A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after
years, passed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January.
Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves
confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by
a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed
immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active
throughout the constituencies, were carried forward with redoubled
energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a
somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock--a former
fag indeed of his at Eton--whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do.
Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all
his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most
stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days
went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was
harassed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth
was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and
unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations;
and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying
there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to
spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening
an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him
as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take
into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to
himself but to others.
In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could snatch from
a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal
fortunes were all deeply interested. In vain--with a tardy instinct that
it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for
Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long
stay at Mellor was largely owing--did Aldous subdue himself to
propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long
accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself
not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least
twice in Raeburn's hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as
it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some
of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce's
indignation nor Marcella's discomfort and annoyance could restrain.
Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions
to the Radical candidate he was asserting his independence of the
Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with
him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns' heir.
Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards
with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had
thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a
sickly and disappointed man. Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took
no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton. But it seemed to be
no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once
have taken to get rid of him.
In vain, too, did Miss Raeburn do her best for the nephew to whom she
was still devoted, in spite of his deplorable choice of a wife. She took
in the situation as a whole probably sooner than anybody else, and she
instantly made heroic efforts to see more of Marcella, to get her to
come oftener to the Court, and in many various ways to procure the poor
deluded Aldous more of his betrothed's society. She paid many chattering
and fussy visits to Mellor--visits which chafed Marcella--and before
long, indeed, roused a certain suspicion in the girl's wilful mind.
Between Miss Raeburn and Mrs. Boyce there was a curious understanding.
It was always tacit, and never amounted to friendship, still less to
intimacy. But it often yielded a certain melancholy consolation to
Aldous Raeburn's great-aunt. It was clear to her that this strange
mother was just as much convinced as she was that Aldous was making a
great mistake, and that Marcella was not worthy of him. But the
engagement being there--a fact not apparently to be undone--both ladies
showed themselves disposed to take pains with it, to protect it against
aggression. Mrs. Boyce found herself becoming more of a _chaperon_ than
she had ever yet professed to be; and Miss Raeburn, as we have said,
made repeated efforts to capture Marcella and hold her for Aldous, her
lawful master.
But Marcella proved extremely difficult to manage. In the first place
she was a young person of many engagements. Her village scheme absorbed
a great deal of time. She was deep in a varied correspondence, in the
engagement of teachers, the provision of work-rooms, the collecting and
registering of workers, the organisation of local committees and so
forth. New sides of the girl's character, new capacities and
capabilities were coming out; new forms of her natural power over her
fellows were developing every day; she was beginning, under the
incessant stimulus of Wharton's talk, to read and think on social and
economic subjects, with some system and coherence, and it was evident
that she took a passionate mental pleasure in it all. And the more
pleasure these activities gave her, the less she had to spare for those
accompaniments of her engagement and her position that was to be, which
once, as Mrs. Boyce's sharp eyes perceived, had been quite normally
attractive to her.
"Why do you take up her time so, with all these things?" said Miss
Raeburn impatiently to Lady Winterbourne, who was now Marcella's
obedient helper in everything she chose to initiate. "She doesn't care
for anything she _ought_ to care about at this time, and Aldous sees
nothing of her. As for her trousseau, Mrs. Boyce declares she has had to
do it all. Marcella won't even go up to London to have her wedding-dress
fitted!"
Lady Winterbourne looked up bewildered.
"But I can't make her go and have her wedding-dress fitted, Agneta! And
I always feel you don't know what a fine creature she is. You don't
really appreciate her. It's splendid the ideas she has about this work,
and the way she throws herself into it."
"I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, indignantly. "That's just what I object
to. Why can't she throw herself into being in love with Aldous! That's
her business, I imagine, just now--if she were a young woman like
anybody else one had ever seen--instead of holding aloof from everything
he does, and never being there when he wants her. Oh! I have no patience
with her. But, of course, I must--" said Miss Raeburn, hastily
correcting herself--"of course, I must have patience."
"It will all come right, I am sure, when they are married," said Lady
Winterbourne, rather helplessly.
"That's just what my brother says," cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "He
won't hear a word--declares she is odd and original, and that Aldous
will soon know how to manage her. It's all very well; nowadays men
_don't_ manage their wives; that's all gone with the rest. And I am
sure, my dear, if she behaves after she is married as she is doing now,
with that most objectionable person Mr. Wharton--walking, and talking,
and taking up his ideas, and going to his meetings--she'll be a handful
for any husband."
"Mr. Wharton!" said Lady Winterbourne, astonished. Her absent black
eyes, the eyes of the dreamer, of the person who lives by a few intense
affections, saw little or nothing of what was going on immediately under
them. "Oh! but that is because he is staying in the house, and he is a
Socialist; she calls herself one--"
"My _dear_," said Miss Raeburn, interrupting emphatically;
"if--you--had--now--an unmarried daughter at home--engaged or not--would
you care to have Harry Wharton hanging about after her?"
"Harry Wharton?" said the other, pondering; "he is the Levens' cousin,
isn't he? he used to stay with them. I don't think I have seen him since
then. But yes, I do remember; there was something--something
disagreeable?"
She stopped with a hesitating, interrogative air. No one talked less
scandal, no one put the uglinesses of life away from her with a hastier
hand than Lady Winterbourne. She was one of the most consistent of moral
epicures.
"Yes, _extremely_ disagreeable," said Miss Raeburn, sitting bolt
upright. "The man has no principles--never had any, since he was a child
in petticoats. I know Aldous thinks him unscrupulous in politics and
everything else. And then, just when you are worked to death, and have
hardly a moment for your own affairs, to have a man of that type always
at hand to spend odd times with your lady love--flattering her, engaging
her in his ridiculous schemes, encouraging her in all the extravagances
she has got her head twice too full of already, setting her against your
own ideas and the life she will have to live--you will admit that it is
not exactly soothing!"
"Poor Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully, looking far ahead
with her odd look of absent rigidity, which had in reality so little to
do with a character essentially soft; "but you see he _did_ know all
about her opinions. And I don't think--no, I really don't think--I could
speak to her."
In truth, this woman of nearly seventy--old in years, but wholly young
in temperament--was altogether under Marcella's spell--more at ease with
her already than with most of her own children, finding in her
satisfaction for a hundred instincts, suppressed or starved by her own
environment, fascinated by the girl's friendship, and eagerly grateful
for her visits. Miss Raeburn thought it all both incomprehensible and
silly.
"Apparently no one can!" cried that lady in answer to her friend's
demurrer; "is all the world afraid of her?"
And she departed in wrath. But she knew, nevertheless, that she was just
as much afraid of Marcella as anybody else. In her own sphere at the
Court, or in points connected with what was due to the family, or to
Lord Maxwell especially, as the head of it, this short, capable old lady
could hold her own amply with Aldous's betrothed, could maintain,
indeed, a sharp and caustic dignity, which kept Marcella very much in
order. Miss Raeburn, on the defensive, was strong; but when it came to
attacking Marcella's own ideas and proceedings, Lord Maxwell's sister
became shrewdly conscious of her own weaknesses. She had no wish to
measure her wits on any general field with Marcella's. She said to
herself that the girl was too clever and would talk you down.
Meanwhile, things went untowardly in various ways. Marcella disciplined
herself before the Gairsley meeting, and went thither resolved to give
Aldous as much sympathy as she could. But the performance only repelled
a mind over which Wharton was every day gaining more influence. There
was a portly baronet in the chair; there were various Primrose Dames on
the platform and among the audience; there was a considerable
representation of clergy; and the labourers present seemed to Marcella
the most obsequious of their kind. Aldous spoke well--or so the audience
seemed to think; but she could feel no enthusiasm for anything that he
said. She gathered that he advocated a Government inspection of
cottages, more stringent precautions against cattle disease, better
technical instruction, a more abundant provision of allotments and small
freeholds, &c.; and he said many cordial and wise-sounding things in
praise of a progress which should go safely and wisely from step to
step, and run no risks of dangerous reaction. But the assumptions on
which, as she told herself rebelliously, it all went--that the rich and
the educated must rule, and the poor obey; that existing classes and
rights, the forces of individualism and competition, must and would go
on pretty much as they were; that great houses and great people, the
English land and game system, and all the rest of our odious class
paraphernalia were in the order of the universe; these ideas, conceived
as the furniture of Aldous's mind, threw her again into a ferment of
passionate opposition. And when the noble baronet in the chair--to her
eye, a pompous, frock-coated stick, sacrificing his after-dinner sleep
for once, that he might the more effectually secure it in the
future--proposed a vote of confidence in the Conservative candidate;
when the vote was carried with much cheering and rattling of feet; when
the Primrose Dames on the platform smiled graciously down upon the
meeting as one smiles at good children in their moments of pretty
behaviour; and when, finally, scores of toil-stained labourers, young
and old, went up to have a word and a hand-shake with "Muster Raeburn,"
Marcella held herself aloof and cold, with a look that threatened
sarcasm should she be spoken to. Miss Raeburn, glancing furtively round
at her, was outraged anew by her expression.
"She will be a thorn in all our sides," thought that lady. "Aldous is a
fool!--a poor dear noble misguided fool!"
Then on the way home, she and Aldous drove together. Marcella tried to
argue, grew vehement, and said bitter things for the sake of victory,
till at last Aldous, tired, worried, and deeply wounded, could bear it
no longer.
"Let it be, dear, let it be!" he entreated, snatching at her hand as
they rolled along through a stormy night. "We grope in a dark world--you
see some points of light in it, I see others--won't you give me credit
for doing what I can--seeing what I can? I am sure--_sure_--you will
find it easier to bear with differences when we are quite together--when
there are no longer all these hateful duties and engagements--and
persons--between us."
"Persons! I don't know what you mean!" said Marcella.
Aldous only just restrained himself in time. Out of sheer fatigue and
slackness of nerve he had been all but betrayed into some angry speech
on the subject of Wharton, the echoes of whose fantastic talk, as it
seemed to him, were always hanging about Mellor when he went there. But
he did refrain, and was thankful. That he was indeed jealous and
disturbed, that he had been jealous and disturbed from the moment Harry
Wharton had set foot in Mellor, he himself knew quite well. But to play
the jealous part in public was more than the Raeburn pride could bear.
There was the dread, too, of defining the situation--of striking some
vulgar irrevocable note.
So he parried Marcella's exclamation by asking her whether she had any
idea how many human hands a parliamentary candidate had to shake between
breakfast and bed; and then, having so slipped into another tone, he
tried to amuse himself and her by some of the daily humours of the
contest. She lent herself to it and laughed, her look mostly turned away
from him, as though she were following the light of the carriage lamps
as it slipped along the snow-laden hedges, her hand lying limply in his.
But neither were really gay. His soreness of mind grew as in the pauses
of talk he came to realise more exactly the failure of the evening--of
his very successful and encouraging meeting--from his own private point
of view.
"Didn't you like that last speech?" he broke out suddenly--"that
labourer's speech? I thought you would. It was entirely his own
idea--nobody asked him to do it."
In reality Gairsley represented a corner of the estate which Aldous had
specially made his own. He had spent much labour and thought on the
improvement of what had been a backward district, and in particular he
had tried a small profit-sharing experiment upon a farm there which he
had taken into his own hands for the purpose. The experiment had met
with fair success, and the labourer in question, who was one of the
workers in it, had volunteered some approving remarks upon it at the
meeting.
"Oh! it was very proper and respectful!" said Marcella, hastily.
The carriage rolled on some yards before Aldous replied. Then he spoke
in a drier tone than he had ever yet used to her.
"You do it injustice, I think. The man is perfectly independent, and an
honest fellow. I was grateful to him for what he said."
"Of course, I am no judge!" cried Marcella, quickly--repentantly. "Why
did you ask me? I saw everything crooked, I suppose--it was your
Primrose Dames--they got upon my nerves. Why did you have them? I didn't
mean to vex and hurt you--I didn't indeed--it was all the other way--and
now I have."
She turned upon him laughing, but also half crying, as he could tell by
the flutter of her breath.
He vowed he was not hurt, and once more changed both talk and tone. They
reached the drive's end without a word of Wharton. But Marcella went to
bed hating herself, and Aldous, after his solitary drive home, sat up
long and late, feverishly pacing and thinking.
* * * * *
Then next evening how differently things fell!
Marcella, having spent the afternoon at the Court, hearing all the
final arrangements for the ball, and bearing with Miss Raeburn in a way
which astonished herself, came home full of a sense of duty done, and
announced to her mother that she was going to Mr. Wharton's meeting in
the Baptist chapel that evening.
"Unnecessary, don't you think?" said Mrs. Boyce, lifting her eyebrows.
"However, if you go, I shall go with you."
Most mothers, dealing with a girl of twenty-one, under the
circumstances, would have said, "I had rather you stayed at home." Mrs.
Boyce never employed locutions of this kind. She recognised with perfect
calmness that Marcella's bringing up, and especially her independent
years in London, had made it impossible.
Marcella fidgeted.
"I don't know why you should, mamma. Papa will be sure to want you. Of
course, I shall take Deacon."
"Please order dinner a quarter of an hour earlier, and tell Deacon to
bring down my walking things to the hall," was all Mrs. Boyce said in
answer.
Marcella walked upstairs with her head very stiff. So her mother, and
Miss Raeburn too, thought it necessary to keep watch on her. How
preposterous! She thought of her free and easy relations with her
Kensington student-friends, and wondered when a more reasonable idea of
the relations between men and women would begin to penetrate English
country society.
Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.
"Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense," he said irritably
to his wife, "but it's the fellow's power of talk that is so
astonishing. _He_ isn't troubled with your Raeburn heaviness."
Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.
"If papa goes," she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed
her, "it will spoil the meeting. The labourers will turn sulky. I
shouldn't wonder if they did or said something unpleasant. As it is,
_you_ had much better not come, mamma. They are sure to attack the
cottages--and other things."
Mrs. Boyce took no notice as far as she herself was concerned, but her
quiet decision at last succeeded in leaving Mr. Boyce safely settled by
the fire, provided as usual with a cigarette and a French novel.
The meeting was held in a little iron Baptist chapel, erected some few
years before on the outskirts of the village, to the grief and scandal
of Mr. Harden. There were about a hundred and twenty labourers present,
and at the back some boys and girls, come to giggle and make a
noise--nobody else. The Baptist minister, a smooth-faced young man,
possessed, as it turned out, of opinions little short of Wharton's own
in point of vigour and rigour, was already in command. A few late
comers, as they slouched in, stole side looks at Marcella and the veiled
lady in black beside her, sitting in the corner of the last bench; and
Marcella nodded to one or two of the audience, Jim Hurd amongst them.
Otherwise no one took any notice of them. It was the first time that
Mrs. Boyce had been inside any building belonging to the village.
Wharton arrived late. He had been canvassing at a distance, and neither
of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with
a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he
took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for
half an hour and let them go. Did you ever see such a stolid set?"
"You will rouse them," said Marcella.
Her eyes were animated, her colour high, and she took no account at all
of his plea of weariness.
"You challenge me? I must rouse them--that was what you came to see? Is
that it?"
She laughed and made no answer. He left her and went up to the
minister's desk, the men shuffling their feet a little, and rattling a
stick here and there as he did so.
The young minister took the chair and introduced the speaker. He had a
strong Yorkshire accent, and his speech was divided between the most
vehement attacks, couched in the most Scriptural language, upon capital
and privilege--that is to say, on landlords and the land system, on
State churches and the "idle rich," interspersed with quavering returns
upon himself, as though he were scared by his own invective. "My
brothers, let us be _calm_!" he would say after every burst of passion,
with a long deep-voiced emphasis on the last word; "let us, above all
things, be _calm_!"--and then bit by bit voice and denunciation would
begin to mount again towards a fresh climax of loud-voiced attack, only
to sink again to the same lamb-like refrain. Mrs. Boyce's thin lip
twitched, and Marcella bore the good gentleman a grudge for providing
her mother with so much unnecessary amusement.
As for Wharton, at the opening of his speech he spoke both awkwardly and
flatly; and Marcella had a momentary shock. He was, as he said, tired,
and his wits were not at command. He began with the general political
programme of the party to which--on its extreme left wing--he proclaimed
himself to belong. This programme was, of course, by now a newspaper
commonplace of the stalest sort. He himself recited it without
enthusiasm, and it was received without a spark, so far as appeared, of
interest or agreement. The minister gave an "hear, hear," of a loud
official sort; the men made no sign.
"They might be a set of Dutch cheeses!" thought Marcella, indignantly,
after a while. "But, after all, why should they care for all this? I
shall have to get up in a minute and stop those children romping."
But through all this, as it were, Wharton was only waiting for his
second wind. There came a moment when, dropping his quasi-official and
high political tone, he said suddenly with another voice and emphasis:
"Well now, my men, I'll be bound you're thinking, 'That's all pretty
enough!--we haven't got anything against it--we dare say it's all right;
but we don't care a brass ha'porth about any of it! If that's all you'd
got to say to us, you might have let us bide at home. We don't have none
too much time to rest our bones a bit by the fire, and talk to the
missus and the kids. Why didn't you let us alone, instead of bringing us
out in the cold?'
"Well, but it _isn't_ all I've got to say--and you know it--because
I've spoken to you before. What I've been talking about is all true, and
all important, and you'll see it some day when you're fit. But what can
men in your position know about it, or care about it? What do any of you
want, but _bread_--"
--He thundered on the desk--
"--a bit of decent _comfort_--a bit of _freedom_--freedom from tyrants
who call themselves your betters!--a bit of rest in your old age, a home
that's something better than a dog-hole, a wage that's something better
than starvation, an honest share in the wealth you are making every day
and every hour for other people to gorge and plunder!"
He stopped a moment to see how _that_ took. A knot of young men in a
corner rattled their sticks vigorously. The older men had begun at any
rate to look at the speaker. The boys on the back benches instinctively
stopped scuffling.
Then he threw himself into a sort of rapid question-and-answer. What
were their wages?--eleven shillings a week?
"Not they!" cried a man from the middle of the chapel. "Yer mus' reckon
it wet an' dry. I wor turned back two days las' week, an' two days this,
_fower_ shillin' lost each week--that's what I call skinnin' ov yer."
Wharton nodded at him approvingly. By now he knew the majority of the
men in each village by name, and never forgot a face or a biography.
"You're right there, Watkins. Eleven shillings, then, when it isn't
less, never more, and precious often less; and harvest money--the
people that are kind enough to come round and ask you to vote Tory for
them make a deal of that, don't they?--and a few odds and ends here and
there--precious few of them! There! that's about it for wages, isn't it?
Thirty pounds a year, somewhere about, to keep a wife and children
on--and for ten hours a day work, not counting meal times--that's it, I
think. Oh, you _are_ well off!--aren't you?"
He dropped his arms, folded, on the desk in front of him, and paused to
look at them, his bright kindling eye running over rank after rank. A
chuckle of rough laughter, bitter and jeering, ran through the benches.
Then they broke out and applauded him.
Well, and about their cottages?
His glance caught Marcella, passed to her mother sitting stiffly
motionless under her veil. He drew himself up, thought a moment, then
threw himself far forward again over the desk as though the better to
launch what he had to say, his voice taking a grinding determined note.
He had been in all parts of the division, he said; seen everything,
inquired into everything. No doubt, on the great properties there had
been a good deal done of late years--public opinion had effected
something, the landlords had been forced to disgorge some of the gains
wrested from labour, to pay for the decent housing of the labourer. But
did anybody suppose that _enough_ had been done? Why, he had seen
_dens_--aye, on the best properties--not fit for the pigs that the
farmers wouldn't let the labourers keep, lest they should steal their
straw for the littering of them!--where a man was bound to live the
life of a beast, and his children after him--
A tall thin man of about sixty rose in his place, and pointed a long
quavering finger at the speaker.
"What is it, Darwin? speak up!" said Wharton, dropping at once into the
colloquial tone, and stooping forward to listen.
"My sleepin' room's six foot nine by seven foot six. We have to shift
our bed for the rain's comin' in, an' yer may see for yoursels ther
ain't much room to shift it in. An' beyont us ther's a room for the
chillen, same size as ourn, an' no window, nothin' but the door into us.
Ov a summer night the chillen, three on 'em, is all of a sweat afore
they're asleep. An' no garden, an' no chance o' decent ways nohow. An'
if yer ask for a bit o' repairs yer get sworn at. An' that's all that
most on us can get out of Squire Boyce!"
There was a hasty whisper among some of the men round him, as they
glanced over their shoulders at the two ladies on the back bench. One or
two of them half rose, and tried to pull him down. Wharton looked at
Marcella; it seemed to him he saw a sort of passionate satisfaction on
her pale face, and in the erect carriage of her head. Then she stooped
to the side and whispered to her mother. Mrs. Boyce shook her head and
sat on, immovable. All this took but a second or two.
"Ah, well," said Wharton, "we won't have names; that'll do us no good.
It's not the _men_ you've got to go for so much--though we shall go for
them too before long when we've got the law more on our side. It's the
system. It's the whole way of dividing the wealth that _you_ made, you
and your children--by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant
work--between you and those who _don't_ work, who live on your labour
and grow fat on your poverty! What we want is _a fair division_. There
_ought_ to be wealth enough--there _is_ wealth enough for all in this
blessed country. The earth gives it; the sun gives it: labour extracts
and piles it up. Why should one class take three-fourths of it and leave
you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which
is all you have to starve and breed on? Why?--_why_? I say.
Why!--because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited _cowards_,
unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a
pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and
your class--there, _that's_ why it is, and I tell it you straight out!"
He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at
them--scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the
blaze of his blue eye. A murmur ran through the room. Some of the men
laughed excitedly. Darwin sprang up again.
"You keep the perlice off us, an' gie us the cuttin' up o' their
bloomin' parks an' we'll do it fast enough," he cried.
"Much good that'll do you, just at present," said Wharton,
contemptuously. "Now, you just listen to me."
And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the
room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the
country districts--the transference of authority within the villages
from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily
during the transition time for the provision of house room, water,
light, education and amusement for the labourer; and ultimately land and
capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker
on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and
interest of the capitalist class relieves him of taxes, and the
disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master
in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all. And, as a first
step to this new Jerusalem--_organisation_!--self-sacrifice enough to
form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates
in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.
"Then I suppose you think you'd be turned out of your cottages,
dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow. Just you try! There
are people all over the country ready to back you, if you'd only back
yourselves. But you _won't_. You won't fight--that's the worst of you;
that's what makes all of us _sick_ when we come down to talk to you. You
won't spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing--not you!--to
subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling
your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men. What's the good of
your grumbling? I suppose you'll go on like that--grumbling and starving
and cringing--and talking big of the things you could do if you
would:--and all the time not one honest effort--not one!--to better
yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks! By the Lord! I tell you
it's a _damned_ sort of business talking to fellows like you!"
Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal,
emphasis. The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden
movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it.
Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil. Her
eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.
As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk
to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered
or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His
blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them,
his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his
curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed
into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even;
laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the
sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.
Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these
cottagers, she had never lived till now--under the blaze of these
eyes--within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the
power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the
weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged,
dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in
the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a
sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on
his knee, against his breast. "Here," she thought, while her pulses
leapt, "is the leader for me--for these. Let him call, I will follow."
It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly,
when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm
of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement,
hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate
practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take
towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for
the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but
put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed
forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so--with some
good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise
instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the
day of election--came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed,
and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved
herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken
bodily from the _Labour Clarion_ of the preceding week. Then a
resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was
passed unanimously amid evident excitement. It was the first time that
such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.
* * * * *
Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect,
mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony. For one who knew
her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a
man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.
As for Marcella, she said little or nothing. But Wharton, in the dark of
the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that
her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response
would have been electric.
When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the
vestibule--Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall--he said to her,
his voice hoarse with fatigue:
"Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?"
Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.
"You rated them enough."
"Well, did you disapprove?"
"Oh, no! it seems to be your way."
"My proof of friendship? Well, can there be a greater? Will you show me
some to-morrow?"
"How can I?"
"Will you criticise?--tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night,
or a hypocrite? Your mother would."
"I dare say!" said Marcella, her breath quickening; "but don't expect it
from me."
"Why?"
"Because--because I don't pretend. I don't know whether you roused them,
but you roused _me_."
She swept on before him into the dark hall, without giving him a moment
for reply, took her candle, and disappeared.
Wharton found his own staircase, and went up to bed. The light he
carried showed his smiling eyes bent on the ground, his mouth still
moving as though with some pleasant desire of speech.