CHAPTER XV.

Two days later, in the afternoon, Aldous Raeburn found himself at the

door of Mellor. When he entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Boyce, who had

heard his ring, was hurrying away.

"Don't go," he said, detaining her with a certain peremptoriness. "I

want all the light on this I can get. Tell me, she has _actually_

brought herself to regard this man's death as in some sort my doing--as

something which ought to separate us?"

Mrs. Boyce saw that he held an opened letter from Marcella crushed in

his hand. But she did not need the explanation. She had been expecting

him at any hour throughout the day, and in just this condition of mind.

"Marcella must explain for herself," she said, after a moment's thought.

"I have no right whatever to speak for her. Besides, frankly, I do not

understand her, and when I argue with her she only makes me realise that

I have no part or lot in her--that I never had. It is just enough. She

was brought up away from me. And I have no natural hold. I cannot help

you, or any one else, with her."

Aldous had been very tolerant and compassionate in the past of this

strange mother's abdication of her maternal place, and of its probable

causes. But it was not in human nature that he should be either to-day.

He resumed his questioning, not without sharpness.

"One word, please. Tell me something of what has happened since

Thursday, before I see her. I have written--but till this morning I have

had not one line from her."

They were standing by the window, he with his frowning gaze, in which

agitation struggled against all his normal habits of manner and

expression, fixed upon the lawn and the avenue. She told him briefly

what she knew of Marcella's doings since the arrival of Wharton's

telegram--of the night in the cottage, and the child's death. It was

plain that he listened with a shuddering repulsion.

"Do you know," he exclaimed, turning upon her, "that she may never

recover this? Such a strain, such a horror! rushed upon so wantonly, so

needlessly."

"I understand. You think that I have been to blame? I do not wonder. But

it is not true--not in this particular case. And anyway your view is not

mine. Life--and the iron of it--has to be faced, even by women--perhaps,

most of all, by women. But let me go now. Otherwise my husband will come

in. And I imagine you would rather see Marcella before you see him or

any one."

That suggestion told. He instantly gathered himself together, and

nervously begged that she would send Marcella to him at once. He could

think of nothing, talk of nothing, till he had seen her. She went, and

Aldous was left to walk up and down the room planning what he should

say. After the ghastly intermingling of public interests and private

misery in which he had lived for these many weeks there was a certain

relief in having reached the cleared space--the decisive moment--when he

might at last give himself wholly to what truly concerned him. He would

not lose her without a struggle. None the less he knew, and had known

ever since the scene in the Court library, that the great disaster of

his life was upon him.

The handle of the door turned. She was there.

He did not go to meet her. She had come in wrought up to face

attack--reproaches, entreaties--ready to be angry or to be humble, as he

should give her the lead. But he gave her no lead. She had to break

through that quivering silence as best she could.

"I wanted to explain everything to you," she said in a low voice, as she

came near to him. "I know my note last night was very hard and abrupt. I

didn't mean to be hard. But I am still so tired--and everything that one

says, and feels, hurts so."

She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not

been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he

looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into

which she had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a

passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.

"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you read my letter

that I wrote you the day before--?"

"Yes."

"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your

grief--your suffering--or to the suffering of any human being for whom

you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"

"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking

sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have

done."

"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat

beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you

desire so passionately for others--freedom of conscience--freedom of

judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all

my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have

refused me the commonest right of love--the right to show you myself, to

prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion--misery,

much more, oh, much more to me than to you!--I was in truth bent on the

same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same

goal."

"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what

burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry--that there was a

struggle in your mind--that you pitied me--pitied _them_. But you judged

it all _from above_--you looked down--and I could not see that you had

any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I

was below--in the midst--_close_ to the horror and anguish of them."

"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I

not offer--entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed

to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented

us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke

deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement

which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?

You owe it to me to answer."

She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's

mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last

in this white heat of an accusing passion. In return she began to forget

her own resolve to bear herself gently.

"You don't remember," she cried, "that what divided us was

your--your--incapacity to put the human pity first; to think of the

surrounding circumstances--of the debt that you and I and everybody like

us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had been stunted and starved by

life as he had been."

Her lip began to tremble.

"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I had been a poor

man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my judgment of right and

wrong--in such a matter. You would have let me remember that I was a

citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice! You would have let

me plead that Hurd's sin was not against me, but against the community,

and that in determining whether to do what you wished or no, I must

think of the community and its good before even I thought of pleasing

you. If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this would have been

permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of my _money_,"--she

shrank before the accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest

moral rights. _My_ scruple, _my_ feeling, were nothing to you. Your

pride was engaged as well as your pity, and I must give way. Marcella!

you talk of justice--you talk of equality--is the only man who can get

neither at your hands--the man whom you promised to marry!"

His voice dwelt on that last word, dwelt and broke. He leant over her in

his roused strength, and tried to take her hand. But she moved away from

him with a cry.

"It is no use! Oh, don't--don't! It may be all true. I was vain, I dare

say, and unjust, and hard. But don't you see--don't you understand--if

we _could_ take such different views of such a case--if it could divide

us so deeply--what chance would there be if we were married? I ought

never--never--to have said 'Yes' to you--even as I was then. But _now_,"

she turned to him slowly, "can't you see it for yourself? I am a changed

creature. Certain things in me are gone--_gone_--and instead there is a

fire--something driving, tormenting--which must burn its way out. When I

think of what I liked so much when you asked me to marry you--being

rich, and having beautiful things, and dresses, and jewels, and

servants, and power--social power--above all _that_--I feel sick and

choked. I couldn't breathe now in a house like Maxwell Court. The poor

have come to mean to me the only people who really _live_, and really

_suffer_. I must live with them, work for them, find out what I can do

for them. You must give me up--you must indeed. Oh! and you will! You

will be glad enough, thankful enough, when--when--you know what I _am_!"

He started at the words. Where was the prophetess? He saw that she was

lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the

chair.

In an instant he was on his knees beside her.

"Marcella!" he could hardly command his voice, but he held her

struggling hand against his lips. "You think that suffering belongs to

one class? Have you really no conception of what you will be dealing to

me if you tear yourself away from me?"

She withdrew her hand, sobbing.

"Don't, don't stay near me!" she said; "there is--more--there is

something else."

Aldous rose.

"You mean," he said in an altered voice, after a pause of silence, "that

another influence--another man--has come between us?"

She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.

"If I could say to you only this," she began at last, with long pauses,

"'I mistook myself and my part in life. I did wrong, but forgive me, and

let me go for both our sakes'--that would be--well!--that would be

difficult,--but easier than this! Haven't you understood at all?

When--when Mr. Wharton came, I began to see things very soon, not in my

own way, but in his way. I had never met any one like him--not any one

who showed me such possibilities in _myself_--such new ways of using

one's life, and not only one's possessions--of looking at all the great

questions. I thought it was just friendship, but it made me critical,

impatient of everything else. I was never myself from the beginning.

Then,--after the ball,"--he stooped over her that he might hear her the

more plainly,--"when I came home I was in my room and I heard

steps--there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house.

I went out to see. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts--oh, I can't tell, I

can't tell!--anyway, he was there. We went into the library, and we

talked. He did not want to touch our marriage,--but he said all sorts of

mad things,--and at last--he kissed me."

The last words were only breathed. She had often pictured herself

confessing these things to him. But the humiliation in which she

actually found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of,

more than she could bear. All those great words of pity and mercy--all

that implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never

attain--to end in this story! The effect of it, on herself, rather than

on him, was what she had not foreseen.

Aldous raised himself slowly.

"And when did this happen?" he asked after a moment.

"I told you--the night of the ball--of the murder," she said with a

shiver; "we saw Hurd cross the avenue. I meant to have told you

everything at once."

"And you gave up that intention?" he asked her, when he had waited a

little for more, and nothing came.

She turned upon him with a flash of the old defiance.

"How could I think of my own affairs?"

"Or of mine?" he said bitterly.

She made no answer.

Aldous got up and walked to the chimney-piece. He was very pale, but his

eyes were bright and sparkling. When she looked up at him at last she

saw that her task was done. His scorn--his resentment--were they not the

expiation, the penalty she had looked forward to all along?--and with

that determination to bear them calmly? Yet, now that they were there in

front of her, they stung.

"So that--for all those weeks--while you were letting me write as I did,

while you were letting me conceive you and your action as I did, you had

this on your mind? You never gave me a hint; you let me plead; you let

me regard you as wrapped up in the unselfish end; you sent me those

letters of his--those most misleading letters!--and all the time--"

"But I meant to tell you--I always meant to tell you," she cried

passionately. "I would never have gone on with a secret like that--not

for your sake--but for my own."

"Yet you did go on so long," he said steadily; "and my agony of mind

during those weeks--my feeling towards you--my--"

He broke off, wrestling with himself. As for her, she had fallen back in

her chair, physically incapable of anything more.

He walked over to her side and took up his hat.

"You have done me wrong," he said, gazing down upon her. "I pray God you

may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future! Give me leave to

write to you once more, or to send my friend Edward Hallin to see you.

Then I will not trouble you again."

He waited, but she could give him no answer. Her form as she lay there

in this physical and moral abasement printed itself upon his heart. Yet

he felt no desire whatever to snatch the last touch--the last kiss--that

wounded passion so often craves. Inwardly, and without words, he said

farewell to her. She heard his steps across the room; the door shut; she

was alone--and free.

BOOK III.

"O Neigung, sage, wie hast du so tief

Im Herzen dich verstecket?

Wer hat dich, die verborgen schlief,

Gewecket?"

CHAPTER I.

"Don't suppose that I feel enthusiastic or sentimental about the 'claims

of Labour,'" said Wharton, smiling to the lady beside him. "You may get

that from other people, but not from me. I am not moral enough to be a

fanatic. My position is simplicity itself. When things are inevitable, I

prefer to be on the right side of them, and not on the wrong. There is

not much more in it than that. I would rather be on the back of the

'bore' for instance, as it sweeps up the tidal river, than the swimmer

caught underneath it."

"Well, that is intelligible," said Lady Selina Farrell, looking at her

neighbour, as she crumbled her dinner-roll. To crumble your bread at

dinner is a sign of nervousness, according to Sydney Smith, who did it

with both hands when he sat next an Archbishop; yet no one for a good

many years past had ever suspected Lady Selina of nervousness, though

her powers had probably been tried before now by the neighbourhood of

many Primates, Catholic and Anglican. For Lady Selina went much into

society, and had begun it young.

"Still, you know," she resumed after a moment's pause--"you _play_

enthusiasm in public--I suppose you must."

"Oh! of course," said Wharton, indifferently. "That is in the game."

"Why should it be--always? If you are a leader of the people, why don't

you educate them? My father says that bringing feeling into politics is

like making rhymes in one's account book."

"Well, when you have taught the masses how _not_ to feel," said Wharton,

laughing, "we will follow your advice. Meanwhile it is our brains and

their feelings that do the trick. And by the way, Lady Selina, are _you_

always so cool? If you saw the Revolution coming to-morrow into the

garden of Alresford House, would you go to the balcony and argue?"

"I devoutly hope there would be somebody ready to do something more to

the point," said Lady Selina, hastily. "But of course _we_ have

enthusiasms too."

"What, the Flag--and the Throne--that kind of thing?"

The ironical attention which Wharton began at this moment to devote to

the selection of an olive annoyed his companion.

"Yes," she repeated emphatically, "the Flag and the Throne--all that has

made England great in the past. But we know very well that they are not

_your_ enthusiasms."

Wharton's upper lip twitched a little.

"And you are quite sure that Busbridge Towers has nothing to do with

it?" he said suddenly, looking round upon her.

Busbridge Towers was the fine ancestral seat which belonged to Lady

Selina's father, that very respectable and ancient peer, Lord Alresford,

whom an ungrateful party had unaccountably omitted--for the first

time--from the latest Conservative administration.

"Of course we perfectly understand," replied Lady Selina, scornfully,

"that your side--and especially your Socialist friends, put down all

that _we_ do and say to greed and selfishness. It is our

misfortune--hardly our fault."

"Not at all," said Wharton, quietly, "I was only trying to convince you

that it is a little difficult to drive feeling out of politics. Do you

suppose our host succeeds? You perceive?--this is a Radical house--and a

Radical banquet?"

He pushed the _menu_ towards her significantly. Then his eye travelled

with its usual keen rapidity over the room, over the splendid

dinner-table, with its display of flowers and plate, and over the

assembled guests. He and Lady Selina were dining at the hospitable board

of a certain rich manufacturer, who drew enormous revenues from the

west, had formed part of the Radical contingent of the last Liberal

ministry, and had especially distinguished himself by a series of

uncompromising attacks on the ground landlords of London.

Lady Selina sighed.

"It is all a horrible tangle," she said, "and what the next twenty years

will bring forth who can tell? Oh! one moment, Mr. Wharton, before I

forget. Are you engaged for Saturday week?"

He drew a little note-book out of his pocket and consulted it. It

appeared that he was not engaged.

"Then will you dine with us?" She lightly mentioned the names of four or

five distinguished guests, including the Conservative Premier of the

day. Wharton made her a little ceremonious bow.

"I shall be delighted. Can you trust me to behave?"

Lady Selina's smile made her his match for the moment.

"Oh! we can defend ourselves!" she said. "By the way I think you told me

that Mr. Raeburn was not a friend of yours."

"No," said Wharton, facing her look with coolness. "If you have asked

Mr. Raeburn for the 23rd, let me crave your leave to cancel that note in

my pocket-book. Not for my sake, you understand, at all."

She had difficulty in concealing her curiosity. But his face betrayed

nothing. It always seemed to her that his very dark and straight

eyebrows, so obtrusive and unusual as compared with the delicacy of the

features, of the fair skin and light brown curls, made it easy for him

to wear any mask he pleased. By their mere physical emphasis they drew

attention away from the subtler and more revealing things of expression.

"They say," she went on, "that he is sure to do well in the House, if

only he can be made to take interest enough in the party. But one of his

admirers told me that he was not at all anxious to accept this post they

have just given him. He only did it to please his grandfather. My father

thinks Lord Maxwell much aged this year. He is laid up now, with a chill

of some sort I believe. Mr. Raeburn will have to make haste if he is to

have any career in the Commons. But you can see he cares very little

about it. All his friends tell me they find him changed since that

unlucky affair last year. By the way, did you ever see that girl?"

"Certainly. I was staying in her father's house while the engagement

was going on."

"Were you!" said Lady Selina, eagerly, "and what did you think of her?"

"Well, in the first place," said Wharton, slowly, "she is beautiful--you

knew that?"

Lady Selina nodded.

"Yes. Miss Raeburn, who has told me most of what I know, always throws

in a shrug and a 'but' when you ask about her looks. However, I have

seen a photograph of her, so I can judge for myself. It seemed to me a

beauty that men perhaps would admire more than women."

Wharton devoted himself to his green peas, and made no reply. Lady

Selina glanced at him sharply. She herself was by no means a beauty. But

neither was she plain. She had a long, rather distinguished face, with a

marked nose and a wide thin-lipped mouth. Her plentiful fair hair, a

little dull and ashy in colour, was heaped up above her forehead in

infinitesimal curls and rolls which did great credit to her maid, and

gave additional height to the head and length to a thin white neck. Her

light blue eyes were very direct and observant. Their expression implied

both considerable knowledge of the world and a natural inquisitiveness.

Many persons indeed were of opinion that Lady Selina wished to know too

much about you and were on their guard when she approached.

"You admired her very much, I see," she resumed, as Wharton still

remained silent.

"Oh, yes. We talked Socialism, and then I defended her poacher for her."

"Oh, I remember. And it is really true, as Miss Raeburn says, that she

broke it off because she could not get Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn to

sign the petition for the poacher?"

"Somewhere about true," said Wharton, carelessly.

"Miss Raeburn always gives the same account; you can never get anything

else out of her. But I sometimes wonder whether it is the _whole_ truth.

_You_ think she was sincere?"

"Well, she gave up Maxwell Court and thirty thousand a year," he replied

drily. "I should say she had at least earned the benefit of the doubt."

"I mean," said Lady Selina, "was she in love with anybody else, and was

the poacher an excuse?"

She turned upon him as she spoke--a smiling, self-possessed person--a

little spoilt by those hard, inquisitive eyes.

"No, I think not," said Wharton, throwing his head back to meet her

scrutiny. "If so, nothing has been heard of him yet. Miss Boyce has been

at St. Edward's Hospital for the last year."

"To learn nursing? It is what all the women do nowadays, they tell me,

who can't get on with their relations or their lovers. Do you suppose it

is such a very hard life?"

"I don't want to try!" said Wharton. "Do you?"

She evaded his smile.

"What is she going to do when she has done her training?"

"Settle down and nurse among the poor, I believe."

"Magnificent, no doubt, but hardly business, from her point of view. How

much more she might have done for the poor with thirty thousand a year!

And any woman could put up with Aldous Raeburn."

Wharton shrugged his shoulders.

"We come back to those feelings, Lady Selina, you think so badly of."

She laughed.

"Well, but feelings must be intelligible. And this seems so small a

cause. However, were you there when it was broken off?"

"No; I have never seen her since the day of the poacher's trial."

"Oh! So she has gone into complete seclusion from all her friends?"

"That I can't answer for. I can only tell you my own experience."

Lady Selina bethought herself of a great many more questions to ask, but

somehow did not ask them. The talk fell upon politics, which lasted till

the hostess gave the signal, and Lady Selina, gathering up her fan and

gloves, swept from the room next after the Countess at the head of the

table, while a host of elderly ladies, wives of ministers and the like,

stood meekly by to let her pass.

As he sat down again, Wharton made the entry of the dinner at Alresford

House, to which he had just promised himself, a little plainer. It was

the second time in three weeks that Lady Selina had asked him, and he

was well aware that several other men at this dinner-table, of about the

same standing and prospects as himself, would be very glad to be in his

place. Lady Selina, though she was unmarried, and not particularly

handsome or particularly charming, was a personage--and knew it. As the

mistress of her father's various fine houses, and the kinswoman of half

the great families of England, she had ample social opportunities, and

made, on the whole, clever use of them. She was not exactly popular, but

in her day she had been extremely useful to many, and her invitations

were prized. Wharton had been introduced to her at the beginning of

this, his second session, had adopted with her the easy, aggressive,

"personal" manner--which, on the whole, was his natural manner towards

women--and had found it immediately successful.

When he had replaced his pocket-book, he found himself approached by a

man on his own side of the table, a member of Parliament like himself,

with whom he was on moderately friendly terms.

"Your motion comes on next Friday, I think," said the new-comer.

Wharton nodded.

"It'll be a beastly queer division," said the other--"a precious lot of

cross-voting."

"That'll be the way with that kind of question for a good while to

come--don't you think"--said Wharton, smiling, "till we get a complete

reorganisation of parties?"

As he leaned back in his chair, enjoying his cigarette, his half-shut

eyes behind the curls of smoke made a good-humoured but contemptuous

study of his companion.

Mr. Bateson was a young manufacturer, recently returned to Parliament,

and newly married. He had an open, ruddy face, spoilt by an expression

of chronic perplexity, which was almost fretfulness. Not that the

countenance was without shrewdness; but it suggested that the man had

ambitions far beyond his powers of performance, and already knew himself

to be inadequate.

"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you get a considerable vote," he resumed,

after a pause; "it's like women's suffrage. People will go on voting for

this kind of thing, till there seems a chance of getting it. _Then_!"

"Ah, well!" said Wharton, easily, "I see we shan't get _you_."

"_I_!--vote for an eight-hours day, by local and trade option! In my

opinion I might as well vote for striking the flag on the British Empire

at once! It would be the death-knell of all our prosperity."

Wharton's artistic ear disliked the mixture of metaphor, and he frowned

slightly.

Mr. Bateson hurried on. He was already excited, and had fallen upon

Wharton as a prey.

"And you really desire to make it _penal_ for us manufacturers--for me

in my industry--in spite of all the chances and changes of the market,

to work my men more than eight hours a day--_even_ if they wish it!"

"We must get our decision, our majority of the adult workers in any

given district in favour of an eight-hours day," said Wharton, blandly;

"then when they have voted for it, the local authority will put the Act

in motion."

"And my men--conceivably--may have voted in the minority, against any

such tomfoolery; yet, when the vote is given, it will be a punishable

offence for them, and me, to work overtime? You _actually_ mean that;

how do you propose to punish us?"

"Well," said Wharton, relighting his cigarette, "that is a much debated

point. Personally, I am in favour of imprisonment rather than fine."

The other bounded on his chair.

"You would imprison me for working overtime--with _willing men!_"

Wharton eyed him with smiling composure. Two or three other men--an old

general, the smart private secretary of a cabinet minister, and a

well-known permanent official at the head of one of the great spending

departments--who were sitting grouped at the end of the table a few feet

away, stopped their conversation to listen.

"Except in cases of emergency, which are provided for under the Act,"

said Wharton. "Yes, I should imprison you, with the greatest pleasure in

life. Eight hours _plus_ overtime is what we are going to stop, _at all

hazards!_"

A flash broke from his blue eyes. Then he tranquilly resumed his

smoking.

The young manufacturer flushed with angry agitation.

"But you must know, it is inconceivable that you should not know, that

the whole thing is stark staring lunacy. In our business, trade is

declining, the export falling every year, the imports from France

steadily advancing. And you are going to make us fight a country where

men work eleven hours a day, for lower wages, with our hands tied behind

our backs by legislation of this kind? Well, you know," he threw

himself back in his chair with a contemptuous laugh, "there can be only

one explanation. You and your friends, of course, have banished

political economy to Saturn--and you suppose that by doing so you get

rid of it for all the rest of the world. But I imagine it will beat you,

all the same!"

He stopped in a heat. As usual what he found to say was not equal to

what he wanted to say, and beneath his anger with Wharton was the

familiar fuming at his own lack of impressiveness.

"Well, I dare say," said Wharton, serenely. "However, let's take your

'political economy' a moment, and see if I can understand what you mean

by it. There never were two words that meant all things to all men so

disreputably!"

And thereupon to the constant accompaniment of his cigarette, and with

the utmost composure and good temper, he began to "heckle" his

companion, putting questions, suggesting perfidious illustrations,

extracting innocent admissions, with a practised shrewdness and malice,

which presently left the unfortunate Bateson floundering in a sea of his

own contradictions, and totally unable for the moment to attach any

rational idea whatever to those great words of his favourite science,

wherewith he was generally accustomed to make such triumphant play, both

on the platform and in the bosom of the family.

The permanent official round the corner watched the unequal fight with

attentive amusement. Once when it was a question of Mill's doctrine of

cost of production as compared with that of a leading modern

collectivist, he leant forward and supplied a correction of something

Wharton had said. Wharton instantly put down his cigarette and addressed

him in another tone. A rapid dialogue passed between them, the dialogue

of experts, sharp, allusive, elliptical, in the midst of which the host

gave the signal for joining the ladies.

"Well, all I know is," said Bateson, as he got up, "that these kinds of

questions, if you and your friends have your way, will _wreck_ the

Liberal party before long--far more effectually than anything Irish has

ever done. On these things some of us will fight, if it must come to

that."

Wharton laughed.

"It would be a national misfortune if you didn't give us a stiff job,"

he said, with an airy good-humour which at once made the other's

blustering look ridiculous.

"I wonder what that fellow is going to do in the House," said the

permanent official to his companion as they went slowly upstairs,

Wharton being some distance ahead. "People are all beginning to talk of

him as a coming man, though nobody quite knows why, as yet. They tell me

he frames well in speaking, and will probably make a mark with his

speech next Friday. But his future seems to me very doubtful. He can

only become a power as the head of a new Labour party. But where is the

party? They all want to be kings. The best point in his favour is that

they are likely enough to take a gentleman if they must have a leader.

But there still remains the question whether he can make anything out of

the material."

"I hope to God he can't!" said the old general, grimly; "it is these

town-chatterers of yours that will bring the Empire about our heads

before we've done. They've begun it already, wherever they saw a

chance."

* * * * *

In the drawing-room Wharton devoted himself for a few minutes to his

hostess, a little pushing woman, who confided to his apparently

attentive ear a series of grievances as to the bad manners of the great

ladies of their common party, and the general evil plight of Liberalism

in London from the social point of view.

"Either they give themselves airs--_rediculous_ airs!--or they admit

everybody!" she said, with a lavish use of white shoulders and scarlet

fan by way of emphasis. "My husband feels it just as much as I do. It is

a real misfortune for the party that its social affairs should be so

villainously managed. Oh! I dare say _you_ don't mind, Mr. Wharton,

because you are a Socialist. But, I assure you, those of us who still

believe in the influence of the best people don't like it."

A point whence Wharton easily led her through a series of spiteful

anecdotes bearing on her own social mishaps and rebuffs, which were none

the less illuminating because of the teller's anxious effort to give

them a dignified and disinterested air. Then, when neither she nor her

plight were any longer amusing, he took his leave, exchanging another

skirmishing word or two on the staircase with Lady Selina, who it

appeared was "going on" as he was, and to the same house.

In a few minutes his hansom landed him at the door of a great mansion

in Berkeley Square, where a huge evening party was proceeding, given by

one of those Liberal ladies whom his late hostess had been so freely

denouncing. The lady and the house belonged to a man who had held high

office in the late Administration.

As he made his way slowly to the top of the crowded stairs, the stately

woman in white satin and diamonds who was "receiving" on the landing

marked him, and when his name was announced she came forward a step or

two. Nothing could have been more flattering than the smile with which

she gave him her gloved hand to touch.

"Have you been out of town all these Sundays?" she said to him, with the

slightest air of soft reproach. "I am always at home, you know--I told

you so!"

She spoke with the ease of one who could afford to make whatever social

advances she pleased. Wharton excused himself, and they chatted a little

in the intervals of her perpetual greetings to the mounting crowd. She

and he had met at a famous country house in the Easter recess, and her

aristocrat's instinct for all that gives savour and sharpness to the

dish of life had marked him at once.

"Sir Hugh wants you to come down and see us in Sussex," she said,

stretching her white neck a little to speak after him, as he was at last

carried through the drawing-room door by the pressure behind him. "Will

you?"

He threw back an answer which she rather took for granted than heard,

for she nodded and smiled through it--stiffening her delicate-face the

moment afterwards to meet the timid remarks of one of her husband's

constituents--asked by Sir Hugh in the streets that afternoon--who

happened to present her with the next hand to shake.

Inside, Wharton soon found himself brought up against the ex-Secretary

of State himself, who greeted him cordially, and then bantered him a

little on his coming motion.

"Oh, I shall be interested to see what you make of it. But, you know, it

has no _actuality_--never can have--till you can agree among yourselves.

You _say_ you want the same thing--I dare say you'll all swear it on

Friday--but _really_--"

The statesman shook his head pleasantly.

"The details are a little vague still, I grant you," said Wharton,

smiling.

"And you think the principle matters twopence without the details? I

have always found that the difficulty with the Christian command, 'Be ye

perfect.' The principle doesn't trouble me at all!"

The swaying of the entering throng parted the two speakers, and for a

second or two the portly host followed with his eye the fair profile and

lightly-built figure of the younger man as they receded from him in the

crowd. It was in his mind that the next twenty years, whether this man

or that turned out to be important or no, must see an enormous

quickening of the political pace. He himself was not conscious of any

jealousy of the younger men; but neither did he see among them any

commanding personality. This young fellow, with his vivacity, his

energy, and his Socialist whims, was interesting enough; and his

problem was interesting--the problem of whether he could make a party

out of the heterogeneous group of which he was turning out to be

indisputably the ablest member. But what was there _certain_ or

_inevitable_ about his future after all? And it was the same with all

the rest. Whereas the leaders of the past had surely announced

themselves beyond mistake from the beginning. He was inclined to think,

however, that we were levelling up rather than levelling down. The world

grew too clever, and leadership was more difficult every day.

Meanwhile Wharton found his progress through these stately rooms

extremely pleasant. He was astonished at the multitude of people he

knew, at the numbers of faces that smiled upon him. Presently, after

half an hour of hard small talk, he found himself for a moment without

an acquaintance, leaning against an archway between two rooms, and free

to watch the throng. Self-love, "that froward presence, like a

chattering child within us," was all alert and happy. A feeling of

surprise, too, which had not yet worn away. A year before he had told

Marcella Boyce, and with conviction, that he was an outcast from his

class. He smiled now at that past _naïveté_ which had allowed him to

take the flouts of his country neighbours and his mother's unpopularity

with her aristocratic relations for an index of the way in which

"society" in general would be likely to treat him and his opinions. He

now knew, on the contrary, that those opinions had been his best

advertisement. Few people, it appeared, were more in demand among the

great than those who gave it out that they would, if they could, abolish

the great.

"It's because they're not enough afraid of us--yet," he said to himself,

not without spleen. "When we really get to business--if we ever do--I

shall not be coming to Lady Cradock's parties."

"Mr. Wharton, do you ever do such a frivolous thing as go to the

theatre?" said a pretty, languishing creature at his elbow, the wife of

a London theatrical manager. "Suppose you come and see us in 'The

Minister's Wooing,' first night next Saturday. I've got _one_ seat in my

box, for somebody _very_ agreeable. Only it must be somebody who can

appreciate my frocks!"

"I should be charmed," said Wharton. "Are the frocks so adorable?"

"Adorable! Then I may write you a note? You don't have your horrid

Parliament that night, do you?" and she fluttered on.

"I think you don't know my younger daughter, Mr. Wharton?" said a severe

voice at his elbow.

He turned and saw an elderly matron with the usual matronly cap and

careworn countenance putting forward a young thing in white, to whom he

bowed with great ceremony. The lady was the wife of a north-country

magnate of very old family, and one of the most exclusive of her kind in

London. The daughter, a vision of young shyness and bloom, looked at him

with frightened eyes as he leant against the wall beside her and began

to talk. She wished he would go away and let her get to the girl friend

who was waiting for her and signalling to her across the room. But in a

minute or two she had forgotten to wish anything of the kind. The

mixture of audacity with a perfect self-command in the manner of her new

acquaintance, that searching half-mocking look, which saw everything in

detail, and was always pressing beyond the generalisations of talk and

manners, the lightness and brightness of the whole aspect, of the curls,

the eyes, the flexible determined mouth, these things arrested her. She

began to open her virgin heart, first in protesting against attack, then

in confession, till in ten minutes her white breast was heaving under

the excitement of her own temerity and Wharton knew practically all

about her, her mingled pleasure and remorse in "going out," her

astonishment at the difference between the world as it was this year,

and the world as it had been last, when she was still in the

school-room--her Sunday-school--her brothers--her ideals--for she was a

little nun at heart--her favourite clergyman--and all the rest of it.

"I say, Wharton, come and dine, will you, Thursday, at the House--small

party--meet in my room?"

So said one of the party whips, from behind into his ear. The speaker

was a popular young aristocrat who in the preceding year had treated the

member for West Brookshire with chilliness. Wharton turned--to consider

a moment--then gave a smiling assent.

"All right!" said the other, withdrawing his hand from Wharton's

shoulder--"good-night!--two more of these beastly crushes to fight

through till I can get to my bed, worse luck! Are any of your fellows

here to-night?"

Wharton shook his head.

"Too austere, I suppose?"

"A question of dress coats, I should think," said Wharton, drily.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

"And this calls itself a party gathering--in a radical and democratic

house--what a farce it all is!"

"Agreed! good-night."

And Wharton moved on, just catching as he did so the eyes of his new

girl acquaintance looking back at him from a distant door. Their shy

owner withdrew them instantly, coloured, and passed out of sight.

At the same moment a guest entered by the same door, a tall grave man in

the prime of life, but already grey haired. Wharton, to his surprise,

recognised Aldous Raeburn, and saw also that the master of the house had

him by the arm. They came towards him, talking. The crowd prevented him

from getting effectually out of their way, but he turned aside and took

up a magazine lying on a bookcase near.

"And you really think him a trifle better?" said the ex-minister.

"Oh, yes, better--certainly better--but I am afraid he will hardly get

back to work this session--the doctors talk of sending him away at

once."

"Ah, well," said the other, smiling, "we don't intend it seems to let

you send anything important up to the Lords yet awhile, so there will be

time for him to recruit."

"I wish I was confident about the recruiting," said Raeburn, sadly. "He

has lost much strength. I shall go with them to the Italian lakes at the

end of next week, see them settled and come back at once."

"Shall you miss a sitting of the commission?" asked his host. Both he

and Raeburn were members of an important Labour Commission appointed the

year before by the new Conservative government.

"Hardly, I think," said Raeburn, "I am particularly anxious not to miss

D----'s evidence."

And they fell talking a little about the Commission and the witnesses

recently examined before it. Wharton, who was wedged in by a group of

ladies, and could not for the moment move, heard most of what they were

saying, much against his will. Moreover Raeburn's tone of quiet and

masterly familiarity with what he and his companion were discussing

annoyed him. There was nothing in the world that he himself would more

eagerly have accepted than a seat on that Commission.

"Ah! there is Lady Cradock!" said Raeburn, perceiving his hostess across

a sea of intervening faces, and responding to her little wave of the

hand. "I must go and get a few words with her, and then take my aunt

away."

As he made his way towards her, he suddenly brushed against Wharton, who

could not escape. Raeburn looked up, recognised the man he had touched,

flushed slightly and passed on. A bystander would have supposed them

strangers to each other.

CHAPTER II.

Two or three minutes later, Wharton was walking down a side street

towards Piccadilly. After all the flattering incidents of the evening,

the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly.

Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been

thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome

pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in

the library at Mellor to her _fiancé_ at the moment of giving him his

dismissal--and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached

him about the broken engagement, by the help still more of the look, or

rather the entire absence of look wherewith Raeburn had walked past his

greeting and his outstretched hand in a corridor of the House, on the

first occasion of their meeting after the news had become public

property, Wharton was inclined to think she _had_--what then? No doubt

the stern moralist might have something to say on the subject of taking

advantage of a guest's position to tamper with another man's betrothed.

If so, the stern moralist would only show his usual incapacity to grasp

the actual facts of flesh and blood. What chance would he or any one

else have had with Marcella Boyce, if she had happened to be in love

with the man she had promised to marry? That little trifle had been left

out in the arrangement. It might have worked through perfectly well

without; as it happened it had broken down. _Realities_ had broken it

down. Small blame to them!

"I stood for _truth_!" he said to himself with a kind of rage--"that

moment when I held her in the library, she _lived_.--Raeburn offered her

a platform, a position; _I_ made her think, and feel. I helped her to

know herself. Our relation was not passion; it stood on the

threshold--but it was real--a true relation so far as it went. That it

went no farther was due again to circumstances--realities--of another

kind. That _he_ should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is

natural enough. If we were in France he would call me out and I should

give him satisfaction with all the pleasure in life. But what am _I_

about? Are his ways mine? I should have nothing left but to shoot myself

to-morrow if they were!"

He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a

merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in

him by contact with Aldous Raeburn.

"Has he not interfered with my freedom--stamped his pedantic foot on

me--ever since we were boys together! I have owed him one for many

years--now I have paid it. Let him take the chances of war!"

Then, driven on by an irritation not to be quieted, he began against his

will to think of those various occasions on which he and Aldous Raeburn

had crossed each other in the past--of that incident in particular which

Miss Raeburn had roughly recalled to Lady Winterbourne's reluctant

memory.

Well, and what of it? It had occurred when Wharton was a lad of

twenty-one, and during an interval of some months when Aldous Raeburn,

who had left Cambridge some three years before, and was already the man

of importance, had shown a decided disposition to take up the brilliant,

unmanageable boy, whom the Levens, among other relations, had already

washed their hands of.

"What did he do it for?" thought Wharton. "Philanthropic motives of

course. He is one of the men who must always be saving their souls, and

the black sheep of the world come in handy for the purpose. I remember I

was flattered then. It takes one some time to understand the workings of

the Hebraistic conscience!"

Yes--as it galled him to recollect--he had shown great plasticity for a

time. He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and Raeburn's

letters and Raeburn's influence had certainly pulled him through various

scrapes that might have been disastrous. Then--a little later--he could

see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch Etive, where he and

Raeburn, Lord Maxwell, Miss Raeburn, and a small party had spent the

August of his twenty-first birthday. Well--that surly keeper, and his

pretty wife who had been Miss Raeburn's maid--could anything be more

inevitable? A hard and jealous husband, and one of the softest, most

sensuous natures that ever idleness made love to. The thing was in the

air!--in the summer, in the blood--as little to be resisted as the

impulse to eat when you are hungry, or drink when you thirst. Besides,

what particular harm had been done, what particular harm _could_ have

been done with such a Cerberus of a husband? As to the outcry which had

followed one special incident, nothing could have been more uncalled

for, more superfluous. Aldous had demanded contrition, had said strong

things with the flashing eyes, the set mouth of a Cato. And the culprit

had turned obstinate--would repent nothing--not for the asking.

Everything was arguable, and Renan's doubt as to whether he or Théophile

Gautier were in the right of it, would remain a doubt to all time--that

was all Raeburn could get out of him. After which the Hebraist friend of

course had turned his back on the offender, and there was an end of it.

That incident, however, had belonged to a stage in his past life, a

stage marked by a certain prolonged tumult of the senses, on which he

now looked back with great composure. That tumult had found vent in

other adventures more emphatic a good deal than the adventure of the

keeper's wife. He believed that one or two of them had been not unknown

to Raeburn.

Well, that was done with! His mother's death--that wanton stupidity on

the part of fate--and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first

drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he

now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of travel, and

the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of

adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the intellectual

stimulus which comes of perpetual change, of new heavens, new seas, new

societies, had loosened the yoke of the flesh and saved him from

himself. The deliverance so begun had been completed at home, by the

various chances and opportunities which had since opened to him a solid

and tempting career in that Labour movement his mother had linked him

with, without indeed ever understanding either its objects or its men.

The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the

vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things

had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with

the thrill of increasing personal success. Passion would require to

present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession of him

again.

As to his relation to Raeburn, he well remembered that when, after that

long break in his life, he and Aldous had met casually again, in London

or elsewhere, Aldous had shown a certain disposition to forget the old

quarrel, and to behave with civility, though not with friendliness. As

to Wharton he was quite willing, though at the same time he had gone

down to contest West Brookshire, and, above all, had found himself in

the same house as Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, with an even livelier

sense than usual of the excitement to be got out of mere living.

No doubt when Raeburn heard that story of the library--if he had heard

it--he recognised in it the man and the character he had known of old,

and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in bitter

and insurmountable disgust. A mere Hebraist's mistake!

"That girl's attraction for me was not an attraction of the

senses--except so far that for every normal man and woman charm is

charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be! What I played

for with her was _power_--power over a nature that piqued and yet by

natural affinity belonged to me. I could not have retained that power,

as it happened, by any bait of passion. Even without the Hurd affair, if

I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have

risen against me and her own treachery. I knew that perfectly well, and

took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting,

too interesting, to give up. For the moment! then a few days,--a few

weeks later--Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!"

And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own

idiosyncrasies. It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of

mental emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him

within the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the

Hurd agitation was over. That agitation had brought him vigorously and

profitably into public notice at a convenient moment. But what had

originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became

in the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation. Wharton

had no sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself

strangely at home there. He had the instinct for debate, the instinct

for management, together with a sensitive and contriving ambition. He

found himself possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance

that astonished him--a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for

drudgery, and for making the best of dull men. The omens were all

favourable, sometimes startlingly so. He was no longer hampered by the

ill-will of a county or a family connection. Here in this new world,

every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was

worth. Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two

preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House,

from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still

loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise. The anxieties

and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.

The quick, elastic nature adjusted itself at once. To some kinds of

success, nothing is so important as the ability to forget--to sweep the

mind free of everything irrelevant and superfluous. Marcella Boyce, and

all connected with her, passed clean out of Wharton's consciousness.

Except that once or twice he said to himself with a passing smile that

it was a good thing he had not got himself into a worse scrape at

Mellor. Good heavens! in what plight would a man stand--a man with his

career to make--who had given Marcella Boyce claims upon him! As well

entangle oneself with the Tragic Muse at once as with that stormy,

unmanageable soul!

So much for a year ago. To-night, however, the past had been thrust back

upon him, both by Lady Selina's talk and by the meeting with Raeburn. To

smart indeed once more under that old ascendency of Raeburn's, was to

be provoked into thinking of Raeburn's old love.

Where was Miss Boyce? Surely her year of hospital training must be up by

now?

He turned into St. James Street, stopped at a door not far from the

Palace end, let himself in, and groped his way to the second floor. A

sleepy man-servant turned out of his room, and finding that his master

was not inclined to go to bed, brought lights and mineral water. Wharton

was practically a teetotaller. He had taken a whim that way as a boy,

and a few experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had

only confirmed what had been originally perhaps a piece of

notoriety-hunting. He had, as a rule, flawless health; and the

unaccustomed headaches and nausea which followed these occasional

excesses had disgusted and deterred him. He shook himself easily free of

a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and had ever since found

his abstinence a source both of vanity and of distinction. Nothing

annoyed him more than to hear it put down to any ethical motive. "If I

liked the beastly stuff, I should swim in it to-morrow," he would say

with an angry eye when certain acquaintance--not those he made at Labour

Congresses--goaded him on the point. "As it is, why should I make it, or

chloral, or morphia, or any other poison, my master! What's the

inducement--eh, you fellows?"

_En revanche_ he smoked inordinately.

"Is that all, sir," said his servant, pausing behind his chair, after

candles, matches, cigarettes, and Apollinaris had been supplied in

abundance.

"Yes; go to bed, Williams, but don't lock up. Good-night."

The man departed, and Wharton, going to the window which opened on a

balcony looking over St. James Street, threw it wide, and smoked a

cigarette leaning against the wall. It was on the whole a fine night and

warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air. In the

street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only

just past midnight and the clubs were not yet empty. To his right the

turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky

covered with light, windy cloud. Beyond it his eye sought instinctively

for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless--like some

one in a stupid silence. That light of the sitting House had become to

him one of the standing pleasures of life. He had never yet been

honestly glad of its extinction.

"I'm a precious raw hand," he confessed to himself with a shake of the

head as he stood there smoking. "And it can't last--nothing does."

Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the edge of the

balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a

little, and finally took out a letter. He stooped over the lamp to read

it. It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had written him some two or

three days after the breach of her engagement. That fact was barely

mentioned at the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any

kind. Then the letter continued:

"I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and

attempted through these many weeks. But for them it must have been plain

to us both that we could never rightly meet again. I am very destitute

just now--and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing

left me. But that scene in the past, which put us both wrong with

honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out--_thought--suffered_

away. I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other

co-worker and co-thinker--if in the future you ever want my work, if you

can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could

do--ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.

"But for the present I am going quite away into another world. I have

been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and

they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go. As

soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year's training at a

London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and

nurse. This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife from

seeing Hurd the day before the execution. I knew then that all was over

for me at Mellor.

"As for the wretched break-down of everything--of all my schemes and

friendships here--I had better not speak of it. I feel that I have given

these village-folk, whom I had promised to help, one more reason to

despair of life. It is not pleasant to carry such a thought away with

one. But if the tool breaks and blunts, how can the task be done? It can

be of no use till it has been re-set.

"I should like to know how your plans prosper. But I shall see your

paper and follow what goes on in Parliament. For the present I want

neither to write nor get letters. They tell me that as a probationer I

shall spend my time at first in washing glasses, and polishing

bath-taps, on which my mind rests!

"If you come across my friends of whom I have spoken to you--Louis,

Anthony, and Edith Craven--and could make any use of Louis for the

_Labour Clarion_, I should be grateful. I hear they have had bad times

of late, and Louis has engaged himself, and wants to be married. You

remember I told you how we worked at the South Kensington classes

together, and how they made me a Venturist?

"Yours very truly,

"MARCELLA BOYCE."

Wharton laid down the letter, making a wry mouth over some of its

phrases.

"'_Put us both wrong with honour and conscience.' 'One more reason for

despair of life'--'All was over for me at Mellor_'--dear! dear!--how

women like the big words--the emphatic pose. All those little odds and

ends of charities--that absurd straw-plaiting scheme! Well, perhaps one

could hardly expect her to show a sense of humour just then. But why

does nature so often leave it out in these splendid creatures?"

"Hullo!" he added, as he bent over the table to look for a pen; "why

didn't that idiot give me these?"

For there, under an evening paper which he had not touched, lay a pile

of unopened letters. His servant had forgotten to point them out to him.

On the top was a letter on which Wharton pounced at once. It was

addressed in a bold inky hand, and he took it to be from Nehemiah

Wilkins, M.P., his former colleague at the Birmingham Labour Congress,

of late a member of the _Labour Clarion_ staff, and as such a daily

increasing plague and anxiety to the _Clarion's_ proprietor.

However, the letter was not from Wilkins. It was from the secretary of

a Midland trades-union, with whom Wharton had already been in

communication. The union was recent, and represented the as yet feeble

organisation of a metal industry in process of transition from the

home-workshop to the full factory, or Great Industry stage. The

conditions of work were extremely bad, and grievances many; wages were

low, and local distress very great. The secretary, a young man of

ability and enthusiasm, wrote to Wharton to say that certain alterations

in the local "payment lists" lately made by the employers amounted to a

reduction of wages; that the workers, beginning to feel the heartening

effects of their union, were determined not to submit; that bitter and

even desperate agitation was spreading fast, and that a far-reaching

strike was imminent. Could they count on the support of the _Clarion_?

The _Clarion_ had already published certain letters on the industry from

a Special Commissioner--letters which had drawn public attention, and

had been eagerly read in the district itself. Would the _Clarion_ now

"go in" for them? Would Mr. Wharton personally support them, in or out

of Parliament, and get his friends to do the same? To which questions,

couched in terms extremely flattering to the power of the _Clarion_ and

its owner, the secretary appended a long and technical statement of the

situation.

Wharton looked up from the letter with a kindling eye. He foresaw an

extremely effective case, both for the newspaper and the House of

Commons. One of the chief capitalists involved was a man called Denny,

who had been long in the House, for whom the owner of the _Clarion_

entertained a strong personal dislike. Denny had thwarted him

vexatiously--had perhaps even made him ridiculous--on one or two

occasions; and Wharton saw no reason whatever for forgiving one's

enemies until, like Narvaez, one had "shot them all." There would be

much satisfaction in making Denny understand who were his masters. And

with these motives there mingled a perfectly genuine sympathy with the

"poor devils" in question, and a desire to see them righted.

"Somebody must be sent down at once," he said to himself. "I suppose,"

he added, with discontent, "it must be Wilkins."

For the man who had written the articles for the _Labour Clarion_, as

Special Commissioner, had some three weeks before left England to take

command of a colonial newspaper.

Still pondering, he took up the other letters, turned them

over--childishly pleased for the thousandth time by the M.P. on each

envelope and the number and variety of his correspondence--and eagerly

chose out three--one from his bankers, one from his Lincolnshire agent,

and one from the _Clarion_ office, undoubtedly this time in Wilkins's

hand.

He read them, grew a little pale, swore under his breath, and, angrily

flinging the letters away from him, he took up his cigarette again and

thought.

The letter from his bankers asked his attention in stiff terms to a

largely overdrawn account, and entirely declined to advance a sum of

money for which he had applied to them without the guarantee of two

substantial names in addition to his own. The letter from his agent

warned him that the extraordinary drought of the past six weeks,

together with the general agricultural depression, would certainly mean

a large remission of rents at the June quarter day, and also informed

him that the holders of his co-operative farm would not be able to pay

their half-yearly interest on the capital advanced to them by the

landlord.

As to the third letter, it was in truth much more serious than the two

others. Wilkins, the passionate and suspicious workman, of great natural

ability, who had been in many ways a thorn in Wharton's side since the

beginning of his public career, was now member for a mining

constituency. His means of support were extremely scanty, and at the

opening of the new Parliament Wharton had offered him well-paid work on

the _Clarion_ newspaper. It had seemed to the proprietor of the

_Clarion_ a way of attaching a dangerous man to himself, perhaps also of

controlling him. Wilkins had grudgingly accepted, understanding

perfectly well what was meant.

Since then the relation between the two men had been one of perpetual

friction. Wilkins's irritable pride would yield nothing, either in the

House or in the _Clarion_ office, to Wharton's university education and

class advantages, while Wharton watched with alarm the growing influence

of this insubordinate and hostile member of his own staff on those

labour circles from which the _Clarion_ drew its chief support.

In the letter he had just read Wilkins announced to the proprietor of

the _Clarion_ that in consequence of the "scandalous mismanagement" of

that paper's handling of a certain trade arbitration which had just

closed, he, Wilkins, could no longer continue to write for it, and

begged to terminate his engagement at once, there being no formal

agreement between himself and Wharton as to length of notice on either

side. A lively attack on the present management and future prospects of

the _Clarion_ followed, together with the threat that the writer would

do what in him lay henceforward to promote the cause of a certain rival

organ lately started, among such working men as he might be able to

influence.

"_Brute_! jealous, impracticable brute!" exclaimed Wharton aloud, as he

stood chafing and smoking by the window. All the difficulties which this

open breach was likely to sow in his path stood out before him in clear

relief.

"_Personal_ leadership, there is the whole problem," he said to himself

in moody despair. "Can I--like Parnell--make a party and keep it

together? Can I through the _Clarion_--and through influence _outside_

the House--coerce the men _in_ the House? If so, we can do something,

and Lady Cradock will no longer throw me her smiles. If not the game is

up, both for me and for them. They have no cohesion, no common

information, no real power. Without leaders they are a mere set of

half-educated firebrands whom the trained mind of the country humours

because it must, and so far as they have brute force behind them.

Without _leadership_, _I_ am a mere unit of the weakest group in the House.

Yet, by Jove! it looks as though I had not the gifts."

And he looked back with passionate chagrin on the whole course of his

connection with Wilkins, his unavailing concessions and small

humiliations, his belief in his own tact and success, all the time that

the man dealt with was really slipping out of his hands.

"Damn the fellow!" he said at last, flinging his cigarette away. "Well,

that's done with. All the same, he would have liked that Midland job! He

has been hankering after a strike there for some time, and might have

ranted as he pleased. I shall have the satisfaction of informing him he

has lost his opportunity. Now then--who to send? By Jove! what about

Miss Boyce's friend?"

He stood a moment twisting the quill-pen he had taken up, then he

hastily found a sheet of paper and wrote:

"Dear Miss Boyce,--It is more than a year since I have heard of you, and

I have been wondering with much interest lately whether you have really

taken up a nursing life. You remember speaking to me of your friends the

Cravens? I come across them sometimes at the Venturist meetings, and

have always admired their ability. Last year I could do nothing

practical to meet your wishes. This year, however, there is an opening

on the _Clarion_, and I should like to discuss it with you. Are you in

town or to be found? I could come any afternoon next week, _early_--I go

down to the House at four--or on Saturdays. But I should like it to be

Tuesday or Wednesday, that I might try and persuade you to come to our

Eight Hours debate on Friday night. It would interest you, and I think I

could get you a seat. We Labour members are like the Irishmen--we can

always get our friends in.

"I must send this round by Mellor, so it may not reach you till Tuesday.

Perhaps you will kindly telegraph. The _Clarion_ matter is pressing.

"Yours sincerely,

"H.S. WHARTON."

When he had finished he lingered a moment over the letter, the play of

conflicting motives and memories bringing a vague smile to the lips.

Reverie, however, was soon dispersed. He recollected his other

correspondents, and springing up he began to pace his room, gloomily

thinking over his money difficulties, which were many. He and his mother

had always been in want of money ever since he could remember. Lady

Mildred would spend huge sums on her various crotchets and campaigns,

and then subside for six months into wretched lodgings in a back street

of Southsea or Worthing, while the Suffolk house was let, and her son

mostly went abroad. This perpetual worry of needy circumstances had

always, indeed, sat lightly on Wharton. He was unmarried, and so far

scarcity had generally passed into temporary comfort before he had time

to find it intolerable. But now the whole situation was becoming more

serious. In the first place, his subscriptions and obligations as a

member of Parliament, and as one of the few propertied persons in a

moneyless movement, were considerable. Whatever Socialism might make of

money in the future, he was well aware that money in the present was no

less useful to a Socialist politician than to any one else. In the next

place, the starting and pushing of the _Clarion_ newspaper--originally

purchased by the help of a small legacy from an uncle--had enormously

increased the scale of his money transactions and the risks of life.

How was it that, with all his efforts, the _Clarion_ was not making, but

losing money? During the three years he had possessed it he had raised

it from the position of a small and foul-mouthed print, indifferently

nourished on a series of small scandals, to that of a Labour organ of

some importance. He had written a weekly signed article for it, which

had served from the beginning to bring both him and the paper into

notice; he had taken pains with the organisation and improvement of the

staff; above all, he had spent a great deal more money upon it, in the

way of premises and appliances, than he had been, as it turned out, in

any way justified in spending.

Hence, indeed, these tears. Rather more than a year before, while the

_Clarion_ was still enjoying a first spurt of success and notoriety, he

had, with a certain recklessness which belonged to his character,

invested in new and costly machinery, and had transferred the paper to

larger offices. All this had been done on borrowed money.

Then, for some reason or other, the _Clarion_ had ceased to answer to

the spur--had, indeed, during the past eight months been flagging

heavily. The outside world was beginning to regard the _Clarion_ as an

important paper. Wharton knew all the time that its advertisements were

falling off, and its circulation declining. Why? Who can say? If it is

true that books have their fates, it is still more true of newspapers.

Was it that a collectivist paper--the rival organ mentioned by

Wilkins--recently started by a group of young and outrageously clever

Venturists and more closely in touch than the _Clarion_ with two or

three of the great unions, had filched the _Clarion's_ ground? Or was it

simply that, as Wharton put it to himself in moments of rage and

despondency, the majority of working men "are either sots or

block-heads, and will read and support _nothing_ but the low racing or

police-court news, which is all their intelligences deserve?" Few people

had at the bottom of their souls a more scornful distrust of the

"masses" than the man whose one ambition at the present moment was to be

the accepted leader of English labour.

Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was

liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept

waiting. On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great

indulgence.

He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his

curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back. Presently

he stopped--absently--in front of the inner wall of the room, where,

above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolnshire house, a

number of large framed photographs were hung close together.

His eye caught one and brightened. With an impatient gesture, like that

of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.

"If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will

take me out of it! What a _gorgeous_ time we had on that glacier!"

He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan

Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had spent

four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very grain

and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could

_feel_ the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind. The man

seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself. And

there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and

that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they

had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of

the glacier. Ah, those had been years of _life_, those _Wanderjahre_! He

ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing

itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores

with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and

fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the

wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever

of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.

"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,'" he thought.

"Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?"

And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a

flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how

indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we

choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! _Somewhere_, while we

toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is _air_, there is _sea_, the joy

of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying! This

interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or

altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose--why! they

could be shaken off at a moment's notice!

"However"--he turned on his heel--"suppose we try a few other trifles

first. What time? those fellows won't have gone to bed yet!"

He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way

to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped

before a well-known fashionable club, extremely small, and extremely

select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had

introduced him when he was young and tender, and his mother's relations

still cherished hopes of snatching him as a brand from the burning.

The front rooms of the club were tolerably full still. He passed on to

the back. A door-keeper stationed in the passage stepped back and

silently opened a door. It closed instantly behind him, and Wharton

found himself in a room with some twenty other young fellows playing

baccarat, piles of shining money on the tables, the electric lamps hung

over each, lighting every detail of the scene with the same searching

disenchanting glare.

"I say!" cried a young dark-haired fellow, like a dishevelled Lord

Byron. "Here comes the Labour leader--make room!"

And amid laughter and chaffing he was drawn down to the baccarat table,

where a new deal was just beginning. He felt in his pockets for money;

his eyes, intent and shining, followed every motion of the dealer's

hand. For three years now, ever since his return from his travels, the

gambler's passion had been stealing on him. Already this season he had

lost and won--on the whole lost--large sums. And the fact was--so

far--absolutely unknown except to the men with whom he played in this

room.

CHAPTER III.

"If yer goin' downstairs, Nuss, you'd better take that there scuttle

with yer, for the coals is gittin' low an' it ull save yer a journey!"

Marcella looked with amusement at her adviser--a small bandy-legged boy

in shirt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly

featured face. He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding,

his sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his

expression sharp and keen as a hawk's.

"Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I'm gone, and don't

let any one in but the doctor."

And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick

woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.

"I aint a goin' ter," said the boy, shortly, beginning to sweep again

with energy, "an' if this 'ere baby cries, give it the bottle, I

s'pose?"

"No, certainly not," said Marcella, firmly; "it has just had one. You

sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone."

Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and

ran a general's eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the room.

"Now look 'ere, Nuss," he said in a tone of pitying remonstrance, "yer

never a goin' down to that 'ere coal cellar without a light. Yer'll 'ave

to come runnin' up all them stairs again--sure as I'm alive yer will!"

And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end

of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the

coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still

masterfully considering her, let her go.

Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar

all over the poorer parts of West Central London--the eighteenth-century

house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now

parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air,

water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its

chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic

art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.

Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling

on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade.

Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors

of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and

dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that

the house added one more to the standing shames of the district--an

opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings

among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again

with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.

The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed

a sleepless night. The evening before she had been sent for in haste to

a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a

ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women

friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation

of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the

patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been

Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had

done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an

instant. The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman

among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse;

while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as

best she could, in the midst of the poor thing's wild shrieks and

wrestlings.

It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their

utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the day's

work. Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband

looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged

suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had

not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and

night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and

that--she could hardly have told how.

"_Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!_" said the husband, rising and shaking

himself. He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race,

a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter. Yet,

after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of

perspiration.

"You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again,"

said Marcella.

The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the

nurse.

"You will not go away, mees," he implored, "you will not leaf me alone?"

Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.

"No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes.

You had better go to bed."

It was close on three o'clock. The man demurred a little, but he was in

truth too worn out to resist. He went into the back room and lay down

with the children.

Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her

patient. Her quick ear caught every sound about her--the heavy breaths

of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the

sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the

crowded house. Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances

for pulling the woman through--for it was what a nurse calls "a good

case," one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty--partly on the

extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and

mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman's

illness; and partly--in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought--on

the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in

this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother

and her child!

The year in hospital had _rushed_--dreamless sleep by night, exhausting

fatigue of mind and body by day. A hospital nurse, if her work _seizes_

her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself. Now, for some

six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse,

under the control of a central office and superintendent. Her work lay

in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind. The life was

freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to self-consciousness.

* * * * *

But now the night was over. The husband had gone off to work at a

factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children

had been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself

had been home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office

asking that her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in

sole charge, with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.

When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found

Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.

"Well, Benny!" she said as she entered, "how have you got on?"

"Yer can't move the dirt on them boards with sweepin'," said Benny,

looking at them with disgust; "an' I ain't a goin' to try it no more."

"You're about right there, Benny," said Marcella, mournfully, as she

inspected them; "well, we'll get Mrs. Levi to come in and scrub--as soon

as your mother can bear it."

She stepped up to the bed and looked at her patient, who seemed to be

passing into a state of restless prostration, more or less under the

influence of morphia. Marcella fed her with strong beef tea made by

herself during the night, and debated whether she should give brandy.

No--either the doctor would come directly, or she would send for him.

She had not seen him yet, and her lip curled at the thought of him. He

had ordered a nurse the night before, but had not stayed to meet her,

and Marcella had been obliged to make out his instructions from the

husband as best she could.

Benny looked up at her with a wink as she went back to the fire.

"I didn't let none o' _them_ in," he said, jerking his thumb over his

shoulder. "They come a whisperin' at the door, an' a rattlin' ov the

handle as soon as ever you gone downstairs. But I tole 'em just to take

theirselves off, an' as 'ow you didn't want 'em. Sillies!"

And taking a crust smeared with treacle out of his pocket, Benny

returned with a severe air to the sucking of it.

Marcella laughed.

"Clever Benny," she said, patting his head; "but why aren't you at

school, sir?"

Benjamin grinned.

"'Ow d'yer s'pose my ma's goin' to git along without me to do for 'er

and the babby?" he replied slily.

"Well, Benny, you'll have the Board officer down on you."

At this the urchin laughed out.

"Why, 'e wor here last week! Ee can't be troublin' 'isself about this

'ere bloomin' street _ev_ery day in the week."

There was a sharp knock at the door.

"The doctor," she said, as her face dismissed the frolic brightness

which had stolen upon it for a moment. "Run away, Benny."

Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then

withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with

him.

The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair

moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the

fire.

"You come from the St. Martin's Association?"

Marcella stiffly replied. He took her temperature-chart from her hand

and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time

to time with eyes that displeased her. Presently she came to an account

of the condition in which she had found her patient. The edge on the

words, for all their professional quiet, was unmistakable. She saw him

flush.

He moved towards the bed, and she went with him. The woman moaned as he

approached her. He set about his business with hands that shook.

Marcella decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his

proceedings with increasing disgust and amazement. Presently she could

bear it no longer.

"I think," she said, touching his arm, "that you had better leave it to

me--and--go away!"

He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying,

and faced her fiercely.

"What do you mean?" he said, "don't you know your place?"

The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.

"Yes--I know my place!"

Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she

had to say. She knew--and he could not deny--that he had endangered his

patient's life. She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it

again. Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse.

His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.

Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for

an instant he would have struck her. Finally he turned down his

shirt-cuffs and walked away.

"You understand," he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his

hand, "that I shall not attend this case again till your Association can

send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the

doctor. I shall now write a report to your superintendent."

"As you please," said Marcella, quietly. And she went to the door and

opened it.

He passed her sneering:

"A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say.

I'd sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!"

Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening. "Will you go?" she

said.

He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside,

breathing threats.

Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath.

There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth

and strain.

Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to

fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking. In another

minute or two she would be besieged by them. She called sharply,

"Benny!"

Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses

to right and left.

"What is it you want, Nuss? No, she don't want none o' _you_--_there_!"

And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in

all their faces, but that Marcella said to him--

"Let in Mrs. Levi, please."

The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was

admitted, and then the key was turned. Marcella scribbled a line on a

half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with

it.

"I have sent for a new doctor," she explained, still frowning and white,

to Mrs. Levi. "That one was not fit."

The woman's olive-skinned face lightened all over. "Thanks to the Lord!"

she said, throwing up her hands. "But how in the world did you do 't,

miss? There isn't a single soul in this house that doesn't go all of a

tremble at the sight of 'im. Yet all the women has 'im when they're

ill--bound to. They thinks he must be clever, 'cos he's such a brute. I

do believe sometimes it's that. He _is_ a brute!"

Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set

her straight and comfortable again. But the woman had begun to mutter

once more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did not understand,

and could no longer be kept still. The temperature was rising again, and

another fit of delirium was imminent. Marcella could only hope that she

and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor

came. When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the

poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could,

while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman's

illness and of Dr. Blank's conduct of it. Marcella's feeling, as she

listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity! The sufferings

of the poor, _because_ they were poor--these things often, still,

darkened earth and heaven for her. That wretch would have been quite

capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently,

if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do

squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.

"Hullo, nurse!" said a cheery voice; "you seem to have got a bad case."

The sound was as music in Marcella's ears. The woman she held was fast

becoming unmanageable--had just shrieked, first for "poison," then for a

"knife," to kill herself with, and could hardly be prevented by the

combined strength of her nurse and Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself

madly out of bed, and now from tearing out her black hair in handfuls.

The doctor--a young Scotchman with spectacles, and stubbly red

beard--came quickly up to the bed, asked Marcella a few short questions,

shrugged his shoulders over her dry report of Dr. Blank's proceedings,

then took out a black case from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe

together.

For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by any treatment.

The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and

nurse, in the intervals of his wife's paroxysms, not to leave him alone.

Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the

passage of time. Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out

with a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected

his professional sense. Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an

instant, struck out with a wild right hand. The blow caught Marcella on

the cheek, and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.

"You are hurt," said Dr. Angus, running up to her.

"No, no," she said, smiling through the tears that the shock had called

into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside; "it is nothing.

You said you wanted some fresh ice."

And she went into the back room to get it.

The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the patient.

"You will have to send her to the infirmary," he said to the husband;

"there is nothing else for it."

Marcella came back with the ice, and was able to apply it to the head.

The patient was quieter--was, in fact, now groaning herself into a fresh

period of exhaustion.

The doctor's sharp eyes took note of the two figures, the huddled

creature on the pillows and the stately head bending over her, with the

delicately hollowed cheek, whereon the marks of those mad fingers stood

out red and angry. He had already had experience of this girl in one or

two other cases.

"Well," he said, taking up his hat, "it is no good shilly-shallying. I

will go and find Dr. Swift." Dr. Swift was the parish doctor.

When he had gone, the big husband broke down and cried, with his head

against the iron of the bed close to his wife. He put his great hand on

hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois. They had been

eight years married, and she had never had a day's serious illness till

now. Marcella's eyes filled with tears as she moved about the room,

doing various little tasks.

At last she went up to him.

"Won't you go and have some dinner?" she said to him kindly. "There's

Benjamin calling you," and she pointed to the door of the back room,

where stood Benny, his face puckered with weeping, forlornly holding out

a plate of fried fish, in the hope of attracting his father's attention.

The man, who in spite of his size and strength was in truth childishly

soft and ductile, went as he was bid, and Marcella and Mrs. Levi set

about doing what they could to prepare the wife for her removal.

Presently parish doctor and sanitary inspector appeared, strange and

peremptory invaders who did but add to the terror and misery of the

husband. Then at last came the ambulance, and Dr. Angus with it. The

patient, now once more plunged in narcotic stupor, was carried

downstairs by two male nurses, Dr. Angus presiding. Marcella stood in

the doorway and watched the scene,--the gradual disappearance of the

helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat

of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by

step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and

browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and

landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr.

Angus could hardly make his directions heard, angrily as he bade them

stand back; and on the top stair, the big husband, following the form of

his departing and unconscious wife with his eyes, his face convulsed

with weeping, the whimpering children clinging about his knees.

How hot it was!--how stifling the staircase smelt, and how the sun beat

down from that upper window on the towzled unkempt women with their

large-eyed children.

CHAPTER IV.

Marcella on her way home turned into a little street leading to a great

block of model dwellings, which rose on the right hand side and made

everything else, the mews entrance opposite, the lines of squalid shops

on either side, look particularly small and dirty. The sun was beating

fiercely down, and she was sick and tired.

As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the

large asphalted court round which they ran--blazing heat on one side of

it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with

chalk marks for wickets--she was seized with depression. The tall yet

mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of

packed and crowded humanity--these things, instead of offering her rest,

only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more

endurance, more making the best of it.

But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her,

and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of

her own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her

children, who had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In

sets 7 and 8, on either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two

widows, each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.

Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside the

"home" of the district on certain conditions, which had been fulfilled

in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her old friends in

these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable though poor

class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her to make a

temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that she

could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for

their companionship, as she pleased.

As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or

entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the

living room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back

kitchen.

The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's training

showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak flap

tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three cane

chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the

varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books

on the tables--there was not one of these things that was not in its

degree a pleasure to her young senses, that did not help her to live her

life. This afternoon as she opened the door and looked in, the pretty

colours and forms in the tiny room were as water to the thirsty. Her

mother had sent her some flowers the day before. There they were on the

tables, great bunches of honey-suckles, of blue-bells, and Banksia

roses. And over the mantelpiece was a photograph of the place where such

flowers as Mellor possessed mostly grew--the unkempt lawn, the old

fountain and grey walls of the Cedar Garden.

The green blind over the one window which looked into the court, had

been drawn down against the glare of the sun, as though by a careful

hand. Beside a light wooden rocking chair, which was Marcella's

favourite seat, a tray of tea things had been put out. Marcella drew a

long breath of comfort as she put down her bag.

"Now, _can_ I wait for my tea till I have washed and dressed?"

She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy

child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door

between her rooms and the Hurds.

"Minta!"

A voice responded.

"Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there's a good soul! I will be

back directly."

And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room,

daintily fresh and clean but very pale. She had taken off her nurse's

dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung

about her in cool folds.

But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her

disapprovingly.

"Whatever are you so late for?" she asked a little peevishly. "You'll

get ill if you go missing your dinner."

"I couldn't help it, Minta, it was such a bad case."

Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased. Her mind was

constantly full of protest against this nursing. Why should Miss Boyce

do such "funny things"--why should she live as she did, at all?

Their relation to each other was a curious one. Marcella, knowing that

the life of Hurd's widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent for

her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering

her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service. Minta

already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her.

It was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine

that one of the "gentlemen" who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve

Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out

of pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce

would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling,

and leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from

Mellor. Her first instinct after her husband's execution had been to

hide herself from all the world. But for a long time her precarious

state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary

Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village. It was not till

Marcella's proposal came that her way was clear. She sold her bits of

things at once, took her children and went up to Brown's buildings.

Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from

which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often

shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at

thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with

almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps

there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open

mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the

result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed

mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of

their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never

have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask

of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression

that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and

distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man,

Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not

pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the

children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic

pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss

Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and

Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she

came in and found him sitting there.

Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through

this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not

call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening,

had declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be

that of servant in any sense, but of friend and sister; and on her and

her children Marcella had spent from the beginning a number of new

womanish wiles which, strangely enough, this hard, strenuous life had

been developing in her. She would come and help put the children to bed;

she would romp with them in their night-gowns; she would bend her

imperious head over the anxious endeavour to hem a pink cotton pinafore

for Daisy, or dress a doll for the baby. But the relation jarred and

limped perpetually, and Marcella wistfully thought it her fault.

Just now, however, as she sat gently swaying backwards and forwards in

the rocking-chair, enjoying her tea, her mood was one of nothing but

content.

"Oh, Minta, give me another cup. I want to have a sleep so badly, and

then I am going to see Miss Hallin, and stay to supper with them."

"Well, you mustn't go out in them nursin' things again," said Minta,

quickly; "I've put you in some lace in your black dress, an' it looks

beautiful."

"Oh, thank you, Minta; but that black dress always seems to me too smart

to walk about these streets in."

"It's just _nice_," said Minta, with decision. "It's just what everybody

that knows you--what your mamma--would like to see you in. I can't abide

them nursin' clothes--nasty things!"

"I declare!" cried Marcella, laughing, but outraged; "I never like

myself so well in anything."

Minta was silent, but her small mouth took an obstinate look. What she

really felt was that it was absurd for ladies to wear caps and aprons

and plain black bonnets, when there was no need for them to do anything

of the kind.

"Whatever have you been doing to your cheek?" she exclaimed, suddenly,

as Marcella handed her the empty cup to take away.

Marcella explained shortly, and Minta looked more discontented than

ever. "A lot of low people as ought to look after themselves," that was

how in her inmost mind she generally defined Marcella's patients. She

had been often kind and soft to her neighbours at Mellor, but these

dirty, crowded Londoners were another matter.

"Where is Daisy?" asked Marcella as Minta was going away with the tea;

"she must have come back from school."

"Here I am," said Daisy, with a grin, peeping in through the door of the

back kitchen. "Mother, baby's woke up."

"Come here, you monkey," said Marcella; "come and go to sleep with me.

Have you had your tea?"

"Yes, lots," said Daisy, climbing up into Marcella's lap. "Are you going

to be asleep a long time?"

"No--only a nap. Oh! Daisy, I'm so tired. Come and cuddlie a bit! If you

don't go to sleep you know you can slip away--I shan't wake."

The child, a slight, red-haired thing, with something of the ethereal

charm that her dead brother had possessed, settled herself on Marcella's

knees, slipped her left thumb into her mouth, and flung her other arm

round Marcella's neck. They had often gone to sleep so. Mrs. Hurd came

back, drew down the blind further, threw a light shawl over them both,

and left them.

An hour and a half later Minta came in again as she had been told.

Daisy had slipped away, but Marcella was still lying in the perfect

gentleness and relaxation of sleep.