CHAPTER VI.
"Oh! Miss Boyce, may I come in?"
The voice was Frank Leven's. Marcella was sitting in the old library alone late on the following afternoon. Louis Craven, who was now her paid agent and adviser, had been with her, and she had accounts and estimates before her.
"Come in," she said, startled a little by Frank's tone and manner, and looking at him interrogatively.
Frank shut the heavy old door carefully behind him. Then, as he advanced to her she saw that his flushed face wore an expression unlike anything she had yet seen there—of mingled joy and fear.
She drew back involuntarily.
"Is there anything—anything wrong?"
"No," he said impetuously, "no! But I have something to tell you, and I don't know how. I don't know whether I ought. I have run almost all the way from the Court."
And, indeed, he could hardly get his breath. He took a stool she pushed to him, and tried to collect himself. She heard her heart beat as she waited for him to speak.
"It's about Lord Maxwell," he said at last, huskily, turning his head away from her to the fire. "I've just had a long walk with him. Then he left me; he had no idea I came on here. But something drove me; I felt I must come, I must tell. Will you promise not to be angry with me—to believe that I've thought about it—that I'm doing it for the best?"
He looked at her nervously.
"If you wouldn't keep me waiting so long," she said faintly, while her cheeks and lips grew white.
"Well,—I was mad this morning! Betty hasn't spoken to me since yesterday. She's been always about with him, and Miss Raeburn let me see once or twice last night that she thought I was in the way. I never slept a wink last night, and I kept out of their sight all the morning. Then, after lunch, I went up to him, and I asked him to come for a walk with me. He looked at me rather queerly—I suppose I was pretty savage. Then he said he'd come. And off we went, ever so far across the park. And I let out. I don't know what I said; I suppose I made a beast of myself. But anyway, I asked him to tell me what he meant, and to tell me, if he could, what Betty meant. I said I knew I was a cool hand, and he might turn me out of the house, and refuse to have anything more to do with me if he liked. But I was going to rack and ruin, and should never be any good till I knew where I stood—and Betty would never be serious—and, in short, was he in love with her himself? for any one could see what Miss Raeburn was thinking of."
The boy gulped down something like a sob, and tried to give himself time to be coherent again. Marcella sat like a stone.
"When he heard me say that—'in love with her yourself,' he stopped dead. I saw that I had made him angry. 'What right have you or any one else,' he said, very short, 'to ask me such a question?' Then I just lost my head, and said anything that came handy. I told him everybody talked about it—which, of course, was rubbish—and at last I said, 'Ask anybody; ask the Winterbournes, ask Miss Boyce—they all think it as much as I do.' 'Miss Boyce!' he said—'Miss Boyce thinks I want to marry Betty Macdonald?' Then I didn't know what to say—for, of course, I knew I'd taken your name in vain; and he sat down on the grass beside a little stream there is in the park, and he didn't speak to me for a long time—I could see him throwing little stones into the water. And at last he called me. 'Frank!' he said; and I went up to him. And then—"
The lad seemed to tremble all over. He bent forward and laid his hand on
Marcella's knee, touching her cold ones.
"And then he said, 'I can't understand yet, Frank, how you or anybody else can have mistaken my friendship for Betty Macdonald. At any rate, I know there's been no mistake on her part. And if you take my advice, you'll go and speak to her like a man, with all your heart, and see what she says. You don't deserve her yet, that I can tell you. As for me'—I can't describe the look of his face; I only know I wanted to go away—'you and I will be friends for many years, I hope, so perhaps you may just understand this, once for all. For me there never has been, and there never will be, but one woman in the world—to love. And you know,' he said after a bit, 'or you ought to know, very well, who that woman is.' And then he got up and walked away. He did not ask me to come, and I felt I dared not go after him. And then I lay and thought. I remembered being here; I thought of what I had said to you—of what I had fancied now and then about—about you. I felt myself a brute all round; for what right had I to come and tell you what he told me? And yet, there it was—I had to come. And if it was no good my coming, why, we needn't say anything about it ever, need we? But—but—just look here, Miss Boyce; if you—if you could begin over again, and make Aldous happy, then there'd be a good many other people happy too—I can tell you that."
He could hardly speak plainly. Evidently there was on him an overmastering impulse of personal devotion, gratitude, remorse, which for the moment even eclipsed his young passion. It was but vaguely explained by anything he had said; it rested clearly on the whole of his afternoon's experience.
But neither could Marcella speak, and her pallor began to alarm him.
"I say!" he cried; "you're not angry with me?"
She moved away from him, and with her shaking finger began to cut the pages of a book that lay open on the mantelpiece. The little mechanical action seemed gradually to restore her to self-control.
"I don't think I can talk about it," she said at last, with an effort; "not now."
"Oh! I know," said Frank, in penitence, looking at her black dress; "you've been upset, and had such a lot of trouble. But I—"
She laid her hand on his shoulder. He thought he had never seen her so beautiful, pale as she was.
"I'm not the least angry. I'll tell you so—another day. Now, are you going to Betty?"
The young fellow sprang up, all his expression changing, answering to the stimulus of the word.
"They'll be home directly, Miss Raeburn and Betty," he said steadily, buttoning his coat; "they'd gone out calling somewhere. Oh! she'll lead me a wretched life, will Betty, before she's done!"
A charming little ghost of a smile crossed Marcella's white lips.
"Probably Betty knows her business," she said; "if she's quite unmanageable, send her to me."
In his general turmoil of spirits the boy caught her hand and kissed it—would have liked, indeed, to kiss her and all the world. But she laughed, and sent him away, and with a sly, lingering look at her he departed.
She sank into her chair and never moved for long. The April sun was just sinking behind the cedars, and through the open south window of the library came little spring airs and scents of spring flowers. There was an endless twitter of birds, and beside her the soft chatter of the wood fire. An hour before, her mood had been at open war with the spring, and with all those impulses and yearnings in herself which answered to it. Now it seemed to her that a wonderful and buoyant life, akin to all the vast stir, the sweet revivals of Nature, was flooding her whole being.
She gave herself up to it, in a trance interwoven with all the loveliest and deepest things she had ever felt—with her memory of Hallin, with her new gropings after God. Just as the light was going she got up hurriedly and went to her writing-table. She wrote a little note, sat over it a while, with her face hidden in her hands, then sealed, addressed, and stamped it. She went out herself to the hall to put it in the letter-box. For the rest of the evening she went about in a state of dream, overcome sometimes by rushes of joy, which yet had in them exquisite elements of pain; hungering for the passage of the hours, for sleep that might cancel some of them; picturing the road to the Court and Widrington, along which the old postman had by now carried her letter—the bands of moonlight and shade lying across it, the quiet of the budding woods, and the spot on the hillside where he had spoken to her in that glowing October. It must lie all night in a dull office—her letter; she was impatient and sorry for it. And when he got it, it would tell him nothing, though she thought it would rather surprise him. It was the merest formal request that he would, if he could, come and see her again the following morning on business.
During the evening Mrs. Boyce lay on the sofa and read. It always still gave the daughter a certain shock of surprise when she saw the slight form resting in this way. In words Mrs. Boyce would allow nothing, and her calm composure had been unbroken from the moment of their return home, though it was not yet two months since her husband's death. In these days she read enormously, which again was a new trait—especially novels. She read each through rapidly, laid it down without a word of comment, and took up another. Once or twice, but very rarely, Marcella surprised her in absent meditation, her hand covering the page. From the hard, satiric brightness of her look on these occasions it seemed probable that she was speculating on the discrepancies between fiction and real life, and on the falsity of most literary sentiment.
To-night Marcella sat almost silent—she was making a frock for a village child she had carried off from its mother, who was very ill—and Mrs. Boyce read. But as the clock approached ten, the time when they generally went upstairs, Marcella made a few uncertain movements, and finally got up, took a stool, and sat down beside the sofa.
* * * * *
An hour later Marcella entered her own room. As she closed the door behind her she gave an involuntary sob, put down her light, and hurrying up to the bed, fell on her knees beside it and wept long. Yet her mother had not been unkind to her. Far from it. Mrs. Boyce had praised her—in few words, but with evident sincerity—for the courage that could, if necessary, put convention aside; had spoken of her own relief; had said pleasant things of Lord Maxwell; had bantered Marcella a little on her social schemes, and wished her the independence to stick to them. Finally, as they got up to go to bed, she kissed Marcella twice instead of once, and said:
"Well, my dear, I shall not be in your way to-morrow morning; I promise you that."
The speaker's satisfaction was plain; yet nothing could have been less maternal. The girl's heart, when she found herself alone, was very sore, and the depression of a past which had been so much of a failure, so lacking in any satisfied emotion and the sweet preludes of family affection, darkened for a while even the present and the future.
After a time she got up, and leaving her room, went to sit in a passage outside it. It was the piece of wide upper corridor leading to the winding stairs she had descended on the night of the ball. It was one of the loneliest and oddest places in the house, for it communicated only with her room and the little staircase, which was hardly ever used. It was, indeed, a small room in itself, and was furnished with a few huge old chairs with moth-eaten frames and tattered seats. A flowery paper of last-century date sprawled over the walls, the carpet had many holes in it, and the shallow, traceried windows, set almost flush in the outer surface of the wall, were curtainless now, as they had been two years before.
She drew one of the old chairs to a window, and softly opened it. There was a young moon, and many stars, seen uncertainly through the rush of April cloud. Every now and then a splash of rain moved the creepers and swept across the lawn, to be followed by a spell of growing and breathing silence. The scent of hyacinths and tulips mounted through the wet air. She could see a long ghostly line of primroses, from which rose the grey base of the Tudor front, checkered with a dim light and shade. Beyond the garden, with its vague forms of fountain and sun-dial, the cedars stood watching; the little church slept to her left.
So, face to face with Nature, the old house, and the night, she took passionate counsel with herself. After to-night surely, she would be no more lonely! She was going for ever from her own keeping to that of another. For she never, from the moment she wrote her letter, had the smallest doubt as to what his answer to her would be; never the smallest dread that he would, even in the lightest passing impression, connect what she was going to do with any thought of blame or wonder. Her pride and fear were gone out of her; only, she dared not think of how he would look and speak when the moment came, because it made her sick and faint with feeling.
How strange to imagine what, no doubt, would be said and thought about her return to him by the outside world! His great place in society, his wealth, would be the obvious solution of it for many—too obvious even to be debated. Looking back upon her thoughts of this night in after years, she could not remember that the practical certainty of such an interpretation had even given her a moment's pain. It was too remote from all her now familiar ways of thinking—and his. In her early Mellor days the enormous importance that her feverish youth attached to wealth and birth might have been seen in her very attacks upon them. Now all her standards were spiritualised. She had come to know what happiness and affection are possible in three rooms, or two, on twenty-eight shillings a week; and, on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous—a man of stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student's tastes, into the position of a great landowner—had shown her, in the case at least of one member of the rich class, how wealth may be a true moral burden and test, the source of half the difficulties and pains—of half the nobleness also—of a man's life. Not in mere wealth and poverty, she thought, but in things of quite another order—things of social sympathy and relation—alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions, by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man.
Had they ever really formed a part of historical time, those eight months of their engagement? Looking back upon them, she saw herself moving about in them like a creature without eyes, worked, blindfold, by a crude inner mechanism that took no account really of impressions from without. Yet that passionate sympathy with the poor—that hatred of oppression? Even these seemed to her to-night the blind, spasmodic efforts of a mind that all through saw nothing—mistook its own violences and self-wills for eternal right, and was but traitor to what should have been its own first loyalties, in seeking to save and reform.
Was true love now to deliver her from that sympathy, to deaden in her that hatred? Her whole soul cried out in denial. By daily life in natural relations with the poor, by a fruitful contact with fact, by the clash of opinion in London, by the influence of a noble friendship, by the education of awakening passion—what had once been mere tawdry and violent hearsay had passed into a true devotion, a true thirst for social good. She had ceased to take a system cut and dried from the Venturists, or any one else; she had ceased to think of whole classes of civilised society with abhorrence and contempt; and there had dawned in her that temper which is in truth implied in all the more majestic conceptions of the State—the temper that regards the main institutions of every great civilisation, whether it be property, or law, or religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, divine and sacred. For man has not been their sole artificer! Throughout there has been working with him "the spark that fires our clay."
Yes!—but modification, progress, change, there must be, for us as for our fathers! Would marriage fetter her? It was not the least probable that he and she, with their differing temperaments, would think alike in the future, any more than in the past. She would always be for experiments, for risks, which his critical temper, his larger brain, would of themselves be slow to enter upon. Yet she knew well enough that in her hands they would become bearable and even welcome to him. And for himself, she thought with a craving, remorseful tenderness of that pessimist temper of his towards his own work and function that she knew so well. In old days it had merely seemed to her inadequate, if not hypocritical. She would have liked to drive the dart deeper, to make him still unhappier! Now, would not a wife's chief function be to reconcile him with himself and life, to cheer him forward on the lines of his own nature, to believe, understand, help?
Yet always in the full liberty to make her own sacrifices, to realise her own dreamlands! She thought with mingled smiles and tears of her plans for this bit of earth that fate had brought under her hand; she pledged herself to every man, woman, and child on it so to live her life that each one of theirs should be the richer for it; she set out, so far as in her lay, to "choose equality." And beyond Mellor, in the great changing world of social speculation and endeavour, she prayed always for the open mind, the listening heart.
"There is one conclusion, one cry, I always come back to at last," she remembered hearing Hallin say to a young Conservative with whom he had been having a long economic and social argument. "Never resign yourself!—that seems to be the main note of it. Say, if you will—believe, if you will, that human nature, being what it is, and what, so far as we can see, it always must be, the motives which work the present social and industrial system can never be largely superseded; that property and saving—luck, too!—struggle, success, and failure, must go on. That is one's intellectual conclusion; and one has a right to it—you and I are at one in it. But then—on the heels of it comes the moral imperative! 'Hold what you please about systems and movements, and fight for what you hold; only, as an individual—never say—never think!—that it is in the order of things, in the purpose of God, that one of these little ones—this Board-School child, this man honestly out of work, this woman "sweated" out of her life—should perish!' A contradiction, or a commonplace, you say? Well and good. The only truths that burn themselves into the conscience, that work themselves out through the slow and manifold processes of the personal will into a pattern of social improvement, are the contradictions and the commonplaces!"
So here, in the dark, alone with the haunting, uplifting presences of "admiration, hope, and love," Marcella vowed, within the limits of her personal scope and power, never to give up the struggle for a nobler human fellowship, the lifelong toil to understand, the passionate effort to bring honour and independence and joy to those who had them not. But not alone; only, not alone! She had learnt something of the dark aspects, the crushing complexity of the world. She turned from them to-night, at last, with a natural human terror, to hide herself in her own passion, to make of love her guide and shelter. Her whole rich being was wrought to an intoxication of self-giving. Oh! let the night go faster! faster! and bring his step upon the road, her cry of repentance to his ear.
* * * * *
"I trust I am not late. Your clocks, I think, are ahead of ours. You said eleven?"
Aldous advanced into the room with hand outstretched. He had been ushered into the drawing-room, somewhat to his surprise.
Marcella came forward. She was in black as before, and pale, but there was a knot of pink anemones fastened at her throat, which, in the play they made with her face and hair, gave him a start of pleasure.
"I wanted," she said, "to ask you again about those shares—how to manage the sale of them. Could you—could you give me the name of some one in the City you trust?"
He was conscious of some astonishment.
"Certainly," he said. "If you would rather not entrust it to Mr. French, I can give you the name of the firm my grandfather and I have always employed; or I could manage it for you if you would allow me. You have quite decided?"
"Yes," she said mechanically,—"quite. And—and I think I could do it myself. Would you mind writing the address for me, and will you read what I have written there?"
She pointed to the little writing-table and the writing materials upon it, then turned away to the window. He looked at her an instant with uneasy amazement.
He walked up to the table, put down his hat and gloves beside it, and stooped to read what was written.
"It was in this room you told me I had done you a great wrong. But wrongdoers may be pardoned sometimes, if they ask it. Let me know by a sign, a look, if I may ask it. If not it would be kind to go away without a word."
She heard a cry. But she did not look up. She only knew that he had crossed the room, that his arms were round her, her head upon his breast.
"Marcella!—wife!" was all he said, and that in a voice so low, so choked, that she could hardly hear it.
He held her so for a minute or more, she weeping, his own eyes dim with tears, her cheek laid against the stormy beating of his heart.
At last he raised her face, so that he could see it.
"So this—this was what you had in your mind towards me, while I have been despairing—fighting with myself, walking in darkness. Oh, my darling! explain it. How can it be? Am I real? Is this face—these lips real?"—he kissed both, trembling. "Oh! when a man is raised thus—in a moment—from torture and hunger to full joy, there are no words—"
His head sank on hers, and there was silence again, while he wrestled with himself.
At last she looked up, smiling.
"You are to please come over here," she said, and leading him by the hand, she took him to the other side of the room. "That is the chair you sat in that morning. Sit down!"
He sat down, wondering, and before he could guess what she was going to do she had sunk on her knees beside him.
"I am going to tell you," she said, "a hundred things I never told you before. You are to hear me confess; you are to give me penance; you are to say the hardest things possible to me. If you don't I shall distrust you."
She smiled at him again through her tears. "Marcella," he cried in distress, trying to lift her, to rise himself, "you can't imagine that I should let you kneel to me!"
"You must," she said steadily; "well, if it will make you happier, I will take a stool and sit by you. But you are there above me—I am at your feet—it is the same chair, and you shall not move"—she stooped in a hasty passion, as though atoning for her "shall," and kissed his hand—"till I have said it all—every word!"
So she began it—her long confession, from the earliest days. He winced often—she never wavered. She carried through the sharpest analysis of her whole mind with regard to him; of her relations to him and Wharton in the old days; of the disloyalty and lightness with which she had treated the bond, that yet she had never, till quite the end, thought seriously of breaking; of her selfish indifference to, even contempt for, his life, his interests, his ideals; of her calm forecasts of a married state in which she was always to take the lead and always to be in the right—then of the real misery and struggle of the Hurd trial.
"That was my first true experience," she said; "it made me wild and hard, but it burnt, it purified. I began to live. Then came the day when—when we parted—the time in hospital—the nursing—the evening on the terrace. I had been thinking of you—because remorse made me think of you—solitude—Mr. Hallin—everything. I wanted you to be kind to me, to behave as though you had forgotten everything, because it would have made me comfortable and happy; or I thought it would. And then, that night you wouldn't be kind, you wouldn't forget—instead, you made me pay my penalty."
She stared at him an instant, her dark brows drawn together, struggling to keep her tears back, yet lightening from moment to moment into a divine look of happiness. He tried to take possession of her, to stop her, to silence all this self-condemnation on his breast. But she would not have it; she held him away from her.
"That night, though I walked up and down the terrace with Mr. Wharton afterwards, and tried to fancy myself in love with him—that night, for the first time, I began to love you! It was mean and miserable, wasn't it, not to be able to appreciate the gift, only to feel when it was taken away? It was like being good when one is punished, because one must—"
She laid down her head against his chair with a long sigh. He could bear it no longer. He lifted her in his arms, talking to her passionately of the feelings which had been the counterpart to hers, the longings, jealousies, renunciations—above all, the agony of that moment at the Mastertons' party.
"Hallin was the only person who understood," he said; "he knew all the time that I should love you to my grave. I could talk to him."
She gave a little sob of joy, and pushing herself away from him an instant, she laid a hand on his shoulder.
"I told him," she said—"I told him, that night he was dying."
He looked at her with an emotion too deep even for caresses.
"He never spoke—coherently—after you left him. At the end he motioned to me, but there were no words. If I could possibly love you more, it would be because you gave him that joy."
He held her hand, and there was silence. Hallin stood beside them, living and present again in the life of their hearts.
Then, little by little, delight and youth and love stole again upon their senses.
"Do you suppose," he exclaimed, "that I yet understand in the least how it is that I am here, in this chair, with you beside me? You have told me much ancient history!—but all that truly concerns me this morning lies in the dark. The last time I saw you, you were standing at the garden-door, with a look which made me say to myself that I was the same blunderer I had always been, and had far best keep away. Bridge me the gap, please, between that hell and this heaven!"
She held her head high, and changed her look of softness for a frown.
"You had spoken of 'marriage!'" she said. "Marriage in the abstract, with a big M. You did it in the tone of my guardian giving me away. Could I be expected to stand that?"
He laughed. The joy in the sound almost hurt her.
"So one's few virtues smite one," he said as he captured her hand again. "Will you acknowledge that I played my part well? I thought to myself, in the worst of tempers, as I drove away, that I could hardly have been more official. But all this is evasion. What I desire to know, categorically, is, what made you write that letter to me last night, after—after the day before?"
She sat with her chin on her hand, a smile dancing.
"Whom did you walk with yesterday afternoon?" she said slowly.
He looked bewildered.
"There!" she cried, with a sudden wild gesture; "when I have told you it will undo it all. Oh! if Frank had never said a word to me; if I had had no excuse, no assurance, nothing to go upon, had just called to you in the dark, as it were, there would be some generosity, some atonement in that! Now you will think I waited to be meanly sure, instead of—"
She dropped her dark head upon his hand again with an abandonment which unnerved him, which he had almost to brace himself against.
"So it was Frank," he said—"Frank! Two hours ago, from my window, I saw him and Betty down by the river in the park. They were supposed to be fishing. As far as I could see they were sifting or walking hand in hand, in the face of day and the keepers. I prepared wise things to say to them. None of them will be said now, or listened to. As Frank's mentor I am undone."
He held her, looking at her intently.
"Shall I tell you," he asked, in a lower voice—"shall I show you something—something that I had on my heart as I was walking here?"
He slipped his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and drew out a little plain black leather case. When he opened it she saw that it contained a pen-and-ink sketch of herself that had been done one evening by a young artist staying at the Court, and—a bunch of traveller's joy.
She gazed at it with a mixture of happiness and pain. It reminded her of cold and selfish thoughts, and set them in relief against his constancy. But she had given away all rights—even the right to hate herself. Piteously, childishly, with seeking eyes, she held out her hand to him, as though mutely asking him for the answer to her outpouring—the last word of it all. He caught her whisper.
"Forgive?" he said to her, scorning her for the first and only time in their history. "Does a man forgive the hand that sets him free, the voice that recreates him? Choose some better word—my wife!"