Well!--to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at

his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind

him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his

springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.

The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference.

Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.

"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front--oh! not

very full yet, sir--will be directly."

Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in.

Yes!--there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the

grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of

Commons puts its ladies--as though its owner were already absorbed in

what was passing before her.

She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.

"Oh! now, come and tell us everything--and who everybody is. Why don't

we see the Speaker?--and which is the Government side?--oh, yes, I see.

And who's this speaking now?"

"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting

to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair

for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"

"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella,

impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's

names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!--he's just

come in!--oh, don't be so superior, though you _have_ been here

before--you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"

Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.

"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's

no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!--do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the

Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you

sit?--I see--and there's Mr. Bennett--and that black-faced man, Mr.

Wilkins, I met at the Hallins--you don't like him, do you?" she said,

drawing back and looking at him sharply.

"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said

Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a

fool of himself and us to-night--we shall see! It's kind of you to wish

us an Irish row!--considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall

never get another!"

"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh,

that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"--a pause--"Dear me,

how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a

Democrat, Mr. Wharton--I find myself terribly in love with the

Government. But who's that?"

She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew

hurriedly back.

"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."

A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was

giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the

first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw

Aldous Raeburn.

She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick

glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as

the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.

"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to

take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much--they don't get any

change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under

the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night

the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over

to a friend if I may--a Staffordshire member, who has his wife

here--Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you.

Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion;

but they will look after you."

The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said

about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was

Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.

"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty

minutes. Wish me well through!"

Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for

the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the

fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn

ghost should walk this particular evening.

Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long

silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was

lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well

that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she

shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and

singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the

light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.

"_All that my life can do to pour good measure_--_down_--_running

over_--_into yours, I vowed you then!_"

The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain.

Was it indeed this man under her eyes--so listless, so unconscious--who

had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think

of.

And now--never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them

again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"--separate, estranged, for

ever? It was like the touch of death--the experience brought with it

such a chill--such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to

be broken through.

Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To

have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in

one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank

Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It

was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of

family than he. And as for the girl--the little dancing, flirting

girl!--why the thing happened every day. _His_ wife should not be too

strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should

cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with

the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at

least was clear to her--the curious recognition that never before had

she considered Aldous Raeburn, _in and for himself_, as an independent

human being.

"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to

herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"

But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn,

after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared

suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her

with the same fascination as before.

The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the

speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both

inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was

fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters

were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had

been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their

paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government--all

were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.

"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of

excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the

crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his

hat.

In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and

crowded House in a voice--clear, a little hard, but capable of the most

accomplished and subtle variety--which for the first moment sent a

shudder of memory through Marcella.

Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as

though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on

the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an

_irritable_ sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible

for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any

effect upon such a crowd!--so irresponsive, individualist, unfused--so

lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and

excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below,

under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were

those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call

"_cheers_"?

But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the

atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one

wholly different--nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent

sense--informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the

memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had

been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader--awoke to the peculiar

conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its

performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the

House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion

offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand

to succeed in it.

Why? Because here after all is power--here is the central machine. Here

are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have

for their span of life the leading--or the wrecking?--of this great

fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our country. Here things

are not only debated, but done--lamely or badly, perhaps, but still

_done_--which will affect our children's children; which link us to the

Past; which carry us on safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods

know. And in this passage, this chequered, doubtful passage from

thinking to doing, an infinite savour and passion of life is somehow

disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure,

public and personal; it enwraps the spectacle and the actors; it carries

and supports patriot and adventurer alike.

Ideas, perceptions of this kind--the first chill over--stole upon and

conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into

Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It

would be a success this speech--it was a success! The House was gained,

was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments,

which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was

being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent--with

brilliancy, moderation, practical detail--moderation above all! From the

slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English

"working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts--through

the general description of the present situation, of the workman's

present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for

State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the

effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the

great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the

economic future of England--the speaker carried his thread of luminous

speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point

he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the

propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of

detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist

terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions

of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the

regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated

to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life,

possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of

leisure, knowledge, and delight--the crowded benches before and behind

him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of

"flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had

earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the

Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in

the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a

deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in

the utterances of the Labour men.

"'The mildest mannered man' _et cetera!_" said a smiling member of the

late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton

sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up

of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are

eager to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance

on anything last year."

"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled

the man addressed.

"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put

up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his

hat again which he had taken up.

Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her

chair with a long breath.

"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she

sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very

competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government

side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she

possessed--and she was full of them--had been stirred and satisfied by

the speech and the speaker.

But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his

peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact

the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley

personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the

poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same

time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to

measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A

year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of

pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time

conscious of a curious growth--independence.

But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as

it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon

her--in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in

the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.

Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her

brothers were typical Venturists--a little cynical, therefore, towards

all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and

a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it

down--through him--as a first law, that sentiment in public is the

abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was

little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.

"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That

man _Wilkins_!"

Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's

Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting

down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and

frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.

With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to

have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short

stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an

important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of

the bill which had been sketched by Wharton--personal jealousy and

distrust of the mover of the resolution--denial of his representative

place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which

he had nothing to do--the most violent protest against the servility

with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and

political enfranchisement--and the most passionate assertion that

between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great

parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred,

unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and

landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its

heel--all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness

from the torrent of north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah

Wilkins rioted in one of the best "times" of his life. That he was an

orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again;

and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.

The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words

rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady

Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench,

caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!--you haven't

even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final

attack upon the Liberals--who, after ruining their own chances and the

chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man

whining for his support as their only hope of recovery--was delivered to

a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an

angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.

Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech in a

state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting

erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had come to

sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down,

and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government _non

possumus_, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour

which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened

with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity as to which hand

to shake and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of

compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the

Opposition under the ferocities of some others of its nominal friends.

Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, the _habitué_.

While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come

back again to his seat next to the Speaker, who was his official chief.

Every now and then the Minister turned to him, and Raeburn handed him a

volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the

great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the

Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once

more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver

of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far

turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other--and

she, once more, looking on!

When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with

thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun--when it was seen

that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who

were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House,

a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity

felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be

leader had been for some time considerable.

When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire,

both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A

man who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the

unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had

hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had

given Wharton the warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals,

to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous

though still perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he

personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during

the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour

members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young

and brilliant man beside him.

Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of

religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an

imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its

expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong

conviction that the time had come when the Labour party _must_ have

separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to

this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might

have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy

of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He

threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the

phrase, in the direction of Wilkins--who in the middle of the speech

abruptly walked out--and before he sat down, the close attention, the

looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about

him,--amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in

Parliament--made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch

not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary

history of the great industrial movement.

The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out

to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one

man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with

his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt

a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him--perfectly white,

with a lip he in vain tried to steady.

"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."

Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the

out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of

the Englishman.

Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an

ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the

Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the

spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience

behind him!--and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How

could he get her to himself somehow for a moment--and dispose of that

Craven girl?

"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of

the Gallery.

But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw,

the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.

"Don't let's talk here," she said. "Can't we go out? I am melted!"

"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we

shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested?"

Edith smiled demurely.

"I thought it a good debate," she said.

"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward remark as he led

the way.

CHAPTER IX.

"How enchanting!" cried Marcella, as they emerged on the terrace, and

river, shore, and sky opened upon them in all the thousand-tinted light

and shade of a still and perfect evening. "Oh, how hot we were--and how

badly you treat us in those dens!"

Those confident eyes of Wharton's shone as they glanced at her.

She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff--it seemed to him he

remembered it of old--and on the waving masses of hair lay a little

bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied

demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the

beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing--the rich arresting

note of the voice--the inimitable carriage of the head--Wharton realised

them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in

some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was in

his power, his possession.

The terrace was full of people, and alive with a Babel of talk. Yet, as

he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that

Marcella was instantly marked. Every one who passed them, or made way

for them, looked and looked again.

The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew

nothing of her own effect. She was drinking in the sunset light--the

poetic mystery of the river--the lovely line of the bridge--the

associations of the place where she stood, of this great building

overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror

lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Raeburn; then when a

stranger showed himself she gave herself up again to her young pleasure

in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed;

Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so

well-fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh

homage to itself; and she had more and more glamour for him in the

reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment.

"Ah, here are the Lanes!" he said, detecting at last a short lady in

black amid a group of men.

Marcella and Edith were introduced. Then Edith found a friend in a young

London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him

till dinner should be announced.

"I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace," said Wharton to

Mr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet awhile. What a crowd! The

Alresfords not come yet, I see."

Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round.

"Raeburn has a party to-night. And there are at least three or four

others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be

equally scarce!"

Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella. But she was talking to Mrs. Lane,

and had heard nothing.

"Let me just show you the terrace," he said to her. "No chance of dinner

for another twenty minutes."

They strolled away together. As they moved along, a number of men

waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and congratulations--glancing

the while at the lady on his left. But presently they were away from the

crowd which hung about the main entrance to the terrace, and had reached

the comparatively quiet western end, where were only a few pairs and

groups walking up and down.

"Shall I see Mr. Bennett?" she asked him eagerly, as they paused by the

parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing under the fast

incoming tide. "I want to."

"I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a

prayer-meeting--at least I guess so. There is a famous American

evangelist speaking in Westminster to-night--I am as certain as I ever

am of anything that Bennett is there--dining on Moody and Sankey. Men

are a medley, don't you think?--So you liked his speech?"

"How coolly you ask!" she said, laughing. "Did _you_?"

He was silent a moment, his smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he

turned to her.

"How much gratitude do you think I owe him?"

"As much as you can pay," she said with emphasis. "I never heard

anything more complete, more generous."

"So you were carried away?"

She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity--a touch of defiance.

"No!--neither by him, nor by you. I don't believe in your Bill--and I am

_sure_ you will never carry it!"

Wharton lifted his eyebrows.

"Perhaps you'll tell me where you are," he said, "that I may know how to

talk? When we last discussed these things at Mellor, I _think_--you were

a Socialist?"

"What does it matter what I was last year?" she asked him gaily, yet

with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay; "I was a baby!

_Now_ perhaps I have earned a few poor, little opinions--but they are a

ragged bundle--and I have never any time to sort them."

"Have you left the Venturists?"

"No!--but I am full of perplexities; and the Cravens, I see, will soon

be for turning me out. You understand--I _know_ some working folk now!"

"So you did last year."

"No!"--she insisted, shaking her head--"that was all different. But now

I am _in_ their world--I live with them--and they talk to me. One

evening in the week I am 'at home' for all the people I know in our

Buildings--men and women. Mrs. Hurd--you know who I mean?"--her brow

contracted a moment--"she comes with her sewing to keep me company; so

does Edith Craven; and sometimes the little room is packed. The men

smoke--when we can have the windows open!--and I believe I shall soon

smoke too--it makes them talk better. We get all sorts--Socialists,

Conservatives, Radicals--"

"--And you don't think much of the Socialists?"

"Well! they are the interesting, dreamy fellows," she said, laughing,

"who don't save, and muddle their lives. And as for argument, the

Socialist workman doesn't care twopence for facts--that don't suit him.

It's superb the way he treats them!"

"I should like to know who does care!" said Wharton, with a shrug. Then

he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command her. He

had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the crisp

curls of hair. "But tell me"--he went on--"who has been tampering with

you? Is it Hallin? You told me you saw him often."

"Perhaps. But what if it's everything?--_living?_--saving your presence!

A year ago at any rate the world was all black--_or_ white--to me. Now I

lie awake at night, puzzling my head about the shades between--which

makes the difference. A compulsory Eight Hours' Day for all men in all

trades!" Her note of scorn startled him. "You _know_ you won't get it!

And all the other big exasperating things you talk about--public

organisation of labour, and the rest--you won't get them till all the

world is a New Jerusalem--and when the world is a New Jerusalem nobody

will want them!"

Wharton made her an ironical bow.

"Nicely said!--though we have heard it before. Upon my word, you have

marched!--or Edward Hallin has carried you. So now you think the poor

are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible worlds--is that

the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in fact? the man who

got up after me?"

His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a

recollection that brought a frown.

"That was the man, then, you attacked in the _Clarion_ this morning!"

"Ah! you read me!" said Wharton, with sudden pleasure. "Yes--that opened

the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven has gone down, and the

strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two batteries to bear, he

letting fly as correspondent, and I from the office. I enjoyed writing

that article."

"So I should think," she said drily; "all I know is, it made _one_

reader passionately certain that there was another side to the matter!

There may not be. I dare say there isn't; but on me at least that was

the effect. Why is it"--she broke out with vehemence--"that not a single

Labour paper is ever capable of the simplest justice to an opponent?"

"You think any other sort of paper is any better?" he asked her

scornfully.

"I dare say not. But that doesn't matter to me! it is _we_ who talk of

justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to man, and then we go and

blacken the men who don't agree with us--whole classes, that is to say,

of our fellow-countrymen, not in the old honest slashing style,

Tartuffes that we are!--but with all the delicate methods of a new art

of slander, pursued almost for its own sake. We know so much

better--always--than our opponents, we hardly condescend even to be

angry. One is only 'sorry'--'obliged to punish'--like the priggish

governess of one's childhood!"

In spite of himself, Wharton flushed.

"My best thanks!" he said. "Anything more? I prefer to take my drubbing

all at once."

She looked at him steadily.

"Why did you write, or allow that article on the West Brookshire

landlords two days ago?"

Wharton started.

"Well! wasn't it true?"

"No!" she said with a curling lip; "and I think you know it wasn't

true."

"What! as to the Raeburns? Upon my word, I should have imagined," he

said slowly, "that it represented your views at one time with tolerable

accuracy."

Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet, and, taking

up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river.

He saw the hand shake.

"Look here," he said, turning round so that he too leant over the river,

his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear. "Are you always

going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you know that there is no one

in the world I would sooner please if I could?"

She did not speak.

"In the first place," he said, laughing, "as to my speech, do you

suppose that I believe in that Bill which I described just now?"

"I don't know," she said indignantly, once more playing with the stones

on the wall. "It sounded like it."

"That is my gift--my little _carillon_, as Renan would say. But do you

imagine I want you or any one else to tell me that we shan't get such a

Bill for generations? Of course we shan't!"

"Then why do you make farcical speeches, bamboozling your friends and

misleading the House of Commons?"

He saw the old storm-signs with glee--the lightning in the eye, the rose

on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry.

"Because, my dear lady--_we must generate our force_. Steam must be got

up--I am engaged in doing it. We shan't get a compulsory eight hours'

day for all trades--but in the course of the agitation for that precious

illusion, and by the help of a great deal of beating of tom-toms, and

gathering of clans, we shall get a great many other things by the way

that we _do_ want. Hearten your friends, and frighten your

enemies--there is no other way of scoring in politics--and the

particular score doesn't matter. Now don't look at me as if you would

like to impeach me!--or I shall turn the tables. _I_ am still fighting

for my illusions in my own way--_you_, it seems, have given up yours!"

But for once he had underrated her sense of humour. She broke into a low

merry laugh which a little disconcerted him.

"You mock me?" he said quickly--"think me insincere,

unscrupulous?--Well, I dare say! But you have no right to mock me. Last

year, again and again, you promised me guerdon. Now it has come to

paying--and I claim!"

His low distinct voice in her ear had a magnetising effect upon her. She

slowly turned her face to him, overcome by--yet fighting

against--memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference

to that scene she hated to think of, he would have probably lost this

hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but

a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all

those tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things

of pity and fear, which had so often seemed to her the atonement for,

the washing away of that old baseness.

He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly--

"I promised to be grateful. So I am."

"No, no!" he said, still in the same low tone. "You promised me a

friend. Where is she?"

She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and

her eyes were fixed on the haze opposite, whence emerged the blocks of

the great hospital and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But

his gaze compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an

expression half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could

speak.

"Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life?" he said drily. "It is

not the life for you; it does not fit you in the least."

"You test your friends!" she cried, her cheek flaming again at the

provocative change of voice. "What possible right have you to that

remark?"

"I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You can't serve

them where you are. Nursing is not for you; you are wanted among your

own class--among your equals--among the people who are changing and

shaping England. It is absurd. You are masquerading."

She gave him a little sarcastic nod.

"Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in my

life."

He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or posing.

"You are just what you were in one respect--terribly in the right! Be a

little humble to-night for a change. Come, condescend to the classes! Do

you see Mr. Lane calling us?"

And, in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning

to them from the distance.

"Do you know Lady Selina Farrell?" he asked her, as they walked quickly

back to the dispersing crowd.

"No; who is she?"

Wharton laughed.

"Providence should contrive to let Lady Selina overhear that question

once a week--in your tone! Well, she is a personage--Lord Alresford's

daughter--unmarried, rich, has a _salon_, or thinks she has--manipulates

a great many people's fortunes and lives, or thinks she does, which,

after all, is what matters--to Lady Selina. She wants to know you,

badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is--you will let

me introduce you? She dines with us."

In another moment Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a

very fashionable black and pink bonnet, who held out a gracious hand.

"I have heard so much of you!" said Lady Selina, as they walked along

the passage to the dining-room together. "It must be so wonderful, your

nursing!"

Marcella laughed rather restively.

"No, I don't think it is," she said; "there are so many of us."

"Oh, but the things you do--Mr. Wharton told me--so interesting!"

Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady

Selina thought her a very handsome but very _gauche_ young woman. Still,

_gauche_ or no, she had thrown over Aldous Raeburn and thirty thousand a

year; an act which, as Lady Selina admitted, put you out of the common

run.

"Do you know most of the people dining?" she enquired in her blandest

voice. "But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton's, I

think?"

"He stayed at our house last year," said Marcella, abruptly. "No, I

don't know anybody."

"Then shall I tell you? It makes it more interesting, doesn't it? It

ought to be a pleasant little party."

And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella

that most of them were very "smart" or very important. Some of the smart

names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn's talk of last year;

and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and two or

three prominent members. It was all rather surprising.

At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the

young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were

agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown

beauty. The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing

with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that

story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong

to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.

Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she

could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lady

Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella's

minister on his left. At the other end of the table sat Mrs. Lane, doing

her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a blind old age,

gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and possible premier.

But the talk, on the whole, was general--a gay and careless

give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball

flying from one accustomed hand to another.

And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in

it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as

her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor--the solitary, eccentric figure

pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate--bringing the enmity

of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead.

Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot and of

Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour

of country-house "sets," with a patter of names which sounded in her

scornful ear like a paragraph from the _World_; above all, a general air

of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate, seemed

inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the

"idle rich," whereof--in the popular idea--he was held to be one of the

very particular foes!--

No doubt, as the dinner moved on, this first impression changed

somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost

upon her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself

had so often fumed; she watched the occasional recoil of the women about

him, as though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal, and

had been suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things

puzzled, partly propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and

hostile. How was it possible--from such personal temporising--such a

frittering of the forces and sympathies--to win the single-mindedness

and the power without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk

with him--reproach him!

"Well--I must go--worse luck," said Wharton at last, laying down his

napkin and rising. "Lane, will you take charge? I will join you outside

later."

"If he ever finds us!" said her neighbour to Marcella. "I never saw the

place so crowded. It is odd how people enjoy these scrambling meals in

these very ugly rooms."

Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee-tavern

place, in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the

end, while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space

below.

"Are there any other rooms than this?" she asked idly.

"One more," said a young man across the table, who had been introduced

to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to

look at him, as he desired. "But there is another big party there

to-night--Raeburn--you know," he went on innocently, addressing the

minister; "he has got the Winterbournes and the Macdonalds--quite a

gathering--rather an unusual thing for him."

The minister glanced quickly at his companion. But she had turned to

answer a question from Lady Selina, and thenceforward, till the party

rose, she gave him little opportunity of observing her.

As the outward-moving stream of guests was once more in the corridor

leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane.

"I think," she said--"I am afraid--we ought to be going--my friend and

I. Perhaps Mr. Lane--perhaps he would just show us the way out; we can

easily find a cab."

There was an imploring, urgent look in her face which struck Mrs. Lane.

But Mr. Lane's loud friendly voice broke in from behind.

"My dear Miss Boyce!--we can't possibly allow it--no! no--just half an

hour--while they bring us our coffee--to do your homage, you know, to

the terrace--and the river--and the moon!--And then--if you don't want

to go back to the House for the division, we will see you safely into

your cab. Look at the moon!--and the tide"--they had come to the wide

door opening on the terrace--"aren't they doing their very best for

you?"

Marcella looked behind her in despair. _Where_ was Edith? Far in the

rear!--and fully occupied apparently with two or three pleasant

companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on, with Mr.

Lane chatting beside her--though the sight of the shining terrace, with

its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she

could hardly control.

"Come and look at the water," she said to Mr. Lane; "I would rather not

walk up and down if you don't mind."

He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or

promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now

trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and

sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for

the voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Lady Winterbourne, above

all! How unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a

forwarded letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her

address.

"Well, how did you like the speech to-night--_the_ speech?" said Mr.

Lane, a genial Gladstonian member, more heavily weighted with estates

than with ideas. "It was splendid, wasn't it?--in the way of speaking.

Speeches like that are a safety-valve--that's my view of it. Have 'em

out--all these ideas--get 'em discussed!"--with a good-humoured shake of

the head for emphasis. "Does nobody any harm and may do good. I can tell

you, Miss Boyce, the House of Commons is a capital place for taming

these clever young men!--you must give them their head--and they make

excellent fellows after a bit. Why--who's this?--My dear Lady

Winterbourne!--this _is_ a sight for sair een!"

And the portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately

lady in black, whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight.

"_Marcella_!" cried a woman's voice.

Yes--there he was!--close behind Lady Winterbourne. In the soft darkness

he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over the wall

without an idea--a suspicion.

She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winterbourne, hesitated a

second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She

could not see his face in the darkness; but she was suddenly and

strangely conscious of the whole scene--of the great dark building with

its lines of fairy-lit gothic windows--the blue gulf of the river

crossed by lines of wavering light--the swift passage of a steamer with

its illuminated saloon and crowded deck--of the wonderful mixture of

moonlight and sunset in the air and sky--of this dark figure in front of

her.

Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not

know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She

threw herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a

tremor almost equal to her own.

"Oh! do come with me--come away!--I want to talk to you!" she said

incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winterbourne with a strong

hand.

Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the terrace.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elder lady--"to think of finding _you_

here! How astonishing--how--how dreadful! No!--I don't mean that. Of

course you and he must meet--but it was only yesterday he told me he

had never seen you again--since--and it gave me a turn. I was very

foolish just now. There now--stay here a moment--and tell me about

yourself."

And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind

her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne

recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic

severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same

delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling.

She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed

it in the dark so that no one saw.

"I _am_ glad to see you again," she said passionately, "so glad!"

Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.

"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child! And I

have heard so little of you--your mother never seemed to know. When will

you come and see me--or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we

were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to

a ball. How _strange_"--she broke off--"how very strange that you and he

should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with

Lord Maxwell."

"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily. "Will you come to tea

with me next week?--Oh, I will write.--And we must go too--where _can_

my friend be?"

She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.

"I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway," said Lady Winterbourne;

"or shall we look after you?"

"No! no! Take me back to the Lanes."

"Mamma, are you coming?" said a voice like a softened version of Lady

Winterbourne's. Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl's

voice said piteously:

"_Dear_ Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take so long to do! _I_

shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend. Ermyntrude will be

sorry she ever knew me. _Do_ come!"

"Don't cry, Betty. I certainly shan't take you if you do!" said Lady

Ermyntrude, laughing. "Mamma, is this Miss Boyce--_your_ Miss Boyce?"

She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude

under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall

stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had

little notion of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the

girlish form hanging on Lady Winterbourne's arm than she was of her own

words, of "Betty's" beautiful soft eyes--also shyly and gravely fixed

upon herself--under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the long,

pointed chin; the whimsical little face.

"Well, none of _you_ are any good!" said Betty at last, in a tragic

voice. "I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and 'ask a

p'leeceman.' Mr. Raeburn!"

He disengaged himself from a group behind and came--with no alacrity.

Betty ran up to him.

"Mr. Raeburn! Ermyntrude and Lady Winterbourne are going to sleep here,

if you don't mind making arrangements. But _I_ want a hansom."

At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along

towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world

had never rolled more evenly.

"Oh! there she is--there is my friend!" cried Marcella to Lady

Winterbourne. "Good-night--good-night!"

She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a

moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to "collect"

another straying member of the party.

An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort--even

her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes. She walked up to

him.

"Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?" she said in a tremulous hurry. "I

am so sorry he is ill--I hadn't heard--I--"

She dared not look up. Was that _his_ voice answering?

"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day

give a rather better report. We take him abroad to-morrow."

"Marcella! at last!" cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend;

"you lost me? Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way. But look, there is

Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go--come and say good-night--everybody is

departing."

Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of

humiliation--pain--sore resentment. That cold, strange tone--those

unwilling words!--She had gone up to him--as undisciplined in her

repentance as she had been in aggression--full of a passionate yearning

to make friends--somehow to convey to him that she "was sorry," in the

old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little.

There could be no misunderstanding possible! He of all men knew best how

irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and

you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another

human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and

go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the

promises of ethics and religion _ought_ to bring peace--peace and a

soothed conscience?

But she had been repulsed--put aside, so she took it--and by one of the

kindest and most generous of men! She moved along the terrace in a maze,

seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All that

obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her--which had

found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once

loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike, her--was

beating and swelling stormlike within her. She had taken being loved so

easily, so much as a matter of course! How was it that it hurt her now

so much to have lost love, and power, and consideration? She had never

felt any passion for Aldous Raeburn--had taken him lightly and shaken

him off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from

him--the proud manner of a moment--had inflicted a smart upon her she

could hardly bear. They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy,

uncared for!

But, on the contrary, she _must_ be happy!--_must_ be loved! To this,

and this only, had she been brought by the hard experience of this

strenuous year.

* * * * *

"Oh, Mrs. Lane, _be_ an angel!" exclaimed Wharton's voice. "Just one

turn--five minutes! The division will be called directly, and then we

will all thank our stars and go to bed!"

In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bare-headed, radiant,

reckless even, as he was wont to be in moments of excitement. He had

seen her speak to Raeburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind

was too full for any perception of other people's situations--even hers.

He was absorbed with himself, and with her, as she fitted his present

need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his

lips; and his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and

the pleasure of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to

homage; his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference,

a flattery, to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the

evening had lent a new prestige.

She, too, in his eyes, had triumphed--had made her mark. His ears were

full of the comments made upon her to-night by the little world on the

terrace. If it were not for money--_hateful_ money!--what more brilliant

wife could be desired for any rising man?

So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division

was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of

herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment,

had given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet to

think her kind and fair.

CHAPTER X.

"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I.

Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all

these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than--"

"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give

you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us

weaklings? Do you think I _want_ to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing

too much,' my good friend!"

Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by

Hallin's "chaff."

"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out

with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more

unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now,

rest, and begin again in the winter?"

Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly

joined in front of him.

"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.

Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed

it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.

"Why you should behave as though you _wished_ to make such a prophecy

true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.

Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in

front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked

unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had

possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its

clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes--_coeli lucida

templa_--the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under

its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been

something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and

movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between

the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.

"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting

up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I _shall_ give up soon.

Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with

their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures.

I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead,

and--I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh

when no man can work."

They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the political

situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive

now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind.

Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with

positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have

passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain

current _isms_ and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years

had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs,

indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.

He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his

early friends by his passionate democracy--his belief in, and trust of,

the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and

manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for

Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest

remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith,

but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among

the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the

friendship of these two in the least.

But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his

working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he

had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all

kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the

prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had

grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and

the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which

logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human

powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away

with--say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller

human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his

life. And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of

the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future

enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to

distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private

possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them

already. And that not for wealth's sake--though a more equal

distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably

tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that

continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual

heritage.

How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have

answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of the land."

Not, of course, by violence--which only means the worst form of waste

known to history--but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating

legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other

kinds of property--by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of

communal initiative and control--and above all by the continuous private

effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all

sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student--or

the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of

rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a

vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A

nation is not saved so cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to

land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which

might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men,

women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his

profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a

growing despair.

The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and

Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other

European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the

community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more

and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified

will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a

state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for

effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and

decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external

conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and

pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for

ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him,

could never do without them, if man was to be man.

So that he saw it all _sub specie aeternitatis_, as a matter not of

economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank

in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled

speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry

Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was

spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not

with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to

Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!--to be exhausting in him the very

springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at

last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What

help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to

discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and

affections as any _homoousion_ of old? Had they not already cost him

love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?

* * * * *

"Ah, dear old fellow--enough!" said Hallin at last--"take me back to

Italy! You have told me so little--such a niggardly little!"

"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous;

"the first rain in Northern Italy for four months--worse luck! 'Rain at

Reggio, rain at Parma.--At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'--that might about

stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty

Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."

"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"

Aldous laughed.

"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in

Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a

kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a

deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was

pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with

the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got

his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in

hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him

round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the

spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt

Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff--and then positively skipped

for joy in the street outside--the amazed officer looking on. And as for

her career over the roof of the Duomo--the agitation of it nearly

brought my aunt to destruction--and even I heaved a sigh of relief when

I got them both down safe."

"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of

her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a

barrel organ."

"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as

every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it

makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across,

especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old

maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel _salon_ at

night--a perfect ring of them--and the men outside, totally neglected,

and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody

she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade--a governess, or a

schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy--that she did not devote herself to that

somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is

nature or art."

He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the

thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign

or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the

over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the

place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.

"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes

to his friend, "that I had seen her again."

Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:

"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she

dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you--but she

said nothing."

"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and

I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's

party. She spoke to me afterwards--I believe now--she meant to be

kind"--his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all--"but I

saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own

manner, but I could not help myself."

His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow.

Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce,

but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that

Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his

life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in

him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had

not perhaps expected.

"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a

pause, "that she is going to marry him?"

"No--no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly,

perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more

likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success--of a

kind--in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come

rapidly to the front."

"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that

group are too unmanageable. If he _were_ a Parnell! But he lacks just

the qualities that matter--the reticence, the power of holding

himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard

self-concentration."

Aldous raised his shoulders.

"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds

himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him everywhere."

"What!--among the smart people?"

Aldous nodded.

"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do

it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all

at once."

"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody

supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well

overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and

its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the

_Clarion?_"

"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I

might not be able to go on giving to the strike."

Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked

back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest

friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella

Boyce--never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything

connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let

him follow his own conviction.

"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have

been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.

Aldous hesitated; then he said--

"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"

Hallin made a little face.

"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with

anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she

comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I

could cry over her!"

Aldous started.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand

on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to

talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than

Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But

this--this--" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for

a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he

could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day,

'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had

thrown me over except _with ill-will._' The word astonished me, but

sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of _anger_ to the most

futile, the most ridiculous degree!"

He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his

own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's

shoulders, and there was a short pause.

"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands

dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?--I forget."

Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again,

meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning

visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the

investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury

Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and

regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had

finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of

things in two or three selected streets.

It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt

strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly

directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he

thought the Government could really do good.

Then Raeburn turned to go.

"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he

opened the door.

"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have

my jaunt."

Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common

Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one

or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see

some sight.

"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand

them over to me."

"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the

room.

* * * * *

Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane

hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the

squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic

of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering

in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already

disappeared from the too short London summer.

For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness

in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun

or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of

tune--whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested

him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome

estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He

was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty

that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely

intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him

now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an

object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was still

free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for

those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his

transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all

the ceremonial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense

and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him

from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less

happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men

felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.

He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street,

and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and

box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention

of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner

crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a

fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a

trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital

worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas

out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight

preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two

walked on together talking.

The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of

all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were

already marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a peculiarly

vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the

worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's

notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.

After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its

condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow

roadway strewn with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by

costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken

pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most

of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat,

seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and

decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the

street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human

type.

A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they

had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.

"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's

interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after.

The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of

respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the

worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it

at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and

stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be

as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor

of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."

And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left,

he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of

some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly

peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"--that is

to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering,

the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been

slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every

circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and

revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to

light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was,

of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners;

the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men,

and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for

themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.

When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further

end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil

of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and

heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great

enough. But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of

"big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of affairs,

courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of

preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.

Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood

still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had

been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged

from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the

skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive

before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.

"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"

Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air.

The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling them, yet

too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some ten or

twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.

"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds

like murder. You go back for that policeman!"

And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way

through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by,

had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and

screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the

house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there

before him. The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans,

uproar--all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the

second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a

voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before,

crying piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"

Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were

trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be

shot out from the dark passage inside--two wrestling with the third, a

wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed

with blood.

"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister

too!"

"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous--it's the nuss he means! I

sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer

_blackguard_, you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a

frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.

"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's

call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.

Aldous was already upstairs.

"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the

first landing--for all sounds from above had ceased.

"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us _begged_ and

_implored_ of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we,

Betsy?--didn't we, Doll?"

Aldous ran up.

On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on

the ground, apparently beaten to death.

By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two

or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity.

Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left

arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was

doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag

stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her

what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on

Raeburn's heart.

In such an exaltation of nerve _she_ could be surprised at nothing.

When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.

"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her--speaking with pauses, as

though to get her breath--"he has--killed her. But there--is a chance.

Are the--police there--and a stretcher?"

Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly

sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's

nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.

"Did you see it, miss?"

"I--I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same

difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other

side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the

bandage she was applying. "But he was--such a great--powerful brute."

Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried

to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.

"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his

note-book, "attending a child--that's ill--when I heard the screams.

They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room--then rushed

after her--I _think_--to throw her downstairs--I stopped that. Then he

took up something--oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken

piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink--I

couldn't--do much."

Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.

"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.

"It's not broken--it's wrenched; I can't use it. There--that's all we

can do--till she gets--to hospital."

Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he

could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and

was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and

quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the

deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little.

Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing

at the woman's marred face--indescribably patient in its deep

unconsciousness--at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their

wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair--with tears that ran

unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched

a chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once

before--beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.

At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had

cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse

before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names

and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.

"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her.

"Won't you let me take you home?--you want it sorely. The police are

trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They

will remove her with every care--he will see to it."

Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he

was--where they were--how they had last met. And with the remembrance

came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness.

She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her

anymore--after this! When at the White House she had got herself into

disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would

silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and

so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now.

No!--after this he _must_ be friends with her.

"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a

quivering, appealing accent--and so they fell silent.

Aldous looked round the room--at the miserable filthy garret with its

begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its

heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty

gin-bottles here and there--all the familiar, one might almost say

conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation--then at this

breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling

was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance--against her

mother!--against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the

finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a

hopeless struggle with devildom.

"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint

voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not

much worse than others--though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a

little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in

the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing--used to

come in and out--when I was nursing him--Oh, I wish--I _wish_ they would

come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form--"every

moment is of importance!"

As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it

opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the

lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and

skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently

the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole

street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.

Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police,

who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her

as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning

against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and

seemed to him on the point of fainting.

"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then

going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few

words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.

"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They

will not trouble you any more for the present."

He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the

cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street

as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she

recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab.

Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to

control herself and not to faint.

He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the

exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was

this what her new career--her enthusiasms--meant, or might mean!

Twenty-three!--in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable

waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.

Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made

impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such

scenes--such gross physical abominations. Amazing!--how meanly,

passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman! He

himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern

joy of the fight. But she!--let her leave the human brute and his

unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne--it was never meant--that

she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in

such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed

him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in

the cottage.

In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely.

Presently, as he watched her--hating the man for driving and the cab for

shaking--he saw her white lips suddenly smile.

"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing

is all like that!"

"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.

"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again.

"Nobody is ever rude to us--I often pine for experiences!"

How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.

"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your

arm hurt you much?"

"Yes,--but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up

work for a bit.--Mr. Raeburn!"

"Yes." His heart beat.

"We may meet often--mayn't we?--at Lady Winterbourne's--or in the

country? Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often--" She turned

away her weary head a moment--gathered strength to begin again--"--how

often I have regretted--last year. I see now--that I behaved--more

unkindly"--her voice was almost a whisper--"than I thought then. But it

is all done with--couldn't we just be good friends--understand each

other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"

She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.

As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was

really in his mind was the Terrace--was Wharton's advancing figure. But

her state--the moment--coerced him.

"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with

astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She

knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.

She put out her hand.

"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh

no!"

Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant

against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her

self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been

able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But

she hardly heard him.

At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of

Brown's Buildings.

"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know

you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs--then I shan't

be any more trouble."

So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the

court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of children.

Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him

with a wan smile.

"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"

Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed. Then

he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and

implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best

cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.

After which he spent--poor Aldous!--one of the most restless and

miserable nights of his life.

CHAPTER XI.

Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window

of Lady Winterbourne's drawing-room. The house--in James Street,

Buckingham Gate--looked out over the exercising ground of the great

barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James's Park to the

left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things,

and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of

sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's

Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie

still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let

alone.

Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still

out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon.

Marcella had her thoughts to herself.

But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In

the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady

Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained

service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so

pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic

temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had

been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood

was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort

and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place

among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these

parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay

the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her

heart was somehow wrestling--must somehow wrestle--its passionate way.

But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover,

under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could

neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her

nursing--a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent

and moody.

On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she

paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she _had_ saved--probably

at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed

through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and--as

Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their

minds--would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.

Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest.

She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of

that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge

of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her

and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been

with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable

appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible;

the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in

common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had

been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she

had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange

if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had

let it count with him so little.

Childishly, angrily--_she wanted him to be friends!_ Why shouldn't he?

He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin

might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future

lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the

same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her

father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day,

whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable

though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must

go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a

situation?--make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not

simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was

inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.

Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to

whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him

with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his

private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle;

and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and

colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a

number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the

information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined

ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of

Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious

surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained

his place in Brookshire--by the mere accidents of birth. After all,

aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men

by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays

is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by

what he has--so far at least has "progress" brought us.

She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of

temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of

"consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political

contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the

future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried;

while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public.

Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and

various sources--mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men

already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work

of England. Above all things did she love and admire power--the power of

personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the

secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly

different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a

kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her

imagination.

Then--apart from the political world and its judgments--the intimacy

between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new

aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend, he

was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the

affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little

oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the

memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady

Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were

both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no

one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or

agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to

regard him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not

easily yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by

strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and

sweetness of disposition had full play; and although, now that Marcella

was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than

usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were all so

kind and indulgent to _her_, seeing that they cared so much for him and

all that affected him.

Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain

irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement

she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her

conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as

combative as ever.

Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more

soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that

nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the

lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of

course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual

adornments of the "New Journalism."

The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them--comparatively a large

world--fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names. To lose

your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come across

her again in this manner and in these circumstances--there was a

dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us

too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would

have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in

particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she

had claims, and was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and

see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention

whatever of playing the lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and

fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once

or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for

the wounded arm that its owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane

lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly, just across

the Green Park.

Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession

a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller

sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had

been no craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally

indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the

attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry

Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever.

She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady

Winterbourne neither knew him, nor apparently wished to know him--a fact

which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate.

Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and

again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women,

with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them

he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent

lived their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening

returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new

friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the

young demagogue had yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least

as much duped as he. Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he

was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to

his interest to break them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these

people--the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his

mind--seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished

eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something

she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.

Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her

from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that

he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of

appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and

Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between

them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great

friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread

of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On

the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed

him, as a lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be

sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes,

she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious

little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great

lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself

flushing from brow to chin at the thought--"He does not want any one to

suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!"

It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects

of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that

she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When

it _did_ enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his--and

that he was full of doubts! The perception had given to her manner an

increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into

efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not

refrain, if he was to preserve his power.

So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in

it neither simplicity nor joy. She was conscious of a certain dull and

baffled feeling--a sense of humiliation--which hurt. Moreover, the scene

of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination

perpetually. She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her--the pity,

the ugliness, the confusion of it.

* * * * *

The muslin curtain beside her suddenly swelled out in a draught of air,

and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it

should swing to. Some one had opened the door of the room.

"_Did_ I blow you out of window?" said a girl's voice; and there behind

her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty Macdonald, a vision of white

muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed

face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big shady hat.

"Oh, do come in!" said Marcella, shyly; "Lady Winterbourne will be in

directly."

"So Panton told me," said Betty, sinking down on a high stool beside

Marcella's chair, and taking off her hat; "and Panton doesn't tell _me_

any stories _now_--I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in the

day? Don't you think there will be a special little corner of purgatory

for London butlers? I hope Panton will get off easy!"

Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand, and studied Marcella.

Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved; her pale

face and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis.

When Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain

story, she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet, if only

to prick her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she

saw her close she felt herself near to falling in love with her.

Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had

thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little

merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the

thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have

already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her heart, and by

contrast honesty despising--for the moment--that very happy and popular

person, Betty Macdonald!

"Do you like being alone?" she asked Marcella, abruptly.

Marcella coloured.

"Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company," she said. "I

was very glad to see you come in."

"Were you?" said Betty, joyously, with a little gleam in her pretty

eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. "May I kiss you?" she

said, in the wistfullest, eagerest voice.

Marcella smiled, and, laying her hand on Betty's, shyly drew her.

"That's better!" said Betty, with a long breath. "That's the second

milestone; the first was when I saw you on the Terrace. Couldn't you

mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the

horrid thing is when you have to mark them back again! Nobody ever did

that with you!"

"Because I have no friends," said Marcella, quickly; then, when Betty

clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added quickly with

a smile, "except a few I make poultices for."

"There!" said Betty, enviously, "to think of being really _wanted_--for

poultices--or, anything! I never was wanted in my life! When I die

they'll put on my poor little grave--

"She's buried here--that hizzie Betty;

She did na gude--so don't ee fret ye!

"--oh, there they are!"--she ran to the window--"Lady Winterbourne and

Ermyntrude. Doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterbourne doing her

duties? She gets into her carriage after lunch as one might mount a

tumbril. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to the scaffold

at Hyde Park Corner.' She looks the unhappiest woman in England--and all

the time Ermyntrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her

season for the world! She gives Ermyntrude a lot of trouble, but she

_is_ a dear--a naughty dear--and mothers are _such_ a chance!

Ermyntrude! _where_ did you get that bonnet? You got it without me--and

my feelings won't stand it!"

Lady Ermyntrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together,

chattering and laughing. Lady Winterbourne came up to Marcella and

enquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves, when

the drawing-room door opened again.