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BY
COPYRIGHT, 1894
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped March, 1894. Reprinted April
twice, and May, June, July, August three times, 1894.
Norwood Press: J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick
& Smith.
Boston Mass., U.S.A.
After the inquiry before the magistrates--conducted, as she
passionately thought, with the most marked animus on the part of the bench
and police towards the prisoners--had resulted in the committal for
trial of Hurd and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Raeburn a
letter which hurt him sorely.
"Don't come over to see me for a little while," it ran.
"My mind is all given over to feelings which must seem to
you--which, I know, do seem to you--unreasonable and unjust. But
they are my life, and when they are criticised, or even treated coldly, I
cannot bear it. When you are not there to argue with, I can believe, most
sincerely, that you have a right to see this matter as you do, and that it
is monstrous of me to expect you to yield to me entirely in a thing that
concerns your sense of public duty. But don't come now--not
before the trial. I will appeal to you it I think you can help me. I
know you will if you
can. Mr. Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters, which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of the evidence."
Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and
difficulty.
"I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a
burden to you. You can hardly imagine that it is not grievous to me to
think of any trouble of yours as being made worse by my being with you. But
still I understand. One thing only I ask--that you should not imagine
the difference between us greater than it is. The two letters you enclose
have given me much to ponder. If only the course of the trial enables me
with an honest heart to throw myself into your crusade of mercy, with what
joy shall I come and ask you to lead me, and to forgive my own slower sense
and pity!
"I should like you to know that Hallin is very much inclined to
agree with you, to think that the whole affair was a
'scrimmage,' and that Hurd at least ought to be reprieved. He
would have come to talk it over with you himself, but that Clarke forbids
him anything that interests or excites him for the present. He has been
very ill and suffering for the last fortnight, and, as you know, when these
attacks come on we try to keep everything from him that could pain or
agitate him. But I see that this whole affair is very much on his mind, in
spite of my efforts.
"... Oh, my darling! I am writing late at night, with your letter
open before me and your picture close to my hand. So many things rise in my
mind to say
to you. There will come a time--there must!--when I may pour them all out. Meanwhile, amid all jars and frets, remember this, that I have loved you better each day since first we met.
"I will not come to Mellor then for a little while. My election,
little heart as I have for it will fill up the week. The nomination-day is
fixed for Thursday and the polling for Monday."
Marcella read the letter with a confusion of feeling so great as to be
in itself monstrous and demoralising. Was she never to be simple, to see
her way clearly again?
As for him, as he rode about the lanes and beechwoods in the days that
followed, alone often with that nature for which all such temperaments as
Aldous Raeburn's have so secret and so observant an affection, he was
perpetually occupied with this difficulty which had arisen between Marcella
and himself, turning it over and over in the quiet of the morning, before
the turmoil of the day began.
He had followed the whole case before the magistrates with the most
scrupulous care. And since then, he had twice run across the Widrington
solicitor for the defence, who was now instructing Wharton. This man,
although a strong Radical, and employed generally by hlis own side, saw no
objection at all to letting Lord Maxwell's heir and representative
understand how in his opinion the case was going. Aldous Raeburn was a
person whom everybody respected; confidences were safe with him; and he was
himself deeply interested in the affair. The Raeburns being the Raeburns,
with all that that implied for smaller
people in Brookshire, little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall's employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was still his, Burridge's opinion, that everything that could be advanced would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can always be got up in a game-preserving case.
"And is as a rule political and anti-landlord," thought
Aldous, on one of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down. He
foresaw exactly what would happen. As he envisaged the immediate future, he
saw one figure as the centre of it--not Marcella, but Wharton! Wharton
was defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for
his own support and his grandfather's, through Marcella. To Wharton
would belong not only the popular kudos of
the matter, but much more, and above all, Marcella's gratitude.
Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the
road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had asked
Marcella to be his wife. The pale February sunlight was spreading from his
left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant shoulders of
the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk plain. Sounds of
labour came from thle distant fields; sounds of winter birds from the
branches round him. The place, the time, raised in him all the intensest
powers of con-
sciousness. He saw himself as the man standing midway in everything--speculation, politics, sympathies--as the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world. Wharton! He knew him--had read him long ago--read him afresh of late. Raeburn's lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover. Here was he, banished from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and sympathies, busily forging a link--
"It shall be broken!" said Raeburn to himself
with a sudden fierce concentration of will. "So much I will
claim--and enforce."
But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy prudence. He gathered
himself together with a long breath, and went his way.
For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in
this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The
moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane
and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that
they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like
avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates
crime" left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the
whole rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had
suffered all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that
he, more than other men, was called to be his
brother's keeper. It was natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.
But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line
between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life and
action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers destroyed
were his servants, or practically his servants, made no difference to him
whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the circumnstances had
been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to be a murderer, no
employer's interest, no landlord's desire for vengence, would
have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as he emphatically
did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind more deliberate
and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would have held it a piece
of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and compunctions as to the
rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere with a duty to justice
and society.
Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and
compunctions.
Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was
conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of trouble
of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment.
Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal
humility, and interfused with all-determining all--elements of
judgment, subtleties,
prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and distorted; none the less, reality wins the day. So Hallin read it.
Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a
bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with, and
spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings,
committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either man
to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything outside the
clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of intense and
monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a tiny cottage,
hanging over sickbeds, and thrilling to each pulse of anguish as it beat in
the miserable beings she tended.
The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and
jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after Easter
without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in village and
county. And when the reason was known--that it was because Miss Boyce
had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that until the whole
affair was over, and the men either executed or reprieved, she could spare
no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there was curiously little
sympathy with Marcella.
Most of her own class thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.
"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster
Raeburn, she can't," said old Patton, delivering himself as he
sat leaning on his stick at his open door, while his wife and another woman
or two chattered inside. "Not what I'd call lover-y. She
don't want to run in harness, she don't, no sooner than she need.
She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."
"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin',"
said his wife, with her gentle sigh, "to hear summat o' that new
straw-plaitin' she talk about. But nary a word. They do say as
it's give up althegither."
"No, she's took up wi' nursin' Minta
Hurd--wonderful took up," said another woman. "They do say
as Ann Mullins can't abear her. When she's there nobody can open
their mouth. When that kind o' thing happens in the fambly it's
had enoof without havin' a lady trailin' about you all day long,
so that you have to be mindin' yersel', an' thinkin'
about givin' her a cheer, an' the like."
One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella,
coming from the Hurds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going
home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.
Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her
relations, mainly, to do her justice,
from fear lest she might somehow hurt or offend them. She had been to see Charlie Dynes's mother, but she had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary Harden to the keeper's widow.
Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella
came up with her.
"Oh, she's puddlin' along," she said
in answer to Marcella's inquiry, using a word very familiar in the
village. "She'll not do herself a mischief while there's
Nurse Ellen an' me to watch her like a pair o' cats. She's
dreadful upset, is Isabella--shouldn't ha' thought it of
her. That fust day"--a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy
face--"no, I'm not a-goin' to think about that fust
day, I'm not, 'tain't a ha'porth o' good,"
she added resolutely; "but she was all right when they'd let her
get 'im 'ome, and wash an' settle 'im, an'
put'im comfortable like in his coffin. He wor a big man, miss, when he
wor laid out! Searle, as made the coffin, told her as ee 'adn't
made one such an extry size since old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen
year ago. Ee'd soon a done for Jim Hurd if it 'ad been fists
o' both sides. But guns is things as yer can't reckon
on."
"Why didn't he let Hurd alone," said Marcella, sadly,
"and prosecute him next day? It's attacking men when their blood
is up that brings these awful things about."
"Wal, I don't see that," said Mrs. Jellison,
pugnaciously; "he wor paid to do't--an' he had the law
on his side. 'Ow 's she?" she said, lowering her voice and
jerking her thumb in the direction of the Hurds' cottage.
"She's very ill," replied Marcella, with a contraction
of the brow. "Dr. Clarke says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't."
"They're a-goin' to try 'im Thursday?" said
Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly.
"Yes."
"An' Muster Wharton be a-goin' to defend 'im.
Muster Wharton may be cliver, ee may--they do say as ee can see the
grass growin', ee's that knowin'-but ee'll not get Jim
Hurd off; there's nobody in the village as b'lieves for a moment
as 'ow he will. They'll best 'im. Lor' bless yer,
they'll best 'im. I was a-sayin' it to Isabella this
afternoon--ee'll not save 'is neck, don't you be
afeared."
Marcella drew herself up with a shiver of repulsion.
"Will it mend your daughter's grief to see another
woman's heart broken? Don't you suppose it might bring her some
comfort, Mrs. Jellison, if she were to try and forgive that poor wretch?
She might remember that her husband gave himn provocation, and that anyway,
if his life is spared, his punishment and their misery will be heavy
enough!"
"Oh, lor' no!" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly.
"She don't want to be forgivin' of 'im. Mr. Harden ee
come talkin' to 'er, but she isn't one o' that sort,
isn't Isabella. I'm sartin sure she'll be better in
'erself when they've put 'im out o' the way. It makes
her all ov a fever to think of Muster Wharton gettin' 'im off.
I don't bear Jim Hurd no pertickler malice. Isabella may
talk herself black i' the face, but she and Johnnie'll have to
come 'ome and live along o' me, whatever she may say. She
can't stay in that cottage, cos they'll be wantin' it for
another keeper.
Lord Maxwell ee's givin' her a fine pension, my word ee is! an' says ee'll look after Johnnie. And what with my bit airnins--we'll,do, yer know, miss-we'll do!"
The old woman looked up with a nod, her green eyes sparkling with the
queer inhuman light that belonged to them.
Marcella could not bring herself to say good-night to her, and was
hurrying on without a word, when Mrs. Jellison stopped her.
"An' 'ow about that straw-plaitin', miss?"
she said slyly.
"I have had to put it on one side for a bit," said Marcella,
coldly, hating the woman's society. "I have had my hands full
and Lady Winterbourne has been away, but we shall, of course, take it up
again later."
She walked away quickly, and Mrs. Jellison hobbled after her, grinning
to herself every now and then as she caught the straight, tall figure
against the red evening sky.
"I'll go in ter town termorrer," she thought,
"an' have a crack wi' Jimmy Gedge; ee
needn't be afeard for 'is livin'. An' them great fules
as ha' bin runnin' in a string arter 'er, an'
cacklin' about their eighteenpence a score, as I've told 'em
times, I'll eat my apron the fust week as iver they get it. I
don't hold wi' ladies--no, nor passons neither--not
when it comes to meddlin' wi' your wittles, an'
dictatin' to yer about forgivin' them as ha' got the better
ov yer. That young lady there, what do she matter? That sort's allus
gaddin' about? What'll she keer about us when
she's got 'er fine husband? Here o' Saturday, gone o' Monday--that's what she is. Now Jimmy Gedge, yer kin allus count on 'im. Thirty-six year ee ha' set there in that 'ere shop, and I guess ee'll set there till they call 'im ter kingdom come. Ee's a cheatin', sweatin', greedy old skinflint is Jimmy Gedge; but when yer wants 'im yer kin find 'im."
Marcella hurried home, she was expecting a letter from Wharton, the
third within a week. She had not set eyes on him since they had met that
first morning in the drive, and it was plain to her that he was as
unwilling as she was that there should be any meeting between them. Since
the moment of his taking up the case, in spite of the pressure of
innumerable engageitents, he had found time to send her, almost daily,
sheets covered with his small even writing, in which every detail and
prospect of the legal situation, so far as it concerned James Hurd, were
noted and criticised with a shrewdness and fulness which never wavered, and
never lost for a moment the professional note.
"Dear Miss Boyce"--the letters began--leading up
to a "Yours faithfully," which Marcella read as carefully as
the rest. Often, as she turned them over, she asked herself whether that
scene in the library had not been a mere delusion of the brain, whether the
man whose wild words and act had burnt themselves into her life could
possibly be writing her these letters, in this key, without a reference,
without an allusion. Every day, as she opened them, she looked them through
quietly with a shaking pulse; every day she found herself proudly able to
hand them on to her
mother, with the satisfaction of one who has nothing to conceal, whatever the rest of the world may suspect. He was certainly doing his best to replace their friendship on that level of high comradeship in ideas and causes which, as she told herself, it had once occupied. His own wanton aggression and her weakness had toppled it down thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!
Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one
long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted
none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which she
had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs. Hurd,
with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anæmic and
consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony, peopled
by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with the
white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would
rouse her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and
body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to
this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity in
it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards all
the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and sustenance, the
indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and gloried
accordlingly. To be cut off now from all ministration,
all comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken his neck--and buried him"--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin' capital" for him; hut she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him; the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a kind of animial lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still survived. But it made her life faint within her to talk of the murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the
usual peasant's realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence. When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once, and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free heaven.
As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the
doctor said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow,
wasted to an infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange
blue eyes, but always patient, always struggling to say his painful
"thank you" when she fed him with some of the fruit constantly
sent her from Maxwell Court. Everything that was said about his father he
took in and understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost
divided from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or
his state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature
was strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.
After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of
the February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole
upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the
swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and
out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face
kept the
angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison. More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its significant black and white, but it was older--a woman spoke from it. Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease; she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or God? She would hardly let herself think of Aldous--though she must think of him by-and-by! He and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day, stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous would not help her--or not with any help worth having--in consoling this misery--binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a crime against him to confess--but she felt herself his superior none the less. If he cast her off--why then surely they would be quits, quits for good and all.
As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled
cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.
Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor
than they had been, and her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door William touched his cap to her.
"Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss."
She stopped sharply.
"Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?"
"In the drawing-room, miss."
She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.
Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent air
Marcella knew so well.
When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands,
then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business
errand and has no time to waste.
"I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of
spare hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going.
You understand that the case comes on at the assizes next
Thursday?"
Marcella assented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the
fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made
Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her--but
it was the only sign.
"I should like to warn you," he said gravely, "that I
entertain no hope whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best,
but the verdict will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure
to take a severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I
believe it to be--extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the
judge, according to what I hear,
will probably be against us. The prosecution have got together extremely strong evidence--as to Hurd's long connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness--as to his repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends were interrupted--and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it."
He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition
and at some length; then he paused.
"This being so," he resumed, "the question is, what
can be done? There must be a petition. Amongst my own party I shall be, of
course, able to do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without
some at least of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one
word--do you imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell
to sign?"
Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.
"I will try," she said at last, with deliberation.
"Then"--he took up his gloves--"there may be
a chance for us. If you cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord
Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can be secured, others will easily follow. Their
names--especially under all the circumstances--will carry a
peculiar weight. I may say everything, in the first instance--the
weight, the first effect of the petition--depends on them. Well, then,
I leave it in your hands. No time should be lost after the sentence. As to
the grounds of our plea, I shall, of course, lay them down in court to the
best of my ability."
"I shall be there," she interrupted.
He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no
comment.
"Well, then," he restumed after a pause, "I need say
no more for the present. How is the wife?"
She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment
passed between them.
"And your election?" said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him
with hostile eyes, as he got up to take leave.
"To-morrow!" He threw up his hands with a little gesture of
impatience. "That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the
way, whatever happens. I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can
carry me. Good-bye, Miss Boyce."
Marcella went slowly upstairs. The scene which had just passed was
unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering. Then the sound of the
front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature. The first
sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness. The next--her
mind threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, "Can I, by
any means, get my way with Aldous?"
The deep-pitched words fell slowly on Marcella's ears, as she sat
leaning forward in the gallery of the Widrington Assize Court. Women were
sobbing beside and behind her. Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon
against her sister-in-law, her face buried in Ann's black shawl. For
an instant after Hurd's death sentence had been spoken Marcella's
nerves ceased to throb--the long exhaustion of feeling stopped. The
harsh light and shade of the ill-lit room; the gas-lamps in front of the
judge, blanching the ranged faces of the jury; the long table of reporters
below, some writing, but most looking intently towards the dock; the figure
of Wharton opposite, in his barrister's gown and wig--that face
of his, so small, nervous, delicate--the frowning eyebrows a dark bar
under the white of the wig--his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon
the judge; the heads and attitudes of the condemned men, especially the
form of a fair-haired youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who
stood a little in front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his
dwarf's stature--these things Marcella saw indeed; for years
after she could have described them point by point; but for some seconds or
minutes her eyes stared at them without
conscious reaction of the mind on the immediate spectacle.
In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting
there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the stream
of impressions and images. The crushing accumulation of hostile
evidence--witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning
weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence--Wharton's
irritation under it--the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his
cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the personal
success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical accomplishment of
the manner, as one wrestling before his equals--nothing left here of
the garrulous vigour and brutality of the labourers'
meeting!--the masterly use of all that could avail, the few quiet
words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by implication to
the larger ethical sense of the community,--all this she thought of
with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous voice
rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity were alike
weary; the brain asserted itself.
The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand;
and during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had
been largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the
gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for
East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's
employer, sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised
not only Marcella Boyce,
but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's murderer.
On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh
coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up
sternly--"I cannot conceive why men and women--women
especially--should come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but
if I hear another laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose
whole conscious nature was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw
Aldous flush and shrink as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the
court, she caught the eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county
magistrate. At the judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where
she and Aldous sat; then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly
looked away again. She perfectly--passionately--understood that
Brookshire was very sorry for Aldous Raeburn that day.
The death sentences--three in number--were over. The judge was
a very ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries
with it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on
voice and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could
be felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women
broke from the gallery.
"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed,
amid stifled sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly
alive to everything around it.
The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly
pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about
face towards
a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, stopped an instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery. Hurd also turned irresolutely.
"Look!" exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting
woman beside her, "he's goin'."
Marcella bent forward. She, rather than the wife, caught the last look
on his large dwarf's face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under
the gas.
Aldous touched her softly on the arm.
"Yes," she said quickly, "yes, we must get her out.
Ann, can you lift her?"
Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman: Ann Mulllins held her on
the other. Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her
long black cloak. The gallery made way for them; every one looked and
whispered till they had passed. Below, at the foot of the stairs, they
found themselves in a passage crowded with people--lawyers, witnesses,
officials, mixed with the populace. Again a road was opened for Aldous and
his charges.
"This way, Mr. Raeburn," said a policeman, with alacrity.
"Stand back, please! Is your carriage there, sir?"
"Let Ann Mullins take her--put them into the cab--I want
to speak to Mr. Wharton," said Marcella in Aldous's ear.
"Get me a cab at once," he said to the policeman, "and
tell my carriage to wait."
"Miss Boyce!"
Marcella turned hastily and saw Wharton beside
her. Aldous also saw him, and the two men interchanged a few words.
"There is a private room close by," said Wharton, "I
am to take you there, and Mr. Raeburn will join us at once."
He led her along a corridor, and opened a door to the left. They entered
a small dingy room, looking through a begrimed window on a courtyard. The
gas was lit, and the table was strewn with papers.
"Never, never more beautiful!" flashed through
Wharton's mind, "with that knit, strenuous brow--that
tragic scorn for a base world--that royal gait--"
Aloud he said:
"I have done my best privately among the people I can get at, and
I thought, before I go up to town to-night--you know Parliament meets
on Monday?--I would show you what I had been able to do, and ask you
to take charge of a copy of the petition." He pointed to a long
envelope lying on the table. "I have drafted it myself--I think
it puts all the points we can possibly urge--but as to the
names--"
He took out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
"It won't do," he said, looking down at it, and shaking
his head. "As I said to you, it is so far political merely. There is
a very strong Liberal and Radical feeling getting up about the case. But
that won't carry us far. This petition with these names is a
demonstration against game preserving and keepers' tyranny. What we
want is the co-operation of a neighbourhood, especially of its
leading citizens.
However, I explained all this to you--there is no need to discuss it. Will you look at the list?"
Still holding it, he ran his finger over it, commenting here and there.
She stood beside him; the sleeve of his gown brushed her black cloak; and
under his perfect composure there beat a wild exultation in his
power--withlout any apology, any forgiveness--to hold her there,
alone with him, listening--her proud head stooped to his--her eye
following his with this effort of anxious attention.
She made a few hurried remarks on the names, but her knowledge of the
county was naturally not very serviceable. He folded up the paper and put
it back.
"I think we understand," he said. "You will do what
you can in the only quarter"--he spoke slowly--"that
can really aid, and you will communicate with me at the House of Commons? I
shall do what I can, of course, when the moment comes, in Parliament, and
meanwhile I shall start the matter in the Press--our best hope. The
Radical papers are already taking it up."
There was a sound of steps in the passage outside. A policeman opened
the door, and Aldous Raeburn entered. His quick look ran over the two
figures standing beside the table.
"I had some difficulty in finding a cab," he explained,
"and we had to get some brandy; but she came round, and we got her
off. I sent one of our men with her. The carriage is here."
He spoke--to Marcella--with some formality. He was very pale,
but there was both authority and tension in his bearing.
"I have been consulting with Miss Boyce," said Wharton, with
equal distance of manner, "as to the petition we are sending up to
the Home Office."
Aldous made no reply.
"One word, Miss Boyce,"--Wharton quietly turned to her.
"May I ask you to read the petition carefully, before you attempt to
do anything with it? It lays stress on the only doubt that can
reasonably be felt after the evidence, and after the judge's summing
up. That particular doubt I hold to be entirely untouched by the trial; but
it requires careful stating--the issues may easily be
confused."
"Will you come?" said Aldous to Marcella. What she chose to
think the forced patience of his tone exasperated her.
"I will do everything I can," she said in a low, distinct
voice to Wharton. "Good-bye."
She held out her hand. To both the moment was one of infinite meaning;
to her, in her high spiritual excitement, a sacrament of pardon and
gratitude--expressed once for all--by this touch--in Aldous
Raeburn's presence.
The two men nodded to each other. Wharton was already busy, putting his
papers together.
"We shall meet next week, I suppose, in the House?" said
Wharton, casually. "Good-night."
"Will you take me to the Court?" said Marcella to Aldous,
directly the door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping
crowd that almost filled the little market-place of Widrington, the horses
moved off. "I told mamma, that, if I did
not come home, I should be with you, and that I should ask you to send me back from the Court tonight."
She still held the packet Wharton had given her in her hand. As though
for air, she had thrown back the black gauze veil she had worn all through
the trial, and, as they passed through the lights of the town, Aldous could
see in her face the signs--the plain, startling signs--of the
effect of these weeks upon her. Pale, exhausted, yet showing in every
movement the nervous excitement which was driving her on--his heart
sank as he looked at her--foreseeing what was to come.
As soon as the main street had been left behind, he put his head out of
the window, and gave the coachman, who had been told to go to Mellor, the
new order.
"Will you mind if I don't talk?" said Marcella, when he
was again beside her. "I think I am tired out, but I might rest now a
little. When we get to the Court, will you ask Miss Raeburn to let me have
some food in her sitting-room? Then, at nine o'clock or so, may I come
down and see Lord Maxwell and you--together?"
What she said, and the manner in which she said it, could only add to
his uneasiness; but he assented, put a cushion behind her, wrapped the rugs
round her, and then sat silent, train after train of close and anxious
thought passing through his mind as they rolled along the dark roads.
When they arrived at Maxwell Court, the sound of the carriage brought
Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn at once into the hall.
Aldous went forward in front of Marcella. "I have brought
Marcella," he said hastily to his aunt. "Will you take her
upstairs to your sitting-room, and let her have some food and rest? She is
not fit for the exertion of dinner, but she wishes to speak to my
grandfather afterwards."
Lord Maxwell had already hurried to meet the black-veiled figure
standing proudly in the dim light of the outer hall.
"My dear! my dear!" he said, drawing her arm within his, and
patting her hand in fatherly fashion. "How worn-out you
look!--Yes, certainly--Agneta, take her up and let her
rest--And you wish to speak to me afterwards? Of course, my dear, of
course--at any time."
Miss Raeburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of
Aldous's manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest
upstairs straightway, put her on the sofa in a cheerful sitting-room with a
bright fire, anid then, shrewdly guessing that she herself could not
possibly be a congenial companion to the girl at such a moment, whatever
might have happened or might be going to happen, she looked at her watch,
said that she must go down to dinner, and promptly left her to the charge
of a kind elderly maid, who was to do and get for her whatever she
would.
Marcella made herself swallow some food and wine. Then she said that she
wished to be alone and rest for an hour, and would come downstairs at nine
o'clock. The maid, shocked by her pallor, was loth to leave her, but
Marcella insisted.
When she was left alone she drew herself up to the
fire and tried hard to get warm, as she had tried to eat. When in this way a portion of physical ease and strength had come back to her, she took out the petition from its envelope and read it carefully. As she did so her lip relaxed, her eye recovered something of its brightness. All the points that had occurred to her confusedly, amateurishly, throughout the day, were here thrown into luminous and admirable form. She had listened to them indeed, as urged by Wharton in his concluding speech to the jury, but it had not, alas! seemed so marvelous to her then, as it did now, that, after such a plea, the judge should have summed up as he did.
When she had finished it and had sat thinking awhile over the declining
fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss
Raeburn's desk, and wrote on it:
"Will you read this--and Lord Maxwell--before I come
down? I forgot that you had not seen it.--M."
A ring at the bell brought the maid.
"Will you please get this taken to Mr. Raeburn? And then,
don't disturb me again for half an hour."
And for that that time she lay in Miss Raeburn's favourite chair,
outwardly at rest. Inwardly she was ranging all her arguments, marshalling
all her forces.
When the chiming clock in the great hall below struck nine, she got up
and put the lamp for a moment on the mantelpiece, which held a mirror. She
had already bathed her face and smoothed her hair. But she looked at
herself again with attention, drew down the thick front waves of hair a
little lower on the
white brow, as she liked to have them, and once more straightened the collar and cuffs which were the only relief to her plain black dress.
The house as she stepped out into it seemed very still. Perfumed breaths
of flowers and pot-pourri ascended from the hall. The pictures along the
walls as she passed were those same Caroline and early Georgian beauties
that had so flashingly suggested her own future rule in this domain on the
day when Aldous proposed to her.
She felt suddenly very shrinking and lonely as she went downstairs. The
ticking of a large clock somewhere--the short, screaminig note of Miss
Raeburn's parrot in one of the ground-floor rooms--these sounds
and the beating of her own heart seemed to have the vast house to
themselves.
No!--that was a door opening--Aldous coming to fetch her. She
drew a childish breath of comfort.
He sprang up the stairs, two or three steps at a time, as he saw her
coming.
"Are you rested--were they good to you? Oh! my precious
one!--how pale you are still! Will you come and see my grandfather
now? He is quite ready."
She let him lead her in. Lord Maxwell was standing by his writing-table,
leaning over the petition which was open before him--one hand upon it.
At sight of her he lifted his white head. His fine aquiline face was grave
and disturbed. But nothing could have been kinder or more courtly than his
manner as he came towards her.
"Sit down in that chair. Aldous, make her
com-
fortable. Poor child, how tired she looks! I hear you wished to speak to me on this most unhappy, most miserable business."
Marcella, who was sitting erect on the edge of the chair into which
Aldous had put her, lifted her eyes with a sudden confidence. She had
always liked Lord Maxwell.
"Yes," she said, struggling to keep down eagerness and
emotion. "Yes, I came to bring you this petition, which is to be sent
up to the Home Secretary on behalf of Jim Hurd, and--and--to
beg of you and Aldous to sign it, if in any way you can. I
know it will be difficult, but I thought I might--I might be able to
suggest something to you--to convince you--as I have known these
people so well--and it is very important to have your
signatures."
How crude it sounded--how mechanical! She felt that she had not yet
command of herself. The strange place, the stately room, the consciousness
of Aldous behind her--Aldous, who should have been on her side and was
not--all combined to intimidate her.
Lord Maxwell's concern was evident. In the first place, he was
painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker. Why, what had
Aldous been about? So thin! so frail and willowy in her black
dress--monstrous!
"My dear," he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly
hand on her shoulder, "my dear, I wish I could make you understand
how gladly I would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably
could. I would do it for your sake and for your grandfather's sake.
But--this is a matter of conscience, of public
duty, both for Aldous and myself. You will not surely wish even, that we should be governed in our relations to it by any private feeling or motive?"
"No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about
it--and I take such a different view from Aldous. He
knows--everybody must know--that there is another side, another
possible view from that which the judge took. You weren't in court
to-day were you, at all?"
"No. But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great
care, and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who
followed everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special
note of Mr. Wharton's speeches."
"Aldous!"--her voice broke irrepressibly into another
note--"I thought he would have let me speak to you
first!--to-night!"
Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.
Aldous bent over her chair.
"You remember," he said, "you sent down the petition.
I thought that meant that we were to read and discuss it. I am very
sorry."
She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow. But already
she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.
"The whole point lies in this," she said, looking up:
"Can we believe Hurd's own story? There is no
evidence to corroborate it. I grant that--the judge did not believe
it--and there is the evidence of hatred. But is it not possible and
conceivable all the same? He says that he did not go out with any thought
whatever of killing Westall, but that when
Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him, as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him. Surely, surely that is conceivable? There is--there must be a doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite different from other kinds and degrees of murder."
Now she possessed herself. The gift of flowing persuasive speech which
was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had
been maturing, came to her call. She leant forward and took up the
petition. One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and
there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's
life--presenting it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in
an atmosphere of emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the
"tears of things." To her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole
matter--so sordid, commonplace, brutal in Lord Maxwell's
eyes!--had become a tragic poem, a thing of fear and pity, to which
her whole being vibratcd. And as she conceived it, so she reproduced it.
Wharton's points were there indeed, but so were Hurd's poverty,
Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a tyrant's
insults, the miserable wife, the branded children--emphasised, all of
them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the girl's
voice.
Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one
knee crossed over the other. Aldous still hung over her chair. Neither
interrupted her. Once the eyes of the two men met over her head--a
distressed, significant look. Aldous heard
all she said, but what absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed.
When her voice broke--when she had said all she could think
of--she remained looking imploringly at Lord Maxwell.
He was silent a little; then he stooped forward and took her hand.
"You have spoken," he said with great feeling, "most
nobly--most well--like a good woman, with a true compassionate
heart. But all these things you have said are not new to me, my dear
chlild. Aldous warned me of this petition--he has pressed upon me,
still more I am sure upon himself, all that he conceived to be your view of
the case--the view of those who are now moving in the matter. But with
the best will in the world I cannot, and I believe that he
cannot--though he must speak for himself--I cannot take that
view. In my belief Hurd's act was murder, and deserves the penalty of
murder. I have paid some attention to these things. I was a practising
barrister in my youth, and later I was for two years Home Secretary. I will
explain to you my grounds very shortly."
And, bending forward, he gave the reasons for his judgment of the case
as carefully and as lucidly as though he were stating them to a
fellow-expert, and not to an agitated girl of twenty-one. Both in words and
manner there was an implied tribute, not only to Marcella, but perhaps to
that altered position
of the woman in our moving world which affects so many things and persons in unexpected ways.
Marcella listened, restlessly. She had drawn her hand away, and was
twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. The flush that had sprung up
while she was talking had died away. She grew whiter and whiter. When Lord
Maxwell ceased, she said quickly, and as he thought unreasonably--
"So you will not sign?"
"No," he replied firmly, "I cannot sign. Holding the
conviction about the matter I do, I should be giving my name to statements
I do not believe; and in order to give myself the pleasure of pleasing you,
and of indulging the pity that every man must feel for every
murderer's wife and children, I should be not only committing a public
wrong, but I should be doing what I could to lessen the safety and security
of one whole class of my servants--men who give me honourable
service--and two of whom have been so cruelly, so wantonly hurried
before their Maker!"
His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the
matter. Marcella shivered.
"Then," she said slowly, "Hurd will be
executed."
Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.
"Let me tell you," he said, "that that does not follow
at all. There is some importance in signatures or rather in
the local movement that the signatures implt)y. It enables a case to be
reopened, which, in any event, this case is sure to be. But any Home
Secretary who could decide a murder case on any other grounds whatever than
those of law and his own conscience would not deserve his place a
day--an
hour! Believe me, you mistake the whole situation."
He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and
authority. Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to throb
anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice, which was
in itself an agony.
"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.
"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly.
"Won't you try and believe what it costs me to
refuse?"
It was a heavy blow to her. Amply as she had been prepared for it, there
had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end she
would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before that
ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly conscious. Yet it
had not availed her here--not even with the man who loved her.
Lord Maxwell looked at the two--the man's face of suffering,
the girl's struggling breath.
"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave
you a minute. Do make Marcella rest--get her, for all our sakes, to
forget this a little. Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above
all, persuade her that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but
that in a matter of this kind she must leave us to do--as before
God!--what we think right."
He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with
dignity--nay, a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the
room.
Marcella sprang up.
"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled
voice. "I will go upstairs."
"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me,
if it is impossible for you to be generous?"
"Just!" she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion,
pushing him back from her. "You can talk of
justice!"
He tried to speak, stammered, and failed. That strange paralysis of the
will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must
either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never
loved her more passionately--but as he stood there looking at her,
something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable
dawned.
"You," she said again, walking stormily to and
fro, and catching at her breath--"You, in this
house, with this life--to talk of justice--the justice that comes
of slaying a man like Hurd! And I must go back to that cottage, to that
woman, and tell her there is no hope--none! Because
you must follow your conscience--you who have everything!
Oh! I would not have your conscience--I wish you a heart--rather!
Don't come to me, please! Oh! I must think how it can be. Things
cannot go on so. I should kill myself, and make you miserable. But now I
must go to her--to the poor--to those
whom I love, whom I carry in my heart!"
She broke off sobbing. He saw her, in her wild excitement, look round
the splendid room as though she would wither it to ruin with one fiery,
accusing glance.
"You are very scornful of wealth," he said, catching her
wrists, "but one thing you have no right to scorn!--the man who
has given you his inmost heart--and now only asks you to believe in
this, that he is not the cruel hypocrite you are, determined to make
him!"
His face quivered in every feature. She was checked a
moment--checked by the moral compulsion of his tone and manner, as
well as by his words. But again she tore herself away.
"Please go and order the carriage," she said.
"I cannot bear any more. I must go home and rest. Some
day I will ask your pardon--oh! for this-and--and--"
she was almost choked again--"other things. But now I must go
away. There is some one who will help me. I must not forget
that!"
The reckless words, the inflection, turned Aldous to stone.
Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect--their eyes met. Then he
went up to the bell and rang it.
"The brougham at once, for Miss Boyce. Will you have a maid to go
with you?" he asked, motioning the servant to stay till Miss Boyce
had given the answer.
"No, thank you. I must go and put on my things. Will you explain
to Miss Raeburn?"
The footman opened the door for her. She went.
Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed
humiliation of the man before her.
"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly. "I
remonstrated with Marcella, but I could do nothing. I think, if you are
wise, you will not for the present attempt to see her."
Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor. After a
few moments' silence he looked up again.
"And she gave you no message for me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly. "Only that she
could not bear to see anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter
was still undecided."
Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was
arrested by a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss
Boyce, of which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some
black silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the
chair; the cushion at the aek still bore the imprint of the sitter. She had
been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled be-
fore him. The door into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.
He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the
writing. Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside
her.
"Will you tell me," he said steadily--"I think
you will admit I have a right to know--is Marcella in constant
correspondence now with Henry Wharton?"
Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.
"I believe so," she quickly replied. "So far as I can
judge, he writes to her almost every other day."
"Does she show you his letters?"
"Very often. They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews
and efforts on Hurd's behalf."
"Would vou not say," he asked, after another pause, raising
his clear grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December
Marcella's whole views and thoughts have been largely--perhaps
vitally--influenced by this man?"
Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind--had, indeed,
often marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before.
Now that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them
with commion sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both
parties. The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and oppressed
the mother. For herself she asked to see things in a dry light. Yet she
knew well that the moment was critical. Her feeling was more mixed than it
had been. On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's side--with
qualifications and impatiences, however.
She took up her embroidery again before she answered him. In her opinion
the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the diplomatist.
"Yes, certainly," she said at last. "He has done a
great deal to form her opinions. He has made her both read and think on all
those subjects she has so long been fond of talking about."
She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with
him.
"Has there been nothing else than that in it?" said Aldous,
in an odd voice.
Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions. She looked at him straight, her slight,
energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind
her.
"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real
truth. I think there is nothing else. But let me tell you what
more I think."
Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant. In his pity and liking for
her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.
"If you would," he entreated.
"Leave Marcella quite alone--for the present. She is not
herself--not normal, in any way. Nor will she be till this dreadful
thing is over. But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a
little, then"--her thin voice expressed all the
emphasis it could--"then assert yourself! Ask her
that question you have asked me--and get your answer."
He understood. Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she
had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past.
But there was a proud and senisitive instinct in him which both
told him that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.
"You have come from London to-day?" said Mrs. Boyce,
changing the subject. All intimate and personal conversation was
distasteful to her, and she admitted few responsibilities. Her daughter
hardly counted among them.
"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said,
trying to smile. "I must get back to-night."
"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs.
Boyce.
He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and
trouble I am, he must be spared. Indeed, since the night of the trial, I
feel as though I had been of very little use to any human being."
He spoke simply, but every word touched her. What an inconceivable
entanglement the whole thing was! Yet she was no longer merely contemptuous
of it.
"Look!" she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the
ground beside the chair which held the envelope; "she is already
making the mourning for the children. I can see she despairs."
He made a sound of horror.
"Can you do nothing?" he cried reproachfully. "To
think of her dwelling upon this--nothing but this, day and
night--and I, banished and powerless!"
He buried his head in his hands.
"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately. Then,
after a pause, "You do not imagine--there is any chance of
success for her?"
He looked up and shook his head.
"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know. Wharton is
managing it with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the
House. But I happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I
certainly gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm.
There may be some delay. The new ministry will not kiss hands till
Saturday. But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home
Secretary.--By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my
seeing Judge Cartwright," he added hastily--almost imploringly.
"I could not bear that she should suppose--"
Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have
imagined such a man in it such a plight.
"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from
me," he added slowly, "that I could never have believed she
would be so unkind as to let me come down from London to see her, and send
me away empty--without a word?"
"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and
looking up. "Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton,
in his letter this morning, mentioned that you had given him two
introductions which were important to him. She specially wished you to be
thanked for it."
His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was
genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget that
the world yields itself only to the "violent."
He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from
her window, watched him go.
"How could she see him?" she asked herself
passionately, both then and on many other occasions during these rushing,
ghastly days. His turn would come, and it should be amply given him. But
now the very thought of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's
library threw her into wild tears. The time for entreaty--for
argument--was gone by, so far as he was concerned. He might have been
her champion, and would not. She threw herself recklessly, madly into the
encouragement and support of the man who had taken up the task which, in
her eyes, should have been her lover's. It had become to her a
fight--with society, with the law, with Aldous--in
which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of the fight she had
realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter offence to her.
How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the
newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line; she
wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters; she
attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been started at
Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd and her
children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector, because
they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with her father
were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of alarm as to
how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but that anything
should come in the way of his daughter's match was, notwithstanding,
the very last thing in the world, as he soon discovered, that he really
desired.
During six months he had taken it for granted; so had the county. He, of all men, could not afford to be made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of the matter. He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had had a good deal to do with it. So that between him and his daughter there were now constant sparrings--sparrings which degraded Marcella in her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from home.
The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course,
was in Minta Hurd's kitchen. Side by side with that piteous plaintive
misery, her own fierceness dwindled. She would sit with little Willie on
her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and
crying silently. She never suspected that her presence was often, burden
and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the wife
herself. While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs. Hurd
was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and simpler
consolations than any Marcella could give her.
The last week arrived. Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and
despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause became
more desperate. On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man, who told
her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope. Tuesday night,
Wharton asked his last question in Parliament. Friday was the day fixed for
the execution.
The question in Parliament came on late. The Home Secretary's
answer, though not final in form, was final in substance. Wharton went out
immediately and wrote to Marcella. "She will not sleep if I telegraph
to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for
physical detail, which had in it something of the woman. But, knowing that
his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of eight
next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn the news
first from the papers.
Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an
oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might reach
her any hour.
She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the
house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind
her. William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of
understanding. Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out of
sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.
"All over. The Home Secretary's official refusal to interfere
with sentence sent to Widrington to-day. Accept my sorrow and
sympathy."
She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically. Before her
lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her
father's big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied
his ferrets in the winter nights. But to-day the spring worked in it, and
breathed upon it. The young corn was already green in the furrows; the
hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks
were in the air, daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the wide treeless basin.
Human helplessness, human agony--set against the careless joy of
nature--there is no new way of feeling these things. But not to have
felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled
Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full
stature of our kind.
"Marcella, it is my strong wish--my command--that you do
not go out to the village to-night."
"I must go, papa."
It was Thursday night--the night before the Friday morning fixed
for Hurd's execution. Dinner at Mellor was just over. Mr. Boyce, who
was standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own
inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter. She had
not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black cloak and
black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks. Mr. Boyce
detested the garb.
"You are making yourself ridiculous, Marcella. Pity
for these wretched people is all very well, but you have no business to
carry it to such a point that you--and we--become the talk, the
laughing-stock of the county. And I should like to see you, too, pay some
attention to Aldous Raeburn's feelings and wishes."
The admonition, in her father's mouth, would almost have made her
laugh, if she could have
laughed at anything. But, instead, she only repeated:
"I must go, I have explained to mamma."
"Evelyn! why do you pernit it?" cried Mr. Boyce, turning
aggressively to his wife.
"Marcella explained to me, as she truly said," replied Mrs.
Boyce, looking up calmly. "It is not her habit to ask permission of
any one."
"Mamma," exclaimed the girl, in her deep voice, "you
would not wish to stop me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, after a pause, "no. You have
gone so far, I understand your wish to do this. Richard,"--she
got up and went to him,--"don't excite yourself about it;
shall I read to you, or play a game with you?"
He looked at her, trembling with anger. But her quiet eye warned him
that he had had threatenings of pain that afternoon. His anger sank into
fear. He became once more irritable and abject.
"Let her gang her gait," he said, throwing himself into a
chair. "But I tell you I shall not put up with this kind of thing
much longer, Marcella."
"I shall not ask you, papa," she said steadily, as she moved
towards the door. Mrs. Boyce paused where she stood, and looked after her
daughter, struck by her words. Mr. Boyce simply took them as referring to
the marriage which would emancipate her before long from any control of
his, and fumed, without finding a reply.
The maid-servant who, by Mrs. Boyce's orders. was to accompany
Marcella to the village, was already at the front door. She carried a
basket
con-
taining invalid food for little Willie, and a lighted lantern.
It was a dark night and raining fast. Marcella was fastening up her
tweed skirt in the hall, when she saw Mrs. Boyce hurry along the gallery
above, and immediately afterwards her mother came across the hall to
her.
"You had better take the shawl, Marcella: it is cold and raw. If
you are going to sit up most of the night you will want it."
She put a wrap of her own across Marcella's arm.
"Your father is quite right," she went on. "You have
had one horrible experience to-day already--"
"Don't, mamma!" exclaimed Marcella, interrupting her.
Then suddenly she threw her arms round her mother.
"Kiss me, mamma! please kiss me!"
Mrs. Boyce kissed her gravely, and let herself even linger a moment in
the girl's strong hold.
"You are extraordinarily wilful," she said. "And it is
so strange to me that you think you do any good. Are you sure even that she
wants to have you?"
Marcella's lip quivered. She could not speak, apparently. Waving
her hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two
disappeared into the blackness.
"But does it do any good?" Mrs. Boyce repeated
to herself as she went back to the drawing-room.
"Sympathy! who was ever yet fed, warmed, comforted by
sympathy? Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that the
human being should want at such a
moment--solitude. Why should we force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?"
Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the
warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this horror
which, was beneath them.
At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the
little maid.
"Now, Ruth, you can go home. Run quick, it is so dark,
Ruth!"
"Yes, miss."
The young country girl trembled. Miss Boyce's tragic passion in
this matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she
lived.
"Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the
poor,--and to punish the cruel!"
"Yes, miss," said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry. The
lantern she held flashed its light on Miss Boyce's white face and tall
form. Till her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark
eye, so wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.
On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused. She heard voices
inside--or rather the rector's voice reading.
A thought of scorn rose in her heart. "How long will the poor
endure this religion--this make-believe--which preaches patience,
patience! when it ought to be urging war?"
But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt. The rector looked up and
made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade any
other
movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and the reading went on.
Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that
afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for. He had bade
them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a mattress had
been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it. Her huddled
form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed eyelids, thrown
out against the dark oak of the settle, and the disordered mass of grizzled
hair, made the centre of the cottage.
Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough
hand she held, her eyes red with weeping. Fronting them, beside a little
table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his
Testament in his hand, his slight boy's figure cast in sharp shadow on
the cottage wall. He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light of
the lamp from the wife's eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a
chair to keep it from little Willie. Between mother and child sat Ann
Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from time
to time--a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children and
much poverty--of whom Marcella was often impatient.
"And he said, Lord, remember me when Thoy comest into Thy Kingdom. And He said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."
The rector's voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt
insistently on each word, then paused. "To-day," whispered Mary, caressing Minta's hand, while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."
Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the
cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and
sent a start through Willie's wasted body. The reader resumed; but
perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling
leaven.
Neverthleless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on
every pang of the Passion, putting together every sacred and sublime word.
For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held up the Man
of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had come, his
moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he accepted it with
the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.
"And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their breasts."
"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your
husband. He has passed through death--through cruel death; and where
He has gone, we poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to
Him. No sin, however black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His
hand in the dark waters, if it be, only repented,--thrown upon His
Cross. Let us
pray for your husband, let us implore the Lord's mercy this night--this hour!--upon his soul."
A shudder of remembrance passed through Marcella. The rector knelt; Mrs.
Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at intervals;
Ann Mullins sobbed loudlly and Mary Harden wept as she prayed, lost in a
mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there on the cottage
floor-stretching hands of pity over the woman beside her, showing His
marred side and brow.
Marcella alone sat erect, her whlole being one passionate protest
against a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities
of this too real earth on the shadowy heal of one far-off Redeemer.
"This very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort
an accomplice of those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and
killing, because they know of nothing better to do with the life they
themselves have made outcast."
And she hardened her heart.
When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for
some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the
boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his
mother and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager,
concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his and she perceived
in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the rough screen
which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of pinched paper Wharton
had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and moved the chair at little
forward that he might see
them better. The child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little all--with just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exqisite content which had fascinated Wharton. Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could have wept.
At last the rector and his sister rose.
"God be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to
her; "God support you!"
His voice trembled. Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.
"Oh, Mr. Harden!" she cried with a sudden wail. "Mr.
Harden!"
Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with
quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."
The rector turned to Marcella.
"You are staying the night with her?" he asked, under his
breath.
"Yes. Mrs. Mullins was up all last night. I offered to come
to-night."
"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Hurd?"
"For a very few minutes."
"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?" he asked
anxiously. "Is he penitent?"
"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce
humanness in her unfriendly eyes. "I promised him that when the child
died, he should be burid respectably--not by the parish. And I told
him I would always look after the little girls."
The rector sighed. He moved away. Then unexpectedly he came back
again.
"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as
not to be heard by any one else in the cottage. "You are taking a
great responsibility here tonight. Let me implore you not to fill that poor
woman with thoughts of bitternss and revenge at such a moment of her life.
That you feel bitterly, I know. Mary has explained to
me--but ask yourself, I beg of you!--how is she to
be helped through her misery, either now or in the future, except by
patience and submission to the will of God?"
He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of
his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.
"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella,
coldly. She felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion
which his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her. That
hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell once
for all.
Mary did not venture to kiss her friend. They all went. Ann Mullins, who
was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last. When she was
going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the skirt,
saying incoherent things.
"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her,
"won't you let Ann go? I am going to spend the night here, and
take care of you and Willie."
Mrs. Hurd gave a painful start.
"You're very good, miss," she said half-consciously,
"very good, I'm sure. But she's his own flesh and blood is
Ann--his own flesh and blood. Ann!"
The two women clung together, the rough, ill-tempered sister-in-law
muttering what soothing she could think of. When she was gone, Minta Hurd
turned her face to the back of the settle and moaned her hands clenched
under her breast.
Marcella went about her preparations for the night. "She is
extremely weak," Dr. Clarke had said; "the heart in such a
state she may die of syncope on very small provocation. If she is to spend
the night in crying and exciting herself, it will go hard with her. Get her
to sleep if you possibly can."
And he had left a sleeping draught. Marcella resolved that she would
persuade her to take it. "But I will wake her before eight
o'clock," she thought. "No human being has the right to
rob her of herself through that last hour."
And tenderly she coaxed Minta to take the doctor's
"medicine." Minta swallowed it submissively, asking no
questions. But the act of taking it roused her for the time, and she would
talk. She even got up and tottered across to Willie.
"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he's got his
animals--he don't think of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won't
you think of your father?--you'll never have a father, Willie,
not after to-night!"
The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his
haggard, dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the
face, and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He
looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not
speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it
struck
her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same as it had been for days; she reassured herself.
And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching
limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed the
shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of the
watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.
Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself
with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock showed
that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she drew it
upon her knee; but it lay unopened.
A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes
of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on
her cloak.
A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the
chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside
her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of
ear, and imagined more.
All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look
round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn across
one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the light of the
lamp, she stared through the
panes into the night without at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon him.
She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something
else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman's
face!--the powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline
features--the mad keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes
looked in hungrily at the prostrate form on the settle--at the
sleeping child. Another figure appeared out of the dark, running up the
path. There was a slight scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the
curtain close with a hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The
woman who had looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was
becoming more and more difficult to manage and to watch.
Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a
sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it
haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.
The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and
struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more
piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours passed, as all sounds
from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence settled
round her in ever-widening circles,
like deep waters sinking to repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide seat with shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife. "He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd. "Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal knows--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us something as against the nothing of death--and a man wastes them in sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity! Oh, why are we here--why am I here--to ache like this--to hate good people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"
She sat over the fire, Willie's hand clasped in hers. He alone in
this forlorn household loved her. Mrs. Hurd and the other
children feared and depended on her. This creature of
thistle-down--this little thread and patch of humanity--felt no
fear of her. It was as though his weakness divined through her harshness
and unripeness those maternal and protecting powers with which her nature
was in truth so richly dowered. He confided himself to her with no
misgivings. He was at ease when she was there.
Little piteous hand!--its touch was to her symbolic,
imperative.
Eight months had she been at Mellor? And that Marcella, who had been
living and moving amid these woods and lanes all this time--that
foolish girl, delighting in new grandeurs, and flattered by Aldous
Raeburn's attentions--that hot, ambitious person who had meant to
rule a county through a husband--what had become of her? Up to the
night of Hurd's death sentence she had still existed in some sort,
with her obligations, qualms, remorses. But since then--every day,
every hour had been grinding, scorching her away--fashioning in flame
and fever this new Marcella who sat here, looking impatiently into another
life, which should know nothing of the bonds of the old.
Ah, yes!--her thought could distinguish between the
act and the man, between the man and his class; but in her
feeling all was confounded. This awful growth of sympathy in
her--strange irony!--had made all sympathy for Aldous Raeburn
impossible to her. Marry him?--no! no!--never! But she would make
it quite easy to him to give her up. Pride should come in--he should
feel no pain in doing it. She had in her pocket the letter she had received
from him that afternoon. She had hardly been able to read it. Ear and heart
were alike dull to it.
From time to time she probably slept in her chair. Or else it was the
perpetual rush of images and sensations through the mind that hastened the
hours. Once when the first streaks of the March dawn were
showing through the curtains Minta Hurd sprang up with a loud cry:
"Oh, my God! Jim, Jim!. Oh, no!--take that off. Oh,
please, sir, please! Oh, for God's sake, sir!"
Agony struggled with sleep. Marcella, shuddering, held and soothed her,
and for a while sleep, or rather the drug in her veins, triumphed again.
For another hour or two she lay restlessly tossing from side to side, but
unconscious.
Willie hardly moved all night. Again and again Marcella held beef-tea or
milk to his mouth, and tried to rouse him to take it, but she could make no
impression on the passive lips; the sleeping serenity of the brow never
changed.
At last, with a start, Marcella looked round and saw that the morning
was fully there. A cold light was streaming through the curtains the fire
was still glowing; but her limbs were stiff and chilled under her shawl.
She sprang up, horror descending on her. Her shaking fingers could hardly
draw out the watch in her belt.
Ten minutes to eight!
For the first time the girl felt nerve and resolution fail her. She
looked at Mrs. Hurd and wrung her hands. The mother was muttering and
moving, but not yet fully awake; and Willie lay as before. Hardly knowing
what she was doing, she drew the curtains back, as though inspiration might
come with the light. The rain-clouds trailed across the common; water
dripped heavily from the thatch of the cottage; and a few birds twittered
from some bedraggled
larches at the edge of the common. Far away, beyond and beneath those woods to the right, Widrington lay on the plain, with that high-walled stone building at its edge. She saw everything as it must now be happening as plainly as though she were bodily present there--the last meal--the pinioning--the chaplain.
Goaded by the passing seconds, she turned back at last to wake that poor
sleeper behind her. But something diverted her. With a start she saw that
Willie's eves were open.
"Willie," she said, running to him, "how are you dear?
Shall I lift your head a little?"
He did not answer, though she thought he tried, and she was struck by
the blueness under the eyes and nose. Hurriedly she felt his tiny feet.
They were quite cold.
"Mrs. Hurd!" she cried, rousing her in haste; "dear
Mrs. Hurd, come and see Willie!"
The mother sprang up bewildered, and, hurrying across the room, threw
herself upon him.
"Willie, what is it ails you, dear? Tell mother! Is it your feet
are so cold? But we'll rub them--we'll get you warm soon.
And here's something to make you better." Marcella handed her
some brandy. "Drink it, dear; drink it, sweetheart!" Her voice
grew shrill.
"He can't," said Marcella. "Do not let us plague
him; it is the end. Dr. Clarke said it would come in the
morning."
They hung over him, forgetting everything but him for the
moment--the only moment in his little life he came first even with his
mother.
There was a slight movement of the hand.
"He wants his animals," said Marcella, the tears pouring
down her cheeks. She lifted them and put them on his breast, laying the
cold fingers over them.
Then he tried to speak.
"Daddy!" he whispered, looking up fully at his mother;
"take 'em to Daddy!"
She fell on her knees beside him with a shriek, hiding her face, and
shaking front head to foot. Marcella alone saw the slight, mysterious
smile, the gradual sinking of the lids, the shudder of departing life that
ran through the limbs.
A heavy sound swung through the air--a heavy repeated sound. Mrs.
Hurd held up her head and listened. The church clock tolled eight. She
knelt there, struck motionless by terror--by recollection.
"Oh, Jim!" she said, under her breath--"my
Jim!"
The plaintive tone--as of a creature that has not even breath and
strength left wherewith to chide the fate that crushes it--broke
Marcella's heart. Sitting beside the dead son, she wrapt the mother in
her arms, and the only words that even her wild spirit could find wherewith
to sustain this woman through the moments of her husband's death were
words of prayer--the old shuddering cries wherewith the human soul
from the beginning has thrown itself on that awful encompassing Life whence
it issued, and whither it returns.
"Don't go," he said, detaining her with a certain
peremptoriness. "I want all the light on this I can get. Tell me, she
has actually brought herself to regard this man's death
as in some sort my doing--as something which ought to separate
us?"
Mrs. Boyce saw that he held an opened letter from Marcella crushed in
his hand. But she did not need the explanation. She had been expecting him
at any hour throughout the day, and in just this condition of mind.
"Marcella must explain for herself," she said, after a
moment's thought. "I have no right whatever to speak for her.
Besides, frankly, I do not understand her, and when I argue with her she
only makes me realise that I have no part or lot in her--that I never
had. It is just enough. She was brought up away from me. And I have no
natural hold. I cannot help you, or any one else, with her."
Aldous had been very tolerant and compassionate in the past of this
strange mother's abdication of her maternal place, and of its probable
causes. But it
was not in human nature that he should be either to-day. He resumed his questioning, not without sharpness.
"One word, please. Tell me something of what has happened since
Thursday, before I see her. I have written--but till this morning I
have had not one line from her."
They were standing by the window, he with his frowning gaze, in which
agitation struggled against all his normal habits of manner and expression,
fixed upon the lawn and the avenue. She told him briefly what she knew of
Marcella's doings since the arrival of Wharton's
telegram--of the night in the cottage, and the child's death. It
was plain that he listened with a shuddering repulsion.
"Do you know," he exclaimed, turning upon her, "that
she may never recover this? Such a strain, such a horror! rushed upon so
wantonly, so needlessly."
"I understand. You think that I have been to blame? I do not
wonder. But it is not true--not in this particular case. And anyway
your view is not mine. Life--and the iron of it--has to be faced,
even by women--perhaps, most of all, by women. But let me go now.
Otherwise my husband will come in. And I imagine you would rather see
Marcella before you see him or any one."
That suggestion told. He instantly gathered himself together, and
nervously begged that she would send Marcella to him at once. He could
think of nothing, talk of nothing, till he had seen her. She went, and
Aldous was left to walk up and down the
room planning what he should say. After the ghastly intermingling of public interests and private misery in which he had lived for these many weeks there was a certain relief in having reached the cleared space--the decisive moment--when he might at last give himself wholly to what truly concerned him. He would not lose her without a struggle. None the less he knew, and had known ever since the scene in the Court library, that the great disaster of his life was upon him.
The handle of the door turned. She was there.
He did not go to meet her. She had come in wrought up to face
attack--reproaches, entreaties--ready to be angry or to be
humble, as he should give her the lead. But he gave her no lead. She had to
break through that quivering silence as best she could.
"I wanted to explain everything to you," she said in a low
voice, as she came near to him. "I know my note last night was very
hard and abrupt. I didn't mean to be hard. But I am still so
tired--and everything that one says, and feels, hurts so."
She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not
been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he looked
at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into which she
had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a passionate protesting
wrath, under his pain.
"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you
read my letter that I wrote you the day before--?"
"Yes."
"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to
your grief--your suffering--or to the suffering of any human
being for whom you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"
"It was not what you have said all through," she replied,
looking sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you
have done."
"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from
his seat beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that
freedom you desire--so passionately for others--freedom of
conscience--freedom of judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I
asked it of you with all my soul. And you denied me more. Through these
five weeks you have refused me the commonest right of love--the right
to show you myself, to prove to you that through all this misery of
differing opinion--misery, much more, oh, much more to me than to
you!--I was in truth bent on the same ends with you, bearing the same
burden, groping towards the same goal."
"No! no!" she cried turning upon him, and catching at a
word; "what burden have you ever borne? I know you were
sorry--that there was a struggle in your mind--that you pitied
me--pitied them. But you judged it all from
above--you looked down--and I could not see that you had
any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I
was below--in the midst--close to the horror and
anguish of them."
"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not
with you? Did I not offer--entreat? I could
not sign a statement of fact which seemed to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me? You owe it to me to answer."
She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's
mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last in
this white heat of an accusing passion. In return she began to forget her
own resolve to bear herself gently.
"You don't remember," she cried, "that what
divided us was your--your--incapacity to put the human pity
first; to think of the surrounding circumstances--of the debt that you
and I and everybody like us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had
been stunted and starved by life as he had been."
Her lip began to tremble.
"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I
had been a poor man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my
judgment of right and wrong--in such a matter. You would have let me
remember that I was a citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice!
You would have let me plead that Hurd's sin was not against me, but
against the community, and that in determining whether to do what you
wished or no, I must think of the community and its good before even I
thought of pleasing you. If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this
would have been permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of
my money,"--she shrank before the
accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest moral rights. My scruple, my feeling, were nothing to you. Your pride was engaged as well as your pity, and I must give way. Marcella! you talk of justice--you talk of equality--is the only man who can get neither at your hands--the man whom you promised to marry!"
His voice dwelt on that last word, dwelt and broke. He leant over her in
his roused strength, and tried to take her hand. But she moved away from
him with a cry.
"It is no use! Oh, don't--don't! It may be all
true. I was vain, I dare say, and unjust, and hard. But don't you
see--don't you understand--if we could take
such different views of such a case--if it could divide us so
deeply--what chance would there be if we were married? I ought
never--never--to have said 'Yes' to you--even as
I was then. But now," she turned to him slowly,
"can't you see it for yourself? I am a changed creature. Certain
things in me are gone--gone--and instead there is a
fire--something driving, tormenting--which must burn its way out.
When I think of what I liked so much when you asked me to marry
you--being rich, and having beautiful things, and dresses, and jewels,
and servants, and power--social power--above all
that--I feel sick and choked. I couldn't breathe now
in a house like Maxwell Court. The poor have come to mean to me the only
people who really live, and really suffer. I must
live with them, work for them, find out what I can do for them. You must
give me up--you must indeed. Oh! and you will! You will
be glad enough, thankful enough, when--when--you know what I am!"
He started at the words. Where was the prophetess? He saw that she was
lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the
chair.
In an instant he was on his knees beside her.
"Marcella!" he could hardly command his voice, but he held
her struggling hand against his lips. "You think that suffering
belongs to one class? Have you really no conception of what you will be
dealing to me if you tear yourself away from me?"
She withdrew her hand, sobbing.
"Don't, don't stay near me!" she said;
"there is--more--there is something else."
Aldous rose.
"You mean," he said in an altered voice, after a pause of
silence, "that another influence--another man--has come
between us?"
She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.
"If I could say to you only this," she began at last, with
long pauses, "'I mistook myself and my part in life. I did
wrong, but forgive me, and let me go for both our sakes'--that
would be--well!--that would be difficult,--but easier than
this! Haven't you understood at all? When--when Mr. Wharton came,
I began to see things very soon, not in my own way, but in his way. I had
never met anyone like him--not any one who showed me such
possibilities in myself--such new ways of using
one's life, and not only one's possessions--of looking at
all the great questions. I thought it was just friendship, but it
made me critical, impatient of everything else. I was never myself from the beginning. Then,--after the ball,"--he stooped over her that he might hear her the more plainly,--"when I came home I was in my room and I heard steps--there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house. I went out to see. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts--oh, I can't tell, I can't tell!--anyway, he was there. We went into the library, and we talked. He did not want to touch our marriage,--but he said all sorts of mad things,--and at last--he kissed me."
The last words were only breathed. She had often pictured herself
confessing these things to him. But the humiliation in which she actually
found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of, more than
she could bear. All those great words of pity and mercy--all that
implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never attain--to
end in this story! The effect of it, on herself, rather than on him, was
what she had not foreseen.
Aldous raised himself slowly.
"And when did this happen?" he asked after a moment.
"I told you--the night of the ball--of the
murder," she said with a shiver; "we saw Hurd cross the avenue.
I meant to have told you everything at once."
"And you gave up that intention?" he asked her, when he had
waited a little for more, and nothing came.
She turned upon him with a flash of the old defiance.
"How could I think of my own affairs?"
"Or of mine?" he said bitterly.
She made no answer.
Aldous got up and walked to the chimney-piece. He was very pale, but his
eyes were bright and sparkling. When she looked up at him at last she saw
that her task was done. His scorn--his resentment--were they not
the expiation, the penalty she had looked forward to all along?--and
with that determination to bear them calmly? Yet, now that they were there
in front of her, they stung.
"So that--for all those weeks--while you were letting me
write as I did, while you were letting me conceive you and your action as I
did, you had this on your mind? You never gave me a hint; you let me plead;
you let me regard you as wrapped up in the unselfish end; you sent me those
letters of his--those most misleading letters!--and all the
time--"
"But I meant to tell you--I always meant to tell you,"
she cried passionately. "I would never have gone on with a secret
like that--not for your sake--but for my own."
"Yet you did go on so long," he said steadily; "and my
agony of mind during those weeks--my feeling towards
you--my--"
He broke off, wrestling with himself. As for her, she had fallen back in
her chair, physically incapable of anything more.
He walked over to her side and took up his hat.
"You have done me wrong," he said, gazing down upon her.
"I pray God you may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future!
Give me leave to write
to you once more, or to send my friend Edward Hallin to see you. Then I will not trouble you again."
He waited, but she could give him no answer. Her form as she lay there
in this physical and moral abasement printed itself upon his heart. Yet he
felt no desire whatever to snatch the last touch--the last
kiss--that wounded passion so often craves. Inwardly, and without
words, he said farewell to her. She heard his steps across the room; the
door shut; she was alone--and free.
"O Neigung, sage, wie hast du so tief
Im Herzen dich verstecket?
Wer hat dich, die verborgen schlief,
Gewecket?"
"Well, that is intelligible," said Lady Selina Farrell,
looking at her neighbour, as she crumbled her dinner-roll. To crumble your
bread at dinner is a sign of nervousness, according to Sydney Smith, who
did it with both hands when he sat next an Archbishop; yet no one for a
good many years past had ever suspected Lady Selina of nervousness, though
her powers had probably been tried before now by the neighbourhood of many
Primates, Catholic and Anglican. For Lady Selina went much into society,
and had begun it young.
"Still, you know," she resumed after a moment's
pause--"you play enthusiasm in public--I
suppose you must."
"Oh! of course," said Wharton, indifferently. "That is
in the game."
"Why should it be--always? If you are a leader of the people,
why don't you educate them? My father says that bringing feeling into
politics is like making rhymes in one's account book."
"Well, when you have taught the masses how not to
feel," said Wharton, laughing, "we will follow your advice.
Meanwhile it is our brains and their feelings that do the trick. And by the
way, Lady Selina, are you always so cool? If you saw the
Revolution coming to-morrow into the garden of Alresford House, would you
go to the balcony and argue?"
"I devoutly hope there would be somebody ready to do something
more to the point," said Lady Selina, hastily. "But of course
we have enthusiasms too."
"What, the Flag--and the Throne--that kind of
thing?"
The ironical attention which Wharton began at this moment to devote to
the selection of an olive annoyed his companion.
"Yes," she repeated emphatically, "the Flag and the
Throne--all that has made England great in the past. But we know very
well that they are not your enthusiasms."
Wharton's upper lip twitched a little.
"And you are quite sure that Busbridge Towers has nothing to do
with it?" he said suddenly, looking round upon her.
Bushbridge Towers was the fine ancestral seat which belonged to Lady
Selina's father, that very respectable and ancient peer, Lord
Alresford, whom an ungrateful party had unaccountably omitted--for the
first time--from the latest Conservative administration.
"Of course we perfectly understand," replied Lady Selina,
scornfully, "that your side--and especially your Socialist
friends, put down all that we do and say to greed and
selfishness. It is our misfortune--hardly our fault."
"Not at all," said Wharton, quietly, "I was only
trying to convince you that it is a little difficult to drive feeling out
of politics. Do you suppose our host succeeds? You perceive?--this is
a Radical house--and a Radical banquet?"
He pushed the menu towards her
significantly, Then his eye travelled with its usual keen rapidity over the
room, over the splendid dinner-table, with its display of flowers and
plate, and over the assembled guests. He and Lady Selina were dining at the
hospitable board of a certain rich manufacturer, who drew enormous revenues
from the west, had formed part of the Radical contingent of the last
Liberal ministry, and had especially distinguished himself by a series of
uncompromising attacks on the ground landlords of London.
Lady Selina sighed.
"It is all a horrible tangle," she said, "and what the
next twenty years will bring forth who can tell? Oh! one moment, Mr.
Wharton, before I forget. Are you engaged for Saturday week?"
He drew a little note-book out of his pocket and consulted it. It
appeared that he was not engaged.
"Then will you dine with us?" She lightly mentioned the
names of four or five distinguished guests, including the Conservative
Premier of the day. Wharton made her a little ceremonious bow.
"I shall be delighted. Can you trust me to behave?"
Lady Selina's smile made her his match for the moment.
"Oh! we can defend ourselves!" she said. "By the way I
think you told me that Mr. Raeburn was not a friend of yours."
"No," said Wharton, facing her look with coolness. "If
you have asked Mr. Raeburn for the 23rd, let me crave your leave to cancel
that note in my pocket-book. Not for my sake, you understand, at
all."
She had difficulty in concealing her curiosity. But his face betrayed
nothing. It always seemed to her that his very dark and straight eyebrows,
so obtrusive and unusual as compared with the delicacy of the features, of
the fair skin and light brown curls, made it easy for him to wear any mask
he pleased. By their mere physical emphasis they drew attention away from
the subtler and more revealing things of expression.
"They say," she went on, "that he is sure to do well
in the House, if only he can be made to take interest enough in the party.
But one of his admirers told me that he was not at all anxious to accept
this post they have just given him. He only did it to please his
grandfather. My father thinks Lord Maxwell much aged this year. He is laid
up now, with a chill of some sort I believe. Mr. Raeburn will have to make
haste if he is to have any career in the Commons. But you can see he cares
very little about it. All his friends tell me they find him changed since
that unlucky affair last year. By the way, did you ever see that
girl?"
"Certainly. I was staying in her father's house while the
engagement was going on."
"Were you!" said Lady Selina, eagerly, "and what did
you think of her?"
"Well, in the first place," said Wharton, slowly, "she
is beautiful--you knew that?"
Lady Selina nodded.
"Yes. Miss Raeburn, who has told me most of what I know, always
throws in a shrug and a 'but' when you ask about her looks.
However, I have seen a photograph of her, so I can judge for myself. It
seemed to me a beauty that men perhaps would admire more than
women."
Wharton devoted himself to his green peas, and made no reply. Lady
Selina glanced at him sharply. She herself was by no means a beauty. But
neither was she plain. She had a long, rather distinguislied face, with a
marked nose and a wide thin-lipped mouth. Her plentiful fair hair, a little
dull and ashy in colour, was heaped up above her forehead in infinitesimal
curls and rolls which did great credit to her maid, and gave additional
height to the head and length to a thin white neck. Her light blue eyes
were very direct and observant. Their expression implied both considerable
knowledge of the world and a natural inquisitiveness. Many persons indeed
were of opinion that Lady Selina wished to know too much about you and were
on their guard when she approached.
"You admired her very much, I see," she resumed, as Wharton
still remained silent.
"Oh, yes. We talked Socialism, and then I defended her poacher for
her."
"Oh, I remember. And it is really true, as Miss Raeburn says, that
she broke it off because she could not get Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn to
sign the petition for the poacher?"
"Somewhere about true," said Wharton, carelessly.
"Miss Raeburn always gives the same account; you can never get
anything else out of her. But I sometimes wonder whether it is the
whole truth. You think she was
sincere?"
"Well, she gave up Maxwell Court and thirty thousand a
year," he replied drily. "I should say she had at least earned
the benefit of the doubt."
"I mean," said Lady Selina, "was she in love with
anybody else, and was the poacher an excuse?"
She turned upon him as she spoke--a smiling, self-possessed
person--a little spoilt by those hard, inquisitive eyes.
"No, I think not," said Wharton, throwing his head back to
meet her scrutiny. "If so, nothing has been heard of him yet. Miss
Boyce has been at St. Edward's Hospital for the last year."
"To learn nursing? It is what all the women do nowadays, they tell
me, who can't get on with their relations or their lovers. Do you
suppose it is such a very hard life?"
"I don't want to try!" said Wharton. "Do
you?"
She evaded his smile.
"What is she going to do when she has done her
training?"
"Settle down and nurse among the poor, I believe."
"Magnificent, no doubt, but hardly business, from her point of
view. How much more she might have
done for the poor with thirty thousand a year! And any woman could put up with Aldous Raeburn."
Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
"We come back to those feelings, Lady Selina, you think so badly
of."
She laughed.
Well, but feelings must be intelligible. And this seems so small a
cause. However, were you there when it was broken off?"
"No; I have never seen her since the day of the poacher's
trial."
"Oh! So she has gone into complete seclusion from all her
friends?"
"That I can't answer for. I can only tell you my own
experience."
Lady Selina bethought herself of a great many more questions to ask, but
somehow did not ask them. The talk fell upon politics, which lasted till
the hostess gave the signal, and Lady Selina, gathering up her fan and
gloves, swept from the room next after the Countess at the head of the
table, while a host of elderly ladies, wives of ministers and the like,
stood meekly by to let her pass.
As he sat down again, Wharton made the entry of the dinner at Alresford
House, to which he had just promised himself, a little plainer. It was the
second time in three weeks that Lady Selina had asked him, and he was well
aware that several other men at this dinner-table, of about the same
standing and prospects as himself, would be very glad to be in his place.
Lady Selina, though she was unmarried, and not particularly handsome or
particularly charm-
ing, was a personage--and knew it. As the mistress of her father's various fine houses, and the kinswoman of half the great families of England, she had ample social opportunities, and made, on the whole, clever use of them. She was not exactly popular, but in her day she had been extremely useful to many, and her invitations were prized. Wharton had been introduced to her at the beginning of this, his second session, had adopted with her the easy, aggressive, "personal" manner--which, on the whole, was his natural manner towards women--and had found it immediately successful.
When he had replaced his pocket-book, he found himself approached by a
man on his own side of the table, a member of Parliament like himself, with
whom he was on moderately friendly terms.
"Your motion comes on next Friday, I think," said the
new-comer.
Wharton nodded.
"It'll be a beastly queer division," said the
other--"a precious lot of cross-voting."
"That'll be the way with that kind of question for a good
while to come--don't you think"--said Wharton,
smiling, "till we get a complete reorganisation of
parties?"
As he leaned back in his chair, enjoying his cigarette, his half-shut
eyes behind the curls of smoke made a good-humoured but contemptuous study
of his companion.
Mr. Bateson was a young manufacturer, recently returned to Parliament,
and newly married. He had an open, ruddy face, spoilt by an expression of
chronic
perplexity, which was almost fretfulness. Not that the countenance was without shrewdness; but it suggested that the man had ambitions far beyond his powers of performance, and already knew himself to be inadequate.
"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you get a considerable
vote," he resumed, after a pause; "it's like women's
suffrage. People will go on voting for this kind of thing, till there seems
a chance of getting it. Then!"
"Ah, well!" said Wharton, easily, "I see we
shan't get you."
"I!--vote for an eight-hours day, by local and trade option!
In my opinion I might as well vote for striking the flag on the British
Empire at once! It would be the death-knell of all our
prosperity."
Wharton's artistic ear disliked the mixture of metaphor, and he
frowned slightly.
Mr. Bateson hurried on. He was already excited, and had fallen upon
Wharton as a prey.
"And you really desire to make it penal for us
manufacturers--for me in my industry--in spite of all the chances
and changes of the market, to work my men more than eight hours a
day--even if they wish it!"
"We must get our decision, our majority of the adult workers in
any given district in favour of an eight-hours day," said Wharton,
blandly; "then when they have voted for it, the local authority will
put the Act in motion."
"And my men--conceivably--may have voted in the
minority, against any such tomfoolery; yet, when the vote is given, it will
be a punishable offence for
them, and me, to work overtime? You actually mean that; how do you propose to punish us?"
"Well," said Wharton, relighting his cigarette, "that
is a much debated point. Personally, I am in favour of imprisonment rather
than fine."
The other bounded on his chair.
"You would imprison me for working overtime--with
willing men!"
Wharton eyed him with smiling composure. Two or three other men--an
old general, the smart private secretary of a cabinet minister, and a
well-known permanent official at the head of one of the great spending
departments--who were sitting grouped at the end of the table a few
feet away, stopped their conversation to listen.
"Except in cases of emergency, which are provided for under the
Act," said Wharton. "Yes, I should imprison you, with the
greatest pleasure in life. Eight hours plus overtime is what
we are going to stop, at all hazards!"
A flash broke from his blue eyes. Then he tranquilly resumed his
smoking.
The young manufacturer flushed with angry agitation.
"But you must know, it is inconceivable that you should not know,
that the whole thing is stark staring lunacy. In our business, trade is
declining, the export falling every year, the imports from France steadily
advancing. And you are going to make us fight a country where men work
eleven hours a day, for lower wages, with our hands tied behind our backs
by legislation of this kind? Well, you know," he threw
himself back in his chair with a contemptuous laugh, "there can be only one explanation. You and your friends, of course, have banished political economy to Saturn--and you suppose that by doing so you get rid of it for all the rest of the world. But I imagine it will beat you, all the same!"
He stopped in a heat. As usual what he found to say was not equal to
what he wanted to say, and beneath his anger with Wharton was the familiar
fuming at his own lack of impressiveness.
"Well, I dare say," said Wharton, serenely. "However,
let's take your 'political economy' a moment, and see if I
can understand what you mean by it. There never were two words that meant
all things to all men so disreputably!"
And thereupon to the constant accompaniment of his cigarette, and with
the utmost composure and good temper, he began to "heckle" his
companion, putting questions, suggesting perfidious illustrations,
extracting innocent admissions, with a practised shrewdness and malice,
which presently left the unfortunate Bateson floundering in a sea of his
own contradictions, and totally unable for the moment to attach any
rational idea whatever to those great words of his favourite science,
wherewith he was generally accustomed to make such triumphant play, both on
the platform and in the bosom of the family.
The permanent official round the corner watched the unequal fight with
attentive amusement. Once when it was a question of Mill's doctrine of
cost of production as compared with that of a leading modern collectivist,
he leant forward and supplied a correction
of something Wharton had said. Wharton instantly put down his cigarette and addressed him in another tone. A rapid dialogue passed between them, the dialogue of experts, sharp, allusive, elliptical, in the midst of which the host gave the signal for joining the ladies.
"Well, all I know is," said Bateson, as he got up,
"that these kinds of questions, if you and your friends have your
way, will wreck the Liberal party before long--far more
effectually than anything Irish has ever done. On these things some of us
will fight, if it must come to that."
Wharton laughed.
"It would be a national misfortune if you didn't give us a
stiff job," he said, with an airy good-humour which at once made the
other's blustering look ridiculous.
"I wonder what that fellow is going to do in the House,"
said the permanent official to his companion as they went slowly upstairs,
Wharton being some distance ahead. "People are all beginning to talk
of him as a coming man, though nobody quite knows why, as yet. They tell me
he frames well in speaking, and will probably make a mark with his speech
next Friday. But his future seems to me very doubtful. He can only become a
power as the head of a new Labour party. But where is the party? They all
want to be kings. The best point in his favour is that they are likely
enough to take a gentleman if they must have a leader. But there still
remains the question whether he can make anything out of the
material."
"I hope to God he can't!" said the old general, grimly;
"it is these town-chatterers of yours that will bring the Empire
about our heads before we've done. They've begun it already,
wherever they saw a chance."
In the drawing-room Wharton devoted himself for a few minutes to his
hostess, a little pushing woman, who confided to his apparently attentive
ear a series of grievances as to the bad manners of the great ladies of
their common party, and the general evil plight of Liberalism in London
from the social point of view.
"Either they give themselves
airs--rediculous
airs!--or they admit everybody!" she said, with a lavish use of
white shoulders and scarlet fan by way of emphasis. "My husband feels
it just as much as I do. It is a real misfortune for the party that its
social affairs should be so villainously managed. Oh! I dare say
you don't mind, Mr. Wharton, because you are a Socialist.
But, I assure you, those of us who still believe in the influence of the
best people don't like it."
A point whence Wharton easily led her through a series of spiteful
anecdotes bearing on her own social mishaps and rebuffs, which were none
the less illuminating because of the teller's anxious effort to give
them a dignified and disinterested air. Then, when neither she nor her
plight were any longer amusing, he took his leave, exchanging another
skirmishing word or two on the staircase with Lady Selina, who it appeared
was "going on" as he was, and to the same house.
In a few minutes his hansom landed him at the door of a great mansion in
Berkeley Square, where a huge evening party was proceeding, given by one of
those Liberal ladies whom his late hostess had been so freely denouncing.
The lady and the house belonged to a man who had held high office in the
late Administration.
As he made his way slowly to the top of the crowded stairs, the stately
woman in white satin and diamonds who was "receiving" on the
landing marked him, and when his name was announced she came forward a step
or two. Nothing could have been more flattering than the smile with which
she gave him her gloved hand to touch.
"Have you been out of town all these Sundays?" she said to
him, with the slightest air of soft reproach. "I am always at home,
you know--I told you so!"
She spoke with the ease of one who could afford to make whatever social
advances she pleased. Wharton excused himself, and they chatted a little in
the intervals of her perpetual greetings to the mounting crowd. She and he
had met at a famous country house in the Easter recess, and her
aristocrat's instinct for all that gives savour and sharpness to the
dish of life had marked him at once.
"Sir Hugh wants you to come down and see us in Sussex," she
said, stretching her white neck a little to speak after him, as he was at
last carried through the drawing-room door by the pressure behind him.
"Will you?"
He threw back an answer which she rather took for granted than heard,
for she nodded and smiled through
it--stiffening her delicate face the moment afterwards to meet the timid remarks of one of her husband's constituents--asked by Sir Hugh in the streets that afternoon--who happened to present her with the next hand to shake.
Inside, Wharton soon found himself brought up against the ex-Secretary
of State himself, who greeted him cordially, and then bantered him a little
on his coming motion.
"Oh, I shall be interested to see what you make of it. But, you
know, it has no actuality--never can have--till you
can agree among yourselves. You say you want the same
thing--I dare say you'll all swear it on Friday--but
really--"
The statesman shook his head pleasantly.
"The details are a little vague still, I grant you," said
Wharton, smiling.
"And you think the principle matters twopence without the details?
I have always found that the difficulty with the Christian command,
'Be ye perfect.' The principle doesn't trouble me at
all!"
The swaying of the entering throng parted the two speakers, and for a
second or two the portly host followed with his eye the fair profile and
lightly-built figure of the younger man as they receded from him in the
crowd. It was in his mind that the next twenty years, whether this man or
that turned out to be important or no, must see an enormous quickening of
the political pace. He himself was not conscious of any jealousy of the
younger men; but neither did he see among them any comanding personality.
This young fellow, with his vivacity, his energy, and
his Socialist whims, was interesting enough; and his problem was interesting--the problem of whether he could make a party out of the heterogeneous group, of which he was turning out to be indisputably the ablest member. But what was there certain or inevitable about his future after all? And it was the same with all the rest. Whereas the leaders of the past had surely announced themselves beyond mistake from the beginning. He was inclined to think, however, that we were levelling up rather than levelling down. The world grew too clever, and leadership was more difficult every day.
Meanwhile Wharton found his progress through these stately rooms
extremely pleasant. He was astonished at the multitude of people he knew,
at the numbers of faces that smiled upon him. Presently, after half an hour
of hard small talk, he found himself for a moment without an acquaintance
leaning against an archway between two rooms, and free to watch the throng.
Self-love, "that froward presence, like a chattering child within
us," was all alert and happy. A feeling of surprise, too, which had
not yet worn away. A year before he had told Marcella Boyce, and with
conviction, that he was an outcast from his class. He smiled now at that
past naïveté which had allowed
him to take the flouts of his country neighbours and his mother's
unpopularity with her aristocratic relations for an index of the way in
which "society" in general would be likely to treat him and his
opinions. He now knew, on the contrary, that those opinions had been his
best advertisement. Few people, it appeared, were more in
demand among the great than those who gave it out that they would, if they could, abolish the great.
"It's because they're not enough afraid of
us--yet," he said to himself, not without spleen. "When we
really get to business--if we ever do--I shall not be coming to
Lady Cradock's parties."
"Mr. Wharton, do you ever do such a frivolous thing as go to the
theatre?" said a pretty, languishing creature at his elbow, the wife
of a London theatrical manager. "Suppose you come and see us in
'The Minister's Wooing,' first night next Saturday.
I've got one seat in my box, for somebody
very agreeable. Only it must be somebody who can appreciate my
frocks!"
"I should be charmed," said Wharton. "Are the frocks
so adorable?"
"Adorable! Then I may write you a note? You don't have your
horrid Parliament that night, do you?" and she fluttered on.
"I think you don't know my younger daughter, Mr.
Wharton?" said a severe voice at his elbow.
He turned and saw an elderly matron with the usual matronly cap and
careworn countenance putting forward a young thing in white, to whom he
bowed with great ceremony. The lady was the wife of a north-country magnate
of very old family, and one of the most exclusive of her kind in London.
The daughter, a vision of young shyness and bloom, looked at him with
frightened eyes as he leant against the wall beside her and began to talk.
She wished he would go away and let her get to the girl friend who was
waiting for her and signalling to her across
the room. But in a minute or two she had forgotten to wish anything of the kind. The mixture of audacity with a perfect self-command in the manner of her new acquaintance, that searching half-mocking look, which saw everything in detail, and was always pressing beyond the generalisations of talk and manners, the lightness and brightness of the whole aspect, of the curls, the eyes, the flexible determined mouth, these things arrested her. She began to open her virgin heart, first in protesting against attack, then in confession, till in ten minutes her white breast was heaving under the excitement of her own temerity and Wharton knew practically all about her, her mingled pleasure and remorse in "going out," her astonishment at the difference between the world as it was this year, and the world as it had been last, when she was still in the school-room--her Sunday-school--her brothers--her ideals--for she was a little nun at heart--her favourite clergyman--and all the rest of it.
"I say, Wharton, come and dine, will you, Thursday, at the
House--small party--meet in my room?"
So said one of the party whips, from behind into his ear. The speaker
was a popular young aristocrat who in the preceding year had treated the
member for West Brookshire with chilliness. Wharton turned--to
consider a moment--then gave a smiling assent.
"All right!" said the other, withdrawing his hand from
Wharton's shoulder--"good-night!--two more of these
beastly crushes to fight through till I can get to my bed, worse luck! Are
any of your fellows here to-night?"
Wharton shook his head.
"Too austere, I suppose?"
"A question of dress coats, I should think," said Wharton,
drily.
The other shrugged his shoulders.
"And this calls itself a party gathering--in a radical and
democratic house--what a farce it all is!"
"Agreed! good-night."
And Wharton moved on, just catching as he did so the eyes of his new
girl acquaintance looking back at him from a distant door. Their shy owner
withdrew them instantly, coloured, and passed out of sight.
At the same moment a guest entered by the same door, a tall grave man in
the prime of life, but already grey haired. Wharton, to his surprise,
recognised Aldous Raeburn, and saw also that the master of the house had
him by the arm. They came towards him, talking. The crowd prevented him
from getting effectually out of their way, but he turned aside and took up
a magazine lying on a bookcase near.
"And you really think him a trifle better?" said the
ex-minister.
"Oh, yes, better--certainly better--but I am afraid he
will hardly get back to work this session--the doctors talk of sending
him away at once."
"Ah, well," said the other, smiling, "we don't
intend it seems to let you send anything important up to the Lords yet
awhile, so there will be time for him to recruit."
"I wish I was confident about the recruiting," said Raeburn,
sadly. "He has lost much strength. I shall go with them to the
Italian lakes at the end of next week, see them settled and come back at
once."
"Shall you miss a sitting of the commission?" asked his
host. Both he and Raeburn were members of an important Labour Commission
appointed the year before by the new Conservative government.
"Hardly, I think," said Raeburn, "I am particularly
anxious not to miss D----'s evidence."
And they fell talking a little about the Commision and the witnesses
recently examined before it. Wharton, who was wedged in by a group of
ladies, and could not for the moment move, heard most of what they were
saying, much against his will. Moreover Raeburn's tone of quiet and
masterly familiarity with what he and his companion were discussing annoyed
him. There was nothing in the world that he himself would more eagerly have
accepted than a seat on that Commission.
"Ah! there is Lady Cradock!" said Raeburn, perceiving his
hostess across a sea of intervening faces, and responding to her little
wave of the hand. "I must go and get a few words with her, and then
take my aunt away."
As he made his way towards her, he sudlenly brushed against Wharton, who
could not escape. Raeburn looked up, recognised the man he had touched,
flushed slightly and passed on. A bystander would have supposed them
strangers to each other.
out in the arrangement. It might have worked through perfectly well without; as it happened it had broken down. Realities had broken it down. Small blame to them!
"I stood for truth!" he said to himself with a
kind of rage--"that moment when I held her in the library, she
lived.--Raeburn offered her a platform, a position;
I made her think, and feel. I helped her to know herself. Our
relation was not passion; it stood on the threshold--but it was
real--a true relation so far as it went. That it went no farther was
due again to circumstances--realities--of another kind. That
he should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is natural
enough. If we were in France he would call me out and I should give him
satisfaction with all the pleasure in life. But what am I
about? Are his ways mine? I should have nothing left but to shoot myself
to-morrow if they were!"
He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a
merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in him
by contact with Aldous Raeburn.
"Has he not interfered with my freedom--stamped his pedantic
foot on me--ever since we were boys together! I have owed him one for
many years--now I have paid it. Let him take the chances of
war!"
Then, driven on by an irritation not to be quieted, he began against his
will to think of those various occasions on which he and Aldous Raeburn had
crossed each other in the past--of that incident in particular which
Miss Raeburn had roughly recalled to Lady Winterbourne's reluctant
memory.
Well, and what of it? It had occurred when Wharton was a lad of
twenty-one, and during an interval of some months when Aldous Raeburn, who
had left Cambridge some three years before, and was already the man of
importance, had shown a decided disposition to take up the brilliant,
unmanageable boy, whom the Levens, among other relations, had already
washed their hands of.
"What did he do it for?" thought Wharton.
"Philanthropic motives of course. He is one of the men who must
always be saving their souls, and the black sheep of the world come in
handy for the purpose. I remember I was flattered then. It takes one some
time to understand the workings of the Hebraistic conscience!"
Yes--as it galled him to recollect--he had shown great
plasticity for a time. He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and
Raeburn's letters and Raeburn's influence had certainly pulled
him through various scrapes that might have been disastrous. Then--a
little later--he could see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch
Etive, where he and Raeburn, Lord Maxwell, Miss Raeburn, and a small party
had spent the August of his twenty-first birthday. Well--that surly
keeper, and his pretty wife who had been Miss Raeburn's
maid--could anything be more inevitable? A hard and jealous husband,
and one of the softest, most sensuous natures that ever idleness made love
to. The thing was in the air!--in the summer, in the blood--as
little to be resisted as the impulse to eat when you are hungry, or drink
when you thirst. Besides, what particular harm had been
done, what particular harm could have been done with such a Cerberus of a husband? As to the outcry which had followed one special incident, nothing could have been more uncalled for, more superfluous. Aldous had demanded contrition, had said strong things with the flashing eyes, the set mouth of a Cato. And the culprit had turned obstinate--would repent nothing--not for the asking. Everything was arguable, and Renan's doubt as to whether he or Théophile Gautier were in the right of it, would remain a doubt to all time--that was all Raeburn could get out of him. After which the Hebraist friend of course had turned his back on the offender, and there was an end of it.
That incident, however, had belonged to a stage in his past life, a
stage marked by a certain prolonged tumult of the senses, on which he now
looked back with great composure. That tumult had found vent in other
adventures more emphatic a good deal than the adventure of the
keeper's wife. He believed that one or two of them had been not
unknown to Raeburn.
Well, that was done with! His mother's death--that wanton
stupidity on the part of fate--and the shock it had somehow caused
him, had first drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure
on which he now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of
travel, and the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them,
joys of adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the
intellectual stimulus which comes of perpetual change, of new heavens, new
seas, new societies, had loosened the yoke of the flesh and saved him from
himself. The deliverance so begun had been completed at home, by the various chances and opportunities which had since opened to him a solid and tempting career in that Labour movement his mother had linked him with, without indeed ever understanding either its objects or its men. The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with the thrill of increasing personal success. Passion would require to present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession of him again.
As to his relation to Raeburn, he well remembered that when, after that
long break in his life, he and Aldous had met casually again, in London or
elsewhere, Aldous had shown a certain disposition to forget the old
quarrel, and to behave with civility, though not with friendliness. As to
Wharton he was quite willing, though at the same time he had gone down to
contest West Brookshire, and, above all, had found himself in the same
house as Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, with an even livelier sense than
usual of the excitement to be got out of mere living.
No doubt when Raeburn heard that story of the library--if he had
heard it--he recognised in it the man and the character he had known
of old, and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in
bitter and insurmountable disgust. A mere Hebraist's mistake!
"That girl's attraction for me was not an attraction of the
senses--except so far that for every normal
man and woman charm is charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be! What I played for with her was power--power over a nature that piqued and yet by natural affinity belonged to me. I could not have retained that power, as it happened, by any bait of passion. Even without the Hurd affair, if I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have risen against me and her own treachery. I knew that perfectly well, and took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting, too interesting, to give up. For the moment! then a few days,--a few weeks later--Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!"
And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own
idiosyncrasies. It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of mental
emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him within
the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the Hurd
agitation was over. That agitation had brought him vigorously and
profitably into public notice at a convenient moment. But what had
originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became in
the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation. Wharton had no
sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself strangely at home
there. He had the instinct for debate, the instinct for management,
together with a sensitive and contriving ambition. He found himself
possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance that astonished
him--a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for drudgery, and for
making the best of dull men. The
omens were all favourable, sometimes startlingly so. He was no longer hampered by the ill-will of a county or a family connection. Here in this new world, every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was worth. Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House, from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise. The anxieties and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.
The quick, elastic nature adjusted itself at once. To some kinds of
success, nothing is so important as the ability to forget--to sweep
the mind free of everything irrelevant and superfluous. Marcella Boyce, and
all connected with her, passed clean out of Wharton's consciousness.
Except that once or twice he said to himself with a passing smile that it
was a good thing he had not got himself into a worse scrape at Mellor. Good
heavens! in what plight would a man stand--a man with his career to
make--who had given Marcella Boyce claims upon him! As well entangle
oneself with the Tragic Muse at once as with that stormy, unmanageable
soul!
So much for a year ago. To-night, however, the past had been thrust back
upon him, both by Lady Selina's talk and by the meeting with Raeburn.
To smart indeed once more under that old ascendency of Raeburn's, was
to be provoked into thinking of Raeburn's old love.
Where was Miss Boyce? Surely her year of hospital training must be up by
now?
He turned into St. James Street, stopped at a door not far from the
Palace end, let himself in, and groped his way to the second floor. A
sleepy man-servant turned out of his room, and finding that his master was
not inclined to go to bed, brought lights and mineral water. Wharton was
practically a teetotaller. He had taken a whim that way as a boy, and a few
experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had only confirmed
what had been originally perhaps a piece of notoriety-hunting. He had, as a
rule, flawless health; and the unaccustomed headaches and nausea which
followed these occasional excesses had disgusted and deterred him. He shook
himself easily free of a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and
had ever since found his abstinence a source both of vanity and of
distinction. Nothing annoyed him more than to hear it put down to any
ethical motive. "If I liked the beastly stuff, I should swim in it
to-morrow," he would say with an angry eye when certain
acquaintance--not those he made at Labour Congresses--goaded him
on the point. "As it is, why should I make it, or chloral, or
morphia, or any other poison, my master! What's the
inducement--eh, you fellows?"
En revanche he smoked inordinately.
"Is that all, sir," said his servant, pausing behind his
chair, after candles, matches, cigarettes, and Apollinaris had been
supplied in abundance.
"Yes; go to bed, Williams, but don't lock up.
Good-night."
The man departed, and Wharton, going to the window which opened on a
balcony looking over St. James
Street, threw it wide, and smoked a cigarette leaning against the wall. It was on the whole a fine night and warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air. In the street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only just past midnight and the clubs were not yet emipty. To his right the turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky covered with light, windy cloud. Beyond it his eye sought instinctively for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless--like some one in a stupid silence. That light of the sitting House had become to him one of the standing pleasures of life. He had never yet been honestly glad of its extinction.
"I'm a precious raw hand," he confessed to himself with
a shake of the head as he stood there smoking. "And it can't
last--nothing does."
Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the ledge of the
balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a
little, and finally took out a letter. He stooped over the lamp to read it.
It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had writtten him some two or three
days after the breach of her engagement. That fact was barely mentioned at
the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any kind. Then the
letter continued:
"I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and attempted through these many weeks. But for them it must have been plain to us both that we could never rightly meet again. I am very destitute just now--and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing left me. But that
Page 106scene in the past, which put us both wrong with honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out--thought--suffered away. I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other co-worker and co-thinker--if in the future you ever want my work, if you can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could do--ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.
"But for the present I am going quite away into another world. I have been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go. As soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year's training at a London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and nurse. This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife from seeing Hurd the day before the execution. I knew then that all was over for me at Mellor.
"As for the wretched break-down of everything--of all my schemes and friendships here--I had better not speak of it. I feel that I have given these village-folk, whom I had promised to help, one more reason to despair of life. It is not pleasant to carry such a thought away with one. But if the tool breaks and blunts, how can the task be done? It can be of no use till it has been re-set.
"I should like to know how your plans prosper. But I shall see your paper and follow what goes on in Parliament. For the present I want neither to write nor get letters. They tell me that as a probationer I shall spend my time at first in washing glasses, and polishing bath-taps, on which my mind rests!
Page 107
"If you come across my friends of whom I have spoken to you--Louis, Anthony, and Edith Craven--and could make any use of Louis for the Labour Clarion, I should be grateful. I hear they have had hard times of late, and Louis has engaged himself, and wants to be married. You remember I told you how we worked at the South Kensington classes together, and how they made me a Venturist?
"Yours very truly, "MARCELLA BOYCE."
"'Put us both wrong with honour and
conscience.' 'One more reason for despair of
life'--'All was over for me at
Mellor'--dear! dear!--how women like the big
words--the emphatic pose. All those little odds and ends of
charities--that absurd straw-plaiting scheme! Well, perhaps one could
hardly expect her to show a sense of humour just then. But why does nature
so often leave it out in these splendid creatures?"
"Hullo!" he added, as he bent over the table to look for a
pen; "why didn't that idiot give me these?"
For there, under an evening paper which he had not touched, lay a pile
of unopened letters. His servant had forgotten to point them out to him. On
the top was a letter on which Wharton pounced at once. It was addressed in
a bold inky hand, and he took it to be from Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P., his
former colleague at the Birminghlam Labour Congress, of late a member of
the Labour Clarion staff, and as such a daily increasing
plague and anxiety to the Clarion's proprietor.
However, the letter was not from Wilkins. It was from the secretary of a
Midland trades-union, with whom Wharton had already been in communication.
The union was recent, and represented the as yet feeble organisation of a
metal industry in process of transition from the home-workshop to the full
factory, or Great Industry stage. The conditions of work were extremely
bad, and grievances many; wages were low, and local distress very great.
The secretary, a young man of ability and enthusiasm, wrote to Wharton to
say that certain alterations in the local "payment lists"
lately made by the employers amounted to a reduction of wages; that the
workers, beginning to feel the heartening effects of their union, were
determined not to submit; that bitter and even desperate agitation was
spreading fast, and that a far-reaching strike was imminent. Could they
count on the support of the Clarion? The
Clarion had already published certain letters on the
industry from a Special Commissioner--letters which had drawn public
attention, and had been eagerly read in the district itself. Would the
Clarion now "go in" for them? Would Mr. Wharton
personally support them, in or out of Parliament, and get his friends to do
the same? To which questions, couched in terms extremely flattering to the
power of the Clarion and its owner, the secretary appended a
long and technical statement of the situation.
Wharton looked up from the letter with a kindling eye. He foresaw an
extremely effective case, both for the newspaper and the House of Commons.
One of the chief capitalists involved was a man called Denny,
who had been long in the House, for whom the owner of the Clarion entertained a strong personal dislike. Denny had thwarted him vexatiously--had perhaps even made him ridiculous--on one or two occasions; and Wharton saw no reason whatever for forgiving one's enemies until, like Narvaez, one had "shot them all." There would be much satisfaction in making Denny understand who were his masters. And with these motives there mingled a perfectly genuine sympathy with the "poor devils" in question, and a desire to see them righted.
"Somebody must be sent down at once," he said to himself.
"I suppose," he added, with discontent, "it must be
Wilkins."
For the man who had written the articles for the Labour
Clarion, as Special Commissioner, had some three weeks before left
England to take command of a colonial newspaper.
Still pondering, he took up the other letters, turned them
over--childishly pleased for the thousandth time by the M.P. on each
envelope and the number and variety of his correspondence--and eagerly
chose out three--one from his bankers, one from his Lincolnshire
agent, and one from the Clarion office, undoubtedly this
time in Wilkins's hand.
He read them, grew a little pale, swore under his breath, and, angrily
flinging the letters away from him, he took up his cigarette again and
thought.
The letter from his bankers asked his attention in stiff terms to a
largely overdrawn account, and entirely declined to advance a sum of money
for which he had applied to them without the guarantee
of two substantial names in addition to his own. The letter from his agent warned him that the extraordinary drought of the past six weeks, together with the general agricultural depression, would certainly mean a large remission of rents at the June quarter day, and also informed him that the holders of his co-operative farm would not be able to pay their half-yearly interest on the capital advanced to them by the landlord.
As to the third letter, it was in truth much more serious than the two
others. Wilkins, the passionate and suspicious workman, of great natural
ability, who had been in many ways a thorn in Wharton's side since the
beginning of his public career, was now member for a mining constituency.
His means of support were extremely scanty, and at the opening of the new
Parliament Wharton had offered him well-paid work on the
Clarion newspaper. It had seemed to the proprietor of the
Clarion a way of attaching a dangerous man to himself,
perhaps also of controlling him. Wilkins had grudgingly accepted,
understanding perfectly well what was meant.
Since then the relation between the two men had been one of perpetual
friction. Wilkins's irritable pride would yield nothing, either in the
House or in the Clarion office, to Wharton's university
education and class advantages, while Wharton watched with alarm the
growing influence of this insubordinate and hostile member of his own staff
on those labour circles from which the Clarion drew its
chief support.
In the letter he had just read Wilkins announced to the proprietor of
the Clarion that in consequence
of the "scandalous mismanagement" of that paper's handling of a certain trade arbitration which had just closed, he, Wilkins, could no longer continue to write for it, and begged to terminate his engagement at once, there being no formal agreement between himself and Wharton as to length of notice on either side. A lively attack on the present management and future prospects of the Clarion followed, together with the threat that the writer would do what in him lay henceforward to promote the cause of a certain rival organ lately started, among such working men as he might be able to influence.
"Brute! jealous, impracticable brute!"
exclaimed Wharton aloud, as he stood chafing and smoking by the window. All
the difficulties which this open breach was likely to sow in his path stood
out before him in clear relief.
"Personal leadership, there is the whole
problem," he said to himself in moody despair. "Can
I--like Parnell--make a party and keep it together? Can I through
the Clarion--and through influence outside
the House--coerce the men in the House? If so, we can do
something, and Lady Cradock will no longer throw me her smiles. If not the
game is up, both for me and for them. They have no cohesion, no common
information, no real power. Without leaders they are a mere set of
half-educated firebrands whom the trained mind of the country humours
because it must, and so far as they have brute force behind them. Without
leadership, I am a mere unit of the weakest group
in the House. Yet, by Jove! it looks as though I had not the
gifts."
And he looked back with passionate chagrin on the whole course of his
connection with Wilkins, his unavailing concessions and small humiliations,
his belief in his own tact and success, all the time that the man dealt
with was really slipping out of his hands.
"Damn the fellow!" he said at last, flinging his cigarette
away. "Well, that's done with. All the same, he would have liked
that Midland job! He has been hankering after a strike there for some time,
and might have ranted as he pleased. I shall have the satisfaction of
informing him he has lost his opportunity. Now then--who to send? By
Jove! what about Miss Boyce's friend?"
He stood a moment twisting the quill-pen he had taken up, then he
hastily found a sheet of paper and wrote:
"Dear Miss Boyce,--It is more than a year since I have heard of you, and I have been wondering with much interest lately whether you have really taken up a nursing life. You remember speaking to me of your friends the Cravens? I come across them sometimes at the Venturist meetings, and have always admired their ability. Last year I could do nothing practical to meet your wishes. This year, however, there is an opening on the Clarion, and I should like to discuss it with you. Are you in town or to be found? I could come any afternoon next week, early--I go down to the House at four--or on Saturdays. But I should like it to be Tuesday or Wednesday, that I might try and persuade you to come to our Eight Hours debate on Friday night. It would interest you, and I think I could get you a seat. We Labour mem-
Page 113bers are like the Irishmen--we can always get our friends in.
"I must send this round by Mellor, so it may not reach you till Tuesday. Perhaps you will kindly telegraph. The Clarion matter is pressing.
"Yours sincerely, "H.S. WHARTON."
Revenge, however, was soon dispersed. He recollected his other
correspondents, and springing up he began to pace his room, gloomily
thinking over his money difficulties, which were many. He and his mother
had always been in want of money ever since he could remember. Lady Mildred
would spend huge sums on her various crotchets and campaigns, and then
subside for six months into wretched lodgings in a back street of Southsea
or Worthing, while the Suffolk house was let, and her son mostly went
abroad. This perpetual worry of needy circumstances had always, indeed, sat
lightly on Wharton. He was unmarried, and so far scarcity had generally
passed into temporary comfort before he had time to find it intolerable.
But now the whole situation was becoming more serious. In the first place,
his subscriptions and obligations as a member of Parliament, and as one of
the few propertied persons in a moneyless movement, were considerable.
Whatever Socialism might make of money in the future, he was well aware
that money in the present was no less useful to a Socialist
poli-
tician than to any one else. In the next place, the starting and pushing of the Clarion newspaper--originally purchased by the help of a small legacy from an uncle--had enormously increased the scale of his money transactions and the risks of life.
How was it that, with all his efforts, the Clarion was
not making, but losing money? During the three years he had possessed it he
had raised it from the position of a small and foul-mouthed print,
indifferently nourished on a series of small scandals, to that of a Labour
organ of some importance. He had written a weekly signed article for it,
which had served from the beginning to bring both him and the paper into
notice; he had taken pains with the organisation and improvement of the
staff; above all, he had spent a great deal more money upon it, in the way
of premises and appliances, than he had been, as it turned out, in any way
justified in spending.
Hence, inideed, these tears. Rather more than a year before, while the
Clarion was still enjoying a first spurt of success and
notoriety, he had, with a certain recklessness which belonged to his
character, invested in new and costly machinery, and had transferred the
paper to larger offices. All this had been done on borrowed money.
Then, for some reason or other, the Clarion had ceased to
answer to the spur--had, indeed, during the past eight months been
flagging heavily. The outside world was beginning to regard the
Clarion as an important paper. Wharton knew all the time
that its advertisements were falling off, and its circulation declining.
Why? Who can say? If it is true that
books have their fates, it is still more true of newspapers. Was it that a collectivist paper--the rival organ mentioned by Wilkins--recently started by a group of young and outrageously clever Venturists and more closely in touch than the Clarion with two or three of the great unions, had filched the Clarion's ground? Or was it simply that, as Wharton put it to himself in moments of rage and despondency, the majority of working men "are either sots or blockheads, and will read and support nothing but the low racing or police-court news, which is all their intelligences deserve?" Few people had at the bottom of their souls a more scornful distrust of the "masses" than the man whose one ambition at the present moment was to be the accepted leader of English labour.
Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was
liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept waiting.
On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great indulgence.
He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his
curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back. Presently he
stopped--absently--in front of the inner wall of the room, where,
above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolnshire house, a
number of large framed photographs were hung close together.
His eye caught one and brightened. With an impatient gesture, like that
of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.
"If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer
will take me out of it! What a gorgeous time we had on that
glacier!"
He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan
Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had
spent four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very
grain and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could
feel the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind.
The man seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself. And
there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and that
fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they had lost
by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of the
glacier. Ah, those, had been years of life, those
Wanderjähre! He ran over the photographs
with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing itself in covetous memories
of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores with their scattered palms, of
superb rivers sweeping with sound and fury round innumerable islands, of
great buildings ivory white amid the wealth of creepers which had pulled
them into ruin, vacant now for ever of the voice of man, and ringed by
untrodden forests.
"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of
Cathay,'" he thought. "Ah! but how much did the man who
wrote that know about Cathay?"
And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a
flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how
indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we
choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! Somewhere,
while we toil in the gloom and the crowd. there is air, there
is sea, the joy of the sun, the life of
the body, so good, so satisfying! This interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose--why! they could be shaken off at a moment's notice!
"However"--he turned on his heel--"suppose
we try a few other trifles first. What time? those fellows won't have
gone to bed yet!"
He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way
to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped
before a well-known fashionable club, extremely small, and extremely
select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had
introduced him when he was young and tender, and his mother's
relations still cherished hopes of snatching him as a brand from the
burning.
The front rooms of the club were tolerably full still. He passed on to
the back. A door-keeper stationed in the passage stepped back and silently
opened a door. It closed instantly behind him, and Wharton found himself in
a room with some twenty other young fellows playing baccarat, piles of
shining money on the tables, the electric lamps hung over each, lighting
every detail of the scene with the same searching disenchanting glare.
"I say!" cried a young dark-haired fellow, like a
dishevelled Lord Byron. "Here comes the Labour leader--make
room!"
And amid laughter and chaffing he was drawn down to the baccarat table,
where a new deal was just beginning. He felt in his pockets for money; his
eyes, intent and shining, followed every motion of the
dealer's hand. For three years now, ever since his return from his travels, the gambler's passion had been stealing on him. Already this season he had lost and won--on the whole lost--large sums. And the fact was--so far--absolutely unknown except to the men with whom he played in this room.
Marcella looked with amusement at her adviser--a small bandy-legged
boy in shirt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly
featured face. He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding, his
sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his expression
sharp and keen as a hawk's.
"Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I'm gone,
and don't let any one in but the doctor."
And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick
woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.
"I aint a goin' ter," said the boy, shortly, beginning
to sweep again with energy, "an' if this 'ere baby cries,
give it the bottle, I s'pose?"
"No, certainly not," said Marcella, firmly; "it has
just had one. You sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone."
Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and
ran a general's eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the
room.
"Now look 'ere, Nuss," he said in a tone of pitying
remonstrance, "yer never a goin' down to that 'ere coal
cellar without a light. Yer'll 'ave to come runnin' up all
them stairs again--sure as I'm alive yer will!"
And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end
of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the coal-scuttle
that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still masterfully
considering her, let her go.
Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar
all over the poorer parts of West Central London--the
eighteenth-century house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr.
Johnson, now parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided
with air, water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its
chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic art
which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.
Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling
on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade. Rather
it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the
swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and
dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that the
house added one more to the standing shames of the district--an
opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings
among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again with
her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.
The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed
a sleepless night. The even-
ing before she had been sent for in haste to a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women friends in a state of raging delirium. The room was full to suffocation of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an instant. The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse; while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as best she could, in the midst of the poor thing's wild shrieks and wrestlings.
It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their
utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the
day's work. Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the
husband looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty,
plunged suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella
had not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and
night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and
that--she could hardly have told how.
"Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!"
said the husband, rising and shaking himself. He was a Jew from German
Poland, and, unlike most of his race, a huge man, with the make and the
muscles of a prize-fighter.
Yet, after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of perspiration.
"You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on
again," said Marcella.
The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the
nurse.
"You will not go away, mees," he implored, "you will
not leaf me alone?"
Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.
"No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor
comes. You had better go to bed."
It was close on three o'clock. The man demurred a little, but he
was in truth too worn out to resist. He went into the back room and lay
down with the children.
Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her
patient. Her quick ear caught every sound about her--the heavy breaths
of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the
sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the
crowded house. Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances for
pulling the woman through--for it was what a nurse calls "a good
case," one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty--partly
on the extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect
and mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the
woman's illness; and partly--in deep, swift sinkings of
meditative thought--on the strangeness of the fact that she should be
there at all, sitting in this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard
over this Jewish mother and her child!
The year in hospital had rushed--dreamless sleep by
night, exhausting fatigue of mind and body by day. A hospital nurse, if her
work seizes her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of
herself. Now, for some six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as
a district nurse, under the control of a central office and superintendent.
Her work lay in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind. The
life was freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to
self-consciousness.
But now the night was over. The husband had gone off to work at a
factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children had
been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself had been
home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office asking that
her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in sole charge,
with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.
When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found
Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.
"Well, Benny!" she said as she entered, "how have you
got on?"
"Yer can't move the dirt on them boards with
sweepin'," said Benny, looking at them with disgust;
"an' I ain't a goin' to try it no more."
"You're about right there, Benny," said Marcella,
mournfully, as she inspected them; "well, we'll get Mrs. Levi to
come in and scrub--as soon as your mother can bear it."
She stepped up to the bed and looked at her patient,
who seemed to be passing into a state of restless prostration, more or less under the influence of morphia. Marcella fed her with strong beef tea made by herself during the night, and debated whether she should give brandy. No--either the docter would come directly, or she would send for him. She had not seen him yet, and her lip curled at the thought of him. He had ordered a nurse the night before, but had not stayed to meet her, and Marcella had been obliged to make out his instructions from the husband as best she could.
Benny looked up at her with a wink as she went back to the fire.
"I didn't let none o' them in," he
said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "They come a
whisperin' at the door, an' a rattlin' ov the handle as soon
as ever you gone downstairs. But I tole 'em just to take theirselves
off, an' as 'ow you didn't want 'em.
Sillies!"
And taking a crust smeared with treacle out of his pocket, Benny
returned with a severe air to the sucking of it.
Marcella laughed.
"Clever Benny," she said, patting his head; "but why
aren't you at school, sir?"
Benjamin grinned.
"'Ow d'yer s'pose my ma's goin' to git
along without me to do for 'er and the babby?" he replied
slily.
"Well, Benny, you'll have the Board officer down on
you."
At this the urchin laughed out.
"Why, 'e wor here last week! Ee can't be troublin'
'isself about this 'ere bloomin' street every
day in the week."
There was a sharp knock at the door.
"The doctor," she said, as her face dismissed the frolic
brightness which had stolen upon it for a moment. "Run away,
Benny."
Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then
withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with
him.
The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair
moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the
fire.
"You come from the St. Martin's Association?"
Marcella stiffly replied. He took her temperature-chart from her hand
and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time to
time with eyes that displeased her. Presently she came to an account of the
condition in which she had found her patient. The edge on the words, for
all their professional quiet, was unmistakable. She saw him flush.
He moved towards the bed, and she went with him. The, woman moaned as he
approached her. He set about his business with hands that shook. Marcella
decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his proceedings with
increasing disgust and amazement. Presently she could bear it no
longer.
"I think," she said, touching his arm, "that you had
better leave it to me--and--go away!"
He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying,
and faced her fiercely.
"What do you mean?" he said, "don't you know your
place?"
The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.
"Yes--I know my place!"
Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she
had to say. She knew--and he could not deny--that he had
endangered his patient's life. She pointed out that he was in a fair
way to endanger it again. Every word she said lay absolutely within her
sphere as a nurse. His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.
Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for
an instant he would have struck her. Finally he turned down his shirt-cuffs
and walked away.
"You understand," he said thickly, turning upon her, with
his hat in his hand, "that I shall not attend this case again till
your Association can send me a nurse that will do as she is told without
insolence to the doctor. I shall now write a report to your
superintendent."
"As you please," said Marcella, quietly. And she went to the
door and opened it.
He passed her sneering:
"A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare
say. I'd sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of
you!"
Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening. "Will you
go?" she said.
He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside,
breathing threats.
Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.
There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth and
strain.
Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above
were beginning to fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking. In another minute or two she would be besieged by them. She called sharply, "Benny!"
Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses
to right and left.
"What is it you want, Nuss? No, she don't want none o'
you--there!"
And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in
all their faces, but that Marcella said to him--
"Let in Mrs. Levi, please."
The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was
admitted, and then the key was turned. Marcella scribbled a line on a
half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with
it.
"I have sent for a new doctor," she explained, still
frowning and white, to Mrs. Levi. "That one was not fit."
The woman's olive-skinned face lightened all over. "Thanks to
the Lord!" she said, throwing up her hands. "But how in the
world did you do 't, miss? There isn't a single soul in this
house that doesn't go all of a tremble at the sight of 'im. Yet
all the women has 'im when they're ill--bound to. They
thinks he must be clever, 'cos he's such a brute. I do believe
sometimes it's that. He is a brute!"
Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set
her straight and comfortable again. But the woman had begun to mutter once
more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did
not understand, and could no longer be kept still. The temperature was rising again, and another fit of delirium was imminent. Marcella could only hope that she and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor came. When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could, while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman's illness and of Dr. Blank's conduct of it. Marcella's feeling, as she listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity! The sufferings of the poor, because they were poor--these things often, still, darkened earth and heaven for her. That wretch would have been quite capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently, if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.
"Hullo, nurse!" said a cheery voice; "you seem to have
got a bad case."
The sound was as music in Marcella's ears. The woman she held was
fast becoming unmanageable--had just shrieked, first for
"poison," then for a "knife," to kill herself with,
and could hardly be prevented by the combined strength of her nurse and
Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself madly out of bed, and now from tearing
out her black hair in handfuls. The doctor--a young Scotchman with
spectacles, and stubbly red beard--came quickly up to the bed, asked
Marcella a few short questions, shrugged his shoulders over her dry report
of Dr. Blank's proceedings, then took out a black case
from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe together.
For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by, any treatment.
The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and nurse,
in the intervals of his wife's paroxysms, not to leave him alone.
Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the
passage of time. Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out with
a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected his
professional sense. Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an instant,
struck out with a wild right hand. The blow caught Marcella on the cheek,
and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.
"You are hurt," said Dr. Angus, running up to her.
"No, no," she said, smiling through the tears that the shock
had called into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside;
"it is nothing. You said you wanted some fresh ice."
And she went into the back room to get it.
The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the
patient.
"You will have to send her to the infirmary," he said to the
husband; "there is nothing else for it."
Marcella came back with the ice, and was able to apply it to the head.
The patient was quieter--was, in fact, now groaning herself into a
fresh period of exhaustion.
The doctor's sharp eyes took note of the two figures, the huddled
creature on the pillows and the stately head bending over her, with the
delicately hollowed
cheek, whereon the marks of those mad fingers stood out red and angry. He had already had experience of this girl in one or two other cases.
"Well," he said, taking up his hat, "it is no good
shilly-shallying. I will go and find Dr. Swift." Dr. Swift was the
parish doctor.
When he had gone, the big husband broke dovwn and cried, with his head
against the iron of the bed close to his wife. He put his great hand on
hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois. They had been eight
years married, and she had never had a day's serious illness till now.
Marcella's eyes filled with tears as she moved about the room, doing
various little tasks.
At last she went up to him.
"Won't you go and have some dinner?" she said to him
kindly. "There's Benjamin calling you," and she pointed to
the door of the back room, where stood Benny, his face puckered with
weeping, forlornly holding out a plate of fried fish, in the hope of
attracting his father's attention.
The man, who in spite of his size and strength was in truth childishly
soft and ductile, went as he was bid, and Marcella and Mrs. Levi set about
doing what they could to prepare the wife for her removal.
Presently parish doctor and sanitary inspector appeared, strange and
peremptory invaders who did but add to the terror and misery of the
husband. Then at last came the ambulance, and Dr. Angus with it. The
patient, now once more plunged in narcotic stupor, was carried downstairs
by two male nurses, Dr. Angus presiding. Marcella stood in the
doorway and watched the scene,--the gradual disappearance of the helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr. Angus could hardly make his directions heard, angrily as he bade them stand back; and on the top stair, the big husband, following the form of his departing and unconscious wife with his eyes, his face convulsed with weeping, the whimpering children clinging about his knees.
How hot it was!--how stifling the staircase smelt, and how the sun
beat down from that upper window on the towzled unkempt women with their
large-eyed children.
As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the
large asphalted court round which they ran--blazing heat on one side
of it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with
chalk marks for wickets--she was seized with depression. The tall yet
mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of
packed and crowded humanity--these things, instead of offering her
rest, only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more
endurance, more making the best of it.
But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her,
and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of her
own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her children, who
had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In sets 7 and 8, on
either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two widows,
each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.
Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside
the "home" of the district on certain conditions, which had
been fulfilled in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her
old friends in these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable
though poor class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her
to make a temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that
she could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for
their companionship, as she pleased.
As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or
entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the living
room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back
kitchen.
The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's
training showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak
flap tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three
cane chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the
varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books on
the tables--there was not one of these things that was not in its
degree a pleasure to her young senses, that did not help her to live her
life. This afternoon as she opened the door and looked in, the pretty
colours and forms in the tiny room were as water to the thirsty. Her mother
had sent her some flowers the day before. There they were on the tables,
great bunches of honey-
suckles, of blue-bells, and Banksia roses. And over the mantelpiece was a photograph of the place where such flowers as Mellor possessed mostly grew--the unkempt lawn, the old fountain and grey walls of the Cedar Garden.
The green blind over the one window which looked into the court, had
been drawn down against the glare of the sun, as though by a careful hand.
Beside a light wooden rocking chair, which was Marcella's favourite
seat, a tray of tea things had been put out. Marcella drew a long breath of
comfort as she put down her bag.
"Now, can I wait for my tea till I have washed and
dressed?"
She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy
child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door
between her rooms and the Hurds.
"Minta!"
A voice responded.
"Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there's a good
soul! I will be back directly."
And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room,
daintily fresh and clean but very pale. She had taken off her nurse's
dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung about
her in cool folds.
But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her
disapprovingly.
"Whatever are you so late for?" she asked a little
peevishly. "You'll get ill if you go missing your
dinner."
"I couldn't help it, Minta, it was such a bad
case."
Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased. Her mind was
constantly full of protest against this nursing. Why should Miss Boyce do
such "funny things"--why should she live as she did, at
all?
Their relation to each other was a curious one. Marcella, knowing that
the life of Hurd's widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent
for her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering
her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service. Minta
already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her. It
was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine that
one of the "gentlemen" who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve
Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out of
pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce would
defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling, and
leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from Mellor. Her
first instinct after her husband's execution had been to hide herself
from all the world. But for a long time her precarious state of health, and
her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary Harden, made it impossible
for her to leave the village. It was not till Marcella's proposal came
that her way was clear. She sold her bits of things at once, took her
children and went up to Brown's buildings.
Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from
which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often
shrunk from it in
the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man, Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she came in and found him sitting there.
Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through
this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not
call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening, had
declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be that of
servant in
one sense, but of friend and sister; and on her and her chilidren Marcella had spent from the beginning a number of new womanish wiles which, strangely enough, this hard, strenuous life had been developing in her. She would come and help put the children to bed; she would romp with them in their night-gowns; she would bend her imperious head over the anxious endeavour to hem a pink cotton pinafore for Daisy, or dress a doll for the baby. But the relation jarred and limped perpetually, and Marcella wistfully thought it her fault.
Just now, however, as she sat gently swaying backwards and forwards in
the rocking-chair, enjoying her tea, her mood was one of nothing but
content.
"Oh, Minta, give me another cup. I want to have a sleep so badly,
and then I am going to see Miss Hallin, and stay to supper with
them."
"Well, you mustn't go out in them nursin' things
again," said Minta, quickly; "I've put you in some lace in
your black dress, an' it looks beautiful."
"Oh, thank you, Minta; but that black dress always seems to me too
smart to walk about these streets in."
"It's just nice," said Minta, with
decision. "It's just what everybody that knows you--what
your mamma--would like to see you in. I can't abide them
nursin' clothes--nasty things!"
"I declare!" cried Marcella, laughing, but outraged;
"I never like myself so well in anything."
Minta was silent, but her small mouth took an obstinate look. What she
really felt was that it was absurd for ladies to wear caps and aprons and
plain
black bonnets, when there was no need for them to do anything of the kind.
"Whatever have you been doing to your cheek?" she exclaimed,
suddenly, as Marcella handed her the empty cup to take away.
Marcella explained shortly, and Minta looked more discontented than
ever. "A lot of low people as ought to look after themselves,"
that was how in her inmost mind she generally defined Marcella's
patients. She had been often kind and soft to her neighbours at Mellor, but
these dirty, crowded Londoners were another matter.
"Where is Daisy?" asked Marcella as Minta was going away
with the tea; "she must have come back from school."
"Here I am," said Daisy, with a grin, peeping in through the
door of the back kitchen. "Mother, baby's woke up."
"Come here, you monkey," said Marcella; "come and go
to sleep with me. Have you had your tea?"
"Yes, lots," said Daisy, climbing up into Marcella's
lap. "Are you going to be asleep a long time?"
"No--only a nap. Oh! Daisy, I'm so tired. Come and
cuddlie a bit! If you don't go to sleep you know you can slip
away--I shan't wake."
The child, a slight, red-haired thing, with something of the ethereal
charm that her dead brother had possessed, settled herself on
Marcella's knees, slipped her left thumb into her mouth, and flung her
other arm round Marcella's neck. They had often gone to sleep so. Mrs.
Hurd came back, drew down the blind further, threw a light shawl over them
both, and left them.
An hour and a half later Minta came in again as she had been told. Daisy
had slipped away, but Marcella was still lying in the perfect gentleness
and relaxation of sleep.
"You said I was to come and wake you," said Minta, drawing
up the blind; "but I don't believe you're a bit fit to be
going about. Here's some hot water, and there's a letter just
come."
Marcella woke with a start, Minta put the letter on her knee, and dream
and reality flowed together as she saw her own name in Wharton's
handwriting.
She read the letter, then sat flushed and thinking for a while with her
hands on her knees.
A little while later she opened the Hurds' front-door.
"Minta, I am going now. I shall be back early after supper, for I
haven't written my report."
"There--now you look something like!" said Minta,
scanning her approvingly--the wide hat and pretty black dress.
"Shall Daisy run out with that telegram?"
"No, thanks. I shall pass the post. Good-bye."
And she stooped and kissed the little withered woman. She wished,
ardently wished, that Minta would be more truly friends with her!
After a brisk walk through the June evening she stopped--still
within the same district--at the door of a house in a long,
old-fashioned street, wherein the builder was busy on either hand, since
most of the long leases had just fallen in. But the house she entered was
still untouched. She climbed a last-century staircase, adorned with panels
of stucco work--
slender Italianate reliefs of wreaths, ribbons, and medallions on a pale green ground. The decoration was clean and cared for, the house in good order. Eighty years ago it was the home of a famous judge, who entertained in its rooms the legal and literary celebrities of his day. Now it was let out to professional people in lodgings or unfurnished rooms. Edward Hallin and his sister occupied the top floor.
Miss Hallin, a pleasant-looking, plain woman of about thirty-five, came
at once in answer to Marcella's knock, and greeted her affectionately.
Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.
"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had
forgotten us!"
"I didn't get home till four, and then I had to have a
sleep," she explained, half shyly.
"What! you haven't been night-nursing?"
"Yes, for once."
"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let's look after
her."
He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window--the
charming circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of
the room and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of
back gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane
trees here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs
of another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities
of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their
blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of
the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of
line against the blue and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.
Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The
walls, indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased,
by photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to
be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a
few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had chosen
with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a piece of
self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one side of the
fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair, the table
that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its knitting, her
accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she sat and worked or
read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching over her brother.
"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella
had settled herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that
would have rested you more."
"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She
had certainly hoped to find them alone.
"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard
you were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away.
Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There
are some anxious things going on."
He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly
wrenched himself from what wre evidently recurrent thoughts.
"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said,
bending forward to her. "You don't know how much I have thought
of what you have told me already."
"I'm doing just the same," she said, laughing.
"Don't take so much interest in it. It's the fashion just
now to admire nurses; but it's ridiculous. We do our work like other
people--sometimes badly, sometimes well. And some of us wouldn't
do it if we could help it."
She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager
to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her
kindly.
"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?"
he asked.
"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more
character. But there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for
you--every hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And
the 'off' times were no trouble--I never did anything else
but walk up and down the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National
Gallery if it was wet."
"And it was the monotony you liked?"
She made a sign of assent.
"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen
it?"
She flushed.
"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said.
not without a little impatience. "But I didn't like it all at once. I hated a great deal of it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and wash--the things they set me to at first--I thought I shlould have been quite happy. To see my table full of glasses without a spot, and my brass-taps shining, made me as proud as a peacock! But then of course I had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."
"How? Morally?"
She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes--it seemed
to me all topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather
a stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn't have spoken
two words to her. And here she was ordering me about--rating me as I
had never rated a housemaid--laughing at me for not knowing this or
that, and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the
things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well that
she had said to herself, 'Now then I must take that proud girl down
at peg, or she will be no use to anybody;' and I had somehow to put
up with it."
"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort
yourself by reflecting that it was everybody's fate?"
Her lip twitched with amusement.
"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd
ideas!--sometimes looking back I can hardly believe it--perhaps
it was partly a queer state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a
passion I used to try and overawe the girls by shaking my
Speaker great-uncle in their faces. And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive sort of way that they couldn't know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor, and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village--or they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course; but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the patient's elbow in two places. Oh! the fuss, and the scolding, and the humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home next day."
"But you didn't?"
"If I could have sat down and thought it out. I should probably
have gone. But I couldn't think it out--I was too
dead tired. That is the chief feature of your first months in
hospital--the utter helpless fatigue at night. You go to bed aching
and you wake up aching. If you are healthy as I was, it doesn't hurt
you; but, when your time comes to sleep, sleep you must. Even
that miserable night my head was no sooner on the pillow than I was asleep;
and next morning there was all the routine as usual, and the dread of being
a minute late on duty. Then when I got into the ward the Sister looked at
me rather queerly and went out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so
grateful to her! I could have brushed her boots or done any other menial
service for her
with delight. And--then--somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of the work seized me--I grew ambitious--they pushed me on rapidly--everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my enemy--and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and engrossing place in the whole world."
"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you
had never obeyed any one in your life before?"
"Not since I was at school--and then--not
much!"
Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the
face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but
that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with her,
as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than the woman,
had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in something
new--something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the pathos and
the pain of growth.
"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.
"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this
afternoon."
Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"
"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to
do?" she asked him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional
air. "And don't suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a
very rare thing for us to undertake night-nursing at all."
"Can you tell me what the case was?"
She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with
Dr. Blank.
"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless
look, "and that I shall be blamed."
"I should think your second doctor will take care of that!"
said Hallin.
"I don't know. I couldn't help it. But it is one of our
first principles not to question a doctor. And last week too I got the
Association into trouble. A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got
quite fond of had to be removed to hospital. She asked me to cut her hair.
It was matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to
the ward. So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at
one to meet the doctor and help get her off. When I came, I found the whole
court in an uproar. The sister of the woman, who had been watching for me,
stood on the doorstep, and implored me to go away. The husband had gone out
of his senses with rage because I had cut his wife's hair without his
consent. 'He'll murder you, Nuss!' said the sister,
'if he sees you! Don't come in!--he's
mad--he's been going round on 'is 'ands and knees
on the floor!'"--
Hallin interrupted with a shout of laughter. Marcella laughed too; but
to his amazement he saw that her hand shook, and that there were tears in
her eyes.
"It's all very well," she said with a sigh, "but
I had to come away in disgrace, all the street looking on. And he made such
a fuss at the office as never was. It was unfortunate--we don't
want the people set against the nurses. And now Dr. Blank!--I seem to
be always getting into scrapes. It is different from hospital, where
everything is settled for one."
Hallin could hardly believe his ears. Such
woman-
ish terrors and depressions from Marcella Boyce! Was she, after all, too young for the work, or was there some fret of the soul reducing her natural force? He felt an unwonted impulse of tenderness towards her--such as one might feel towards a tired child--and set himself to cheer and rest her.
He had succeeded to some extent, when he saw her give a little start,
and following her eyes he perceived that unconsciously his arm, which was
resting on the table, had pushed into her view a photograph in a little
frame, which had been hitherto concealed from her by a glass of flowers. He
would have quietly put it out of sight again, but she sat up in her
chair.
"Will you give it me?" she said, putting out her hand.
He gave it her at once.
"Alice brought it home from Miss Raeburn the other day. His aunt
made him sit to one of the photographers who are always besieging public
men. We thought it good."
"It is very good," she said, after a pause. "Is the
hair really--as grey as that?" She pointed to it.
"Quite. I am very glad that he is going off with Lord Maxwell to
Italy. It will be ten days' break for him at any rate. His work this
last year has been very heavy. He has had his grandfather's to do
really, as well as his own; and this Commission has been a stiff job too. I
am rather sorry that he has taken this new post."
"What post?"
"Didn't you hear? They have made him Under-Secretary to the
Home Department. So that he is now in the Government."
She put back the photograph, and moved her chair a little so as to see
more of the plane trees and the strips of sunset cloud.
"How is Lord Maxwell?" she asked presently.
"Much changed. It might end in a sudden breakup at any
time."
Hallin saw a slight contraction pass over her face. He knew that she had
always felt an affection for Lord Maxwell. Suddenly Marcella looked hastily
round her. Miss Hallin was busy with a little servant at the other end of
the room making arrangements for supper.
"Tell me," she said, bending over the arm of her chair and
speaking in a low, eager voice, "he is beginning to forget
it?"
Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile
suggested an answer from which she turned away.
"If he only would!" she said, speaking almost to herself,
with a kind of impatience. "He ought to marry, for everybody's
sake."
"I see no sign of his marrying--at present," said
Hallin, drily.
He began to put some papers under his hand in order. There was a cold
dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood. Ever since that
day--that never-forgotten day--when he had come to her the
morning after her last interview with Aldous Raeburn--come with
reluctance and dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him--and had
gone away her friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had
ever been in the days of the engagement, their
relation on this subject had been the same. His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life during the past eighteen months, had been very great. In that first interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry, something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly difficult task--its simplicity, its delicate respect for her personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the stress of emotion--this something had suddenly broken down his pale, proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as amazed them both.
Experiences of this kind were not new to him. His life consecrated to
ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a
crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him off
from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially cut him
off from marriage--together with the ardent temperament, the charm,
the imaginative insight which had been his cradlegifts--these things
ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide and prop of
natures stronger and stormier than his own. Often the unwilling guide; for
he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of the man who has set
himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will have power and time to
finish it. The claims made upon him seemed to him often to cost him
physical and brain energy he could ill spare.
But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey
in such matters. Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and
there was no help for it. Since their first memorable interview, at long
intervals, he had written to her and she to him. Of her hospital life, till
to-night, she had never told him much. Her letters had been the passionate
outpourings of a nature sick of itself, and for the moment of living; full
of explanations which really explained little; full too of the untaught
pangs and questionings of a mind which had never given any sustained or
exhaustive effort to any philosophical or social question, and yet was in a
sense tortured by them all--athirst for an impossible justice, and
aflame for ideals mocked first and above all by the writer's own
weakness and defect. Hallin had felt them interesting, sad, and, in a
sense, fine; but he had never braced himself to answer them without groans.
There were so many other people in the world in the same plight!
Nevertheless, all through the growth of friendship one thing had never
altered between them from the beginning--Hallin's irrevocable
judgment of the treatment she had bestowed on Aldous Raeburn. Never
throughout the whole course of their acquaintance had he expressed that
judgment to her in so many words. Notwithstanding, she knew perfectly well
both the nature and the force of it. It lay like a rock in the stream of
their friendship. The currents of talk might circle round it, imply it,
glance off from it; they left it unchanged. At the root of his mind towards
her, at the bottom of his gentle sensitive
nature, there was a sternness which he often forgot--she never.
This hard fact in their relation had insensibly influenced her greatly,
was constantly indeed working in and upon her, especially since the chances
of her nursing career had brought her to settle in this district, within a
stone's throw of him and his sister, so that she saw them often and
intimately. But it worked in different ways. Sometimes--as
to-night--it evoked a kind of defiance.
A minute or two after he had made his remark about Aldous, she said to
him suddenly,
"I had a letter from Mr. Wharton to-day. He is coming to tea with
me to-morrow, and I shall probably go to the House on Friday with Edith
Craven to hear him speak."
Hallin gave a slight start at the name. Then he said nothing; but went
on sorting some letters of the day into different heaps. His silence roused
her irritation.
"Do you remember," she said, in a low, energetic voice,
"that I told you I could never be ungrateful, never forget what he
had done?"
"Yes, I remember," he said, not without a certain sharpness
of tone. "You spoke of giving him help if he ever asked it of
you--has he asked it?"
She explained that what he seemed to be asking was Louis Craven's
help, and that his overtures with regard to the Labour
Clarion were particularly opportune, seeing that Louis was pining
to be able to marry, and was losing heart, hope, and health for want of
some fixed employment. She spoke warmly of her friends
and their troubles, and Hallin's inward distaste had to admit that all she said was plausible. Since the moment in that strange talk which had drawn them together, when she had turned upon him with the passionate cry--"I see what you mean, perfectly! but I am not going to marry Mr. Wharton, so don't trouble to warn me--for the matter of that he has warned me himself:--but my gratitude he has earned, and if he asks for it I will never deny it him"--since that moment there had been no word of Wharton between them. At the bottom of his heart Hallin distrusted her, and was ashamed of himself because of it. His soreness and jealousy for his friend knew no bounds. "If that were to come on again"--he was saying to himself now, as she talked to him--"I could not bear it, I could not forgive her!"
He only wished that she would give up talking about Wharton altogether.
But, on the contrary, she would talk of him--and with a curious
persistence. She must needs know what Hallin thought of his career in
Parliament, of his prospects, of his powers as a speaker. Hallin answered
shortly, like some one approached on a subject for which he cares
nothing.
"Yet, of course, it is not that; it is injustice!" she said
to herself, with vehemence. "He must care; they are his subjects, his
interests too. But he will not look at it dispassionately,
because--"
So they fell out with each other a little, and the talk dragged. Yet,
all the while, Marcella's inner mind was conscious of quite different
thoughts. How good it was to be here, in this room, beside these two
people! She must show herself fractious and difficult
with Hallin sometimes; it was her nature. But in reality, that slight and fragile form, that spiritual presence were now shrined in the girl's eager reverence and affection. She felt towards him as many a Catholic has felt towards his director; though the hidden yearning to be led by him was often oddly covered, as now, by an outer self-assertion. Perhaps her quarrel with him was that he would not lead her enough--would not tell her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.
"I say, Hallin--is this all right?"
The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the
door, and cautiously put in a curly head.
"Frank!--is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing
up.
Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the
window.
"Well, I am glad!" he cried, striding across
the room and shaking Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I
thought none of your friends were ever going to get a sight of you again!
Why, what--"
He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair
boy's face.
"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing;
"or means to pretend he did."
"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only
twice as--I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"--this
in a stage aside to Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves,
and still studying Marcella.
"Well, I think she looks tired," said Hallin,
with a little attempt at a smile, but turning away.
Every-
body felt a certain tension, a certain danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was very welcome.
The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to
it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three
others--over-driven and over-pressed, all of them--responded with
a kind of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out
all his budget--his peacock's pride at having been just put into
the 'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows
with his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just
scraped through his Mods.
"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he
declared, with a child's complacency. "Brutes! I
couldn't remember them. I learnt them up and down, backwards and
forwards--but it was no good; they nearly dished me!"
"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that
when a certain person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in
some obscure year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from
first to last, without a hitch."
"The winner of the Derby!" said the lad,
eagerly, bending forward with his hands on his knees; "why, I should
rather think so! That isn't memory; that's
knowledge!--Goodness! who's this?"
The last remark was addressed sotto voce
to Marcella. Supper was just over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had
returned to the window, while Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help,
herself cleared the table and set all straight.
Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking.
Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to Hallin
and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others were Bennett,
Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders, and Nehemiah
Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and Leven; but the
new-comers took little notice of any one but their host, and were soon
seated about him discussing a matter already apparently familiar to them,
and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with that passionate
directness which, in the social and speculative field, replaced his
ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong disagreement with
the rest--a disagreement which troubled himself and irritated
them.
Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was
sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven
turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.
"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh,
isn't it rum! isn't it rum! Look at
Hallin,--those are the people whom he cares to talk to.
That's a shoemaker, that man to the left--really an awfully cute
fellow--and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason, a
Socialist of course--would like to string me up
to-morrow. Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I
think we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would
pray over us first and shoot us afterwards--which isn't the case,
I understand, with many of 'em. Then the others--you know
them? That's Bennett--regular good fellow--always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves--for which of course they love him no more than they are obliged--And Wilkins--oh! Wilkins"--he chuckled--"they say it'll come to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."
Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a
little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and
looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him. Since
her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the
sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody.
Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that, notwithstanding, all the
world was aware of them.
"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she
said to him with a little scorn.
"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad,
"that's one comfort! But I don't know anything about
anything!--Miss Boyce!"
He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at
once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside
her.
Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several
times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his
sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she recognised
the old symptoms.
"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she
said--"how many since we met last?"
"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind
his fingers--"you're like all the rest."
Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a
flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.
"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over
there and talk! And yet I did want to tell you about it--you were
awfully kind to me down at home. I want to tell you--and I don't
want to tell you--perhaps I oughtn't to tell
you--you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an ungentlemanly brute
for speaking of it at all--and yet somehow--"
The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a
hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at
Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its
two years or so of time!
"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."
"No--really?--shall I?"
Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to
some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A pretty
girl--or rather "an exquisite creature!" met
at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the
"Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls,
Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a
sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate
sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally,
not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every
virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making nothing
but
a devastating and death-dealing use of them--how familiar it all was!--and how many more of them there seemed to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!
"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though
she's so frightfully pretty--well, frightfully
fetching, rather--and well dressed and all the rest of it, she
isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls--not she.
She's read a lot of things--a lot! I'm sure,
Miss Boyce"--he looked at her confidently,-"if
you were to see her you'd think her awfully clever. And
yet she's so little--and so dainty--and she dances--my
goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I mean--Letty Lind
isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her
mother's a most dreadful old bore--well, no, I didn't mean
that--of course I didn't mean that!--but she's fussy,
you know, and invalidy, and has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged
about in bath chairs, and Betty's an angel to her--she is
really--though her mother's always snapping her head off. And as
to the poor--"
Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval,
sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to
restrain this plunging lover.
"Look here--do come to the point--have you proposed to
her?"
"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently.
"About once a week since Christmas. Of course she's played with
me--that sort always does--but I think I might really have a
chance with her, if it weren't for her mother--horrible
old--no, of
course I don't mean that! But now it comes in what I oughtn't to tell you--I know I oughtn't to tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't help talking of it!"
And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red
cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.
Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't
talk in riddles," she said. "What is the matter
with you?--of course you must tell me."
"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging.
"As if you could mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking
to you about--about--You see," he blurted out,
"she's going to Italy with the Raeburns. She's a connection
of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's taken a fancy to her
lately--and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they
asked her to go to Italy--and naturally a fellow sees what
that means--and what her mother's after. I
don't believe Betty would; he's too old for her,
isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"--this time he smote his knee in
real desperation--"now I have done it. I'm
simply bursting always with the thing I'd rather cut my
head off than say. Why they make 'em like me I don't
know!"
"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience--"that
her mother wants her to marry Mr. Raeburn?"
He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair,
her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the
pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night
with a fatigue which was also a dignity,
struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and. excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it--what she would say.
Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his
chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory
excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.
"I don't know why you talk like that," she said,
looking at him steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life
without hearing Mr. Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise
so much! It really doesn't matter what I suppose--that
you think--about my present state of mind. It is very
simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved badly. I know
it--and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living one's
life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to
come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about Mr.
Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."
Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.
"I never thought of that," he said.
"Well, you might, mightn't you?"
For another short space there was silence between
them, while the rush of talk in the centre of the room, was still loud and unspent.
Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy
and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.
"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him,
smiling, and in her most ordinary voice.
The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on
chattering.
"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she
and Mrs. Macdonald--that's Betty's mother--she
hasn't got a father--had talked it over. And now Betty's
going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too for ten days--and
when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me as if I were a little
chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death. It's
sickening!"
"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"
"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said
despondently. "She's always teasing and amusing him. When
she's there she never lets him alone. She harries him out. She makes
him read to her and ride with her. She makes him discuss all sorts of
things with her you'd never think Aldous would
discuss--her lovers and her love affairs, and being in
love!--it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter
she and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me
she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so
flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to
Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said;
'this'll never do! you've got to
come and dance with me, and push those chairs and tables aside'--I can fancy the little stamp she'd give--'and make those other people dance too.' And she made him--she positively made him. Aldous declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of it--and of course the evening went like smoke."
Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed
on the speaker.
"Did Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded
incredulous.
"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends
after that, and he told her everything--oh well," said the lad,
embarrassed, and clutching at his usual formula--"of course, I
didn't mean that. And she's fearfully flattered, you can see she
is, and she tells me that she adores him--that he's the only
great man she's ever known--that I'm not fit to black his
boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me--and all that
sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall have to shoot
myself--I declare I shall!"
"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice;
"the case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we
move? I'm going over there to listen to that talk.
But--first--come and see me whenever you like--3 to 4.30,
Brown's Buildings, Maine Street--and tell me how this goes
on?"
She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half
sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had
been wrapped
up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him.
"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to
himself discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her
cranks, and of course she'll get rid of them. Just like
my luck!"
Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from
her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of listening;
but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how
little men knew of each other!--even the most intimate
friends--and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like,
married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her
meant, of course, the attraction of contraries--one of the most
promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought
Frank's chances were poor.
Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she
discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion of
his present position and prospects in the Labour party--a discussion,
however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the
air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating
a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his chair flushed
and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions
of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had no heart for
anything more. Miss Hallin
observed him anxiously, and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind to send all her guests away.
The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an
organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They
referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had done for "those Irish
fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to
learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and strike
together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to
smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation,
separate place in the House, separate Whips--they were ready, nay
clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry Wharton
as a leader. They spoke of the Clarion with enthusiasm, and
declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was,
moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.
The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one
or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to nothing,
he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room
staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man,
with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair, and
North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with these
epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!
Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some
of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two
workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably--Wilkins's
dialect getting more pronounced with each step of the argument.
"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to
Lunnon to put myself and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry
Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at home, I tell tha,"
cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be the
People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong
ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak
use of us all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for
his own advancement, an' ull kick us down when he's done with us!
Why shouldn't he? What is he? Is he a man of
us--bone of our bone? He's a landlord,
and an aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but
thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have
they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of
years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o'
them--living on his rent and interest--grinding the
faces of the poor, I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the
rest of them do--is goin' to lead me, an' those
as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords! Why are
we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for us?
Let him go to his own class--I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond
of countesses, and they of him!--or let him set up as the friend of
the working man just as he likes--I'm quite agreeable--I
shan't make any bones about takin' his vote; but
I'm not goin' to make him master over me, and give him the right
to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off
fust!"
Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a
worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in
and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason, with a
strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the
religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.
"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he
said quickly, "and that's the ruin of us. We all know that.
Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers,
if we'd gone about our business as you're going about yours in
the House of Commons?"
"I'm not saying we shouldn't
organise," said Wilkinis, fiercely. "What I'm
sayin' is, get a man of the working class--a man who has the
wants of the working class--a man whom the working class
can get a hold on--to do your business for you, and not any
bloodsucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to
ivery honest working man i' the coontry, to mak' a Labour party
and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"
The youug Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd
like it yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll
take a man as can hold his own with the swells--and quite right
too!"
"And if Mr. Wharton is a landlord he's a good sort!"
exclaimed the shoemaker--a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock
coat. "There's many on us knows as have been to hear him speak,
what he's tried to do about the land, and the co-operative farming.
E's straight is Mr. Wharton. We 'aven't got
Socialism yet--an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord. Ee was born it."
"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said
Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy
cheek--"he's ruunin' that paper for his own
hand--Haven't I had experience of him? I know it--And
i'll prove it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest
is Mr. Wharton--and when he's doon it by makkin' fools of
us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're iver likely to
get out o' him. He go agen the landlords
when it coom to the real toossle,--I know 'em--I tell
tha--I know 'em!"
A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.
"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we
in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making
our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have
been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords--no fuss
about it--and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and
fourpence a week!"
Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker--amazed!
Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like
women--least of all, ladies.
He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she
said--which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe--it
was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public
opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and
prize cattle must have prize
cottages of course--"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"
Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee,
went avengingly into facts--the difference between landlords'
villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by
different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the
Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great
blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like
the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.
Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.
"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing
on her head or am I?"
After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen
joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence,
and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the
landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody
rose simultaneously to say good-night.
"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse
club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand
to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."
"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing;
"I am."
He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.
When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.
"Are there many of these Labour members like
that?"
Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.
"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin,
smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a
large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is
amazing,--it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You
astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me
still more!"
And as he fell back into his chair, Mareella caught a flash of
expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.
"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word.
Politics is one thing--slanderous abuse is another!" she said,
throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to
Hallinl the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the
game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.
He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their
ways.
"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven;
"'because she knows it teases.' We know very
well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce?
I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House
I'm always having rows with--and upon my word I didn't know
there was half so much to be said for us!"
Marcella flushed.
"Never mind where I got it!" she said.
In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural
reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.
When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort
her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a
moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.
His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you
dreadfully."
"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a
sigh of exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get
myself into sleeping trim. But you go, Alice--good-night."
When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the
thought--"She must contradict here as she contradicted there!
She--and justice! If she could have been just to a
landlord for one hour last year--"
He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection,
oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep. Then
from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of
strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had
filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of
nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence if the night, all life
became an oppression and a terror and rest, either to-night or in the
future, a thing never to be his.
He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which
so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped
activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he
had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content,
cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite
compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study
of economical and historical questions; the expression through them of such
a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as few
are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty, and
perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power
to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world on whom
all his thoughts centred--these things had been his joy, and had led
him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour
of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.
And now he had come upon opposition--the first cooling of
friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.
Early in the spring of this year a book called To-morrow and the
Land had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of
great ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not
offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question
as it affected England specially and London in particular. It
showed--or tried to show--in picturesque detail what might be the
consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land into
a common or national stock,
of expropriating the landlords, and transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from Progress and Poverty, which also powerfully and directly affected the English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to he grasped by the average working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and--by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of London--treated with abundant humour.
The thing had an enormous success--in popular phrase, "caught
on." Soon Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent
spirits in the working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer
were touched--nay, possessed--by it. The crowd of more or less
socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of
it; the working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a
madness--an infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon
reached an immense sale, and was in every one's hands.
To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled
problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme
importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual
and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the
more eager and passiolate became his own desire to battle with it. His
platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings
many. Hundreds and thousands of men all ovar England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.
And he had been saying his say--throwing into it all his energies,
all his finest work. With the result that--for the first time in
eleven years--he felt his position in the working-class movement
giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand.
Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection;
readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he hid always hitherto
belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few--these bitter ghosts,
with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of
idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He
could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul--it had been
the source of his power--and every economical or social conviction was
in some way bound up with a moral and religious passion which was his
being--his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain,
his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of
other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a
question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw
himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with
some prescience of the martyr's fate.
Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent
over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly
of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many
lesser contests. It was impossible
that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him. Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!
He had various lecturing engagements ahead, conected with this great
debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He had
accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward
to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile
faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships. Oh,
for sleep--for the power to rest--to escape this
corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled
nothing!
"The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative
will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart
it." These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated
deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the
hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hidden wisdom. Could
one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?
Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little
sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door
in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that
the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had
gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the
Labour Clarion, as the paper's correspondent in the
Midlands, with special reference to the important strike just pending.
Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather
further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an
impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two
years' engagement, and had offered two hundred a year. So far as that
went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.
"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper
goes in for the strike, that you will fight it through?"
He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven
was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face,
delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in
appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy
which was apt to pass unac-
countably into sarcasm. Wharton had never felt himself personalily at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.
"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied,
with emphasis--"I have gone through the seretary's
statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case.
The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public
backed them up. There are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should
say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going."
He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air
of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.
"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a
hard man, but a just one according to his lights. There are plenty worse
than he."
Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never
accepting anything that was said quite as it stood--of not, even in
small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was
conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to
Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.
"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked
for his stick--"you see there is talk of arbitration."
"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere
blind. The men have been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig
from the neighbourhood--not in the trade, indeed, but next door to
it--and, of course, the award goes against the men."
"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"
Craven took out a note-book.
"No!--The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men
are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live.
It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down. We must
go for them! I mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you
read the evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let
them live first!"
Craven looked up absently.
"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's
address?" Mr. Thorpe was the secretary.
Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it
was not for Craven to take no notice.
Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as
anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's
grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep disdain
for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of self-advertisement,
held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an amazing
disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.
Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt
directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave the
minutest attention.
"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.
"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of
tone. "Business is up and I am off!"
He took up his hat as he spoke.
"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest
departs," said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the
red-haired Daisy who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the
tea-table.
Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her
tête-à-tête before Louis
Craven arrived, and he was really due at the House. But now that she was on
the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly
beautiful she was, even in this disguise! She wore her nurse's dress;
for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet,
and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown
holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's
eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never
shown more finely. He hesitated and stayed.
"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed
Louis Craven on her way to get some cake.
He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all
gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.
The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat
among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a
Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion,
because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven said little, but
as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his
head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and
laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving
the
universe have at least temporarily succeeded. Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?
"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was
more than spent. "You must be there early, for there will be a crush.
Miss Craven comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out
for you. Good-bye!--good-bye!"
And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen
glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in
which they had been sitting, he went.
He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother,
who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.
"Well--any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a
chair.
"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had enitirely changed
since Wharton had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report
the Damesley strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a
salary--two hundred a year. Oh! it'll do."
He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide
his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched
and worn face.
"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next
week?" said Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.
"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet
voice, interposing. "Anna's got to work out her shirtmaking
time. She only left the tailoresses and began
this new business ten days ago. And she was to have a month at each."
Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet
seen Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and
a better authority on many Labour questions than he.
Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the
benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her
last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had
been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to
shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this
heat.
"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith
pensively. "Louis was lodging on the second floor, she in the third
floor back, and they used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him
imploring the little slavey to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavey
tossed her head, and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out,
Anna came downstairs, calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey
under her thumb, got them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When
Louis came home he discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course
he wept--whatever he may say. But next morning Miss Anna found her
shoes outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with
a note inside one of them. Affecting! wasn't it? Thenceforward, as
long as they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked.
Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."
Marcella laughed.
"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.
"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can
get hold of her. But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or
trying to set up Unions. She does the work of six. She'll earn nearly
as much as I do when we're married. Oh! we shall swim!"
Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect--so unlike the gentle or
satirical detachment which made his ordinary manner--with a darkening
eye, as though annoyed by his effusion.
"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what Mr.
Harry Wharton spends on his clothes, I should think. The Labour men tell me
he is superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his
clothes, he is able to buy you, Louis, body and soul, and you
seem inclined to be grateful."
"Never mind," said Louis recklessly. "He didn't
buy some one else--and I am grateful!"
"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a
fierce change of tone. "You the dependent of that
charlatan! I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very
well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent on him."
Marcella gave an angry start. Louis protested.
"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have
to bear it from me, I tell you--unless you muzzle me too with an
Anna."
"But I don't see why I should bear it,"
said Marcella, turning upon him. "I think you know that I owe Mr.
Wharton a debt. Please remember it!"
Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A
question crossed his mind concerning her. Then he made her a little clumsy bow.
"I am dumb," he said. "My manners, you perceive, are
what they always were."
"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming.
"How can a man who has reached the position he has in so short a
time--in so many different worlds--be disposed of by calling him
an ugly name? It is more than unjust--it is absurd! Besides, what can
you know of him?"
"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to
more bread and butter, "that it is some three years since Master
Harry Wharton joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all. I
watched his beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and
Louis's did. And most of them--as he knows!--have pretty
strong opinions by now about the man."
"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a
man of that type to be the pure-eyed patriot. But neither you nor I can
deny that he has done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my
bosom? Not at all! He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me. I like
the job, and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I
want, and do a bit of decent work."
"You--use Harry Wharton!" said the
cripple, with a sarcasm that brought the colour to Louis's thin cheek
and made Marcella angrier than before. She saw nothing in his attack on
Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough,
that a man of Anthony Craven's type--poor,
unsuc-
cessful, and embittered--should dislike a popular victorious personality.
"Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?" she said with
emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission,
threw himself back in his chair, and was silent.
It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her
friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men,
especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a
mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art, and devoted
himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that he might so
throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle, Anthony had
remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design. Yet he
was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist of the two. Only
what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony
a counsel of despair. He loathed wealth more passionately than ever; but he
believed less in the working man, less in his kind. Rich men must cease to
exist; but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot.
In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the
hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly--though
with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn's name--what had happened
to her at Mellor. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding
it a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil--the lover! To fall a
victim to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was
hard. And as to this move to London, he
thought he foresaw the certain end of it. At any rate he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate. He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years' interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.
After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their
chat with an abrupt--
"What is this job, Louis?"
"I told you. I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley
strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."
"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are
too strong. I had a talk with Denny yesterday."
The Denny he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the
House, but his son--a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one
of the most stiff-backed and autocratic of capitalists, had developed
socialist opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a
member of the "intellectual proletariat," as they have been
called, the free-lances of the Collectivist movement. He had lately joined
the Venturists. Anthony had taken a fancy to him. Louis as yet knew little
or nothing of him.
"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I
don't know. I think the Clarion can do
something. The press grows more and more powerful in these
things."
And he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made--that
Wharton always did make, in talking of the Clarion--as
to its growth under his hands, and increasing influence in Labour
disputes.
"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum! My
own belief is that the Clarion is a rotten property, and
that he knows it!"
At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance after a
certain point becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony for
the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious person whom
one humours but does not argue with. He accepted the part, saying little,
his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing from one to the
other.
However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell. It
was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and her
pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the right
to be rude.
"How are you getting on?" he said to her abruptly as he
dropped her hand.
"Oh, very well! my superintendent leaves me almost alone now,
which is a compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good
woman,' and a sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I
want advice. Those are my chief grievances, I think."
"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"
She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her
say:--
"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."
He laughed.
"How like a woman! A few ill-housed vilagers made you a democrat.
A few well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class.
Your people were wise to let you take this work."
"Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans?" she
asked him, mocking. "And I didn't say 'money' or
'comfort.' did I? but 'happiness.' As for my
'democracy,' you are not perhaps the best judge."
She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an
attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of
storm in her great eyes.
"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.
"Because I have every right to be! I joined a society, pledged to
work 'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what
poor work I can in that spirit."
"You are not a Socialist. Half the things you say, or imply, show
it. And we are Socialists."
She hesitated, looking at him steadily.
"No!--so far as Socialism means a political system--the
trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of
it--I find myself slipping away from it more and more. No!--as I
go about among these wage-earners, the emphasis--do what I
will--comes to lie less and less on possession--more and more on
character. I go to two tenements in the same building. One is
Hell--the other Heaven. Why? Both belong to well-paid artisans with
equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and
pleasant life of it. But one is a man--the other, with all his
belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not all, I know--oh!
don't trouble to tell me so!--but it is more than I thought.
No!--
my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the Socialists that I know here--saving your presence! but--with the people, for instance that slave at Charity Organisation! and get all the abuse from all sides."
Anthony laughed scornfully.
"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she
invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers."
"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the
thought of many days finding defiant expression--"it seems to me
like all other interesting and important things--destined to help
something else! Christianity begins with the poor and division of
goods--it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state.
The Crusades--they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord!--what
they did was to increase trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It
talks of a new order--what it will do is to help to make
the old sound!"
Anthony clapped her ironically.
"Excellent! When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got
hold of you--ask me to come and hear!"
Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hanlds on his sides, a smile in
his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome half-taught
girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or desired to have
it.
Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for
him, rare effusion. Two years before, for the space of some months, he had
been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything warmer
than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her by that moment of passionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly!--she had given him his Anna.
When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment
to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Louis's
thanks had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a
child's brightness. The old passion for ruling--and influencing
was all alive and happy.
"I will see it is all right," she was saying to herself.
"I will look after them."
What she meant was, "I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after
them!" and through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to
that tête-à-tête with him
which had preceded the Cravens' arrival.
How changed he was, yet how much the same! He had not sat beside her for
ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of the
other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious claim to
confidence, to intimacy--on the other hand a new atmosphere, a new
gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties of
power, a great position--everything fitted to touch such an
imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was noble, both
in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had gained
lines that pleased her--lines that a woman marks, because she thinks
they mean experience and mastery.
Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was
pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was pleasure;
so too was his new connection with her old friends. And a pleasure which
took nothing from self-respect; which was open, honourable, eager. As for
that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at the thought of it, only to
thrust the remembrance passionately away. That he should
remember or allude to it, would put an end to friendship. Otherwise friends
they would and should be; and the personal interest in his public career
should lift her out of the cramping influences that flow from the perpetual
commerce of poverty and suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between
men and women grow more possible every day. While, as for Hallin's
distrust, and Anthony Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third
person be bound by either of them? Could any one suppose that such a
temperament as Wharton's would be congenial to Hallin or to
Craven--or--to yet another person, of whom she did not want to
think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of him? It was the very
complexity and puzzle of the character that made its force.
So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this
pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the dreamy
running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who came to clear
away the tea.
"Why, it is close on the half-hour!" cried Marcella,
springing up. "Where are my things?"
She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied
herself that her bag contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.
Suddenly--the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the
tea--by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on
Hallin's table flashed into her mind--its look--the grizzled
hair. With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the
fastenings of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her--a
dumb gesture of contrition and of grief.
She!--she talk of social reform and "character," she
give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she,
whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something
belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her
pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.
When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean
and smelt of flowers. The windows were open, and a young woman was busy
shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her mother
looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then they introduced her with
some ceremony to a "lady," who was sitting beside the patient,
a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen
handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy. The
patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as "the
young person," but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could
not have been surpassed.
Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale
transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off; but
between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and
grateful to her nurse. "I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle
as you--" or--"I do take it kind of
you, Nurse, to do it so slow--oh! there were a young person before you"--or "hasn't she got nice hands, Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem to jar yer."
"Poor foot! but I think it is looking better," said
Marcella, getting up at last from her work, when all was clean and
comfortable and she had replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that
supported it--for its owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in
an old armchair. "And how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?"
"Oh! it's very bad, nights," said Mrs. Jervis,
mildly--"disturbs Emily dreadful. But I always pray every night,
when she lifts me into bed, as I may be took before the morning, an'
God ull do it soon."
"Mother!" cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, "you
know you oughtn't to say them things."
Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face
was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the
frail form there breathed an indomitable air of life, a gay
courage indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.
"Well, yer not to take 'em to heart, Em'ly. It ull be
when it will be--for the Lord likes us to pray, but He'll take
his own time--al' she's got troubles enough of her own,
Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off her ring?"
Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl hushed all
over, and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.
"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last
two days," she said with low vehemence--"as I'm
never goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn
me!"
Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen month before this date she had
married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her baby
was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the brutal
ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her feet again,
she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time in mind and
body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no effort to recover
her, and her family set to work to mend if they could what he had done. The
younger sister of fourteen was earning seven shillings a week at paper-bag
making; the brother, a lad of eighteen, had been apprenticed by his mother,
at the cost of heroic efforts some six years before, to the
leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled branch of it, and was now
taking sixteen shillings a week with the prospect of far better things in
the future. He at once put aside from his earnings enough to teach Emily
"the shirt-ironing," denying himself every indulgence till her
training was over.
Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back;
her earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease;
while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they
lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness and
care.
Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's
speech.
"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the
ringless one that held down the shirt on tihe board.
Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's
eyes glowed with things unsaid and inexpressible--the "eternal passion, eternal pain," which in half the human race have no voice.
"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband,"
said Mrs. Jervis, in her delicate thoughtful voice--"a very
uncultivated man."
Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But
the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them apparently
to express what had to be said.
"It's a sad thing is want of education," Mrs. Jervis
went on in the same tone. "Now there's that lady
there"--with a little courtly wave of her hand towards Mrs.
Burton--"she can't read yer know, Nurse, and I'm that
sorry for her! But I've been reading to her, an' Emily--just
while my cough's quiet--one of my ole tracks."
She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use. It was called
"A Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?" Marcella looked at
it in respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in
her line.
"I do love a track!" said Mrs. Jervis,
pensively. "That's why I don't like these buildings so well
as them others, Em'ly. Here you never get no tracks; and there, what
with one person and another, there was a new one most weeks.
But"--her voice dropped, and she looked timidly first at her
friend, and then at Marcella--"she isn't a Christian,
Nurse. Isn't it sad?"
Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich mahogany complexion, with a black
"front," and a mouth which
turned down decisively at the corners, looked up from her embroidery with severe composure.
"No, Nurse, I'm not a Christian," she said in the tone
of one stating a disagreeable fact for which they are noways responsible.
"My brother is--and my sisters--real good Christian people.
One of my sisters married a gentleman up in Wales. She 'as two
servants, an' fam'ly prayers reg'lar. But I've never
felt no 'call,' and I tell 'em I can't purtend.
An' Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no
different."
She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of
probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked at
her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a
churchwoman.
"Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton," she said
indignantly. "What she means, Nurse, is she isn't a
'member' of any chapel, like mother. But she's been
baptised and confirmed, for I asked her. And of course she's a
Christian."
"Em'ly!" said Mrs. Jervis, with energy.
Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt
upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The
glances of the two women crossed; there seemed to be a mute struggle
between them. Then Emily laid down her iron, stepped quickly across to her
mother, and kneeling beside her, threw her arms around her.
"Have it your own way, mother," she said, while her lip
quivered; "I wasn't a-goin' to cross you."
Mrs. Jervis laid her waxen cheek against her
daughter's tangle of brown hair with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might kill out the struggling flame of life.
"You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis," said Marcella,
with gentle authority. "You know the dressing must tire you, though
you won't confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There; aren't
the pillows easier so? Now rest--and good-bye."
But Mrs. Jervis held her, while Emily slipped away.
"I shall rest soon," she said significantly. "An'
it hurts me when Emily talks like that. It's the only thing that ever
comes atween us. She thinks o' forms an' ceremonies; an' I
think o' grace."
Her old woman's eyes, so clear and vivid under the blanched brow,
searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood, shy and
wondering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so little.
So narrow a life, in these poor rooms, under these crippling conditions of
disease!--and all this preoccupation with, this passion over, the
things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of the
spirit--wonderful!
On coming out from Brown's Buildings, she turned her steps
reluctantly towards a street some distance from her own immediate
neighbourhood, where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion
and an unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman who
often availed himself of the help of the St. Martin's nurses had asked the superintendent to undertake for him "a difficult case." Would one of their nurses go regularly to visit a certain house, ostensibly for the sake of a little boy of five just come back from the hospital, who required care at home for a while, really for the sake of his young mother, who had suddenly developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin?
Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She
somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or three
visits, always dressing the child's sore leg, and endeavouring to make
acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not had much
success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty, with a flighty, restless
manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella, and grateful to her
apparently for the ease she gave the boy. But she offered no confidences;
the rooms she and her husband occupied showed them to be well-to-do;
Marcella had so far found them well-kept; and though the evil she was sent
to investigate was said to be notorious, she had as yet discovered nothing
of it for herself. It seemed to her that she must be either stupid, or that
there must be something albout her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive
with her than with others; and neither alternative pleased her.
To-day, however, as she stopped at the Vincents' door, she noticed
that the doorstep, which was as a rule shining white, was muddy and
neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang,
repeatedly. At last a neighbour, who had been
watching the strange nurse through her own parlour window, came out to the street.
"I think, miss," she said, with an air of polite mystery,
"as you'd better walk in. Mrs. Vincent isn't been
enjyin' very good 'ealth this last few days."
Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after
six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the
back of the house. But in the Vincents' front parlour the blinds were
all pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of
a child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door.
The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent
sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The
elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a wretched
silence; but the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly throwing
himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts, now
crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice, for "Máama!
din-din! Máma! din-din!"
Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She
sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of words.
She was dirty and unkempt; the room was covered with litter; the breakfast
things were still on the table; and the children were evidently
starving.
Marcella, seized with pity, and divining what had happened, tried to
rouse and comfort her. But she got no answer. Then she asked for matches.
Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but
subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them herself, lit a fire of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of the children--the only eatables she could find--and after she had dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea things and tidy the room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her.
In the midst of her labours, an elderly woman cautiously opened the door
and beckoned to her.
Marcella went out into the passage.
"I'm her mother, miss! I 'eered you were 'ere,
an' I follered yer. Oh! such a business as we 'ad, 'er
'usband an' me, a gettin' of 'er 'ome last night.
There's a neighbour come to me, an' she says: 'Mrs. Lucas,
there's your daughter a drinkin' in that public 'ouse,
an' if I was you I'd go and fetch her out; for she's got a
lot o' money, an' she's treatin' everybody all
round.' An' Charlie--that's 'er
'usband--ee come along too, an' between us we got holt on
her. An' iver sence we brought her 'ome last night, she set there
in that cheer, an' niver a word to nobody! Not to me 't any rate,
nor the chillen. I believe 'er 'usband an' 'er 'ad
words this mornin'. But she won't tell me nothin'. She sits
there--just heart-broke"--the woman put up her apron to her
eyes and began crying. "She ain't eatin' nothink all day,
an' I dursen't leave the 'ouse out o' me sight--I
lives close by, miss-for fear of 'er doing 'erself a
mischief."
"How long has she been like this?" said Marcella, drawing
the door cautiously to behind her.
"About fourteen month," said the woman, hopelessly.
"An' none of us knows why. She was such a neat, pretty girl when
she married 'im--an' ee such a steady feellow. An'
I've done my best. I've talked to 'er, an'
I've 'id 'er 'at an' her walking things, an'
taken 'er money out of 'er pockets. An', bless yer,
she's been all right now for seven weeks--till last night. Oh,
deary, teary, me! whatever 'ull become o' them--'er,
an' 'im, an' the children!"
The tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face.
"Leave her to me a little longer," said Marcella, softly;
"but come back to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be
alone."
The woman nodded, and went away.
Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke
for the first time:
"That was my mother you were talkin' to?"
"Yes," said Marcella, quietly, as she took the kettle off
the fire. "Now I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will
you, if I make it?"
The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's
movements with her weary eyes. At last when Marcella knelt down beside her
holding out a cup of tea and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry.
Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked out
of her hand.
"He struck me this morning!--Charlie did--the first time
in seven years. Look here!"
She pulled up her sleeve, and on her white, delicate arm she showed a
large bruise. As she pointed to it her eyes filled with miserable tears;
her lips quivered; anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even
in this abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her refined air. This woman drinking and treating in a low public-house at midnight!--rescued thence by a decent husband!
She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making
the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into her,
she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before which she
quailed. The woman clung to her, moaning about her husband, about the demon
instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew how--by means it
seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and small
self-indulgences--and she felt herself powerrless to fight; about the
wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who was
the respected, well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the
neighbourhood. All through it came back to him.
"We had words, Nurse, this morning, when he went out to his work.
He said he'd nearly died of shame last night; that he couldn't
bear it no more; that he'd take the children from me. And I was all
queer in the head still, and I sauced him--and then--he looked
like a devil--and he took me by the arm--and threw
me down--as if I'd been a sack. An' he never,
never--touched me--before--in all his life.
An' he's never come in all day. An' perhaps I shan't
ever see him again. An' last time--but it wasn't so bad as
this--he said he'd try an' love me again if I'd behave.
An' he did try--and I tried too. But now it's no good,
an' perhaps he'll not come back. Oh, what shall I do? what shall
I do!" she flung her
arms above her head. "Won't anybody find him? won't anybody help me?"
She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching it, her wild eyes
seeking her companion's.
But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a
cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could do
nothing--that there was nothing in her adequate to such an
appeal--nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human life thus
flung upon her.
She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that, appalled her. She tried
still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home--took
hold. between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched
this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she
could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and
had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she
still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no efficacy--no
power.
At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came
in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the
wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached
the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her at
the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what to
say.
"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill
and miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"
The husband looked at her, and then turned away.
"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went
with-
out another word, and with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer filling her being which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's death.
She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards--saying
that she must write some letters and reports--she shut herself up, and
bade good-night to Minta and the children.
But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time,
watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and
even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread
out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the
floor, with her head against a chair--an attitude of her stormy
childhood--she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not
known for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis--the saint--so near
to death, so satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly
life; then of the poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no
power to stay. Both experiences had this in common--that each had had
some part in plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.
What had come to her? During the past weeks there had been something
wrestling in her--some new birth--some "conviction of
sin," as Mrs. Jervis would have said. As she looked back over all her
strenuous youth she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to
Anthony Craven returned upon her, mocked her--made now a scourge for
her own pride, not a mere measure of blame for others.
Aldous Raeburn, her father and mother, her poor--one and all rose against her--plucked at her--reproached her. "Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?" cried a voice, which was the voice of them all; "what are opinions--what is influence, beauty, cleverness?--what is anything worth but charcacter--but soul?"
And character--soul--can only be got by self-surrender; and
self-surrender comes not of knowledge but of love.
A number of thoughts and phrases, hitherto of little meaning to her,
floated into her mind--sank and pressed there. That strange word
"grace" for instance!
A year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first
inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school years,
the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that religion was
played out, that Socialism and Science were enough for mankind.
But nobody could live in hospital--nobody could go among the
poor--nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward
Hallin and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in the
world--this "grace" that
"sustaineth"--however variously interpreted, still living
and working, as it worked of old, among the little Galilean towns, in
Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallin it did not mean the same, perhaps,
as it meant to the hard-worked clergymen she knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But
to all it meant the motive power of life--something subduing,
transforming, delivering--something that to-night she envied with a
passion and a yearning that amazed herself.
How many things she craved, as an eager child craves them! First some
moral change, she knew not what--then Aldous Raeburn's pardon and
friendship--then and above all, the power to lose herself--the
power to love.
Dangerous significant moment in a woman's life--moment at once
of despair and of illusion!
An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been
in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a
speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar
House-of-Commons acquaintance.
"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to
inspect first Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.
Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.
"Not particularly."
"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other,
carrying off his book.
Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a
dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at all
dreamy.
He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.
When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly
and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same general
impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for
pleasure--their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way.
What had he been about all this time? Forget?--such a
creature? Why, it was the merest wantonness! As if such women--with
such a brow, such vitality, such a gait--passed in every street!
What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to
recover the old intimacy--and as to what might come out of it, let the
gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at
Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then
in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.
As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's
Buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged
she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must
emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much her
métier as it was the
métier of a bricklayer's labourer
to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of
such degree and kind as that! They must be brought together. He already
foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play
a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in
London. Let other people nurse, and pitch their tents in
little workmen's flats, and live democracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. Il ne faut pas sortir de son caractère.
The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.
Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.
"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet
him. "Talks of his conscience--and a lot of windy stuff. He
seems to have arranged it with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much
harm."
"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitternes.
"Goodness! let's leave him alone!"
He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics.
Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the
enfant terrible of a party which, though
still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day to organised existence and
separate leadership. The effect of to-night's debate might be of
far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution, pledging the House to a
Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at the end of a long and
varied agitation, was at the moment in clear practical relation to labour
movements all over the country, and had in fact gained greatly in
significance and interest since it was first heard of in public, owing to
events of current history. Workable proposals--a moderate
tone--and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony and a united front
among the representatives of labour--if so much at least could be
attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that not only the
cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the House would be
found to have gained enormously.
"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said
Bennett, as he was going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be till half-past ten at earliest."
Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his
pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him
what line Bennett would take--with regard to one or two points. After
a long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor indeed
generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As to his
hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and hear a
famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far from the
House. The streets were full of placards.
Well!--to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first
at his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind
him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his
springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.
The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with a particular deference.
Wharton was in general in favourite with officials.
"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the
front--oh! not very full yet, sir--will be directly."
Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in.
Yes!--there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the
grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of Commons
puts its ladies--as though its owner were already absorbed in what was
passing before her.
She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her
ear.
"Oh! now, come and tell us everything--and who everybody is.
Why don't we see the Speaker?--and which is the Government
side?--oh, yes, I see. And who's this speaking now?"
"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with
a greeting to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still
vacant chair for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's
great-niece?"
"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said
Marcella, impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me
to people's names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look,
Edith!--he's just come in!--oh, don't be so superior,
though you have been here before--you couldn't tell
me heaps of people!"
Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.
"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith
Craven, calmly; "but it's no reason why you should show me Mr.
Gladstone."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!--do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where
are the Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you
sit?--I see and there's Mr. Bennett--and that black-faced
man, Mr. Wilkins, I met at the Hallins--you don't like him, do
you?" she said, drawing back and looking at him sharply.
"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question
later on!" said Wharton, with a twist of
the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a fool of himself and us to-night--we shall see! It's kind of you to wish us an Irish row!--considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall never get another!"
"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it! she
said decidedly. "Oh, that's the Irish Secretary answering now,
is it?"--a pause--"Dear me, how civil everybody is. I
don't think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton--I
find myself terribly in love with the Government. But who's
that?"
She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew
hurriedly back.
"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so
confusing."
A tall man had risen from the end of the the Government bench, and was
giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For
the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw
Aldous Raeburn.
She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's
quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long
as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.
"He does those things very well," he said carelessly,
judging it best to take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too
much--they don't get any change out of him. Do you see that old
fellow in the white beard under the gallery? He is one of the chartered
bores. When he gets up to-night the House will dine. I shall come up and
look for you, and hand you over to a friend if I may--a Staffordshlire
member, who has his wife here--Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and
I can start with you. Unfortunately I
mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion; but they will look after you."
The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said
about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was
Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.
"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on
in about twenty minutes. Wish me well through!"
Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for
the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray
as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn ghost
should walk this particular evening.
Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long
silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was
lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well
that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she shrank
a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and
singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the light;
for she noticed the same pallor in many others.
"All that my life can do to pour good measure--pressed
down--running over--into yours, I vowed you then!"
The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain.
Was it indeed this man under her eyes--so listless, so
unconscious--who had said them to her with a passion of devotion it
shamed her to think of.
And now--never so much as an ordinary word of
friendship between them again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"--separate, estranged, for ever? It was like the touch of death--the experience brought with it such a chill--such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through.
Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must
be left. To have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong.
Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe
Frank Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry!
It was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of
family than he. And as for the girl--the little dancing, flirting
girl!--why the thing happened every day. His wife should
not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She
should cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all
with the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at
least was clear to her--the curious recognition that never before had
she considered Aldous Raeburn, in and for himself, as an
independent human being.
"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she
said to herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of
me!"
But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn,
after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared
suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized
her with the same fascination as before.
The House was filling rapidly. Questions were
nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government--all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.
"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse
of excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through
the crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his
hat.
In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and
crowded House in a voice--clear, a little hard, but capable of the
most accomplished and subtle variety--which for the first moment sent
a shudder of memory through Marcella.
Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as
though some personal intertst and reputation depended for her, too, on the
sucecess of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an
irritable sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it
possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make
any effect upon such a crowd!--so irresponsive, individualist,
unfused--so lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the
qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men
down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent.
And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call
"cheers"?
But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the
atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one
wholly different--nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's
ardent sense--informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's
with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she
had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader--awoke to the
peculiar conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its
performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the House
talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when
occasion offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his
right hand to succeed in it.
Why? Because here after all is power--here is the central machine.
Here are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to
have for their span of life the leading--or the wrecking?--of
this great fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our
country. Here things are not only debated, but done--lamely or badly,
perhaps, but still done--which will affect our
children's children; which link us to the Past; which carry us on
safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods know. And in this passage,
this chequered, doutbtful passage from thinking to doing, an infinite
savour and passion of life is somehow disengaged. It penetrates through the
boredom, through all the failure, public and personal; it enwraps the
spectacle and the actors; it carries and supports patriot and adventurer
alike.
Ideas, perceptions of this kind--the first chill over--stole
upon and conquered Marcella. Presently it
was as though she had passed into Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It would be a success this speech--it was a success! The House was gained, was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments, which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent--with brilliancy, moderation, practical detail--moderation above all! From the slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English "working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts--through the general description of the present situation, of the workman's present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the economic future of England--the speaker carried his thread of luminous speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life, possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of leisure, knowledge, and delight--the crowded benches before and behind
him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of "flights," except from it chartered masters. But this young man had earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in the utterances of the Labour men.
"'The mildest mannered man' et
cetera!" said a smiling member of the late Government to a
companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton sat down amid the
general stir and movement which betoken the break-up of a crowded House,
and the end of a successful speech which people are eager to discuss in the
lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance on anything last
year."
"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the
angels!" growled the man addressed.
"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing.
"Look! they have put up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear
him." And he laid down his hat again which he had taken up.
Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back
in her chair with a long breath.
"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a
long time she sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the
very competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government
side was saying. Every dramatic and æsthetic instinct she
possessed--and she was full of them--had been stirred and
satisfied by the speech and the speaker.
But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his
peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact the
products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley
personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the
poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same
time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to
measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A
year before she had been as, a babe beside him, whether in matters of pure
mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time conscious of
a curious growth--independence.
But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as
it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon
her--in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in
the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.
Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her
brothers were typical Venturists--a little cynical, therefore, towards
all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and a
cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it
down--through him--as a first law, that sentiment in public is
the abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was
little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.
"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's
done. Now, who's this? That man Wilkins!"
Her tone showed her disguist. Wilkins had sprung up the instant
Wharton's Conservative opponent had
given the first decisive sign of sitting down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and frowling, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.
With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to
have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short
stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an important
north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of the bill which
had been sketched by Wharton--personal jealousy and distrust of the
mover of the resolution--denial of his representative place, and
sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which he had nothing
to do--the most violent protest against the servility with which he
had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and political
enfranchisement--and the most passionate assertion that between any
Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the
past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred, unfathomable and
unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and
dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel--all these ugly or
lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of
north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah Wilkins rioted in one of
the best "times" of his life. That he was an orator thousands
of working men had borne him witness again and again; and in his own
opinion he had never spoken better.
The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words
rattled on, it passed easily into the
stage of amusement. Lady Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench, caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!--you haven't even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final attack upon the Liberals--who, after ruining their own chances and the chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man whining for his support as their only hope of recovery--was delivered to a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.
Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech
in a state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately
sitting erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had
come to sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat
down, and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government
non possumus, couched, of course, in the tone
of deference to King Labour which the modern statesman learns at his
mother's knee, but enlivened with a good deal of ironical and
effective perplexity as to which hand to shake and whose voice to follow,
and winding up with a tribute of compliment to Wharton, mixed with some
neat mock condolence with the Opposition under the ferocities of some
others of its nominal friends.
Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, the
habitué. While it was going on,
Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come back again to his seat next
to the Speaker, who was his official chief. Every now and then the Minister
turned to him, and
Raeburn handed him a volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other--and she, once more, looking on!
When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with
thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun--when it was seen
that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who
were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House, a
man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity felt
was to the relations between him and this new star and would-be leader had
been for some time considerable.
When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire,
both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A man
who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the unquestioned
master of many legions, and whose political position had hitherto been one
of conspicious moderation, even to his own hurt, had given Wharton the
warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals, to their most
contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous though still
perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he personally thought of
the services rendered to labour as
a whole during the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young and brilliant man beside him.
Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of
religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an
imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its
expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong
conviction that the time had come when the Labour party must
have separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to
this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might have
given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy of the
younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He threw out a
little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the phrase, in the
direction of Wilkins--who in the middle of the speech abruptly walked
out--and before he sat down, the close attention, the looks, the
cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about him,--amongst
whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in
Parliament--made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch
not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary history
of the great industrial movement.
The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out
to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one
man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with
his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt a
touch upon his arm.
Wharton was bending over to him--perfectly white, with a lip he in vain tried to steady.
"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a
fool of myself."
Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the
out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of the
Englishman.
Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an
ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the
Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the
spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience behind
him!--and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How could
he get her to himself somehow for a moment--and dispose of that Craven
girl?
"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the
darkness of the Gallery.
But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw,
the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.
"Don't let's talk here," she said.
"Can't we go out? I am melted!"
"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine
evening, and we shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you
interested?"
Edith smiled demurely.
"I thought it a good debate," she said.
"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward
remark as he led the way.
Those confident eyes of Wharton's shone as they glanced at her.
She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff--it seemed to
him he remembered it of old--and on the waving masses of hair lay a
little bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings
tied demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the
beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing--the rich arresting
note of the voice--the inimitable carriage of the head--Wharton
realised them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt
them in some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was
in his power, his possession.
The terrace was full of people, and alive with a Babel of talk. Yet, as
he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that
Marcella was instantly marked. Every one who passed them, or made way for
them, looked and looked again.
The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew
nothing of her own effect. She
was drinking in the sunset light--the poetic mystery of the river--the lovely line of the bridge--the associations of the place where she stood, of this great building overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Raeburn; then when a stranger showed himself she gave herself up again to her young pleasure in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed; Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so well-fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh homage to itself; and she had more and more glamour for him in the reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment.
"Ah, here are the Lanes!" he said, detecting at last a short
lady in black amid a group of men.
Marcella and Edith were introduced. Then Edith found a friend in a young
London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him
till dinner should be announced.
"I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace,"
said Wharton to Mr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet
awhile. What a crowd! The Alresfords not come yet, I see."
Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round.
"Raeburn has a party to-night. And there are at least three or
four others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be
equally scarce!"
Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella. But she was talking to Mrs. Lane,
and had heard nothing.
"Let me just show you the terrace," he said to her.
"No chance of dinner for another twenty minutes."
They strolled away together. As they moved along, a number of men
waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and
congratulations--glancing the while at the lady on his left. But
presently they were away from the crowd which hung about the main entrance
to the terrace, and had reached the comparatively quiet western end, where
were only a few pairs and groups walking up and down.
"Shall I see Mr. Bennett?" she asked him eagerly, as they
paused by the parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing
under the fast incoming tide. "I want to."
"I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a
prayer-meeting--at least I guess so. There is a famous American
evangelist speaking in Westminster to-night--I am as certain as I ever
am of anything that Bennett is there--dining on Moody and Sankey. Men
are a medley, don't you think?--So you liked his
speech?"
"How coolly you ask!" she said, laughing. "Did
you?"
He was silent a moment, his smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he
turned to her.
"How much gratitude do you think I owe him?"
"As much as you can pay," she said with emphasis. "I
never heard anything more complete, more generous."
"So you were carried away?"
She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity--a touch of
defiance.
"No!--neither by him, nor by you. I don't believe in
your Bill--and I am sure you will never carry
it!"
Wharton lifted his eyebrows.
"Perhaps you'll tell me where you are," he said,
"that I may know how to talk? When we last discussed these things at
Mellor, I think--you were a Socialist?"
"What does it matter what I was last year?" she asked him
gaily, yet with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay; "I
was a baby! Now perhaps I have earned a few poor, little
opinions--but they are a ragged bundle--and I have never any time
to sort them."
"Have you left the Venturists?"
"No!--but I am full of perplexities; and the Cravens, I see,
will soon be for turning me out. You understand--I know
some working folk now!"
"So you did last year."
"No!"--she insisted, shaking her head--"that
was all different. But now I am in their world--I live
with them--and they talk to me. One evening in the week I am 'at
home' for all the people I know in our Buildings--men and women.
Mrs. Hurd--you know who I mean?"--her brow contracted a
moment--"she comes with her sewing to keep me company; so does
Edith Craven; and sometimes the little room is packed. The men
smoke--when we can have the windows open!--and I believe I shall
soon smoke too--it makes them talk better. We get all
sorts--Socialists, Conservatives, Radicals--"
"--And you don't think much of the
Socialists?"
"Well! they are the interesting, dreamy fellows," she said,
laughing, "who don't save, and muddle their lives. And as for
argument, the Socialist workman
doesn't care twopence for facts--that don't suit him. It's superb the way he treats them!"
"I should like to know who does care!" said Wharton with a
shrug. Then he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command
her. He had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the
crisp curls of hair. "But tell me"--he went
on--"who has been tampering with you? Is it Hallin? You told me
you saw him often."
"Perhaps. But what if it's
everything?--living?--saving your presence! A year
ago at any rate the world was all black--or
white--to me. Now I lie awake at night, puzzling my head about the
shades between--which makes the difference. A compulsory Eight
Hours' Day for all men in all trades!" Her note of scorn
startled him. "You know you won't get it! And all
the other big exasperating things you talk about--public organisation
of labour, and the rest--you won't get them till all the world is
a New Jerusalem--and when the world is a New Jerusalem nobody will
want them!"
Wharton made her an ironical bow.
"Nicely said!--though we have heard it before. Upon my word,
you have marched!--or Edward Hallin has carried you. So now you think
the poor are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible
worlds--is that the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in
fact? the man who got up after me?"
His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a
recollection that brought a frown.
"That was the man, then, you attacked in the
Clarion this morning!"
"Ah! you read me!" said Wharton, with sudden pleasure.
"Yes--that opened the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven
has gone down, and the strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two
batteries to bear, he letting fly as correspondent, and I from the office.
I enjoyed writing that article."
"So I should think," she said drily; "all I know is,
it made one reader passionately certain that there was another
side to the matter! There may not be. I dare say there isn't; but on
me at least that was the effect. Why is it"--she broke out with
vehemence--"that not a single Labour paper is ever capable of
the simplest justice to an opponent?"
"You think any other sort of paper is any better?" he asked
her scornfully.
"I dare say not. But that doesn't matter to me! it is
we who talk of justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to
man, and then we go and blacken men who don't agree with
us--whole classes, that is to say, of our fellow-countrymen, not in
the old honest slashing style, Tartuffes that we are!--but with all
the delicate methods of a new art of slander, pursued almost for its own
sake. We know so much better--always--than our opponents, we
hardly condescend even to be angry. One is only
'sorry'--'obliged to punish'--like the
priggish governess of one's childhood!"
In spite of himself, Wharton flushed.
"My best thanks!" he said. "Anything more? I prefer to
take my drubbing all at once."
She looked at him steadily.
"Why did you write, or allow that article on the West Brookshire
landlords two days ago?"
Wharton started.
"Well! wasn't it true?"
"No!" she said with a curling lip; "and I think you
know it wasn't true."
"What! as to the Raeburns? Upon my word, I should have
imagined," he said slowly, "that it represented your views at
one time with tolerable accuracy."
Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet, and, taking
up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river. He
saw the hand shake.
"Look here," he said, turning round so that he too leant
over the river, his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear.
"Are you always going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you
know that there is no one in the world I would sooner please if I
could?"
She did not speak.
"In the first place," he said, laughing, "as to my
speech, do you suppose that I believe in that Bill which I described just
now?"
"I don't know," she said indignantly, once more playing
with the stones on the wall. "It sounded like it."
"That is my gift--my little
carillon, as Renan would say. But do you
imagine I want you or any one else to tell me that we shan't get such
a Bill for generations? Of course we shan't!"
"Then why do you make farcical speeches,
bam-
boozling your friends and misleading the House of Commons?"
He saw the old storm-signs with glee--the lightning in the eye, the
rose on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry.
"Because, my dear lady--we must generate our
force. Steam must be got up--I am engaged in doing it. We
shan't get a compulsory eight hours' day for all trades--but
in the course of the agitation for that precious illusion, and by the help
of a great deal of beating of tom-toms, and gathering of clans, we shall
get a great many other things by the way that we do want.
Hearten your friends, and frighten your enemies--there is no other way
of scoring in politics--and the particular score doesn't matter.
Now don't look at me as if you would like to impeach me!--or I
shall turn the tables. I am still fighting for my illusions in
my own way--you, it seems, have given up
yours!"
But for once he had underrated her sense of humour. She broke into a low
merry laugh which a little disconcerted him.
"You mock me?" he said quickly--"think me
insincere, unscrupulous?--Well, I dare say! But you have no right to
mock me. Last year, again and again, you promised me guerdon. Now it has
come to paying--and I claim!"
His low distinct voice in her ear had a magnetising effect upon her. She
slowly turned her face to him, overcome by--yet fighting
against--memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference
to that scene she hated to think of, he would have
probably lost this hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all those tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things of pity and fear, which had so often seemed to her the atonement for, the washing away of that old baseness.
He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly--
"I promised to be grateful. So I am."
"No, no!" he said, still in the same low tone. "You
promised me a friend. Where is she?"
She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and
her eyes were fixed on the haze opposite, whence emerged the blocks of the
great hospital and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But his gaze
compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an expression
half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could speak.
"Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life?" he said
drily. "It is not the life for you; it does not fit you in the
least."
"You test your friends!" she cried, her cheek flaming again
at the provocative change of voice. "What possible right have you to
that remark?"
"I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You
can't serve them where you are. Nursing is not for you; you are wanted
among your own class--among your equals--among the people who are
changing and shaping England. It is absurd. You are
masquerading."
She gave him a little sarcastic nod.
"Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in
my life."
He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or
posing.
"You are just what you were in one respect--terribly in the
right! Be a little humble to-night for a change. Come, condescend to the
classes! Do you see Mr. Lane calling us?"
And, in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning
to them from the distance.
"Do you know Lady Selina Farrell?" he asked her, as they
walked quickly back to the dispersing crowd.
"No; who is she?"
Wharton laughed.
"Providence should contrive to let Lady Selina overhear that
question once a week--in your tone! Well, she is a
personage--Lord Alresford's daughter--unmarried, rich, has a
salon, or thinks she has--manipulates a
great many people's fortunes and lives, or thinks she does, which,
after all, is what matters--to Lady Selina. She wants to know you,
badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is--you will let
me introduce you. She dines with us."
In another moment Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a
very fashionable black and pink bonnet, who held out a gracious hand.
"I have heard so much of you!" said Lady Selina, as they
walked along the passage to the dining-room together. "It must be so
wonderful, your nursing!"
Marcella laughed rather restively.
"No, I don't think it is," she said; "there are
so many of us."
"Oh, but the things you do--Mr. Wharton told
me--so interesting!"
Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady
Selina thought her a very handsome but very
gauche young woman. Still,
gauche or no, she had thrown over Aldous
Raeburn and thirty thousand a year; an act which, as Lady Selina admitted,
put you out of the common run.
"Do you know most of the people dining?" she enquired in her
blandest voice. "But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr.
Wharton's, I think?"
"He stayed at our house last year," said Marcella, abruptly.
"No, I don't know anybody."
"Then shall I tell you? It makes it more interesting, doesn't
it? It ought to be a pleasant little party."
And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella
that most of them were very "smart" or very important. Some of
the smart names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn's talk of
last year; and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and
two or three prominent members. It was all rather surprising.
At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the
young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were
agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown
beauty. The minister, who knew the
Raeburns very well, was discussing with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.
Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she
could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lady
Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of
Marcella's minister on his left. At the other end of the table sat
Mrs. Lane, doing her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a
blind old age, gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and
possible premier. But the talk, on the whole, was general--a gay and
careless give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the
ball flying from one accustomed hand to another.
And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part
in it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as
her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor--the solitary, eccentric
figure pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate--bringing
the enmity of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked
to lead. Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot and of
Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour of
country-house "sets," with a patter of names which sounded in
her scornful ear like a paragraph from the World; above all,
a general air of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate,
seemed inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of
the "idle rich,"
whereof--in the popular idea--he was held to be one of the very particular foes!--
No doubt, as the dinner moved on, this first impression changed
somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost upon
her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself had so
often fumed; she watched the occasional recoil of the women about him, as
though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal, and had been
suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things puzzled, partly
propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and hostile. How was it
possible--from such personal temporising--such a frittering of
the forces and sympathies--to win the single-mindedness and the power
without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk with
him--reproach him!
"Well--I must go--worse luck," said Wharton at
last, laying down his napkin and rising. "Lane, will you take charge?
I will join you outside later."
"If he ever finds us!" said her neighbor to Marcella.
"I never saw the place so crowded. It is odd how people enjoy these
scrambling meals in these very ugly rooms."
Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee-tavern
place in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the end,
while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space below.
"Are there any other rooms than this?" she asked idly.
"One more," said a young man across the table, who
had been introduced to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to look at him, as he desired. "But there is another big party there tonight--Raeburn--you know," he went on innocently, addressing the minister; "he has got the Winterbournes and the Macdonalds--quite a gathering--rather an unusual thing for him."
The minister glanced quickly at his companion But she had turned to
answer a question from Lady Selina, and thenceforward, till the party rose,
she gave him little opportunity of observing her.
As the outward-moving stream of guests was once more in the corridor
leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane.
"I think," she said--"I am afraid--we ought
to be going--my friend and I. Perhaps Mr. Lane--perhaps he would
just show us the way out; we can easily find a cab."
There was an imploring, urgent look in her face, which struck Mrs. Lane.
But Mr. Lane's loud friendly voice broke in from behind.
"My dear Miss Boyce!--we can't possibly allow
it--no! no--just half an hour--while they bring us our
coffee--to do your homage, you know, to the terrace--and the
river--and the moon!--And then--if you don't want to go
back to the House for the division, we will see you safely into your cab.
Look at the moon!--and the tide"--they had come to the wide
door opening on the terrace--"aren't they doing their very
best for you?"
Marcella looked behind her in despair. Where was Edith? Far
in the rear!--and fully occupied
apparently with two or three pleasant companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on, with Mr. Lane chatting beside her--though the sight of the shining terrace, with its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she could hardly control.
"Come and look at the water," she said to Mr. Lane; "I
would rather not walk up and down if you don't mind."
He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or
promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now
trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and
sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for the
voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Lady Winterbourne, above all!
How unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a forwarded
letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her address.
"Well, how did you like the speech to-night--the
speech?" said Mr. Lane, a genial Gladstonian member, more heavily
weighted with estates than with ideas. "It was splendid, wasn't
it?--in the way of speaking. Speeches like that are a
safety-valve--that's my view of it. Have 'em out--all
these ideas--get 'em discussed!"--with a good-humoured
shake of the head for emphasis. "Does nobody any harm and may do
good. I can tell you, Miss Boyce, the House of Commons is a capital place
for taming these clever young men!--you must give them their
head--and they make excellent fellows after a bit.
Why--who's this--My dear Lady Winterlbourne!--this
is a sight for sair een!"
And the portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately
lady in black, whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight.
"Marcella!" cried a woman's voice.
Yes--there he was!--close behind Lady Winterbourne. In the
soft darkness he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over
the wall without an idea--a suspicion.
She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winterbourne, hesitated a
second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She could
not see his face in the darkness; but she was suddenly and strangely
conscious of the whole scene--of the great dark building with its
lines of fairy-lit gothic windows--the blue gulf of the river crossed
by lines of wavering light--the swift passage of a steamer with its
illuminated saloon and crowded deck--of the wonderful mixture of
moonlight and sunset in the air and sky--of this dark figure in front
of her.
Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not
know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She threw
herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a tremor almost
equal to her own.
"Oh! do come with me--come away!--I want to talk to
you!" she said incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady
Winterbourne with a strong hand.
Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the
terrace.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elderly
lady--"to think of finding you here! How
astonishing--how--how dreadful! No!--I don't mean that.
Of
course you and he must meet--but it was only yesterday he told me he had never seen you again--since--and it gave me a turn. I was very foolish just now. There now--stay here a moment--and tell me about yourself."
And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind
her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne recovered
herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic severity of
feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same delicate tremor.
Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling. She took up
the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet and kissed it in the dark
so that no one saw.
"I am glad to see you again," she said
passionately, "so glad!"
Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.
"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child!
And I have heard so little of you--your mother never seemed to know.
When will you come and see me--or shall I come to you? I can't
stay now, for we were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to
take some one to a ball. How strange"--she broke
off--"how very strange that you and he should have met to-night!
He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with Lord Maxwell."
"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily.
"Will you come to tea with me next week?--Oh, I will
write.--And we must go too--where can my friend
be?"
She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.
"I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway," said Lady
Winterbourne; "or shall we look after you?"
"No! no! Take me back to the Lanes."
"Mamma, are you coming?" said a voice like a softened
version of Lady Winterbourne's. Then something small and thin ran
forward, and a girl's voice said piteously:
"Dear Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take
so long to do! I shall be cross with my maid, and look like a
fiend. Ermyntrude will be sorry she ever knew me. Do
come!"
"Don't cry, Betty. I certainly shan't take you if you
do!" said Lady Ermyntrude, laughing. "Mamma, is this Miss
Boyce--your Miss Boyce?"
She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude
under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall stranger
whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had little notion
of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the girlish form
hanging on Lady Winterbourne's arm than she was of her own words, of
"Betty's" beautiful soft eyes--also shyly and gravely
fixed upon herself--under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the
long, pointed chin; the whimsical little face.
"Well, none of you are any good!" said Betty at
last, in a tragic voice. "I shall have to walk home my own poor
little self, and 'ask a p'leeceman.' Mr.
Raeburn!"
He disengaged himself from a group behind and came--with no
alacrity. Betty ran up to him.
"Mr. Raeburn! Ermyntrude and Lady
Winter-
bourne are going to sleep here, if you don't mind making arrangements. But I want a hansom."
At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along
towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world had
never rolled more evenly.
"Oh! there she is--there is my friend!" cried Marcella
to Lady Winterbourne. "Good-night--good-night!"
She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a
moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to
"collect" another straying member of the party.
An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched
discomfort--even her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes.
She walked up to him.
"Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?" she said in a
tremulous hurry. "I am so sorry he is ill--I hadn't
heard--I--"
She dared not look up. Was that his voice answering?
"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors
to-day give a rather better report. We take him abroad
to-morrow."
"Marcella! at last!" cried Edith Craven, catching hold of
her friend; "you lost me? Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way. But
look, there is Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go--come and say
good-night--everybody is departing."
Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of
humiliation--pain--sore resentment. That cold, strange
tone--those unwilling, words!--
She had gone to him--as undisciplined in her repentance as she had been in aggression--full of a passionate yearning to make friends--somehow to convey to him that she "was sorry," in the old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little. There could be no misunderstanding possible! He of all men knew best how irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the promises of ethics and religion ought to bring peace--peace and a soothed conscience?
But she had been repulsed--put aside, so she took it--and by
one of the kindest and most generous of men! She moved along the terrace in
a maze, seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All
that obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her--which
had found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once
loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike her--was
beating and swelling stormlike within her. She had taken being loved so
easily, so much as a matter of course! How was it that it hurt her now so
much to have lost love, and power, and consideration? She had never felt
any passion for Aldous Raeburn--had taken him lightly and shaken him
off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from
him--the proud manner of a moment--had inflicted a smart upon her
she could hardly bear. They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy,
uncared for!
But, on the contrary, she must be
happy!--must be loved! To this, and this only, had she
been brought by the hard experience of this strenuous year.
"Oh, Mrs. Lane, be an angel!" exclaimed
Wharton's voice. "Just one turn--five minutes! The division
will be called directly, and then we will all thank our stars and go to
bed!"
In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bareheaded, radiant,
reckless even, as he was wont to be in moments of excitement. He had seen
her speak to Raeburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind was too
full for any perception of other people's situations--even hers.
He was absorbed with himself, and with her, as she fitted his present need.
The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his lips; and
his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and the pleasure
of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to homage; his
talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference, a flatter, to
which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the evening had lent a new
prestige.
She, too, in his eyes, had triumphed--had made her mark. His ears
were full of the comments made upon her to-night by the little world on the
terrace. If it were not for money--hateful
money!--what more brilliant wife could be desired for any rising
man?
So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division
was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of
herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment, had
given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet to think her
kind and fair.
"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch!
Did Heaven give you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy
and twit us weaklings? Do you think I want to look as
rombustious as you? 'Nothing too much,' my good
friend!"
Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by
Hallin's "chaff."
"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are
wearing yourself out with this lecturing campaign, that you don't
sleep, and that she is more unhappy about you than she has been for months.
Why not give it up now, rest, and begin again in the winter?"
Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly
joined in front of him.
"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said
quietly.
Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed
it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.
"Why you should behave as though you wished to make
such a prophecy true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient
pain.
Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in
front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked
unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had
possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear
aquiline feature, the steady transparent
eyes--coeli lucida templa--the
fresh fairness of the the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of
pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been something
peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements,
suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the
spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.
"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin
at last, putting up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I
shall give up soon. Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want
to do something else with their evenings in July than spend them in
listening to stuffy lectures. I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few
engagements still ahead, and--I confess I am more restless than I used
to be. The night cometh when no man can work."
They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the
political situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been
alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's
mind. Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with
positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have passed
into a period of
negations, of strong opposition to certain current isms and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs, indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.
He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his
early friends by his passionate democracy--his belief in, and trust
of, the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and
manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for
Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest
remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith, but
hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among the
common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the
friendship of these two in the least.
But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his
working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he
had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all kinds
had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the prevailing type of
them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had grown weaker and
weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and the abuse
of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at
doing away with it, than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would
make it reasonable to try and do away with--say love, or religion. To
give property, and therewith the fuller human opportunity, to those that
have none, was the inmost desire of his life.
And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them already. And that not for wealth's sake though a more equal distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual heritage.
How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have
answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of
the land." Not, of course, by violence--which only means the
worst form of waste known to history--but by the continuous pressure
of an emancipating legislation, relieving land from shackles long since
struck off other kinds of property--by the assertion, within a certain
limited range, of communal initiative and control--and above all by
the continuous private effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of
"men of good will." For all sweeping uniform schemes he had the
natural contempt of the student--or the moralist. To imagine that by
nationalising sixty annual millions of rent for instance you could make
England a city of God, was not only at vain dream, but a belittling of
England's history and England's task. A nation is not saved so
cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to land nationalisation or
the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which might have gone to the
housing, educating, and
refining of English men, women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a growing despair.
The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and
Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other
European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the
community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed
to him more and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the
purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation
for a state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and
for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and
decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external
conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and
pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever
shult off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could
never do without them, if man was to be man.
So that he saw it all sub specie
æteritatis, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather
of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning
intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance,
of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of
the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of
breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with a
passionate sorrow which seemed to Raeburn preposterous!
intolerable!--to
be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affections as any homoousion of old? Had they not already cost him love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?
"Ah, dear old fellow--enough!" said Hallin at
last--"take me back to Italy! You have told me so
little--such a niggardly little!"
"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout,"
said Aldous; "the first rain in Northern Italy for four
months--worse luck! 'Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma.--At
Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'--that might about stand for my diary,
except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty Macdonald, and I descended
on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."
"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"
Aldous laughed.
"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our
day in Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after
a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a deer,
and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was
pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the
pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor'
got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in
hand, was explaining to the Signorina
that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the spot So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff--and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside--the amazed officer looking on. And as for her career over the roof of the Duomo--the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction--and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe."
"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile.
"As you talk of her to me I get the notion a little monkey just cut
loose from a barrel organ."
"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous,
laughing again, as every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty
Macdonald, "and it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature
it comes across, especially with old maids! It amounts to genius,
Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them
in the hotel salon at night--a perfect
ring of them--and the men outside, totally neglected, and out of
temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill
at ease, or put in the shade--a governess, or a schoolgirl, or a
lumpish boy--that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a
pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is nature or
art."
He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the
thought which bad risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign or
other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the
over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had
somewhat taken the place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.
"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice,
raising his eyes to his friend, "that I had seen her
again."
Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:
"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech,
and that she dined there. I supposed she might just have come across
you--but she said nothing."
"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly
Lady Winterbourne and I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was
with that man's party. She spoke to me afterwards--I believe
now--she meant to be kind"--his voice showed the difficulty
he had in speaking at all--"but I saw him coming up to talk to
her. I am ashamed to think of my own manner, but I could not help
myself."
His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow.
Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce, but
Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that Aldous
was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his life;
secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in him an
exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had not
perhaps expected.
"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked
quietly, after a pause, "that she is going to marry him?"
"No--no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is
clearly on friendly, perhaps intimate, terms with him.
And just now, of course, she is more likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success--of a kind--in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front."
"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that
divide that group are too unmanageable. If he were a Parnell!
But he lacks just the qualities that matter--the reticence, the power
of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard
self-concentration."
Aldous raised his shoulders.
"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he
holds himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him
everywhere."
"What!--among the smart people?"
Aldous nodded.
"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing.
"He must do it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be
be-Capua-ed all at once."
"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with
intention. Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think
he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make
use of, and its influence. Have you been following the strike
'leaders' in the Clarion?"
"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them
for the world! I might not be able to go on giving to the
strike."
Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked
back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest
friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella
Boyce--never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction.
"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you
have been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.
Aldous hesitated; then he said--
"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"
Hallin made a little face.
"Since when has she become a person likely to be
'satisfied' with anything? She devotes to it a splendid and
wonderful energy. When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and
pity her so much that I should cry over her!"
Aldous started.
"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose
and laid his hand on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell
me! It's best for me not to talk of her. If she were associated in my
mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the
whole thing off. But this--this--" He broke off; then
resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him,
by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress. "A person you
and I know said to me the other day, 'It may sound unromantic, but I
could never think of a woman who had thrown me over except with
ill-will.' The word astonished me, but sometimes I understand
it. I find myself full of anger to the most futile, the most
ridiculous degree!"
He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his
own absurdity, his own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's shoulders, and there was a short pause.
"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as
his hands dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it
you're after?--I forget."
Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again,
meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning
visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the
investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane.
The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and
regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had
finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of
things in two or three selected streets.
It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt
strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly
directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he
thought the Government could really do good.
Then Raeburn turned to go.
"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he
said, as he opened the door.
"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in
fact, don't; I shall have my jaunt."
Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common
Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or
other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some
sight.
"If it's your boys," he said, protesting,
"you're not fit for it. Hand them over to me."
"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him
out of the room.
Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury
Lane hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the
squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of
Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its
roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared
from the too short London summer.
For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness
in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or
the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of
tune--whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had
interested him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some
tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got
home. He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The
certainty that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so
closely intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed
upon him now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an
object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was
still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for
those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his
transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all the
cere-
monial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.
He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street,
and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and
box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention of
the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner
crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a
fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a
trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker,
but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him
already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight preoccupied smile in
return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together
talking.
The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of
all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already
marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a
peculiarly vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole
the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to
Raeburn's notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and
sanitary.
After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its
condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow roadway
strewn
with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type.
A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they
had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.
"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to
Raeburn's interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him
what we were after. The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are
little oases of respectability in it you would never expect. But there is
plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now
you see it at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows
and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be
as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor of
these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of
nothing."
And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left,
he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of
some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly
peopled by women of the very lowest class and their
"bullies"--that is to say, the men who aided
them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.
When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further
end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of
his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard
as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough.
But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of
"big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of
affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of
preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.
Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood
still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had
been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from
all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and
in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of
a running and shouting crowd.
"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with
them. "Listen!"
Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the
air. The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling
them, yet too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some
ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned
white.
"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening,
"and it sounds like murder. You go back for that
policeman!"
And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way
through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had
done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and screaming
women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house,
hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him.
The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans, uproar--all
the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor
of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a voice,
different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying
piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"
Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were
trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot
out from the dark passage inside--two wrestling with the third, a wild
beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with
blood.
"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors;
"an' for the Sister too!"
"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind
Aldous--"it's the nuss he means! I sor her go in when I wor
at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer blackguard
you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a frenzy,
had not the bystanders caught hold of her.
"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up
at Peabody's call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed
back.
Aldous was already upstairs.
"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and
cowering on the first landing--for all sounds from above had
ceased.
"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us
begged and implored of that young person, sir,
not to go a-near him! Didn't we, Betsy?--didn't we,
Doll?"
Aldous ran up.
On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on
the ground, apparently beaten to death.
By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two
or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity.
Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left arm
hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was doing
her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag stood open
beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her what she asked
for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on Raeburn's
heart.
In such an exaltation of nerve she could be surprised
at nothing. When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.
"I think," she said, as he stooped down to
her--speaking with pauses, as though to get her breath--"he
has--killed her. But there--is a chance. Are the--police
there--and a stretcher?"
Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly
sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's
nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.
"Did you see it, miss?"
"I--I tried to separate them," she replied, still
speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous,
who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to
help her with the bandage she was applying. "But he was--such a
great--powerful brute."
Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and
tried to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.
"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took
out his note-book, "attending a child--that's
ill--when I heard the screams. They were on the landing; he had turned
her out of the room--then rushed after her--I
think--to throw her downstairs--I stopped that. Then
he took up something--oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing
to a broken piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite
mad with drink--I couldn't--do much."
Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.
"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.
"It's not broken--it's wrenched; I can't use
it.
There--that's all we can do--till she gets--to hospital."
Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he
could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and was
proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and quietly
pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the deep line
of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little. Then she sank
down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing at the woman's
marred face--indescribably patient in its deep
unconsciousness--at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their
wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair--with tears that ran
unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched a
chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once
before--beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.
At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had
cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before
his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names and evidence
of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.
"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently,
bending over her. "Won't you let me take you home?--you
want it sorely. The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend
here who will help. They will remove her with every care--he will see
to it."
Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he
was--where they were--
how they had last met. And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness. She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her any more--after this! When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now. No!--after this he must be friends with her.
"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with
a quivering, appealing accent--and so they fell silent.
Aldous looked round the room--at the miserable filthy garret with
its begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its
heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed, its empty gin-bottles
here and there--all the familiar, one might almost say
conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation--then at this
breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling was
one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance--against her
mother!--against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the
finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a
hopeless struggle with devildom.
"I have been here several times before," she said presently,
in a faint voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the
street is not much worse than others--though, of course, it has a bad
name. There is a little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many
of the women in the house are very
good to him and his mother. This poor thing--used to come in and out--when I was nursing him--Oh, I wish--I wish they would come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form--"every moment is of importance!"
As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it
opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the
lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and
skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently the
police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole street,
were on their way to the nearest hospital.
Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police,
who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as
to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning against the
passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and seemed to him
on the point of fainting.
"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to
Peabody; then going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged
a few words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to
Marcella.
"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please,
directly. They will not trouble you any more for the present."
He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the
cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street as
though he were himself in anguish. She was some time
before she recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab. Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to control herself and not to faint.
He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the
exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was
this what her new career--her enthusiasms--meant, or might mean!
Twenty-three!--in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable
waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.
Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made
impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such
scenes--such gross physical abominations. Amazing!--how meanly,
passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman!
He himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow,
the stern joy of the fight. But she!--let her leave the human brute
and his unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne--it was never
meant--that she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at
least, in such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had
possessed him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the
night in the cottage.
In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely.
Presently, as he watched her--hating the man for driving and the cab
for shaking--he saw her white lips suddenly smile.
"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him;
"you think nursing is all like that!"
"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.
"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes
again. "Nobody is ever rude to us--I often pine for
experiences!"
How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.
"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her.
"Does your arm hurt you much?"
"Yes,--but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have
to give up work for a bit.--Mr. Raeburn!"
"Yes." His heart beat.
"We may meet often--mayn't we?--at Lady
Winterbourne's--or in the country? Couldn't we be friends?
You don't know how often--" She turned away her weary head
a moment--gathered strength to begin again--"--how
often I have regretted--last year. I see now--that I
behaved--more unkindly"--her voice was almost a
whisper--"than I thought then. But it is all done
with--couldn't we just be good friends--understand each
other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"
She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.
As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was
really in his mind was the Terrace--was Wharton's advancing
figure. But her state--the moment--coerced him.
"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but
with astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She
knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.
She put out her hand.
"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a
shudder; "oh no!"
Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant
against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her self-control,
gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been able to save. He
tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But she hardly heard
him.
At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of
Brown's Buildings.
"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will;
"do you know you will have to help me across that court, and
upstairs--then I shan't be any more trouble."
So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress
across the court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of
children. Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from
him with a wan smile.
"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"
Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed.
Then he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and
implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best cleverness
to hide all motion of his in the matter.
After which he spent--poor Aldous!--one of the most restless
and miserable nights of his life.
Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still
out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon.
Marcella had her thoughts to herself.
But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In
the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady
Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained
service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so
pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic temper,
delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had been here a
fortnight, and was now pining to go back
to work. Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling--must somehow wrestle--its passionate way. But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover, undergoing treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing--a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody.
On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she
paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she had
saved--probably at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go
scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence. But she
lived; and--as Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had
abundantly made up their minds--would be permanently cared for and
comforted in the future.
Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest.
She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of that
tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of
friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and
Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been with
Lady Winterbourne; he had done his
best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible; the man who had stood by her through such a sceen could do no less, in common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little.
Childishly, angrily--she wanted him to be friends! Why
shouldn't he? He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time,
whatever Mr. Hallin might say. Then why not put his pride away and be
generous? Their future lives must of necessity touch each other, for they
were bound to the same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew
herself to be her father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and
before that day, whenever her father's illness, of which she now
understood the incurable though probably tedious nature, should reach a
certain stage, she must go home and take up her life there again. Why
embitter such a situation?--make it more difficult for everybody
concerned? Why not simply bury the past and begin again? In her
restlessness she was inclined to think herself much wiser and more
magnanimous than he.
Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to
whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him with
all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his private life
and his public career. Their circle,
too, was his circle; and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained his place in Brookshire--by the mere accidents of births. After all, aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by what he has--so far at least has "progress" brought us.
She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of
temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of
"consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his
political contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of
the future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried;
while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public. Marcella,
indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and various
sources--mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men already
themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work of England.
Above all things did she love and admire power--the power of personal
capacity. It had been the secret, it was still
half the secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her imagination.
Then--apart from the political world and its judgments--the
intimacy between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many
new aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend,
he was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the
affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little
oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the
memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady
Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were
both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no
one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or
agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to regard
him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not easily
yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by strangers. But
here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and sweetness of disposition
had full play; and although, now that Marcella was in their house, he came
less often, and was less free with them than usual, she saw enough to make
her wonder a little that they were all so kind and indulgent to
her, seeing that they cared so much for him and all that
affected him.
Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain
irritation in it. Was it all
her own fault that in her brief engagement she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as combative as ever.
Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more
soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that
nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the
lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of
course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual
adornments of the "New Journalism."
The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them--comparatively a
large world--fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names.
To lose your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come
across her again in this manner and in these circumstances--there was
a dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us too
seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would have
liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in particular,
the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she had claims, and
was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and see her guest.
She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention whatever of playing the
lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and fatigue. But she had
succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once or twice of an afternoon
to meet two or three people. It was better for the wounded arm that its
owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane lived at a convenient distance,
at a house in Piccadilly, just across the Green Park.
Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession a
few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller sweets
of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had been no
craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally indifferent to
what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the attraction had been
simply the occasional presence there of Harry Wharton. He excited, puzzled,
angered, and commanded her more than ever. She could not keep herself away
from the chance of meeting him. And Lady Winterbourne neither knew him, nor
apparently wished to know him--a fact which probably tended to make
Marcella obstinate.
Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and
again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women,
with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them he
talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent lived
their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening returned upon
her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new friends a certain
malicious triumph in the readiness with which the young demagogue had
yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least as much duped as he.
Like Hallin, she did not believe that at bottom he was the man to let
himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to his interest to break
them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these people--the claims they
and their amusement made upon his time and his mind--seemed to this
girl, who watched them with her dark, astonished
eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something she had never dreamed of; and it caused her contempt and irritation.
Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her
from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that he
did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of
appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and Marcella
sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between them
frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great
friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread of
their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On the
Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed him, as a
lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be sometimes
devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes, she thought,
even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious little neglects
towards her, generally in the presence of some great lady or other. On one
of these occasions she suddenly felt herself flushing from brow to chin at
the thought--"He does not want any one to suppose for a moment
that he wishes to marry me!"
It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects
of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say
that she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him.
When it did enter her mind, she saw that it had already
entered his--and that he was full of doubts! The perception had given
to her manner
an increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not refrain, if he was to preserve his power.
So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in
it neither simplicity nor joy She was conscious of a certain dull and
baffled feeling--a sense of humiliation--which hurt. Moreover,
the scene of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination
perpetually. She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her--the
pity, the ugliness, the confusion of it.
The muslin curtain beside her suddenly swelled out in a draught of air,
and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it should
swing to. Some one had opened the door of the room.
"Did I blow you out of window?" said a
girl's voice; and there behind her, in a half-timid attitude, stood
Betty Macdonald, a vision of white muslin, its frills and capes a little
tossed by the wind, the pointed face and golden hair showing small and
elf-like under the big shady hat.
"Oh, do come in!" said Marcella, shyly; "Lady
Winterbourne will be in directly."
"So Panton told me," said Betty, sinking down on a high
stool beside Marcella's chair, and taking off her hat; "and
Panton doesn't tell me any stories
now--I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in
the day? Don't you think there will be a special little corner of
purgatory for London butlers? I hope Panton will get off easy!"
Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand, and studied Marcella.
Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved; her pale face
and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis. When
Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain story,
she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet, if only to prick
her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she saw her
close she felt herself near to falling in love with her. Moreover, the
incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had thrilled a
creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little merry thing would
sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the thought of what a
girl only two years older than herself must have already seen of sin and
tragedy, envying her with all her heart, and by contrast honestly
despising--for the moment--that very happy and popular person,
Betty Macdonald!
"Do you like being alone?" she asked Marcella, abruptly.
Marcella coloured.
"Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company," she
said. "I was very glad to see you come in."
"Were you?" said Betty, joyously, with a little gleam in her
pretty eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. "May I kiss
you?" she said, in the wistfullest, eagerest voice.
Marcella smiled, and, laying her hand on Betty's, shyly drew
her.
"That's better!" said Betty, with a long breath.
"That's the second milestone; the first was when saw you on the Terrace. Couldn't you mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the horrid thing is when you have to mark them back again! Nobody ever did that with you!"
"Because I have no friends," said Marcella, quickly; then,
when Betty clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added
quickly with a smile, "except a few I make poultices for."
"There!" said Betty, enviously, "to think of being
really wanted--for poultices--or anything! I never
was wanted in my life! When I die they'll put on my poor little
grave--
--oh, there they are!"--she ran to the window--"Lady Winterbourne and Ermyntrude. Doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterbourne doing her duties? She gets into her carriage after lunch as one might mount a tumbril. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to 'the scaffold at Hyde Park Corner.' She looks the unhappiest woman in England--and all the time Ermyntrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her season for the world! She gives Ermyntrude a lot of trouble, but she is a dear--a naughty dear--and mothers are such a chance! Ermyntrude! where did you get that bonnet? You got it without me--and my feelings won't stand it!"
"She's buried here--that hizzie Betty;
She did na gade--so don't ee fret ye!
Lady Ermyntrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together,
chattering and laughing. Lady Win-
terbourne came up to Marcella and enquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves, when the drawing-room door opened again.
"Tea, Panton!" said Lady Winterbourne, without turning her
head, and in the tone of Lady Macbeth. But the magnificent butler took no
notice.
"Lady Selina Farrell!" he announced in a firm voice.
Lady Winterbourne gave a nervous start; then, with the air of a person
cut out of wood, made a slight advance, and held out a limp hand to her
visitor.
"Won't you sit down?" she said.
Anybody who did not know her would have supposed that she had never seen
Lady Selina before. In reality she and the Alresfords were cousins. But she
did not like Lady Selina, and never took any pains to conceal it--a
fact which did not in the smallest degree interfere with the younger
lady's performance of her family duties.
Lady Selina found a seat with easy aplomb, put up her bejewelled fingers
to draw off her veil, and smililgly prepared herself for tea. She enquired
of Betty how she was enjoying herself, and of Lady Ermyntrude how her
husband and baby in the country were getting on without her. The tone of
this last question made the person addressed flush and draw herself up. It
was put as banter, but certainly conveyed that Lady Ermyntrude was
neglecting her family for the sake of dissipat