"I _love_ this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with
his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to
take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or
carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper classes are!
Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save
our lives."
They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of
the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had
been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose
money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to
her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to
match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the
upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to
eighteenth-century taste. But the old books in the old latticed shelves
which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the
Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that
worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table
at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old
friend--on the wrong side--Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the
worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay
in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the
laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there
were rotten places in the carpetless floor.
"I have tried my best," said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a
hole in the floor. "I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to
mend some of these places myself. But I only broke the rotten wood away;
and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good. I did get a
carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn't know where to
begin. I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but--"
She looked sadly round the musty, forlorn place.
"But not so well, I am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's
apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's
maddening to think what duffers we gentlefolks are!"
"Why do you harp on that?" said Marcella, quickly. She had been taking
him over the house, and was in twenty minds again as to whether and how
much she liked him.
"Because I have been reading some Board of Trade reports before
breakfast," said Wharton, "on one or two of the Birmingham industries in
particular. Goodness! what an amount of knowledge and skill and resource
these fellows have that I go about calling the 'lower orders.' I wonder
how long they are going to let me rule over them!"
"I suppose brain-power and education count for something still?" said
Marcella, half scornfully.
"I am greatly obliged to the world for thinking so," said Wharton with
emphasis, "and for thinking so about the particular kind of brain-power
I happen to possess, which is the point. The processes by which a
Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to
'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are,
of course, mere imbecility--compared to my performances in Responsions.
Lucky for _me_, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a
good time of it--and the Birmingham jeweller calls me 'sir.'"
"Oh! the skilled labour! that can take care of itself, and won't go on
calling you 'sir' much longer. But what about the unskilled--the people
here for instance--the villagers? We talk of their governing themselves;
we wish it, and work for it. But which of us _really_ believes that they
are fit for it, or that they are ever going to get along without _our_
brain-power?"
"No--poor souls!" said Wharton, with a peculiar vibrating emphasis.
"'_By their stripes we are healed, by their death we have lived_.' Do
you remember your Carlyle?"
They had entered one of the bays formed by the bookcases which on either
side of the room projected from the wall at regular intervals, and were
standing by one of the windows which looked out on the great avenue.
Beside the window on either side hung a small portrait--in the one case
of an elderly man in a wig, in the other of a young, dark-haired woman.
"Plenty in general, but nothing in particular," said Marcella, laughing.
"Quote."
He was leaning against the angle formed by the wall and the bookcase.
The half-serious, half-provocative intensity of his blue eyes under the
brow which drooped forward contrasted with the careless, well-appointed
ease of his general attitude and dress.
"'_Two men I honour, and no third_,'" he said, quoting in a slightly
dragging, vibrating voice: "'_First, the toil-worn craftsman that with
earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her
man's.--Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us
were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred_.' Heavens! how the words swing! But it is great nonsense, you
know, for you and me--Venturists--to be maundering like this.
Charity--benevolence--that is all Carlyle is leading up to. He merely
wants the cash nexus supplemented by a few good offices. But we want
something much more unpleasant! 'Keep your subscriptions--hand over your
dividends--turn out of your land--and go to work!' Nowadays society is
trying to get out of doing what _we_ want, by doing what Carlyle
wanted."
"_Do_ you want it?" said Marcella.
"I don't know," he said, laughing. "It won't come in our time."
Her lip showed her scorn.
"That's what we all think. Meanwhile you will perhaps admit that a
little charity greases the wheels."
"_You_ must, because you are a woman; and women are made for
charity--and aristocracy."
"Do you suppose you know so much about women?" she asked him, rather
hotly. "I notice it is always the assumption of the people who make most
mistakes."
"Oh! I know enough to steer by!" he said, smiling, with a little
inclination of his curly head, as though to propitiate her. "How like
you are to that portrait!"
Marcella started, and saw that he was pointing to the woman's portrait
beside the window--looking from it to his hostess with a close
considering eye.
"That was an ancestress of mine," she said coldly, "an Italian lady. She
was rich and musical. Her money built these rooms along the garden, and
these are her music books."
She showed him that the shelves against which she was leaning were full
of old music.
"Italian!" he said, lifting his eyebrows. "Ah, that explains. Do you
know--that you have all the qualities of a leader!"--and he moved away a
yard from her, studying her--"mixed blood--one must always have that to
fire and fuse the English paste--and then--but no! that won't do--I
should offend you."
Her first instinct was one of annoyance--a wish to send him about his
business, or rather to return him to her mother who would certainly keep
him in order. Instead, however, she found herself saying, as she looked
carelessly out of window--
"Oh! go on."
"Well, then"--he drew himself up suddenly and wheeled round upon
her--"you have the gift of compromise. That is invaluable--that will
take you far."
"Thank you!" she said. "Thank you! I know what that means--from a
Venturist. You think me a mean insincere person!"
He started, then recovered himself and came to lean against the
bookshelves beside her.
"I mean nothing of the sort," he said, in quite a different manner, with
a sort of gentle and personal emphasis. "But--may I explain myself, Miss
Boyce, in a room with a fire? I can see you shivering under your fur."
For the frost still reigned supreme outside, and the white grass and
trees threw chill reflected lights into the forsaken library. Marcella
controlled a pulse of excitement that had begun to beat in her, admitted
that it was certainly cold, and led the way through a side door to a
little flagged parlour, belonging to the oldest portion of the house,
where, however, a great log-fire was burning, and some chairs drawn up
round it. She took one and let the fur wrap she had thrown about her for
their promenade through the disused rooms drop from her shoulders. It
lay about her in full brown folds, giving special dignity to her slim
height and proud head. Wharton glancing about in his curious inquisitive
way, now at the neglected pictures, now on the walls, now at the old oak
chairs and chests, now at her, said to himself that she was a splendid
and inspiring creature. She seemed to be on the verge of offence with
him too, half the time, which was stimulating. She would have liked, he
thought, to play the great lady with him already, as Aldous Raeburn's
betrothed. But he had so far managed to keep her off that plane--and
intended to go on doing so.
"Well, I meant this," he said, leaning against the old stone chimney
and looking down upon her; "only _don't_ be offended with me, please.
You are a Socialist, and you are going--some day--to be Lady Maxwell.
Those combinations are only possible to women. They can sustain them,
because they are imaginative--not logical."
She flushed.
"And you," she said, breathing quickly, "are a Socialist and a landlord.
What is the difference?"
He laughed.
"Ah! but I have no gift--I can't ride the two horses, as you will be
able to--quite honestly. There's the difference. And the consequence is
that with my own class I am an outcast--they all hate me. But you will
have power as Lady Maxwell--and power as a Socialist--because you will
give and take. Half your time you will act as Lady Maxwell should, the
other half like a Venturist. And, as I said, it will give you power--a
modified power. But men are less clever at that kind of thing."
"Do you mean to say," she asked him abruptly, "that you have given up
the luxuries and opportunities of your class?"
He shifted his position a little.
"That is a different matter," he said after a moment. "We Socialists are
all agreed, I think, that no man can be a Socialist by himself.
Luxuries, for the present, are something personal, individual. It is
only a man's 'public form' that matters. And there, as I said before, I
have no gift!--I have not a relation or an old friend in the world that
has not turned his back upon me--as you might see for yourself
yesterday! My class has renounced me already--which, after all, is a
weakness."
"So you pity yourself?" she said.
"By no means! We all choose the part in life that amuses us--that brings
us most _thrill_. I get most thrill out of throwing myself into the
workmen's war--much more than I could ever get, you will admit, out of
dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me
to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the
present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great
tragi-comedy of the working-class movement. It stirs, pricks, interests
me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental passions
in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to
some great outburst, to scenes and struggles at any rate that will make
us all look alive. I am like a child with the best of its cake to come,
but with plenty in hand already. Ah!--stay still a moment, Miss Boyce!"
To her amazement he stooped suddenly towards her; and she, looking down,
saw that a corner of her light, black dress, which had been overhanging
the low stone fender, was in flames, and that he was putting it out with
his hands. She made a movement to rise, alarmed lest the flames should
leap to her face--her hair. But he, releasing one hand for an instant
from its task of twisting and rolling the skirt upon itself, held her
heavily down.
"Don't move; I will have it out in a moment. You won't be burnt."
And in a second more she was looking at a ragged brown hole in her
dress; and at him, standing, smiling, before the fire, and wrapping a
handkerchief round some of the fingers of his left hand.
"You have burnt yourself, Mr. Wharton?"
"A little."
"I will go and get something--what would you like?"
"A little olive oil if you have some, and a bit of lint--but don't
trouble yourself."
She flew to find her mother's maid, calling and searching on her way for
Mrs. Boyce herself, but in vain. Mrs. Boyce had disappeared after
breakfast, and was probably helping her husband to dress.
In a minute or so Marcella ran downstairs again, bearing various
medicaments. She sped to the Stone Parlour, her cheek and eye glowing.
"Let me do it for you."
"If you please," said Wharton, meekly.
She did her best, but she was not skilful with her fingers, and this
close contact with him somehow excited her.
"There," she said, laughing and releasing him. "Of course, if I were a
work-girl I should have done it better. They are not going to be very
bad, I think."
"What, the burns? Oh, no! They will have recovered, I am afraid, long
before your dress."
"Oh, my dress! yes, it is deplorable. I will go and change it."
She turned to go, but she lingered instead, and said with an odd,
introductory laugh:
"I believe you saved my life!"
"Well, I am glad I was here. You might have lost self-possession--even
_you_ might, you know!--and then it would have been serious."
"Anyway"--her voice was still uncertain--"I might have been
disfigured--disfigured for life!"
"I don't know why you should dwell upon it now it's done with," he
declared, smiling.
"It would be strange, wouldn't it, if I took it quite for granted--all
in the day's work?" She held out her hand: "I am grateful--please."
He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which
might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.
"May I exact a reward?"
"Ask it."
"Will you take me down with you to your village? I know you are going. I
must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington. I have
an appointment there at two o'clock. But perhaps you will introduce me
to one or two of your poor people first?"
Marcella assented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her
walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother
to go with them. She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a
feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and
indecorously towards whom?--towards Aldous? But how, or why? She did not
know. But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity,
combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the
day. In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.
By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella's uncomfortable
feelings had all passed away. Without knowing it, she was becoming too
much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were
together. It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a
few hundred yards that he was taking advantage--presuming on what had
happened. He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred
ways, she discovered. At the same time it was _she_ who was always on
the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against
the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave
her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy's country. He put her
through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations,
the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what
she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought
it _possible_ to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her
pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.
But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had
constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not
mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was
talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she
had not even managed to _see_ these people, to interpret their lives
under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.
Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant
so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner. He let
her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still
pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and
irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other.
All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of
society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior"
and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to
these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the
ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he
did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so
much the worse for you when the working class came to its own; if you
did do them, the burden of debt was hardly diminished, and the rope was
still left on your neck.
Now Marcella herself had on one or two occasions taken a malicious
pleasure in flaunting these doctrines, or some of them, under Miss
Raeburn's eyes. But somehow, as applied to herself, they were
disagreeable. Each of us is to himself a "special case"; and she saw the
other side. Hence a constant soreness of feeling; a constant recalling
of the argument to the personal point of view; and through it all a
curious growth of intimacy, a rubbing away of barriers. She had felt
herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we
know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by
that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty
impulse in her to the noblest proportions! Under Wharton's Socratic
method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish
desires, worthy of her childhood--to cry, to go into a passion!--and
when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young,
dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have
beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish
pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his
doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural
relations of country life.
They went first to Mrs. Jellison's, to whom Marcella wished to unfold
her workshop scheme.
"Don't let me keep you," she said to Wharton coldly, as they neared the
cottage; "I know you have to catch your train."
Wharton consulted his watch. He had to be at a local station some two
miles off within an hour.
"Oh! I have time," he said. "Do take me in, Miss Boyce. I have made
acquaintance with these people so far, as my constituents--now show them
to me as your subjects. Besides, I am an observer. I 'collect' peasants.
They are my study."
"They are not my subjects, but my friends," she said with the same
stiffness.
They found Mrs. Jellison having her dinner. The lively old woman was
sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table
which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window
and window-sill whereon lay her coil of "plait" and the simple
straw-splitting machine she had just been working. When Marcella had
taken the only other chair the hovel contained, nothing else remained
for Wharton but to flatten himself as closely against the door as he
might.
"I'm sorry I can't bid yer take a cheer," said Mrs. Jellison to him,
"but what yer han't got yer can't give, so I don't trouble my head about
nothink."
Wharton applauded her with easy politeness, and then gave himself, with
folded arms, to examining the cottage while Marcella talked. It might be
ten feet broad, he thought, by six feet in one part and eight feet in
another. The roof was within little more than an inch of his head. The
stairway in the corner was falling to pieces; he wondered how the woman
got up safely to her bed at night; custom, he supposed, can make even
old bones agile.
Meanwhile Marcella was unfolding the project of the straw-plaiting
workshop that she and Lady Winterbourne were about to start. Mrs.
Jellison put on her spectacles apparently that she might hear the
better, pushed away her dinner in spite of her visitors' civilities, and
listened with a bright and beady eye.
"An' yer agoin' to pay me one a sixpence a score, where I now gets
ninepence. And I'll not have to tramp it into town no more--you'll send
a man round. And who is agoin' to pay me, miss, if you'll excuse me
asking?"
"Lady Winterbourne and I," said Marcella, smiling. "We're going to
employ this village and two others, and make as good business of it as
we can. But we're going to begin by giving the workers better wages, and
in time we hope to teach them the higher kinds of work."
"Lor'!" said Mrs. Jellison. "But I'm not one o' them as kin do with
changes." She took up her plait and looked at it thoughtfully.
"Eighteen-pence a score. It wor that rate when I wor a girl. An' it ha'
been dibble--dibble--iver sense; a penny off here, an' a penny off
there, an' a hard job to keep a bite ov anythink in your mouth."
"Then I may put down your name among our workers, Mrs. Jellison?" said
Marcella, rising and smiling down upon her.
"Oh, lor', no; I niver said that," said Mrs. Jellison, hastily. "I don't
hold wi' shilly-shallyin' wi' yer means o' livin'. I've took my plait to
Jimmy Gedge--'im an' 'is son, fust shop on yer right hand when yer git
into town--twenty-five year, summer and winter--me an' three other
women, as give me a penny a journey for takin' theirs. If I wor to go
messin' about wi' Jimmy Gedge, Lor' bless yer, I should 'ear ov it--oh!
I shoulden sleep o' nights for thinkin' o' how Jimmy ud serve me out
when I wor least egspectin' ov it. He's a queer un. No, miss, thank yer
kindly; but I think I'll bide."
Marcella, amazed, began to argue a little, to expound the many
attractions of the new scheme. Greatly to her annoyance, Wharton came
forward to her help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new
partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy
suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm,
embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but
sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity
but to talk of something else and go--above all, to talk of something
else before going, lest the would-be benefactor should be thought a
petty tyrant.
"Oh, Johnnie?--thank yer, miss--'e's an owdacious young villain as iver
I seed--but _clever_--lor', you'd need 'ave eyes in yer back to look
after _'im_. An' _coaxin'_! ''Aven't yer brought me no sweeties,
Gran'ma?' 'No, my dear,' says I. 'But if you was to _look_, Gran'ma--in
both your pockets, Gran'ma--iv you was to let _me_ look?' It's a sharp
un Isabella, she don't 'old wi' sweet-stuff, she says, sich a pack o'
nonsense. She'd stuff herself sick when she wor 'is age. Why shouldn't
_ee_ be happy, same as her? There ain't much to make a child 'appy in
_that_ 'ouse. Westall, ee's that mad about them poachers over Tudley
End; ee's like a wild bull at 'ome. I told Isabella ee'd come to
knockin' ov her about _some_ day, though ee did speak so oily when ee
wor a courtin'. Now she knows as I kin see a thing or two," said Mrs.
Jellison, significantly. Her manner, Wharton noticed, kept always the
same gay philosophy, whatever subject turned up.
"Why, that's an old story--that Tudley End business--" said Marcella,
rising. "I should have thought Westall might have got over it by now."
"But bless yer, ee says it's goin' on as lively as iver. Ee says ee
knows they're set on grabbin' the birds t'other side the estate, over
beyond Mellor way--ee's got wind of it--an' ee's watchin' night an' day
to see they don't do him no bad turn _this_ month, bekase o' the big
shoot they allus has in January. An' lor', ee do speak drefful bad o'
_soom_ folks," said Mrs. Jellison, with an amused expression. "You know
some on 'em, miss, don't yer?" And the old woman, who had begun toying
with her potatoes, slanted her fork over her shoulder so as to point
towards the Hurds' cottage, whereof the snow-laden roof could be seen
conspicuously through the little lattice beside her, making sly eyes the
while at her visitor.
"I don't believe a word of it," said Marcella, impatiently. "Hurd has
been in good work since October, and has no need to poach. Westall has a
down on him. You may tell him I think so, if you like."
"That I will," said Mrs. Jellison, cheerfully, opening the door for
them. "There's nobody makes 'im 'ear the trëuth, nobbut me. I _loves_
naggin' ov 'im, ee's that masterful. But ee don't master _me_!"
"A gay old thing," said Wharton as they shut the gate behind them. "How
she does enjoy the human spectacle. And obstinate too. But you will find
the younger ones more amenable."
"Of course," said Marcella, with dignity. "I have a great many names
already. The old people are always difficult. But Mrs. Jellison will
come round."
"Are you going in here?"
"Please."
Wharton knocked at the Hurds' door, and Mrs. Hurd opened.
The cottage was thick with smoke. The chimney only drew when the door
was left open. But the wind to-day was so bitter that mother and
children preferred the smoke to the draught. Marcella soon made out the
poor little bronchitic boy, sitting coughing by the fire, and Mrs. Hurd
busied with some washing. She introduced Wharton, who, as before, stood
for some time, hat in hand, studying the cottage. Marcella was perfectly
conscious of it, and a blush rose to her cheek while she talked to Mrs.
Hurd. For both this and Mrs. Jellison's hovel were her father's property
and somewhat highly rented.
Minta Hurd said eagerly that she would join the new straw-plaiting, and
went on to throw out a number of hurried, half-coherent remarks about
the state of the trade past and present, leaning meanwhile against the
table and endlessly drying her hands on the towel she had taken up when
her visitors came in.
Her manner was often nervous and flighty in these days. She never looked
happy; but Marcella put it down to health or natural querulousness of
character. Yet both she and the children were clearly better nourished,
except Willie, in whom the tubercular tendency was fast gaining on the
child's strength.
Altogether Marcella was proud of her work, and her eager interest in
this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more
possessive than ever. Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but
she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of class
differences, against which in her own way she was struggling. One thing
delighted her--that he seemed to take more and more interest in the
labour questions she discussed with him, and in that fervid, exuberant
literature she provided him with. Moreover, he now went to all Mr.
Wharton's meetings that were held within reasonable distance of Mellor;
and, as she said to Aldous with a little laugh, which, however, was not
unsweet, _he_ had found her man work--_she_ had robbed his candidate of
a vote.
Wharton listened a while to her talk with Minta, smiled a little,
unperceived of Marcella, at the young mother's docilities of manner and
phrase; then turned his attention to the little hunched and coughing
object by the fire.
"Are you very bad, little man?"
The white-faced child looked up, a dreary look, revealing a patient,
melancholy soul. He tried to answer, but coughed instead.
Wharton, moving towards him, saw a bit of ragged white paper lying on
the ground, which had been torn from a grocery parcel.
"Would you like something to amuse you a bit--Ugh! this smoke! Come
round here, it won't catch us so much. _Now_, then, what do you say to a
doggie,--two doggies?"
The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger's knee, and did
his very utmost to stop coughing. But when he had succeeded his quick
panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton's knee.
"Hm--Give him two months or thereabouts!" thought Wharton. "What a
beastly hole!--one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade
larger. Damp, insanitary, cold--bad water, bad drainage, I'll be
bound--bad everything. That girl may well try her little best. And I go
making up to that man Boyce! What for? Old spites?--new
spites?--which?--or both!"
Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping;
and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most
enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears
and stretching legs.
The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched
it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most
exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.
"What? did you like it, grasshopper?" cried Wharton, enchanted by the
beauty of the look, his own colour mounting. "Then you shall have
another."
And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside
the first, stood a second fairy animal--a greyhound this time, with
arching neck and sharp long nose.
"There's two on 'em at Westall's!" cried the child, hoarsely, clutching
at his treasures in an ecstasy.
Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the
name. Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at
once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court. She understood they
were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.
Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. "Oh! he
didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed
satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's
annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm,
turned his head an instant to listen.
Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs.
Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it. He had promised her, she thought
to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the
word of a working man as different from anybody else's.
So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the
stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and
give a smile or two to the sick boy.
But, as she did so, she stood amazed at the spectacle of Wharton and the
child. Then, moving up to them, she perceived the menagerie--for it had
grown to one--on Wharton's knee.
"You didn't guess I had such tricks," he said, smiling.
"But they are so good--so artistic!" She took up a little galloping
horse he had just fashioned and wondered at it.
"A great-aunt taught me--she was a genius--I follow her at a long
distance. Will you let me go, young man? You may keep all of them."
But the child, with a sudden contraction of the brow, flung a tiny
stick-like arm round his neck, pressing hard, and looking at him. There
was a red spot in each wasted cheek, and his eyes were wide and happy.
Wharton returned the look with one of quiet scrutiny--the scrutiny of
the doctor or the philosopher. On Marcella's quick sense the contrast of
the two heads impressed itself--the delicate youth of Wharton's with its
clustering curls--the sunken contours and the helpless suffering of the
other. Then Wharton kissed the little fellow, put his animals carefully
on to a chair beside him, and set him down.
They walked along the snowy street again, in a different relation to
each other. Marcella had been touched and charmed, and Wharton teased
her no more. As they reached the door of the almshouse where the old
Pattons lived, she said to him: "I think I had rather go in here by
myself, please. I have some things to give them--old Patton has been
very ill this last week--but I know what you think of doles--and I know
too what you think, what you must think, of my father's cottages. It
makes me feel a hypocrite; yet I must do these things; we are different,
you and I--I am sure you will miss your train!"
But there was no antagonism, only painful feeling in her softened look.
Wharton put out his hand.
"Yes, it is time for me to go. You say I make you feel a hypocrite! I
wonder whether you have any idea what you make me feel? Do you imagine I
should dare to say the things I have said except to one of the _élite_?
Would it be worth my while, as a social reformer? Are you not vowed to
great destinies? When one comes across one of the tools of the future,
must one not try to sharpen it, out of one's poor resources, in spite of
manners?"
Marcella, stirred--abashed--fascinated--let him press her hand. Then he
walked rapidly away towards the station, a faint smile twitching at his
lip.
"An inexperienced girl," he said to himself, composedly.