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"If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that could live an hour?"
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 anyone 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 stornmy 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.
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 man-
aged 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 inde-
pendence 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
with-
out 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.
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
housework."
"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
watertight 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
con-
tact 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. Mar-
cella, 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 dogs 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 everyone 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 hinm, 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.
Har-
den 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 neighbourood 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 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 of 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 pane-
gyric. 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.
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 warnmly. 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 in-
evitably 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 those 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 glorifed 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 a 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 to make him alter his mind?" she said, not
ungratefully, but still with a touch of sarcasm in her tones. "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 village, 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 set 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 biterness 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
uassert 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."
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--represent-
ing 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 woodcutter'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, a 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," discus-
sions 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, a 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 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 inquire into
them in detail. As to any real restoration of cordiality between the owner
of Mellor and his father's old friend and connections, that of course
was not to be looked for; but there should be decent social recognition,
and--in the case 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.
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 Græco-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 demande 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 word 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
peas-
ant, 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
resentmant 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
fêted 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 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 acquaintare 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 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.
Alto-
gether 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 metings, 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 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 anyone 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 imnpressions, 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 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. Tonight 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.
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 Winterborne," 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 unmistakeable; 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
after-
noon. 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 differnt 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 everyone 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 to
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; so 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 none 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 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 "æsthetic" 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 sbould 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 something without
claiming more--and more than he can conceivably or possibly get.
Startled and pleased at first by 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 other men, soonest of all.
He wished he had not been taken ny 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 fender
stool, 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 some one--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 cotnty!"
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!
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 tomorrow. 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 pereemptory 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
helpin 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.
Jellson," 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 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 calmy. "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 reticences 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 the
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 see in 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 as 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 bon 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 ye, 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 hersaelf 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 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 tittletattles 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 then 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, accrding to their own ideas, but bearing so little
ill-will; amusing themselves and 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!
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, 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 anyone 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 crying 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. The 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. Something 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 dursen'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 nothin' 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 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, make
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, an 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 afeard--'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 chairmaker 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 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 tonight 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 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, eldely 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!
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 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 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
discriminat-
ing, 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 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 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 mementoes 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 newcomer,
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 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 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 again
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 be still 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
tête-à-tête.
"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
Eng-
land 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 acqintance,
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 everyone 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 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
countryside 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--we who have every-
thing, 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
thou-
sands 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, 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 Marcell, 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
Max-
well, 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?"
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 he 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, 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 had 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 tomorrow.
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 tumbledown.
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 the 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 galiery, 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 predominated 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 fêted 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
syddenly, 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 down stairs.
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 somethidng 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
armn 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
granddaughter will always find friends in this house."
Lord Maxwell would have been very much astonished to be 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--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."
"Whoever 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 tbe
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.
"A woman has enough to govern wisely
Her own demeanours, passions and divisions."
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. "Ee'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 downthe 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.
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 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
sup-
pose 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 himself: 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 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 anyone 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 chldish; 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 Aidous."
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
adrmiring 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?"
"Right!" 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--ifever 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 hers 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 anyone 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.
"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 sublety 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 movemnent,
anticipating every want! After a while Hallin found himself half-inclined
to Mr. Boyce's view, that men of Raeburn's 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
à 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 mnany 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 primitve 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 be 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 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,
stam-
mering. "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 armchair 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 Gairsley. 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 eye, 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
tête-à-tête.
"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
preeminence 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.
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 rebuilt 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
bought 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 booksellers
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 toilworn 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; though 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 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 store
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 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 counterbalanced by
that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every petty 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 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 it 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 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."