Nearly three weeks passed--short flashing weeks, crowded with
agitations, inward or outward, for all the persons of this story.
After the inquiry before the magistrates--conducted, as she passionately
thought, with the most marked animus on the part of the bench and police
towards the prisoners--had resulted in the committal for trial of Hurd
and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Raeburn a letter which
hurt him sorely.
"Don't come over to see me for a little while," it ran. "My mind is all
given over to feelings which must seem to you--which, I know, do seem to
you--unreasonable and unjust. But they are my life, and when they are
criticised, or even treated coldly, I cannot bear it. When you are not
there to argue with, I can believe, most sincerely, that you have a
right to see this matter as you do, and that it is monstrous of me to
expect you to yield to me entirely in a thing that concerns your sense
of public duty. But don't come now--not before the trial. I will appeal
to you if I think you can help me. I _know_ you will if you can. Mr.
Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters,
which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of
the evidence."
Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and difficulty.
"I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a burden to
you. You can hardly imagine that it is not grievous to me to think of
any trouble of yours as being made worse by my being with you. But still
I understand. One thing only I ask--that you should not imagine the
difference between us greater than it is. The two letters you enclose
have given me much to ponder. If only the course of the trial enables me
with an honest heart to throw myself into your crusade of mercy, with
what joy shall I come and ask you to lead me, and to forgive my own
slower sense and pity!
"I should like you to know that Hallin is very much inclined to agree
with you, to think that the whole affair was a 'scrimmage,' and that
Hurd at least ought to be reprieved. He would have come to talk it over
with you himself, but that Clarke forbids him anything that interests or
excites him for the present. He has been very ill and suffering for the
last fortnight, and, as you know, when these attacks come on we try to
keep everything from him that could pain or agitate him. But I see that
this whole affair is very much on his mind, in spite of my efforts.
"... Oh, my darling! I am writing late at night, with your letter open
before me and your picture close to my hand. So many things rise in my
mind to say to you. There will come a time--there _must!_--when I may
pour them all out. Meanwhile, amid all jars and frets, remember this,
that I have loved you better each day since first we met.
"I will not come to Mellor then for a little while. My election, little
heart as I have for it, will fill up the week. The nomination-day is
fixed for Thursday and the polling for Monday."
Marcella read the letter with a confusion of feeling so great as to be
in itself monstrous and demoralising. Was she never to be simple, to see
her way clearly again?
As for him, as he rode about the lanes and beechwoods in the days that
followed, alone often with that nature for which all such temperaments
as Aldous Raeburn's have so secret and so observant an affection, he was
perpetually occupied with this difficulty which had arisen between
Marcella and himself, turning it over and over in the quiet of the
morning, before the turmoil of the day began.
He had followed the whole case before the magistrates with the most
scrupulous care. And since then, he had twice run across the Widrington
solicitor for the defence, who was now instructing Wharton. This man,
although a strong Radical, and employed generally by his own side, saw
no objection at all to letting Lord Maxwell's heir and representative
understand how in his opinion the case was going. Aldous Raeburn was a
person whom everybody respected; confidences were safe with him; and he
was himself deeply interested in the affair. The Raeburns being the
Raeburns, with all that that implied for smaller people in Brookshire,
little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall's
employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the
defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was
still his, Burridge's opinion, that everything that could be advanced
would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came
into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the
only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can
always be got up in a game-preserving case.
"And is as a rule political and anti-landlord," thought Aldous, on one
of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down. He foresaw
exactly what would happen. As he envisaged the immediate future, he saw
one figure as the centre of it--not Marcella, but Wharton! Wharton was
defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for
his own support and his grandfather's, through Marcella. To Wharton
would belong not only the popular _kudos_ of the matter, but much more,
and above all, Marcella's gratitude.
Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the
road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had
asked Marcella to be his wife. The pale February sunlight was spreading
from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant
shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk
plain. Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter
birds from the branches round him. The place, the time, raised in him
all the intensest powers of consciousness. He saw himself as the man
_standing midway_ in everything--speculation, politics, sympathies--as
the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the
perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world. Wharton!
He knew him--had read him long ago--read him afresh of late. Raeburn's
lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not
repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover. Here was he, banished
from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and
sympathies, busily forging a link--
"It shall be _broken!_" said Raeburn to himself with a sudden fierce
concentration of will. "So much I will claim--and enforce."
But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence. He gathered
himself together with a long breath, and went his way.
* * * * *
For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in
this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The
moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane
and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that
they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like
avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates crime"
left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole
rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had suffered
all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he,
more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was
natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on
Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and
limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and
responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.
But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line
between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life
and action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers
destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no
difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the
circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to
be a murderer, no employer's interest, no landlord's desire for
vengeance, would have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as
he emphatically did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind
more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would
have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and
compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere
with a duty to justice and society.
Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and
compunctions.
Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was
conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of
trouble of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment.
Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal
humility, and interfused with all--determining all--elements of
judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which
he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance
and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the
whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a
strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed
it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and
distorted; none the less, _reality_ wins the day. So Hallin read it.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a
bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with,
and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings,
committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either
man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything
outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of
intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a
tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of
anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.
The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and
jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after
Easter--without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in
village and county. And when the reason was known--that it was because
Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that
until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or
reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there
was curiously little sympathy with Marcella. Most of her own class
thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss
Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance
anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive
English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the
bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.
"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said
old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his
open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside.
"_Not_ what I'd call lover-y. She don't want to run in harness, she
don't, no sooner than, she need. She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."
"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife, with her gentle
sigh, "to hear summat o' that new straw-plaitin' she talk about. But
nary a word. They do say as it's give up althegither."
"No, she's took up wi' nursin' Minta Hurd--wonderful took up," said
another woman. "They do say as Ann Mullins can't abear her. When she's
there nobody can open their mouth. When that kind o' thing happens in
the fambly it's bad enoof without havin' a lady trailin' about you all
day long, so that you have to be mindin' yersel', an' thinkin' about
givin' her a cheer, an' the like."
One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella,
coming from the Hurds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going
home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.
Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her
relations, mainly, to do her justice, from fear lest she might somehow
hurt or offend them. She had been to see Charlie Dynes's mother, but she
had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary
Harden to the keeper's widow.
Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella
came up with her.
"Oh, she's _puddlin'_ along," she said in answer to Marcella's inquiry,
using a word very familiar in the village. "She'll not do herself a
mischief while there's Nurse Ellen an' me to watch her like a pair o'
cats. She's dreadful upset, is Isabella--shouldn't ha' thought it of
her. That fust day"--a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face--"no, I'm
not a-goin' to think about that fust day, I'm not, 'tain't a ha'porth o'
good," she added resolutely; "but she was all right when they'd let her
get 'im 'ome, and wash an' settle 'im, an' put 'im comfortable like in
his coffin. He wor a big man, miss, when he wor laid out! Searle, as
made the coffin, told her as ee 'adn't made one such an extry size since
old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen year ago. Ee'd soon a done for
Jim Hurd if it 'ad been fists o' both sides. But guns is things as yer
can't reckon on.".
"Why didn't he let Hurd alone," said Marcella, sadly, "and prosecute him
next day? It's attacking men when their blood is up that brings these
awful hings about."
"Wal, I don't see that," said Mrs. Jellison, pugnaciously; "he wor paid
to do 't--an' he had the law on his side. 'Ow 's she?" she said,
lowering her voice and jerking her thumb in the direction of the Hurds'
cottage.
"She's very ill," replied Marcella, with a contraction of the brow.
"Dr. Clarke says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't."
"They're a-goin' to try 'im Thursday?" said Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly.
"Yes."
"An' Muster Wharton be a-goin' to defend 'im. Muster Wharton may be
cliver, ee may--they do say as ee can see the grass growin', ee's that
knowin'--but ee'll not get Jim Hurd off; there's nobody in the village
as b'lieves for a moment as 'ow he will. They'll best 'im. Lor' bless
yer, they'll best 'im. I was a-sayin' it to Isabella this
afternoon--ee'll not save 'is neck, don't you be afeared."
Marcella drew herself up with a shiver of repulsion.
"Will it mend your daughter's grief to see another woman's heart broken?
Don't you suppose it might bring her some comfort, Mrs. Jellison, if she
were to try and forgive that poor wretch? She might remember that her
husband gave him provocation, and that anyway, if his life is spared,
his punishment and their misery will be heavy enough!"
"Oh, lor' no!" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly. "She don't want to be
forgivin' of 'im. Mr. Harden ee come talkin' to 'er, but she isn't one
o' that sort, isn't Isabella. I'm sartin sure she'll be better in
'erself when they've put 'im out o' the way. It makes her all ov a fever
to think of Muster Wharton gettin' 'im off. _I_ don't bear Jim Hurd no
pertickler malice. Isabella may talk herself black i' the face, but she
and Johnnie'll have to come 'ome and live along o' me, whatever she may
say. She can't stay in that cottage, cos they'll be wantin' it for
another keeper. Lord Maxwell ee's givin' her a fine pension, my word ee
is! an' says ee'll look after Johnnie. And what with my bit
airnins--we'll do, yer know, miss--we'll do!"
The old woman looked up with a nod, her green eyes sparkling with the
queer inhuman light that belonged to them.
Marcella could not bring herself to say good-night to her, and was
hurrying on without a word, when Mrs. Jellison stopped her.
"An' 'ow about that straw-plaitin', miss?" she said slyly.
"I have had to put it on one side for a bit," said Marcella, coldly,
hating the woman's society. "I have had my hands full and Lady
Winterbourne has been away, but we shall, of course, take it up again
later."
She walked away quickly, and Mrs. Jellison hobbled after her, grinning
to herself every now and then as she caught the straight, tall figure
against the red evening sky.
"I'll go in ter town termorrer," she thought, "an' have a crack wi'
Jimmy Gedge; _ee_ needn't be afeard for 'is livin'. An' them great fules
as ha' bin runnin' in a string arter 'er, an' cacklin' about their
eighteen-pence a score, as I've told 'em times, I'll eat my apron the
fust week as iver they get it. I don't hold wi' ladies--no, nor passons
neither--not when it comes to meddlin' wi' your wittles, an' dictatin'
to yer about forgivin' them as ha' got the better ov yer. That young
lady there, what do she matter? That sort's allus gaddin' about? What'll
she keer about us when she's got 'er fine husband? Here o' Saturday,
gone o' Monday--that's what she is. Now Jimmy Gedge, yer kin allus count
on '_im._ Thirty-six year ee ha' set there in that 'ere shop, and I
guess ee'll set there till they call 'im ter kingdom come. Be's a
cheatin', sweatin', greedy old skinflint is Jimmy Gedge; but when yer
wants 'im yer _kin_ find 'im."
* * * * *
Marcella hurried home, she was expecting a letter from Wharton, the
third within a week. She had not set eyes on him since they had met that
first morning in the drive, and it was plain to her that he was as
unwilling as she was that there should be any meeting between them.
Since the moment of his taking up the case, in spite of the pressure of
innumerable engagements, he had found time to send her, almost daily,
sheets covered with his small even writing, in which every detail and
prospect of the legal situation, so far as it concerned James Hurd, were
noted and criticised with a shrewdness and fulness which never wavered,
and never lost for a moment the professional note.
"Dear Miss Boyce"--the letters began--leading up to a "Yours
faithfully," which Marcella read as carefully as the rest. Often, as she
turned them over, she asked herself whether that scene in the library
had not been a mere delusion of the brain, whether the man whose wild
words and act had burnt themselves into her life could possibly be
writing her these letters, in this key, without a reference, without an
allusion. Every day, as she opened them, she looked them through quietly
with a shaking pulse; every day she found herself proudly able to hand
them on to her mother, with the satisfaction of one who has nothing to
conceal, whatever the rest of the world may suspect. He was certainly
doing his best to replace their friendship on that level of high
comradeship in ideas and causes which, as she told herself, it had once
occupied. His own wanton aggression and her weakness had toppled it down
thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know
him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He
assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more
be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!
Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one
long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted
none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which
she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and
consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony,
peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with
the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse
her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and
body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to
this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity
in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards
all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and
sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and
gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all
comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when
the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken
his neck--and buried him"--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid
pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in
prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on
Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they
brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always
thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings
paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of
a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a
voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous
things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of
instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her
to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would
like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin'
capital" for him; but she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he
didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him;
the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one
can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming
again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his
chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a
kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still
survived. But it made _her_ life faint within her to talk of the
murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's
realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.
When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was
locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the
bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this
awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she
left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once,
and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann
Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free
heaven.
As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the doctor
said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an
infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but
always patient, always struggling to say his painful "thank you" when
she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell
Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and
understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided
from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his
state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was
strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.
After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the
February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole
upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the
swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and
out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face
kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.
More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved
upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its
significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.
Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion
and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of
all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid
their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease;
she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of
soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the
spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and
tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or God? She would hardly let
herself think of Aldous--though she _must_ think of him by-and-by! He
and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in
her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day,
stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous
would not help her--or not with any help worth having--in consoling this
misery--binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a
crime against him to confess--but she felt herself his superior none the
less. If he cast her off--why then surely they would be quits, quits for
good and all.
As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled
cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.
Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and
her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door
William touched his cap to her.
"Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss."
She stopped sharply.
"Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?"
"In the drawing-room, miss."
She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.
Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent air
Marcella knew so well.
When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands,
then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business
errand and has no time to waste.
"I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of spare
hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going. You
understand that the case comes on at the assizes next Thursday?"
Marcella assented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the
fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made
Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her--but it was
the only sign.
"I should like to warn you," he said gravely, "that I entertain no hope
whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best, but the verdict
will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure to take a
severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I believe it
to be extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the judge,
according to what I hear, will probably be against us. The prosecution
have got together extremely strong evidence--as to Hurd's long
connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness--as to his
repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends
were interrupted--and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and
Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it."
He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition
and at some length; then he paused.
"This being so," he resumed, "the question is, what can be done? There
must be a petition. Amongst my own party I shall be, of course, able to
do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without some at least
of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one word--do you
imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell to sign?"
Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.
"I will try," she said at last, with deliberation.
"Then"--he took up his gloves--"there may be a chance for us. If you
cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can
be secured, others will easily follow. Their names--especially under all
the circumstances--will carry a peculiar weight. I may say everything,
in the first instance--the weight, the first effect of the
petition--depends on them. Well, then, I leave it in your hands. No time
should be lost after the sentence. As to the grounds of our plea, I
shall, of course, lay them down in court to the best of my ability."
"I shall be there," she interrupted.
He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no
comment.
"Well, then," he resumed after a pause, "I need say no more for the
present. How is the wife?"
She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment
passed between them.
"And your election?" said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile
eyes, as he got up to take leave.
"To-morrow!" He threw up his hands with a little gesture of impatience.
"That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the way, whatever
happens. I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can carry me.
Good-bye, Miss Boyce."
Marcella went slowly upstairs. The scene which had just passed was
unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering. Then the sound of the
front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature. The first
sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness. The next--her mind
threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, "Can I, by any
means, get my way with Aldous?"