CHAPTER V.
Before she went home, Marcella turned into the little rectory garden to see if she could find Mary Harden for a minute or two. The intimacy between them was such that she generally found entrance to the house by going round to a garden door and knocking or calling. The house was very small, and Mary's little sitting-room was close to this door.
Her knock brought Mary instantly.
"Oh! come in. You won't mind. We were just at dinner. Charles is going away directly. Do stay and talk to me a bit."
Marcella hesitated, but at last went in. The meals at the rectory distressed her—the brother and sister showed the marks of them. To-day she found their usual fare carefully and prettily arranged on a spotless table; some bread, cheese, and boiled rice—nothing else. Nor did they allow themselves any fire for meals. Marcella, sitting beside them in her fur, did not feel the cold, but Mary was clearly shivering under her shawl. They eat meat twice a week, and in the afternoon Mary lit the sitting-room fire. In the morning she contented herself with the kitchen, where, as she cooked for many sick folk, and had only a girl of fourteen whom she was training to help her with the housework, she had generally much to do.
The Rector did not stay long after her arrival. He had a distant visit to pay to a dying child, and hurried off so as to be home, if possible, before dark. Marcella admired him, but did not feel that she understood him more as they were better acquainted. He was slight and young, and not very clever; but a certain inexpugnable dignity surrounded him, which, real as it was, sometimes irritated Marcella. It sat oddly on his round face—boyish still, in spite of its pinched and anxious look—but there it was, not to be ignored. Marcella thought him a Conservative, and very backward and ignorant in his political and social opinions. But she was perfectly conscious that she must also think him a saint; and that the deepest things in him were probably not for her.
Mr. Harden said a few words to her now as to her straw-plaiting scheme, which had his warmest sympathy—Marcella contrasted his tone gratefully with that of Wharton, and once more fell happily in love with her own ideas—then he went off, leaving the two girls together.
"Have you seen Mrs. Hurd this morning?" said Mary.
"Yes, Willie seems very bad."
Mary assented.
"The doctor says he will hardly get through the winter, especially if this weather goes on. But the greatest excitement of the village just now—do you know?—is the quarrel between Hurd and Westall. Somebody told Charles yesterday that they never meet without threatening each other. Since the covers at Tudley End were raided, Westall seems to have quite lost his head. He declares Hurd knew all about that, and that he is hand and glove with the same gang still. He vows he will catch him out, and Hurd told the man who told Charles that if Westall bullies him any more he will put a knife into him. And Charles says that Hurd is not a bit like he was. He used to be such a patient, silent creature. Now—"
"He has woke up to a few more ideas and a little more life than he had, that's all," said Marcella, impatiently. "He poached last winter, and small blame to him. But since he got work at the Court in November—is it likely? He knows that he was suspected; and what could be his interest now, after a hard day's work, to go out again at night, and run the risk of falling into Westall's clutches, when he doesn't want either the food or the money?"
"I don't know," said Mary, shaking her head. "Charles says, if they once do it, they hardly ever leave it off altogether. It's the excitement and amusement of it."
"He promised me," said Marcella, proudly.
"They promise Charles all sorts of things," said Mary, slyly; "but they don't keep to them."
Warmly grateful as both she and the Rector had been from the beginning to Marcella for the passionate interest she took in the place and the people, the sister was sometimes now a trifle jealous—divinely jealous—for her brother. Marcella's unbounded confidence in her own power and right over Mellor, her growing tendency to ignore anybody else's right or power, sometimes set Mary aflame, for Charles's sake, heartily and humbly as she admired her beautiful friend.
"I shall speak to Mr. Raeburn about it," said Marcella.
She never called him "Aldous" to anybody—a stiffness which jarred a little upon the gentle, sentimental Mary.
"I saw you pass," she said, "from one of the top windows. He was with you, wasn't he?"
A slight colour sprang to her sallow cheek, a light to her eyes. Most wonderful, most interesting was this engagement to Mary, who—strange to think!—had almost brought it about. Mr. Raeburn was to her one of the best and noblest of men, and she felt quite simply, and with a sort of Christian trembling for him, the romance of his great position. Was Marcella happy, was she proud of him, as she ought to be? Mary was often puzzled by her.
"Oh no!" said Marcella, with a little laugh. "That wasn't Mr. Raeburn. I don't know where your eyes were, Mary. That was Mr. Wharton, who is staying with us. He has gone on to a meeting at Widrington."
Mary's face fell.
"Charles says Mr. Wharton's influence in the village is very bad," she said quickly. "He makes everybody discontented; sets everybody by the ears; and, after all, what can he do for anybody?"
"But that's just what he wants to do—to make them discontented," cried Marcella. "Then, if they vote for him, that's the first practical step towards improving their life."
"But it won't give them more wages or keep them out of the public house," said Mary, bewildered. She came of a homely middle-class stock, accustomed to a small range of thinking, and a high standard of doing. Marcella's political opinions were an amazement, and on the whole a scandal to her. She preferred generally to give them a wide berth.
Marcella did not reply. It was not worth while to talk to Mary on these topics. But Mary stuck to the subject a moment longer.
"You can't want him to get in, though?" she said in a puzzled voice, as she led the way to the little sitting-room across the passage, and took her workbasket out of the cupboard. "It was only the week before last Mr. Raeburn was speaking at the schoolroom for Mr. Dodgson. You weren't there, Marcella?"
"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I thought you knew perfectly well, Mary, that Mr. Raeburn and I don't agree politically. Certainly, I hope Mr. Wharton will get in!"
Mary opened her eyes in wonderment. She stared at Marcella, forgetting the sock she had just slipped over her left hand, and the darning needle in her right.
Marcella laughed.
"I know you think that two people who are going to be married ought to say ditto to each other in everything. Don't you—you dear old goose?"
She came and stood beside Mary, a stately and beautiful creature in her loosened furs. She stroked Mary's straight sandy hair back from her forehead. Mary looked up at her with a thrill, nay, a passionate throb of envy—soon suppressed.
"I think," she said steadily, "it is very strange—that love should oppose and disagree with what it loves."
Marcella went restlessly towards the fire and began to examine the things on the mantelpiece.
"Can't people agree to differ, you sentimentalist? Can't they respect each other, without echoing each other on every subject?"
"Respect!" cried Mary, with a sudden scorn, which was startling from a creature so soft.
"There, she could tear me in pieces!" said Marcella, laughing, though her lip was not steady. "I wonder what you would be like, Mary, if you were engaged."
Mary ran her needle in and out with lightning speed for a second or two, then she said almost under her breath—
"I shouldn't be engaged unless I were in love. And if I were in love, why, I would go anywhere—do anything—believe anything—if he told me!"
"Believe anything?—Mary—you wouldn't!"
"I don't mean as to religion," said Mary, hastily. "But everything else—I would give it all up!—governing one's self, thinking for one's self. He should do it, and I would bless him!"
She looked up crimson, drawing a very long breath, as though from some deep centre of painful, passionate feeling. It was Marcella's turn to stare. Never had Mary so revealed herself before.
"Did you ever love any one like that, Mary?" she asked quickly.
Mary dropped her head again over her work and did not answer immediately.
"Do you see—" she said at last, with a change of tone, "do you see that we have got our invitation?"
Marcella, about to give the rein to an eager curiosity Mary's manner had excited in her, felt herself pulled up sharply. When she chose, this little meek creature could put on the same unapproachableness as her brother. Marcella submitted.
"Yes, I see," she said, taking up a card on the mantelpiece. "It will be a great crush. I suppose you know. They have asked the whole county, it seems to me."
The card bore an invitation in Miss Raeburn's name for the Rector and his sister to a dance at Maxwell Court—the date given was the twenty-fifth of January.
"What fun!" said Mary, her eye sparkling. "You needn't suppose that I know enough of balls to be particular. I have only been to one before in my life—ever. That was at Cheltenham. An aunt took me—I didn't dance. There were hardly any men, but I enjoyed it."
"Well, you shall dance this time," said Marcella, "for I will make Mr.
Raeburn introduce you."
"Nonsense, you won't have any time to think about me. You will be the queen—everybody will want to speak to you. I shall sit in a corner and look at you—that will be enough for me."
Marcella went up to her quickly and kissed her, then she said, still holding her—
"I know you think I ought to be very happy, Mary!"
"I should think I do!" said Mary, with astonished emphasis, when the voice paused—"I should think I do!"
"I am happy—and I want to make him happy. But there are so many things, so many different aims and motives, that complicate life, that puzzle one. One doesn't know how much to give of one's self, to each—"
She stood with her hand on Mary's shoulder, looking away towards the window and the snowy garden, her brow frowning and distressed.
"Well, I don't understand," said Mary, after a pause. "As I said before, it seems to me so plain and easy—to be in love, and give one's self all—to that. But you are so much cleverer than I, Marcella, you know so much more. That makes the difference. I can't be like you. Perhaps I don't want to be!"—and she laughed. "But I can admire you and love you, and think about you. There, now, tell me what you are going to wear?"
"White satin, and Mr. Raeburn wants me to wear some pearls he is going to give me, some old pearls of his mother's. I believe I shall find them at Mellor when I get back."
There was little girlish pleasure in the tone. It was as though Marcella thought her friend would be more interested in her bit of news than she was herself, and was handing it on to her to please her.
"Isn't there a superstition against doing that—before you're married?" said Mary, doubtfully.
"As if I should mind if there was! But I don't believe there is, or Miss Raeburn would have heard of it. She's a mass of such things. Well! I hope I shall behave myself to please her at this function. There are not many things I do to her satisfaction; it's a mercy we're not going to live with her. Lord Maxwell is a dear; but she and I would never get on. Every way of thinking she has, rubs me up the wrong way; and as for her view of me, I am just a tare sown among her wheat. Perhaps she is right enough!"
Marcella leant her cheek pensively on one hand, and with the other played with the things on the mantelpiece.
Mary looked at her, and then half smiled, half sighed.
"I think it is a very good thing you are to be married soon," she said, with her little air of wisdom, which offended nobody. "Then you'll know your own mind. When is it to be?"
"The end of February—after the election."
"Two months," mused Mary.
"Time enough to throw it all up in, you think?" said Marcella, recklessly, putting on her gloves for departure. "Perhaps you'll be pleased to hear that I am going to a meeting of Mr. Raeburn's next week?"
"I am glad. You ought to go to them all."
"Really, Mary! How am I to lift you out of this squaw theory of matrimony? Allow me to inform you that the following evening I am going to one of Mr. Wharton's—here in the schoolroom!"
She enjoyed her friend's disapproval.
"By yourself, Marcella? It isn't seemly!"
"I shall take a maid. Mr. Wharton is going to tell us how the people can—get the land, and how, when they have got it, all the money that used to go in rent will go in taking off taxes and making life comfortable for the poor." She looked at Mary with a teasing smile.
"Oh! I dare say he will make his stealing sound very pretty," said Mary, with unwonted scorn, as she opened the front door for her friend.
Marcella flashed out.
"I know you are a saint, Mary," she said, turning back on the path outside to deliver her last shaft. "I am often not so sure whether you are a Christian!"
Then she hurried off without another word, leaving the flushed and shaken Mary to ponder this strange dictum.
* * * * *
Marcella was just turning into the straight drive which led past the church on the left to Mellor House, when she heard footsteps behind her, and, looking round, she saw Edward Hallin.
"Will you give me some lunch, Miss Boyce, in return for a message? I am here instead of Aldous, who is very sorry for himself, and will be over later. I am to tell you that he went down to the station to meet a certain box. The box did not come, but will come this afternoon; so he waits for it, and will bring it over."
Marcella flushed, smiled, and said she understood. Hallin moved on beside her, evidently glad of the opportunity of a talk with her.
"We are all going together to the Gairsley meeting next week, aren't we?
I am so glad you are coming. Aldous will do his best."
There was something very winning in his tone to her. It implied both his old and peculiar friendship for Aldous, and his eager wish to find a new friend in her—to adopt her into their comradeship. Something very winning, too, in his whole personality—in the loosely knit, nervous figure, the irregular charm of feature, the benignant eyes and brow—even in the suggestions of physical delicacy, cheerfully concealed, yet none the less evident. The whole balance of Marcella's temper changed in some sort as she talked to him. She found herself wanting to please, instead of wanting to conquer, to make an effect.
"You have just come from the village, I think?" said Hallin. "Aldous tells me you take a great interest in the people?"
He looked at her kindly, the look of one who saw all his fellow-creatures nobly, as it were, and to their best advantage.
"One may take an interest," she said, in a dissatisfied voice, poking at the snow crystals on the road before her with the thorn-stick she carried, "but one can do so little. And I don't know anything; not even what I want myself."
"No; one can do next to nothing. And systems and theories don't matter, or, at least, very little. Yet, when you and Aldous are together, there will be more chance of doing, for you than for most. You will be two happy and powerful people! His power will be doubled by happiness; I have always known that."
Marcella was seized with shyness, looked away, and did not know what to answer. At last she said abruptly—her head still turned to the woods on her left—
"Are you sure he is going to be happy?"
"Shall I produce his letter to me?" he said, bantering—"or letters? For I knew a great deal about you before October 5" (their engagement-day), "and suspected what was going to happen long before Aldous did. No; after all, no! Those letters are my last bit of the old friendship. But the new began that same day," he hastened to add, smiling: "It may be richer than the old; I don't know. It depends on you."
"I don't think—I am a very satisfactory friend," said Marcella, still awkward, and speaking with difficulty.
"Well, let me find out, won't you? I don't think Aldous would call me exacting. I believe he would give me a decent character, though I tease him a good deal. You must let me tell you sometime what he did for me—what he was to me—at Cambridge? I shall always feel sorry for Aldous's wife that she did not know him at college."
A shock went through Marcella at the word—that tremendous word—wife.
As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made!
"I should like you to tell me," she said faintly. Then she added, with more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, "But you really must come in and rest. Aldous told me he thought the walk from the Court was too much for you. Shall we take this short way?"
And she opened a little gate leading to a door at the side of the house through the Cedar Garden. The narrow path only admitted of single file, and Hallin followed her, admiring her tall youth and the fine black and white of her head and cheek as she turned every now and then to speak to him. He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of her beauty, and the truth in Aldous's comparison of her to one of the tall women in a Florentine fresco. But he felt himself a good deal baffled by her, all the same. In some ways, so far as any man who is not the lover can understand such things, he understood why Aldous had fallen in love with her; in others, she bore no relation whatever to the woman his thoughts had been shaping all these years as his friend's fit and natural wife.
Luncheon passed as easily as any meal could be expected to do, of which Mr. Boyce was partial president. During the preceding month or two he had definitely assumed the character of an invalid, although to inexperienced eyes like Marcella's there did not seem to be very much the matter. But, whatever the facts might be, Mr. Boyce's adroit use of them had made a great difference to his position in his own household. His wife's sarcastic freedom of manner was less apparent; and he was obviously less in awe of her. Meanwhile he was as sore as ever towards the Raeburns, and no more inclined to take any particular pleasure in Marcella's prospects, or to make himself agreeable towards his future son-in-law. He and Mrs. Boyce had been formally asked in Miss Raeburn's best hand to the Court ball, but he had at once snappishly announced his intention of staying at home. Marcella sometimes looked back with astonishment to his eagerness for social notice when they first came to Mellor. Clearly the rising irritability of illness had made it doubly unpleasant to him to owe all that he was likely to get on that score to his own daughter; and, moreover, he had learnt to occupy himself more continuously on his own land and with his own affairs.
As to the state of the village, neither Marcella's entreaties nor reproaches had any effect upon him. When it appeared certain that he would be summoned for some specially flagrant piece of neglect he would spend a few shillings on repairs; otherwise not a farthing. All that filial softening towards him of which Marcella had been conscious in the early autumn had died away in her. She said to herself now plainly and bitterly that it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the smallest expression of such a feeling. As it was, she was left to wonder and chafe at her mother's new-born mildness.
In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.
"I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night," he said. "He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that you would not agree with it. But I wanted you to see how he does these things. He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week. Each time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes out what he has to say. Then he speaks it entirely without notes. In this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself gradually an effective and practical speaker. The danger with him, of course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical—not simple and popular enough."
Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.
"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?" he said to her, but in a lower voice, and sitting down beside her.
Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder—wonder at Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her. It was inevitable, of course—youth and beauty rule the world. But the mother, under no spell herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the lowering of standards involved.
"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question, fidgeting the papers under her hand. Then his curious confessor's gift, his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all before him, told upon her.
"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that must come," she added hurriedly. "This is all about details, palliatives. I want him to be more impatient."
"Great political changes you mean?"
She nodded; then added—
"But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come after."
He pondered a moment.
"Aldous has never believed in great changes coming suddenly. He constantly looks upon me as rash in the things I adopt and believe in. But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more equitably, I have never seen Aldous's equal—for the steady passion, the persistence, of it."
She looked up. His pale face had taken to itself glow and fire; his eyes were full of strenuous, nay, severe expression. Her foolish pride rebelled a little.
"Of course, I haven't seen much of that yet," she said slowly.
His look for a moment was indignant, incredulous, then melted into a charming eagerness.
"But you will! naturally you will!—see everything. I hug myself sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather and I will know what Aldous is and does. Oh! the people on the estate know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high intelligence have the power I believe. But I am impatient! In the first place—I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!—I want Aldous to come out of that manner of his to strangers, which is the only bit of the true Tory in him; you can get rid of it, no one else can—How long shall I give you?—And in the next, I want the world not to be wasting itself on baser stuff when it might be praising Aldous!"
"Does he mean Mr. Wharton?" thought Marcella, quickly. "But this world—our world—hates him and runs him down."
But she had no time to answer, for the door opened to admit Aldous, flushed and bright-eyed, looking round the room immediately for her, and bearing a parcel in his left hand.
"Does she love him at all?" thought Hallin, with a nervous stiffening of all his lithe frame, as he walked away to talk to Mrs. Boyce, "or, in spite of all her fine talk, is she just marrying him for his money and position!"
Meanwhile, Aldous had drawn Marcella into the Stone Parlour and was standing by the fire with his arm covetously round her.
"I have lost two hours with you I might have had, just because a tiresome man missed his train. Make up for it by liking these pretty things a little, for my sake and my mother's."
He opened the jeweller's case, took out the fine old pearls—necklace and bracelets—it contained, and put them into her hand. They were his first considerable gift to her, and had been chosen for association's sake, seeing that his mother had also worn them before her marriage.
She flushed first of all with a natural pleasure, the girl delighting in her gaud. Then she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed, inevitable. Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he began to be puzzled by her.
"They are much too good for me. I don't know whether you ought to give me such precious things. I am dreadfully careless and forgetful. Mamma always says so."
"I shall want you to wear them so often that you won't have a chance of forgetting them," he said gaily.
"Will you? Will you want me to wear them so often?" she asked, in an odd voice. "Anyway, I should like to have just these, and nothing else. I am glad that we know nobody, and have no friends, and that I shall have so few presents. You won't give me many jewels, will you?" she said suddenly, insistently, turning to him. "I shouldn't know what to do with them. I used to have a magpie's wish for them; and now—I don't know, but they don't give me pleasure. Not these, of course—not these!" she added hurriedly, taking them up and beginning to fasten the bracelets on her wrists.
Aldous looked perplexed.
"My darling!" he said, half laughing, and in the tone of the apologist, "You know we have such a lot of things. And I am afraid my grandfather will want to give them all to you. Need one think so much about it? It isn't as though they had to be bought fresh. They go with pretty gowns, don't they, and other people like to see them?"
"No, but it's what they imply—the wealth—the having so much while other people want so much. Things begin to oppress me so!" she broke out, instinctively moving away from him that she might express herself with more energy. "I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having. You must not let me like them—you must help me not to care about them!"
Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself. He could of course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside. This question she had raised, this most thorny of all the personal questions of the present—the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and its vanities—was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and robustly real to him than it was to her. Every word in his few sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.
But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of another tune which she seemed to be perpetually trying to recall and piece together. Aldous's slow minor made her impatient.
He turned presently to ask her what she had been doing with her morning—asking her with a certain precision, and observing her attentively. She replied that she had been showing Mr. Wharton the house, that he had walked down with her to the village, and was gone to a meeting at Widrington. Then she remarked that he was very good company, and very clever, but dreadfully sure of his own opinion. Finally she laughed, and said drily:
"There will be no putting him down all the same. I haven't told anybody yet, but he saved my life this morning."
Aldous caught her wrists.
"Saved your life! Dear—What do you mean?"
She explained, giving the little incident all—perhaps more than—its dramatic due. He listened with evident annoyance, and stood pondering when she came to an end.
"So I shall be expected to take quite a different view of him henceforward?" he inquired at last, looking round at her, with a very forced smile.
"I am sure I don't know that it matters to him what view anybody takes of him," she cried, flushing. "He certainly takes the frankest views of other people, and expresses them."
And while she played with the pearls in their box she gave a vivid account of her morning's talk with the Radical candidate for West Brookshire, and of their village expedition.
There was a certain relief in describing the scorn with which her acts and ideals had been treated; and, underneath, a woman's curiosity as to how Aldous would take it.
"I don't know what business he had to express himself so frankly," said Aldous, turning to the fire and carefully putting it together. "He hardly knows you—it was, I think, an impertinence."
He stood upright, with his back to the hearth, a strong, capable, frowning Englishman, very much on his dignity. Such a moment must surely have become him in the eyes of a girl that loved him. Marcella proved restive under it.
"No; it's very natural," she protested quickly. "When people are so much in earnest they don't stop to think about impertinence! I never met any one who dug up one's thoughts by the roots as he does."
Aldous was startled by her flush, her sudden attitude of opposition. His intermittent lack of readiness overtook him, and there was an awkward silence. Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said:
"I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not liking Mr. Wharton?—other than politics, I mean?"
Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.
He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said:
"I had rather not rake up old scores."
She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.
"Dearest," he said, "you shall put me in charity with all the world. But the worst of it is," he added, half laughing, "that I don't see how I am to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put that fire out instead of me!"