
+
+With a new formality and silence, she led the way into the hall, he
+following. As they neared the library there was a sound of voices.
+
+Marcella opened the door in surprise, and there, on either side of the
+fire, sat Betty Macdonald and Frank Leven.
+
+"_That's_ a mercy!" cried Betty, running forward to Marcella and kissing
+her. "I really don't know what would have happened if Mr. Leven and I
+had been left alone any longer. As for the Kilkenny cats, my dear, don't
+mention them!"
+
+The child was flushed and agitated, and there was an angry light in her
+blue eyes. Frank looked simply lumpish and miserable.
+
+"Yes, here I am," said Betty, holding Marcella, and chattering as fast
+as possible. "I made Miss Raeburn bring me over, that I might _just_
+catch a sight of you. She would walk home, and leave the carriage for
+me. Isn't it like all the topsy-turvy things nowadays? When _I'm_ her
+age I suppose I shall have gone back to dolls. Please to look at those
+ponies!--they're pawing your gravel to bits. And as for my watch, just
+inspect it!"--She thrust it reproachfully under Marcella's eyes. "You've
+been such a time in there talking, that Sir Frank and I have had time to
+quarrel for life, and there isn't a minute left for anything rational.
+Oh! good-bye, my dear, good-bye. I never kept Miss Raeburn waiting for
+lunch yet, did I, Mr. Aldous? and I mustn't begin now. Come along, Mr.
+Aldous! You'll have to come home with me. I'm frightened to death of
+those ponies. You shan't drive, but if they bolt, I'll give them to you
+to pull in. Dear, _dear_ Marcella, let me come again--soon--directly!"
+
+A few more sallies and kisses, a few more angry looks at Frank and
+appeals to Aldous, who was much less responsive than usual, and the
+child was seated, very erect and rosy, on the driving seat of the little
+pony-carriage, with Aldous beside her.
+
+"Are you coming, Frank?" said Aldous; "there's plenty of room."
+
+His strong brow had a pucker of annoyance. As he spoke he looked, not at
+Frank, but at Marcella. She was standing a trifle back, among the
+shadows of the doorway, and her attitude conveyed to him an impression
+of proud aloofness. A sigh that was half pain, half resignation, passed
+his lips unconsciously.
+
+"Thank you, I'll walk," said Frank, fiercely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now, will you please explain to me why you look like that, and talk
+like that?" said Marcella, with cutting composure, when she was once
+more in the library, and Frank, crimson to the roots of his hair, and
+saying incoherent things, had followed her there.
+
+"I should think you might guess," said Frank, in reproachful misery, as
+he hung over the fire.
+
+"Not at all!" said Marcella; "you are rude to Betty, and disagreeable to
+me, by which I suppose that you are unhappy. But why should _you_ be
+allowed to show your feelings, when other people don't?"
+
+Frank fairly groaned.
+
+"Well," he said, making efforts at a tragic calm, and looking for his
+hat, "you will, none of you, be troubled with me long. I shall go home
+to-morrow, and take my ticket for California the day after."
+
+_"You,"_ said Marcella, "go to California! What right have you to go to
+California?"
+
+"What right?" Frank stared, then he went on impetuously. "If a girl
+torments a man, as Betty has been tormenting me, there is nothing for
+it, I should think, but to clear out of the way. I am going to clear out
+of the way, whatever anybody says."
+
+"And shoot big game, I suppose--amuse yourself somehow?"
+
+Frank hesitated.
+
+"Well, a fellow can't do nothing," he said helplessly. "I suppose I
+shall shoot."
+
+"And what right have you to do it? Have you any more right than a public
+official would have to spend public money in neglecting his duties?"
+
+Frank stared at her.
+
+"Well, I don't know what you mean," he said at last, angrily; "give it
+up."
+
+"It's quite simple what I mean. You have inherited your father's
+property. Your tenants pay you rent, that comes from their labour. Are
+you going to make no return for your income, and your house, and your
+leisure?"
+
+"Ah! that's your Socialism!" cried the young fellow, roused by her tone.
+"No return? Why, they have the land."
+
+"If I were a thorough-going Socialist," said Marcella, steadily, "I
+should say to you, Go! The sooner you throw off all ties to your
+property, the sooner you prove to the world that you and your class are
+mere useless parasites, the sooner we shall be rid of you. But
+unfortunately _I_ am not such a good Socialist as that. I waver--I am
+not sure of what I wish. But one thing I _am_ sure of, that unless
+people like you are going to treat their lives as a profession, to take
+their calling seriously, there are no more superfluous drones, no more
+idle plunderers than you, in all civilised society!"
+
+Was she pelting him in this way that she might so get rid of some of her
+own inner smart and restlessness? If so, the unlucky Frank could not
+guess it. He could only feel himself intolerably ill-used. He had meant
+to pour himself out to her on the subject of Betty and his woes, and
+here she was rating him as to his _duties_, of which he had hardly as
+yet troubled himself to think, being entirely taken up either with his
+grievances or his enjoyments.
+
+"I'm sure you know you're talking nonsense," he said sulkily, though he
+shrank from meeting her fiery look. "And if I _am_ idle, there are
+plenty of people idler than me--people who live on their money, with no
+land to bother about, and nothing to do for it at all."
+
+"On the contrary, it is they who have an excuse. They have no natural
+opening, perhaps--no plain call. You have both, and, as I said before,
+you have no _right_ to take holidays before you have earned them. You
+have got to learn your business first, and then do it. Give your eight
+hours' day like other people! Who are you that you should have all the
+cake of the world, and other people the crusts?"
+
+Frank walked to the window, and stood staring out, with his back turned
+to her. Her words stung and tingled; and he was too miserable to fight.
+
+"I shouldn't care whether it were cake or crusts," he said at last, in a
+low voice, turning round to her, "if only Betty would have me."
+
+"Do you think she is any the more likely to have you," said Marcella,
+unrelenting, "if you behave as a loafer and a runaway? Don't you suppose
+that Betty has good reasons for hesitating when she sees the difference
+between you--and--and other people?"
+
+Frank looked at her sombrely--a queer mixture of expressions on the
+face, in which the maturer man was already to be discerned at war with
+the powerful young animal.
+
+"I suppose you mean Lord Maxwell?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"You may take what I said," she said at last, looking into the fire, "as
+meaning anybody who pays honestly with work and brains for what society
+has given him--as far as he can pay, at any rate."
+
+"Now look here," said Frank, coming dolefully to sit down beside her;
+"don't slate me any more. I'm a bad lot, I know--well, an idle lot--I
+don't think I am a _bad_ lot--But it's no good your preaching to me
+while Betty's sticking pins into me like this. Now just let me tell you
+how she's been behaving."
+
+Marcella succumbed, and heard him. He glanced at her surreptitiously
+from time to time, but he could make nothing of her. She sat very quiet
+while he described the constant companionship between Aldous and Betty,
+and the evident designs of Miss Raeburn. Just as when he made his first
+confidences to her in London, he was vaguely conscious that he was doing
+a not very gentlemanly thing. But again, he was too unhappy to restrain
+himself, and he longed somehow to make an ally of her.
+
+"Well, I have only one thing to say," she said at last, with an odd
+nervous impatience--"go and ask her, and have done with it! She might
+have some respect for you then. No, I won't help you; but if you don't
+succeed, I'll pity you--I promise you that. And now you must go away."
+
+He went, feeling himself hardly treated, yet conscious nevertheless of a
+certain stirring of the moral waters which had both stimulus and balm in
+it.
+
+She, left behind, sat quiet in the old library for a few lonely minutes.
+The boy's plight made her alternately scornful and repentant of her
+sharpness to him. As to his report, one moment it plunged her in an
+anguish she dared not fathom; the next she was incredulous--could not
+simply make herself take the thing as real.
+
+But one thing had been real--that word from Aldous to her of
+"_marriage_"! The nostril dilated, the breast heaved, as she lost all
+thought of Frank in a resentful passion that could neither justify nor
+calm itself. It seemed still as though he had struck her. Yet she knew
+well that she had nothing to forgive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning she went down to the village meaning to satisfy herself on
+two or three points connected with the new cottages. On the way she
+knocked at the Rectory garden-door, in the hope of finding Mary Harden
+and persuading her to come with her.
+
+She had not seen much of Mary since their return. Still, she had had
+time to be painfully struck once or twice with the white and bloodless
+look of the Rector's sister, and with a certain patient silence about
+her which seemed to Marcella new. Was it the monotony of the life? or
+had both of them been overworking and underfeeding as usual? The Rector
+had received Marcella with his old gentle but rather distant kindness.
+Two years before he had felt strongly about many of her proceedings, and
+had expressed himself frankly enough, at least to Mary. Now he had put
+his former disapprovals out of his mind, and was only anxious to work
+smoothly with the owner of Mellor. He had a great respect for
+"dignities," and she, as far as the village was concerned, was to be his
+"dignity" henceforward. Moreover, he humbly and truly hoped that she
+might be able to enlighten him as to a good many modern conceptions and
+ideas about the poor, for which, absorbed as he was, either in
+almsgiving of the traditional type, or spiritual ministration, or
+sacramental theory, he had little time, and, if the truth were known,
+little affinity.
+
+In answer to her knock Marcella heard a faint "Come in" from the
+interior of the house. She walked into the dining-room, and found Mary
+sitting by the little table in tears. There were some letters before
+her, which she pushed away as Marcella entered, but she did not attempt
+to disguise her agitation.
+
+"What is it, dear? Tell me," said Marcella, sitting down beside her, and
+kissing one of the hands she held.
+
+And Mary told her. It was the story of her life--a simple tale of
+ordinary things, such as wring the quiet hearts and train the unnoticed
+saints of this world. In her first youth, when Charles Harden was for a
+time doing some divinity lecturing in his Oxford college, Mary had gone
+up to spend a year with him in lodgings. Their Sunday teas and other
+small festivities were frequented by her brother's friends, men of like
+type with himself, and most of them either clergymen or about to be
+ordained. Between one of them, a young fellow looking out for his first
+curacy, and Mary an attachment had sprung up, which Mary could not even
+now speak of. She hurried over it, with a trembling voice, to the
+tragedy beyond. Mr. Shelton got his curacy, went off to a parish in the
+Lincolnshire Fens, and there was talk of their being married in a year
+or so. But the exposure of a bitter winter's night, risked in the
+struggle across one of the bleakest flats of the district to carry the
+Sacrament to a dying parishioner, had brought on a peculiar and
+agonising form of neuralgia. And from this pain, so nobly earned, had
+sprung--oh! mystery of human fate!--a morphia-habit, with all that such
+a habit means for mind and body. It was discovered by the poor fellow's
+brother, who brought him up to London and tried to cure him. Meanwhile
+he himself had written to Mary to give her up. "I have no will left, and
+am no longer a man," he wrote to her. "It would be an outrage on my
+part, and a sin on yours, if we did not cancel our promise." Charles,
+who took a hard, ascetic view, held much the same language, and Mary
+submitted, heart-broken.
+
+Then came a gleam of hope. The brother's care and affection prevailed;
+there were rumours of great improvement, of a resumption of work. "Just
+two years ago, when you first came here, I was beginning to
+believe"--she turned away her head to hide the rise of tears--"that it
+might still come right." But after some six or eight months of clerical
+work in London fresh trouble developed, lung mischief showed itself, and
+the system, undermined by long and deep depression, seemed to capitulate
+at once.
+
+"He died last December, at Madeira," said Mary, quietly. "I saw him
+before he left England. We wrote to each other almost to the end. He was
+quite at peace. This letter here was from the chaplain at Madeira, who
+was kind to him, to tell me about his grave."
+
+That was all. It was the sort of story that somehow might have been
+expected to belong to Mary Harden--to her round, plaintive face, to her
+narrow, refined experience; and she told it in a way eminently
+characteristic of her modes of thinking, religious or social, with
+old-fashioned or conventional phrases which, whatever might be the case
+with other people, had lost none of their bloom or meaning for her.
+
+Marcella's face showed her sympathy. They talked for half an hour, and
+at the end of it Mary flung her arms round her companion's neck.
+
+"There!" she said, "now we must not talk any more about it. I am glad I
+told you. It was a comfort. And somehow--I don't mean to be unkind; but
+I couldn't have told you in the old days--it's wonderful how much better
+I like you now than I used to do, though perhaps we don't agree much
+better."
+
+Both laughed, though the eyes of both were full of tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently they were in the village together. As they neared the Hurds'
+old cottage, which was now empty and to be pulled down, a sudden look of
+disgust crossed Marcella's face.
+
+"Did I tell you my news of Minta Hurd?" she said.
+
+No; Mary had heard nothing. So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly
+news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi. Jim Hurd's
+widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky "professor of
+elocution," with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the
+floor beneath her in Brown's Buildings, and had been wont to come in of
+an evening and play comic songs to her and the children. Marcella was
+vehemently sure that he was a charlatan--that he got his living by a
+number of small dishonesties, that he had scented Minta's pension. But
+apart from the question whether he would make Minta a decent husband, or
+live upon her and beat her, was the fact itself of her re-marriage, in
+itself hideous to the girl.
+
+"_Marry_ him!" she said. "Marry any one! Isn't it incredible?"
+
+They were in front of the cottage. Marcella paused a moment and looked
+at it. She saw again in sharp vision the miserable woman fainting on the
+settle, the dwarf sitting, handcuffed, under the eye of his captors;
+she felt again the rush of that whirlwind of agony through which she had
+borne the wife's helpless soul in that awful dawn.
+
+And after that--exit!--with her "professor of elocution." It made the
+girl sick to think of. And Mary, out of a Puseyite dislike of second
+marriage, felt and expressed much the same repulsion.
+
+Well--Minta Hurd was far away, and if she had been there to defend
+herself her powers of expression would have been no match for theirs.
+Nor does youth understand such pleas as she might have urged.
+
+"Will Lord Maxwell continue the pension?" said Mary.
+
+Marcella stopped again, involuntarily.
+
+"So that was his doing?" she said. "I supposed as much."
+
+"You did not know?" cried Mary, in distress. "Oh! I believe I ought not
+to have said anything about it."
+
+"I always guessed it," said Marcella, shortly, and they walked on in
+silence.
+
+Presently they found themselves in front of Mrs. Jellison's very trim
+and pleasant cottage, which lay farther along the common, to the left of
+the road to the Court. There was an early pear-tree in blossom over the
+porch, and a swelling greenery of buds in the little garden.
+
+"Will you come in?" said Mary. "I should like to see Isabella Westall."
+
+Marcella started at the name.
+
+"How is she?" she asked.
+
+"Just the same. She has never been in her right mind since. But she is
+quite harmless and quiet."
+
+They found Mrs. Jellison on one side of the fire, with her daughter on
+the other, and the little six-year-old Johnnie playing between them.
+Mrs. Jellison was straw-plaiting, twisting the straws with amazing
+rapidity, her fingers stained with red from the dye of them. Isabella
+was, as usual, doing nothing. She stared when Marcella and Mary came in,
+but she took no other notice of them. Her powerful and tragic face had
+the look of something originally full of intention, from which spirit
+and meaning had long departed, leaving a fine but lifeless outline.
+Marcella had seen it last on the night of the execution, in ghastly
+apparition at Minta Hurd's window, when it might have been caught by
+some sculptor in quest of the secrets of violent expression, fixed in
+clay or marble, and labelled "Revenge," or "Passion."
+
+Its passionless emptiness now filled her with pity and horror. She sat
+down beside the widow and took her hand. Mrs. Westall allowed it for a
+moment, then drew her own away suddenly, and Marcella saw a curious and
+sinister contraction of the eyes.
+
+"Ah! yo never know how much Isabella unnerstan's, an' how much she
+don't," Mrs. Jellison was saying to Mary. "I can't allus make her out,
+but she don't give no trouble. An' as for that boy, he's a chirruper, he
+is. He gives 'em fine times at school, he do. Miss Barton, she ast him
+in class, Thursday, 'bout Ananias and Sappira. 'Johnnie,' says she,
+'whatever made 'em do sich a wicked thing?' 'Well, _I_ do'n' know,' says
+he; 'it was jus' their nassty good-for-nothink,' says he; 'but they was
+great sillies,' says he. Oh! he don't mean no harm!--lor' bless yer,
+the men is all born contrary, and they can't help themselves. Oh! thank
+yer, miss, my 'ealth is pretty tidy, though I 'ave been plagued this
+winter with a something they call the 'flenzy. I wor very bad! 'Yo go to
+bed, Mrs. Jellison,' says Dr. Sharpe, 'or yo'll know of it.' But I
+worn't goin' to be talked to by 'im. Why, I knowed 'im when he wor no
+'igher nor Johnnie. An' I kep' puddlin' along, an' one mornin' I wor
+fairly choked, an' I just crawled into that parlour, an' I took a sup o'
+brandy out o' the bottle"--she looked complacently at Mary, quite
+conscious that the Rector's sister must be listening to her with
+disapproving ears--"an', lor' bless yer, it cut the phlegm, it did, that
+very moment. My! I did cough. I drawed it up by the yard, I did--and I
+crep' back along the wall, and yo cud ha' knocked me down wi' one o' my
+own straws. But I've been better iver since, an' beginnin' to eat my
+vittles, too, though I'm never no great pecker--I ain't--not at no
+time."
+
+Mary managed to smother her emotions on the subject of the brandy, and
+the old woman chattered on, throwing out the news of the village in a
+series of humorous fragments, tinged in general with the lowest opinion
+of human nature.
+
+When the girls took leave of her, she said slily to Marcella:
+
+"An' 'ow about your plaitin', miss?--though I dessay I'm a bold 'un for
+astin'."
+
+Marcella coloured.
+
+"Well, I've got it to think about, Mrs. Jellison. We must have a meeting
+in the village and talk it over one of these days."
+
+The old woman nodded in a shrewd silence, and watched them depart.
+
+"Wull, I reckon Jimmy Gedge ull lasst my time," she said to herself with
+a chuckle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Mrs. Jellison had this small belief in the powers of the new mistress
+of Mellor over matters which, according to her, had been settled
+generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no
+mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return
+scanning everything about her--the slatternly girls plaiting on the
+doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various
+"publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to
+her--with a moody and passionate eye.
+
+"Mary!" she broke out as they neared the Rectory, "I shall be
+twenty-four directly. How much harm do you think I shall have done here
+by the time I am sixty-four?"
+
+Mary laughed at her, and tried to cheer her. But Marcella was in the
+depths of self-disgust.
+
+"What is wanted, really wanted," she said with intensity, "is not _my_
+help, but _their_ growth. How can I make them _take for
+themselves_--take, roughly and selfishly even, if they will only take!
+As for my giving, what relation has it to anything real or lasting?"
+
+Mary was scandalised.
+
+"I declare you are as bad as Mr. Craven," she said. "He told Charles
+yesterday that the curtseys of the old women in the village to him and
+Charles--women old enough to be their grandmothers--sickened him of the
+whole place, and that he should regard it as the chief object of his
+work here to make such things impossible in the future. Or perhaps
+you're still of Mr.--Mr. Wharton's opinion--you'll be expecting Charles
+and me to give up charity. But it's no good, my dear. We're not
+'advanced,' and we never shall be."
+
+At the mention of Wharton Marcella threw her proud head back; wave after
+wave of changing expression passed over the face.
+
+"I often remember the things Mr. Wharton said in this village," she said
+at last. "There was life and salt and power in many of them. It's not
+what he said, but what he was, that one wants to forget."
+
+They parted presently, and Marcella went heavily home. The rising of the
+spring, the breath of the April air, had never yet been sad and
+oppressive to her as they were to-day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"Oh! Miss Boyce, may I come in?"
+
+The voice was Frank Leven's. Marcella was sitting in the old library
+alone late on the following afternoon. Louis Craven, who was now her
+paid agent and adviser, had been with her, and she had accounts and
+estimates before her.
+
+"Come in," she said, startled a little by Frank's tone and manner, and
+looking at him interrogatively.
+
+Frank shut the heavy old door carefully behind him. Then, as he advanced
+to her she saw that his flushed face wore an expression unlike anything
+she had yet seen there--of mingled joy and fear.
+
+She drew back involuntarily.
+
+"Is there anything--anything wrong?"
+
+"No," he said impetuously, "no! But I have something to tell you, and I
+don't know how. I don't know whether I ought. I have run almost all the
+way from the Court."
+
+And, indeed, he could hardly get his breath. He took a stool she pushed
+to him, and tried to collect himself. She heard her heart beat as she
+waited for him to speak.
+
+"It's about Lord Maxwell," he said at last, huskily, turning his head
+away from her to the fire. "I've just had a long walk with him. Then he
+left me; he had no idea I came on here. But something drove me; I felt
+I must come, I must tell. Will you promise not to be angry with me--to
+believe that I've thought about it--that I'm doing it for the best?"
+
+He looked at her nervously.
+
+"If you wouldn't keep me waiting so long," she said faintly, while her
+cheeks and lips grew white.
+
+"Well,--I was mad this morning! Betty hasn't spoken to me since
+yesterday. She's been always about with him, and Miss Raeburn let me see
+once or twice last night that she thought I was in the way. I never
+slept a wink last night, and I kept out of their sight all the morning.
+Then, after lunch, I went up to him, and I asked him to come for a walk
+with me. He looked at me rather queerly--I suppose I was pretty savage.
+Then he said he'd come. And off we went, ever so far across the park.
+And I let out. I don't know what I said; I suppose I made a beast of
+myself. But anyway, I asked him to tell me what he meant, and to tell
+me, if he could, what Betty meant. I said I knew I was a cool hand, and
+he might turn me out of the house, and refuse to have anything more to
+do with me if he liked. But I was going to rack and ruin, and should
+never be any good till I knew where I stood--and Betty would never be
+serious--and, in short, was he in love with her himself? for any one
+could see what Miss Raeburn was thinking of."
+
+The boy gulped down something like a sob, and tried to give himself time
+to be coherent again. Marcella sat like a stone.
+
+"When he heard me say that--'in love with her yourself,' he stopped
+dead. I saw that I had made him angry. 'What right have you or any one
+else,' he said, very short, 'to ask me such a question?' Then I just
+lost my head, and said anything that came handy. I told him everybody
+talked about it--which, of course, was rubbish--and at last I said, 'Ask
+anybody; ask the Winterbournes, ask Miss Boyce--they all think it as
+much as I do.' '_Miss Boyce_!' he said--'Miss Boyce thinks I want to
+marry Betty Macdonald?' Then I didn't know what to say--for, of course,
+I knew I'd taken your name in vain; and he sat down on the grass beside
+a little stream there is in the park, and he didn't speak to me for a
+long time--I could see him throwing little stones into the water. And at
+last he called me. 'Frank!' he said; and I went up to him. And then--"
+
+The lad seemed to tremble all over. He bent forward and laid his hand on
+Marcella's knee, touching her cold ones.
+
+"And then he said, 'I can't understand yet, Frank, how you or anybody
+else can have mistaken my friendship for Betty Macdonald. At any rate, I
+know there's been no mistake on her part. And if you take my advice,
+you'll go and speak to her like a man, with all your heart, and see what
+she says. You don't deserve her yet, that I can tell you. As for me'--I
+can't describe the look of his face; I only know I wanted to go
+away--'you and I will be friends for many years, I hope, so perhaps you
+may just understand this, once for all. For me there never has been, and
+there never will be, but one woman in the world--to love. And you know,'
+he said after a bit, 'or you ought to know, very well, who that woman
+is.' And then he got up and walked away. He did not ask me to come, and
+I felt I dared not go after him. And then I lay and thought. I
+remembered being here; I thought of what I had said to you--of what I
+had fancied now and then about--about you. I felt myself a brute all
+round; for what right had I to come and tell you what he told me? And
+yet, there it was--I had to come. And if it was no good my coming, why,
+we needn't say anything about it ever, need we? But--but--just look
+here, Miss Boyce; if you--if you could begin over again, and make Aldous
+happy, then there'd be a good many other people happy too--I can tell
+you that."
+
+He could hardly speak plainly. Evidently there was on him an
+overmastering impulse of personal devotion, gratitude, remorse, which
+for the moment even eclipsed his young passion. It was but vaguely
+explained by anything he had said; it rested clearly on the whole of his
+afternoon's experience.
+
+But neither could Marcella speak, and her pallor began to alarm him.
+
+"I say!" he cried; "you're not angry with me?"
+
+She moved away from him, and with her shaking finger began to cut the
+pages of a book that lay open on the mantelpiece. The little mechanical
+action seemed gradually to restore her to self-control.
+
+"I don't think I can talk about it," she said at last, with an effort;
+"not now."
+
+"Oh! I know," said Frank, in penitence, looking at her black dress;
+"you've been upset, and had such a lot of trouble. But I--"
+
+She laid her hand on his shoulder. He thought he had never seen her so
+beautiful, pale as she was.
+
+"I'm not the least angry. I'll tell you so--another day. Now, are you
+going to Betty?"
+
+The young fellow sprang up, all his expression changing, answering to
+the stimulus of the word.
+
+"They'll be home directly, Miss Raeburn and Betty," he said steadily,
+buttoning his coat; "they'd gone out calling somewhere. Oh! she'll lead
+me a wretched life, will Betty, before she's done!"
+
+A charming little ghost of a smile crossed Marcella's white lips.
+
+"Probably Betty knows her business," she said; "if she's quite
+unmanageable, send her to me."
+
+In his general turmoil of spirits the boy caught her hand and kissed
+it--would have liked, indeed, to kiss her and all the world. But she
+laughed, and sent him away, and with a sly, lingering look at her he
+departed.
+
+She sank into her chair and never moved for long. The April sun was just
+sinking behind the cedars, and through the open south window of the
+library came little spring airs and scents of spring flowers. There was
+an endless twitter of birds, and beside her the soft chatter of the wood
+fire. An hour before, her mood had been at open war with the spring, and
+with all those impulses and yearnings in herself which answered to it.
+Now it seemed to her that a wonderful and buoyant life, akin to all the
+vast stir, the sweet revivals of Nature, was flooding her whole being.
+
+She gave herself up to it, in a trance interwoven with all the loveliest
+and deepest things she had ever felt--with her memory of Hallin, with
+her new gropings after God. Just as the light was going she got up
+hurriedly and went to her writing-table. She wrote a little note, sat
+over it a while, with her face hidden in her hands, then sealed,
+addressed, and stamped it. She went out herself to the hall to put it in
+the letter-box. For the rest of the evening she went about in a state of
+dream, overcome sometimes by rushes of joy, which yet had in them
+exquisite elements of pain; hungering for the passage of the hours, for
+sleep that might cancel some of them; picturing the road to the Court
+and Widrington, along which the old postman had by now carried her
+letter--the bands of moonlight and shade lying across it, the quiet of
+the budding woods, and the spot on the hillside where he had spoken to
+her in that glowing October. It must lie all night in a dull office--her
+letter; she was impatient and sorry for it. And when he got it, it would
+tell him nothing, though she thought it would rather surprise him. It
+was the merest formal request that he would, if he could, come and see
+her again the following morning on business.
+
+During the evening Mrs. Boyce lay on the sofa and read. It always still
+gave the daughter a certain shock of surprise when she saw the slight
+form resting in this way. In words Mrs. Boyce would allow nothing, and
+her calm composure had been unbroken from the moment of their return
+home, though it was not yet two months since her husband's death. In
+these days she read enormously, which again was a new trait--especially
+novels. She read each through rapidly, laid it down without a word of
+comment, and took up another. Once or twice, but very rarely, Marcella
+surprised her in absent meditation, her hand covering the page. From the
+hard, satiric brightness of her look on these occasions it seemed
+probable that she was speculating on the discrepancies between fiction
+and real life, and on the falsity of most literary sentiment.
+
+To-night Marcella sat almost silent--she was making a frock for a
+village child she had carried off from its mother, who was very ill--and
+Mrs. Boyce read. But as the clock approached ten, the time when they
+generally went upstairs, Marcella made a few uncertain movements, and
+finally got up, took a stool, and sat down beside the sofa.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later Marcella entered her own room. As she closed the door
+behind her she gave an involuntary sob, put down her light, and hurrying
+up to the bed, fell on her knees beside it and wept long. Yet her mother
+had not been unkind to her. Far from it. Mrs. Boyce had praised her--in
+few words, but with evident sincerity--for the courage that could, if
+necessary, put convention aside; had spoken of her own relief; had said
+pleasant things of Lord Maxwell; had bantered Marcella a little on her
+social schemes, and wished her the independence to stick to them.
+Finally, as they got up to go to bed, she kissed Marcella twice instead
+of once, and said:
+
+"Well, my dear, I shall not be in your way to-morrow morning; I promise
+you that."
+
+The speaker's satisfaction was plain; yet nothing could have been less
+maternal. The girl's heart, when she found herself alone, was very sore,
+and the depression of a past which had been so much of a failure, so
+lacking in any satisfied emotion and the sweet preludes of family
+affection, darkened for a while even the present and the future.
+
+After a time she got up, and leaving her room, went to sit in a passage
+outside it. It was the piece of wide upper corridor leading to the
+winding stairs she had descended on the night of the ball. It was one of
+the loneliest and oddest places in the house, for it communicated only
+with her room and the little staircase, which was hardly ever used. It
+was, indeed, a small room in itself, and was furnished with a few huge
+old chairs with moth-eaten frames and tattered seats. A flowery paper of
+last-century date sprawled over the walls, the carpet had many holes in
+it, and the shallow, traceried windows, set almost flush in the outer
+surface of the wall, were curtainless now, as they had been two years
+before.
+
+She drew one of the old chairs to a window, and softly opened it. There
+was a young moon, and many stars, seen uncertainly through the rush of
+April cloud. Every now and then a splash of rain moved the creepers and
+swept across the lawn, to be followed by a spell of growing and
+breathing silence. The scent of hyacinths and tulips mounted through the
+wet air. She could see a long ghostly line of primroses, from which rose
+the grey base of the Tudor front, checkered with a dim light and shade.
+Beyond the garden, with its vague forms of fountain and sun-dial, the
+cedars stood watching; the little church slept to her left.
+
+So, face to face with Nature, the old house, and the night, she took
+passionate counsel with herself. After to-night surely, she would be no
+more lonely! She was going for ever from her own keeping to that of
+another. For she never, from the moment she wrote her letter, had the
+smallest doubt as to what his answer to her would be; never the smallest
+dread that he would, even in the lightest passing impression, connect
+what she was going to do with any thought of blame or wonder. Her pride
+and fear were gone out of her; only, she dared not think of how he would
+look and speak when the moment came, because it made her sick and faint
+with feeling.
+
+How strange to imagine what, no doubt, would be said and thought about
+her return to him by the outside world! His great place in society, his
+wealth, would be the obvious solution of it for many--too obvious even
+to be debated. Looking back upon her thoughts of this night in after
+years, she could not remember that the practical certainty of such an
+interpretation had even given her a moment's pain. It was too remote
+from all her now familiar ways of thinking--and his. In her early Mellor
+days the enormous importance that her feverish youth attached to wealth
+and birth might have been seen in her very attacks upon them. Now all
+her standards were spiritualised. She had come to know what happiness
+and affection are possible in three rooms, or two, on twenty-eight
+shillings a week; and, on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous--a man
+of stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student's tastes, into the
+position of a great landowner--had shown her, in the case at least of
+one member of the rich class, how wealth may be a true moral burden and
+test, the source of half the difficulties and pains--of half the
+nobleness also--of a man's life. Not in mere wealth and poverty, she
+thought, but in things of quite another order--things of social sympathy
+and relation--alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions,
+by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man.
+
+Had they ever really formed a part of historical time, those eight
+months of their engagement? Looking back upon them, she saw herself
+moving about in them like a creature without eyes, worked, blindfold, by
+a crude inner mechanism that took no account really of impressions from
+without. Yet that passionate sympathy with the poor--that hatred of
+oppression? Even these seemed to her to-night the blind, spasmodic
+efforts of a mind that all through _saw_ nothing--mistook its own
+violences and self-wills for eternal right, and was but traitor to what
+should have been its own first loyalties, in seeking to save and reform.
+
+Was _true_ love now to deliver her from that sympathy, to deaden in her
+that hatred? Her whole soul cried out in denial. By daily life in
+natural relations with the poor, by a fruitful contact with fact, by the
+clash of opinion in London, by the influence of a noble friendship, by
+the education of awakening passion--what had once been mere tawdry and
+violent hearsay had passed into a true devotion, a true thirst for
+social good. She had ceased to take a system cut and dried from the
+Venturists, or any one else; she had ceased to think of whole classes
+of civilised society with abhorrence and contempt; and there had dawned
+in her that temper which is in truth implied in all the more majestic
+conceptions of the State--the temper that regards the main institutions
+of every great civilisation, whether it be property, or law, or
+religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, divine and sacred. For
+man has not been their sole artificer! Throughout there has been working
+with him "the spark that fires our clay."
+
+Yes!--but modification, progress, change, there must be, for us as for
+our fathers! Would marriage fetter her? It was not the least probable
+that he and she, with their differing temperaments, would think alike in
+the future, any more than in the past. She would always be for
+experiments, for risks, which his critical temper, his larger brain,
+would of themselves be slow to enter upon. Yet she knew well enough that
+in her hands they would become bearable and even welcome to him. And for
+himself, she thought with a craving, remorseful tenderness of that
+pessimist temper of his towards his own work and function that she knew
+so well. In old days it had merely seemed to her inadequate, if not
+hypocritical. She would have liked to drive the dart deeper, to make him
+still unhappier! Now, would not a wife's chief function be to reconcile
+him with himself and life, to cheer him forward on the lines of his own
+nature, to believe, understand, help?
+
+Yet always in the full liberty to make her own sacrifices, to realise
+her own dreamlands! She thought with mingled smiles and tears of her
+plans for this bit of earth that fate had brought under her hand; she
+pledged herself to every man, woman, and child on it so to live her life
+that each one of theirs should be the richer for it; she set out, so far
+as in her lay, to "choose equality." And beyond Mellor, in the great
+changing world of social speculation and endeavour, she prayed always
+for the open mind, the listening heart.
+
+"There is one conclusion, one cry, I always come back to at last," she
+remembered hearing Hallin say to a young Conservative with whom he had
+been having a long economic and social argument. "_Never resign
+yourself_!--that seems to be the main note of it. Say, if you
+will--believe, if you will, that human nature, being what it is, and
+what, so far as we can see, it always must be, the motives which work
+the present social and industrial system can never be largely
+superseded; that property and saving--luck, too!--struggle, success, and
+failure, must go on. That is one's intellectual conclusion; and one has
+a right to it--you and I are at one in it. But then--on the heels of it
+comes the moral imperative! 'Hold what you please about systems and
+movements, and fight for what you hold; only, as an individual--_never
+say--never think!_--that it is in the order of things, in the purpose of
+God, that one of these little ones--this Board-School child, this man
+honestly out of work, this woman "sweated" out of her life--should
+perish!' A contradiction, or a commonplace, you say? Well and good. The
+only truths that burn themselves into the conscience, that work
+themselves out through the slow and manifold processes of the personal
+will into a pattern of social improvement, are the contradictions and
+the commonplaces!"
+
+So here, in the dark, alone with the haunting, uplifting presences of
+"admiration, hope, and love," Marcella vowed, within the limits of her
+personal scope and power, never to give up the struggle for a nobler
+human fellowship, the lifelong toil to understand, the passionate effort
+to bring honour and independence and joy to those who had them not. But
+not alone; only, not alone! She had learnt something of the dark
+aspects, the crushing complexity of the world. She turned from them
+to-night, at last, with a natural human terror, to hide herself in her
+own passion, to make of love her guide and shelter. Her whole rich being
+was wrought to an intoxication of self-giving. Oh! let the night go
+faster! faster! and bring his step upon the road, her cry of repentance
+to his ear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I trust I am not late. Your clocks, I think, are ahead of ours. You
+said eleven?"
+
+Aldous advanced into the room with hand outstretched. He had been
+ushered into the drawing-room, somewhat to his surprise.
+
+Marcella came forward. She was in black as before, and pale, but there
+was a knot of pink anemones fastened at her throat, which, in the play
+they made with her face and hair, gave him a start of pleasure.
+
+"I wanted," she said, "to ask you again about those shares--how to
+manage the sale of them. Could you--could you give me the name of some
+one in the City you trust?"
+
+He was conscious of some astonishment.
+
+"Certainly," he said. "If you would rather not entrust it to Mr. French,
+I can give you the name of the firm my grandfather and I have always
+employed; or I could manage it for you if you would allow me. You have
+quite decided?"
+
+"Yes," she said mechanically,--"quite. And--and I think I could do it
+myself. Would you mind writing the address for me, and will you read
+what I have written there?"
+
+She pointed to the little writing-table and the writing materials upon
+it, then turned away to the window. He looked at her an instant with
+uneasy amazement.
+
+He walked up to the table, put down his hat and gloves beside it, and
+stooped to read what was written.
+
+_"It was in this room you told me I had done you a great wrong. But
+wrongdoers may be pardoned sometimes, if they ask it. Let me know by a
+sign, a look, if I may ask it. If not it would be kind to go away
+without a word."_
+
+She heard a cry. But she did not look up. She only knew that he had
+crossed the room, that his arms were round her, her head upon his
+breast.
+
+"Marcella!--wife!" was all he said, and that in a voice so low, so
+choked, that she could hardly hear it.
+
+He held her so for a minute or more, she weeping, his own eyes dim with
+tears, her cheek laid against the stormy beating of his heart.
+
+At last he raised her face, so that he could see it.
+
+"So this--this was what you had in your mind towards me, while I have
+been despairing--fighting with myself, walking in darkness. Oh, my
+darling! explain it. How can it be? Am I real? Is this face--these lips
+real?"--he kissed both, trembling. "Oh! when a man is raised thus--in a
+moment--from torture and hunger to full joy, there are no words--"
+
+His head sank on hers, and there was silence again, while he wrestled
+with himself.
+
+At last she looked up, smiling.
+
+"You are to please come over here," she said, and leading him by the
+hand, she took him to the other side of the room. "That is the chair you
+sat in that morning. Sit down!"
+
+He sat down, wondering, and before he could guess what she was going to
+do she had sunk on her knees beside him.
+
+"I am going to tell you," she said, "a hundred things I never told you
+before. You are to hear me confess; you are to give me penance; you are
+to say the hardest things possible to me. If you don't I shall distrust
+you."
+
+She smiled at him again through her tears. "Marcella," he cried in
+distress, trying to lift her, to rise himself, "you can't imagine that I
+should let _you_ kneel to _me_!"
+
+"You must," she said steadily; "well, if it will make you happier, I
+will take a stool and sit by you. But you are there above me--I am at
+your feet--it is the same chair, and you shall not move"--she stooped in
+a hasty passion, as though atoning for her "shall," and kissed his
+hand--"till I have said it all--every word!"
+
+So she began it--her long confession, from the earliest days. He winced
+often--she never wavered. She carried through the sharpest analysis of
+her whole mind with regard to him; of her relations to him and Wharton
+in the old days; of the disloyalty and lightness with which she had
+treated the bond, that yet she had never, till quite the end, thought
+seriously of breaking; of her selfish indifference to, even contempt
+for, his life, his interests, his ideals; of her calm forecasts of a
+married state in which she was always to take the lead and always to be
+in the right--then of the real misery and struggle of the Hurd trial.
+
+"That was my first true _experience_," she said; "it made me wild and
+hard, but it burnt, it purified. I began to live. Then came the day
+when--when we parted--the time in hospital--the nursing--the evening on
+the terrace. I had been thinking of you--because remorse made me think
+of you--solitude--Mr. Hallin--everything. I wanted you to be kind to me,
+to behave as though you had forgotten everything, because it would have
+made me comfortable and happy; or I thought it would. And then, that
+night you wouldn't be kind, you wouldn't forget--instead, you made me
+pay my penalty."
+
+She stared at him an instant, her dark brows drawn together, struggling
+to keep her tears back, yet lightening from moment to moment into a
+divine look of happiness. He tried to take possession of her, to stop
+her, to silence all this self-condemnation on his breast. But she would
+not have it; she held him away from her.
+
+"That night, though I walked up and down the terrace with Mr. Wharton
+afterwards, and tried to fancy myself in love with him--that night, for
+the first time, I began to love you! It was mean and miserable, wasn't
+it, not to be able to appreciate the gift, only to feel when it was
+taken away? It was like being good when one is punished, because one
+must--"
+
+She laid down her head against his chair with a long sigh. He could bear
+it no longer. He lifted her in his arms, talking to her passionately of
+the feelings which had been the counterpart to hers, the longings,
+jealousies, renunciations--above all, the agony of that moment at the
+Mastertons' party.
+
+"Hallin was the only person who understood," he said; "he knew all the
+time that I should love you to my grave. I could talk to him."
+
+She gave a little sob of joy, and pushing herself away from him an
+instant, she laid a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"I told him," she said--"I told him, that night he was dying."
+
+He looked at her with an emotion too deep even for caresses.
+
+"He never spoke--coherently--after you left him. At the end he motioned
+to me, but there were no words. If I could possibly love you more, it
+would be because you gave him that joy."
+
+He held her hand, and there was silence. Hallin stood beside them,
+living and present again in the life of their hearts.
+
+Then, little by little, delight and youth and love stole again upon
+their senses.
+
+"Do you suppose," he exclaimed, "that I yet understand in the least how
+it is that I am here, in this chair, with you beside me? You have told
+me much ancient history!--but all that truly concerns me this morning
+lies in the dark. The last time I saw you, you were standing at the
+garden-door, with a look which made me say to myself that I was the same
+blunderer I had always been, and had far best keep away. Bridge me the
+gap, please, between that hell and this heaven!"
+
+She held her head high, and changed her look of softness for a frown.
+
+"You had spoken of '_marriage!_'" she said. "Marriage in the abstract,
+with a big _M_. You did it in the tone of my guardian giving me away.
+Could I be expected to stand that?"
+
+He laughed. The joy in the sound almost hurt her.
+
+"So one's few virtues smite one," he said as he captured her hand again.
+"Will you acknowledge that I played my part well? I thought to myself,
+in the worst of tempers, as I drove away, that I could hardly have been
+more official. But all this is evasion. What I desire to know,
+categorically, is, what made you write that letter to me last night,
+after--after the day before?"
+
+She sat with her chin on her hand, a smile dancing.
+
+"Whom did you walk with yesterday afternoon?" she said slowly.
+
+He looked bewildered.
+
+"There!" she cried, with a sudden wild gesture; "when I have told you it
+will undo it all. Oh! if Frank had never said a word to me; if I had had
+no excuse, no assurance, nothing to go upon, had just called to you in
+the dark, as it were, there would be some generosity, some atonement in
+that! Now you will think I waited to be meanly sure, instead of--"
+
+She dropped her dark head upon his hand again with an abandonment which
+unnerved him, which he had almost to brace himself against.
+
+"So it was Frank," he said--"_Frank!_ Two hours ago, from my window, I
+saw him and Betty down by the river in the park. They were supposed to
+be fishing. As far as I could see they were sifting or walking hand in
+hand, in the face of day and the keepers. I prepared wise things to say
+to them. None of them will be said now, or listened to. As Frank's
+mentor I am undone."
+
+He held her, looking at her intently.
+
+"Shall I tell you," he asked, in a lower voice--"shall I show you
+something--something that I had on my heart as I was walking here?"
+
+He slipped his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and drew out a
+little plain black leather case. When he opened it she saw that it
+contained a pen-and-ink sketch of herself that had been done one evening
+by a young artist staying at the Court, and--a bunch of traveller's joy.
+
+She gazed at it with a mixture of happiness and pain. It reminded her of
+cold and selfish thoughts, and set them in relief against his constancy.
+But she had given away all rights--even the right to hate herself.
+Piteously, childishly, with seeking eyes, she held out her hand to him,
+as though mutely asking him for the answer to her outpouring--the last
+word of it all. He caught her whisper.
+
+"Forgive?" he said to her, scorning her for the first and only time in
+their history. "Does a man _forgive_ the hand that sets him free, the
+voice that recreates him? Choose some better word--my wife!"
+
+
+
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