Marcella

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER I.

Ah! how purely, cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul of yearning and of memory into the pearly silence of the morning.

High up on the distant hill to the left, beyond the avenue, the pale apricots and golds of the newly-shorn stubbles caught the mounting light. The beeches of the avenue were turning fast, and the chestnuts girdling the church on her right hand were already thin enough to let the tower show through. That was the bell—the old bell given to the church by Hampden's friend, John Boyce—striking half-past five; and close upon it came the call of a pheasant in the avenue. There he was, fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, redeemed all at once by the sudden whirr of towering flight.

To-day Mary Harden and the Rector would be at work in the church, and to-morrow was to be the Harvest Festival. Was it two years?—or in an hour or two would she be going with her basket from the Cedar Garden, to find that figure in the brown shooting-coat standing with the Hardens on the altar steps?

Alas!—alas!—her head dropped on her hands as she knelt by the open window. How changed were all the aspects of the world! Three weeks before, the bell in that little church had tolled for one who, in the best way and temper of his own generation, had been God's servant and man's friend—who had been Marcella's friend—and had even, in his last days, on a word from Edward Hallin, sent her an old man's kindly farewell.

"Tell her," Lord Maxwell had written with his own hand to Hallin, "she has taken up a noble work, and will make, I pray God, a noble woman. She had, I think, a kindly liking for an old man, and she will not disdain his blessing."

He had died at Geneva, Aldous and Miss Raeburn with him. For instead of coming home in August, he had grown suddenly worse, and Aldous had gone out to him. They had brought him to the Court for burial, and the new Lord Maxwell, leaving his aunt at the Court, had almost immediately returned to town,—because of Edward Hallin's state of health.

Marcella had seen much of Hallin since he and his sister had come back to London in the middle of August. Hallin's apparent improvement had faded within a week or two of his return to his rooms; Aldous was at Geneva; Miss Hallin was in a panic of alarm; and Marcella found herself both nurse and friend. Day after day she would go in after her nursing rounds, share their evening meal, and either write for Hallin, or help the sister—by the slight extra weight of her professional voice—to keep him from writing and thinking.

He would not himself admit that he was ill at all, and his whole energies at the time were devoted to the preparation of a series of three addresses on the subject of Land Reform, which were to be delivered in October to the delegates of a large number of working-men's clubs from all parts of London. So strong was Hallin's position among working-men reformers, and so beloved had been his personality, that as soon as his position towards the new land nationalising movement, now gathering formidable strength among the London working men, had come to be widely understood, a combined challenge had been sent him by some half-dozen of the leading Socialist and Radical clubs, asking him to give three weekly addresses in October to a congress of London delegates, time to be allowed after the lecture for questions and debate.

Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure. For all the time he was struggling with cardiac weakness and brain irritability which would have overwhelmed any one less accustomed to make his account with illness, or to balance against feebleness of body a marvellous discipline of soul.

Lord Maxwell was still alive, and Hallin, in the midst of his work, was looking anxiously for the daily reports from Aldous, living in his friend's life almost as much as in his own—handing on the reports, too, day by day to Marcella, with a manner which had somehow slipped into expressing a new and sure confidence in her sympathy—when she one evening found Minta Hurd watching for her at the door with a telegram from her mother: "Your father suddenly worse. Please come at once." She arrived at Mellor late that same night.

On the same day Lord Maxwell died. Less than a week later he was buried in the little Gairsley church. Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from time to time of what was passing three miles away—of the great house in its mourning—of the figures round the grave. Hallin, of course, would be there. It was a dripping September day, and she passed easily from moments of passionate yearning and clairvoyance to worry herself about the damp and the fatigue that Hallin must be facing.

Since then she had heard occasionally from Miss Hallin. Everything was much as it had been, apparently. Edward was still hard at work, still ill, still serene. "Aldous"—Miss Hallin could not yet reconcile herself to the new name—was alone in the Curzon Street house, much occupied and harassed apparently by the legal business of the succession, by the election presently to be held in his own constituency, and by the winding-up of his work at the Home Office. He was to resign his under-secretaryship; but with the new session and a certain rearrangement of offices it was probable that he would be brought back into the Ministry. Meanwhile he was constantly with them; and she thought that his interest in Edward's work and anxiety about his health were perhaps both good for him as helping to throw off something of his own grief and depression.

Whereby it will be noticed that Miss Hallin, like her brother, had by now come to speak intimately and freely to Marcella of her old lover and their friend.

Now for some days, however, she had received no letter from either brother or sister, and she was particularly anxious to hear. For this was the fourth of October, and on the second he was to have delivered the first of his addresses. How had the frail prophet sped? She had her fears. For her weekly "evenings" in Brown's Buildings had shown her a good deal of the passionate strength of feeling developed during the past year in connection with this particular propaganda. She doubted whether the London working man at the present moment was likely to give even Hallin a fair hearing on the point. However, Louis Craven was to be there. And he had promised to write even if Susie Hallin could find no time. Some report ought to reach Mellor by the evening.

Poor Cravens! The young wife, who was expecting a baby, had behaved with great spirit through the Clarion trouble; and, selling their bits of furniture to pay their debts, they had gone to lodge near Anthony. Louis had got some odds and ends of designing and artistic work to do through his brother's influence; and was writing where he could, here and there. Marcella had introduced them to the Hallins, and Susie Hallin was taking a motherly interest in the coming child. Anthony, in his gloomy way, was doing all he could for them. But the struggle was likely to be a hard one, and Marcella had recognised of late that in Louis as in Anthony there were dangerous possibilities of melancholy and eccentricity. Her heart was often sore over their trouble and her own impotence.

Meantime for some wounds, at any rate, time had brought swift cautery! Not three days after her final interview with Wharton, while the catastrophe in the Labour party was still in every one's mouth, and the air was full of bitter speeches and recriminations, Hallin one evening laid down his newspaper with a sudden startled gesture, and then pushed it over to Marcella. There, in the columns devoted to personal news of various sorts, appeared the announcement:

"A marriage has been arranged between Mr. H.S. Wharfon, M.P. for West Brookshire, and Lady Selina Farrell, only surviving daughter of Lord Alresford. The ceremony will probably take place somewhere about Easter next. Meanwhile Mr. Wharton, whose health has suffered of late from his exertions in and out of the House, has been ordered to the East for rest by his medical advisers. He and his friend Sir William Ffolliot start for French Cochin China in a few days. Their object is to explore the famous ruined temples of Angkor in Cambodia, and if the season is favourable they may attempt to ascend the Mekong. Mr. Wharton is paired for the remainder of the session."

"Did you know anything of this?" said Hallin, with that careful carelessness in which people dress a dubious question.

"Nothing," she said quietly.

Then an impulse not to be stood against, springing from very mingled depths of feeling, drove her on. She, too, put down the paper, and laying her finger-tips together on her knee she said with an odd slight laugh:

"But I was the last person to know. About a fortnight ago Mr. Wharton proposed to me."

Hallin sprang from his chair, almost with a shout. "And you refused him?"

She nodded, and then was angrily aware that, totally against her will or consent, and for the most foolish and remote reasons, those two eyes of hers had grown moist.

Hallin went straight over to her.

"Do you mind letting me shake hands with you?" he said, half ashamed of
his outburst, a dancing light of pleasure transforming the thin face.
"There—I am an idiot! We won't say a word more—except about Lady
Selina. Have you seen her?"

"Three or four times."

"What is she like?"

Marcella hesitated.

"Is she fat—and forty?" said Hallin, fervently—she beat him?"

"Not at all. She is very thin—thirty-five, elegant, terribly of her own opinion—and makes a great parade of 'papa.'"

She looked round at him, unsteadily, but gaily.

"Oh! I see," said Hallin, with disappointment, "she will only take care he doesn't beat her—which I gather from your manner doesn't matter. And her politics?"

"Lord Alresford was left out of the Ministry," said Marcella slily. "He and Lady Selina thought it a pity."

"Alresford—Alresford? Why, of course! He was Lord Privy Seal in their last Cabinet—a narrow-minded old stick!—did a heap of mischief in the Lords. Well!"—Hallin pondered a moment—"Wharton will go over!"

Marcella was silent. The tremor of that wrestler's hour had not yet passed away. The girl could find no words in which to discuss Wharton himself, this last amazing act, or its future.

As for Hallin, he sat lost in pleasant dreams of a whitewashed Wharton, comfortably settled at last below the gangway on the Conservative side, using all the old catch-words in slightly different connections, and living gaily on his Lady Selina. Fragments from the talk of Nehemiah—Nehemiah the happy and truculent, that new "scourge of God" upon the parasites of Labour—of poor Bennett, of Molloy, and of various others who had found time to drop in upon him since the Labour smash, kept whirling in his mind. The same prediction he had just made to Marcella was to be discerned in several of them. He vowed to himself that he would write to Raeburn that night, congratulate him and the party on the possibility of so eminent a recruit—and hint another item of news by the way. She had trusted her confidence to him without any pledge—an act for which he paid her well thenceforward, in the coin of a friendship far more intimate, expansive, and delightful than anything his sincerity had as yet allowed him to show her.

But these London incidents and memories, near as they were in time, looked many of them strangely remote to Marcella in this morning silence. When she drew back from the window, after darkening the now sun-flooded room in a very thorough business-like way, in order that she might have four or five hours' sleep, there was something symbolic in the act. She gave back her mind, her self, to the cares, the anxieties, the remorses of the past three weeks. During the night she had been sitting up with her father that her mother might rest. Now, as she lay down, she thought with the sore tension which had lately become habitual to her, of her father's state, her mother's strange personality, her own short-comings.

* * * * *

By the middle of the morning she was downstairs again, vigorous and fresh as ever. Mrs. Boyce's maid was for the moment in charge of the patient, who was doing well. Mrs. Boyce was writing some household notes in the drawing-room. Marcella went in search of her.

The bare room, just as it ever was—with its faded antique charm—looked bright and tempting in the sun. But the cheerfulness of it did but sharpen the impression of that thin form writing in the window. Mrs. Boyce looked years older. The figure had shrunk and flattened into that of an old woman; the hair, which two years before had been still young and abundant, was now easily concealed under the close white cap she had adopted very soon after her daughter had left Mellor. The dress was still exquisitely neat; but plainer and coarser. Only the beautiful hands and the delicate stateliness of carriage remained—sole relics of a loveliness which had cost its owner few pangs to part with.

Marcella hovered near her—a little behind her—looking at her from time to time with a yearning compunction—which Mrs. Boyce seemed to be aware of, and to avoid.

"Mamma, can't I do those letters for you? I am quite fresh."

"No, thank you. They are just done."

When they were all finished and stamped, Mrs. Boyce made some careful entries in a very methodical account-book, and then got up, locking the drawers of her little writing-table behind her.

"We can keep the London nurse another week I think," she said.

"There is no need," said Marcella, quickly. "Emma and I could divide the nights now and spare you altogether. You see I can sleep at any time."

"Your father seems to prefer Nurse Wenlock," said Mrs. Boyce.

Marcella took the little blow in silence. No doubt it was her due. During the past two years she had spent two separate months at Mellor; she had gone away in opposition to her father's wish; and had found herself on her return more of a stranger to her parents than ever. Mr. Boyce's illness, involving a steady extension of paralytic weakness, with occasional acute fits of pain and danger, had made steady though very gradual progress all the time. But it was not till some days after her return home that Marcella had realised a tenth part of what her mother had undergone since the disastrous spring of the murder.

She passed now from the subject of the nurse with a half-timid remark about "expense."

"Oh! the expense doesn't matter!" said Mrs. Boyce, as she stood absently before the lately kindled fire, warming her chilled fingers at the blaze.

"Papa is more at ease in those ways?" Marcella ventured. And kneeling down beside her mother she gently chafed one of the cold hands.

"There seems to be enough for what is wanted," said Mrs. Boyce, bearing the charing with patience. "Your father, I believe, has made great progress this year in freeing the estate. Thank you, my dear. I am not cold now."

And she gently withdrew her hand.

Marcella, indeed, had already noticed that there were now no weeds on the garden-paths, that instead of one gardener there were three, that the old library had been decently patched and restored, that there was another servant, that William, grown into a very—tolerable footman, wore a reputable coat, and that a plain but adequate carriage and horse had met her at the station. Her pity even understood that part of her father's bitter resentment of his ever-advancing disablement came from his feeling that here at last—just as death was in sight—he, that squalid failure, Dick Boyce, was making a success of something.

Presently, as she knelt before the fire, a question escaped her, which, when it was spoken, she half regretted.

"Has papa been able to do anything for the cottages yet?"

"I don't think so," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly. After a minute's pause she added, "That will be for your reign, my dear."

Marcella looked up with a sharp thrill of pain.

"Papa is better, mamma, and—and I don't know what you mean. I shall never reign here without you."

Mrs. Boyce began to fidget with the rings on her thin left hand.

"When Mellor ceases to be your father's it will be yours," she said, not without a certain sharp decision; "that was settled long ago. I must be free—and if you are to do anything with this place, you must give your youth and strength to it. And your father is not better—except for the moment. Dr. Clarke exactly foretold the course of his illness to me two years ago, on my urgent request. He may live four months—six, if we can get him to the South. More is impossible."

There was something ghastly in her dry composure. Marcella caught her hand again and leant her trembling young cheek against it.

"I could not live here without you, mamma!"

Mrs. Boyce could not for once repress the inner fever which in general her will controlled so well.

"I hardly think it would matter to you so much, my dear."

Marcella shrank.

"I don't wonder you say that!" she said in a low voice. "Do you think it was all a mistake, mamma, my going away eighteen months ago—a wrong act?"

Mrs. Boyce grew restless.

"I judge nobody, my dear!—unless I am obliged. As you know, I am for liberty—above all"—she spoke with emphasis—"for letting the past alone. But I imagine you must certainly have learnt to do without us. Now I ought to go to your father."

But Marcella held her.

"Do you remember in the Purgatorio, mamma, the lines about the loser in the game: 'When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and learning by his grief'? Do you remember?"

Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a little nervous, but assenting. It was one of the inconsistencies of her strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante student. The taste for the most strenuous and passionate of poets had developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of her middle life. Like everything else personal to herself she never spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to Marcella from a child.

"E tristo impara?" repeated Marcella, her voice wavering. "Mamma "—she laid her face against her mother's dress again—"I have lost more throws than you think in the last two years. Won't you believe I may have learnt a little?"

She raised her eyes to her mother's pinched and mask-like face. Mrs. Boyce's lips moved as though she would have asked a question. But she did not ask it. She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew well—the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into alien fields of emotion.

"Well, but one expects persons like you to learn," she said, with a light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention. There was silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just touched her daughter's hair. "Now, will you come up in half an hour? That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his food."

* * * * *

Marcella went to her father at the hour named. She found him in his wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the Cedar Garden. The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old house. It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers. The needlework hangings of the bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed or tattered. But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity of his sleeping-room were a bitter satisfaction to Richard Boyce, even in his sickness. After all said and done, he was king here in his father's and grandfather's place; ruling where they ruled, and—whether they would or no—dying where they died, with the same family faces to bear him witness from the walls, and the same vault awaiting him.

When his daughter entered, he turned his head, and his eyes, deep and black still as ever, but sunk in a yellow relic of a face, showed a certain agitation. She was disagreeably aware that his thoughts were much occupied with her; that he was full of grievance towards her, and would probably before long bring the pathos of his situation as well as the weight of his dying authority to bear upon her, for purposes she already suspected with alarm.

"Are you a little easier, papa?" she said, as she came up to him.

"I should think as a nurse you ought to know better, my dear, than to ask," he said testily. "When a person is in my condition, enquiries of that sort are a mockery!"

"But one may be in less or more pain," she said gently. "I hoped Dr.
Clarke's treatment yesterday might have given you some relief."

He did not vouchsafe an answer. She took some work and sat down by him. Mrs. Boyce, who had been tidying a table of food and medicine, came and asked him if he would be wheeled into another room across the gallery, which had been arranged as a sitting-room. He shook his head irritably.

"I am not fit for it. Can't you see? And I want to speak to Marcella."

Mrs. Boyce went away. Marcella waited, not without a tremor. She was sitting in the sun, her head bent over the muslin strings she was hemming for her nurse's bonnet. The window was wide open; outside, the leaves under a warm breeze were gently drifting down into the Cedar Garden, amid a tangled mass of flowers, mostly yellow or purple. To one side rose the dark layers of the cedars; to the other, the grey front of the library wing.

Mr. Boyce looked at her with the frown which had now become habitual to him, moved his lips once or twice without speaking; and at last made his effort.

"I should think, Marcella, you must often regret by now the step you took eighteen months ago!"

She grew pale.

"How regret it, papa?" she said, without looking up.

"Why, good God!" he said angrily; "I should think the reasons for regret are plain enough. You threw over a man who was devoted to you, and could have given you the finest position in the county, for the most nonsensical reasons in the world—reasons that by now, I am certain, you are ashamed of."

He saw her wince, and enjoyed his prerogative of weakness. In his normal health he would never have dared so to speak to her. But of late, during long fits of feverish brooding—intensified by her return home—he had vowed to himself to speak his mind.

"Aren't you ashamed of them?" he repeated, as she was silent.

She looked up.

"I am not ashamed of anything I did to save Hurd, if that is what you mean, papa."

Mr. Boyce's anger grew.

"Of course you know what everybody said?"

She stooped over her work again, and did not reply.

"It's no good being sullen over it," he said in exasperation; "I'm your father, and I'm dying. I have a right to question you. It's my duty to see something settled, if I can, before I go. Is it true that all the time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved, with Harry Wharton?"

He gave out the words with sharp emphasis, and, bending towards her, he laid an emaciated hand upon her arm.

"What use is there, papa, in going back to these things?" she said, driven to bay, her colour going and coming. "I may have been wrong in a hundred ways, but you never understood that the real reason for it all was that—that—I never was in love with Mr. Raeburn."

"Then why did you accept him?" He fell back against his pillows with a jerk.

"As to that, I will confess my sins readily enough," she said, while her lip trembled, and he saw the tears spring into her eyes. "I accepted him for what you just now called his position in the county, though not quite in that way either."

He was silent a little, then he began again in a voice which gradually became unsteady from self-pity.

"Well, now look here! I have been thinking about this matter a great deal—and God knows I've time to think and cause to think, considering the state I'm in—and I see no reason whatever why I should not try—before I die—to put this thing straight. That man was head over ears in love with you, madly in love with you. I used to watch him, and I know. Of course you offended and distressed him greatly. He could never have expected such conduct from you or any one else. But he's not the man to change round easily, or to take up with any one else. Now, if you regret what you did or the way in which you did it, why shouldn't I—a dying man may be allowed a little licence I should think!—give him a hint?"

"Papa!" cried Marcella, dropping her work, and looking at him with a pale, indignant passion, which a year ago would have quelled him utterly. But he held up his hand.

"Now just let me finish. It would be no good my doing a thing of this kind without saying something to you first, because you'd find it out, and your pride would be the ruin of it. You always had a demoniacal pride, Marcella, even when you were a tiny child; but if you make up your mind now to let me tell him you regret what you did—just that—you'll make him happy, and yourself, for you know very well he's a man of the highest character—and your poor father, who never did you much harm anyway!" His voice faltered. "I'd manage it so that there should be nothing humiliating to you in it whatever. As if there could be anything humiliating in confessing such a mistake as that; besides, what is there to be ashamed of? You're no pauper. I've pulled Mellor out of the mud for you, though you and your mother do give me credit for so precious little!"

He lay back, trembling with fatigue, yet still staring at her with glittering eyes, while his hand on the invalid table fixed to the side of his chair shook piteously. Marcella dreaded the effect the whole scene might have upon him; but, now they were in the midst of it, both feeling for herself and prudence for him drove her into the strongest speech she could devise.

"Papa, if anything of that sort were done, I should take care Mr. Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it—in such a way that it would be impossible for him to carry it further. Dear papa, don't think of such a thing any more. Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly last year, are we now to harass and persecute him? I would sooner disappear from everybody I know—from you and mamma, from England—and never be heard of again."

She stopped a moment—struggling for composure—that she might not excite him too much.

"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr. Raeburn lately—while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright, fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street—a Miss Macdonald."

"Miss how—much?" he asked roughly.

She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter—half conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner mind—but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all the same.

He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.

Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly—

"And that other fellow—Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him in London. Has he been making love to you?"

"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina Farrell—a distant cousin of the Winterbournes—was announced, in several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."

At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral fibre, got up to go.

Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the room drew her father's eyes after her, and for the time his feeling towards her softened curiously. Well, she had not made very much of her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty, and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain balm in the idea that she too—her mother's daughter—with her Merritt blood—could be unlucky.

Marcella went about all day under a vague sense of impending trouble—the result, no doubt, of that intolerable threat of her father's, against which she was, after all, so defenceless.

But whatever it was, it made her all the more nervous and sensitive about the Hallins; about her one true friend, to whom she was slowly revealing herself, even without speech; whose spiritual strength had been guiding and training her; whose physical weakness had drawn to him the maternal, the spending instincts which her nursing life had so richly developed.

She strolled down the drive to meet the post. But there were no letters from London, and she came in, inclined to be angry indeed with Louis Craven for deserting her, but saying to herself at the same time that she must have heard if anything had gone wrong.

An hour or so later, just as the October evening was closing in, she was sitting dreaming over a dim wood-fire in the drawing-room. Her father, as might have been expected, had been very tired and comatose all day. Her mother was with him; the London nurse was to sit up, and Marcella felt herself forlorn and superfluous.

Suddenly, in the silence of the house, she heard the front-door bell ring. There was a step in the hall—she sprang up—the door opened, and William, with fluttered emphasis, announced—

"Lord Maxwell!"

In the dusk she could just see his tall form—the short pause as he perceived her—then her hand was in his, and the paralysing astonishment of that first instant had disappeared under the grave emotion of his look.

"Will you excuse me," he said, "for coming at this hour? But I am afraid you have heard nothing yet of our bad news—and Hallin himself was anxious I should come and tell you. Miss Hallin could not write, and Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You haven't then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?"

"No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was nothing—"

"Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it. But when we got down here this afternoon, and there was nothing from you, both Miss Hallin and Edward felt sure you had not heard—and I walked over. It was a most painful, distressing scene, and he—is very ill."

"But you have brought him to the Court?" she said trembling, lost in the thought of Hallin, her quick breath coming and going. "He was able to bear the journey? Will you tell me?—will you sit down?"

He thanked her hurriedly, and took a seat opposite to her, within the circle of the firelight, so that she saw his deep mourning and the look of repressed suffering.

"The whole thing was extraordinary—I can hardly now describe it," he said, holding his hat in his hands and staring into the fire. "It began excellently. There was a very full room. Bennett was in the chair—and Edward seemed much as usual. He had been looking desperately ill, but he declared that he was sleeping better, and that his sister and I coddled him. Then,—directly he was well started!—I felt somehow that the audience was very hostile. And he evidently felt it more and more. There was a good deal of interruption and hardly any cheers—and I saw after a little—I was sitting not far behind him—that he was discouraged—that he had lost touch. It was presently clear, indeed, that the real interest of the meeting lay not in the least in what he had to say, but in the debate that was to follow. They meant to let him have his hour—but not a minute more. I watched the men about me, and I could see them following the clock—thirsting for their turn. Nothing that he said seemed to penetrate them in the smallest degree. He was there merely as a ninepin to be knocked over. I never saw a meeting so possessed with a madness of fanatical conviction—it was amazing!"

He paused, looking sadly before him. She made a little movement, and he roused himself instantly.

"It was just a few minutes before he was to sit down—I was thankful!—when suddenly—I heard his voice change. I do not know now what happened—but I believe he completely lost consciousness of the scene before him—the sense of strain, of exhaustion, of making no way, must have snapped something. He began a sort of confession—a reverie in public—about himself, his life, his thoughts, his prayers, his hopes—mostly his religious hopes—for the working man, for England—I never heard anything of the kind from him before—you know his reserve. It was so intimate—so painful—oh! so painful!"—he drew himself together with an involuntary shudder—"before this crowd, this eager hostile crowd which was only pining for him to sit down—to get out of their way. The men near me began to look at each other and titter. They wondered what he meant by maundering on like that—'damned canting stuff'—I heard one man near me call it. I tore off a bit of paper, and passed a line to Bennett asking him to get hold of Edward, to stop it. But I think Bennett had rather lost his presence of mind, and I saw him look back at me and shake his head. Then time was up, and they began to shout him down."

Marcella made an exclamation of horror. He turned to her.

"I think it was the most tragic scene I ever saw," he said with a feeling as simple as it was intense. "This crowd so angry and excited—without a particle of understanding or sympathy—laughing, and shouting at him—and he in the midst—white as death—talking this strange nonsense—his voice floating in a high key, quite unlike itself. At last just as I was getting up to go to him, I saw Bennett rise. But we were both too late. He fell at our feet!"

Marcella gave an involuntary sob! "What a horror!" she said, "what a martyrdom!"

"It was just that," he answered in a low voice—"It was a martyrdom. And when one thinks of the way in which for years past he has held these big meetings in the hollow of his hand, and now, because he crosses their passion, their whim,—no kindness!—no patience—nothing but a blind hostile fury! Yet they thought him a traitor, no doubt. Oh! it was all a tragedy!"

There was silence an instant. Then he resumed:

"We got him into the back room. Luckily there was a doctor on the platform. It was heart failure, of course, with brain prostration. We managed to get him home, and Susie Hallin and I sat up. He was delirious all night; but yesterday he rallied, and last night he begged us to move him out of London if we could. So we got two doctors and an invalid carriage, and by three this afternoon we were all at the Court. My aunt was ready for him—his sister is there—and a nurse. Clarke was there to meet him. He thinks he cannot possibly live more than a few weeks—possibly even a few days. The shock and strain have been irreparable."

Marcella lay back in her chair, struggling with her grief, her head and face turned away from him, her eyes hidden by her handkerchief. Then in some mysterious way she was suddenly conscious that Aldous was no longer thinking of Hallin, but of her.

"He wants very much to see you," he said, bending towards her; "but I know that you have yourself serious illness to nurse. Forgive me for not having enquired after Mr. Boyce. I trust he is better?"

She sat up, red-eyed, but mistress of herself. The tone had been all gentleness, but to her quivering sense some slight indefinable change—coldness—had passed into it.

"He is better, thank you—for the present. And my mother does not let me do very much. We have a nurse too. When shall I come?"

He rose.

"Could you—come to-morrow afternoon? There is to be a consultation of doctors in the morning, which will tire him. About six?—that was what he said. He is very weak, but in the day quite conscious and rational. My aunt begged me to say how glad she would be—"

He paused. An invincible awkwardness took possession of both of them. She longed to speak to him of his grandfather but could not find the courage.

When he was gone, she, standing alone in the firelight, gave one passionate thought to the fact that so—in this tragic way—they had met again in this room where he had spoken to her his last words as a lover; and then, steadily, she put everything out of her mind but her friend—and death.