CHAPTER I.

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, the pretty courtesy of her manner. He cleared his throat again, and

tried to forget Mrs. Jellison, who would be sure to let him hear of it

again, whatever he said.

"Well, I can't answer for 'em, miss, I'm sure, but if you ast _me_, I

b'lieve ther's a bit o' boath in it. Yer see it's not in human natur,

when a man's young and 's got his blood up, as he shouldn't want ter

have 'is sport with the wild creeturs. Perhaps he see 'em when ee's

going to the wood with a wood cart--or he cooms across 'em in the

turnips--wounded birds, you understan', miss, perhaps the day after the

gentry 'as been bangin' at 'em all day. An' ee don't see, not for the

life of 'im, why ee shouldn't have 'em. Ther's bin lots an' lots for the

rich folks, an' he don't see why _ee_ shouldn't have a few arter they've

enjoyed theirselves. And mebbe he's eleven shillin' a week--an'

two-threy little chillen--you understan', miss?"

"Of course I understand!" said Marcella, eagerly, her dark cheek

flushing. "Of course I do! But there's a good deal of game given away in

these parts, isn't there? I know Lord Maxwell does, and they say Lord

Winterbourne gives all his labourers rabbits, almost as many as they

want."

Her questions wound old Patton up as though he had been a disused clock.

He began to feel a whirr among his creaking wheels, a shaking of all his

rusty mind.

"Perhaps they do, miss," he said, and his wife saw that he was beginning

to tremble. "I dessay they do--I don't say nothink agen it--though

theer's none of it cooms my way. But that isn't all the rights on it

nayther--no, that it ain't. The labourin' man ee's glad enough to get a

hare or a rabbit for 'is eatin'--but there's more in it nor that, miss.

Ee's allus in the fields, that's where it is--ee can't help seein' the

hares and the rabbits a-comin' in and out o' the woods, if it were iver

so. Ee knows ivery run ov ivery one on 'em; if a hare's started furthest

corner o' t' field, he can tell yer whar she'll git in by, because he's

allus there, you see, miss, an' it's the only thing he's got to take his

mind off like. And then he sets a snare or two--an' ee gits very sharp

at settin' on 'em--an' ee'll go out nights for the sport of it. Ther

isn't many things _ee's_ got to liven him up; an' ee takes 'is chances

o' goin' to jail--it's wuth it, ee thinks."

The old man's hands on his stick shook more and more visibly. Bygones of

his youth had come back to him.

"Oh, I know! I know!" cried Marcella, with an accent half of

indignation, half of despair. "It's the whole wretched system. It spoils

those who've got, and those who haven't got. And there'll be no mending

it till the _people_ get the land back again, and till the rights on it

are common to all."

"My! she do speak up, don't she?" said Mrs. Jellison, grinning again at

her companions. Then, stooping forward with one of her wild movements,

she caught Marcella's arm--"I'd like to hear yer tell that to Lord

Maxwell, miss. I likes a roompus, I do."

Marcella flushed and laughed.

"I wouldn't mind saying that or anything else to Lord Maxwell," she said

proudly. "I'm not ashamed of anything I think."

"No, I'll bet you ain't," said Mrs. Jellison, withdrawing her hand. "Now

then, Patton, you say what _you_ thinks. You ain't got no vote now

you're in the parish houses--I minds that. The quality don't trouble

_you_ at 'lection times. This yoong man, Muster Wharton, as is goin'

round so free, promisin' yer the sun out o' the sky, iv yer'll only vote

for 'im, so th' men say--_ee_ don't coom an' set down along o' you an'

me, an' cocker of us up as ee do Joe Simmons or Jim Hurd here. But that

don't matter. Yur thinkin's yur own, anyway."

But she nudged him in vain. Patton had suddenly run down, and there was

no more to be got out of him.

Not only had nerves and speech failed him as they were wont, but in his

cloudy soul there had risen, even while Marcella was speaking, the

inevitable suspicion which dogs the relations of the poor towards the

richer class. This young lady, with her strange talk, was the new

squire's daughter. And the village had already made up its mind that

Richard Boyce was "a poor sort," and "a hard sort" too, in his landlord

capacity. He wasn't going to be any improvement on his brother--not a

haporth! What was the good of this young woman talking, as she did, when

there were three summonses as he, Patton, heard tell, just taken out by

the sanitary inspector against Mr. Boyce for bad cottages? And not a

farthing given away in the village neither, except perhaps the bits of

food that the young lady herself brought down to the village now and

then, for which no one, in truth, felt any cause to be particularly

grateful. Besides, what did she mean by asking questions about the

poaching? Old Patton knew as well as anybody else in the village, that

during Robert Boyce's last days, and after the death of his sportsman

son, the Mellor estate had become the haunt of poachers from far and

near, and that the trouble had long since spread into the neighbouring

properties, so that the Winterbourne and Maxwell keepers regarded it

their most arduous business to keep watch on the men of Mellor. Of

course the young woman knew it all, and she and her father wanted to

know more. That was why she talked. Patton hardened himself against the

creeping ways of the quality.

"I don't think nought," he said roughly in answer to Mrs. Jellison.

"Thinkin' won't come atwixt me and the parish coffin when I'm took. I've

no call to think, I tell yer."

Marcella's chest heaved with indignant feeling.

"Oh, but, Mr. Patton!" she cried, leaning forward to him, "won't it

comfort you a bit, even if you can't live to see it, to think there's a

better time coming? There must be. People can't go on like this

always--hating each other and trampling on each other. They're beginning

to see it now, they are! When I was living in London, the persons I was

with talked and thought of it all day. Some day, whenever the people

choose--for they've got the power now they've got the vote--there'll be

land for everybody, and in every village there'll be a council to

manage things, and the labourer will count for just as much as the

squire and the parson, and he'll be better educated and better fed, and

care for many things he doesn't care for now. But all the same, if he

wants sport and shooting, it will be there for him to get. For everybody

will have a chance and a turn, and there'll be no bitterness between

classes, and no hopeless pining and misery as there is now!"

The girl broke off, catching her breath. It excited her to say these

things to these people, to these poor tottering old things who had lived

out their lives to the end under the pressure of an iron system, and had

no lien on the future, whatever Paradise it might bring. Again the

situation had something foreseen and dramatic in it. She saw herself, as

the preacher, sitting on her stool beside the poor grate--she realised

as a spectator the figures of the women and the old man played on by the

firelight--the white, bare, damp-stained walls of the cottage, and in

the background the fragile though still comely form of Minta Hurd, who

was standing with her back to the dresser, and her head bent forward,

listening to the talk while her fingers twisted the straw she plaited

eternally from morning till night, for a wage of about 1s. 3d. a week:

Her mind was all aflame with excitement and defiance--defiance of her

father, Lord Maxwell, Aldous Raeburn. Let him come, her friend, and see

for himself what she thought it right to do and say in this miserable

village. Her soul challenged him, longed to provoke him! Well, she was

soon to meet him, and in a new and more significant relation and

environment. The fact made her perception of the whole situation the

more rich and vibrant.

Patton, while these broken thoughts and sensations were coursing through

Marcella's head, was slowly revolving what she had been saying, and the

others were waiting for him.

At last he rolled his tongue round his dry lips and delivered himself by

a final effort.

"Them as likes, miss, may believe as how things are going to happen that

way, but yer won't ketch me! Them as have got 'ull _keep_"--he let his

stick sharply down on the floor--"an' them as 'aven't got 'ull 'ave to

go without and _lump it_--as long as you're alive, miss, you mark my

words!"

"Oh, Lor', you wor allus one for makin' a poor mouth, Patton!" said Mrs.

Jellison. She had been sitting with her arms folded across her chest,

part absent, part amused, part malicious. "The young lady speaks

beautiful, just like a book she do. An' she's likely to know a deal

better nor poor persons like you and me. All _I_ kin say is,--if there's

goin' to be dividin' up of other folks' property, when I'm gone, I hope

George Westall won't get nothink ov it! He's bad enough as 'tis.

Isabella 'ud have a fine time if _ee_ took to drivin' ov his carriage."

The others laughed out, Marcella at their head, and Mrs. Jellison

subsided, the corners of her mouth still twitching, and her eyes shining

as though a host of entertaining notions were trooping through

her--which, however, she preferred to amuse herself with rather than the

public. Marcella looked at Patton thoughtfully.

"You've been all your life in this village, haven't you, Mr. Patton?"

she asked him.

"Born top o' Witchett's Hill, miss. An' my wife here, she wor born just

a house or two further along, an' we two bin married sixty-one year come

next March."

He had resumed his usual almshouse tone, civil and a little plaintive.

His wife behind him smiled gently at being spoken of. She had a long

fair face, and white hair surmounted by a battered black bonnet, a mouth

set rather on one side, and a more observant and refined air than most

of her neighbours. She sighed while she talked, and spoke in a delicate

quaver.

"D'ye know, miss," said Mrs. Jellison, pointing to Mrs. Patton, "as she

kep' school when she was young?"

"Did you, Mrs. Patton?" asked Marcella in her tone of sympathetic

interest. "The school wasn't very big then, I suppose?"

"About forty, miss," said Mrs. Patton, with a sigh. "There was eighteen

the Rector paid for, and eighteen Mr. Boyce paid for, and the rest paid

for themselves."

Her voice dropped gently, and she sighed again like one weighted with an

eternal fatigue.

"And what did you teach them?"

"Well, I taught them the plaitin', miss, and as much readin' and writin'

as I knew myself. It wasn't as high as it is now, you see, miss," and a

delicate flush dawned on the old cheek as Mrs. Patton threw a glance

round her companions as though appealing to them not to tell stories of

her.

But Mrs. Jellison was implacable. "It wor she taught _me_," she said,

nodding at Marcella and pointing sideways to Mrs. Patton. "She had a

queer way wi' the hard words, I can tell yer, miss. When she couldn't

tell 'em herself she'd never own up to it. 'Say Jerusalem, my dear, and

pass on.' That's what she'd say, she would, sure's as you're alive! I've

heard her do it times. An' when Isabella an' me used to read the Bible,

nights, I'd allus rayther do 't than be beholden to me own darter. It

gets yer through, anyway."

"Well, it wor a good word," said Mrs. Patton, blushing and mildly

defending herself. "It didn't do none of yer any harm."

"Oh, an' before her, miss, I went to a school to another woman, as lived

up Shepherd's Row. You remember her, Betsy Brunt?"

Mrs. Brunt's worn eyes began already to gleam and sparkle.

"Yis, I recolleck very well, Mrs. Jellison. She wor Mercy Moss, an' a

goodish deal of trouble you'd use to get me into wi' Mercy Moss, all

along o' your tricks."

Mrs. Jellison, still with folded arms, began to rock herself gently up

and down as though to stimulate memory.

"My word, but Muster Maurice--he wor the clergyman here then, miss--wor

set on Mercy Moss. He and his wife they flattered and cockered her up.

Ther wor nobody like her for keepin' school, not in their eyes--till one

midsummer--she--well she--I don't want to say nothink onpleasant--_but

she transgressed_," said Mrs. Jellison, nodding mysteriously,

triumphant however in the unimpeachable delicacy of her language, and

looking round the circle for approval.

"What do you say?" asked Marcella, innocently. "What did Mercy Moss do?"

Mrs. Jellison's eyes danced with malice and mischief, but her mouth shut

like a vice. Patton leaned forward on his stick, shaken with a sort of

inward explosion; his plaintive wife laughed under her breath till she

must needs sigh because laughter tired her old bones. Mrs. Brunt gurgled

gently. And finally Mrs. Jellison was carried away.

"Oh, my goodness me, don't you make me tell tales o' Mercy Moss!" she

said at last, dashing the water out of her eyes with an excited

tremulous hand. "She's bin dead and gone these forty year--married and

buried mos' respeckable--it 'ud be a burning shame to bring up tales

agen her now. Them as tittle-tattles about dead folks needn't look to

lie quiet theirselves in their graves. I've said it times, and I'll say

it again. What are you lookin' at me for, Betsy Brunt?"

And Mrs. Jellison drew up suddenly with a fierce glance at Mrs. Brunt.

"Why, Mrs. Jellison, I niver meant no offence," said Mrs. Brunt,

hastily.

"I won't stand no insinooating," said Mrs. Jellison, with energy. "If

you've got soomthink agen me, you may out wi' 't an' niver mind the

young lady."

But Mrs. Brunt, much flurried, retreated amid a shower of excuses,

pursued by her enemy, who was soon worrying the whole little company, as

a dog worries a flock of sheep, snapping here and teasing there,

chattering at the top of her voice in broad dialect, as she got more and

more excited, and quite as ready to break her wit on Marcella as on

anybody else. As for the others, most of them had known little else for

weeks than alternations of toil and sickness; they were as much amused

and excited to-night by Mrs. Jellison's audacities as a Londoner is by

his favourite low comedian at his favourite music-hall. They played

chorus to her, laughed, baited her; even old Patton was drawn against

his will into a caustic sociability.

Marcella meanwhile sat on her stool, her chin upon her hand, and her

full glowing eyes turned upon the little spectacle, absorbing it all

with a covetous curiosity.

The light-heartedness, the power of enjoyment left in these old folk

struck her dumb. Mrs. Brunt had an income of two-and-sixpence a week,

_plus_ two loaves from the parish, and one of the parish or "charity"

houses, a hovel, that is to say, of one room, scarcely fit for human

habitation at all. She had lost five children, was allowed two shillings

a week by two labourer sons, and earned sixpence a week--about--by

continuous work at "the plait." Her husband had been run over by a farm

cart and killed; up to the time of his death his earnings averaged about

twenty-eight pounds a year. Much the same with the Pattons. They had

lost eight children out of ten, and were now mainly supported by the

wages of a daughter in service. Mrs. Patton had of late years suffered

agonies and humiliations indescribable, from a terrible illness which

the parish doctor was quite incompetent to treat, being all through a

singularly sensitive woman, with a natural instinct for the decorous and

the beautiful.

Amazing! Starvation wages; hardships of sickness and pain; horrors of

birth and horrors of death; wholesale losses of kindred and friends; the

meanest surroundings; the most sordid cares--of this mingled cup of

village fate every person in the room had drunk, and drunk deep. Yet

here in this autumn twilight, they laughed and chattered, and

joked--weird, wrinkled children, enjoying an hour's rough play in a

clearing of the storm! Dependent from birth to death on squire, parson,

parish, crushed often, and ill-treated, according to their own ideas,

but bearing so little ill-will; amusing themselves with their own

tragedies even, if they could but sit by a fire and drink a neighbour's

cup of tea.

Her heart swelled and burned within her. Yes, the old people were past

hoping for; mere wreck and driftwood on the shore, the spring-tide of

death would soon have swept them all into unremembered graves. But the

young men and women, the children, were they too to grow up, and grow

old like these--the same smiling, stunted, ignobly submissive creatures?

One woman at least would do her best with her one poor life to rouse

some of them to discontent and revolt!

CHAPTER IX.

The fire sank, and Mrs. Hurd made no haste to light her lamp. Soon the

old people were dim chattering shapes in a red darkness. Mrs. Hurd still

plaited, silent and upright, lifting her head every now and then at each

sound upon the road.

At last there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Hurd ran to open it.

"Mother, I'm going your way," said a strident voice. "I'll help you home

if you've a mind."

On the threshold stood Mrs. Jellison's daughter, Mrs. Westall, with her

little boy beside her, the woman's broad shoulders and harsh striking

head standing out against the pale sky behind. Marcella noticed that she

greeted none of the old people, nor they her. And as for Mrs. Hurd, as

soon as she saw the keeper's wife, she turned her back abruptly on her

visitor, and walked to the other end of the kitchen.

"Are you comin', mother?" repeated Isabella.

Mrs. Jellison grumbled, gibed at her, and made long leave-takings, while

the daughter stood silent, waiting, and every now and then peering at

Marcella, who had never seen her before.

"I don' know where yur manners is," said Mrs. Jellison sharply to her,

as though she had been a child of ten, "that you don't say good evenin'

to the young lady."

Mrs. Westall curtsied low, and hoped she might be excused, as it had

grown so dark. Her tone was smooth and servile, and Marcella disliked

her as she shook hands with her.

The other old people, including Mrs. Brunt, departed a minute or two

after the mother and daughter, and Marcella was left an instant with

Mrs. Hurd.

"Oh, thank you, thank you kindly, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, raising her

apron to her eyes to staunch some irrepressible tears, as Marcella

showed her the advertisement which it might possibly be worth Hurd's

while to answer. "He'll try, you may be sure. But I can't think as how

anythink 'ull come ov it."

And then suddenly, as though something unexplained had upset her

self-control, the poor patient creature utterly broke down. Leaning

against the bare shelves which held their few pots and pans, she threw

her apron over her head and burst into the forlornest weeping. "I wish I

was dead; I wish I was dead, an' the chillen too!"

Marcella hung over her, one flame of passionate pity, comforting,

soothing, promising help. Mrs. Hurd presently recovered enough to tell

her that Hurd had gone off that morning before it was light to a farm

near Thame, where it had been told him he might possibly find a job.

"But he'll not find it, miss, he'll not find it," she said, twisting her

hands in a sort of restless misery; "there's nothing good happens to

such as us. An' he wor allus a one to work if he could get it."

There was a sound outside. Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short,

deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly,

splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long

walking.

He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the

fire-lit gloom.

"It's Miss Boyce, Jim," said his wife. "Did you hear of anythink?"

"They're turnin' off hands instead of takin' ov 'em on," he said

briefly, and fell into a chair by the grate.

He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted.

Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she

had taken a warm interest in this man and his family. There was

something about them which marked them out a bit from their

fellows--whether it was the husband's strange but not repulsive

deformity, contrasted with the touch of plaintive grace in the wife, or

the charm of the elfish children, with their tiny stick-like arms and

legs, and the glancing wildness of their blue eyes, under the frizzle of

red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had

begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant

lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly

because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal

simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon

discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours.

At any rate, he would sit listening to her--and smoking, as she made him

do--while she talked politics and socialism to him; and though he said

little in return, she made the most of it, and was sure anyway that he

was glad to see her come in, and must some time read the labour

newspapers and Venturist leaflets she brought him, for they were always

well thumbed before they came back to her.

But to-night his sullen weariness would make no effort, and the hunted

restless glances he threw from side to side as he sat crouching over the

fire--the large mouth tight shut, the nostrils working--showed her that

he would be glad when she went away.

Her young exacting temper was piqued. She had been for some time trying

to arrange their lives for them. So, in spite of his dumb resistance,

she lingered on, questioning and suggesting. As to the advertisement she

had brought down, he put it aside almost without looking at it. "There

ud be a hun'erd men after it before ever he could get there," was all he

would say to it. Then she inquired if he had been to ask the steward of

the Maxwell Court estate for work. He did not answer, but Mrs. Hurd said

timidly that she heard tell a new drive was to be made that winter for

the sake of giving employment. But their own men on the estate would

come first, and there were plenty of them out of work.

"Well, but there is the game," persisted Marcella. "Isn't it possible

they might want some extra men now the pheasant shooting has begun. I

might go and inquire of Westall--I know him a little."

The wife made a startled movement, and Hurd raised his misshapen form

with a jerk.

"Thank yer, miss, but I'll not trouble yer. I don't want nothing to do

with Westall."

And taking up a bit of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw

it violently back into the grate. Marcella looked from one to the other

with surprise. Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort,

and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands.

"Yes, I _shall_ tell, Jim!" she broke out. "I shall. I know Miss Boyce

is one as ull understand--"

Hurd turned round and looked at his wife full. But she persisted.

"You see, miss, they don't speak, don't Jim and George Westall. When Jim

was quite a lad he was employed at Mellor, under old Westall, George's

father as was. Jim was 'watcher,' and young George he was assistant.

That was in Mr. Robert's days, you understand, miss--when Master Harold

was alive; and they took a deal o' trouble about the game. An' George

Westall, he was allays leading the others a life--tale-bearing an'

spyin', an' settin' his father against any of 'em as didn't give in to

him. An', oh, he behaved _fearful_ to Jim! Jim ull tell you. Now, Jim,

what's wrong with you--why shouldn't I tell?"

For Hurd had risen, and as he and his wife looked at each other a sort

of mute conversation seemed to pass between them. Then he turned

angrily, and went out of the cottage by the back door into the garden.

The wife sat in some agitation a moment, then she resumed. "He can't

bear no talk about Westall--it seems to drive him silly. But I say as

how people _should_ know."

Her wavering eye seemed to interrogate her companion. Marcella was

puzzled by her manner--it was so far from simple.

"But that was long ago, surely," she said.

"Yes, it wor long ago, but you don't forget them things, miss! An'

Westall, he's just the same sort as he was then, so folks say," she

added hurriedly. "You see Jim, miss, how he's made? His back was twisted

that way when he was a little un. His father was a good old

man--everybody spoke well of 'im--but his mother, she was a queer mad

body, with red hair, just like Jim and the children, and a temper! my

word. They do say she was an Irish girl, out of a gang as used to work

near here--an' she let him drop one day when she was in liquor, an'

never took no trouble about him afterwards. He was a poor sickly lad, he

was! you'd wonder how he grew up at all. And oh! George Westall he

treated him _cruel_. He'd kick and swear at him; then he'd dare him to

fight, an' thrash him till the others came in, an' got him away. Then

he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within

an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im.

The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was

that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his

hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his

father, and next morning he told me, as he couldn't stand it no longer,

an' he never went back no more."

"And he told no one else?--he never complained?" asked Marcella,

indignantly.

"What ud ha been the good o' that, miss?" Mrs. Hurd said, wondering.

"Nobody ud ha taken his word agen old Westall's. But he come and told

me. I was housemaid at Lady Leven's then, an' he and his father were old

friends of ourn. And I knew George Westall too. He used to walk out with

me of a Sunday, just as civil as could be, and give my mother rabbits

now and again, and do anything I'd ask him. An' I up and told him he was

a brute to go ill-treatin' a sickly fellow as couldn't pay him back.

That made him as cross as vinegar, an' when Jim began to be about with

me ov a Sunday sometimes, instead of him, he got madder and madder. An'

Jim asked me to marry him--he begged of me--an' I didn't know what to

say. For Westall had asked me twice; an' I was afeard of Jim's health,

an' the low wages he'd get, an' of not bein' strong myself. But one day

I was going up a lane into Tudley End woods, an' I heard George Westall

on tother side of the hedge with a young dog he was training. Somethin'

crossed him, an' he flew into a passion with it. It turned me _sick_. I

ran away and I took against him there and then. I was frightened of him.

I duresn't trust myself, and I said to Jim I'd take him. So you can

understan', miss, can't you, as Jim don't want to have nothing to do

with Westall? Thank you kindly, all the same," she added, breaking off

her narrative with the same uncertainty of manner, the same timid

scrutiny of her visitor that Marcella had noticed before.

Marcella replied that she could certainly understand.

"But I suppose they've not got in each other's way of late years," she

said as she rose to go.

"Oh! no, miss, no," said Mrs. Hurd as she went hurriedly to fetch a fur

tippet which her visitor had laid down on the dresser.

"There is _one_ person I can speak to," said Marcella, as she put on the

wrap. "And I will." Against her will she reddened a little; but she had

not been able to help throwing out the promise. "And now, you won't

despair, will you? You'll trust me? I could always do something."

She took Mrs. Hurd's hand with a sweet look and gesture. Standing there

in her tall vigorous youth, her furs wrapped about her, she had the air

of protecting and guiding this poverty that could not help itself. The

mother and wife felt herself shy, intimidated. The tears came back to

her brown eyes.

* * * * *

When Miss Boyce had gone, Minta Hurd went to the fire and put it

together, sighing all the time, her face still red and miserable.

The door opened and her husband came in. He carried some potatoes in his

great earth-stained hands.

"You're goin' to put that bit of hare on? Well, mak' eëaste, do, for I'm

starvin'. What did she want to stay all that time for? You go and get

it. I'll blow the fire up--damn these sticks!--they're as wet as Dugnall

pond."

Nevertheless, as she sadly came and went, preparing the supper, she saw

that he was appeased, in a better temper than before.

"What did you tell 'er?" he asked abruptly.

"What do you spose I'd tell her? I acted for the best. I'm always

thinkin' for you!" she said as though with a little cry, "or we'd soon

be in trouble--worse trouble than we are!" she added miserably.

He stopped working the old bellows for a moment, and, holding his long

chin, stared into the flames. With his deformity, his earth-stains, his

blue eyes, his brown wrinkled skin, and his shock of red hair, he had

the look of some strange gnome crouching there.

"I don't know what you're at, I'll swear," he said after a pause. "I

ain't in any pertickler trouble just now--if yer wouldn't send a fellow

stumpin' the country for nothink. If you'll just let me alone I'll get a

livin' for you and the chillen right enough. Don't you trouble

yourself--an' hold your tongue!"

She threw down her apron with a gesture of despair as she stood beside

him, in front of the fire, watching the pan.

"What am I to do, Jim, an' them chillen--when you're took to prison?"

she asked him vehemently.

"I shan't get took to prison, I tell yer. All the same, Westall got holt

o' me this mornin'. I thought praps you'd better know."

Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he

had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them. His brutality was

mostly assumed. He had adopted it as a mask for more than a year past,

because he _must_ go his way, and she worried him.

"Now look here," he said resolutely, "it don't matter. I'm not goin' to

be took by Westall. I'd kill him or myself first. But he caught me

lookin' at a snare this mornin'--it wor misty, and I didn't see no one

comin'. It wor close to the footpath, and it worn't my snare."

"'Jim, my chap,' says he, mockin', 'I'm sorry for it, but I'm going to

search yer, so take it quietly,' says he. He had young Dynes with

him--so I didn't say nought--I kep' as still as a mouse, an' sure enough

he put his ugly han's into all my pockets. An' what do yer think he

foun'?"

"What?" she said breathlessly.

"Nothink!" he laughed out. "Nary an end o' string, nor a kink o'

wire--nothink. I'd hidden the two rabbits I got las' night, and all my

bits o' things in a ditch far enough out o' his way. I just laughed at

the look ov 'im. 'I'll have the law on yer for assault an' battery, yer

damned miscalculatin' brute!' says I to him--'why don't yer get that boy

there to teach yer your business?' An' off I walked. Don't you be

afeared--'ee'll never lay hands on me!"

But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she

made the tea. He took little heed of her. He sat by the fire quivering

and thinking. In a public-house two nights before this one, overtures

had been made to him on behalf of a well-known gang of poachers with

head-quarters in a neighbouring county town, who had their eyes on the

pheasant preserves in Westall's particular beat--the Tudley End

beat--and wanted a local watcher and accomplice. He had thought the

matter at first too dangerous to touch. Moreover, he was at that moment

in a period of transition, pestered by Minta to give up "the poachin',"

and yet drawn back to it after his spring and summer of field work by

instincts only recently revived, after long dormancy, but now hard to

resist.

Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta's wails which happened

to reach him.

"Look 'ere!" said he to her, "where ud you an' the chillen be this night

if I 'adn't done it? 'Adn't we got rid of every stick o' stuff we iver

'ad? 'Ere's a well-furnished place for a chap to sit in!"--he glanced

bitterly round the bare kitchen, which had none of the little properties

of the country poor, no chest, no set of mahogany drawers, no

comfortable chair, nothing, but the dresser and the few rush chairs and

the table, and a few odds and ends of crockery and household

stuff--"wouldn't we all a bin on the parish, if we 'adn't starved

fust--_wouldn't_ we?--jes' answer me that! _Didn't_ we sit here an'

starve, till the bones was comin' through the chillen's skin?--didn't

we?"

That he could still argue the point with her showed the inner

vulnerableness, the inner need of her affection and of peace with her,

which he still felt, far as certain new habits were beginning to sweep

him from her.

"It's Westall or Jenkins (Jenkins was the village policeman) havin' the

_law_ on yer, Jim," she said with emphasis, putting down a cup and

looking at him--it's the thought of _that_ makes me cold in my back.

None o' _my_ people was ever in prison--an' if it 'appened to you I

should just die of shame!"

"Then yer'd better take and read them papers there as _she_ brought," he

said impatiently, first jerking his finger over his shoulder in the

direction of Mellor to indicate Miss Boyce, and then pointing to a heap

of newspapers which lay on the floor in a corner, "they'd tell yer

summat about the shame o' _makin_' them game-laws--not o' breakin' ov

'em. But I'm sick o' this! Where's them chillen? Why do yer let that boy

out so late?"

And opening the door he stood on the threshold looking up and down the

village street, while Minta once more gave up the struggle, dried her

eyes, and told herself to be cheerful. But it was hard. She was far

better born and better educated than her husband. Her father had been a

small master chair-maker in Wycombe, and her mother, a lackadaisical

silly woman, had given her her "fine" name by way of additional proof

that she and her children were something out of the common. Moreover,

she had the conforming law-abiding instincts of the well-treated

domestic servant, who has lived on kindly terms with the gentry and

shared their standards. And for years after their marriage Hurd had

allowed her to govern him. He had been so patient, so hard-working, such

a kind husband and father, so full of a dumb wish to show her he was

grateful to her for marrying such a fellow as he. The quarrel with

Westall seemed to have sunk out of his mind. He never spoke to or of

him. Low wages, the burden of quick-coming children, the bad sanitary

conditions of their wretched cottage, and poor health, had made their

lives one long and sordid struggle. But for years he had borne his load

with extraordinary patience. He and his could just exist, and the man

who had been in youth the lonely victim of his neighbours' scorn had

found a woman to give him all herself and children to love. Hence years

of submission, a hidden flowering time for both of them.

Till that last awful winter!--the winter before Richard Boyce's

succession to Mellor--when the farmers had been mostly ruined, and half

the able-bodied men of Mellor had tramped "up into the smoke," as the

village put it, in search of London work--then, out of actual sheer

starvation--that very rare excuse of the poacher!--Hurd had gone one

night and snared a hare on the Mellor land. Would the wife and mother

ever forget the pure animal satisfaction of that meal, or the fearful

joy of the next night, when he got three shillings from a local publican

for a hare and two rabbits?

But after the first relief Minta had gone in fear and trembling. For the

old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and

their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place

had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying. He became

excited, unmanageable. Very soon he was no longer content with Mellor,

where, since the death of young Harold, the heir, the keepers had been

dismissed, and what remained of a once numerous head of game lay open to

the wiles of all the bold spirits of the neighbourhood. He must needs go

on to those woods of Lord Maxwell's, which girdled the Mellor estate on

three sides. And here he came once more across his enemy. For George

Westall was now in the far better-paid service of the Court--and a very

clever keeper, with designs on the head keeper's post whenever it might

be vacant. In the case of a poacher he had the scent of one of his own

hares. It was known to him in an incredibly short time that that "low

caselty fellow Hurd" was attacking "his" game.

Hurd, notwithstanding, was cunning itself, and Westall lay in wait for

him in vain. Meanwhile, all the old hatred between the two men revived.

Hurd drank this winter more than he had ever drunk yet. It was

necessary to keep on good terms with one or two publicans who acted as

"receivers" of the poached game of the neighbourhood. And it seemed to

him that Westall pursued him into these low dens. The keeper--big,

burly, prosperous--would speak to him with insolent patronage, watching

him all the time, or with the old brutality, which Hurd dared not

resent. Only in his excitable dwarf's sense hate grew and throve, very

soon to monstrous proportions. Westall's menacing figure darkened all

his sky for him. His poaching, besides a means of livelihood, became

more and more a silent duel between him and his boyhood's tyrant.

And now, after seven months of regular field-work and respectable

living, it was all to begin again with the new winter! The same shudders

and terrors, the same shames before the gentry and Mr. Harden!--the

soft, timid woman with her conscience could not endure the prospect. For

some weeks after the harvest was over she struggled. He had begun to go

out again at nights. But she drove him to look for employment, and lived

in tears when he failed.

As for him, she knew that he was glad to fail; there was a certain ease

and jauntiness in his air to-night as he stood calling the children:

"Will!--you come in at once! Daisy!--Nellie!"

Two little figures came pattering up the street in the moist October

dusk, a third, panted behind. The girls ran in to their mother

chattering and laughing. Hurd lifted the boy in his arm.

"Where you bin, Will? What were yo out for in this nasty damp? I've

brought yo a whole pocket full o' chestnuts, and summat else too."

He carried him in to the fire and sat him on his knees. The little

emaciated creature, flushed with the pleasure of his father's company,

played contentedly in the intervals of coughing with the shining

chestnuts, or ate his slice of the fine pear--the gift of a friend in

Thame--which proved to be the "summat else" of promise. The curtains

were close-drawn; the paraffin lamp flared on the table, and as the

savoury smell of the hare and onions on the fire filled the kitchen, the

whole family gathered round watching for the moment of eating. The fire

played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's

cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to

smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the

dwarf. Family affection--and the satisfaction of the simpler physical

needs--these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour,

to-night, the Hurds were happy.

Meanwhile, in the lane outside, Marcella, as she walked home, passed a

tall broad-shouldered man in a velveteen suit and gaiters, his gun over

his shoulder and two dogs behind him, his pockets bulging on either

side. He walked with a kind of military air, and touched his cap to her

as he passed.

Marcella barely nodded.

"Tyrant and bully!" she thought to herself with Mrs. Hurd's story in her

mind. "Yet no doubt he is a valuable keeper; Lord Maxwell would be sorry

to lose him! It is the system makes such men--and must have them."

The clatter of a pony carriage disturbed her thoughts. A small, elderly

lady, in a very large mushroom hat, drove past her in the dusk and bowed

stiffly. Marcella was so taken by surprise that she barely returned the

bow. Then she looked after the carriage. That was Miss Raeburn.

To-morrow!

CHAPTER X.

"Won't you sit nearer to the window? We are rather proud of our view at

this time of year," said Miss Raeburn to Marcella, taking her visitor's

jacket from her as she spoke, and laying it aside. "Lady Winterbourne is

late, but she will come, I am sure. She is very precise about

engagements."

Marcella moved her chair nearer to the great bow-window, and looked out

over the sloping gardens of the Court, and the autumn splendour of the

woods girdling them in on all sides. She held her head nervously erect,

was not apparently much inclined to talk, and Miss Raeburn, who had

resumed her knitting within a few paces of her guest, said to herself

presently after a few minutes' conversation on the weather and the walk

from Mellor: "Difficult--decidedly difficult--and too much manner for a

young girl. But the most picturesque creature I ever set eyes on!"

Lord Maxwell's sister was an excellent woman, the inquisitive,

benevolent despot of all the Maxwell villages; and one of the soundest

Tories still left to a degenerate party and a changing time. Her brother

and her great-nephew represented to her the flower of human kind; she

had never been capable, and probably never would be capable, of

quarrelling with either of them on any subject whatever. At the same

time she had her rights with them. She was at any rate their natural

guardian in those matters, relating to womankind, where men are

confessedly given to folly. She had accordingly kept a shrewd eye in

Aldous's interest on all the young ladies of the neighbourhood for many

years past; knew perfectly well all that he might have done, and sighed

over all that he had so far left undone.

At the present moment, in spite of the even good-breeding with which she

knitted and chattered beside Marcella, she was in truth consumed with

curiosity, conjecture, and alarm on the subject of this Miss Boyce.

Profoundly as they trusted each other, the Raeburns were not on the

surface a communicative family. Neither her brother nor Aldous had so

far bestowed any direct confidence upon her; but the course of affairs

had, notwithstanding, aroused her very keenest attention. In the first

place, as we know, the mistress of Maxwell Court had left Mellor and its

new occupants unvisited; she had plainly understood it to be her

brother's wish that she should do so. How, indeed, could you know the

women without knowing Richard Boyce? which, according to Lord Maxwell,

was impossible. And now it was Lord Maxwell who had suggested not only

that after all it would be kind to call upon the poor things, who were

heavily weighted enough already with Dick Boyce for husband and father,

but that it would be a graceful act on his sister's part to ask the girl

and her mother to luncheon. Dick Boyce of course must be made to keep

his distance, but the resources of civilisation were perhaps not unequal

to the task of discriminating, if it were prudently set about. At any

rate Miss Raeburn gathered that she was expected to try, and instead of

pressing her brother for explanations she held her tongue, paid her call

forthwith, and wrote her note.

But although Aldous, thinking no doubt that he had been already

sufficiently premature, had said nothing at all as to his own feelings

to his great-aunt, she knew perfectly well that he had said a great deal

on the subject of Miss Boyce and her mother to Lady Winterbourne, the

only woman in the neighbourhood with whom he was ever really

confidential. No woman, of course, in Miss Raeburn's position, and with

Miss Raeburn's general interest in her kind, could have been ignorant

for any appreciable number of days after the Boyces' arrival at Mellor

that they possessed a handsome daughter, of whom the Hardens in

particular gave striking but, as Miss Raeburn privately thought, by no

means wholly attractive accounts. And now, after all these somewhat

agitating preliminaries, here was the girl established in the Court

drawing-room, Aldous more nervous and preoccupied than she had ever seen

him, and Lord Maxwell expressing a particular anxiety to return from his

Board meeting in good time for luncheon, to which he had especially

desired that Lady Winterbourne should be bidden, and no one else! It may

well be supposed that Miss Raeburn was on the alert.

As for Marcella, she was on her side keenly conscious of being observed,

of having her way to make. Here she was alone among these formidable

people, whose acquaintance she had in a manner compelled. Well--what

blame? What was to prevent her from doing the same thing again

to-morrow? Her conscience was absolutely clear. If they were not ready

to meet her in the same spirit in which through Mr. Raeburn she had

approached them, she would know perfectly well how to protect

herself--above all, how to live out her life in the future without

troubling them.

Meanwhile, in spite of her dignity and those inward propitiations it

from time to time demanded, she was, in her human vivid way, full of an

excitement and curiosity she could hardly conceal as perfectly as she

desired--curiosity as to the great house and the life in it, especially

as to Aldous Raeburn's part therein. She knew very little indeed of the

class to which by birth she belonged; great houses and great people were

strange to her. She brought her artist's and student's eyes to look at

them with; she was determined not to be dazzled or taken in by them. At

the same time, as she glanced every now and then round the splendid room

in which they sat, with its Tudor ceiling, its fine pictures, its

combination of every luxury with every refinement, she was distinctly

conscious of a certain thrill, a romantic drawing towards the

stateliness and power which it all implied, together with a proud and

careless sense of equality, of kinship so to speak, which she made light

of, but would not in reality have been without for the world.

In birth and blood she had nothing to yield to the Raeburns--so her

mother assured her. If things were to be vulgarly measured, this fact

too must come in. But they should not be vulgarly measured. She did not

believe in class or wealth--not at all. Only--as her mother had told

her--she must hold her head up. An inward temper, which no doubt led to

that excess of manner of which Miss Raeburn was meanwhile conscious.

Where were the gentlemen? Marcella was beginning to resent and tire of

the innumerable questions as to her likes and dislikes, her

accomplishments, her friends, her opinions of Mellor and the

neighbourhood, which this knitting lady beside her poured out upon her

so briskly, when to her great relief the door opened and a footman

announced "Lady Winterbourne."

A very tall thin lady in black entered the room at the words. "My dear!"

she said to Miss Raeburn, "I am very late, but the roads are abominable,

and those horses Edward has just given me have to be taken such tiresome

care of. I told the coachman next time he might wrap them in shawls and

put them to bed, and _I_ should walk."

"You are quite capable of it, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, kissing her.

"We know you! Miss Boyce--Lady Winterbourne."

Lady Winterbourne shook hands with a shy awkwardness which belied her

height and stateliness. As she sat down beside Miss Raeburn the contrast

between her and Lord Maxwell's sister was sufficiently striking. Miss

Raeburn was short, inclined to be stout, and to a certain gay profusion

in her attire. Her cap was made of a bright silk handkerchief edged with

lace; round her neck were hung a number of small trinkets on various

gold chains; she abounded too in bracelets, most of which were clearly

old-fashioned mementos of departed relatives or friends. Her dress was

a cheerful red verging on crimson; and her general air suggested energy,

bustle, and a good-humoured common sense.

Lady Winterbourne, on the other hand, was not only dressed from head to

foot in severe black without an ornament; her head and face belonged

also to the same impression, as of some strong and forcible study in

black and white. The attitude was rigidly erect; the very dark eyes,

under the snowy and abundant hair, had a trick of absent staring; in

certain aspects the whole figure had a tragic, nay, formidable dignity,

from which one expected, and sometimes got, the tone and gesture of

tragic acting. Yet at the same time, mixed in therewith, a curious

strain of womanish, nay childish, weakness, appealingness. Altogether, a

great lady, and a personality--yet something else too--something

ill-assured, timid, incongruous--hard to be defined.

"I believe you have not been at Mellor long?" the new-comer asked, in a

deep contralto voice which she dragged a little.

"About seven weeks. My father and mother have been there since May."

"You must of course think it a very interesting old place?"

"Of course I do; I love it," said Marcella, disconcerted by the odd

habit Lady Winterbourne had of fixing her eyes upon a person, and then,

as it were, forgetting what she had done with them.

"Oh, I haven't been there, Agneta," said the new-comer, turning after a

pause to Miss Raeburn, "since that summer--_you_ remember that party

when the Palmerstons came over--so long ago--twenty years!"

Marcella sat stiffly upright. Lady Winterbourne grew a little nervous

and flurried.

"I don't think I ever saw your mother, Miss Boyce--I was much away from

home about then. Oh, yes, I did once--"

The speaker stopped, a sudden red suffusing her pale cheeks. She had

felt certain somehow, at sight of Marcella, that she should say or do

something untoward, and she had promptly justified her own prevision.

The only time she had ever seen Mrs. Boyce had been in court, on the

last day of the famous trial in which Richard Boyce was concerned, when

she had made out the wife sitting closely veiled as near to her husband

as possible, waiting for the verdict. As she had already confided this

reminiscence to Miss Raeburn, and had forgotten she had done so, both

ladies had a moment of embarrassment.

"Mrs. Boyce, I am sorry to say, does not seem to be strong," said Miss

Raeburn, bending over the heel of her stocking. "I wish we could have

had the pleasure of seeing her to-day."

There was a pause. Lady Winterbourne's tragic eyes were once more

considering Marcella.

"I hope you will come and see me," she said at last abruptly--"and Mrs.

Boyce too."

The voice was very soft and refined though so deep, and Marcella looking

up was suddenly magnetised.

"Yes, I will," she said, all her face melting into sensitive life.

"Mamma won't go anywhere, but I will come, if you will ask me."

"Will you come next Tuesday?" said Lady Winterbourne quickly--"come to

tea, and I will drive you back. Mr. Raeburn told me about you. He

says--you read a great deal."

The solemnity of the last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, were

not to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneously

thought her extraordinarily radiant and handsome.

"How can he know? Why, I have hardly talked about books to him at all."

"Well! here he comes," said Lady Winterbourne, smiling suddenly; "so I

can ask him. But I am sure he did say so."

It was now Marcella's turn to colour. Aldous Raeburn crossed the room,

greeted Lady Winterbourne, and next moment she felt her hand in his.

"You did tell me, Aldous, didn't you," said Lady Winterbourne, "that

Miss Boyce was a great reader?"

The speaker had known Aldous Raeburn as a boy, and was, moreover, a sort

of cousin, which explained the Christian name.

Aldous smiled.

"I said I thought Miss Boyce was like you and me, and had a weakness

that way, Lady Winterbourne. But I won't be cross-examined!"

"I don't think I am a great reader," said Marcella, bluntly--"at least I

read a great deal, but I hardly ever read a book through. I haven't

patience."

"You want to get at everything so quickly?" said Miss Raeburn, looking

up sharply.

"I suppose so!" said Marcella. "There seems to be always a hundred

things tearing one different ways, and no time for any of them."

"Yes, when one is young one feels like that," said Lady Winterbourne,

sighing. "When one is old one accepts one's limitations. When I was

twenty I never thought that I should still be an ignorant and

discontented woman at nearly seventy."

"It is because you are so young still, Lady Winterbourne, that you feel

so," said Aldous, laughing at her, as one does at an old friend. "Why,

you are younger than any of us! I feel all brushed and stirred up--a boy

at school again--after I have been to see you!"

"Well, I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Lady Winterbourne,

sighing again. Then she looked at the pair beside her--at the alert

brightness in the man's strong and quiet face as he sat stooping

forward, with his hands upon his knees, hardly able to keep his eyes for

an instant from the dark apparition beside him--at the girl's evident

shyness and pride.

"My dear!" she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heard

what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a

baby? It was born with four teeth!"

Miss Raeburn's astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two old

friends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne's

numerous family, which was clearly meant for a _tête-à-tête_.

"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour,

after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her

walk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my

grandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier than

this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept

him an unconscionable time."

Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room

where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the

wall from side to side.

"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What a

delicious thing to live with."

And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints,

suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in

flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses.

Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and

pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled

and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It

was Italy at the great moment--subtle, rich, exuberant.

Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.

"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my special

delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a

garret. I am not sure that I don't in my heart prefer it to any of the

pictures."

"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it--"look at them--the irises,

the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to have

when one was small of what it would be like to have _flowers enough_. I

was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always

cheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, and

I found one here and one there--but such a beggarly, wretched few, for

all one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself

by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this--yes, just like

this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one's

hands in and gather and gather till one was really _satisfied_! That is

the worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough of

anything. One day it's flowers--but the next day it is pudding--and the

next frocks."

Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant to

feel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admiration

and deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck,

and vibrated happily.

"Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will make

up to you!" he said, smiling at her. "But now, I have been wondering to

myself in my room upstairs what you would like to see. There are a good

many treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because you

are an artist. But you shall not be bored with them! You shall see what

and as much as you like. You had about a quarter of an hour's talk with

my aunt, did you not?" he asked, in a quite different tone.

So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance,

he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his own

purposes! Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into her

cheek.

"Miss Raeburn was very kind," she said, with a return of shyness, which

passed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring. "Yes,

she was very kind!--but all the same she doesn't like me--I don't think

she is going to like me--I am not her sort."

"Have you been talking Socialism to her?" he asked her, smiling.

"No, not yet--not yet," she said emphatically. "But I am dreadfully

uncertain--I can't always hold my tongue--I am afraid you will be sorry

you took me up."

"Are you so aggressive? But Aunt Neta is so mild!--she wouldn't hurt a

fly. She mothers every one in the house and out of it. The only people

she is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will wear feathers in

their hats!"

"There!" cried Marcella, indignantly. "Why shouldn't they wear feathers

in their hats? It is their form of beauty--their tapestry!"

"But if one can't have both feathers and boots?" he asked her humbly, a

twinkle in his grey eye. "If one hasn't boots, one may catch a cold and

die of it--which is, after all, worse than going featherless."

"But why _can't_ they have feathers and boots? It is because

you--we--have got too much. You have the tapestry--and--and the

pictures"--she turned and looked round the room--"and this wonderful

house--and the park. Oh, no--I think it is Miss Raeburn has too many

feathers!"

"Perhaps it is," he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing and

saddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled to

him. "You see I am in a difficulty. I want to show you our feathers. I

think they would please you--and you make me ashamed of them."

"How absurd!" cried Marcella, "when I told you how I liked the school

children bobbing to me!"

They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start--"Ah, here is my

grandfather!"

Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, after

greeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce. He saw the old man's

somewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes which

marked the first effect of Marcella's form and presence, the bow, the

stately shake of the hand. The lover hearing his own heart beat,

realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.

"You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to your

grandfather," said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch,

Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne. "He was one of

my dearest friends."

"I'm afraid I don't know much about him," said Marcella, rather bluntly,

"except what I have got out of old letters. I never saw him that I

remember."

Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a great

wish to talk to her, and make her talk. He had pleasant things to say

about Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and some

conversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to a

discussion of the part played by the different local families in the

Civil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried in

various shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease with

herself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the local

brotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he could

not but divine.

The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with an

independence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life. She

was not in the least abashed or shy. Yet it was clear that Lord

Maxwell's first impressions were favourable. Aldous caught every now and

then his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantly

withdrawn--comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, and

tone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn's wife should

be. How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely

real! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its

Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding

the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and

silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving

servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the

dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive,

extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterly

unlike any other woman he had ever seen--every detail of it was charged

to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.

For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is,

almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole

nature, into the second stage--the stage of anxiety, incredulity.

Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning,

seemed to him not nearer, but further from him. She was terribly on her

dignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown

him on that walk, beside the gate? There had been a touch of it, a

divine touch, before luncheon. How could he get her to himself again?

Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic--the

badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent

depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.

"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said Lord

Maxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean. To give money is easy

enough. Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and

thought no more of it. We don't get through so easily."

"No," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "It weighs one down. Last winter

was a nightmare. The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!--though we

seemed to be always giving. And in the middle of it Edward would buy me

a new set of sables. I begged him not, but he laughed at me."

"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, "if nobody bought

sables, there'd be other poor people up in Russia, isn't it?--or

Hudson's Bay?--badly off. One has, to think of that. Oh, you needn't

talk, Aldous! I know you say it's a fallacy. _I_ call it common sense."

She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago left

his great-aunt to work out her own economics. And, anyway, she saw that

he was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne in

watching Miss Boyce.

"It's precisely as Lord Maxwell says," replied Lady Winterbourne; "that

kind of thing used to satisfy everybody. And our grandmothers were very

good women. I don't know why we, who give ourselves so much more trouble

than they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they went

free."

She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, looking

round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.

"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heard

tales of Miss Boyce's opinions!" said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, with

an old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.

Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her

head was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start.

She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his

native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a

girl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.

"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.

"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "We

can't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."

Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which

escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.

"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We

Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what

we can get out of both."

"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"

Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a

morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at

luncheon.

"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I

ought to be--I am in my conscience."

"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition

of most of us?"

"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm

roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a

Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries

and precedences--the worst part of one--that makes me waver, makes me a

traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor

often, I know."

"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and

hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"

"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after

a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me

worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty--such

mutilation of mind and body--were meant to go on for ever!"

Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous

should find those eyes of hers superb?

"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her mildly,

"that if all property were divided to-morrow the force of natural

inequality would not have undone all the work the day after, and given

us back our poor?"

The "newspaper cant" of this remark, as the Cravens would have put it,

brought a contemptuous look for an instant into the girl's face. She

began to talk eagerly and cleverly, showing a very fair training in the

catch words of the school, and a good memory--as one uncomfortable

person at the table soon perceived--for some of the leading arguments

and illustrations of a book of Venturist Essays which had lately been

much read and talked of in London.

Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, and

the interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged into

history, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute of

Labourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other great

matters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, and

all with the same utter oblivion--so it seemed to her stiff indignant

hostess at the other end of the table--of the manners and modesty proper

to a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce's

daughter!

Aldous struck in now and then, trying to soothe her by supporting her to

a certain extent, and so divert the conversation. But Marcella was soon

too excited to be managed; and she had her say; a very strong say often

as far as language went: there could be no doubt of that.

"Ah, well," said Lord Maxwell, wincing at last under some of her

phrases, in spite of his courteous _savoir-faire_, "I see you are of the

same opinion as a good man whose book I took up yesterday: 'The

landlords of England have always shown a mean and malignant passion for

profiting by the miseries of others?' Well, Aldous, my boy, we are

judged, you and I--no help for it!"

The man whose temper and rule had made the prosperity of a whole country

side for nearly forty years, looked at his grandson with twinkling eyes.

Miss Raeburn was speechless. Lady Winterbourne was absently staring at

Marcella, a spot of red on each pale cheek.

Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.

"Of course, you think me very ridiculous," she said, with a tremulous

change of tone. "I suppose I am. And I am as inconsistent as anybody--I

hate myself for it. Very often when anybody talks to me on the other

side, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists: they

always told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker. But it

can't make any difference to one's _feeling_: nothing touches that."

She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing--

"It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see the

places the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, and

one passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudging

back from her work; when one realises that they have no _rights_ when

they come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which _we_, who

have everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that every

one of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than I

shall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state of

things is _somehow_ wrong and topsy-turvy and _wicked_." Her voice rose

a little, every emphasis grew more passionate. "And if I don't do

something--the little such a person as I can--to alter it before I die,

I might as well never have lived."

Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his

mouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was a

forcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal

conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?

Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:

"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with

you. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."

The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.

"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath

from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally

characteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once,

before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it--not at

all. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should

do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine.

Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choose

between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave

nobody--not even the richest--more than four hundred a year."

"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road,"

said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have a

maid."

"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. But

I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your _heart_ and

_conscience_ have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with your

class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My

grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving

home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer

who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She

stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and

then--the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she

drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with

more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power

of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"--and she laid her

thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's

arm--"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of

_right_ in our place and position--at least I find I have. In the old

days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down

with a strong hand."

"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were

violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will

see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will

not be _we_--not the landowners or the capitalists--who will put it

down. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to

lose--a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built

through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their

own savings--it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friends

down so far as they represent any real attack on property--and brutally,

too, I fear, if need be."

"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never can

see how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one _rejoice_ in

it? How can any one _wish_ that the present state of things should go

on? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, and

the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of

course, the poaching--"

Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brother

was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let such

talk go on? It was too unseemly.

Lord Maxwell only laughed. "My dear young lady," he said, much amused,

"are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher?

Disillusion lies that way!--it does indeed. Why--Aldous!--I have been

hearing such tales from Westall this morning. I stopped at Corbett's

farm a minute or two on the way home, and met Westall at the gate coming

out. He says he and his men are being harried to death round about

Tudley End by a gang of men that come, he thinks, from Oxford, a driving

gang with a gig, who come at night or in the early morning--the smartest

rascals out, impossible to catch. But he says he thinks he will soon

have his hand on the local accomplice--a Mellor man--a man named Hurd:

not one of our labourers, I think."

"Hurd!" cried Marcella, in dismay. "Oh no, it _can't_ be--impossible!"

Lord Maxwell looked at her in astonishment.

"Do you know any Hurds? I am afraid your father will find that Mellor is

a bad place for poaching."

"If it is, it is because they are so starved and miserable," said

Marcella, trying hard to speak coolly, but excited almost beyond bounds

by the conversation and all that it implied. "And the Hurds--I don't

believe it a bit! But if it were true--oh! they have been in such

straits--they were out of work most of last winter; they are out of work

now, No one _could_ grudge them. I told you about them, didn't I?" she

said, suddenly glancing at Aldous. "I was going to ask you to-day, if

you could help them?" Her prophetess air had altogether left her. She

felt ready to cry; and nothing could have been more womanish than her

tone.

He bent across to her. Miss Raeburn, invaded by a new and intolerable

sense of calamity, could have beaten him for what she read in his

shining eyes, and in the flush on his usually pale cheek.

"Is he still out of work?" he said. "And you are unhappy about it? But I

am sure we can find him work: I am just now planning improvements at the

north end of the park. We can take him on; I am certain of it. You must

give me his full name and address."

"And let him beware of Westall," said Lord Maxwell, kindly. "Give him a

hint, Miss Boyce, and nobody will rake up bygones. There is nothing I

dislike so much as rows about the shooting. All the keepers know that."

"And of course," said Miss Raeburn, coldly, "if the family are in real

distress there are plenty of people at hand to assist them. The man need

not steal."

"Oh, charity!" cried Marcella, her lip curling.

"A worse crime than poaching, you think," said Lord Maxwell, laughing.

"Well, these are big subjects. I confess, after my morning with the

lunatics, I am half inclined, like Horace Walpole, to think everything

serious ridiculous. At any rate shall we see what light a cup of coffee

throws upon it? Agneta, shall we adjourn?"

CHAPTER XI.

Lord Maxwell closed the drawing-room door behind Aldous and Marcella.

Aldous had proposed to take their guest to see the picture gallery,

which was on the first floor, and had found her willing.

The old man came back to the two other women, running his hand nervously

through his shock of white hair--a gesture which Miss Raeburn well knew

to show some disturbance of mind.

"I should like to have your opinion of that young lady," he said

deliberately, taking a chair immediately in front of them.

"I like her," said Lady Winterbourne, instantly. "Of course she is crude

and extravagant, and does not know quite what she may say. But all that

will improve. I like her, and shall make friends with her."

Miss Raeburn threw up her hands in angry amazement.

"Most forward, conceited, and ill-mannered," she said with energy. "I am

certain she has no proper principles, and as to what her religious views

may be, I dread to think of them! If _that_ is a specimen of the girls

of the present day--"

"My dear," interrupted Lord Maxwell, laying a hand on her knee, "Lady

Winterbourne is an old friend, a very old friend. I think we may be

frank before her, and I don't wish you to say things you may regret.

Aldous has made up his mind to get that girl to marry him, if he can."

Lady Winterbourne was silent, having in fact been forewarned by that odd

little interview with Aldous in her own drawing-room, when he had

suddenly asked her to call on Mrs. Boyce. But she looked at Miss

Raeburn. That lady took up her knitting, laid it down again, resumed it,

then broke out--

"How did it come about? Where have they been meeting?"

"At the Hardens mostly. He seems to have been struck from the beginning,

and now there is no question as to his determination. But she may not

have him; he professes to be still entirely in the dark."

"Oh!" cried Miss Raeburn, with a scornful shrug, meant to express all

possible incredulity. Then she began to knit fast and furiously, and

presently said in great agitation,--

"What can he be thinking of? She is very handsome, of course, but--"

then her words failed her. "When Aldous remembers his mother, how can

he?--undisciplined! self-willed! Why, she laid down the law to _you_,

Henry, as though you had nothing to do but to take your opinions from a

chit of a girl like her. Oh! no, no; I really can't; you must give me

time. And her father--the disgrace and trouble of it! I tell you, Henry,

it will bring misfortune!"

Lord Maxwell was much troubled. Certainly he should have talked to

Agneta beforehand. But the fact was he had his cowardice, like other

men, and he had been trusting to the girl herself, to this beauty he

heard so much of, to soften the first shock of the matter to the present

mistress of the Court.

"We will hope not, Agneta," he said gravely. "We will hope not. But you

must remember Aldous is no boy. I cannot coerce him. I see the

difficulties, and I have put them before him. But I am more favourably

struck with the girl than you are. And anyway, if it comes about, we

must make the best of it."

Miss Raeburn made no answer, but pretended to set her heel, her needles

shaking. Lady Winterbourne was very sorry for her two old friends.

"Wait a little," she said, laying her hand lightly on Miss Raeburn's.

"No doubt with her opinions she felt specially drawn to assert herself

to-day. One can imagine it very well of a girl, and a generous girl in

her position. You will see other sides of her, I am sure you will. And

you would never--you could never--make a breach with Aldous."

"We must all remember," said Lord Maxwell, getting up and beginning to

walk up and down beside them, "that Aldous is in no way dependent upon

me. He has his own resources. He could leave us to-morrow. Dependent on

me! It is the other way, I think, Agneta--don't you?"

He stopped and looked at her, and she returned his look in spite of

herself. A tear dropped on her stocking which she hastily brushed away.

"Come, now," said Lord Maxwell, seating himself; "let us talk it over

rationally. Don't go, Lady Winterbourne."

"Why, they may be settling it at this moment," cried Miss Raeburn,

half-choked, and feeling as though "the skies were impious not to fall."

"No, no!" he said smiling. "Not yet, I think. But let us prepare

ourselves."

* * * * *

Meanwhile the cause of all this agitation was sitting languidly in a

great Louis Quinze chair in the picture gallery upstairs, with Aldous

beside her. She had taken off her big hat as though it oppressed her,

and her black head lay against a corner of the chair in fine contrast to

its mellowed golds and crimsons. Opposite to her were two famous Holbein

portraits, at which she looked from time to time as though attracted to

them in spite of herself, by some trained sense which could not be

silenced. But she was not communicative, and Aldous was anxious.

"Do you think I was rude to your grandfather?" she asked him at last

abruptly, cutting dead short some information she had stiffly asked him

for just before, as to the date of the gallery and its collection.

"Rude!" he said startled. "Not at all. Not in the least. Do you suppose

we are made of such brittle stuff, we poor landowners, that we can't

stand an argument now and then?"

"Your aunt thought I was rude," she said unheeding. "I think I was. But

a house like this excites me." And with a little reckless gesture she

turned her head over her shoulder and looked down the gallery. A

Velasquez was beside her; a great Titian over the way; a priceless

Rembrandt beside it. On her right hand stood a chair of carved steel,

presented by a German town to a German emperor, which, had not its

equal in Europe; the brocade draping the deep windows in front of her

had been specially made to grace a state visit to the house of Charles

II.

"At Mellor," she went on, "we are old and tumble-down. The rain comes

in; there are no shutters to the big hall, and we can't afford to put

them--we can't afford even to have the pictures cleaned. I can pity the

house and nurse it, as I do the village. But here--"

And looking about her, she gave a significant shrug.

"What--our feathers again!" he said laughing. "But consider. Even you

allow that Socialism cannot begin to-morrow. There must be a transition

time, and clearly till the State is ready to take over the historical

houses and their contents, the present nominal owners of them are bound,

if they can, to take care of them. Otherwise the State will be some day

defrauded."

She could not be insensible to the charm of his manner towards her.

There was in it, no doubt, the natural force and weight of the man older

and better informed than his companion, and amused every now and then by

her extravagance. But even her irritable pride could not take offence.

For the intellectual dissent she felt at bottom was tempered by a moral

sympathy of which the gentleness and warmth touched and moved her in

spite of herself. And now that they were alone he could express himself.

So long as they had been in company he had seemed to her, as often

before, shy, hesitating, and ineffective. But with the disappearance of

spectators, who represented to him, no doubt, the harassing claim of

the critical judgment, all was freer, more assured, more natural.

She leant her chin on her hand, considering his plea.

"Supposing you live long enough to see the State take it, shall you be

able to reconcile yourself to it? Or shall you feel it a wrong, and go

out a rebel?"

A delightful smile was beginning to dance in the dark eyes. She was

recovering the tension of her talk with Lord Maxwell.

"All must depend, you see, on the conditions--on how you and your

friends are going to manage the transition. You may persuade

me--conceivably--or you may eject me with violence."

"Oh, no!" she interposed quickly. "There will be no violence. Only we

shall gradually reduce your wages. Of course, we can't do without

leaders--we don't want to do away with the captains of any industry,

agricultural or manufacturing. Only we think you overpaid. You must be

content with less."

"Don't linger out the process," he said laughing, "otherwise it will be

painful. The people who are condemned to live in these houses before the

Commune takes to them, while your graduated land and income taxes are

slowly starving them out, will have a bad time of it."

"Well, it will be your first bad time! Think of the labourer now, with

five children, of school age, on twelve shillings a week--think of the

sweated women in London."

"Ah, think of them," he said in a different tone.

There was a pause of silence.

"No!" said Marcella, springing up. "Don't let's think of them. I get to

believe the whole thing a _pose_ in myself and other people. Let's go

back to the pictures. Do you think Titian 'sweated' his drapery

men--paid them starvation rates, and grew rich on their labour? Very

likely. All the same, that blue woman"--she pointed to a bending

Magdalen--"will be a joy to all time."

They wandered through the gallery, and she was now all curiosity,

pleasure, and intelligent interest, as though she had thrown off an

oppression. Then they emerged into the upper corridor answering to the

corridor of the antiques below. This also was hung with pictures,

principally family portraits of the second order, dating back to the

Tudors--a fine series of berobed and bejewelled personages, wherein

clothes pre-dominated and character was unimportant.

Marcella's eye was glancing along the brilliant colour of the wall,

taking rapid note of jewelled necks surmounting stiff embroidered

dresses, of the whiteness of lace ruffs, or the love-locks and gleaming

satin of the Caroline beauties, when it suddenly occurred to her,--

"I shall be their successor. This is already potentially mine. In a few

months, if I please, I shall be walking this house as mistress--its

future mistress, at any rate!"

She was conscious of a quickening in the blood, a momentary blurring of

the vision. A whirlwind of fancies swept across her. She thought of

herself as the young peeress--Lord Maxwell after all was over

seventy--her own white neck blazing with diamonds, the historic jewels

of a great family--her will making law in this splendid house--in the

great domain surrounding it. What power--what a position--what a

romance! She, the out-at-elbows Marcella, the Socialist, the friend of

the people. What new lines of social action and endeavour she might

strike out! Miss Raeburn should not stop her. She caressed the thought

of the scandals in store for that lady. Only it annoyed her that her

dream of large things should be constantly crossed by this foolish

delight, making her feet dance--in this mere prospect of satin gowns and

fine jewels--of young and fêted beauty holding its brilliant court. If

she made such a marriage, it should be, it must be, on public grounds.

Her friends must have no right to blame her.

Then she stole a glance at the tall, quiet gentleman beside her. A man

to be proud of from the beginning, and surely to be very fond of in

time. "He would always be my friend," she thought. "I could lead him. He

is very clever, one can see, and knows a great deal. But he admires what

I like. His position hampers him--but I could help him to get beyond it.

We might show the way to many!"

"Will you come and see this room here?" he said, stopping suddenly, yet

with a certain hesitation in the voice. "It is my own sitting-room.

There are one or two portraits I should like to show you if you would

let me."

She followed him with a rosy cheek, and they were presently standing in

front of the portrait of his mother. He spoke of his recollections of

his parents, quietly and simply, yet she felt through every nerve that

he was not the man to speak of such things to anybody in whom he did not

feel a very strong and peculiar interest. As he was talking a rush of

liking towards him came across her. How good he was--how affectionate

beneath his reserve--a woman might securely trust him with her future.

So with every minute she grew softer, her eye gentler, and with each

step and word he seemed to himself to be carried deeper into the current

of joy. Intoxication was mounting within him, as her slim, warm youth

moved and breathed beside him; and it was natural that he should read

her changing behaviour for something other than it was. A man of his

type asks for no advance from the woman; the woman he loves does not

make them; but at the same time he has a natural self-esteem, and

believes readily in his power to win the return he is certain he will

deserve.

"And this?" she said, moving restlessly towards his table, and taking up

the photograph of Edward Hallin.

"Ah! that is the greatest friend I have in the world. But I am sure you

know the name. Mr. Hallin--Edward Hallin."

She paused bewildered.

"What! _the_ Mr. Hallin--_that_ was Edward Hallin--who settled the

Nottingham strike last month--who lectures so much in the East End, and

in the north?"

"The same. We are old college friends. I owe him much, and in all his

excitements he does not forget old friends. There, you see--" and he

opened a blotting book and pointed smiling to some closely written

sheets lying within it--"is my last letter to him. I often write two of

those in the week, and he to me. We don't agree on a number of things,

but that doesn't matter."

"What can you find to write about?" she said wondering. "I thought

nobody wrote letters nowadays, only notes. Is it books, or people?"

"Both, when it pleases us!" How soon, oh! ye favouring gods, might he

reveal to her the part she herself played in those closely covered

sheets? "But he writes to me on social matters chiefly. His whole heart,

as you probably know, is in certain experiments and reforms in which he

sometimes asks me to help him."

Marcella opened her eyes. These were new lights. She began to recall all

that she had heard of young Hallin's position in the Labour movement;

his personal magnetism and prestige; his power as a speaker. Her

Socialist friends, she remembered, thought him in the way--a force, but

a dangerous one. He was for the follies of compromise--could not be got

to disavow the principle of private property, while ready to go great

lengths in certain directions towards collective action and corporate

control. The "stalwarts" of _her_ sect would have none of him as a

leader, while admitting his charm as a human being--a charm she

remembered to have heard discussed with some anxiety among her Venturist

friends. But for ordinary people he went far enough. Her father, she

remembered, had dubbed him an "Anarchist" in connection with the terms

he had been able to secure for the Nottingham strikers, as reported in

the newspapers. It astonished her to come across the man again as Mr.

Raeburn's friend.

They talked about Hallin a little, and about Aldous's Cambridge

acquaintance with him. Then Marcella, still nervous, went to look at the

bookshelves, and found herself in front of that working collection of

books on economics which Aldous kept in his own room under his hand, by

way of guide to the very fine special collection he was gradually making

in the library downstairs.

Here again were surprises for her. Aldous had never made the smallest

claim to special knowledge on all those subjects she had so often

insisted on making him discuss. He had been always tentative and

diffident, deferential even so far as her own opinions were concerned.

And here already was the library of a student. All the books she had

ever read or heard discussed were here--and as few among many. The

condition of them, moreover, the signs of close and careful reading she

noticed in them, as she took them out, abashed her: _she_ had never

learnt to read in this way. It was her first contact with an exact and

arduous culture. She thought of how she had instructed Lord Maxwell at

luncheon. No doubt he shared his grandson's interests. Her cheek burned

anew; this time because it seemed to her that she had been ridiculous.

"I don't know why you never told me you took a particular interest in

these subjects," she said suddenly, turning round upon him

resentfully--she had just laid down, of all things, a volume of

Venturist essays. "You must have thought I talked a great deal of

nonsense at luncheon."

"Why!--I have always been delighted to find you cared for such things

and took an interest in them. How few women do!" he said quite simply,

opening his eyes. "Do you know these three pamphlets? They were

privately printed, and are very rare."

He took out a book and showed it to her as one does to a comrade and

equal--as he might have done to Edward Hallin. But something was jarred

in her--conscience or self-esteem--and she could not recover her sense

of heroineship. She answered absently, and when he returned the book to

the shelf she said that it was time for her to go, and would he kindly

ask for her maid, who was to walk with her?

"I will ring for her directly," he said. "But you will let me take you

home?" Then he added hurriedly, "I have some business this afternoon

with a man who lives in your direction."

She assented a little stiffly--but with an inward thrill. His words and

manner seemed suddenly to make the situation unmistakable. Among the

books it had been for the moment obscured.

He rang for his own servant, and gave directions about the maid. Then

they went downstairs that Marcella might say good-bye.

Miss Raeburn bade her guest farewell, with a dignity which her small

person could sometimes assume, not unbecomingly. Lady Winterbourne held

the girl's hand a little, looked her out of countenance, and insisted on

her promising again to come to Winterbourne Park the following Tuesday.

Then Lord Maxwell, with old-fashioned politeness, made Marcella take his

arm through the hall.

"You must come and see us again," he said smiling; "though we are such

belated old Tories, we are not so bad as we sound."

And under cover of his mild banter he fixed a penetrating attentive look

upon her. Flushed and embarrassed! Had it indeed been done already? or

would Aldous settle it on this walk? To judge from his manner and hers,

the thing was going with rapidity. Well, well, there was nothing for it

but to hope for the best.

On their way through the hall she stopped him, her hand still in his

arm. Aldous was in front, at the door, looking for a light shawl she had

brought with her.

"I should like to thank you," she said shyly, "about the Hurds. It will

be very kind of you and Mr. Raeburn to find them work."

Lord Maxwell was pleased; and with the usual unfair advantage of beauty

her eyes and curving lips gave her little advance a charm infinitely

beyond what any plainer woman could have commanded.

"Oh, don't thank me!" he said cheerily. "Thank Aldous. He does all that

kind of thing. And if in your good works you want any help we can give,

ask it, my dear young lady. My old comrade's grand-daughter will always

find friends in this house."

Lord Maxwell would have been very much astonished to hear himself making

this speech six weeks before. As it was, he handed her over gallantly to

Aldous, and stood on the steps looking after them in a stir of mind not

unnoted by the confidential butler who held the door open behind him.

Would Aldous insist on carrying his wife off to the dower house on the

other side of the estate? or would they be content to stay in the old

place with the old people? And if so, how were that girl and his sister

to get on? As for himself, he was of a naturally optimist temper, and

ever since the night of his first interview with Aldous on the subject,

he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view. He liked to

see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding

opinions and lines of her own. It was infinitely better than mere

nonentity. Of course, she was now extravagant and foolish, perhaps vain

too. But that would mend with time--mend, above all, with her position

as Aldous's wife. Aldous was a strong man--how strong, Lord Maxwell

suspected that this impetuous young lady hardly knew. No, he thought the

family might be trusted to cope with her when once they got her among

them. And she would certainly be an ornament to the old house.

Her father of course was, and would be, the real difficulty, and the

blight which had descended on the once honoured name. But a man so

conscious of many kinds of power as Lord Maxwell could not feel much

doubt as to his own and his grandson's competence to keep so poor a

specimen of humanity as Richard Boyce in his place. How wretchedly ill,

how feeble, both in body and soul, the fellow had looked when he and

Winterbourne met him!

The white-haired owner of the Court walked back slowly to his library,

his hands in his pockets, his head bent in cogitation. Impossible to

settle to the various important political letters lying on his table,

and bearing all of them on that approaching crisis in the spring which

must put Lord Maxwell and his friends in power. He was over seventy, but

his old blood quickened within him as he thought of those two on this

golden afternoon, among the beech woods. How late Aldous had left all

these experiences! His grandfather, by twenty, could have shown him the

way.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the two in question were walking along the edge of the hill

rampart overlooking the plain, with the road on one side of them, and

the falling beech woods on the other. They were on a woodland path, just

within the trees, sheltered, and to all intents and purposes alone. The

maid, with leisurely discretion, was following far behind them on the

high road.

Marcella, who felt at moments as though she could hardly breathe, by

reason of a certain tumult of nerve, was yet apparently bent on

maintaining a conversation without breaks. As they diverged from the

road into the wood-path, she plunged into the subject of her companion's

election prospects. How many meetings did he find that he must hold in

the month? What places did he regard as his principal strongholds? She

was told that certain villages, which she named, were certain to go

Radical, whatever might be the Tory promises. As to a well-known

Conservative League, which was very strong in the country, and to which

all the great ladies, including Lady Winterbourne, belonged, was he

actually going to demean himself by accepting its support? How was it

possible to defend the bribery, buns, and beer by which it won its

corrupting way?

Altogether, a quick fire of questions, remarks, and sallies, which

Aldous met and parried as best he might, comforting himself all the time

by thought of those deeper and lonelier parts of the wood which lay

before them. At last she dropped out, half laughing, half defiant, words

which arrested him,--

"Well, I shall know what the other side think of their prospects very

soon. Mr. Wharton is coming to lunch with us to-morrow."

"Harry Wharton!" he said astonished. "But Mr. Boyce is not supporting

him. Your father, I think, is Conservative?"

One of Dick Boyce's first acts as owner of Mellor, when social

rehabilitation had still looked probable to him, had been to send a

contribution to the funds of the League aforesaid, so that Aldous had

public and conspicuous grounds for his remark.

"Need one measure everything by politics?" she asked him a little

disdainfully. "Mayn't one even feed a Radical?"

He winced visibly a moment, touched in his philosopher's pride.

"You remind me," he said, laughing and reddening--"and justly--that an

election perverts all one's standards and besmirches all one's morals.

Then I suppose Mr. Wharton is an old friend?"

"Papa never saw him before last week," she said carelessly. "Now he

talks of asking him to stay some time, and says that, although he won't

vote for him, he hopes that he will make a good fight."

Raeburn's brow contracted in a puzzled frown.

"He will make an excellent fight," he said rather shortly. "Dodgson

hardly hopes to get in. Harry Wharton is a most taking speaker, a very

clever fellow, and sticks at nothing in the way of promises. Ah, you

will find him interesting, Miss Boyce! He has a co-operative farm on his

Lincolnshire property. Last year he started a Labour paper--which I

believe you read. I have heard you quote it. He believes in all that you

hope for--great increase in local government and communal control--the

land for the people--graduated income-tax--the extinction of landlord

and capitalist as soon as may be--_e tutti quanti_. He talks with great

eloquence and ability. In our villages I find he is making way every

week. The people think his manners perfect. ''Ee 'as a way wi' un,' said

an old labourer to me last week. 'If 'ee wor to coe the wild birds, I do

believe, Muster Raeburn, they'd coom to un!'"

"Yet you dislike him!" said Marcella, a daring smile dancing on the dark

face she turned to him. "One can hear it in every word you say."

He hesitated, trying, even at the moment that an impulse of jealous

alarm which astonished himself had taken possession of him, to find the

moderate and measured phrase.

"I have known him from a boy," he said. "He is a connection of the

Levens, and used to be always there in old days. He is very brilliant

and very gifted--"

"Your 'but' must be very bad," she threw in, "it is so long in coming."

"Then I will say, whatever opening it gives you," he replied with

spirit, "that I admire him without respecting him."

"Who ever thought otherwise of a clever opponent?" she cried. "It is the

stock formula."

The remark stung, all the more because Aldous was perfectly conscious

that there was much truth in her implied charge of prejudice. He had

never been very capable of seeing this particular man in the dry light

of reason, and was certainly less so than before, since it had been

revealed to him that Wharton and Mr. Boyce's daughter were to be

brought, before long, into close neighbourhood.

"I am sorry that I seem to you such a Pharisee," he said, turning upon

her a look which had both pain and excitement in it.

She was silent, and they walked on a few yards without speaking. The

wood had thickened around them: The high road was no longer visible. No

sound of wheels or footsteps reached them. The sun struck freely through

the beech-trees, already half bared, whitening the grey trunks at

intervals to an arrowy distinctness and majesty, or kindling the slopes

of red and freshly fallen leaves below into great patches of light and

flame. Through the stems, as always, the girdling blues of the plain,

and in their faces a gay and buoyant breeze, speaking rather of spring

than autumn. Robins, "yellow autumn's nightingales," sang in the hedge

to their right. In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their

charm felt. Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging,

wooing, defining. Aldous's heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve.

Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and

seeing his look she paled a little.

"Do you guess at all why it hurts me to jar with you?" he said--finding

his words in a rush, he did not know how--"Why every syllable of yours

matters to me? It is because I have hopes--dreams--which have become my

life! If you could accept this--this--feeling--this devotion--which has

grown up in me--if you could trust yourself to me--you should have no

cause, I think--ever--to think me hard or narrow towards any person, any

enthusiasm for which you had sympathy. May I say to you all that is in

my mind--or--or--am I presuming?"

She looked away from him, crimson again. A great wave of

exultation--boundless, intoxicating--swept through her. Then it was

checked by a nobler feeling--a quick, penitent sense of his nobleness.

"You don't know me," she said hurriedly: "you think you do. But I am all

odds and ends. I should annoy--wound--disappoint you."

His quiet grey eyes flamed.

"Come and sit down here, on these dry roots," he said, taking already

joyous command of her. "We shall be undisturbed. I have so much to say!"

She obeyed trembling. She felt no passion, but the strong thrill of

something momentous and irreparable, together with a swelling

pride--pride in such homage from such a man.

He led her a few steps down the slope, found a place for her against a

sheltering trunk, and threw himself down beside her. As he looked up at

the picture she made amid the autumn branches, at her bent head, her

shy moved look, her white hand lying ungloved on her black dress,

happiness overcame him. He took her hand, found she did not resist, drew

it to him, and clasping it in both his, bent his brow, his lips upon it.

It shook in his hold, but she was passive. The mixture of emotion and

self-control she showed touched him deeply. In his chivalrous modesty he

asked for nothing else, dreamt of nothing more.

Half an hour later they were still in the same spot. There had been much

talk between them, most of it earnest, but some of it quite gay, broken

especially by her smiles. Her teasing mood, however, had passed away.

She was instead composed and dignified, like one conscious that life had

opened before her to great issues.

Yet she had flinched often before that quiet tone of eager joy in which

he had described his first impressions of her, his surprise at finding

in her ideals, revolts, passions, quite unknown to him, so far, in the

women of his own class. Naturally he suppressed, perhaps he had even

forgotten, the critical amusement and irritation she had often excited

in him. He remembered, he spoke only of sympathy, delight, pleasure--of

his sense, as it were, of slaking some long-felt moral thirst at the

well of her fresh feeling. So she had attracted him first,--by a certain

strangeness and daring--by what she _said_--

"Now--and above all by what you _are_!" he broke out suddenly, moved out

of his even speech. "Oh! it is too much to believe--to dream of! Put

your hand in mine, and say again that it is really _true_ that we two

are to go forward together--that you will be always there to inspire--to

help--"

And as she gave him the hand, she must also let him--in this first

tremor of a pure passion--take the kiss which was now his by right. That

she should flush and draw away from him as she did, seemed to him the

most natural thing in the world, and the most maidenly.

Then, as their talk wandered on, bit by bit, he gave her all his

confidence, and she had felt herself honoured in receiving it. She

understood now at least something--a first fraction--of that inner life,

masked so well beneath his quiet English capacity and unassuming manner.

He had spoken of his Cambridge years, of his friend, of the desire of

his heart to make his landowner's power and position contribute

something towards that new and better social order, which he too, like

Hallin--though more faintly and intermittently--believed to be

approaching. The difficulties of any really new departure were

tremendous; he saw them more plainly and more anxiously than Hallin. Yet

he believed that he had thought his way to some effective reform on his

grandfather's large estate, and to some useful work as one of a group of

like-minded men in Parliament. She must have often thought him careless

and apathetic towards his great trust. But he was not so--not

careless--but paralysed often by intellectual difficulty, by the claims

of conflicting truths.

She, too, explained herself most freely, most frankly. She would have

nothing on her conscience.

"They will say, of course," she said with sudden nervous abruptness,

"that I am marrying you for wealth and position. And in a sense I shall

be. No! don't stop me! I should not marry you if--if--I did not like

you. But you can give me--you have--great opportunities. I tell you

frankly, I shall enjoy them and use them. Oh! do think well before you

do it. I shall _never_ be a meek, dependent wife. A woman, to my mind,

is bound to cherish her own individuality sacredly, married or not

married. Have you thought that I may often think it right to do things

you disagree with, that may scandalise your relations?"

"You shall be free," he said steadily. "I have thought of it all."

"Then there is my father," she said, turning her head away. "He is

ill--he wants pity, affection. I will accept no bond that forces me to

disown him."

"Pity and affection are to me the most sacred things in the world," he

said, kissing her hand gently. "Be content--be at rest--my beautiful

lady!"

There was again silence, full of thought on her side, of heavenly

happiness on his. The sun had sunk almost to the verge of the plain, the

wind had freshened.

"We _must_ go home," she said, springing up. "Taylor must have got there

an hour ago. Mother will be anxious, and I must--I must tell them."

"I will leave you at the gate," he suggested as they walked briskly;

"and you will ask your father, will you not, if I may see him to-night

after dinner?"

The trees thinned again in front of them, and the path curved inward to

the front. Suddenly a man, walking on the road, diverged into the path

and came towards them. He was swinging a stick and humming. His head was

uncovered, and his light chestnut curls were blown about his forehead by

the wind. Marcella, looking up at the sound of the steps, had a sudden

impression of something young and radiant, and Aldous stopped with an

exclamation.

The new-comer perceived them, and at sight of Aldous smiled, and

approached, holding out his hand.

"Why, Raeburn, I seem to have missed you twenty times a day this last

fortnight. We have been always on each other's tracks without meeting.

Yet I think, if we had met, we could have kept our tempers."

"Miss Boyce, I think you do not know Mr. Wharton," said Aldous, stiffly.

"May I introduce you?"

The young man's blue eyes, all alert and curious at the mention of

Marcella's name, ran over the girl's face and form. Then he bowed with a

certain charming exaggeration--like an eighteenth-century beau with his

hand upon his heart--and turned back with them a step or two towards the

road.

BOOK II.

"A woman has enough to govern wisely

Her own demeanours, passions and divisions."

CHAPTER I.

On a certain night in the December following the engagement of Marcella

Boyce to Aldous Raeburn, the woods and fields of Mellor, and all the

bare rampart of chalk down which divides the Buckinghamshire plain from

the forest upland of the Chilterns lay steeped in moonlight, and in the

silence which belongs to intense frost.

Winter had set in before the leaf had fallen from the last oaks; already

there had been a fortnight or more of severe cold, with hardly any snow.

The pastures were delicately white; the ditches and the wet furrows in

the ploughed land, the ponds on Mellor common, and the stagnant pool in

the midst of the village, whence it drew its main water supply, were

frozen hard. But the ploughed chalk land itself lay a dull grey beside

the glitter of the pastures, and the woods under the bright sun of the

days dropped their rime only to pass once more with the deadly cold of

the night under the fantastic empire of the frost. Every day the veil of

morning mist rose lightly from the woods, uncurtaining the wintry

spectacle, and melting into the brilliant azure of an unflecked sky;

every night the moon rose without a breath of wind, without a cloud; and

all the branch-work of the trees, where they stood in the open fields,

lay reflected clean and sharp on the whitened ground. The bitter cold

stole into the cottages, marking the old and feeble with the touch of

Azrael; while without, in the field solitudes, bird and beast cowered

benumbed and starving in hole and roosting place.

How still it was--this midnight--on the fringe of the woods! Two men

sitting concealed among some bushes at the edge of Mr. Boyce's largest

cover, and bent upon a common errand, hardly spoke to each other, so

strange and oppressive was the silence. One was Jim Hurd; the other was

a labourer, a son of old Patton of the almshouses, himself a man of

nearly sixty, with a small wizened face showing sharp and white to-night

under his slouched hat.

They looked out over a shallow cup of treeless land to a further bound

of wooded hill, ending towards the north in a bare bluff of down shining

steep under the moon. They were in shadow, and so was most of the wide

dip of land before them; but through a gap to their right, beyond the

wood, the moonbeams poured, and the farms nestling under the opposite

ridge, the plantations ranging along it, and the bald beacon hill in

which it broke to the plain, were all in radiant light.

Not a stir of life anywhere. Hurd put up his hand to his ear, and

leaning forward listened intently. Suddenly--a vibration, a dull

thumping sound in the soil of the bank immediately beside him. He

started, dropped his hand, and, stooping, laid his ear to the ground.

"Gi' us the bag," he said to his companion, drawing himself upright.

"You can hear 'em turnin' and creepin' as plain as anything. Now then,

you take these and go t' other side."

He handed over a bundle of rabbit nets. Patton, crawling on hands and

knees, climbed over the low overgrown bank on which the hedge stood into

the precincts of the wood itself. The state of the hedge, leaving the

cover practically open and defenceless along its whole boundary, showed

plainly enough that it belonged to the Mellor estate. But the field

beyond was Lord Maxwell's.

Hurd applied himself to netting the holes on his own side, pushing the

brambles and undergrowth aside with the sure hand of one who had already

reconnoitred the ground. Then he crept over to Patton to see that all

was right on the other side, came back, and went for the ferrets, of

whom he had four in a closely tied bag.

A quarter of an hour of intense excitement followed. In all, five

rabbits bolted--three on Hurd's side, two on Patton's. It was all the

two men could do to secure their prey, manage the ferrets, and keep a

watch on the holes. Hurd's great hands--now fixing the pegs that held

the nets, now dealing death to the entangled rabbit, whose neck he broke

in an instant by a turn of the thumb, now winding up the line that held

the ferret--seemed to be everywhere.

At last a ferret "laid up," the string attached to him having either

slipped or broken, greatly to the disgust of the men, who did not want

to be driven either to dig, which made a noise and took time, or to lose

their animal. The rabbits made no more sign, and it was tolerably

evident that they had got as much as they were likely to get out of

that particular "bury."

Hurd thrust his arm deep into the hole where he had put the ferret.

"Ther's summat in the way," he declared at last. "Mos' likely a dead un.

Gi' me the spade."

He dug away the mouth of the hole, making as little noise as possible,

and tried again.

"'Ere ee be," he cried, clutching at something, drew it out, exclaimed

in disgust, flung it away, and pounced upon a rabbit which on the

removal of the obstacle followed like a flash, pursued by the lost

ferret. Hurd caught the rabbit by the neck, held it by main force, and

killed it; then put the ferret into his pocket. "Lord!" he said, wiping

his brow, "they do come suddent."

What he had pulled out was a dead cat; a wretched puss, who on some

happy hunt had got itself wedged in the hole, and so perished there

miserably. He and Patton stooped over it wondering; then Hurd walked

some paces along the bank, looking warily out to the right of him across

the open country all the time. He threw the poor malodorous thing far

into the wood and returned.

The two men lit their pipes under the shelter of the bushes, and rested

a bit, well hidden, but able to see out through a break in the bit of

thicket.

"Six on 'em," said Hurd, looking at the stark creatures beside him. "I

be too done to try another bury. I'll set a snare or two, an' be off

home."

Patton puffed silently. He was wondering whether Hurd would give him one

rabbit or two. Hurd had both "plant" and skill, and Patton would have

been glad enough to come for one. Still he was a plaintive man with a

perpetual grievance, and had already made up his mind that Hurd would

treat him shabbily to-night, in spite of many past demonstrations that

his companion was on the whole of a liberal disposition.

"You bin out workin' a day's work already, han't yer?" he said

presently. He himself was out of work, like half the village, and had

been presented by his wife with boiled swede for supper. But he knew

that Hurd had been taken on at the works at the Court, where the new

drive was being made, and a piece of ornamental water enlarged and

improved--mainly for the sake of giving employment in bad times. He,

Patton, and some of his mates, had tried to get a job there. But the

steward had turned them back. The men off the estate had first claim,

and there was not room for all of them. Yet Hurd had been taken on,

which had set people talking.

Hurd nodded, and said nothing. He was not disposed to be communicative

on the subject of his employment at the Court.

"An' it be true as _she_ be goin' to marry Muster Raeburn?"

Patton jerked his head towards the right, where above a sloping hedge

the chimneys of Mellor and the tops of the Mellor cedars, some two or

three fields away, showed distinct against the deep night blue.

Hurd nodded again, and smoked diligently. Patton, nettled by this

parsimony of speech, made the inward comment that his companion was "a

deep un." The village was perfectly aware of the particular friendship

shown by Miss Boyce to the Hurds. He was goaded into trying a more

stinging topic.

"Westall wor braggin' last night at Bradsell's"--(Bradsell was the

landlord of "The Green Man" at Mellor)--"ee said as how they'd taken you

on at the Court--but that didn't prevent 'em knowin' as you was a bad

lot. Ee said _ee_ 'ad 'is eye on yer--ee 'ad warned yer twoice last

year--"

"That's a lie!" said Hurd, removing his pipe an instant and putting it

back again.

Patton looked more cheerful.

"Well, ee spoke cru'l. Ee was certain, ee said, as you could tell a

thing or two about them coverts at Tudley End, if the treuth were known.

You wor allus a loafer, an' a loafer you'd be. Yer might go snivellin'

to Miss Boyce, ee said, but yer wouldn't do no honest work--ee said--not

if yer could help it--that's what ee said."

"Devil!" said Hurd between his teeth, with a quick lift of all his great

misshapen chest. He took his pipe out of his mouth, rammed it down

fiercely with his thumb, and put it in his pocket.

"Look out!" exclaimed Patton with a start.

A whistle!--clear and distinct--from the opposite side of the hollow.

Then a man's figure, black and motionless an instant on the whitened

down, with a black speck beside it; lastly, another figure higher up

along the hill, in quick motion towards the first, with other specks

behind it. The poachers instantly understood that it was Westall--whose

particular beat lay in this part of the estate--signalling to his night

watcher, Charlie Dynes, and that the two men would be on them in no

time. It was the work of a few seconds to efface as far as possible the

traces of their raid, to drag some thick and trailing brambles which

hung near over the mouth of the hole where there had been digging, to

catch up the ferrets and game, and to bid Hurd's lurcher to come to

heel. The two men crawled up the ditch with their burdens as far away to

leeward as they could get from the track by which the keepers would

cross the field. The ditch was deeply overgrown, and when the

approaching voices warned them to lie close, they crouched under a dense

thicket of brambles and overhanging bushes, afraid of nothing but the

noses of the keepers' dogs.

Dogs and men, however, passed unsuspecting.

"Hold still!" said Hurd, checking Patton's first attempt to move. "He'll

be back again mos' like. It's 'is dodge."

And sure enough in twenty minutes or so the men reappeared. They

retraced their steps from the further corner of the field, where some

preserves of Lord Maxwell's approached very closely to the big Mellor

wood, and came back again along the diagonal path within fifty yards or

so of the men in the ditch.

In the stillness the poachers could hear Westall's harsh and peremptory

voice giving some orders to his underling, or calling to the dogs, who

had scattered a little in the stubble. Hurd's own dog quivered beside

him once or twice.

Then steps and voices faded into the distance and all was safe.

The poachers crept out grinning, and watched the keepers' progress

along the hill-face, till they disappeared into the Maxwell woods.

"_Ee_ be sold again--blast 'im!" said Hurd, with a note of quite

disproportionate exultation in his queer, cracked voice. "Now I'll set

them snares. But you'd better git home."

Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him

two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his

poacher's coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a

way as possible.

Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden

crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three

hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.

Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor

church. The cold was bitter, but his night's work was not over yet, and

he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.

Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of

the hills in the frosty silence. Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over

the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to

climb the ascent of the wood. The outskirts of it were filled with a

thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it

was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon,

now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid

the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about

their polished trunks. Such infinite grace and strength in the line work

of the branches!--branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected

fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable

harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against

the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as

though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, were

but one majestic conception of a master artist.

But Hurd saw nothing of this as he plunged through the leaves. He was

thinking that it was extremely likely a man would be on the look-out for

him to-night under the big beeches--a man with some business to propose

to him. A few words dropped in his ear at a certain public-house the

night before had seemed to him to mean this, and he had accordingly sent

Patton out of the way.

But when he got to the top of the hill no one was to be seen or heard,

and he sat him down on a fallen log to smoke and wait awhile.

He had no sooner, however, taken his seat than he shifted it uneasily,

turning himself round so as to look in the other direction. For in front

of him, as he was first placed, there was a gap in the trees, and over

the lower wood, plainly visible and challenging attention, rose the dark

mass of Mellor House. And the sight of Mellor suggested reflections just

now that were not particularly agreeable to Jim Hurd.

He had just been poaching Mr. Boyce's rabbits without any sort of

scruple. But the thought of _Miss_ Boyce was not pleasant to him when he

was out on these nightly raids.

Why had she meddled? He bore her a queer sort of grudge for it. He had

just settled down to the bit of cobbling which, together with his wife's

plait, served him for a blind, and was full of a secret excitement as to

various plans he had in hand for "doing" Westall, combining a maximum of

gain for the winter with a maximum of safety, when Miss Boyce walked in,

radiant with the news that there was employment for him at the Court, on

the new works, whenever he liked to go and ask for it.

And then she had given him an odd look.

"And I was to pass you on a message from Lord Maxwell, Hurd," she had

said: "'You tell him to keep out of Westall's way for the future, and

bygones shall be bygones.' Now, I'm not going to ask what that means. If

you've been breaking some of our landlords' law, I'm not going to say

I'm shocked. I'd alter the law to-morrow, if I could!--you know I would.

But I do say you're a fool if you go on with it, now you've got good

work for the winter; you must please remember your wife and children."

And there he had sat like a log, staring at her--both he and Minta not

knowing where to look, or how to speak. Then at last his wife had broken

out, crying:

"Oh, miss! we should ha starved--"

And Miss Boyce had stopped her in a moment, catching her by the hand.

Didn't she know it? Was she there to preach to them? Only Hurd must

promise not to do it any more, for his wife's sake.

And he--stammering--left without excuse or resource, either against her

charge, or the work she offered him--had promised her, and promised her,

moreover--in his trepidation--with more fervency than he at all liked

to remember.

For about a fortnight, perhaps, he had gone to the Court by day, and had

kept indoors by night. Then, just as the vagabond passions, the Celtic

instincts, so long repressed, so lately roused, were goading at him

again, he met Westall in the road--Westall, who looked him over from top

to toe with an insolent smile, as much as to say, "Well, my man, we've

got the whip hand of you now!" That same night he crept out again in the

dark and the early morning, in spite of all Minta's tears and scolding.

Well, what matter? As towards the rich and the law, he had the morals of

the slave, who does not feel that he has had any part in making the

rules he is expected to keep, and breaks them when he can with glee. It

made him uncomfortable, certainly, that Miss Boyce should come in and

out of their place as she did, should be teaching Willie to read, and

bringing her old dresses to make up for Daisy and Nellie, while he was

making a fool of her in this way. Still he took it all as it came. One

sensation wiped out another.

Besides, Miss Boyce had, after all, much part in this double life of

his. Whenever he was at home, sitting over the fire with a pipe, he read

those papers and things she had brought him in the summer. He had not

taken much notice of them at first. Now he spelled them out again and

again. He had always thought "them rich people took advantage of yer."

But he had never supposed, somehow, they were such thieves, such mean

thieves, as it appeared, they were. A curious ferment filled his

restless, inconsequent brain. The poor were downtrodden, but they were

coming to their rights. The land and its creatures were for the people!

not for the idle rich. Above all, Westall was a devil, and must be put

down. For the rest, if he could have given words to experience, he would

have said that since he began to go out poaching he had burst his prison

and found himself. A life which was not merely endurance pulsed in him.

The scent of the night woods, the keenness of the night air, the tracks

and ways of the wild creatures, the wiles by which he slew them, the

talents and charms of his dog Bruno--these things had developed in him

new aptitudes both of mind and body, which were in themselves

exhilaration. He carried his dwarf's frame more erect, breathed from an

ampler chest. As for his work at the Court, he thought of it often with

impatience and disgust. It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or

he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.

"Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!" He fell

thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked. Two of Westall's

best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in

November!--and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say "Jack

Robinson." Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds.

There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the

hollow--they had been kept for the last shoot in January. Hang him! why

wasn't that fellow up to time?

But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack

across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the

ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic

melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found

himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood.

A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called

overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle or fall of a branch

that startled him. Yet he knew every track, every tree in that wood. Up

and down that field outside he had followed his father at the plough, a

little sickly object of a lad, yet seldom unhappy, so long as childhood

lasted, and his mother's temper could be fled from, either at school or

in the fields. Under that boundary hedge to the right he had lain

stunned and bleeding all a summer afternoon, after old Westall had

thrashed him, his heart scorched within him by the sense of wrong and

the craving for revenge. On that dim path leading down the slope of the

wood, George Westall had once knocked him down for disturbing a sitting

pheasant. He could see himself falling--the tall, powerful lad standing

over him with a grin.

Then, inconsequently, he began to think of his father's death. He made a

good end did the old man. "Jim, my lad, the Lord's verra merciful," or

"Jim, you'll look after Ann." Ann was the only daughter. Then a sigh or

two, and a bit of sleep, and it was done.

And everybody must go the same way, must come to the same stopping of

the breath, the same awfulness--in a life of blind habit--of a moment

that never had been before and never could be again? He did not put it

to these words, but the shudder that is in the thought for all of us,

seized him. He was very apt to think of dying, to ponder in his secret

heart _how_ it would be, and when. And always it made him very soft

towards Minta and the children. Not only did the _life_ instinct cling

to them, to the warm human hands and faces hemming him in and protecting

him from that darkness beyond with its shapes of terror. But to think of

himself as sick, and gasping to his end, like his father, was to put

himself back in his old relation to his wife, when they were first

married. He might cross Minta now, but if he came to lie sick, he could

see himself there, in the future, following her about with his eyes, and

thanking her, and doing all she told him, just as he'd used to do. He

couldn't die without her to help him through. The very idea of her being

taken first, roused in him a kind of spasm--a fierceness, a clenching of

the hands. But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his

way, and she must just get used to it.

Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood. He replied, and was

almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith's

apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells' village, who had often brought him

information before.

The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log. Then they parted;

Hurd went back to the ditch where he had left the game, put two rabbits

into his pockets, left the other two to be removed in the morning when

he came to look at his snares, and went off home, keeping as much as

possible in the shelter of the hedges. On one occasion he braved the

moonlight and the open field, rather than pass through a woody corner

where an old farmer had been found dead some six years before. Then he

reached a deep lane leading to the village, and was soon at his own

door.

As he climbed the wooden ladder leading to the one bedroom where he, his

wife, and his four children slept, his wife sprang up in bed.

"Jim, you must be perished--such a night as 't is. Oh, Jim--where ha'

you bin?"

She was a miserable figure in her coarse nightgown, with her grizzling

hair wild about her, and her thin arms nervously outstretched along the

bed. The room was freezing cold, and the moonlight stealing through the

scanty bits of curtains brought into dismal clearness the squalid bed,

the stained walls, and bare uneven floor. On an iron bedstead, at the

foot of the large bed, lay Willie, restless and coughing, with the elder

girl beside him fast asleep; the other girl lay beside her mother, and

the wooden box with rockers, which held the baby, stood within reach of

Mrs. Hurd's arm.

He made her no answer, but went to look at the coughing boy, who had

been in bed for a week with bronchitis.

"You've never been and got in Westall's way again?" she said anxiously.

"It's no good my tryin' to get a wink o' sleep when you're out like

this."

"Don't you worrit yourself," he said to her, not roughly, but decidedly.

"I'm all right. This boy's bad, Minta."

"Yes, an' I kep' up the fire an' put the spout on the kettle, too." She

pointed to the grate and to the thin line of steam, which was doing its

powerless best against the arctic cold of the room.

Hurd bent over the boy and tried to put him comfortable. The child, weak

and feverish, only began to cry--a hoarse bronchial crying, which

threatened to wake the baby. He could not be stopped, so Hurd made haste

to take off his own coat and boots, and then lifted the poor soul in his

arms.

"You'll be quiet, Will, and go sleep, won't yer, if daddy takes keer on

you?"

He wrapped his own coat round the little fellow, and lying down beside

his wife, took him on his arm and drew the thin brown blankets over

himself and his charge. He himself was warm with exercise, and in a

little while the huddling creatures on either side of him were warm too.

The quick, panting breath of the boy soon showed that he was asleep. His

father, too, sank almost instantly into deep gulfs of sleep. Only the

wife--nervous, overdone, and possessed by a thousand fears--lay tossing

and wakeful hour after hour, while the still glory of the winter night

passed by.