Marcella

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER VI.

A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after years, passed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January. Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active throughout the constituencies, were carried forward with redoubled energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock—a former fag indeed of his at Eton—whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do. Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was harassed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations; and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to himself but to others.

In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could snatch from a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal fortunes were all deeply interested. In vain—with a tardy instinct that it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long stay at Mellor was largely owing—did Aldous subdue himself to propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least twice in Raeburn's hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce's indignation nor Marcella's discomfort and annoyance could restrain. Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions to the Radical candidate he was asserting his independence of the Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns' heir. Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a sickly and disappointed man. Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton. But it seemed to be no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once have taken to get rid of him.

In vain, too, did Miss Raeburn do her best for the nephew to whom she was still devoted, in spite of his deplorable choice of a wife. She took in the situation as a whole probably sooner than anybody else, and she instantly made heroic efforts to see more of Marcella, to get her to come oftener to the Court, and in many various ways to procure the poor deluded Aldous more of his betrothed's society. She paid many chattering and fussy visits to Mellor—visits which chafed Marcella—and before long, indeed, roused a certain suspicion in the girl's wilful mind. Between Miss Raeburn and Mrs. Boyce there was a curious understanding. It was always tacit, and never amounted to friendship, still less to intimacy. But it often yielded a certain melancholy consolation to Aldous Raeburn's great-aunt. It was clear to her that this strange mother was just as much convinced as she was that Aldous was making a great mistake, and that Marcella was not worthy of him. But the engagement being there—a fact not apparently to be undone—both ladies showed themselves disposed to take pains with it, to protect it against aggression. Mrs. Boyce found herself becoming more of a chaperon than she had ever yet professed to be; and Miss Raeburn, as we have said, made repeated efforts to capture Marcella and hold her for Aldous, her lawful master.

But Marcella proved extremely difficult to manage. In the first place she was a young person of many engagements. Her village scheme absorbed a great deal of time. She was deep in a varied correspondence, in the engagement of teachers, the provision of work-rooms, the collecting and registering of workers, the organisation of local committees and so forth. New sides of the girl's character, new capacities and capabilities were coming out; new forms of her natural power over her fellows were developing every day; she was beginning, under the incessant stimulus of Wharton's talk, to read and think on social and economic subjects, with some system and coherence, and it was evident that she took a passionate mental pleasure in it all. And the more pleasure these activities gave her, the less she had to spare for those accompaniments of her engagement and her position that was to be, which once, as Mrs. Boyce's sharp eyes perceived, had been quite normally attractive to her.

"Why do you take up her time so, with all these things?" said Miss Raeburn impatiently to Lady Winterbourne, who was now Marcella's obedient helper in everything she chose to initiate. "She doesn't care for anything she ought to care about at this time, and Aldous sees nothing of her. As for her trousseau, Mrs. Boyce declares she has had to do it all. Marcella won't even go up to London to have her wedding-dress fitted!"

Lady Winterbourne looked up bewildered.

"But I can't make her go and have her wedding-dress fitted, Agneta! And I always feel you don't know what a fine creature she is. You don't really appreciate her. It's splendid the ideas she has about this work, and the way she throws herself into it."

"I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, indignantly. "That's just what I object to. Why can't she throw herself into being in love with Aldous! That's her business, I imagine, just now—if she were a young woman like anybody else one had ever seen—instead of holding aloof from everything he does, and never being there when he wants her. Oh! I have no patience with her. But, of course, I must—" said Miss Raeburn, hastily correcting herself—"of course, I must have patience."

"It will all come right, I am sure, when they are married," said Lady
Winterbourne, rather helplessly.

"That's just what my brother says," cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "He won't hear a word—declares she is odd and original, and that Aldous will soon know how to manage her. It's all very well; nowadays men don't manage their wives; that's all gone with the rest. And I am sure, my dear, if she behaves after she is married as she is doing now, with that most objectionable person Mr. Wharton—walking, and talking, and taking up his ideas, and going to his meetings—she'll be a handful for any husband."

"Mr. Wharton!" said Lady Winterbourne, astonished. Her absent black eyes, the eyes of the dreamer, of the person who lives by a few intense affections, saw little or nothing of what was going on immediately under them. "Oh! but that is because he is staying in the house, and he is a Socialist; she calls herself one—"

"My dear," said Miss Raeburn, interrupting emphatically; "if—you—had—now—an unmarried daughter at home—engaged or not—would you care to have Harry Wharton hanging about after her?"

"Harry Wharton?" said the other, pondering; "he is the Levens' cousin, isn't he? he used to stay with them. I don't think I have seen him since then. But yes, I do remember; there was something—something disagreeable?"

She stopped with a hesitating, interrogative air. No one talked less scandal, no one put the uglinesses of life away from her with a hastier hand than Lady Winterbourne. She was one of the most consistent of moral epicures.

"Yes, extremely disagreeable," said Miss Raeburn, sitting bolt upright. "The man has no principles—never had any, since he was a child in petticoats. I know Aldous thinks him unscrupulous in politics and everything else. And then, just when you are worked to death, and have hardly a moment for your own affairs, to have a man of that type always at hand to spend odd times with your lady love—flattering her, engaging her in his ridiculous schemes, encouraging her in all the extravagances she has got her head twice too full of already, setting her against your own ideas and the life she will have to live—you will admit that it is not exactly soothing!"

"Poor Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully, looking far ahead with her odd look of absent rigidity, which had in reality so little to do with a character essentially soft; "but you see he did know all about her opinions. And I don't think—no, I really don't think—I could speak to her."

In truth, this woman of nearly seventy—old in years, but wholly young in temperament—was altogether under Marcella's spell—more at ease with her already than with most of her own children, finding in her satisfaction for a hundred instincts, suppressed or starved by her own environment, fascinated by the girl's friendship, and eagerly grateful for her visits. Miss Raeburn thought it all both incomprehensible and silly.

"Apparently no one can!" cried that lady in answer to her friend's demurrer; "is all the world afraid of her?"

And she departed in wrath. But she knew, nevertheless, that she was just as much afraid of Marcella as anybody else. In her own sphere at the Court, or in points connected with what was due to the family, or to Lord Maxwell especially, as the head of it, this short, capable old lady could hold her own amply with Aldous's betrothed, could maintain, indeed, a sharp and caustic dignity, which kept Marcella very much in order. Miss Raeburn, on the defensive, was strong; but when it came to attacking Marcella's own ideas and proceedings, Lord Maxwell's sister became shrewdly conscious of her own weaknesses. She had no wish to measure her wits on any general field with Marcella's. She said to herself that the girl was too clever and would talk you down.

Meanwhile, things went untowardly in various ways. Marcella disciplined herself before the Gairsley meeting, and went thither resolved to give Aldous as much sympathy as she could. But the performance only repelled a mind over which Wharton was every day gaining more influence. There was a portly baronet in the chair; there were various Primrose Dames on the platform and among the audience; there was a considerable representation of clergy; and the labourers present seemed to Marcella the most obsequious of their kind. Aldous spoke well—or so the audience seemed to think; but she could feel no enthusiasm for anything that he said. She gathered that he advocated a Government inspection of cottages, more stringent precautions against cattle disease, better technical instruction, a more abundant provision of allotments and small freeholds, &c.; and he said many cordial and wise-sounding things in praise of a progress which should go safely and wisely from step to step, and run no risks of dangerous reaction. But the assumptions on which, as she told herself rebelliously, it all went—that the rich and the educated must rule, and the poor obey; that existing classes and rights, the forces of individualism and competition, must and would go on pretty much as they were; that great houses and great people, the English land and game system, and all the rest of our odious class paraphernalia were in the order of the universe; these ideas, conceived as the furniture of Aldous's mind, threw her again into a ferment of passionate opposition. And when the noble baronet in the chair—to her eye, a pompous, frock-coated stick, sacrificing his after-dinner sleep for once, that he might the more effectually secure it in the future—proposed a vote of confidence in the Conservative candidate; when the vote was carried with much cheering and rattling of feet; when the Primrose Dames on the platform smiled graciously down upon the meeting as one smiles at good children in their moments of pretty behaviour; and when, finally, scores of toil-stained labourers, young and old, went up to have a word and a hand-shake with "Muster Raeburn," Marcella held herself aloof and cold, with a look that threatened sarcasm should she be spoken to. Miss Raeburn, glancing furtively round at her, was outraged anew by her expression.

"She will be a thorn in all our sides," thought that lady. "Aldous is a fool!—a poor dear noble misguided fool!"

Then on the way home, she and Aldous drove together. Marcella tried to argue, grew vehement, and said bitter things for the sake of victory, till at last Aldous, tired, worried, and deeply wounded, could bear it no longer.

"Let it be, dear, let it be!" he entreated, snatching at her hand as they rolled along through a stormy night. "We grope in a dark world—you see some points of light in it, I see others—won't you give me credit for doing what I can—seeing what I can? I am sure—sure—you will find it easier to bear with differences when we are quite together—when there are no longer all these hateful duties and engagements—and persons—between us."

"Persons! I don't know what you mean!" said Marcella.

Aldous only just restrained himself in time. Out of sheer fatigue and slackness of nerve he had been all but betrayed into some angry speech on the subject of Wharton, the echoes of whose fantastic talk, as it seemed to him, were always hanging about Mellor when he went there. But he did refrain, and was thankful. That he was indeed jealous and disturbed, that he had been jealous and disturbed from the moment Harry Wharton had set foot in Mellor, he himself knew quite well. But to play the jealous part in public was more than the Raeburn pride could bear. There was the dread, too, of defining the situation—of striking some vulgar irrevocable note.

So he parried Marcella's exclamation by asking her whether she had any idea how many human hands a parliamentary candidate had to shake between breakfast and bed; and then, having so slipped into another tone, he tried to amuse himself and her by some of the daily humours of the contest. She lent herself to it and laughed, her look mostly turned away from him, as though she were following the light of the carriage lamps as it slipped along the snow-laden hedges, her hand lying limply in his. But neither were really gay. His soreness of mind grew as in the pauses of talk he came to realise more exactly the failure of the evening—of his very successful and encouraging meeting—from his own private point of view.

"Didn't you like that last speech?" he broke out suddenly—"that labourer's speech? I thought you would. It was entirely his own idea—nobody asked him to do it."

In reality Gairsley represented a corner of the estate which Aldous had specially made his own. He had spent much labour and thought on the improvement of what had been a backward district, and in particular he had tried a small profit-sharing experiment upon a farm there which he had taken into his own hands for the purpose. The experiment had met with fair success, and the labourer in question, who was one of the workers in it, had volunteered some approving remarks upon it at the meeting.

"Oh! it was very proper and respectful!" said Marcella, hastily.

The carriage rolled on some yards before Aldous replied. Then he spoke in a drier tone than he had ever yet used to her.

"You do it injustice, I think. The man is perfectly independent, and an honest fellow. I was grateful to him for what he said."

"Of course, I am no judge!" cried Marcella, quickly—repentantly. "Why did you ask me? I saw everything crooked, I suppose—it was your Primrose Dames—they got upon my nerves. Why did you have them? I didn't mean to vex and hurt you—I didn't indeed—it was all the other way—and now I have."

She turned upon him laughing, but also half crying, as he could tell by the flutter of her breath.

He vowed he was not hurt, and once more changed both talk and tone. They reached the drive's end without a word of Wharton. But Marcella went to bed hating herself, and Aldous, after his solitary drive home, sat up long and late, feverishly pacing and thinking.

* * * * *

Then next evening how differently things fell!

Marcella, having spent the afternoon at the Court, hearing all the final arrangements for the ball, and bearing with Miss Raeburn in a way which astonished herself, came home full of a sense of duty done, and announced to her mother that she was going to Mr. Wharton's meeting in the Baptist chapel that evening.

"Unnecessary, don't you think?" said Mrs. Boyce, lifting her eyebrows.
"However, if you go, I shall go with you."

Most mothers, dealing with a girl of twenty-one, under the circumstances, would have said, "I had rather you stayed at home." Mrs. Boyce never employed locutions of this kind. She recognised with perfect calmness that Marcella's bringing up, and especially her independent years in London, had made it impossible.

Marcella fidgeted.

"I don't know why you should, mamma. Papa will be sure to want you. Of course, I shall take Deacon."

"Please order dinner a quarter of an hour earlier, and tell Deacon to bring down my walking things to the hall," was all Mrs. Boyce said in answer.

Marcella walked upstairs with her head very stiff. So her mother, and Miss Raeburn too, thought it necessary to keep watch on her. How preposterous! She thought of her free and easy relations with her Kensington student-friends, and wondered when a more reasonable idea of the relations between men and women would begin to penetrate English country society.

Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.

"Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense," he said irritably to his wife, "but it's the fellow's power of talk that is so astonishing. He isn't troubled with your Raeburn heaviness."

Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.

"If papa goes," she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed her, "it will spoil the meeting. The labourers will turn sulky. I shouldn't wonder if they did or said something unpleasant. As it is, you had much better not come, mamma. They are sure to attack the cottages—and other things."

Mrs. Boyce took no notice as far as she herself was concerned, but her quiet decision at last succeeded in leaving Mr. Boyce safely settled by the fire, provided as usual with a cigarette and a French novel.

The meeting was held in a little iron Baptist chapel, erected some few years before on the outskirts of the village, to the grief and scandal of Mr. Harden. There were about a hundred and twenty labourers present, and at the back some boys and girls, come to giggle and make a noise—nobody else. The Baptist minister, a smooth-faced young man, possessed, as it turned out, of opinions little short of Wharton's own in point of vigour and rigour, was already in command. A few late comers, as they slouched in, stole side looks at Marcella and the veiled lady in black beside her, sitting in the corner of the last bench; and Marcella nodded to one or two of the audience, Jim Hurd amongst them. Otherwise no one took any notice of them. It was the first time that Mrs. Boyce had been inside any building belonging to the village.

Wharton arrived late. He had been canvassing at a distance, and neither of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for half an hour and let them go. Did you ever see such a stolid set?"

"You will rouse them," said Marcella.

Her eyes were animated, her colour high, and she took no account at all of his plea of weariness.

"You challenge me? I must rouse them—that was what you came to see? Is that it?"

She laughed and made no answer. He left her and went up to the minister's desk, the men shuffling their feet a little, and rattling a stick here and there as he did so.

The young minister took the chair and introduced the speaker. He had a strong Yorkshire accent, and his speech was divided between the most vehement attacks, couched in the most Scriptural language, upon capital and privilege—that is to say, on landlords and the land system, on State churches and the "idle rich," interspersed with quavering returns upon himself, as though he were scared by his own invective. "My brothers, let us be calm!" he would say after every burst of passion, with a long deep-voiced emphasis on the last word; "let us, above all things, be calm!"—and then bit by bit voice and denunciation would begin to mount again towards a fresh climax of loud-voiced attack, only to sink again to the same lamb-like refrain. Mrs. Boyce's thin lip twitched, and Marcella bore the good gentleman a grudge for providing her mother with so much unnecessary amusement.

As for Wharton, at the opening of his speech he spoke both awkwardly and flatly; and Marcella had a momentary shock. He was, as he said, tired, and his wits were not at command. He began with the general political programme of the party to which—on its extreme left wing—he proclaimed himself to belong. This programme was, of course, by now a newspaper commonplace of the stalest sort. He himself recited it without enthusiasm, and it was received without a spark, so far as appeared, of interest or agreement. The minister gave an "hear, hear," of a loud official sort; the men made no sign.

"They might be a set of Dutch cheeses!" thought Marcella, indignantly, after a while. "But, after all, why should they care for all this? I shall have to get up in a minute and stop those children romping."

But through all this, as it were, Wharton was only waiting for his second wind. There came a moment when, dropping his quasi-official and high political tone, he said suddenly with another voice and emphasis:

"Well now, my men, I'll be bound you're thinking, 'That's all pretty enough!—we haven't got anything against it—we dare say it's all right; but we don't care a brass ha'porth about any of it! If that's all you'd got to say to us, you might have let us bide at home. We don't have none too much time to rest our bones a bit by the fire, and talk to the missus and the kids. Why didn't you let us alone, instead of bringing us out in the cold?'

"Well, but it isn't all I've got to say—and you know it—because I've spoken to you before. What I've been talking about is all true, and all important, and you'll see it some day when you're fit. But what can men in your position know about it, or care about it? What do any of you want, but bread—"

—He thundered on the desk—

"—a bit of decent comfort—a bit of freedom—freedom from tyrants who call themselves your betters!—a bit of rest in your old age, a home that's something better than a dog-hole, a wage that's something better than starvation, an honest share in the wealth you are making every day and every hour for other people to gorge and plunder!"

He stopped a moment to see how that took. A knot of young men in a corner rattled their sticks vigorously. The older men had begun at any rate to look at the speaker. The boys on the back benches instinctively stopped scuffling.

Then he threw himself into a sort of rapid question-and-answer. What were their wages?—eleven shillings a week?

"Not they!" cried a man from the middle of the chapel. "Yer mus' reckon it wet an' dry. I wor turned back two days las' week, an' two days this, fower shillin' lost each week—that's what I call skinnin' ov yer."

Wharton nodded at him approvingly. By now he knew the majority of the men in each village by name, and never forgot a face or a biography. "You're right there, Watkins. Eleven shillings, then, when it isn't less, never more, and precious often less; and harvest money—the people that are kind enough to come round and ask you to vote Tory for them make a deal of that, don't they?—and a few odds and ends here and there—precious few of them! There! that's about it for wages, isn't it? Thirty pounds a year, somewhere about, to keep a wife and children on—and for ten hours a day work, not counting meal times—that's it, I think. Oh, you are well off!—aren't you?"

He dropped his arms, folded, on the desk in front of him, and paused to look at them, his bright kindling eye running over rank after rank. A chuckle of rough laughter, bitter and jeering, ran through the benches. Then they broke out and applauded him.

Well, and about their cottages?

His glance caught Marcella, passed to her mother sitting stiffly motionless under her veil. He drew himself up, thought a moment, then threw himself far forward again over the desk as though the better to launch what he had to say, his voice taking a grinding determined note.

He had been in all parts of the division, he said; seen everything, inquired into everything. No doubt, on the great properties there had been a good deal done of late years—public opinion had effected something, the landlords had been forced to disgorge some of the gains wrested from labour, to pay for the decent housing of the labourer. But did anybody suppose that enough had been done? Why, he had seen dens—aye, on the best properties—not fit for the pigs that the farmers wouldn't let the labourers keep, lest they should steal their straw for the littering of them!—where a man was bound to live the life of a beast, and his children after him—

A tall thin man of about sixty rose in his place, and pointed a long quavering finger at the speaker.

"What is it, Darwin? speak up!" said Wharton, dropping at once into the colloquial tone, and stooping forward to listen.

"My sleepin' room's six foot nine by seven foot six. We have to shift our bed for the rain's comin' in, an' yer may see for yoursels ther ain't much room to shift it in. An' beyont us ther's a room for the chillen, same size as ourn, an' no window, nothin' but the door into us. Ov a summer night the chillen, three on 'em, is all of a sweat afore they're asleep. An' no garden, an' no chance o' decent ways nohow. An' if yer ask for a bit o' repairs yer get sworn at. An' that's all that most on us can get out of Squire Boyce!"

There was a hasty whisper among some of the men round him, as they glanced over their shoulders at the two ladies on the back bench. One or two of them half rose, and tried to pull him down. Wharton looked at Marcella; it seemed to him he saw a sort of passionate satisfaction on her pale face, and in the erect carriage of her head. Then she stooped to the side and whispered to her mother. Mrs. Boyce shook her head and sat on, immovable. All this took but a second or two.

"Ah, well," said Wharton, "we won't have names; that'll do us no good. It's not the men you've got to go for so much—though we shall go for them too before long when we've got the law more on our side. It's the system. It's the whole way of dividing the wealth that you made, you and your children—by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant work—between you and those who don't work, who live on your labour and grow fat on your poverty! What we want is a fair division. There ought to be wealth enough—there is wealth enough for all in this blessed country. The earth gives it; the sun gives it: labour extracts and piles it up. Why should one class take three-fourths of it and leave you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which is all you have to starve and breed on? Why?—why? I say. Why!—because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited cowards, unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and your class—there, that's why it is, and I tell it you straight out!"

He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at them—scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the blaze of his blue eye. A murmur ran through the room. Some of the men laughed excitedly. Darwin sprang up again.

"You keep the perlice off us, an' gie us the cuttin' up o' their bloomin' parks an' we'll do it fast enough," he cried.

"Much good that'll do you, just at present," said Wharton, contemptuously. "Now, you just listen to me."

And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the country districts—the transference of authority within the villages from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily during the transition time for the provision of house room, water, light, education and amusement for the labourer; and ultimately land and capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and interest of the capitalist class relieves him of taxes, and the disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all. And, as a first step to this new Jerusalem—organisation!—self-sacrifice enough to form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.

"Then I suppose you think you'd be turned out of your cottages, dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow. Just you try! There are people all over the country ready to back you, if you'd only back yourselves. But you won't. You won't fight—that's the worst of you; that's what makes all of us sick when we come down to talk to you. You won't spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing—not you!—to subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men. What's the good of your grumbling? I suppose you'll go on like that—grumbling and starving and cringing—and talking big of the things you could do if you would:—and all the time not one honest effort—not one!—to better yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks! By the Lord! I tell you it's a damned sort of business talking to fellows like you!"

Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal, emphasis. The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it. Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil. Her eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.

As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them, his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even; laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.

Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these cottagers, she had never lived till now—under the blaze of these eyes—within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged, dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on his knee, against his breast. "Here," she thought, while her pulses leapt, "is the leader for me—for these. Let him call, I will follow."

It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly, when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement, hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so—with some good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the day of election—came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed, and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken bodily from the Labour Clarion of the preceding week. Then a resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was passed unanimously amid evident excitement. It was the first time that such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.

* * * * *

Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect, mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony. For one who knew her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.

As for Marcella, she said little or nothing. But Wharton, in the dark of the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response would have been electric.

When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the vestibule—Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall—he said to her, his voice hoarse with fatigue:

"Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?"

Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.

"You rated them enough."

"Well, did you disapprove?"

"Oh, no! it seems to be your way."

"My proof of friendship? Well, can there be a greater? Will you show me some to-morrow?"

"How can I?"

"Will you criticise?—tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night, or a hypocrite? Your mother would."

"I dare say!" said Marcella, her breath quickening; "but don't expect it from me."

"Why?"

"Because—because I don't pretend. I don't know whether you roused them, but you roused me."

She swept on before him into the dark hall, without giving him a moment for reply, took her candle, and disappeared.

Wharton found his own staircase, and went up to bed. The light he carried showed his smiling eyes bent on the ground, his mouth still moving as though with some pleasant desire of speech.