CHAPTER III.
"I think I saw the letters arrive," said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter.
"And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us."
"Let me go for them, mamma."
"No, thank you, I must go in."
And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel. Marcella watched her widow's cap and black dress as they passed along the pergola of the hotel garden, between bright masses of geraniums and roses on either side.
They had been sitting in the famous garden of the Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi. To Marcella's left, far below the high terrace of the hotel, the green and azure of the Salernian gulf shone and danced in the sun, to her right a wood of oak and arbutus stretched up into a purple cliff—a wood starred above with gold and scarlet berries, and below with cyclamen and narcissus. From the earth under the leafy oaks—for the oaks at Amalfi lose and regain their foliage in winter and spring by imperceptible gradations—came a moist English smell. The air was damp and warm. A convent bell tolled from invisible heights above the garden; while the olives and vines close at hand were full of the chattering voices of gardeners and children, and broken here and there by clouds of pink almond-blossom. March had just begun, and the afternoons were fast lengthening. It was little more than a fortnight since Mr. Boyce's death. In the November of the preceding year Mrs. Boyce and Marcella had brought him to Naples by sea, and there, at a little villa on Posilippo, he had drawn sadly to his end. It had been a dreary time, from which Marcella could hardly hope that her mother would ever fully recover. She herself had found in the long months of nursing—nursing of which, with quiet tenacity, she had gradually claimed and obtained her full share—a deep moral consolation. They had paid certain debts to conscience, and they had for ever enshrined her father's memory in the silence of an unmeasured and loving pity.
But the wife? Marcella sorely recognised that to her mother these last days had brought none of the soothing, reconciling influences they had involved for herself. Between the husband and wife there had been dumb friction and misery—surely also a passionate affection!—to the end. The invalid's dependence on her had been abject, her devotion wonderful. Yet, in her close contact with them, the daughter had never been able to ignore the existence between them of a wretched though tacit debate—reproach on his side, self-defence or spasmodic effort on hers—which seemed to have its origin deep in the past, yet to be stimulated afresh by a hundred passing incidents of the present. Under the blight of it, as under the physical strain of nursing, Mrs. Boyce had worn and dwindled to a white-haired shadow; while he had both clung to life and feared death more than would normally have been the case. At the end he had died in her arms, his head on her breast; she had closed his eyes and performed every last office without a tear; nor had Marcella ever seen her weep from then till now. The letters she had received, mostly, Marcella believed, from her own family, remained unopened in her travelling-bag. She spoke very little, and was constantly restless, nor could Marcella as yet form any idea of the future.
After the funeral at Naples Mrs. Boyce had written immediately to her husband's solicitor for a copy of his will and a statement of affairs. She had then allowed herself to be carried off to Amalfi, and had there, while entirely declining to admit that she was ill, been clearly doing her best to recover health and nerve sufficient to come to some decision, to grapple with some crisis which Marcella also felt to be impending—though as to why it should be impending, or what the nature of it might be, she could only dread and guess.
There was much bitter yearning in the girl's heart as she sat, breathed on by the soft Italian wind blowing from this enchanted sea. The inner cry was that her mother did not love her, had never loved her, and might even now—weird, incredible thought!—be planning to desert her. Hallin was dead—who else was there that cared for her or thought of her? Betty Macdonald wrote often, wild, "schwärmerisch" letters. Marcella looked for them with eagerness, and answered them affectionately. But Betty must soon marry, and then all that would be at an end. Meanwhile Marcella knew well it was Betty's news that made Betty's adoration doubly welcome. Aldous Raeburn—she never did or could think of him under his new name—was apparently in London, much occupied in politics, and constantly, as it seemed, in Betty's society. What likelihood was there that her life and his would ever touch again? She thought often of her confession to Hallin, but in great perplexity of feeling. She had, of course, said no word of secrecy to him at the time. Such a demand in a man's last hour would have been impossible. She had simply followed a certain mystical love and obedience in telling him what he asked to know, and in the strong spontaneous impulse had thought of nothing beyond. Afterwards her pride had suffered fresh martyrdom. Could he, with his loving instinct, have failed to give his friend some sign? If so, it had been unwelcome, for since the day of Hallin's funeral she and Aldous had been more complete strangers than before. Lady Winterbourne, Betty, Frank Leven, had written since her father's death; but from him, nothing.
By the way, Frank Leven had succeeded at Christmas, by old Sir Charles Leven's unexpected death, to the baronetcy and estates. How would that affect his chances with Betty?—if indeed there were any such chances left.
As to her own immediate future, Marcella knew from many indications that Mellor would be hers at once. But in her general tiredness of mind and body she was far more conscious of the burden of her inheritance than of its opportunities. All that vivid castle-building gift which was specially hers, and would revive, was at present in abeyance. She had pined once for power and freedom, that she might make a Kingdom of Heaven of her own, quickly. Now power and freedom, up to a certain point, were about to be put into her hands; and instead of plans for acting largely and bountifully on a plastic outer world, she was saying to herself, hungrily, that unless she had something close to her to love and live for, she could do nothing. If her mother would end these unnatural doubts, if she would begin to make friends with her own daughter, and only yield herself to be loved and comforted, why then it might be possible to think of the village and the straw-plaiting! Otherwise—the girl's attitude as she sat dreaming in the sun showed her despondency.
She was roused by her mother's voice calling her from the other end of the pergola.
"Yes, mamma."
"Will you come in? There are some letters."
"It is the will," thought Marcella, as Mrs. Boyce turned back to the hotel, and she followed.
Mrs. Boyce shut the door of their sitting-room, and then went up to her daughter with a manner which suddenly struck and startled Marcella. There was natural agitation and trouble in it.
"There is something in the will, Marcella, which will, I fear, annoy and distress you. Your father inserted it without consulting me. I want to know what you think ought to be done. You will find that Lord Maxwell and I have been appointed joint executors."
Marcella turned pale.
"Lord Maxwell!" she said, bewildered. "Lord Maxwell—Aldous! What do you mean, mamma?"
Mrs. Boyce put the will into her hands, and, pointing the way among the technicalities she had been perusing while Marcella was still lingering in the garden, showed her the paragraph in question. The words of the will were merely formal: "I hereby appoint," &c., and no more; but in a communication from the family solicitor, Mr. French, which Mrs. Boyce silently handed to her daughter after she had read the legal disposition, the ladies were informed that Mr. Boyce had, before quitting England, written a letter to Lord Maxwell, duly sealed and addressed, with instructions that it should be forwarded to its destination immediately after the writer's burial. "Those instructions," said Mr. French, "I have carried out. I understand that Lord Maxwell was not consulted as to his appointment as executor prior to the drawing up of the will. But you will no doubt hear from him at once, and as soon as we know that he consents to act, we can proceed immediately to probate."
"Mamma, how could he?" said Marcella, in a low, suffocated voice, letting will and letter fall upon her knee.
"Did he give you no warning in that talk you had with him at Mellor?" said Mrs. Boyce, after a minute's silence.
"Not the least," said Marcella, rising restlessly and beginning to walk up and down. "He spoke to me about wishing to bring it on again—asked me to let him write. I told him it was all done with—for ever! As to my own feelings, I felt it was no use to speak of them; but I thought—I believed, I had proved to him that Lord Maxwell had absolutely given up all idea of such a thing; and that it was already probable he would marry some one else. I told him I would rather disappear from every one I knew than consent to it—he could only humiliate us all by saying a word. And now, after that!—"
She stopped in her restless walk, pressing her hands miserably together.
"What does he want with us and our affairs?" she broke out. "He wishes, of course, to have no more to do with me. And now we force him—force him into these intimate relations. What can papa have said in that letter to him? What can he have said? Oh! it is unbearable! Can't we write at once?"
She pressed her hands over her eyes in a passion of humiliation and disgust. Mrs. Boyce watched her closely.
"We must wait, anyway, for his letter," she said. "It ought to be here by to-morrow morning."
Marcella sank on a chair by an open glass door, her eyes wandering, through the straggling roses growing against the wall of the stone balcony outside, to the laughing purples and greens of the sea.
"Of course," she said unhappily, "it is most probable he will consent. It would not be like him to refuse. But, mamma, you must write. I must write and beg him not to do it. It is quite simple. We can manage everything for ourselves. Oh! how could papa?" she broke out again in a low wail, "how could he?"
Mrs. Boyce's lips tightened sharply. It seemed to her a foolish question. She, at least, had had the experience of twenty years out of which to answer it. Death had made no difference. She saw her husband's character and her own seared and broken life with the same tragical clearness; she felt the same gnawing of an affection not to be plucked out while the heart still beat. This act of indelicacy and injustice was like many that had gone before it; and there was in it the same evasion and concealment towards herself. No matter. She had made her account with it all twenty years before. What astonished her was, that the force of her strong coercing will had been able to keep him for so long within the limits of the smaller and meaner immoralities of this world.
"Have you read the rest of the will?" she asked, after a long pause.
Marcella lifted it again, and began listlessly to go through it.
"Mamma!" she said presently, looking up, the colour flushing back into her face, "I find no mention of you in it throughout. There seems to be no provision for you."
"There is none," said Mrs. Boyce, quietly. "There was no need. I have my own income. We lived upon it for years before your father succeeded to Mellor. It is therefore amply sufficient for me now."
"You cannot imagine," cried Marcella, trembling in every limb, "that I am going to take the whole of my father's estate, and leave nothing—nothing for his wife. It would be impossible—unseemly. It would be to do me an injustice, mamma, as well as yourself," she added proudly.
"No, I think not," said Mrs. Boyce, with her usual cold absence of emotion. "You do not yet understand the situation. Your father's misfortunes nearly ruined the estate for a time. Your grandfather went through great trouble, and raised large sums to—" she paused for the right phrase—"to free us from the consequences of your father's actions. I benefited, of course, as much as he did. Those sums crippled all your grandfather's old age. He was a man to whom I was attached—whom I respected. Mellor, I believe, had never been embarrassed before. Well, your uncle did a little towards recovery—but on the whole he was a fool. Your father has done much more, and you, no doubt, will complete it. As for me, I have no claim to anything more from Mellor. The place itself is"—again she stopped for a word of which the energy, when it came, seemed to escape her—"hateful to me. I shall feel freer if I have no tie to it. And at last I persuaded your father to let me have my way."
Marcella rose from her seat impetuously, walked quickly across the room, and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.
"Mamma, are you still determined—now that we two are alone in the world—to act towards me, to treat me as though I were not your daughter—not your child at all, but a stranger?"
It was a cry of anguish. A sudden slight tremor swept over Mrs. Boyce's thin and withered face. She braced herself to the inevitable.
"Don't let us make a tragedy of it, my dear," she said, with a light touch on Marcella's hands. "Let us discuss it reasonably. Won't you sit down? I am not proposing anything very dreadful. But, like you, I have some interests of my own, and I should be glad to follow them—now—a little. I wish to spend some of the year in London; to make that, perhaps, my headquarters, so as to see something of some old friends whom I have had no intercourse with for years—perhaps also of my relations." She spoke of them with a particular dryness. "And I should be glad—after this long time—to be somewhat taken out of oneself, to read, to hear what is going on, to feed one's mind a little."
Marcella, looking at her, saw a kind of feverish light, a sparkling intensity in the pale blue eyes, that filled her with amazement. What, after all, did she know of this strange individuality from which her own being had taken its rise? The same flesh and blood—what an irony of nature!
"Of course," continued Mrs. Boyce, "I should go to you, and you would come to me. It would only be for part of the year. Probably we should get more from each other's lives so. As you know, I long to see things as they are, not conventionally. Anyway, whether I were there or no, you would probably want some companion to help you in your work and plans. I am not fit for them. And it would be easy to find some one who could act as chaperon in my absence."
The hot tears sprang to Marcella's eyes. "Why did you send me away from you, mamma, all my childhood," she cried. "It was wrong—cruel. I have no brother or sister. And you put me out of your life when I had no choice, when I was too young to understand."
Mrs. Boyce winced, but made no reply. She sat with her delicate hand across her brow. She was the white shadow of her former self; but her fragility had always seemed to Marcella more indomitable than anybody else's strength.
Sobs began to rise in Marcella's throat.
"And now," she said, in half-coherent despair, "do you know what you are doing? You are cutting yourself off from me—refusing to have any real bond to me just when I want it most. I suppose you think that I shall be satisfied with the property and the power, and the chance of doing what I like. But"—she tried her best to gulp back her pain, her outraged feeling, to speak quietly—"I am not like that really any more. I can take it all up, with courage and heart, if you will stay with me, and let me—let me—love you and care for you. But, by myself, I feel as if I could not face it! I am not likely to be happy—for a long time—except in doing what work I can. It is very improbable that I shall marry. I dare say you don't believe me, but it is true. We are both sad and lonely. We have no one but each other. And then you talk in this ghastly way of separating from me—casting me off."
Her voice trembled and broke, she looked at her mother with a frowning passion.
Mrs. Boyce still sat silent, studying her daughter with a strange, brooding eye. Under her unnatural composure there was in reality a half-mad impatience, the result of physical and moral reaction. This beauty, this youth, talk of sadness, of finality! What folly! Still, she was stirred, undermined in spite of herself.
"There!" she said, with a restless gesture, "let us, please, talk of it no more. I will come back with you—I will do my best. We will let the matter of my future settlement alone for some months, at any rate, if that will satisfy you or be any help to you."
She made a movement as though to rise from her low chair. But the great waters swelled in Marcella—swelled and broke. She fell on her knees again by her mother, and before Mrs. Boyce could stop her she had thrown her young arms close round the thin, shrunken form.
"Mother!" she said. "Mother, be good to me—love me—you are all I have!"
And she kissed the pale brow and cheek with a hungry, almost a violent tenderness that would not be gainsaid, murmuring wild incoherent things.
Mrs. Boyce first tried to put her away, then submitted, being physically unable to resist, and at last escaped from her with a sudden sob that went to the girl's heart. She rose, went to the window, struggled hard for composure, and finally left the room.
But that evening, for the first time, she let Marcella put her on the sofa, tend her, and read to her. More wonderful still, she went to sleep while Marcella was reading. In the lamplight her face looked piteously old and worn. The girl sat for long with her hands clasped round her knees, gazing down upon it, in a trance of pain and longing.
* * * * *
Marcella was awake early next morning, listening to the full voice of the sea as it broke three hundred feet below, against the beach and rocky walls of the little town. She was lying in a tiny white room, one of the cells of the old monastery, and the sun as it rose above the Salernian mountains—the mountains that hold Paestum in their blue and purple shadows—danced in gold on the white wall. The bell of the cathedral far below tolled the hour. She supposed it must be six o'clock. Two hours more or so, and Lord Maxwell's letter might be looked for.
She lay and thought of it—longed for it, and for the time of answering it, with the same soreness that had marked all the dreams of a restless night. If she could only see her father's letter! It was inconceivable that he should have mentioned her name in his plea. He might have appealed to the old friendship between the families. That was possible, and would have, at any rate, an appearance of decency. But who could answer for it—or for him? She clasped her hands rigidly behind her head, her brows frowning, bending her mind with an intensity of will to the best means of assuring Aldous Raeburn that she and her mother would not encroach upon him. She had a perpetual morbid vision of herself as the pursuer, attacking him now through his friend, now through her father. Oh! when would that letter come, and let her write her own!
She tried to read, but in reality listened for every sound of awakening life in the hotel. When at last her mother's maid came in to call her, she sprang up with a start.
"Deacon, are the letters come?"
"There are two for your mother, miss; none for you."
Marcella threw on her dressing-gown, watched her opportunity, and slipped in to her mother, who occupied a similar cell next door.
Mrs. Boyce was sitting up in bed, with a letter before her, her pale blue eyes fixed absently on the far stretch of sea.
She looked round with a start as Marcella entered. "The letter is to me, of course," she said.
Marcella read it breathlessly.
"Dear Mrs. Boyce,—I have this morning received from your solicitor, Mr. French, a letter written by Mr. Boyce to myself in November of last year. In it he asks me to undertake the office of executor, to which, I hear from Mr. French, he has named me in his will. Mr. French also enquires whether I shall be willing to act, and asks me to communicate with you.
"May I, then, venture to intrude upon you with these few words? Mr. Boyce refers in his touching letter to the old friendship between our families, and to the fact that similar offices have often been performed by his relations for mine, or vice versa. But no reminder of the kind was in the least needed. If I can be of any service to yourself and to Miss Boyce, neither your poor husband nor you could do me any greater kindness than to command me.
"I feel naturally some diffidence in the matter. I gather from Mr. French that Miss Boyce is her father's heiress, and comes at once into the possession of Mellor. She may not, of course, wish me to act, in which case I should withdraw immediately; but I sincerely trust that she will not forbid me the very small service I could so easily and gladly render.
"I cannot close my letter without venturing to express the deep sympathy I have felt for you and yours during the past six months. I have been far from forgetful of all that you have been going through, though I may have seemed so. I trust that you and your daughter will not hurry home for any business cause, if it is still best for your health to stay in Italy. With your instructions Mr. French and I could arrange everything.
"Believe me,
"Yours most sincerely,
"MAXWELL."
"You will find it difficult, my dear, to write a snub in answer to that letter," said Mrs. Boyce, drily, as Marcella laid it down.
Marcella's face was, indeed, crimson with perplexity and feeling.
"Well, we can think it over," she said as she went away.
Mrs. Boyce pondered the matter a good deal when she was left alone. The signs of reaction and change in Marcella were plain enough. What they precisely meant, and how much, was another matter. As to him, Marcella's idea of another attachment might be true, or might be merely the creation of her own irritable pride. Anyway, he was in the mood to write a charming letter. Mrs. Boyce's blanched lip had all its natural irony as she thought it over. To her mind Aldous Raeburn's manners had always been a trifle too good, whether for his own interests or for this wicked world. And if he had any idea now of trying again, let him, for Heaven's sake, not be too yielding or too eager! "It was always the way," thought Mrs. Boyce, remembering a child in white frock and baby shoes—"if you wished to make her want anything, you had to take it away from her."
Meanwhile the mere thought that matters might even yet so settle themselves drew from the mother a long breath of relief. She had spent an all but sleepless night, tormented by Marcella's claim upon her. After twenty years of self-suppression this woman of forty-five, naturally able, original, and independent, had seen a glimpse of liberty. In her first youth she had been betrayed as a wife, degraded as a member of society. A passion she could not kill, combined with some stoical sense of inalienable obligation, had combined to make her both the slave and guardian of her husband up to middle life; and her family and personal pride, so strong in her as a girl, had found its only outlet in this singular estrangement she had achieved between herself and every other living being, including her own daughter. Now her husband was dead, and all sorts of crushed powers and desires, mostly of the intellectual sort, had been strangely reviving within her. Just emerged, as she was, from the long gloom of nursing, she already wished to throw it all behind her—to travel, to read, to make acquaintances—she who had lived as a recluse for twenty years! There was in it a last clutch at youth, at life. And she had no desire to enter upon this new existence—in comradeship with Marcella. They were independent and very different human beings. That they were mother and daughter was a mere physical accident.
Moreover, though she was amply conscious of the fine development in Marcella during the past two years, it is probable that she felt her daughter even less congenial to her now than of old. For the rich, emotional nature had, as we have seen, "suffered conviction," had turned in the broad sense to "religion," was more and more sensitive, especially since Hallin's death, to the spiritual things and symbols in the world. At Naples she had haunted churches; had read, as her mother knew, many religious books.
Now Mrs. Boyce in these matters had a curious history. She had begun life as an ardent Christian, under evangelical influences. Her husband, on the other hand, at the time she married him was a man of purely sceptical opinions, a superficial disciple of Mill and Comte, and fond of an easy profanity which seemed to place him indisputably with the superior persons of this world. To the amazement and scandal of her friends, Evelyn Merritt had not been three months his wife before she had adopted his opinions en bloc, and was carrying them out to their logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher. Thenceforward her conception of things—of which, however, she seldom spoke—had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that, in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things orthodox and established.
Then, in his last illness, he had finally broken away from her, and his own past. "Evelyn, I should like to see a clergyman," he had said to her in his piteous voice, "and I shall ask him to give me the Sacrament." She had made every arrangement accordingly; but her bitter soul could see nothing in the step but fear and hypocrisy; and he knew it. And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy. Had not the hard devotion of twenty years made him at least her own? And here was this black-coated reciter of incredible things stepping into her place. Only in death she recovered him wholly. No priest interfered while he drew his last breath upon her bosom.
And now Marcella! Yet the girl's voice and plea tugged at her withered heart. She felt a dread of unknown softnesses—of being invaded and weakened by things in her akin to her daughter, and so captured afresh. Her mind fell upon the bare idea of a revival of the Maxwell engagement, and caressed it.
Meanwhile Marcella stood dressing by the open window in the sunlight, which filled the room with wavy reflections caught from the sea. Fishing-boats were putting off from the beach, three hundred feet below her; she could hear the grating of the keels, the songs of the boatmen. On the little breakwater to the right an artist's white umbrella shone in the sun; and a half-naked boy, poised on the bows of a boat moored beside the painter, stood bent in the eager attitude of one about to drop the bait into the blue wave below. His brown back burnt against the water. Cliff, houses, sea, glowed in warmth and light; the air was full of roses and orange-blossom; and to an English sense had already the magic of summer.
And Marcella's hands, as she coiled and plaited her black hair, moved with a new lightness; for the first time since her father's death her look had its normal fire, crossed every now and then by something that made her all softness and all woman. No! as her mother said, one could not snub that letter or its writer. But how to answer it! In imagination she had already penned twenty different replies. How not to be grasping or effusive, and yet to show that you could feel and repay kindness—there was the problem!
Meanwhile, from that letter, or rather in subtle connection with it, her thoughts at last went wandering off with a natural zest to her new realm of Mellor, and to all that she would and could do for the dwellers therein.