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Marcella

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #13728 · 1,406,153 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Marcella

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: October 12, 2004 [eBook #13728]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCELLA ***

MARCELLA

by

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Author of _Robert Elsmere_, _The History Of David Grieve_, etc.

In Two Volumes

1894







[Illustration: Portrait of Mary A. Ward]



TO MY FATHER I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE



BOOK I.


"If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that could live an hour?"



CHAPTER I.

"The mists--and the sun--and the first streaks of yellow in the
beeches--beautiful!--_beautiful_!"


And with a long breath of delight Marcella Boyce threw herself on her
knees by the window she had just opened, and, propping her face upon her
hands, devoured the scene, before her with that passionate intensity of
pleasure which had been her gift and heritage through life.

She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care of
centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some Scotch
firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow selective hand
of time had been at work for generations, developing here the delightful
roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there the bold caprice of bare
fir trunks and ragged branches, standing black against the sky. Beyond
the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye
indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn
onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid
maturity, ending at last in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate
of some importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of
the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with
them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity.
Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at the same
moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the end of the
avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on either side of the
lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting the broad gravel terrace
beneath her window.

"It _is_ a heavenly place, all said and done," she protested to herself
with a little frown. "But no doubt it would have been better still if
Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden
decent. Still--"

She dropped on a stool beside the open window, and as her eyes steeped
themselves afresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the
former look of glowing content--that content of youth which is never
merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous
eagerness.

It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr. Richard
Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park the old home of the
Boyces, and it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had
received her summons home from the students' boarding-house in
Kensington, where she had been lately living. She had ardently wished
to assist in the June "settling-in," having not been able to apply her
mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying, nor
indeed to any other subject whatever, since the news of their
inheritance had reached her. But her mother in a dry little note had let
it be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself. Marcella
had better go on with her studies as long as possible.

Yet Marcella was here at last. And as she looked round her large bare
room, with its old dilapidated furniture, and then out again to woods
and lawns, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her
childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out--atoned for by
this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so
deplorably!--since no one could have reasonably expected that an
apparently sound man of sixty would have succumbed in three days to the
sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted
successfully a score of times before.

Her great desire now was to put the past--the greater part of it at any
rate--behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with,
poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present
position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid
for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money,
and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or
fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these
past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity
of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible
figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was
Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the
only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one
of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a
life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest
possible degree of interest and novelty.

Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only
succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.

For against her will, she fell straightway--in this quiet of the autumn
morning--into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her
present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after
scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or
disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the
fine plastic face turned to the September woods.

She had been at school since she was nine years old--there was the
dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in
her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so
impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a
dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a
large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice
of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to
the complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical
phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet
adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in
the background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory
was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague--the image of a
tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces
behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to
fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one,
she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and
stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.

When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall
for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed
with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and
tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her
nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life
she had been an average child of the quick and clever type, with average
faults. But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the discipline, the
teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff House School for
Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for the time being,
into a demon. She hated her lessons, though, when she chose, she could
do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions; she
hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold ablutions with some
dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated the meals in the
long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was forbidden and twice
pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and
scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself
out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her own thwarted appetite as she sat
black-browed and brooding in her place. She was not a favourite with her
companions, and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her
perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress. The whole of her first year
was one continual series of sulks, quarrels, and revolts.

Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed,
when Miss Frederick, at her wit's end, would take advantage of one of
the child's perpetual colds to try the effects of a day's seclusion and
solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her
charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good. "For I do believe a
great part of it's liver or nerves! No child in her right senses could
behave so," she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who had
been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend and
excuse Marcella than any one else in the house--no one exactly knew why.

Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold
was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the
bedclothes--for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed
you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in
the early morning with a cup of senna-tea, and at long and regular
intervals throughout the day with beef-tea and gruel; and that no one
should come to see and talk with her, unless, indeed, it were the
doctor, quiet being in all cases of sickness the first condition of
recovery, and the natural schoolgirl in Miss Frederick's persuasion
being more or less inclined to complain without cause if illness were
made agreeable.

For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella
was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and
a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the
bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her--a pitiable morsel,
in truth, of rather forlorn humanity. For though she had her movements
of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing the senna-tea
in Martha's face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown to denounce
Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom, something
generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or any wish
"to be good," but only an aching, inmost sense of childish loneliness
and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried everybody's
patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented crises
which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.

So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to
amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming
awake. Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was
always the heroine. Before the annoyance of her afternoon gruel, which
she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full fairy-land again,
figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess
of Wales--of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and model of English
society whose portrait in the window of the little stationer's shop at
Marswell--the small country town near Cliff House--had attracted the
child's attention once, on a dreary walk, and had ever since governed
her dreams. Marcella had no fairy-tales, but she spun a whole cycle for
herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long
her own particular property. She had only to shut her eyes and she had
caught her idol's attention--either by some look or act of passionate
yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the
street--or by throwing herself in front of the divinity's runaway
horses--or by a series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative
child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old
family and had aristocratic relations. Then, when the Princess had held
out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight! Marcella grew up on the
instant: she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the
"Boyce eyes and hair;" she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin
with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess,
laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land,
her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the
time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate
flatteries and attentions.

Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest
summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening
her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare
white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper
opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet
stretching away on either hand. The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the
depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of
the Princess's maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty
child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in
contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party
frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb
day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold
was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a
page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom,
at seven.

Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie
of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of
amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily
miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social
difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the
girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three
neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal
on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her
establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt
themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs
which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like
Marcella Boyce. Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she
was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a
famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of this great-uncle
had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed
so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the
child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish
eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired
gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called
"Grandpapa." Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory
of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.
There they were now--the glory and the dignity--a feverish leaven,
driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks,
which could lead to nothing but humiliation.

"I wish my great-uncle were here! _He'd_ make you remember--you
great--you great--big bully you!"--she shrieked on one occasion when she
had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl--the stout
and comely daughter of a local ironmonger--had been successfully
asserting herself.

The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.

"_Your_ great-uncle! Upon my word! And who may he be, miss? If it comes
to that, I'd like to show _my_ great-uncle David how you've scratched my
wrist. He'd give it you. He's almost as strong as father, though he is
so old. You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don't talk
stuff to me."

Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed
out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her. She rushed up to the
top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden
niche of the wall, shaking and crying,--now planning vengeance on her
conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own
ill-bred and impotent folly.

No--during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory
declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday--Marcella
sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and
small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and
self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly
allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the
top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Rénier, Miss
Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small
sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged "the little wild-cat,"
as the school generally dubbed the Speaker's great-niece, whenever she
could.

But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.
Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections. In the first
place, a taste for reading had rooted itself--reading of the adventurous
and poetical kind. There were two or three books which Marcella had
absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember. For at twenty-one
people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry to have
opinions, must skim and "turn over" books rather than read them, must
use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind, and suffer
occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders. But at thirteen--what
concentration! what devotion! what joy! One of these precious volumes
was Bulwer's "Rienzi"; another was Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs"; a
third was a little red volume of "Marmion" which an aunt had given her.
She probably never read any of them through--she had not a particle of
industry or method in her composition--but she lived in them. The parts
which it bored her to read she easily invented for herself, but the
scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no
gift for verse-making, but she laboriously wrote a long poem on the
death of Rienzi, and she tried again and again with a not inapt hand to
illustrate for herself in pen and ink the execution of Wallace.

But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in
comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.

To take the adoration first. When Marcella came to Cliff House she was
recommended by the same relation who gave her "Marmion" to the kind
offices of the clergyman of the parish, who happened to be known to some
of the Boyce family. He and his wife--they had no children--did their
duty amply by the odd undisciplined child. They asked her to tea once or
twice; they invited her to the school-treat, where she was only
self-conscious and miserably shy; and Mr. Ellerton had at least one
friendly and pastoral talk with Miss Frederick as to the difficulties of
her pupil's character. For a long time little came of it. Marcella was
hard to tame, and when she went to tea at the Rectory Mrs. Ellerton, who
was refined and sensible, did not know what to make of her, though in
some unaccountable way she was drawn to and interested by the child. But
with the expansion of her thirteenth year there suddenly developed in
Marcie's stormy breast an overmastering absorbing passion for these two
persons. She did not show it to them much, but for herself it raised
her to another plane of existence, gave her new objects and new
standards. She who had hated going to church now counted time entirely
by Sundays. To see the pulpit occupied by any other form and face than
those of the rector was a calamity hardly to be borne; if the exit of
the school party were delayed by any accident so that Mr. and Mrs.
Ellerton overtook them in the churchyard, Marcella would walk home on
air, quivering with a passionate delight, and in the dreary afternoon of
the school Sunday she would spend her time happily in trying to write
down the heads of Mr. Ellerton's sermon. In the natural course of things
she would, at this time, have taken no interest in such things at all,
but whatever had been spoken by him had grace, thrill, meaning.

Nor was the week quite barren of similar delights. She was generally
sent to practise on an old square piano in one of the top rooms. The
window in front of her overlooked the long white drive and the distant
high road into which it ran. Three times a week on an average Mrs.
Ellerton's pony carriage might be expected to pass along that road.
Every day Marcella watched for it, alive with expectation, her fingers
strumming as they pleased. Then with the first gleam of the white pony
in the distance, over would go the music stool, and the child leapt to
the window, remaining fixed there, breathing quick and eagerly till the
trees on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs.
Ellerton. Then her moment of Paradise was over; but the afterglow of it
lasted for the day.

So much for romance, for feelings as much like love as childhood can
know them, full of kindling charm and mystery. Her friendship had been
of course different, but it also left deep mark. A tall, consumptive
girl among the Cliff House pupils, the motherless daughter of a
clergyman-friend of Miss Frederick's, had for some time taken notice of
Marcella, and at length won her by nothing else, in the first instance,
than a remarkable gift for story-telling. She was a parlour-boarder, had
a room to herself, and a fire in it when the weather was cold. She was
not held strictly to lesson hours; many delicacies in the way of food
were provided for her, and Miss Frederick watched over her with a quite
maternal solicitude. When winter came she developed a troublesome cough,
and the doctor recommended that a little suite of rooms looking south
and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden should be given up
to her. There was a bedroom, an intermediate dressing-room, and then a
little sitting-room built out upon the terrace, with a window-door
opening upon it.

Here Mary Lant spent week after week. Whenever lesson hours were done
she clamoured for Marcie Boyce, and Marcella was always eager to go to
her. She would fly up stairs and passages, knock at the bedroom door,
run down the steps to the queer little dressing-room where the roof
nearly came on your head, and down more steps again to the sitting-room.
Then when the door was shut, and she was crooning over the fire with her
friend, she was entirely happy. The tiny room was built on the edge of
the terrace, the ground fell rapidly below it, and the west window
commanded a broad expanse of tame arable country, of square fields and
hedges, and scattered wood. Marcella, looking back upon that room,
seemed always to see it flooded with the rays of wintry sunset, a kettle
boiling on the fire, her pale friend in a shawl crouching over the
warmth, and the branches of a snowberry tree, driven by the wind,
beating against the terrace door.

But what a story-teller was Mary Lant! She was the inventor of a story
called "John and Julia," which went on for weeks and months without ever
producing the smallest satiety in Marcella. Unlike her books of
adventure, this was a domestic drama of the purest sort; it was
extremely moral and evangelical, designed indeed by its sensitively
religious author for Marcie's correction and improvement. There was in
it a sublime hero, who set everybody's faults to rights and lectured the
heroine. In real life Marcella would probably before long have been
found trying to kick his shins--a mode of warfare of which in her demon
moods she was past mistress. But as Mary Lant described him, she not
only bore with and trembled before him--she adored him. The taste for
him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself--a girl of a
tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist
faith, and already prescient of death--grew upon her. Soon her absorbing
desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at
practising times. For this purpose she gave herself the worst cold she
could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to
be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only
threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former,
whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and
gave up the cough in despair. It was her first sorrow and cost her some
days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears,
when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother
announced the sudden death of Mary Lant.




CHAPTER II.


Friendship and love are humanising things, and by her fourteenth year
Marcella was no longer a clever little imp, but a fast-maturing and in
some ways remarkable girl, with much of the woman in her already. She
had begun even to feel an interest in her dress, to speculate
occasionally on her appearance. At the fourth breaking-up party after
her arrival at Cliff House, Marcella, who had usually figured on these
occasions in a linsey-woolsey high to the throat, amid the frilled and
sashed splendours of her companions, found lying on her bed, when she
went up with the others to dress, a plain white muslin dress with blue
ribbons. It was the gift of old Mademoiselle Rénier, who affectionately
wished her queer, neglected favourite to look well. Marcella examined it
and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings. First of all there
was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to
the kindness of the French governess, whereas finery for the occasion
had been freely sent to all the other girls from "home." She very nearly
turned her back upon the bed and its pretty burden. But then the mere
snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons, and the
burning curiosity to see herself decked therein, overcame a nature
which, in the midst of its penury, had been always really possessed by
a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seemliness. Marcella
wore it, was stormily happy in it, and kissed Mademoiselle Rénier for it
at night with an effusion, nay, some tears, which no one at Cliff House
had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage
and fury.

A little later her father came to see her, the first and only visit he
paid to her at school. Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a
stranger, received him demurely, making no confidences, and took him
over the house and gardens. When he was about to leave her a sudden
upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she was happy and if
she wanted anything.

"Yes!" said Marcella, her large eyes gleaming; "tell mamma I want a
'fringe.' Every other girl in the school has got one."

And she pointed disdainfully to her plainly parted hair. Her father,
astonished by her unexpected vehemence, put up his eyeglass and studied
the child's appearance. Three days later, by her mother's permission,
Marcella was taken to the hairdresser at Marswell by Mademoiselle
Rénier, returned in all the glories of a "fringe," and, in
acknowledgment thereof, wrote her mother a letter which for the first
time had something else than formal news in it.

Meanwhile new destinies were preparing for her. For a variety of small
reasons Mr. Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter
from a distance, was not, upon personal inspection, very favourably
struck with his daughter's surroundings. His wife remarked shortly, when
he complained to her, that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the
daughter of persons of their means could expect to be. But Mr. Boyce
stuck to his point. He had just learnt that Harold, the only son of his
widowed brother Robert, of Mellor Park, had recently developed a deadly
disease, which might be long, but must in the end be sure. If the young
man died and he outlived Robert, Mellor Park would be his; they would
and must return, in spite of certain obstacles, to their natural rank in
society, and Marcella must of course be produced as his daughter and
heiress. When his wife repulsed him, he went to his eldest sister, an
old maid with a small income of her own, who happened to be staying with
them, and was the only member of his family with whom he was now on
terms. She was struck with his remarks, which bore on family pride, a
commodity not always to be reckoned on in the Boyces, but which she
herself possessed in abundance; and when he paused she slowly said that
if an ideal school of another type could be found for Marcella, she
would be responsible for what it might cost over and above the present
arrangement. Marcella's manners were certainly rough; it was difficult
to say what she was learning, or with whom she was associating;
accomplishments she appeared to have none. Something should certainly be
done for her--considering the family contingencies. But being a strong
evangelical, the aunt stipulated for "religious influences," and said
she would write to a friend.

The result was that a month or two later Marcella, now close on her
fourteenth birthday, was transferred from Cliff House to the charge of a
lady who managed a small but much-sought-after school for young ladies
at Solesby, a watering place on the east coast.

       *       *       *       *       *

But when in the course of reminiscence Marcella found herself once more
at Solesby, memory began to halt and wander, to choose another tone and
method. At Solesby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of
Cliff House, together with her own burning sense of inferiority and
disadvantage, had troubled her no more. She was well taught there, and
developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly
broken in to all social proprieties. But it was not her lessons or her
dancing masters that she remembered. She had made for herself agitations
at Cliff House, but what were they as compared to the agitations of
Solesby! Life there had been one long Wertherish romance in which there
were few incidents, only feelings, which were themselves events. It
contained humiliations and pleasures, but they had been all matters of
spiritual relation, connected with one figure only--the figure of her
schoolmistress, Miss Pemberton; and with one emotion only--a passion, an
adoration, akin to that she had lavished on the Ellertons, but now much
more expressive and mature. A tall slender woman with brown,
grey-besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of our
grandmothers on either cheek, and braided into a classic knot
behind--the face of a saint, an enthusiast--eyes overflowing with
feeling above a thin firm mouth--the mouth of the obstinate saint, yet
sweet also: this delicate significant picture was stamped on Marcella's
heart. What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in
connection with it? what night-vigils when a tired girl kept herself
through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a
figure with a night-lamp standing an instant in the doorway?--for Miss
Pemberton, who slept little and read late, never went to rest without
softly going the rounds of her pupils' rooms. What storms of contest,
mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions, first of
combat, then of reconciliation to which they led! What a strange
development on the pupil's side of a certain histrionic gift, a turn for
imaginative intrigue, for endless small contrivances such as might rouse
or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling! What agitated moments
of religious talk! What golden days in the holidays, when
long-looked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition, letters
which were carried about and wept over till they fell to pieces under
the stress of such a worship--what terrors and agonies of a stimulated
conscience--what remorse for sins committed at school--what zeal to
confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence--and what indifference
meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home!

Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart's blood
from their very cradles! Marcella could hardly look back now, in the
quiet of thought, to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver
of agitation. Yet now she never saw her. It was two years since they
parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to join a
widowed brother. It was all over--for ever. Those precious letters had
worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella's religious feelings; she
was once more another being.

       *       *       *       *       *

But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her
school days? Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and
its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of all
that it had opened to her, and meant for her. Fresh agitations!--fresh
passions!--but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and
sympathies.

At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it
was apparently not convenient that she should join them. Marcella,
looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired at
home. No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays;
but she suspected--nay, was certain--that there had been other and more
permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with them a burden.
At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave Miss Pemberton, her
mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of late shown decided
aptitude both for music and painting, it would be well that she should
cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than would be possible
at home. Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries, and was quite willing that her
daughter should go, for a time, to a lady whose address she enclosed,
and to whom she herself had written--a lady who received girl-students
working at the South Kensington art classes.

So began an experience, as novel as it was strenuous. Marcella soon
developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two
professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her
gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and
confident critic of the art of other people--which is much. But though
art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it
was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and
motive-power of her new life--not in art, but in the birth of social and
philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.

One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London,
both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister.
The three were orphans. They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and
Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so much
living into the twenty-four hours. The two brothers, both of them
skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all
day, were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their
evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist
propaganda. They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere and
quite unworldly. They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and the
charities of the rich were equally odious to them. That there could be
any "right" in private property or private wealth had become incredible
to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from
the existing state of London; and though one was humorous and handsome,
the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither could discuss the
Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked without anger.
And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more artistic gift
than either of them, was like unto them.

Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their
friends. She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public
evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged. Edie,
the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the
books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and
dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the
herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall
enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason,
brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle,
together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they
flattered her with technical talk; they were full of the importance of
women to the new doctrine and the new era.

The handsome brother was certainly in love with her; the other,
probably. Marcella was not in love with either of them, but she was
deeply interested in all three, and for the sickly brother she felt at
that time a profound admiration--nay, reverence--which influenced her
vitally at a critical moment of life. "Blessed are the poor"--"Woe unto
you, rich men"--these were the only articles of his scanty creed, but
they were held with a fervour, and acted upon with a conviction, which
our modern religion seldom commands. His influence made Marcella a
rent-collector under a lady friend of his in the East End; because of
it, she worked herself beyond her strength in a joint attempt made by
some members of the Venturist Society to organise a Tailoresses' Union;
and, to please him, she read articles and blue-books on Sweating and
Overcrowding. It was all very moving and very dramatic; so, too, was the
persuasion Marcella divined in her friends, that she was destined in
time, with work and experience, to great things and high place in the
movement.

The wholly unexpected news of Mr. Boyce's accession to Mellor had very
various effects upon this little band of comrades. It revived in
Marcella ambitions, instincts and tastes wholly different from those of
her companions, but natural to her by temperament and inheritance. The
elder brother, Anthony Craven, always melancholy and suspicious, divined
her immediately.

"How glad you are to be done with Bohemia!" he said to her ironically
one day, when he had just discovered her with the photographs of Mellor
about her. "And how rapidly it works!"

"What works?" she asked him angrily.

"The poison of possession. And what a mean end it puts to things! A week
ago you were all given to causes not your own; now, how long will it
take you to think of us as 'poor fanatics!'--and to be ashamed you ever
knew us?"

"You mean to say that I am a mean hypocrite!" she cried. "Do you think
that because I delight in--in pretty things and old associations, I must
give up all my convictions? Shall I find no poor at Mellor--no work to
do? It is unkind--unfair. It is the way all reform breaks down--through
mutual distrust!"

He looked at her with a cold smile in his dark, sunken eyes, and she
turned from him indignantly.

When they bade her good-bye at the station, she begged them to write to
her.

"No, no!" said Louis, the handsome younger brother. "If ever you want
us, we are there. If you write, we will answer. But you won't need to
think about us yet awhile. Good-bye!"

And he pressed her hand with a smile.

The good fellow had put all his own dreams and hopes out of sight with a
firm hand since the arrival of her great news. Indeed, Marcella realised
in them all that she was renounced. Louis and Edith spoke with affection
and regret. As to Anthony, from the moment that he set eyes upon the
maid sent to escort her to Mellor, and the first-class ticket that had
been purchased for her, Marcella perfectly understood that she had
become to him as an enemy.

"They shall see--I will show them!" she said to herself with angry
energy, as the train whirled her away. And her sense of their
unwarrantable injustice kept her tense and silent till she was roused to
a childish and passionate pleasure by a first sight of the wide lawns
and time-stained front of Mellor.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of such elements, such memories of persons, things, and events, was
Marcella's reverie by the window made up. One thing, however, which,
clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of
energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her
musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and
loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of
many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations
all through--and were not the great passion of her Solesby days,
together with the interest and novelty of her London experience, enough
to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect? Ah! but it will be
observed that in this sketch of Marcella's schooldays nothing has been
said of Marcella's holidays. In this omission the narrative has but
followed the hasty, half-conscious gaps and slurs of the girl's own
thought. For Marcella never thought of those holidays and all that was
connected with them _in detail_, if she could possibly avoid it. But it
was with them, in truth, and with what they implied, that she was so
irritably anxious to be done when she first began to be reflective by
the window; and it was to them she returned with vague, but still
intense consciousness when the rush of active reminiscence died away.

       *       *       *       *       *

That surely was the breakfast bell ringing, and with the dignified
ancestral sound which was still so novel and attractive to Marcella's
ear. Recalled to Mellor Park and its circumstances, she went
thoughtfully downstairs, pondering a little on the shallow steps of the
beautiful Jacobean staircase. _Could_ she ever turn her back upon those
holidays? Was she not rather, so to speak, just embarked upon their
sequel, or second volume?

But let us go downstairs also.




CHAPTER III.


Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part of
the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the house
in the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. The
decorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed by
their eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at any
rate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the worn
and discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, and
petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760,
besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed on
them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately
carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a
miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian
carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely
Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the
purposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, which
disturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, and
its modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one.
Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of her
tall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till
now, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.

Her father and mother were already at table, together with Mrs. Boyce's
brown spaniel Lynn.

Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn and
greasy livery coat, who represented the men-service of the
establishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of her
eyebrows, and the twitching of her thin lips, it was plain to Marcella
that her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behaving
foolishly.

"There, for goodness' sake, cut some bread on the sideboard," said the
angry master, "and hand it round instead of staring about you like a
stuck pig. What they taught you at Sir William Jute's I can't conceive.
_I_ didn't undertake to make a man-servant of you, sir."

The pale, harassed lad flew at the bread, cut it with a vast scattering
of crumbs, handed it clumsily round, and then took glad advantage of a
short supply of coffee to bolt from the room to order more.

"Idiot!" said Mr. Boyce, with an angry frown, as he disappeared.

"If you would allow Ann to do her proper parlour work again," said his
wife blandly, "you would, I think, be less annoyed. And as I believe
William was boot boy at the Jutes', it is not surprising that he did not
learn waiting."

"I tell you, Evelyn, that our position _demands_ a man-servant!" was the
hot reply. "None of my family have ever attempted to run this house with
women only. It would be unseemly--unfitting--incon--"

"Oh, I am no judge of course of what a Boyce may do!" said his wife
carelessly. "I leave that to you and the neighbourhood."

Mr. Boyce looked uncomfortable, cooled down, and presently when the
coffee came back asked his wife for a fresh supply in tones from which
all bellicosity had for the time departed. He was a small and singularly
thin man, with blue wandering eyes under the blackest possible eyebrows
and hair. The cheeks were hollow, the complexion as yellow as that of
the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden
by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between
irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were
as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and
self-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce,
of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect with
the pride of old family; his dress was careful and correct to the last
detail; and his hands with their long fingers were of an excessive
delicacy, though marred as to beauty by a thinness which nearly amounted
to emaciation.

"The servants say they must leave unless the ghost does, Marcella," said
Mrs. Boyce, suddenly, laying a morsel of toast as she spoke on Lynn's
nose. "Someone from the village of course has been talking--the cook
says she heard _something_ last night, though she will not condescend to
particulars--and in general it seems to me that you and I may be left
before long to do the house work."

"What do they say in the village?" asked Marcella eagerly.

"Oh! they say there was a Boyce two hundred years ago who fled down
here from London after doing something he shouldn't--I really forget
what. The sheriff's officers were advancing on the house. Their approach
displeased him, and he put an end to himself at the head of the little
staircase leading from the tapestry-room down to my sitting-room. Why
did he choose the _staircase_?" said Mrs. Boyce with light
reflectiveness.

"It won't do," said Marcella, shaking her head. "I know the Boyce they
mean. He was a ruffian, but he shot himself in London; and, any way, he
was dead long before that staircase was built."

"Dear me, how well up you are!" said her mother. "Suppose you give a
little lecture on the family in the servants' hall. Though I never knew
a ghost yet that was undone by dates."

There was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply with
Marcella's amused but sympathetic interest. _Detachment_ was perhaps the
characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner,--a curious separateness, as
it were, from all the things and human beings immediately about her.

Marcella pondered.

"I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently. "He will
have heard them in the village. I am going to the church this morning."

Her mother looked at her--a look of quiet examination--and smiled. The
Lady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already assumed during the six
weeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly.

"Harden!" said Mr. Boyce, catching the name. "I wish that man would
leave me alone. What have I got to do with a water-supply for the
village? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a water-tight
roof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert has
behaved."

Marcella's cheek flushed.

"The village water-supply is a _disgrace_," she said with low emphasis.
"I never saw such a crew of unhealthy, wretched-looking children in my
life as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought to
look after them. I believe you could be _forced_ to do something,
papa--if the local authority were of any use."

She looked at him defiantly.

"Nonsense," said Mr. Boyce testily. "They got along in your Uncle
Robert's days, and they can get along now. Charity, indeed! Why, the
state of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, I
should think, to take a man's mind. Don't you go talking to Mr. Harden
in the way you do, Marcella. I don't like it, and I won't have it. You
have the interests of your family and your home to think of first."

"Poor starved things!" said Marcella sarcastically--"living in such a
_den_!"

And she swept her white hand round, as though calling to witness the
room in which they sat.

"I tell you," said Mr. Boyce, rising and standing before the fire,
whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth so
little known to him, and whose nature and aims during the close contact
of the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity and
disturbance to him,--"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all,
must be to keep up the family position!--_our_ position. Look at that
library, and its condition; look at the state of these wall-papers; look
at the garden; look at the estate books if it comes to that. Why, it
will be years before, even with all my knowledge of affairs, I can pull
the thing through--years!"

Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough--she had pushed back her chair, and was
alternately studying her husband and daughter. They might have been
actors performing for her amusement. And yet, amusement is not precisely
the word. For that hazel eye, with its frequent smile, had not a spark
of geniality. After a time those about her found something scathing in
its dry light.

Now, as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him, his
look wavered, and his mood collapsed. He threw her a curious furtive
glance, and fell silent.

"I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London Socialist
friends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the pause that
followed. "You have, I see, taken a great liking for them."

"Oh! well--I don't know," said Marcella, with a shrug, and something of
a proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very kind--but--he doesn't seem to
have thought much about things."

She never talked about her London friends to her mother, if she could
help it. The sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they
could. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was constantly her
mother's victim, do what she would. But in her quiet moments she stood
on the defensive.

"So the Socialists are the only people who think?" said Mrs. Boyce, who
was now standing by the window, pressing her dog's head against her
dress as he pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens.
They tell me they give all their substance away--already--and every one
says it is going to be a particularly bad winter. The living, I hear, is
worth nothing. All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful.
It is the first duty of martyrs."

Marcella looked at her mother indignantly. It seemed to her often that
she said the most heartless things imaginable.

"Cheerful!" she said--"in a village like this--with all the young men
drifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters--no one
to stand by him--no money and no helpers--the people always ill--wages
eleven and twelve shillings a week--and only the old wrecks of men left
to do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in _this_ house to
back him up a little. All he asks is that papa should go and satisfy
himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and
Lord Maxwell's--"

"Lord Maxwell's!" cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state of
half-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away his
cigarette--"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousand
a year, if he has a penny. By the way, I wish he would just have the
civility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!"

He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the
footman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and a
note.

"The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?"

"Well, that's odd!" said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening. "Here _is_
Lord Maxwell's answer, just as I was talking of it."

His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, a
strange expectancy in her whole attitude. He tore it open, read it, and
then threw it angrily under the grate.

"No answer. Shut the door." The lad retreated. Mr. Boyce sat down and
began carefully to put the fire together. His thin left hand shook upon
his knee.

There was a moment's pause of complete silence. Mrs. Boyce's face might
have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she
stood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in her
sweeping black. But she said not a word, and presently left the room.

Marcella watched her father.

"Papa--_was_ that a note from Lord Maxwell?"

Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any one
was still there. It struck Marcella that he looked yellow and
shrunken--years older than her mother. An impulse of tenderness, joined
with anger and a sudden sick depression--she was conscious of them all
as she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out. Her
parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; but
her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes
the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might
have had. She had no habitual deference to break through, and the
hindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strong
than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year
by year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing
at them, as was now so often the case with her.

"Papa, is Lord Maxwell's note an uncivil one?"

Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over the
blaze.

"Why, that man's only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket
together from morning till night when we were boys. Henry Raeburn was a
bit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first
rabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the
two estates join. After that we were always companions--we used to go
out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow
watching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the inner
hall door, in the Windmill Hill fields--at least I did--I was a better
shot than he by that time. He didn't like Robert--he always wanted me."

"Well, papa, but what does he say?" asked Marcella, impatiently. She
laid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father's shoulder.

Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her. He and her mother had originally
sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily
worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming
to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her. But the sight
of her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanly
compassion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.

"He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refers
me to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who had
just bought the place. Oh, it is quite evident what he means. They were
here without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeks
at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a
card nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the
Levens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I did
think--I was fool enough to think--that when I came back to the old
place, my father's old friends would let bygones be bygones. I never did
_them_ any harm. Let them 'gang their gait,' confound them!"--the little
dark man straightened himself fiercely--"I can get my pleasure out of
the land; and as for your mother, she'd not lift a finger to propitiate
one of them!"

In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic
pride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.

Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither with
lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks--now
over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second
volume beginning--the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories
of shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?

"What was it you wanted about those coverts, papa?" she asked presently,
with a quick decision.

"What the deuce does it matter? If you want to know, I proposed to him
to exchange my coverts over by the Scrubs, which work in with his
shooting, for the wood down by the Home Farm. It was an exchange made
year after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found
it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack and
ruin after Harold's death. It gave me something to write about, and I
was determined to know where I stood--Well! the old Pharisee can go his
way: I'll go mine."

And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his native
heath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height,
and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns--a picturesque and
elegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.

"I shall ask Mr. Aldous Raeburn about it, if I see him in the village
to-day," said Marcella, quietly.

Her father started, and looked at her with some attention.

"What have you seen of Aldous Raeburn?" he inquired. "I remember hearing
that you had come across him."

"Certainly I have come across him. I have met him once or twice at the
Vicarage--and--oh! on one or two other occasions," said Marcella,
carelessly. "He has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says his
grandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away from
home. He does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now: writes for him, and
helps to manage the estate; and next year, when the Tories come back and
Lord Maxwell is in office again--"

"Why, of course, there'll be plums for the grandson," said Mr. Boyce
with a sneer. "That goes without saying--though we are such a virtuous
lot."

"Oh yes, he'll get on--everybody says so. And he'll deserve it too!" she
added, her eye kindling combatively as she surveyed her father. "He
takes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board of
guardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very much, but he is not
exactly popular, according to them. His manners are sometimes shy and
awkward, and the poor people think he's proud."

"Ah! a prig I dare say--like some of his uncles before him," said Mr.
Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, you say?"

And again he turned a quick considering eye on his daughter.

"Oh dear! yes," said Marcella, with a little proud smile. There was a
pause; then she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardens
have hard work just now with the harvest festival, and I promised to
take them some flowers."

"Well"--said her father, grudgingly, "so long as you don't promise
anything on my account! I tell you, I haven't got sixpence to spend on
subscriptions to anything or anybody. By the way, if you see Reynolds
anywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are going
round the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what the
coverts look like. The stock has all run down, and the place has been
poached to death. But he thinks if we take on an extra man in the
spring, and spend a little on rearing, we shall do pretty decently next
year."

The colour leapt to Marcella's cheek as she tied on her hat.

"You will set up another keeper, and you won't do anything for the
village?" she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another word
she opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace,
leaving her father both angered and amazed.

A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a
good deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhood
are expected to join. His wife had long since consented to play the
game, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no
dupe. As to what Marcella's part in the affair might be going to be, her
father was as yet uneasily in the dark. What constantly astonished him,
as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl's beauty. Surely she
had been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not only
beauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by the
possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was very
accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a
father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by
misfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would have
lovers--friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell
was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the
daughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie,
wherein the Raeburns' behaviour and Marcella's unexpected gifts played
about equal parts.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the most
adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey,
mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "garden
front," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny
and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers
grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though
conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeed
wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it;
the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of two
gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases,
and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.

As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by
the ragged charm of the old place.

On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for
beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if
house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the
neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply,
shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,--in short, the general
self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,--where would have been
that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely,
which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend
even upon _her_, the latest born of all its children--to ask for
tendance and cherishing even from _her_. She was always planning
how--with a minimum of money to spend--it could be comforted and healed,
and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though
she had been bred there.

But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and
depression of spirit. What _was_ this past which in these new
surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?
She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the
truth. Yet, of whom? Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to
any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her
power. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tell
me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you."
All the same, it _was_ due to them all, due to herself especially, now
that she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in the
dark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of the
facts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, as
untowardly in their, in _her_ way, as they had done in the shabby school
and lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.

Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and could
not, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to be
insurmountable. Her instinct told her as she looked back that their
relation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts and
humiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts. Their poverty and
the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the
disrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends of
their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool
distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget the
existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, and
laid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of the
world. Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw no
personal advantage and distinction in the Boyces' acquaintance, but
rather the contrary.

As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that the
breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or
his oldest friends. A little shiver passed through her as she reflected
that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the
feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be
strongest. Well, it _was_ hard upon them!--hard upon her mother--hard
upon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the
dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these
things! And there they were all the time--dogging and thwarting.

She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel
path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little
church. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the
Park, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, of
the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south
sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been
already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit
of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.

It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble
graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any
rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various
styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the
name of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in
the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who
fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field,
lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his
later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then
with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful
idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family
of any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal,
upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, on
the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had
given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the
making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the
terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried
on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate
justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them
intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's
education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections--a
tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but
on the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, and
still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.

Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--a
break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a
moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into
brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of
poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went
abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend of
Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever
doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of the
leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly
acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an
Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home
to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its
fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted,
pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected
whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined
names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks
mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.

The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle life
she died--much loved and passionately mourned. Her tomb bore no
long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace--for
she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for
it--the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's
_Vita Nuova_.

The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her
music-books survived,--a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but
the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own
physique and her father's were to be traced to its original, as well, no
doubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both--aptitudes not hitherto
conspicuous in her respectable race.

In reality, however, she loved every one of them--these Jacobean and
Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood in
the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled
heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable
pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great
lifting wave. The depression of her father's repentances and
trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter
of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their
guild of honour.

There were difficulties in her path, no doubt--but she had her
vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others.
_She_ had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed
individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and
wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two
years had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knew
perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age
could never venture--that she had fascination, resource, brain.

Already, in these few weeks--Smiles played about her lips as she thought
of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the
Hardens'. His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alter
the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one
of the _partis_ most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the
neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce's
daughter--all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which
it had to contend.

No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and
her parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman's
charm, a woman's energy should do it all.

Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, her
mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust.
Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--of
mission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her was
the Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched
bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when
it came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought
face to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism,
but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and
upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had
worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their
generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the
workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive,
resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy
misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid
unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse,
or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanched
and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of
insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food--these figures and
types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. In
London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been
to her as a pawn in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh;
and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk about
him. Under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was very
clear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, and had always depended,
the labourer of Mellor.

Well, she had tried to live with them ever since she came--had gone in
and out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and their
lives and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by their
cringing; now enjoying her position among them with the natural
aristocratic instinct of women, now grinding her teeth over her father's
and uncle's behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doing
for her new subjects.

What, _their_ friend and champion, and ultimately their redeemer too?
Well, and why not? Weak women have done greater things in the world. As
she stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, she
was conscious of a dramatic moment--would not have been sorry,
perhaps, if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her.

But there was a saving sincerity at the root of her, and her strained
mood sank naturally into a girlish excitement.

"We shall see!--We shall see!" she said aloud, and was startled to hear
her words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she stooped
to separate her flowers and see what quantities she had of each.

But while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herself
again. She walked down the church and stood at the open south door,
looking and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leading
across the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were coming
along it towards the church, both flower-laden, and beside walked a tall
man in a brown shooting suit, with his gun in his hand and his dog
beside him.

The excitement in Marcella's eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as she
saw the group, and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow. She
waited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signals
of the vicar's sister; but inwardly she was not quiet at all. For the
tall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Raeburn.




CHAPTER IV.


"How kind of you!" said the rector's sister, enthusiastically; "but I
thought you would come and help us."

And as Marcella took some of her burdens from her, Miss Harden kissed
Marcella's cheek with a sort of timid eagerness. She had fallen in love
with Miss Boyce from the beginning, was now just advanced to this
privilege of kissing, and being entirely convinced that her new friend
possessed all virtues and all knowledge, found it not difficult to hold
that she had been divinely sent to sustain her brother and herself in
the disheartening task of civilising Mellor. Mary Harden was naturally a
short, roundly made girl, neither pretty nor plain, with grey-blue eyes,
a shy manner, and a heart all goodness. Her brother was like unto
her--also short, round, and full-faced, with the same attractive eyes.
Both were singularly young in aspect--a boy and girl pair. Both had the
worn, pinched look which Mrs. Boyce complained of, and which, indeed,
went oddly with their whole physique. It was as though creatures built
for a normal life of easy give and take with their fellows had fallen
upon some unfitting and jarring experience. One striking difference,
indeed, there was between them, for amid the brother's timidity and
sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of
the priest--nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic.

Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure
at the sight of Marcella Boyce. Aldous Raeburn was clearly embarrassed
thereby. Indeed, as he laid down his gun outside the low churchyard
wall, while Marcella and the Hardens were greeting, that generally
self-possessed though modest person was conscious of a quite disabling
perturbation of mind. Why in the name of all good manners and decency
had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting trim, on that
particular morning, by Mr. Boyce's daughter on her father's land, and
within a stone's throw of her father's house? Was he not perfectly well
aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning despatched
to the new owner of Mellor? Had he not ineffectually tried to delay
execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his
grandfather? Had not the incident weighed on him ever since, wounding an
admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the
dark, during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce's
acquaintance, so strong and startling did he all in a moment feel them
to be?

And then to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer
moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public
property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male
to help her. But why in this neighbourhood at all?--why not rather on
the other side of the county? He could have scourged himself on the
spot for an unpardonable breach of manners and feeling.

However, Miss Boyce certainly made no sign. She received him without any
_empressement_, but also without the smallest symptom of offence. They
all moved into the church together, Mr. Raeburn carrying a vast bundle
of ivy and fern, the rector and his sister laden with closely-packed
baskets of cut flowers. Everything was laid down on the chancel steps
beside Marcella's contribution, and then the Hardens began to plan out
operations. Miss Harden ran over on her fingers the contributions which
had been sent in to the rectory, or were presently coming over to the
church in a hand-cart. "Lord Maxwell has sent the most _beautiful_ pots
for the chancel," she said, with a grateful look at young Raeburn. "It
will be quite a show." To which the young rector assented warmly. It was
very good, indeed, of Lord Maxwell to remember them always so liberally
at times like these, when they had so little direct claim upon him. They
were not his church or his parish, but he never forgot them all the
same, and Mellor was grateful. The rector had all his sister's gentle
effusiveness, but a professional dignity besides, even in his thanks,
which made itself felt.

Marcella flushed as he was speaking.

"I went to see what I could get in the way of greenhouse things," she
said in a sudden proud voice. "But we have nothing. There are the
houses, but there is nothing in them. But you shall have all our
out-of-door flowers, and I think a good deal might be done with autumn
leaves and wild things if you will let me try."

A speech, which brought a flush to Mr. Raeburn's cheek as he stood in
the background, and led Mary Harden into an eager asking of Marcella's
counsels, and an eager praising of her flowers.

Aldous Raeburn said nothing, but his discomfort increased with every
moment. Why had his grandfather been so officious in this matter of the
flowers? All very well when Mellor was empty, or in the days of a miser
and eccentric, without womankind, like Robert Boyce. But now--the act
began to seem to him offensive, a fresh affront offered to an
unprotected girl, whose quivering sensitive look as she stood talking to
the Hardens touched him profoundly. Mellor church might almost be
regarded as the Boyces' private chapel, so bound up was it with the
family and the house. He realised painfully that he ought to be
gone--yet could not tear himself away. Her passionate willingness to
spend herself for the place and people she had made her own at first
sight, checked every now and then by a proud and sore reserve--it was
too pretty, too sad. It stung and spurred him as he watched her; one
moment his foot moved for departure, the next he was resolving that
somehow or other he must make speech with her--excuse--explain.
Ridiculous! How was it possible that he should do either!

He had met her--perhaps had tried to meet her--tolerably often since
their first chance encounter weeks ago in the vicarage drawing-room. All
through there had been on his side the uncomfortable knowledge of his
grandfather's antipathy to Richard Boyce, and of the social steps to
which that antipathy would inevitably lead. But Miss Boyce had never
shown the smallest consciousness, so far, of anything untoward or
unusual in her position. She had been clearly taken up with the interest
and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered. The old
house, its associations, its history, the beautiful country in which it
lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with
that of the town,--he had heard her talk of all these things with a
freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no
doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention.
The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical
discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The
girl's vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special
fulness of life. So that in his new preoccupation with herself, and by
contact with her frank self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her
position, and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that
unlucky note from Mellor; his grandfather's prompt reply to it; his own
ineffective protest; and now this tongue-tiedness--this clumsy
intrusion--which she must feel to be an indelicacy--an outrage.

Suddenly he heard Miss Harden saying, with penitent emphasis, "I _am_
stupid! I have left the scissors and the wire on the table at home; we
can't get on without them; it is really too bad of me."

"I will go for them," said Marcella promptly. "Here is the hand-cart
just arrived and some people come to help; you can't be spared. I will
be back directly."

And, gathering up her black skirt in a slim white hand, she sped down
the church, and was out of the south door before the Hardens had time to
protest, or Aldous Raeburn understood what she was doing.

A vexed word from Miss Harden enlightened him, and he went after the
fugitive, overtaking her just where his gun and dog lay, outside the
churchyard.

"Let me go, Miss Boyce," he said, as he caught her up. "My dog and I
will run there and back."

But Marcella hardly looked at him, or paused.

"Oh no!" she said quickly, "I should like the walk."

He hesitated; then, with a flush which altered his usually quiet,
self-contained expression, he moved on beside her.

"Allow me to go with you then. You are sure to find fresh loads to bring
back. If it's like our harvest festival, the things keep dropping in all
day."

Marcella's eyes were still on the ground.

"I thought you were on your way to shoot, Mr. Raeburn?"

"So I was, but there is no hurry; if I can be useful. Both the birds and
the keeper can wait."

"Where are you going?"

"To some outlying fields of ours on the Windmill Hill. There is a tenant
there who wants to see me. He is a prosy person with a host of
grievances. I took my gun as a possible means of escape from him."

"Windmill Hill? I know the name. Oh! I remember: it was there--my father
has just been telling me--that your father and he shot the pair of
kestrels, when they were boys together."

Her tone was quite light, but somehow it had an accent, an emphasis,
which made Aldous Raeburn supremely uncomfortable. In his disquiet, he
thought of various things to say; but he was not ready, nor naturally
effusive; the turn of them did not please him; and he remained silent.

Meantime Marcella's heart was beating fast. She was meditating a _coup_.

"Mr. Raeburn!"

"Yes!"

"Will you think me a very extraordinary person if I ask you a question?
Your father and mine were great friends, weren't they, as boys?--your
family and mine were friends, altogether?"

"I believe so--I have always heard so," said her companion, flushing
still redder.

"You knew Uncle Robert--Lord Maxwell did?"

"Yes--as much as anybody knew him--but--"

"Oh, I know: he shut himself up and hated his neighbours. Still you knew
him, and papa and your father were boys together. Well then, if you
won't mind telling me--I know it's bold to ask, but I have reasons--why
does Lord Maxwell write to papa in the third person, and why has your
aunt, Miss Raeburn, never found time in all these weeks to call on
mamma?"

She turned and faced him, her splendid eyes one challenge. The glow and
fire of the whole gesture--the daring of it, and yet the suggestion of
womanish weakness in the hand which trembled against her dress and in
the twitching lip--if it had been fine acting, it could not have been
more complete. And, in a sense, acting there was in it. Marcella's
emotions were real, but her mind seldom deserted her. One half of her
was impulsive and passionate; the other half looked on and put in
finishing touches.

Acting or no, the surprise of her outburst swept the man beside her off
his feet. He found himself floundering in a sea of excuses--not for his
relations, but for himself. He ought never to have intruded; it was
odious, unpardonable; he had no business whatever to put himself in her
way! Would she please understand that it was an accident? It should not
happen again. He quite understood that she could not regard him with
friendliness. And so on. He had never so lost his self-possession.

Meanwhile Marcella's brows contracted. She took his excuses as a fresh
offence.

"You mean, I suppose, that I have no right to ask such questions!" she
cried; "that I am not behaving like a lady--as one of your relations
would? Well, I dare say! I was not brought up like that. I was not
brought up at all; I have had to make myself. So you must avoid me if
you like. Of course you will. But I resolved there--in the church--that
I would make just one effort, before everything crystallises, to break
through. If we must live on here hating our neighbours and being cut by
them, I thought I would just ask you why, first. There is no one else to
ask. Hardly anybody has called, except the Hardens, and a few new people
that don't matter. And _I_ have nothing to be ashamed of," said the girl
passionately, "nor has mamma. Papa, I suppose, did some bad things long
ago. I have never known--I don't know now--what they were. But I should
like to understand. Is everybody going to cut us because of that?"

With a great effort Aldous Raeburn pulled himself together, certain fine
instincts both of race and conduct coming to his help. He met her
excited look by one which had both dignity and friendliness.

"I will tell you what I can, Miss Boyce. If you ask me, it is right I
should. You must forgive me if I say anything that hurts you. I will try
not--I will try not!" he repeated earnestly. "In the first place, I know
hardly anything in detail. I do not remember that I have ever wished to
know. But I gather that some years ago--when I was still a
lad--something in Mr. Boyce's life--some financial matters, I
believe--during the time that he was member of Parliament, made a
scandal, and especially among his family and old friends. It was the
effect upon his old father, I think, who, as you know, died soon
afterwards--"

Marcella started.

"I didn't know," she said quickly.

Aldous Raeburn's distress grew.

"I really oughtn't to speak of these things," he said, "for I don't know
them accurately. But I want to answer what you said--I do indeed. It was
that, I think, chiefly. Everybody here respected and loved your
grandfather--my grandfather did--and there was great feeling for him--"

"I see! I see!" said Marcella, her chest heaving; "and against papa."

She walked on quickly, hardly seeing where she was going, her eyes dim
with tears. There was a wretched pause. Then Aldous Raeburn broke out--

"But after all it is very long ago. And there may have been some harsh
judgment. My grandfather may have been misinformed as to some of the
facts. And I--"

He hesitated, struck with the awkwardness of what he was going to say.
But Marcella understood him.

"And you will try and make him alter his mind?" she said, not
ungratefully, but still with a touch of sarcasm in her tone. "No, Mr.
Raeburn, I don't think that will succeed."

They walked on in silence for a little while. At last he said, turning
upon her a face in which she could not but see the true feeling of a
just and kindly man--

"I meant that if my grandfather could be led to express himself in a way
which Mr. Boyce could accept, even if there were no great friendship as
there used to be, there might be something better than this--this,
which--which--is so painful. And any way, Miss Boyce, whatever happens,
will you let me say this once, that there is no word, no feeling in this
neighbourhood--how could there be?--towards you and your mother, but one
of respect and admiration? Do believe that, even if you feel that you
can never be friendly towards me and mine again--or forget the things I
have said!"

"Respect and admiration!" said Marcella, wondering, and still scornful.
"Pity, perhaps. There might be that. But any way mamma goes with papa.
She always has done. She always will. So shall I, of course. But I am
sorry--_horribly_ sore and sorry! I was so delighted to come here. I
have been very little at home, and understood hardly anything about
this worry--not how serious it was, nor what it meant. Oh! I _am_
sorry--there was so much I wanted to do here--if anybody could only
understand what it means to me to come to this place!"

They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them,
beyond a stubble field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners,
lay the small scattered Tillage, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls
of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning
against a great belt of distant beechwood which begirt the hamlet and
the common along which it lay. The stubble field was a feast of shade
and tint, of apricots and golds shot with the subtlest purples and
browns; the flame of the wild-cherry leaf and the deeper crimson of the
haws made every hedge a wonder; the apples gleamed in the cottage
garden; and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the
half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers
which made the village.

Instinctively both stopped. Marcella locked her hands behind her in a
gesture familiar to her in moments of excitement; the light wind blew
back her dress in soft, eddying folds; for the moment, in her tall
grace, she had the air of some young Victory poised upon a height, till
you looked at her face, which was, indeed, not exultant at all, but
tragic, extravagantly tragic, as Aldous Raeburn, in his English reserve,
would perhaps have thought in the case of any woman with tamer eyes and
a less winning mouth.

"I don't want to talk about myself," she began. "But you know, Mr.
Raeburn--you must know--what a state of things there is here--you know
what a _disgrace_ that village is. Oh! one reads books, but I never
thought people could actually _live_ like that--here in the wide
country, with room for all. It makes me lie awake at night. We are not
rich--we are very poor--the house is all out of repair, and the estate,
as of course you know, is in a wretched condition. But when I see these
cottages, and the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to
anything we get. I had some friends in London who were Socialists, and I
followed and agreed with them, but here one _sees_! Yes, indeed!--it
_is_ too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives
depend upon him. Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser; and look at
the death-rate of the village--look at the children; you can see how it
has crushed the Hardens already. No, we have no right to it!--it ought
to be taken from us; some day it will be taken from us!"

Aldous Raeburn smiled, and was himself again. A woman's speculations
were easier to deal with than a woman's distress.

"It is not so hopeless as that, I think," he said kindly. "The Mellor
cottages are in a bad state certainly. But you have no idea how soon a
little energy and money and thought sets things to rights."

"But we have no money!" cried Marcella. "And if he is miserable here, my
father will have no energy to do anything. He will not care what
happens. He will defy everybody, and just spend what he has on himself.
And it will make me wretched--_wretched_. Look at that cottage to the
right, Mr. Raeburn. It is Jim Hurd's--a man who works mainly on the
Church Farm, when he is in work. But he is deformed, and not so strong
as others. The farmers too seem to be cutting down labour everywhere--of
course I don't understand--I am so new to it. Hurd and his family had an
_awful_ winter, last winter--hardly kept body and soul together. And now
he is out of work already--the man at the Church Farm turned him off
directly after harvest. He sees no prospect of getting work by the
winter. He spends his days tramping to look for it; but nothing turns
up. Last winter they parted with all they could sell. This winter it
must be the workhouse! It's _heart-breaking_. And he has a mind; he can
_feel_! I lend him the Labour paper I take in, and get him to talk. He
has more education than most, and oh! the _bitterness_ at the bottom of
him. But not against persons--individuals. It is like a sort of blind
patience when you come to that--they make excuses even for Uncle Robert,
to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a
crime--yes, a _crime_! The woman must have been such a pretty
creature--and refined too. She is consumptive, of course--what else
could you expect with that cottage and that food? So is the eldest
boy--a little white atomy! And the other children. Talk of London--I
never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village. Twelve
shillings a week, and work about half the year! Oh! they _ought_ to hate
us!--I try to make them," cried Marcella, her eyes gleaming. "They ought
to hate all of us landowners, and the whole wicked system. It keeps them
from the land which they ought to be sharing with us; it makes one man
master, instead of all men brothers. And who is fit to be master? Which
of us? Everybody is so ready to take the charge of other people's lives,
and then look at the result!"

"Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad," said
Aldous Raeburn, smiling a little, but more coldly. Marcella, glancing at
him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and
class pride in him--a pride which was not going to assert itself, but
none the less implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and
him. In an instant her quick imagination realised herself as the
daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class. When she
attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her--any man in
similar circumstances--must naturally think: "Ah, well, poor girl--Dick
Boyce's daughter--what can you expect?" Whereas--Aldous Raeburn!--she
thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell
possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for
honourable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or
towards their neighbours and dependents. A shiver of passionate vanity,
wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frame stiffened.

"There are model squires, of course," she said slowly, striving at least
for a personal dignity which should match his. "There are plenty of
landowners who do their duty as they understand it--no one denies that.
But that does not affect the system; the grandson of the best man may be
the worst, but his one-man power remains the same. No! the time has come
for a wider basis. Paternal government and charity were very well in
their way--democratic self-government will manage to do without them!"

She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look. It delighted her to pit
these wide and threatening generalisations against the Maxwell power--to
show the heir of it that she at least--father or no father--was no
hereditary subject of his, and bound to no blind admiration of the
Maxwell methods and position.

Aldous Raeburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at
her indeed all the time. Miss Boyce's opinions could hardly matter to
him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her
talk. This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class
went, as it happened, very deep with him--too deep for chance
discussion. What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself,
seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal
history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous
type pick up from newspapers and magazines. She had touched his family
pride for an instant; but only for an instant. What he was abidingly
conscious of, was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with
difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of
which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more
determined--absurdly determined--to help her.

"Oh! no doubt the world will do very well without us some day," he said
lightly, in answer to her tirade; "no one is indispensable. But are you
so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had
observed--pardon me for saying it--on the two or three occasions we have
met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the
old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your
ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor
people out of the mire in your own way. No! I don't feel that you are
thorough-going!"

Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful
laugh--a laugh of humorous confession, which changed her whole look and
mood.

"Is that all you have noticed? If you wish to know, Mr. Raeburn, I love
the labourers for touching their hats to me. I love the school children
for bobbing to me. I love my very self--ridiculous as _you_ may think
it--for being Miss Boyce of Mellor!"

"Don't say things like that, please!" he interrupted; "I think I have
not deserved them."

His tone made her repent her gibe. "No, indeed, you have been most kind
to me," she cried. "I don't know how it is. I am bitter and personal in
a moment--when I don't mean to be. Yes! you are quite right. I am proud
of it all. If nobody comes to see us, and we are left all alone out in
the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in--proud of the
old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the
beeches! How absurd it would seem to other people, who have so much
more! But I have had so little--so _little_!" Her voice had a hungry
lingering note. "And as for the people, yes, I am proud too that they
like me, and that already I can influence them. Oh, I will do my best
for them, my _very best_! But it will be hard, very hard, if there is
no one to help me!"

She heaved a long sigh. In spite of the words, what she had said did not
seem to be an appeal for his pity. Rather there was in it a sweet
self-dedicating note as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a
note which once more left Aldous Raeburn's self-restraint tottering. She
was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over
the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside
him--after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must
surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat!

He bent over to her.

"Don't talk of there being no one to help! There may be many ways out of
present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be
large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?"

She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller--she liked that;
she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and
bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no
thrill. But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already
constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her,
and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own
power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, "I
_am_ large-minded enough! You have been very kind, and I have been very
wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret: I am sure, if you can help me,
you will."

There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before
the miry village road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage.
Aldous Raeburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of
travellers'-joy out of the hedge beside him.

"That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it," he said, and
with a smile put the cluster of white seed-tufts and green leaves into
one of the pockets of his shooting jacket.

"Oh, don't tie me down!" said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also.
"And don't you think, Mr. Raeburn, that you might open that gate? At
least, we can't get the scissors and the wire unless you do."




CHAPTER V.


The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day's
shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home. He
glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a
glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long
eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light
streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing
black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards
in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both
desires and dreads.

He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of
him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined. His dog, a
black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat
weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous
Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two
miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.

About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland.
After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its
three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of
arable--representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by
the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern
uplands--the beech woods closed thickly round him. Beech woods of all
kinds--from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring
pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the
dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished
bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings
crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of
leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green
heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and
far-receding path. Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far
within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner's wheel, which told
him he was passing one of the wood-cutter's huts that in the hilly parts
of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking
industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous
valleys. And two or three times also he passed a string of the great
timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown
horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks
rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters' pipes rising
slowly into the damp sunset air. But for the most part the road along
which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind. Nor were there any
signs of habitation--no cottages, no farms. He was scarcely more than
thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have
been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that
through which he was passing.

And presently the solitude took a grander note. He was nearing the edge
of the high upland along which he had been walking. In front of him the
long road with its gleaming pools bent sharply to the left, showing pale
and distinct against a darkening heaven and the wide grey fields which
had now, on one side of his path, replaced the serried growth of young
plantations. Night was fast advancing from south and east over the
upland. But straight in front of him and on his right, the forest trees,
still flooded with sunset, fell in sharp steeps towards the plain.
Through their straight stems glowed the blues and purples of that lower
world; and when the slopes broke and opened here and there, above the
rounded masses of their red and golden leaf the level distances of the
plain could be seen stretching away, illimitable in the evening dusk, to
a west of glory, just vacant of the sun. The golden ball had sunk into
the mists awaiting it, but the splendour of its last rays was still on
all the western front of the hills, bathing the beech woods as they rose
and fell with the large undulations of the ground.

Insensibly Raeburn, filled as he was with a new and surging emotion,
drew the solemnity of the forest glades and of the rolling distances
into his heart. When he reached the point where the road diverged to the
left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, whence he commanded the whole
sweep of the hill rampart from north to west, and the whole expanse of
the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost
in many thoughts, while the night fell.

He looked over the central plain of England--the plain which stretches
westward to the Thames and the Berkshire hills, and northward through
the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent.
An historic plain--symbolic, all of it, to an English eye. There in the
western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford; in front of
him was the site of Chalgrove Field, where Hampden got his clumsy death
wound, and Thame, where he died; and far away, to his right, where the
hills swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the
face of the down, the vast scoured cross, whereby a Saxon king had
blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath.

Aldous Raeburn was a man to feel these things. He had seldom stood on
this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him
of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous. If it had not
been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul. For the
great view had an interest for him personally it could hardly have
possessed to the same degree for any other man. On his left hand Maxwell
Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill--a splendid pile
which some day would be his. Behind him; through all the upland he had
just traversed; beneath the point where he stood; along the sides of the
hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land which also would be
his--which, indeed, practically was already his--for his grandfather was
an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections
and hopes were centred. The dim churches scattered over the immediate
plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers
in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages
showing here and there on the fringes of the wood--all the equipment and
organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English
midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated,
under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him--upon his one
man's brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.

In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's
tremulous elation and sense of romance. Since his Cambridge days, and of
late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot
in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight
than of inspiration. Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed
by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers. During
his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had
drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation which, as it
happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men. The
responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the
relation of the State to the individual--of the old Radical dogma of
free contract to the thwarting facts of social inequality; the Tory
ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the Liberal
ideal of self-government by the many: these commonplaces of economical
and political discussion had very early become living and often sore
realities in Aldous Raeburn's mind, because of the long conflict in him,
dating from his Cambridge life, between the influences of birth and
early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection
which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world.

Towards the close of his first year at Trinity, & young man joined the
college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages,
a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows. He was poor and held
a small scholarship; but it was soon plain that his health was not equal
to the Tripos routine, and that the prizes of the place, brilliant as
was his intellectual endowment, were not for him. After an inward
struggle, of which none perhaps but Aldous Raeburn had any exact
knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to
another career. A couple of hours' serious brainwork in the day was all
that was ever possible to him henceforward. He spent it, as well as the
thoughts and conversation of his less strenuous moments, on the study of
history and sociology, with a view to joining the staff of lecturers for
the manufacturing and country towns which the two great Universities,
touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organise.
He came of a stock which promised well for such a pioneer's task. His
father had been an able factory inspector, well-known for his share in
the inauguration and revision of certain important factory reforms; the
son inherited a passionate humanity of soul; and added to it a magnetic
and personal charm which soon made him a remarkable power, not only in
his own college, but among the finer spirits of the University
generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after
dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way
imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour--the river, the dons,
the schools--to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that
search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the
utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative
opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a pose, without a false
note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish intensity and
simplicity. To many a Trinity man in after life the memory of his slight
figure and fair head, of the eager slightly parted mouth, of the eyes
glowing with some inward vision, and of the gesture with which he would
spring up at some critical point to deliver himself, standing amid his
seated and often dissentient auditors, came back vivid and ineffaceable
as only youth can make the image of its prophets.

Upon Aldous Raeburn, Edward Hallin produced from the first a deep
impression. The interests to which Hallin's mind soon became exclusively
devoted--such as the systematic study of English poverty, or of the
relation of religion to social life, reforms of the land and of the
Church--overflowed upon Raeburn with a kindling and disturbing force.
Edward Hallin was his gad-fly; and he had no resource, because he loved
his tormentor.

Fundamentally, the two men were widely different. Raeburn was a true son
of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts
of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob-reason and all
the vulgarities of popular rhetoric; steeped, too, in a number of subtle
prejudices, and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler
sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and
conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge
discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar; his mind
worked slowly, yet with a delicate precision; and his generally cold
manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet,
except in the case of his friendship with Edward Hallin, led him to much
personal happiness.

Hallin left Cambridge after a pass degree to become lecturer on
industrial and economical questions in the northern English towns.
Raeburn stayed on a year longer, found himself third classic and the
winner of a Greek verse prize, and then, sacrificing the idea of a
fellowship, returned to Maxwell Court to be his grandfather's companion
and helper in the work of the estate, his family proposing that, after a
few years' practical experience of the life and occupations of a country
gentleman, he should enter Parliament and make a career in politics.
Since then five or six years had passed, during which he had learned to
know the estate thoroughly, and to take his normal share in the business
and pleasures of the neighbourhood. For the last two years he had been
his grandfather's sole agent, a poor-law guardian and magistrate
besides, and a member of most of the various committees for social and
educational purposes in the county. He was a sufficiently keen sportsman
to save appearances with his class; enjoyed a walk after the partridges
indeed, with a friend or two, as much as most men; and played the host
at the two or three great battues of the year with a propriety which his
grandfather however no longer mistook for enthusiasm. There was nothing
much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank. His
neighbours felt him to be a personality, but thought him reserved and
difficult; he was respected, but he was not popular like his
grandfather; people speculated as to how he would get on in Parliament,
or whom he was to marry; but, except to the dwellers in Maxwell Court
itself, or of late to the farmers and labourers on the estate, it would
not have mattered much to anybody if he had not been there. Nobody ever
connected any romantic thought with him. There was something in his
strong build, pale but healthy aquiline face, his inconspicuous brown
eyes and hair, which seemed from the beginning to mark him out as the
ordinary earthy dweller in an earthy world.

Nevertheless, these years had been to Aldous Raeburn years marked by an
expansion and deepening of the whole man, such as few are capable of.
Edward Hallin's visits to the Court, the walking tours which brought the
two friends together almost every year in Switzerland or the Highlands,
the course of a full and intimate correspondence, and the various calls
made for public purposes by the enthusiast and pioneer upon the pocket
and social power of the rich man--these things and influences, together,
of course, with the pressure of an environing world, ever more real,
and, on the whole, ever more oppressive, as it was better understood,
had confronted Aldous Raeburn before now with a good many teasing
problems of conduct and experience. His tastes, his sympathies, his
affinities were all with the old order; but the old faiths--economical,
social, religious--were fermenting within him in different stages of
disintegration and reconstruction; and his reserved habit and often
solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over-refinement. His future
career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him. One
thing only was clear to him--that to dogmatise about any subject under
heaven, at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion
absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot.

So that Aldous Raeburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed
with struggle of different kinds. And the particular point of view where
he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his
memory with flashes of self-realisation which were, on the whole, more
of a torment to him than a joy. If he had not been Aldous Raeburn, or
any other person, tied to a particular individuality, with a particular
place and label in the world, the task of the analytic mind, in face of
the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one!--so it
had often seemed to him.

But to-night all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made
doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A
transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot--a man once more
young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at
last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long missed,
long hungered for.

Six weeks was it since he had first seen her--this tall, straight,
Marcella Boyce? He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing
golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had
walked beside him across the church fields, in that thin black dress,
with, the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes--the small white
teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its
gesture, so restless, so alive! What a presence--how absorbing,
troubling, preoccupying! No one in her company could forget her--nay,
could fail to observe her. What ease and daring, and yet no hardness
with it--rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion,
beneath it all!

How straight she had flung her questions at him!--her most awkward
embarrassing questions. What other woman would have dared such
candour--unless perhaps as a stroke of fine art--he had known women
indeed who could have done it so. But where could be the art, the
policy, he asked himself indignantly, in the sudden outburst of a young
girl pleading with her companion's sense of truth and good feeling in
behalf of those nearest to her?

As to her dilemma itself, in his excitement he thought of it with
nothing but the purest pleasure! She had let him see that she did not
expect him to be able to do much for her, though she was ready to
believe him her friend. Ah well--he drew a long breath. For once,
Raeburn, strange compound that he was of the man of rank and the
philosopher, remembered his own social power and position with an
exultant satisfaction. No doubt Dick Boyce had misbehaved himself
badly--the strength of Lord Maxwell's feeling was sufficient proof
thereof. No doubt the "county," as Raeburn himself knew, in some detail,
were disposed to leave Mellor Park severely alone. What of that? Was it
for nothing that the Maxwells had been for generations at the head of
the "county," i.e. of that circle of neighbouring families connected by
the ties of ancestral friendship, or of intermarriage, on whom in this
purely agricultural and rural district the social pleasure and comfort
of Miss Boyce and her mother must depend?

He, like Marcella, did not believe that Richard Boyce's offences were of
the quite unpardonable order; although, owing to a certain absent and
preoccupied temper, he had never yet taken the trouble to enquire into
them in detail. As to any real restoration of cordiality between the
owner of Mellor and his father's old friends and connections, that of
course was not to be looked for; but there should be decent social
recognition, and--in the case of Mrs. Boyce and her daughter--there
should be homage and warm welcome, simply because she wished it, and it
was absurd she should not have it! Raeburn, whose mind was ordinarily
destitute of the most elementary capacity for social intrigue, began to
plot in detail how it should be done. He relied first upon winning his
grandfather--his popular distinguished grandfather, whose lightest word
had weight in Brookshire. And then, he himself had two or three women
friends in the county--not more, for women had not occupied much place
in his thoughts till now. But they were good friends, and, from the
social point of view, important. He would set them to work at once.
These things should be chiefly managed by women.

But no patronage! She would never bear that, the glancing proud
creature. She must guess, indeed, let him tread as delicately as he
might, that he and others were at work for her. But oh! she should be
softly handled; as far as he could achieve it, she should, in a very
little while, live and breathe compassed with warm airs of good-will and
consideration.

He felt himself happy, amazingly happy, that at the very beginning of
his love, it should thus be open to him, in these trivial, foolish ways,
to please and befriend her. Her social dilemma and discomfort one
moment, indeed, made him sore for her; the next, they were a kind of
joy, since it was they gave him this opportunity to put out a strong
right arm.

Everything about her at this moment was divine and lovely to him; all
the qualities of her rich uneven youth which she had shown in their
short intercourse--her rashness, her impulsiveness, her generosity. Let
her but trust herself to him, and she should try her social experiments
as she pleased--she should plan Utopias, and he would be her hodman to
build them. The man perplexed with too much thinking remembered the
girl's innocent, ignorant readiness to stamp the world's stuff anew
after the forms of her own pitying thought, with a positive thirst of
sympathy. The deep poetry and ideality at the root of him under all the
weight of intellectual and critical debate leapt towards her. He thought
of the rapid talk she had poured out upon him, after their compact of
friendship, in their walk back to the church, of her enthusiasm for her
Socialist friends and their ideals,--with a momentary madness of
self-suppression and tender humility. In reality, a man like Aldous
Raeburn is born to be the judge and touchstone of natures like Marcella
Boyce. But the illusion of passion may deal as disturbingly with moral
rank as with social.

It was his first love. Years before, in the vacation before he went to
college, his boyish mind had been crossed, by a fancy for a pretty
cousin a little older than himself, who had been very kind indeed to
Lord Maxwell's heir. But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental
life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral
storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to
her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick
of parrot phrases. She, on her part, thought him detestable; she married
shortly afterwards, and often spoke to her husband in private of her
"escape" from that queer fellow Aldous Raeburn.

Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women, both in
London and in the country, and had made friends with some of them in his
quiet serious way. But none of them had roused in him even a passing
thrill of passion. He had despised himself for it; had told himself
again and again that he was but half a man--

Ah! he had done himself injustice--he had done himself injustice!

His heart was light as air. When at last the sound of a clock striking
in the plain roused him with a start, and he sprang up from the heap of
stones where he had been sitting in the dusk, he bent down a moment to
give a gay caress to his dog, and then trudged off briskly home,
whistling under the emerging stars.




CHAPTER VI.


By the time, however, that Aldous Raeburn came within sight of the
windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down. The
lover had fallen, for the time, into the background, and the capable,
serious man of thirty, with a considerable experience of the world
behind him, was perfectly conscious that there were many difficulties in
his path. He could not induce his grandfather to move in the matter of
Richard Boyce without a statement of his own feelings and aims. Nor
would he have avoided frankness if he could. On every ground it was his
grandfather's due. The Raeburns were reserved towards the rest of the
world, but amongst themselves there had always been a fine tradition of
mutual trust; and Lord Maxwell amply deserved that at this particular
moment his grandson should maintain it.

But Raeburn could not and did not flatter himself that his grandfather
would, to begin with, receive his news even with toleration. The grim
satisfaction with which that note about the shooting had been
despatched, was very clear in the grandson's memory. At the same time it
said much for the history of those long years during which the old man
and his heir had been left to console each other for the terrible
bereavements which had thrown them together, that Aldous Raeburn never
for an instant feared the kind of violent outburst and opposition that
other men in similar circumstances might have looked forward to. The
just living of a life-time makes a man incapable of any mere selfish
handling of another's interests--a fact on which the bystander may
reckon.

It was quite dark by the time he entered the large open-roofed hall of
the Court.

"Is his lordship in?" he asked of a passing footman.

"Yes, sir--in the library. He has been asking for you, sir."

Aldous turned to the right along the fine corridor lighted with Tudor
windows to an inner quadrangle, and filled with Graeco-Roman statuary
and sarcophagi, which made one of the principal features of the Court.
The great house was warm and scented, and the various open doors which
he passed on his way to the library disclosed large fire-lit rooms, with
panelling, tapestry, pictures, books everywhere. The colour of the whole
was dim and rich; antiquity, refinement reigned, together with an
exquisite quiet and order. No one was to be seen, and not a voice was to
be heard; but there was no impression of solitude. These warm,
darkly-glowing rooms seemed to be waiting for the return of guests just
gone out of them; not one of them but had an air of cheerful company.
For once, as he walked through it, Aldous Raeburn spared the old house
an affectionate possessive thought. Its size and wealth, with all that
both implied, had often weighed upon him. To-night his breath quickened
as he passed the range of family portraits leading to the library door.
There was a vacant space here and there--"room for your missus, too, my
boy, when you get her!" as his grandfather had once put it.

"Why, you've had a long day, Aldous, all by yourself," said Lord
Maxwell, turning sharply round at the sound of the opening door. "What's
kept you so late?"

His spectacles fell forward as he spoke, and the old man shut them in
his hand, peering at his grandson through the shadows of the room. He
was sitting by a huge fire, an "Edinburgh Review" open on his knee. Lamp
and fire-light showed a finely-carried head, with a high wave of snowy
hair thrown back, a long face delicately sharp in the lines, and an
attitude instinct with the alertness of an unimpaired bodily vigour.

"The birds were scarce, and we followed them a good way," said Aldous,
as he came up to the fire. "Rickman kept me on the farm, too, a good
while, with interminable screeds about the things he wants done for
him."

"Oh, there is no end to Rickman," said Lord Maxwell, good-humouredly.
"He pays his rent for the amusement of getting it back again. Landowning
will soon be the most disinterested form of philanthropy known to
mankind. But I have some news for you! Here is a letter from Barton by
the second post"--he named an old friend of his own, and a Cabinet
Minister of the day. "Look at it. You will see he says they can't
possibly carry on beyond January. Half their men are becoming
unmanageable, and S----'s bill, to which they are committed, will
certainly dish them. Parliament will meet in January, and he thinks an
amendment to the Address will finish it. All this confidential, of
course; but he saw no harm in letting me know. So now, my boy, you will
have your work cut out for you this winter! Two or three evenings a
week--you'll not get off with less. Nobody's plum drops into his mouth
nowadays. Barton tells me, too, that he hears young Wharton will
certainly stand for the Durnford division, and will be down upon us
directly. He will make himself as disagreeable to us and the Levens as
he can--that we may be sure of. We may be thankful for one small mercy,
that his mother has departed this life! otherwise you and I would have
known _furens quid femina posset_!"

The old man looked up at his grandson with a humorous eye. Aldous was
standing absently before the fire, and did not reply immediately.

"Come, come, Aldous!" said Lord Maxwell with a touch of impatience,
"don't overdo the philosopher. Though I am getting old, the next
Government can't deny me a finger in the pie. You and I between us will
be able to pull through two or three of the things we care about in the
next House, with ordinary luck. It is my firm belief that the next
election will give our side the best chance we have had for half a
generation. Throw up your cap, sir! The world may be made of green
cheese, but we have got to live in it!"

Aldous smiled suddenly--uncontrollably--with a look which left his
grandfather staring. He had been appealing to the man of maturity
standing on the threshold of a possibly considerable career, and, as he
did so, it was as though he saw the boy of eighteen reappear!

"_Je ne demands pas mieux_!" said Aldous with a quick lift of the voice
above its ordinary key. "The fact is, grandfather, I have come home with
something in my mind very different from politics--and you must give me
time to change the focus. I did not come home as straight as I
might--for I wanted to be sure of myself before I spoke to you. During
the last few weeks--"

"Go on!" cried Lord Maxwell.

But Aldous did not find it easy to go on. It suddenly struck him that it
was after all absurd that he should be confiding in any one at such a
stage, and his tongue stumbled.

But he had gone too far for retreat. Lord Maxwell sprang up and seized
him by the arms.

"You are in love, sir! Out with it!"

"I have seen the only woman in the world I have ever wished to marry,"
said Aldous, flushing, but with deliberation. "Whether she will ever
have me, I have no idea. But I can conceive no greater happiness than to
win her. And as I want _you_, grandfather, to do something for her and
for me, it seemed to me I had no right to keep my feelings to myself.
Besides, I am not accustomed to--to--" His voice wavered a little. "You
have treated me as more than a son!"

Lord Maxwell pressed his arm affectionately.

"My dear boy! But don't keep me on tenterhooks like this--tell me the
name!--the name!"

And two or three long meditated possibilities flashed through the old
man's mind.

Aldous replied with a certain slow stiffness--

"Marcella Boyce!--Richard Boyce's daughter. I saw her first six weeks
ago."

"God bless my soul!" exclaimed Lord Maxwell, falling back a step or two,
and staring at his companion. Aldous watched him with anxiety.

"You know that fellow's history, Aldous?"

"Richard Boyce? Not in detail. If you will tell me now all you know, it
will be a help. Of course, I see that you and the neighbourhood mean to
cut him,--and--for the sake of--of Miss Boyce and her mother, I should
be glad to find a way out."

"Good heavens!" said Lord Maxwell, beginning to pace the room, hands
pressed behind him, head bent. "Good heavens! what a business! what an
extraordinary business!"

He stopped short in front of Aldous. "Where have you been meeting
her--this young lady?"

"At the Hardens'--sometimes in Mellor village. She goes about among the
cottages a great deal."

"You have not proposed to her?"

"I was not certain of myself till to-day. Besides it would have been
presumption so far. She has shown me nothing but the merest
friendliness."

"What, you can suppose she would refuse you!" cried Lord Maxwell, and
could not for the life of him keep the sarcastic intonation out of his
voice.

Aldous's look showed distress. "You have not seen her, grandfather," he
said quietly.

Lord Maxwell began to pace again, trying to restrain the painful emotion
that filled him. Of course, Aldous had been entrapped; the girl had
played upon his pity, his chivalry--for obvious reasons.

Aldous tried to soothe him, to explain, but Lord Maxwell hardly
listened. At last he threw himself into his chair again with a long
breath.

"Give me time, Aldous--give me time. The thought of marrying my heir to
that man's daughter knocks me over a little."

There was silence again. Then Lord Maxwell looked at his watch with
old-fashioned precision.

"There is half an hour before dinner. Sit down, and let us talk this
thing out."

       *       *       *       *       *

The conversation thus started, however, was only begun by dinner-time;
was resumed after Miss Raeburn--the small, shrewd, bright-eyed person
who governed Lord Maxwell's household--had withdrawn; and was continued
in the library some time beyond his lordship's usual retiring hour. It
was for the most part a monologue on the part of the grandfather, broken
by occasional words from his companion; and for some time Marcella Boyce
herself--the woman whom Aldous desired to marry--was hardly mentioned in
it. Oppressed and tormented by a surprise which struck, or seemed to
strike, at some of his most cherished ideals and just resentments, Lord
Maxwell was bent upon letting his grandson know, in all their fulness,
the reasons why no daughter of Richard Boyce could ever be, in the true
sense, fit wife for a Raeburn.

Aldous was, of course, perfectly familiar with the creed implied in it
all. A Maxwell should give himself no airs whatever, should indeed feel
no pride whatever, towards "men of goodwill," whether peasant,
professional, or noble. Such airs or such feeling would be both vulgar
and unchristian. But when it came to _marriage_, then it behoved him to
see that "the family"--that carefully grafted and selected stock to
which he owed so much--should suffer no loss or deterioration through
him. Marriage with the fit woman meant for a Raeburn the preservation of
a pure blood, of a dignified and honourable family habit, and moreover
the securing to his children such an atmosphere of self-respect within,
and of consideration from without, as he had himself grown up in. And a
woman could not be fit, in this sense, who came either of an
insignificant stock, untrained to large uses and opportunities, or of a
stock which had degenerated, and lost its right of equal mating with the
vigorous owners of unblemished names. Money was of course important and
not to be despised, but the present Lord Maxwell, at any rate,
large-minded and conscious of wealth he could never spend, laid
comparatively little stress upon it; whereas, in his old age, the other
instinct had but grown the stronger with him, as the world waxed more
democratic, and the influence of the great families waned.

Nor could Aldous pretend to be insensible to such feelings and beliefs.
Supposing the daughter could be won, there was no doubt whatever that
Richard Boyce would be a cross and burden to a Raeburn son-in-law. But
then! After all! Love for once made philosophy easy--made class
tradition sit light. Impatience grew; a readiness to believe Richard
Boyce as black as Erebus and be done with it,--so that one might get to
the point--the real point.

As to the story, it came to this. In his youth, Richard Boyce had been
the younger and favourite son of his father. He possessed some ability,
some good looks, some manners, all of which were wanting in his loutish
elder brother. Sacrifices were accordingly made for him. He was sent to
the bar. When he stood for Parliament his election expenses were
jubilantly paid, and his father afterwards maintained him with as
generous a hand as the estate could possibly bear, often in the teeth of
the grudging resentment of Robert his firstborn. Richard showed signs of
making a rapid success, at any rate on the political platform. He spoke
with facility, and grappled with the drudgery of committees during his
first two years at Westminster in a way to win him the favourable
attention of the Tory whips. He had a gift for modern languages, and
spoke chiefly on foreign affairs, so that when an important Eastern
Commission had to be appointed, in connection with some troubles in the
Balkan States, his merits and his father's exertions with certain old
family friends sufficed to place him upon it.

The Commission was headed by a remarkable man, and was able to do
valuable work at a moment of great public interest, under the eyes of
Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much
fêted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to
see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's
face and white head might have been observed at many a London party
beside the small Italianate physique of his son.

And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune. A certain fresh
west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty
at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr.
Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world,
and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as
unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her
character--a character of much complexity and stoical strength--was
little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce
through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him,
and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.

Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then--a crash. It
was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife,
and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities
of Dick Boyce himself. First, the desire to maintain a "position," to
make play in society with a pretty wife, and, in the City, with a
marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more
doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful
than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public,
filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours. Nor was
this all. A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going
badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the
East had been elected by acclamation a member of several fashionable
clubs, tried to retrieve himself at the gaming-table. Lastly, when money
matters at home and abroad, when the anxieties of his wife and the
altered manners of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons
grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came
upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even
than they were before. No story could be more commonplace or more
detestable.

"Ah, how well I remember that poor old fellow--old John Boyce," said
Lord Maxwell, slowly, shaking his stately white head over it, as he
leant talking and musing against the mantelpiece. "I saw him the day he
came back from the attempt to hush up the company business. I met him in
the road, and could not help pulling up to speak to him. I was so sorry
for him. We had been friends for many years, he and I. 'Oh, good God!'
he said, when he saw me. 'Don't stop me--don't speak to me!' And he
lashed his horse up--as white as a sheet--fat, fresh-coloured man that
he was in general--and was off. I never saw him again till after his
death. First came the trial, and Dick Boyce got three months'
imprisonment, on a minor count, while several others of the precious lot
he was mixed up with came in for penal servitude. There was some
technical flaw in the evidence with regard to him, and the clever
lawyers they put on made the most of it; but we all thought, and society
thought, that Dick was morally as bad as any of them. Then the papers
got hold of the gambling debts and the woman. She made a disturbance at
his club, I believe, during the trial, while he was out on bail--anyway
it all came out. Two or three other people were implicated in the
gambling business--men of good family. Altogether it was one of the
biggest scandals I remember in my time."

The old man paused, the long frowning face sternly set. Aldous gazed at
him in silence. It was certainly pretty bad--worse than he had thought.

"And the wife and child?" he said presently.

"Oh, poor things!"--said Lord Maxwell, forgetting everything for the
moment but his story--"when Boyce's imprisonment was up they disappeared
with him. His constituents held indignation meetings, of course. He gave
up his seat, and his father allowed him a small fixed income--she had
besides some little money of her own--which was secured him afterwards,
I believe, on the estate during his brother's lifetime. Some of her
people would have gladly persuaded her to leave him, for his behaviour
towards her had been particularly odious,--and they were afraid, too, I
think, that he might come to worse grief yet and make her life
unbearable. But she wouldn't. And she would have no sympathy and no
talk. I never saw her after the first year of their marriage, when she
was a most radiant and beautiful creature. But, by all accounts of her
behaviour at the time, she must be a remarkable woman. One of her family
told me that she broke with all of them. She would know nobody who would
not know him. Nor would she take money, though they were wretchedly
poor; and Dick Boyce was not squeamish. She went off to little lodgings
in the country or abroad with him without a word. At the same time, it
was plain that her life was withered. She could make one great effort;
but, according to my informant, she had no energy left for anything
else--not even to take interest in her little girl--"

Aldous made a movement.

"Suppose we talk about her?" he said rather shortly.

Lord Maxwell started and recollected himself. After a pause he said,
looking down under his spectacles at his grandson with an expression in
which discomfort strove with humour--

"I see. You think we are beating about the bush. Perhaps we are. It is
the difference between being old and being young, Aldous, my boy.
Well--now then--for Miss Boyce. How much have you seen of her?--how deep
has it gone? You can't wonder that I am knocked over. To bring that man
amongst us! Why, the hound!" cried the old man, suddenly, "we could not
even get him to come and see his father when he was dying. John had lost
his memory mostly--had forgotten, anyway, to be angry--and just _craved_
for Dick, for the only creature he had ever loved. With great difficulty
I traced the man, and tried my utmost. No good! He came when his father
no longer knew him, an hour before the end. His nerves, I understood,
were delicate--not so delicate, however, as to prevent his being present
at the reading of the will! I have never forgiven him that cruelty to
the old man, and never will!"

And Lord Maxwell began to pace the library again, by way of working off
memory and indignation.

Aldous watched him rather gloomily. They had now been discussing Boyce's
criminalities in great detail for a considerable time, and nothing else
seemed to have any power to touch--or, at any rate, to hold--Lord
Maxwell's attention. A certain deep pride in Aldous--the pride of
intimate affection--felt itself wounded.

"I see that you have grave cause to think badly of her father," he said
at last, rising as he spoke. "I must think how it concerns me. And
to-morrow you must let me tell you something about her. After all, she
has done none of these things. But I ought not to keep you up like this.
You will remember Clarke was very emphatic about your not exhausting
yourself at night, last time he was here."

Lord Maxwell turned and stared.

"Why--why, what is the matter with you, Aldous? Offended?
Well--well--There--I _am_ an old fool!"

And, walking up to his grandson, he laid an affectionate and rather
shaking hand on the younger's shoulder.

"You have a great charge upon you, Aldous--a charge for the future. It
has upset me--I shall be calmer to-morrow. But as to any quarrel between
us! Are you a youth, or am I a three-tailed bashaw? As to money, you
know, I care nothing. But it goes against me, my boy, it goes against
me, that _your_ wife should bring such a story as that with her into
this house!"

"I understand," said Aldous, wincing. "But you must see her,
grandfather. Only, let me say it again--don't for one moment take it for
granted that she will marry me. I never saw any one so free, so
unspoilt, so unconventional."

His eyes glowed with the pleasure of remembering her looks, her tones.

Lord Maxwell withdrew his hand and shook his head slowly.

"You have a great deal to offer. No woman, unless she were either
foolish or totally unexperienced, could overlook that. Is she about
twenty?"

"About twenty."

Lord Maxwell waited a moment, then, bending over the fire, shrugged his
shoulders in mock despair.

"It is evident you are out of love with me, Aldous. Why, I don't know
yet whether she is dark or fair!"

The conversation jarred on both sides. Aldous made an effort.

"She is very dark," he said; "like her mother in many ways, only quite
different in colour. To me she seems the most beautiful--the only
beautiful woman I have ever seen. I should think she was very clever in
some ways--and very unformed--childish almost--in others. The Hardens
say she has done everything she could--of course it isn't much--for that
miserable village in the time she has been there. Oh! by the way, she is
a Socialist. She thinks that all we landowners should be done away
with."

Aldous looked round at his grandfather, so soon probably to be one of
the lights of a Tory Cabinet, and laughed. So, to his relief, did Lord
Maxwell.

"Well, don't let her fall into young Wharton's clutches, Aldous, or he
will be setting her to canvas. So, she is beautiful and she is
clever--and _good_, my boy? If she comes here, she will have to fill
your mother's and your grandmother's place."

Aldous tried to reply once or twice, but failed.

"If I did not feel that she were everything in herself to be loved and
respected"--he said at last with some formality--"I should not long, as
I do, to bring you and her together."

Silence fell again. But instinctively Aldous felt that his grandfather's
mood had grown gentler--his own task easier. He seized on the moment at
once.

"In the whole business," he said, half smiling, "there is only one thing
clear, grandfather, and that is, that, if you will, you can do me a
great service with Miss Boyce."

Lord Maxwell turned quickly and was all sharp attention, the keen
commanding eyes under their fine brows absorbing, as it were, expression
and life from the rest of the blanched and wrinkled face.

"You could, if you would, make matters easy for her and her mother in
the county," said Aldous, anxious to carry it off lightly. "You could,
if you would, without committing yourself to any personal contact with
Boyce himself, make it possible for me to bring her here, so that you
and my aunt might see her and judge."

The old man's expression darkened.

"What, take back that note, Aldous! I never wrote anything with greater
satisfaction in my life!"

"Well,--more or less," said Aldous, quietly. "A very little would do it.
A man in Richard Boyce's position will naturally not claim very
much--will take what he can get."

"And you mean besides," said his grandfather, interrupting him, "that I
must send your aunt to call?"

"It will hardly be possible to ask Miss Boyce here unless she does!"
said Aldous.

"And you reckon that I am not likely to go to Mellor, even to see her?
And you want me to say a word to other people--to the Winterbournes and
the Levens, for instance?"

"Precisely," said Aldous.

Lord Maxwell meditated; then rose.

"Let me now appease the memory of Clarke by going to bed!" (Clarke was
his lordship's medical attendant and autocrat.) "I must sleep upon this,
Aldous."

"I only hope I shall not have tired you out."

Aldous moved to extinguish a lamp standing on a table near.

Suddenly his grandfather called him.

"Aldous!"

"Yes."

But, as no words followed, Aldous turned. He saw his grandfather
standing erect before the fire, and was startled by the emotion he
instantly perceived in eye and mouth.

"You understand, Aldous, that for twenty years--it is twenty years last
month since your father died--you have been the blessing of my life? Oh!
don't say anything, my boy; I don't want any more agitation. I have
spoken strongly; it was hardly possible but that on such a matter I
should feel strongly. But don't go away misunderstanding me--don't
imagine for one instant that there is anything in the world that really
matters to me in comparison with your happiness and your future!"

The venerable old man wrung the hand he held, walked quickly to the
door, and shut it behind him.

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour later, Aldous was writing in his own sitting-room, a room on the
first floor, at the western corner of the house, and commanding by
daylight the falling slopes of wood below the Court, and all the wide
expanses of the plain. To-night, too, the blinds were up, and the great
view drawn in black and pearl, streaked with white mists in the ground
hollows and overarched by a wide sky holding a haloed moon, lay spread
before the windows. On a clear night Aldous felt himself stifled by
blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with
a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not
interfering with the full range of his eye over the night-world without.
He secretly believed that human beings see far too little of the night,
and so lose a host of august or beautiful impressions, which might be
honestly theirs if they pleased, without borrowing or stealing from
anybody, poet or painter.

The room was lined with books, partly temporary visitors from the great
library downstairs, partly his old college books and prizes, and partly
representing small collections for special studies. Here were a large
number of volumes, blue books, and pamphlets, bearing on the condition
of agriculture and the rural poor in England and abroad; there were some
shelves devoted to general economics, and on a little table by the fire
lay the recent numbers of various economic journals, English and
foreign. Between the windows stood a small philosophical bookcase, the
volumes of it full of small reference slips, and marked from end to end;
and on the other side of the room was a revolving book-table crowded
with miscellaneous volumes of poets, critics, and novelists--mainly,
however, with the first two. Aldous Raeburn read few novels, and those
with a certain impatience. His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle
with difficult and unmanageable fact; and for that transformation and
illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes
take refuge and comfort, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to
natural beauty. Hardly any novel writing, or reading, seemed to him
worth while. A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in
doing either.

Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture--the picture of a young
woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of
art, yet linked in Aldous's mind with a hundred touching recollections,
buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve. She had died
in childbirth when he was nine; her baby had died with her, and her
husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two
years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which
come upon strong men by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of
helpless wrong which even religious faith can only partially soothe.

Aldous remembered his mother's death; still more his father's, that
father who could speak no last message to his son, could only lie dumb
upon his pillows, with those eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the
hand now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside the small and
trembling hand of the son. His boyhood had been spent under the shadow
of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him too early
realise himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left
to affection and to ambition. This premature development, amid the most
melancholy surroundings, of the sense of personal importance--not in any
egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact--had robbed a nervous
and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity
which it could ill do without. Aldous Raeburn had been too much thought
for and too painfully loved. But for Edward Hallin he might well have
acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's
range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties.

It was to Edward Hallin he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir
of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his
grandfather's outburst, seemed to put sleep far off. On the table before
him stood a photograph of Hallin, besides a miniature of his mother as a
girl. He had drawn the miniature closer to him, finding sympathy and joy
in its youth, in the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it
were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight.

To Hallin he had already spoken of Miss Boyce, drawing her in light,
casual, and yet sympathetic strokes as the pretty girl in a difficult
position whom one would watch with curiosity and some pity. To-night his
letter, which should have discussed a home colonisation scheme of
Hallin's, had but one topic, and his pen flew.

"Would you call her beautiful? I ask myself again and again, trying to
put myself behind your eyes. She has nothing, at any rate, in common
with the beauties we have down here, or with those my aunt bade me
admire in London last May. The face has a strong Italian look, but not
Italian of to-day. Do you remember the Ghirlandajo frescoes in Santa
Maria Novella, or the side groups in Andrea's frescoes at the
Annunziata? Among them, among the beautiful tall women of them, there
are, I am sure, noble, freely-poised, suggestive heads like hers--hair,
black wavy hair, folded like hers in large simple lines, and faces
with the same long, subtle curves. It is a face of the Renaissance,
extraordinarily beautiful, as it seems to me, in colour and expression;
imperfect in line, as the beauty which marks the meeting point
between antique perfection and modern character must always be. It
has _morbidezza_--unquiet melancholy charm, then passionate
gaiety--everything that is most modern grafted on things Greek and old.
I am told that Burne Jones drew her several times while she was in
London, with delight. It is the most _artistic_ beauty, having both the
harmonies and the dissonances that a full-grown art loves.

"She may be twenty or rather more. The mind has all sorts of ability;
comes to the right conclusion by a divine instinct, ignoring the how and
why. What does such a being want with the drudgery of learning? to such
keenness life will be master enough. Yet she has evidently read a good
deal--much poetry, some scattered political economy, some modern
socialistic books, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle. She takes everything
dramatically, imaginatively, goes straight from it to life, and back
again. Among the young people with whom she made acquaintance while she
was boarding in London and working at South Kensington, there seem to
have been two brothers, both artists, and both Socialists; ardent young
fellows, giving all their spare time to good works, who must have
influenced her a great deal. She is full of angers and revolts, which
you would delight in. And first of all, she is applying herself to her
father's wretched village, which will keep her hands full. A large and
passionate humanity plays about her. What she says often seems to me
foolish--in the ear; but the inner sense, the heart of it, command me.

"Stare as you please, Ned! Only write to me, and come down here as soon
as you can. I can and will hide nothing from you, so you will believe me
when I say that all is uncertain, that I know nothing, and, though I
hope everything, may just as well fear everything too. But somehow I am
another man, and the world shines and glows for me by day and night."

Aldous Raeburn rose from his chair and, going to the window, stood
looking out at the splendour of the autumn moon. Marcella moved across
the whiteness of the grass; her voice was still speaking to his inward
ear. His lips smiled; his heart was in a wild whirl of happiness.

Then he walked to the table, took up his letter, read it, tore it
across, and locked the fragments in a drawer.

"Not yet, Ned--not yet, dear old fellow, even to you," he said to
himself, as he put out his lamp.




CHAPTER VII.


Three days passed. On the fourth Marcella returned late in the afternoon
from a round of parish visits with Mary Harden. As she opened the oak
doors which shut off the central hall of Mellor from the outer
vestibule, she saw something white lying on the old cut and disused
billiard table, which still occupied the middle of the floor till
Richard Boyce, in the course of his economies and improvements, could
replace it by a new one.

She ran forward and took up a sheaf of cards, turning them over in a
smiling excitement. "Viscount Maxwell," "Mr. Raeburn," "Miss Raeburn,"
"Lady Winterbourne and the Misses Winterbourne," two cards of Lord
Winterbourne's--all perfectly in form.

Then a thought flashed upon her. "Of course it is his doing--and I asked
him!"

The cards dropped from her hand on the billiard table, and she stood
looking at them, her pride fighting with her pleasure. There was
something else in her feeling too--the exultation of proved power over a
person not, as she guessed, easily influenced, especially by women.

"Marcella, is that you?"

It was her mother's voice. Mrs. Boyce had come in from the garden
through the drawing-room, and was standing at the inner door of the
hall, trying with shortsighted eyes to distinguish her daughter among
the shadows of the great bare place. A dark day was drawing to its
close, and there was little light left in the hall, except in one corner
where a rainy sunset gleam struck a grim contemporary portrait of Mary
Tudor, bringing out the obstinate mouth and the white hand holding a
jewelled glove.

Marcella turned, and by the same gleam her mother saw her flushed and
animated look.

"Any letters?" she asked.

"No; but there are some cards. Oh yes, there is a note," and she pounced
upon an envelope she had overlooked. "It is for you, mother--from the
Court."

Mrs. Boyce came up and took note and cards from her daughter's hand.
Marcella watched her with quick breath.

Her mother looked through the cards, slowly putting them down one by one
without remark.

"Oh, mother! do read the note!" Marcella could not help entreating.

Mrs. Boyce drew herself together with a quick movement as though her
daughter jarred upon her, and opened the note. Marcella dared not look
over her. There was a dignity about her mother's lightest action, about
every movement of her slender fingers and fine fair head, which had
always held the daughter in check, even while she rebelled.

Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.

"I must go and make the tea," she said, in a light, cold tone, and
turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had
just been carried.

Marcella followed, reading. The note was from Miss Raeburn, and it
contained an invitation to Mrs. Boyce and her daughter to take luncheon
at the Court on the following Friday. The note was courteously and
kindly worded. "We should be so glad," said the writer, "to show you and
Miss Boyce our beautiful woods while they are still at their best, in
the way of autumn colour."

"How will mamma take it?" thought Marcella anxiously. "There is not a
word of papa!"

When she entered the drawing-room, she caught her mother standing
absently at the tea-table. The little silver caddy was still in her hand
as though she had forgotten to put it down; and her eyes, which
evidently saw nothing, were turned to the window, the brows frowning.
The look of suffering for an instant was unmistakable; then she started
at the sound of Marcella's step, and put down the caddy amid the
delicate china crowded on the tray, with all the quiet precision of her
ordinary manner.

"You will have to wait for your tea," she said, "the water doesn't
nearly boil."

Marcella went up to the fire and, kneeling before it, put the logs with
which it was piled together. But she could not contain herself for long.

"Will you go to the Court, mamma?" she asked quickly, without turning
round.

There was a pause. Then Mrs. Boyce said drily--

"Miss Raeburn's proceedings are a little unexpected. We have been here
four months, within two miles of her, and it has never occurred to her
to call. Now she calls and asks us to luncheon in the same afternoon.
Either she took too little notice of us before, or she takes too much
now--don't you think so?"

Marcella was silent a moment. Should she confess? It began to occur to
her for the first time that in her wild independence she had been taking
liberties with her mother.

"Mamma!"

"Yes."

"I asked Mr. Aldous Raeburn the other day whether everybody here was
going to cut us! Papa told me that Lord Maxwell had written him an
uncivil letter and--"

"You--asked--Mr. Raeburn--" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly. "What do you
mean?"

Marcella turned round and met the flash of her mother's eyes.

"I couldn't help it," she said in a low hurried voice. "It seemed so
horrid to feel everybody standing aloof--we were walking together--he
was very kind and friendly--and I asked him to explain."

"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce. "And he went to his aunt--and she went to Lady
Winterbourne--they were compassionate--and there are the cards. You have
certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"

Marcella felt an instant's fear--fear of the ironic power in the
sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before
the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother's fragile
imperious beauty. Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.

"You have got used to it, mamma! I feel as if it would kill me to live
here, shut off from everybody--joining with nobody--with no friendly
feelings or society. It was bad enough in the old lodging-house days;
but here--why _should_ we?"

Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.

"I supposed you would ask sooner or later," she said in a low determined
voice, with what to Marcella was a quite new note of reality in it.
"Probably Mr. Raeburn told you--but you must of course have guessed it
long ago--that society does not look kindly on us--and has its reasons.
I do not deny in the least that it has its reasons. I do not accuse
anybody, and resent nothing. But the question with me has always been,
Shall I accept pity? I have always been able to meet it with a No! You
are very different from me--but for you also I believe it would be the
happiest answer."

The eyes of both met--the mother's full of an indomitable fire which had
for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter's
troubled and miserable.

"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly. "There are so many things I
want to do here, and one can do nothing if every one is against you.
People would be friends with you and me--and with papa too,--through us.
Some of them wish to be kind"--she added insistently, thinking of Aldous
Raeburn's words and expression as he bent to her at the gate--"I know
they do. And if we can't hold our heads high because--because of things
in the past--ought we to be so proud that we won't take their hands when
they stretch them out--when they write so kindly and nicely as this?"

And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.

Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot. Then with
a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a
spoon near her.

"You shall go," she said presently--"you wish it--then go--go by all
means. I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage.
One can put a great deal on health--mine is quite serviceable in the way
of excuses. I will try and do you no harm, Marcella. If you have chosen
your line and wish to make friends here--very well--I will do what I can
for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life--for which, my
dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."

Marcella looked at her with dismay and a yearning she had never felt
before.

"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"

There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which
for once suggested the normal filial relation. But Mrs. Boyce did not
waver. She had long learnt perhaps to regard Marcella as a girl
singularly well able to take care of herself; and had recognised the
fact with relief.

"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping
her tea--"in your interests as well as mine. You will make all the
greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave.
Those cards shall be properly returned, of course. For the rest--let no
one disturb themselves till they must. And if I were you, Marcella, I
would hardly discuss the family affairs any more--with Mr. Raeburn or
anybody else."

And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose
power over the world about her had never extended to her mother.
Marcella flushed and played with the fire.

"You see, mamma," she said after a moment, still looking at the logs and
the shower of sparks they made as she moved them about, "you never let
me discuss them with you."

"Heaven forbid!" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly; then, after a pause: "You
will find your own line in a little while, Marcella, and you will see,
if you so choose it, that there will be nothing unsurmountable in your
way. One piece of advice let me give you. Don't be too _grateful_ to
Miss Raeburn, or anybody else! You take great interest in your Boyce
belongings, I perceive. You may remember too, perhaps, that there is
other blood in you--and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to
either patronage or pity."

Marcella started. Her mother had never named her own kindred to her
before that she could remember. She had known for many years that there
was a breach between the Merritts and themselves. The newspapers had
told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were
fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the
Boyces' threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could
still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even
a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother's
mother. The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her
first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was
almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the
Merritts.

And now this note of intense personal and family pride, under which Mrs.
Boyce's voice had for the first time quivered a little! Marcella had
never heard it before, and it thrilled her. She sat on by the fire,
drinking her tea and every now and then watching her companion with a
new and painful curiosity. The tacit assumption of many years with her
had been that her mother was a dry limited person, clever and determined
in small ways, that affected her own family, but on the whole
characterless as compared with other people of strong feelings and
responsive susceptibilities. But her own character had been rapidly
maturing of late, and her insight sharpening. During these recent weeks
of close contact, her mother's singularity had risen in her mind to the
dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.

Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.

"Your father will be in, I suppose. Yes, I hear the front door."

As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a
sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her
dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in
mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a
good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and
velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks,
generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various
fanciful and distinguished trifles--rings, an old chatelaine, a diamond
brooch--which Marcella remembered, the same, and worn in the same way,
since her childhood. Mrs. Boyce, however, wore her clothes so daintily,
and took such scrupulous and ingenious care of them, that her dress
cost, in truth, extremely little--certainly less than Marcella's.

There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding
of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from
shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.

"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife
abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry
by the fire. He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to
trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.

"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her
silver kettle.

"_I_ don't want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They
should have done their calling long ago. There's no grace in it now; I
don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion."

But the women were silent. Marcella's attention was diverted from her
mother to the father's small dark head and thin face. There was a great
repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against
circumstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural
affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and
silenced her. He stood in her way--terribly in her way--and yet it
strangely seemed to her, that never before till these last few weeks had
she felt herself a daughter.

"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she took his cup; "don't
you think you had better go at once and change?"

"I'm all right," he said shortly--"as right as I'm likely to be, anyway.
As for the shooting, it's nothing but waste of time and shoe leather. I
shan't go out any more. The place has been clean swept by some of those
brutes in the village--your friends, Marcella. By the way, Evelyn, I
came across young Wharton in the road just now."

"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively. "I don't remember--ought I?"

"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said
testily. "I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on. He is
working like a horse, he tells me. Dodgson, the Raeburns' candidate, has
got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him
up. I like him. I won't vote for him; but I'll see fair play. I've asked
him to come to tea here on Saturday, Evelyn. He'll be back again by the
end of the week. He stays at Dell's farm when he comes--pretty bad
accommodation, I should think. We must show him some civility."

He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening
under his nervous determination to assert himself--to hold up his head
physically and morally against those who would repress him.

Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly. He had passed his first
weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and
country friends should recognise him again and condone his
"irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through
his head. He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour
if they would give him the chance--not like that miserly fool, his
brother Robert. The past was so much past; who now was more respectable
or more well intentioned than he? He was an impressionable imaginative
man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he
pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts,
partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and
daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store
of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past
catastrophe. Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after
such a lapse? He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither
drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child. These things, if
the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of
physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in him, than to
self-conquest; but he was no doubt entitled to make the most of them.
There were signs indeed that his forecast had been not at all
unreasonable. His womenkind _were_ making their way. At the very moment
when Lord Maxwell had written him a quelling letter, he had become aware
that Marcella was on good terms with Lord Maxwell's heir. Had he not
also been stopped that morning in a remote lane by Lord Winterbourne and
Lord Maxwell on their way back from the meet, and had not both
recognised and shaken hands with him? And now there were these cards.

Unfortunately, in spite of Raeburn's opinion to the contrary, no man in
such a position and with such a temperament ever gets something without
claiming more--and more than he can conceivably or possibly get.
Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and
his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his
afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So
these were the terms he was to be on with them--the deuce take them and
their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look
foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men,
soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished
he had not answered them; he would show them in the future that he would
eat no dirt for them or anybody else.

So on the way home there had been a particular zest in his chance
encounter with the young man who was likely to give the Raeburns and
their candidate--so all the world said--a very great deal of trouble.
The seat had been held to be an entirely safe one for the Maxwell
nominee. Young Wharton, on the contrary, was making way every day, and,
what with securing Aldous's own seat in the next division, and helping
old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full.
Dick Boyce was glad of it. He was a Tory; but all the same he wished
every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential
manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.

The three sat on together for a little while in silence. Marcella kept
her seat by the fire on the old gilt fenderstool, conscious in a
dreamlike way of the room in front of her--the stately room with its
stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind
the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red
twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to
the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert
Boyce--conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her
own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on
the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had
he said to Lord Maxwell?--and to the Winterbournes? She wished she could
know. She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again
quickly. Yet it would be awkward too.

       *       *       *       *       *

Presently she got up and went away to take off her things. As the door
closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn's note, which
Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.

"They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said. "I am not going,
but I shall send her."

He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most
contradictory effects upon him.

"Why don't you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a
moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.

"I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old
to begin again."

"What! you mean to say," he asked her angrily, raising his voice, "that
you have never _meant_ to do your duties here--the duties of your
position?"

"I did not foresee many, outside this house and land. Why should we
change our ways? We have done very well of late. I have no mind to risk
what I have got."

He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back
again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some
respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on.
His anger sank into moroseness.

"Then why do you let Marcella go? What good will it do her to go about
without her parents? People will only despise her for a girl of no
spirit--as they ought."

"It depends upon how it is done. I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs.
Boyce. "A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of
health. She need never give offence if she has decent wits. It will be
understood that I do not go out, and then someone--Miss Raeburn or Lady
Winterbourne--will take up Marcella and mother her."

She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.

"If you were to talk of _my_ health, it would be more to the purpose,"
he said, with grim inconsequence. And raising his heavy lids he looked
at her full.

She got up and went over to him.

"Do you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly
you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"

She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in
their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost
touched him. A passionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and
kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did
not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give
him again.

Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.

"Clarke does me no good--not an atom," he said, rising. "There--don't
you come. I Can look after myself."

He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She
put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so
stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from
the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more
nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor
God.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late
that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety
dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."

A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart--pain, new-born and
insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous
Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden
invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with
her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.

But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence
not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon
impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.

"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be
all true what Mr. Raeburn said--probably a great deal more. Poor, poor
mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty
quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."

Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white
reflection in the old flawed glass.

She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in
her service. There could be no question but that he was specially
interested in her.

And he was not a man to be lightly played upon--nay, rather a singularly
reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had been always held
concerning him. Marcella was triumphantly conscious that he had not from
the beginning given _her_ much trouble. But the common report of him
made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more
significant. Even the Hardens--so Marcella gathered from her friend and
admirer Mary--unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the
hastening of Christ's kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take
note.

It was not as though he were in the dark as to her antecedents. He knew
all--at any rate, more than she did--and yet it might end in his asking
her to marry him. What then?

Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the glass! _Love_, at such a
thought, must have sunk upon its knees and hid its face for tender
humbleness and requital. Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty
which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.

What was stirring in her was really a passionate ambition--ambition to
be the queen and arbitress of human lives--to be believed in by her
friends, to make a mark for herself among women, and to make it in the
most romantic and yet natural way, without what had always seemed to her
the sordid and unpleasant drudgeries of the platform, of a tiresome
co-operation with, or subordination to others who could not understand
your ideas.

Of course, if it happened, people would say that she had tried to
capture Aldous Raeburn for his money and position's sake. Let them say
it. People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it.
Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what
purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such
a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her
maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for
something to carry her _deep_ into life; into the heart of its widest
and most splendid opportunities!

She threw up her hands, clasping them above her head amid her clouds of
curly hair--a girlish excited gesture.

"I could revive the straw-plaiting; give them better teaching and better
models. The cottages should be rebuilt. Papa would willingly hand the
village over to me if I found the money! We would have a parish
committee to deal with the charities--oh! the Hardens would come in. The
old people should have their pensions as of right. No hopeless old age,
no cringing dependence! We would try co-operation on the land, and pull
it through. And not in Mellor only. One might be the ruler, the
regenerator of half a county!"

Memory brought to mind in vivid sequence the figures and incidents of
the afternoon, of her village round with Mary Harden.

"_As the eyes of servants towards the hand of their mistress_"--the old
words occurred to her as she thought of herself stepping in and out of
the cottages. Then she was ashamed of herself and rejected the image
with vehemence. Dependence was the curse of the poor. Her whole aim, of
course, should be to teach them to stand on their own feet, to know
themselves as men. But naturally they would be grateful, they would let
themselves be led. Intelligence and enthusiasm give power, and ought to
give it--power for good. No doubt, under Socialism, there will be less
scope for either, because there will be less need. But Socialism, as a
system, will not come in our generation. What we have to think for is
the transition period. The Cravens had never seen that, but Marcella saw
it. She began to feel herself a person of larger experience than they.

As she undressed, it seemed to her as though she still felt the clinging
hands of the Hurd children round her knees, and through them, symbolised
by them, the suppliant touch of hundreds of other helpless creatures.

She was just dropping to sleep when her own words to Aldous Raeburn
flashed across her,--

"Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people's lives, and look
at the result!"

She must needs laugh at herself, but it made little matter. She fell
asleep cradled in dreams. Aldous Raeburn's final part in them was not
great!




CHAPTER VIII.


Mrs. Boyce wrote her note to Miss Raeburn, a note containing cold though
civil excuses as to herself, while accepting the invitation for
Marcella, who should be sent to the Court, either in the carriage or
under the escort of a maid who could bring her back. Marcella found her
mother inclined to insist punctiliously on conventions of this kind. It
amused her, in submitting to them, to remember the free and easy ways of
her London life. But she submitted--and not unwillingly.

On the afternoon of the day which intervened between the Maxwells' call
and her introduction to the Court, Marcella walked as usual down to the
village. She was teeming with plans for her new kingdom, and could not
keep herself out of it. And an entry in one of the local papers had
suggested to her that Hurd might possibly find work in a parish some
miles from Mellor. She must go and send him off there.

When Mrs. Hurd opened the door to her, Marcella was astonished to
perceive behind her the forms of several other persons filling up the
narrow space of the usually solitary cottage--in fact, a tea-party.

"Oh, come in, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, with some embarrassment, as though
it occurred to her that her visitor might legitimately wonder to find a
person of her penury entertaining company. Then, lowering her voice,
she hurriedly explained: "There's Mrs. Brunt come in this afternoon to
help me wi' the washin' while I finished my score of plait for the woman
who takes 'em into town to-morrow. And there's old Patton an' his
wife--you know 'em, miss?--them as lives in the parish houses top o' the
common. He's walked out a few steps to-day. It's not often he's able,
and when I see him through the door I said to 'em, 'if you'll come in
an' take a cheer, I dessay them tea-leaves 'ull stan' another wettin'. I
haven't got nothink else.' And there's Mrs. Jellison, she came in along
o' the Pattons. You can't say her no, she's a queer one. Do you know
her, miss?"

"Oh, bless yer, yes, yes. She knows me!" said a high, jocular voice,
making Mrs. Hurd start; "she couldn't be long hereabouts without makkin'
eëaste to know me. You coom in, miss. We're not afraid o' you--Lor'
bless you!"

Mrs. Hurd stood aside for her visitor to pass in, looking round her the
while, in some perplexity, to see whether there was a spare chair and
room to place it. She was a delicate, willowy woman, still young in
figure, with a fresh colour, belied by the grey circles under the eyes
and the pinched sharpness of the features. The upper lip, which was
pretty and childish, was raised a little over the teeth; the whole
expression of the slightly open mouth was unusually soft and sensitive.
On the whole, Minta Hurd was liked in the village, though she was
thought a trifle "fine." The whole family, indeed, "kept theirsels to
theirsels," and to find Mrs. Hurd with company was unusual. Her name,
of course, was short for Araminta.

Marcella laughed as she caught Mrs. Jellison's remarks, and made her way
in, delighted. For the present, these village people affected her like
figures in poetry or drama. She saw them with the eye of the imagination
through a medium provided by Socialist discussion, or by certain phases
of modern art; and the little scene of Mrs. Hurd's tea-party took for
her in an instant the dramatic zest and glamour.

"Look here, Mrs. Jellison," she said, going up to her; "I was just going
to leave these apples for your grandson. Perhaps you'll take them, now
you're here. They're quite sweet, though they look green. They're the
best we've got, the gardener says."

"Oh, they are, are they?" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly, looking up at
her. "Well, put 'em down, miss. I dare say he'll eat 'em. He eats most
things, and don't want no doctor's stuff nayther, though his mother do
keep on at me for spoilin' his stummuck."

"You are just fond of that boy, aren't you, Mrs. Jellison?" said
Marcella, taking a wooden stool, the only piece of furniture left in the
tiny cottage on which it was possible to sit, and squeezing herself into
a corner by the fire, whence she commanded the whole group. "No! don't
you turn Mr. Patton out of that chair, Mrs. Hurd, or I shall have to go
away."

For Mrs. Hurd, in her anxiety, was whispering in old Patton's ear that
it might be well for him to give up her one wooden arm-chair, in which
he was established, to Miss Boyce. But he, being old, deaf, and
rheumatic, was slow to move, and Marcella's peremptory gesture bade her
leave him in peace.

"Well, it's you that's the young 'un, ain't it, miss?" said Mrs.
Jellison, cheerfully. "Poor old Patton, he do get slow on his legs,
don't you, Patton? But there, there's no helping it when you're turned
of eighty."

And she turned upon him a bright, philosophic eye, being herself a young
thing not much over seventy, and energetic accordingly. Mrs. Jellison
passed for the village wit, and was at least talkative and excitable
beyond her fellows.

"Well, _you_ don't seem to mind getting old, Mrs. Jellison," said
Marcella, smiling at her.

The eyes of all the old people round their tea-table were by now drawn
irresistibly to Miss Boyce in the chimney corner, to her slim grace, and
the splendour of her large black hat and feathers. The new squire's
daughter had so far taken them by surprise. Some of them, however, were
by now in the second stage of critical observation--none the less
critical because furtive and inarticulate.

"Ah?" said Mrs. Jellison, interrogatively, with a high, long-drawn note
peculiar to her. "Well, I've never found you get forrarder wi' snarlin'
over what you can't help. And there's mercies. When you've had a husband
in his bed for fower year, miss, and he's took at last, you'll _know_."

She nodded emphatically. Marcella laughed.

"I know you were very fond of him, Mrs. Jellison, and looked after him
very well, too."

"Oh, I don't say nothin' about that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "But
all the same you kin reckon it up, and see for yoursen. Fower year--an'
fire upstairs, an' fire downstairs, an' fire all night, an' soomthin'
allus wanted. An' he such an objeck afore he died! It do seem like a
holiday now to sit a bit."

And she crossed her hands on her lap with a long breath of content. A
lock of grey hair had escaped from her bonnet, across her wrinkled
forehead, and gave her a half-careless rakish air. Her youth of long
ago--a youth of mad spirits, and of an extraordinary capacity for
physical enjoyment, seemed at times to pierce to the surface again, even
through her load of years. But in general she had a dreamy, sunny look,
as of one fed with humorous fancies, but disinclined often to the
trouble of communicating them.

"Well, I missed my daughter, I kin tell you," said Mrs. Brunt, with a
sigh, "though she took a deal more lookin' after nor your good man, Mrs.
Jellison."

Mrs. Brunt was a gentle, pretty old woman, who lived in another of the
village almshouses, next door to the Pattons, and was always ready to
help her neighbours in their domestic toils. Her last remaining
daughter, the victim of a horrible spinal disease, had died some nine or
ten months before the Boyces arrived at Mellor. Marcella had already
heard the story several times, but it was part of her social gift that
she was a good listener to such things even at the twentieth hearing.

"You wouldn't have her back though," she said gently, turning towards
the speaker.

"No, I wouldn't have her back, miss," said Mrs. Brunt, raising her hand
to brush away a tear, partly the result of feeling, partly of a
long-established habit. "But I do miss her nights terrible! 'Mother,
ain't it ten o'clock?--mother, look at the clock, do, mother--ain't it
time for my stuff, mother--oh, I do _hope_ it is.' That was her stuff,
miss, to make her sleep. And when she'd got it, she'd _groan_--you'd
think she couldn't be asleep, and yet she was, dead-like--for two hours.
I didn't get no rest with her, and now I don't seem to get no rest
without her."

And again Mrs. Brunt put her hand up to her eyes.

"Ah, you were allus one for toilin' an' frettin'," said Mrs. Jellison,
calmly. "A body must get through wi' it when it's there, but I don't
hold wi' thinkin' about it when it's done."

"I know one," said old Patton, slily, "that fretted about _her_ darter
when it didn't do her no good."

He had not spoken so far, but had sat with his hands on his stick, a
spectator of the women's humours. He was a little hunched man, twisted
and bent double with rheumatic gout, the fruit of seventy years of field
work. His small face was almost lost, dog-like, under shaggy hair and
overgrown eyebrows, both snow-white. He had a look of irritable
eagerness, seldom, however, expressed in words. A sudden passion in the
faded blue eyes; a quick spot of red in his old cheeks; these Marcella
had often noticed in him, as though the flame of some inner furnace
leapt. He had been a Radical and a rebel once in old rick-burning days,
long before he lost the power in his limbs and came down to be thankful
for one of the parish almshouses. To his social betters he was now a
quiet and peaceable old man, well aware of the cakes and ale to be got
by good manners; but in the depths of him there were reminiscences and
the ghosts of passions, which were still stirred sometimes by causes not
always intelligible to the bystander.

He had rarely, however, physical energy enough to bring any
emotion--even of mere worry at his physical ills--to the birth. The
pathetic silence of age enwrapped him more and more. Still he could gibe
the women sometimes, especially Mrs. Jellison, who was in general too
clever for her company.

"Oh, you may talk, Patton!" said Mrs. Jellison, with a little flash of
excitement. "You do like to have your talk, don't you! Well, I dare say
I _was_ orkard with Isabella. I won't go for to say I _wasn't_ orkard,
for I _was_. She should ha' used me to 't before, if she wor took that
way. She and I had just settled down comfortable after my old man went,
and I didn't see no sense in it, an' I don't now. She might ha' let the
men alone. She'd seen enough o' the worrit ov 'em."

"Well, she did well for hersen," said Mrs. Brunt, with the same gentle
melancholy. "She married a stiddy man as 'ull keep her well all her
time, and never let her want for nothink."

"A sour, wooden-faced chap as iver I knew," said Mrs. Jellison,
grudgingly. "I don't have nothink to say to him, nor he to me. He thinks
hissen the Grand Turk, he do, since they gi'en him his uniform, and made
him full keeper. A nassty, domineerin' sort, I calls him. He's allus
makin' bad blood wi' the yoong fellers when he don't need. It's the way
he's got wi' 'im. But _I_ don't make no account of 'im, an' I let 'im
see 't."

All the tea-party grinned except Mrs. Hurd. The village was well
acquainted with the feud between Mrs. Jellison and her son-in-law,
George Westall, who had persuaded Isabella Jellison at the mature age of
thirty-five to leave her mother and marry him, and was now one of Lord
Maxwell's keepers, with good pay, and an excellent cottage some little
way out of the village. Mrs. Jellison had never forgiven her daughter
for deserting her, and was on lively terms of hostility with her
son-in-law; but their only child, little Johnnie, had found the soft
spot in his grandmother, and her favourite excitement in life, now that
he was four years old, was to steal him from his parents and feed him on
the things of which Isabella most vigorously disapproved.

Mrs. Hurd, as has been said, did not smile. At the mention of Westall,
she got up hastily, and began to put away the tea things.

Marcella meanwhile had been sitting thoughtful.

"You say Westall makes bad blood with the young men, Mrs. Jellison?" she
said, looking up. "Is there much poaching in this village now, do you
think?"

There was a dead silence. Mrs. Hurd was at the other end of the cottage
with her back to Marcella; at the question, her hands paused an instant
in their work. The eyes of all the old people--of Patton and his wife,
of Mrs. Jellison, and pretty Mrs. Brunt--were fixed on the speaker, but
nobody said a word, not even Mrs. Jellison. Marcella coloured.

"Oh, you needn't suppose--" she said, throwing her beautiful head back,
"you needn't suppose that _I_ care about the game, or that I would ever
be mean enough to tell anything that was told me. I know it _does_
cause a great deal of quarrelling and bad blood. I believe it does
here--and I should like to know more about it. I want to make up my mind
what to think. Of course, my father has got his land and his own
opinions. And Lord Maxwell has too. But I am not bound to think like
either of them--I should like you to understand that. It seems to me
right about all such things that people should enquire and find out for
themselves."

Still silence. Mrs. Jellison's mouth twitched, and she threw a sly
provocative glance at old Patton, as though she would have liked to poke
him in the ribs. But she was not going to help him out; and at last the
one male in the company found himself obliged to clear his throat for
reply.

"We're old folks, most on us, miss, 'cept Mrs. Hurd. We don't hear talk
o' things now like as we did when we were younger. If you ast Mr. Harden
he'll tell you, I dessay."

Patton allowed himself an inward chuckle. Even Mrs. Jellison, he
thought, must admit that he knew a thing or two as to the best way of
dealing with the gentry.

But Marcella fixed him with her bright frank eyes.

"I had rather ask in the village," she said. "If you don't know how it
is now, Mr. Patton, tell me how it used to be when you were young. Was
the preserving very strict about here? Were there often fights, with the
keepers--long ago?--in my grandfather's days?--and do you think men
poached because they were hungry, or because they wanted sport?"

Patton looked at her fixedly a moment undecided, then her strong
nervous youth seemed to exercise a kind of compulsion on him; perhaps,
too, t

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