CHAPTER VIII.
Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the drive home. Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella's imagination would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what spirit her mother had taken the evening—the first social festivity in which Richard Boyce's wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact, Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first public entry on Lord Maxwell's arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several old acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She had received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to society by this great match that her daughter was making. Lady Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in smoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watched Marcella—except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did not see—and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to Hallin.
Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxious to get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticing Marcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in the ball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done. Yet the mother had observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhat different from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had been gentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken some pains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her. Lord Maxwell—ignorant of the Wandle incident—was charmed with her, and openly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his hearty old man's way. Only Miss Raeburn held indignantly aloof, and would not pretend, even to Mrs. Boyce.
And now Marcella was tired—dead tired, she said to herself, both in mind and body. She lay back in the carriage, trying to sink herself in her own fatigue, to forget everything, to think of nothing. Outside the night was mild, and the moon clear. For some days past, after the break up of the long frost, there had been heavy rain. Now the rain had cleared away, and in the air there was already an early promise of spring. As she walked home from the village that afternoon she had felt the buds and the fields stirring.
When they got home, Mrs. Boyce turned to her daughter at the head of the stairs, "Shall I unlace your dress, Marcella?"
"Oh no, thank you. Can I help you?"
"No. Good-night."
"Mamma!" Marcella turned and ran after her. "I should like to know how papa is. I will wait here if you will tell me."
Mrs. Boyce looked surprised. Then she went into her room and shut the door. Marcella waited outside, leaning against the old oak gallery which ran round the hall, her candle the one spot of light and life in the great dark house.
"He seems to have slept well," said Mrs. Boyce, reappearing, and speaking under her breath. "He has not taken the opiate I left for him, so he cannot have been in pain. Good-night."
Marcella kissed her and went. Somehow, in her depression of nerve and will, she was loth to go away by herself. The loneliness of the night, and of her wing of the house, weighed upon her; the noises made by the old boards under her steps, the rustling draughts from the dark passages to right and left startled and troubled her; she found herself childishly fearing lest her candle should go out.
Yet, as she descended the two steps to the passage outside her door, she could have felt little practical need of it, for the moonlight was streaming in through its uncovered windows, not directly, but reflected from the Tudor front of the house which ran at right angles to this passage, and was to-night a shining silver palace, every battlement, window, and moulding in sharpest light and shade under the radiance of the night. Beneath her feet, as she looked out into the Cedar Garden, was a deep triangle of shadow, thrown by that part of the building in which she stood; and beyond the garden the barred black masses of the cedars closing up the view lent additional magic to the glittering unsubstantial fabric of the moonlit house, which was, as it were, embosomed and framed among them. She paused a moment, struck by the strangeness and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air of some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird gathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatiently longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and tumble into sleep.
Yet she made no hurry. She fell on the first chair that offered. Her candle behind her had little power over the glooms of the dark tapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her own form, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straight in front of her. She sat with her hands round her knees, absently looking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of the darkness. But she was conscious of nothing save one mounting overwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.
Mr. Wharton must go away—he must—or she could not bear it.
Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender, rose and broke upon her. At last, physical weariness recalled her. She put up her hands to take off her pearls.
As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head. Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.
Steps surely—light steps—along the corridor outside, and on the staircase. Nor did they die away. She could still hear them,—as she sat, arrested, straining her ears,—pacing slowly along the lower passage.
Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life. This room of hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most persistently. Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan. Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least forty years before the staircase was made. None the less, no servant would go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark; and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep where she did. Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic, of steps, groans, lights in the library, and the rest. Marcella had consistently laughed at her.
Yet all the same she had made in secret a very diligent pursuit of this ghost, settling in the end to a certain pique with him that he would not show himself to so ardent a daughter of the house. She had sat up waiting for him; she had lingered in the corridor outside, and on the stairs, expecting him. By the help of a favourite carpenter she had made researches into roofs, water-pipes, panelling, and old cupboards, in the hope of finding a practical clue to him. In vain.
Yet here were the steps—regular, soft, unmistakable. The colour rushed back into her cheeks! Her eager healthy youth forgot its woes, flung off its weariness, and panted for an adventure, a discovery. Springing up, she threw her fur wrap round her again, and gently opened the door, listening.
For a minute, nothing—then a few vague sounds as of something living and moving down below—surely in the library? Then the steps again. Impossible that it should be any one breaking in. No burglar would walk so leisurely. She closed her door behind her, and, gathering her white satin skirts about her, she descended the staircase.
The corridor below was in radiant moonlight, chequered by the few pieces of old furniture it contained, and the black and white of the old portrait prints hanging on the walls. At first her seeking, excited eyes could make out nothing. Then in a flash they perceived the figure of Wharton at the further end near the garden door, leaning against one of the windows. He was apparently looking out at the moonlit house, and she caught the faint odour of a cigarette.
Her first instinct was to turn and fly. But Wharton had seen her. As he looked about him at the sound of her approach, the moon, which was just rounding the corner of the house, struck on her full, amid the shadows of the staircase, and she heard his exclamation.
Dignity—a natural pride—made her pause. She came forward slowly—he eagerly.
"I heard footsteps," she said, with a coldness under which he plainly saw her embarrassment. "I could not suppose that anybody was still up, so I came down to see."
He was silent a moment, scanning her with laughing eyes. Then he shook his head. "Confess you took me for the ghost?" he said.
She hesitated; then must laugh too. She herself had told him the stories, so that his guess was natural.
"Perhaps I did," she said. "One more disappointment! Good-night."
He looked after her a quick undecided moment as she made a step in front of him, then at the half-burnt cigarette he held in his hand, threw the end away with a hasty gesture, overtook her and walked beside her along the corridor.
"I heard you and your mother come in," he said, as though explaining himself. "Then I waited till I thought you must both be asleep, and came down here to look at that wonderful effect on the old house." He pointed to the silver palace outside. "I have a trick of being sleepless—a trick, too, of wandering at night. My own people know it, and bear with me, but I am abashed that you should have found me out. Just tell me—in one word—how the ball went?"
He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenly wide-awake as though it were three o'clock in the afternoon instead of three in the morning.
Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.
"It went very well," she said perversely, putting her satin-slippered foot on the first step. "There were six hundred people upstairs, and four hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man. Everybody said it was splendid."
His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her. As he had often frankly warned her, he was a man in quest of sensations. Certainly, in this strange meeting with Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, in the midst of the sleep-bound house, he had found one. Her eyes were heavy, her cheek pale. But in this soft vague light—white arms and neck now hidden, now revealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin—she was more enchanting than he had ever seen her. His breath quickened.
He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him. What harm—to her or to Raeburn? Raeburn would have chances enough before long. Why admit his monopoly before the time? She was not in love with him! As to Mrs. Grundy—absurd! What in the true reasonableness of things was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well as by day?
"One moment"—he said, delaying her. "You must be dead tired—too tired for romance. Else I should say to you, turn aside an instant and look at the library. It is a sight to remember."
Inevitably she glanced behind her, and saw that the library door was ajar. He flung it open, and the great room showed wide, its high domed roof lost in shadow, while along the bare floor and up the latticed books crept, here streaks and fingers, and there wide breadths of light from the unshuttered and curtainless windows.
"Isn't it the very poetry of night and solitude?" he said, looking in with her. "You love the place; but did you ever see it so lovable? The dead are here; you did right to come and seek them! Look at your namesake, in that ray. To-night she lives! She knows that is her husband opposite—those are her books beside her. And the rebel!"—he pointed smiling to the portrait of John Boyce. "When you are gone I shall shut myself up here—sit in his chair, invoke him—and put my speech together. I am nervous about to-morrow" (he was bound, as she knew, to a large Labour Congress in the Midlands, where he was to preside), "and sleep will make no terms with me. Ah!—how strange! Who can that be passing the avenue?"
He made a step or two into the room, and put up his hand to his brow, looking intently. Involuntarily, yet with a thrill, Marcella followed. They walked to the window.
"It is Hurd!" she cried in a tone of distress, pressing her face against the glass. "Out at this time, and with a gun! Oh, dear, dear!"
There could be no question that it was Hurd. Wharton had seen him linger in the shadowy edge of the avenue, as though reconnoitring, and now, as he stealthily crossed the moonlit grass, his slouching dwarf's figure, his large head, and the short gun under his arm, were all plainly visible.
"What do you suppose he is after?" said Wharton, still gazing, his hands in his pockets.
"I don't know; he wouldn't poach on our land; I'm sure he wouldn't! Besides, there is nothing to poach."—Wharton smiled.—"He must be going, after all, to Lord Maxwell's coverts! They are just beyond the avenue, on the side of the hill. Oh! it is too disappointing! Can we do anything?"
She looked at her companion with troubled eyes. This incursion of something sadly and humanly real seemed suddenly to have made it natural to be standing beside him there at that strange hour. Her conscience was soothed.
Wharton shook his head.
"I don't see what we could do. How strong the instinct is! I told you that woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form—the squalid peasant's form—of the same instinct which sends the young fellows of our class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is the instinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one's innings against the powers that be—Nature, or the law, or convention."
"I know all that—I never blame them!"—cried Marcella—"but just now it is so monstrous—so dangerous! Westall specially alert—and this gang about! Besides, I got him work from Lord Maxwell, and made him promise me—for the wife and children's sake."
Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
"I should think Westall is right, and that the gang have got hold of him. It is what always happens. The local man is the catspaw.—So you are sorry for him—this man?" he said in another tone, facing round upon her.
She looked astonished, and drew herself up nervously, turning at the same time to leave the room. But before she could reply he hurried on:
"He—may escape his risk. Give your pity, Miss Boyce, rather to one—who has not escaped!"
"I don't know what you mean," she said, unconsciously laying a hand on one of the old chairs beside her to steady herself. "But it is too late to talk. Good-night, Mr. Wharton."
"Good-bye," he said quietly, yet with a low emphasis, at the same time moving out of her path. She stopped, hesitating. Beneath the lace and faded flowers on her breast he could see how her heart beat.
"Not good-bye? You are coming back after the meeting?"
"I think not. I must not inflict myself—on Mrs. Boyce—any more. You will all be very busy during the next three weeks. It would be an intrusion if I were to come back at such a time—especially—considering the fact"—he spoke slowly—"that I am as distasteful as I now know myself to be, to your future husband. Since you all left to-night the house has been very quiet. I sat over the fire thinking. It grew clear to me. I must go, and go at once. Besides—a lonely man as I am must not risk his nerve. His task is set him, and there are none to stand by him if he fails."
She trembled all over. Weariness and excitement made normal self-control almost impossible.
"Well, then, I must say thank you," she said indistinctly, "for you have taught me a great deal."
"You will unlearn it!" he said gaily, recovering his self-possession, so it seemed, as she lost hers. "Besides, before many weeks are over you will have heard hard things of me. I know that very well. I can say nothing to meet them. Nor should I attempt anything. It may sound brazen, but that past of mine, which I can see perpetually present in Aldous Raeburn's mind, for instance, and which means so much to his good aunt, means to me just nothing at all! The doctrine of identity must be true—I must be the same person I was then. But, all the same, what I did then does not matter a straw to me now. To all practical purposes I am another man. I was then a youth, idle, désoeuvré, playing with all the keys of life in turn. I have now unlocked the path that suits me. Its quest has transformed me—as I believe, ennobled me. I do not ask Raeburn or any one else to believe it. It is my own affair. Only, if we ever meet again in life, you and I, and you think you have reason to ask humiliation of me, do not ask it, do not expect it. The man you will have in your mind has nothing to do with me. I will not be answerable for his sins."
As he said these things he was leaning lightly forward, looking up at her, his arms resting on the back of one of the old chairs, one foot crossed over the other. The attitude was easy calm itself. The tone—indomitable, analytic, reflective—matched it. Yet, all the same, her woman's instinct divined a hidden agitation, and, woman-like, responded to that and that only.
"Mr. Raeburn will never tell me old stories about anybody," she said proudly. "I asked him once, out—out of curiosity—about you, and he would tell me nothing."
"Generous!" said Wharton, drily. "I am grateful."
"No!" cried Marcella, indignantly, rushing blindly at the outlet for emotion. "No!—you are not grateful; you are always judging him harshly—criticising, despising what he does."
Wharton was silent a moment. Even in the moonlight she could see the reddening of his cheek.
"So be it," he said at last. "I submit. You must know best. But you? are you always content? Does this milieu into which you are passing always satisfy you? To-night, did your royalty please you? will it soon be enough for you?"
"You know it is not enough," she broke out, hotly; "it is insulting that you should ask in that tone. It means that you think me a hypocrite!—and I have given you no cause—"
"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed, interrupting her, and speaking in a low, hurried voice. "I had no motive, no reason for what I said—none—but this, that you are going—that we are parting. I spoke in gibes to make you speak—somehow to strike—to reach you. To-morrow it will be too late!"
And before, almost, she knew that he had moved, he had stooped forward, caught a fold of her dress, pressed it to his lips, and dropped it.
"Don't speak," he said brokenly, springing up, and standing before her in her path. "You shall forgive me—I will compel it! See! here we are on this moonlit space of floor, alone, in the night. Very probably we shall never meet again, except as strangers. Put off convention, and speak to me, soul to soul! You are not happy altogether in this marriage. I know it. You have as good as confessed it. Yet you will go through with it. You have given your word—your honour holds you. I recognise that it holds you. I say nothing, not a syllable, against your bond! But here, to-night, tell me, promise me that you will make this marriage of yours serve our hopes and ends, the ends that you and I have foreseen together—that it shall be your instrument, not your chain. We have been six weeks together. You say you have learnt from me; you have! you have given me your mind, your heart to write on, and I have written. Henceforward you will never look at life as you might have done if I had not been here. Do you think I triumph, that I boast? Ah!" he drew in his breath—"What if in helping you, and teaching you—for I have helped and taught you!—I have undone myself? What if I came here the slave of impersonal causes, of ends not my own? What if I leave—maimed—in face of the battle? Not your fault? No, perhaps not! but, at least, you owe me some gentleness now, in these last words—some kindness in farewell."
He came closer, held out his hands. With one of her own she put his back, and lifted the other dizzily to her forehead.
"Don't come near me!" she said, tottering. "What is it? I cannot see.
Go!"
And guiding herself, as though blindfold, to a chair, she sank upon it, and her head dropped. It was the natural result of a moment of intense excitement coming upon nerves already strained and tried to their utmost. She fought desperately against her weakness; but there was a moment when all around her swam, and she knew nothing.
Then came a strange awakening. What was this room, this weird light, these unfamiliar forms of things, this warm support against which her cheek lay? She opened her eyes languidly. They met Wharton's half in wonder. He was kneeling beside her, holding her. But for an instant she realised nothing except his look, to which her own helplessly replied.
"Once!" she heard him whisper. "Once! Then nothing more—for ever."
And stooping, slowly, deliberately, he kissed her.
In a stinging flow, life, shame, returned upon her. She struggled to her feet, pushing him from her.
"You dared," she said, "dared such a thing!"
She could say no more; but her attitude, fiercely instinct, through all her physical weakness, with her roused best self, was speech enough. He did not venture to approach her. She walked away. He heard the door close, hurrying steps on the little stairs, then silence.
He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wall for some time. When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhair which had dropped from her dress.
"That was a scene!" he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of his own hand. "It carries one back to the days of the Romantics. Was I Alfred de Musset?—and she George Sand? Did any of them ever taste a more poignant moment than I—when she—lay upon my breast? To be helpless—yet yield nothing—it challenged me! Yet I took no advantage—none. When she looked—when her eye, her soul, was, for that instant, mine, then!—Well!—the world has rushed with me since I saw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a quality again. What did I say?—how much did I mean? My God! how can I tell? I began as an actor, did I finish as a man?"
He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron will quieting down each rebellious pulse.
"That poacher fellow did me a good turn. Dare! the word galled. But, after all, what woman could say less? And what matter? I have held her in my arms, in a setting—under a moon—worthy of her. Is not life enriched thereby beyond robbery? And what harm? Raeburn is not injured. She will never tell—and neither of us will ever forget. Ah!—what was that?"
He walked quickly to the window. What he had heard had been a dull report coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of the avenue. As he reached the window it was followed by a second.
"That poacher's gun?—no doubt!"—he strained his eyes in vain—"Collision perhaps—and mischief? No matter! I have nothing to do with it. The world is all lyric for me to-night. I can hear in it no other rhythm."
* * * * *
The night passed away. When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lying with wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it. Her candle still burnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallest desire for sleep. She had gone through shame and anguish. But she would have scorned to pity herself. Was it not her natural, inevitable portion?
"I will tell Aldous everything—everything," she said to herself for the hundredth time, as the light penetrated. "Was that only seven striking—seven—impossible!"
She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the hours that must pass before she could see Aldous—put all to the touch.
Suddenly she remembered Hurd—then old Patton.
"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment—her passion to get away from herself. "Is he gone? This is the hour when old people die—the dawn. I will go and see—go at once."
She sprang up. To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance, of social amends, however small, however futile—to propitiate herself, if but by a hairbreadth—this, no doubt, was the instinct at work. She dressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to make against the stiffness of her own young bones—glad of her hunger and faintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought and conquered.
In a very short time she had passed quietly downstairs and through the hall, greatly to the amazement of William, who opened the front door for her. Once in the village road the damp raw air revived her greatly. She lifted her hot temples to it, welcoming the waves of wet mist that swept along the road, feeling her youth come back to her.
Suddenly as she was nearing the end of a narrow bit of lane between high hedges, and the first houses of the village were in sight, she was stopped by a noise behind her—a strange unaccountable noise as of women's voices, calling and wailing. It startled and frightened her, and she stood in the middle of the road waiting.
Then she saw coming towards her two women running at full speed, crying and shouting, their aprons up to their faces.
"What is it? What is the matter?" she asked, going to meet them, and recognising two labourers' wives she knew.
"Oh! miss—oh! miss!" said the foremost, too wrapt up in her news to be surprised at the sight of her. "They've just found him—they're bringin' ov 'im home; they've got a shutter from Muster Wellin! 'im at Disley Farm. It wor close by Disley wood they found 'em. And there's one ov 'is men they've sent off ridin' for the inspector—here he come, miss! Come out o' th' way!"
They dragged her back, and a young labourer galloped past them on a farm colt, urging it on to its full pace, his face red and set.
"Who is found?" cried Marcella—"What is it?"
"Westall, miss—Lor' bless you—Shot him in the head they did—blowed his brains right out—and Charlie Dynes—oh! he's knocked about shamful—the doctor don't give no hopes of him. Oh deary—deary me! And we're goin' for Muster Harden—ee must tell the widder—or Miss Mary—none on us can!"
"And who did it?" said Marcella, pale with horror, holding her.
"Why the poachers, miss. Them as they've bin waitin' for all along—and they do say as Jim Hurd's in it. Oh Lord, oh Lord!"
Marcella stood petrified, and let them hurry on.