"But this is unbearable!" said Aldous. "Do you mean to say that she is
at home and that she will not see me?"
Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed
humiliation of the man before her.
"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly. "I remonstrated with
Marcella, but I could do nothing. I think, if you are wise, you will not
for the present attempt to see her."
Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor. After a
few moments' silence he looked up again.
"And she gave you no message for me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly. "Only that she could not bear to see
anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter was still
undecided."
Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was arrested by
a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of
which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some black
silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair;
the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter. She had
been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled before him. The door
into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.
He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the
writing. Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside
her.
"Will you tell me," he said steadily--"I think you will admit I have a
right to know--is Marcella in constant correspondence now with Henry
Wharton?"
Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.
"I believe so," she quickly replied. "So far as I can judge, he writes
to her almost every other day."
"Does she show you his letters?"
"Very often. They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews and
efforts on Hurd's behalf."
"Would you not say," he asked, after another pause, raising his clear
grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December Marcella's
whole views and thoughts have been largely--perhaps vitally--influenced
by this man?"
Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind--had, indeed, often
marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before. Now
that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them
with common sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both
parties. The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and
oppressed the mother. For herself she asked to see things in a dry
light. Yet she knew well that the moment was critical. Her feeling was
more mixed than it had been. On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's
side--with qualifications and impatiences, however.
She took up her embroidery again before she answered him. In her
opinion the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the
diplomatist.
"Yes, certainly," she said at last. "He has done a great deal to form
her opinions. He has made her both read and think on all those subjects
she has so long been fond of talking about."
She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with him.
"Has there been nothing else than that in it?" said Aldous, in an odd
voice.
Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions. She looked at him straight, her slight,
energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind
her.
"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real truth. I _think_
there is nothing else. But let me tell you what more I think."
Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant. In his pity and liking for
her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.
"If you would," he entreated.
"Leave Marcella quite alone--for the present. She is not herself--not
normal, in any way. Nor will she be till this dreadful thing is over.
But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a little,
_then_"--her thin voice expressed all the emphasis it could--"_then_
assert yourself! Ask her that question you have asked me--and get your
answer."
He understood. Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she
had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past.
But there was a proud and sensitive instinct in him which both told him
that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.
"You have come from London to-day?" said Mrs. Boyce, changing the
subject. All intimate and personal conversation was distasteful to her,
and she admitted few responsibilities. Her daughter hardly counted among
them.
"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said, trying to smile.
"I must get back to-night."
"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs. Boyce.
He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and trouble I
am, he must be spared. Indeed, since the night of the trial, I feel as
though I had been of very little use to any human being."
He spoke simply, but every word touched her. What an inconceivable
entanglement the whole thing was! Yet she was no longer merely
contemptuous of it.
"Look!" she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the ground beside
the chair which held the envelope; "she is already making the mourning
for the children. I can see she despairs."
He made a sound of horror.
"Can you do nothing?" he cried reproachfully. "To think of her dwelling
upon this--nothing but this, day and night--and I, banished and
powerless!"
He buried his head in his hands.
"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately. Then, after a
pause, "You do not imagine there is any chance of success for her?"
He looked up and shook his head.
"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know. Wharton is managing it
with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the House. But I
happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I certainly
gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm. There
may be some delay. The new ministry will not kiss hands till Saturday.
But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home
Secretary.--By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my seeing
Judge Cartwright," he added hastily--almost imploringly. "I could not
bear that she should suppose--"
Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have
imagined such a man in such a plight.
"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from me," he added
slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to
let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty--without
a word?"
"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.
"Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton, in his letter
this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which
were important to him. She specially wished you to be thanked for it."
His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was
genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget
that the world yields itself only to the "violent."
He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from,
her window, watched him go.
"How _could_ she see him?" she asked herself passionately, both then
and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days. His turn
would come, and it should be amply given him. But _now_ the very thought
of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears.
The time for entreaty--for argument--was gone by, so far as he was
concerned. He might have been her champion, and would not. She threw
herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man
who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her
lover's. It had become to her a _fight_--with society, with the law,
with Aldous--in which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of
the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter
offence to her.
How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the
newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line;
she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters;
she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been
started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd
and her children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector,
because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with
her father were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of
alarm as to how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but
that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was,
notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon
discovered, that he really desired. During six months he had taken it
for granted; so had the county. He, of all men, could not afford to be
made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of
the matter. He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was
not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had
had a good deal to do with it. So that between him and his daughter
there were now constant sparrings--sparrings which degraded Marcella in
her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from
home.
The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course,
was in Minta Hurd's kitchen. Side by side with that piteous plaintive
misery, her own fierceness dwindled. She would sit with little Willie on
her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and
crying silently. She never suspected that her presence was often a
burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the
wife herself. While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs.
Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and
simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.
The last week arrived. Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and
despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause
became more desperate. On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man,
who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope.
Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament. Friday was
the day fixed for the execution.
The question in Parliament came on late. The Home Secretary's answer,
though not final in form, was final in substance. Wharton went out
immediately and wrote to Marcella. "She will not sleep if I telegraph
to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for
physical detail, which had in it something of the woman. But, knowing
that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of
eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn
the news first from the papers.
Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an
oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might
reach her any hour.
She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the
house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind
her. William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of
understanding. Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out
of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.
"All over. The Home Secretary's official refusal to interfere with
sentence sent to Widrington to-day. Accept my sorrow and sympathy."
She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically. Before her
lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her father's
big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied his ferrets
in the winter nights. But to-day the spring worked in it, and breathed
upon it. The young corn was already green in the furrows; the
hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air,
daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the
flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the
wide treeless basin.
Human helplessness, human agony--set against the careless joy of
nature--there is no new way of feeling these things. But not to have
felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled
Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full
stature of our kind.
* * * * *
"Marcella, it is my strong wish--my command--that you do _not_ go out to
the village to-night."
"I must go, papa."
It was Thursday night--the night before the Friday morning fixed for
Hurd's execution. Dinner at Mellor was just over. Mr. Boyce, who was
standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own
inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter. She
had not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black
cloak and black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks.
Mr. Boyce detested the garb.
"You are making yourself _ridiculous_, Marcella. Pity for these wretched
people is all very well, but you have no business to carry it to such a
point that you--and we--become the talk, the laughing-stock of the
county. And I should like to see you, too, pay some attention to Aldous
Raeburn's feelings and wishes."
The admonition, in her father's mouth, would almost have made her laugh,
if she could have laughed at anything. But, instead, she only repeated:
"I must go, I have explained to mamma."
"Evelyn! why do you permit it?" cried Mr. Boyce, turning aggressively to
his wife.
"Marcella explained to me, as she truly said," replied Mrs. Boyce,
looking up calmly. "It is not her habit to ask permission of any one."
"Mamma," exclaimed the girl, in her deep voice, "you would not wish to
stop me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, after a pause, "no. You have gone so far, I
understand your wish to do this. Richard,"--she got up and went to
him,--"don't excite yourself about it; shall I read to you, or play a
game with you?"
He looked at her, trembling with anger. But her quiet eye warned him
that he had had threatenings of pain that afternoon. His anger sank into
fear. He became once more irritable and abject.
"Let her gang her gait," he said, throwing himself into a chair. "But I
tell you I shall not put up with this kind of thing much longer,
Marcella."
"I shall not ask you, papa," she said steadily, as she moved towards the
door. Mrs. Boyce paused where she stood, and looked after her daughter,
struck by her words. Mr. Boyce simply took them as referring to the
marriage which would emancipate her before long from any control of his,
and fumed, without finding a reply.
The maid-servant who, by Mrs. Boyce's orders, was to accompany Marcella
to the village, was already at the front door. She carried a basket
containing invalid food for little Willie, and a lighted lantern.
It was a dark night and raining fast. Marcella was fastening up her
tweed skirt in the hall, when she saw Mrs. Boyce hurry along the gallery
above, and immediately afterwards her mother came across the hall to
her.
"You had better take the shawl, Marcella: it is cold and raw. If you are
going to sit up most of the night you will want it."
She put a wrap of her own across Marcella's arm.
"Your father is quite right," she went on. "You have had one horrible
experience to-day already--"
"Don't, mamma!" exclaimed Marcella, interrupting her. Then suddenly she
threw her arms round her mother.
"Kiss me, mamma! please kiss me!"
Mrs. Boyce kissed her gravely, and let herself even linger a moment in
the girl's strong hold.
"You are extraordinarily wilful," she said. "And it is so strange to me
that you think you do any good. Are you sure even that she wants to have
you?"
Marcella's lip quivered. She could not speak, apparently. Waving her
hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two
disappeared into the blackness.
"But _does_ it do any good?" Mrs. Boyce repeated to herself as she went
back to the drawing-room. "_Sympathy!_ who was ever yet fed, warmed,
comforted by _sympathy_? Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that
the human being should want at such a moment--solitude. Why should we
force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?"
Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the
warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this
horror which was beneath them.
At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the
little maid.
"Now, Ruth, you can go home. Run quick, it is so dark, Ruth!"
"Yes, miss."
The young country girl trembled. Miss Boyce's tragic passion in this
matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she
lived.
"Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the
poor,--and to punish the cruel!"
"Yes, miss," said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry. The lantern she
held flashed its light on Miss Boyce's white face and tall form. Till
her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark eye, so
wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.
On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused. She heard voices inside--or
rather the rector's voice reading.
A thought of scorn rose in her heart. "How long will the poor endure
this religion--this make-believe--which preaches patience, _patience_!
when it ought to be urging war?"
But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt. The rector looked up and
made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade
any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose
makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and
the reading went on.
Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that
afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for. He had
bade them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a
mattress had been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it.
Her huddled form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed
eyelids, thrown out against the dark oak of the settle, and the
disordered mass of grizzled hair, made the centre of the cottage.
Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough
hand she held, her eyes red with weeping. Fronting them, beside a little
table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his
Testament in his hand, his slight boy's figure cast in sharp shadow on
the cottage wall. He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light
of the lamp from the wife's eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a
chair to keep it from little Willie. Between mother and child sat Ann
Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from
time to time--a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children
and much poverty--of whom Marcella was often impatient.
"_And he said, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom. And
He said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me
in Paradise."_
The rector's voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt insistently on each
word, then paused. "_To-day_," whispered Mary, caressing Minta's hand,
while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the
Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."
Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the
cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and
sent a start through Willie's wasted body. The reader resumed; but
perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling leaven.
Nevertheless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on
every pang of the Passion, putting together every sacred and sublime
word. For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held
up the Man of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had
come, his moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he
accepted it with the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.
"_And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they
beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their breasts_."
He closed the book, and bent forward, so as to bring his voice close to
the wife's ear.
"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your husband. He has
passed through death--through cruel death; and where He has gone, we
poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to Him. No sin, however
black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His hand in the dark
waters, if it be only repented,--thrown upon His Cross. Let us pray for
your husband, let us implore the Lord's mercy this night--this
hour!--upon his soul."
A shudder of remembrance passed through Marcella. The rector knelt; Mrs.
Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at
intervals; Ann Mullins sobbed loudly; and Mary Harden wept as she
prayed, lost in a mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there
on the cottage floor--stretching hands of pity over the woman beside
her, showing His marred side and brow.
Marcella alone sat erect, her whole being one passionate protest against
a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities of
this too real earth on the shadowy head of one far-off Redeemer. "This
very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort an accomplice of
those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and killing, because they
know of nothing better to do with the life they themselves have made
outcast."
And she hardened her heart.
When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for
some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the
boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother
and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager,
concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she
perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the
rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of
pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and
moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better. The
child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton
hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little, all--with
just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had
fascinated Wharton. Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could
have wept.
At last the rector and his sister rose.
"God be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; "God
support you!"
His voice trembled. Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.
"Oh, Mr. Harden!" she cried with a sudden wail. "Mr. Harden!"
Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with
quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."
The rector turned to Marcella.
"You are staying the night with her?" he asked, under his breath.
"Yes. Mrs. Mullins was up all last night. I offered to come to-night."
"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Hurd?"
"For a very few minutes."
"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?" he asked anxiously. "Is he
penitent?"
"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce humanness in her
unfriendly eyes. "I promised him that when the child died, he should be
buried respectably--not by the parish. And I told him I would always
look after the little girls."
The rector sighed. He moved away. Then unexpectedly he came back again.
"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as not to be
heard by any one else in the cottage. "You are taking a great
responsibility here to-night. Let me implore you not to fill that poor
woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her
life. That _you_ feel bitterly, I know. Mary has explained to me--but
ask yourself, I beg of you!--how is _she_ to be helped through her
misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission
to the will of God?"
He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of
his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.
"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella, coldly. She
felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which
his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her. That
hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell
once for all.
Mary did not venture to kiss her friend. They all went. Ann Mulling, who
was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last. When she
was going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the
skirt, saying incoherent things.
"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her, "won't you
let Ann go? I am going to spend the night here, and take care of you and
Willie."
Mrs. Hurd gave a painful start.
"You're very good, miss," she said half-consciously, "very good, I'm
sure. But she's his own flesh and blood is Ann--his own flesh and blood.
Ann!"
The two women clung together, the rough, ill-tempered sister-in-law
muttering what soothing she could think of. When she was gone, Minta
Hurd turned her face to the back of the settle and moaned, her hands
clenched under her breast.
Marcella went about her preparations for the night. "She is extremely
weak," Dr. Clarke had said; "the heart in such a state she may die of
syncope on very small provocation. If she is to spend the night in
crying and exciting herself, it will go hard with her. Get her to sleep
if you possibly can."
And he had left a sleeping draught. Marcella resolved that she would
persuade her to take it. "But I will wake her before eight o'clock," she
thought. "No human being has the right to rob her of herself through
that last hour."
And tenderly she coaxed Minta to take the doctor's "medicine." Minta
swallowed it submissively, asking no questions. But the act of taking it
roused her for the time, and she would talk. She even got up and
tottered across to Willie.
"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he's got his animals--he don't think
of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won't you think of your father?--you'll
never have a father, Willie, not after to-night!"
The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his haggard,
dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the face,
and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He
looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not
speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it
struck her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and
there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced
Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had
fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same
as it had been for days; she reassured herself.
And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching
limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed
the shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of
the watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.
Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself
with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock
showed that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she
drew it upon her knee; but it lay unopened.
A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes
of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on
her cloak.
A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the
chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside
her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of
ear, and imagined more.
All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look
round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn
across one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the
light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without
at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door
of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came
out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on
the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon
him.
She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something
else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman's face!--the
powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline features--the mad
keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes looked in hungrily
at the prostrate form on the settle--at the sleeping child. Another
figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path. There was a slight
scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the curtain close with a
hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The woman who had
looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was becoming more
and more difficult to manage and to watch.
Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a
sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it
haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.
The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and
struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more
piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours passed, as all
sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence
settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to
repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with
shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife.
"He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information
which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant
sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.
"Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal
_knows_--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us
something as against the _nothing_ of death--and a man wastes them in
sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily
struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no
husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may
well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity!
Oh, why are we here--why am _I_ here--to ache like this--to hate good
people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to
madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot
forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"
She sat over the fire, Willie's hand clasped in hers. He alone in this
forlorn household _loved_ her. Mrs. Hurd and the other children feared
and depended on her. This creature of thistle-down--this little thread
and patch of humanity--felt no fear of her. It was as though his
weakness divined through her harshness and unripeness those maternal and
protecting powers with which her nature was in truth so richly dowered.
He confided himself to her with no misgivings. He was at ease when she
was there.
Little piteous hand!--its touch was to her symbolic, imperative.
Eight months had she been at Mellor? And that Marcella, who had been
living and moving amid these woods and lanes all this time--that foolish
girl, delighting in new grandeurs, and flattered by Aldous Raeburn's
attentions--that hot, ambitious person who had meant to rule a county
through a husband--what had become of her? Up to the night of Hurd's
death sentence she had still existed in some sort, with her obligations,
qualms, remorses. But since then--every day, every hour had been
grinding, scorching her away--fashioning in flame and fever this new
Marcella who sat here, looking impatiently into another life, which
should know nothing of the bonds of the old.
Ah, yes!--her _thought_ could distinguish between the act and the man,
between the man and his class; but in her _feeling_ all was confounded.
This awful growth of sympathy in her--strange irony!--had made all
sympathy for Aldous Raeburn impossible to her. Marry him?--no!
no!--never! But she would make it quite easy to him to give her up.
Pride should come in--he should feel no pain in doing it. She had in her
pocket the letter she had received from him that afternoon. She had
hardly been able to read it. Ear and heart were alike dull to it.
From time to time she probably slept in her chair. Or else it was the
perpetual rush of images and sensations through the mind that hastened
the hours. Once when the first streaks of the March dawn were showing
through the curtains Minta Hurd sprang up with a loud cry:
"Oh, my God! Jim, _Jim!_ Oh, no!--take that off. Oh, _please_, sir,
please! Oh, for God's sake, sir!"
Agony struggled with sleep. Marcella, shuddering, held and soothed her,
and for a while sleep, or rather the drug in her veins, triumphed again.
For another hour or two she lay restlessly tossing from side to side,
but unconscious.
Willie hardly moved all night. Again and again Marcella held beef-tea or
milk to his mouth, and tried to rouse him to take it, but she could make
no impression on the passive lips; the sleeping serenity of the brow
never changed.
At last, with a start, Marcella looked round and saw that the morning
was fully there. A cold light was streaming through the curtains; the
fire was still glowing; but her limbs were stiff and chilled under her
shawl. She sprang up, horror descending on her. Her shaking fingers
could hardly draw out the watch in her belt.
_Ten minutes to eight_!
For the first time the girl felt nerve and resolution fail her. She
looked at Mrs. Hurd and wrung her hands. The mother was muttering and
moving, but not yet fully awake; and Willie lay as before. Hardly
knowing what she was doing, she drew the curtains back, as though
inspiration might come with the light. The rain-clouds trailed across
the common; water dripped heavily from the thatch of the cottage; and a
few birds twittered from some bedraggled larches at the edge of the
common. Far away, beyond and beneath those woods to the right,
Widrington lay on the plain, with that high-walled stone building at its
edge. She saw everything as it must now be happening as plainly as
though she were bodily present there--the last meal--the pinioning--the
chaplain.
Goaded by the passing seconds, she turned back at last to wake that poor
sleeper behind her. But something diverted her. With a start she saw
that Willie's eyes were open.
"Willie," she said, running to him, "how are you, dear? Shall I lift
your head a little?"
He did not answer, though she thought he tried, and she was struck by
the blueness under the eyes and nose. Hurriedly she felt his tiny feet.
They were quite cold.
"Mrs. Hurd!" she cried, rousing her in haste; "dear Mrs. Hurd, come and
see Willie!"
The mother sprang up bewildered, and, hurrying across the room, threw
herself upon him.
"Willie, what is it ails you, dear? Tell mother! Is it your feet are so
cold? But we'll rub them--we'll get you warm soon. And here's something
to make you better." Marcella handed her some brandy. "Drink it, dear;
drink it, sweetheart!" Her voice grew shrill.
"He can't," said Marcella. "Do not let us plague him; it is the end. Dr.
Clarke said it would come in the morning."
They hung over him, forgetting everything but him for the moment--the
only moment in his little life he came first even with his mother.
There was a slight movement of the hand.
"He wants his animals," said Marcella, the tears pouring down her
cheeks. She lifted them and put them on his breast, laying the cold
fingers over them.
Then he tried to speak.
"Daddy!" he whispered, looking up fully at his mother; "take 'em to
Daddy!"
She fell on her knees beside him with a shriek, hiding her face, and
shaking from head to foot. Marcella alone saw the slight, mysterious
smile, the gradual sinking of the lids, the shudder of departing life
that ran through the limbs.
A heavy sound swung through the air--a heavy repeated sound. Mrs. Hurd
held up her head and listened. The church clock tolled eight. She knelt
there, struck motionless by terror--by recollection.
"Oh, Jim!" she said, under her breath--"my Jim!"
The plaintive tone--as of a creature that has not even breath and
strength left wherewith to chide the fate that crushes it--broke
Marcella's heart. Sitting beside the dead son, she wrapt the mother in
her arms, and the only words that even her wild spirit could find
wherewith to sustain this woman through the moments of her husband's
death were words of prayer--the old shuddering cries wherewith the human
soul from the beginning has thrown itself on that awful encompassing
Life whence it issued, and whither it returns.