CHAPTER X.
"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I. Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than—"
"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us weaklings? Do you think I want to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing too much,' my good friend!"
Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by
Hallin's "chaff."
"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now, rest, and begin again in the winter?"
Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly joined in front of him.
"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.
Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.
"Why you should behave as though you wished to make such a prophecy true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.
Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes—coeli lucida templa—the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.
"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting up a thin hand and touching his friend—"I shall give up soon. Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures. I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead, and—I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh when no man can work."
They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk—of the political situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind. Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain current isms and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs, indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.
He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his early friends by his passionate democracy—his belief in, and trust of, the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith, but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the friendship of these two in the least.
But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with—say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his life. And not merely common property—though like all true soldiers of the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future enormously extended—but in the first place, and above all, to distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them already. And that not for wealth's sake—though a more equal distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably tend to wealth—but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual heritage.
How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have answered—"For England—mainly by a fresh distribution of the land." Not, of course, by violence—which only means the worst form of waste known to history—but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other kinds of property—by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of communal initiative and control—and above all by the continuous private effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student—or the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A nation is not saved so cheaply!—and to see those energies turned to land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men, women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate—filled him with a growing despair.
The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the community, was everything—yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man.
So that he saw it all sub specie aeternitatis, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!—to be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affections as any homoousion of old? Had they not already cost him love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?
* * * * *
"Ah, dear old fellow—enough!" said Hallin at last—"take me back to
Italy! You have told me so little—such a niggardly little!"
"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous; "the first rain in Northern Italy for four months—worse luck! 'Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma.—At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'—that might about stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."
"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"
Aldous laughed.
"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff—and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside—the amazed officer looking on. And as for her career over the roof of the Duomo—the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction—and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe."
"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a barrel organ."
"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across, especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel salon at night—a perfect ring of them—and the men outside, totally neglected, and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade—a governess, or a schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy—that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is nature or art."
He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.
"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes to his friend, "that I had seen her again."
Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:
"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you—but she said nothing."
"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's party. She spoke to me afterwards—I believe now—she meant to be kind"—his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all—"but I saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own manner, but I could not help myself."
His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow. Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce, but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had not perhaps expected.
"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a pause, "that she is going to marry him?"
"No—no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly, perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success—of a kind—in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front."
"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that group are too unmanageable. If he were a Parnell! But he lacks just the qualities that matter—the reticence, the power of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard self-concentration."
Aldous raised his shoulders.
"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him everywhere."
"What!—among the smart people?"
Aldous nodded.
"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all at once."
"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the Clarion?"
"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I might not be able to go on giving to the strike."
Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella Boyce—never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction.
"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.
Aldous hesitated; then he said—
"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"
Hallin made a little face.
"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I could cry over her!"
Aldous started.
"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But this—this—" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day, 'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had thrown me over except with ill-will.' The word astonished me, but sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of anger to the most futile, the most ridiculous degree!"
He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's shoulders, and there was a short pause.
"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?—I forget."
Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again, meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of things in two or three selected streets.
It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he thought the Government could really do good.
Then Raeburn turned to go.
"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he opened the door.
"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have my jaunt."
Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some sight.
"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand them over to me."
"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the room.
* * * * *
Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared from the too short London summer.
For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of tune—whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an object on which affection—checked and thwarted elsewhere—was still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for those other changes to which the first great change must lead—his transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all the ceremonial side of life—he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.
He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street, and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together talking.
The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already marked for demolition—a "black street," bearing a peculiarly vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.
After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow roadway strewn with costers' refuse—it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market—its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type.
A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.
"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after. The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."
And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"—that is to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.
When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough. But his companion—a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of "big-wigs"—was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.
Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.
"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"
Shrieks—of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air. The men and women who rushed past the two strangers—hustling them, yet too excited to notice them—were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.
"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds like murder. You go back for that policeman!"
And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling—cries, groans, uproar—all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall—then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion—"Help!"
Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark passage inside—two wrestling with the third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with blood.
"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister too!"
"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous—it's the nuss he means! I sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer blackguard, you!"—and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.
"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.
Aldous was already upstairs.
"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the first landing—for all sounds from above had ceased.
"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us begged and implored of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we, Betsy?—didn't we, Doll?"
Aldous ran up.
On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on the ground, apparently beaten to death.
By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity. Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on Raeburn's heart.
In such an exaltation of nerve she could be surprised at nothing.
When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.
"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her—speaking with pauses, as though to get her breath—"he has—killed her. But there—is a chance. Are the—police there—and a stretcher?"
Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.
"Did you see it, miss?"
"I—I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the bandage she was applying. "But he was—such a great—powerful brute."
Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.
"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his note-book, "attending a child—that's ill—when I heard the screams. They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room—then rushed after her—I think—to throw her downstairs—I stopped that. Then he took up something—oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink—I couldn't—do much."
Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.
"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.
"It's not broken—it's wrenched; I can't use it. There—that's all we can do—till she gets—to hospital."
Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little. Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing at the woman's marred face—indescribably patient in its deep unconsciousness—at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair—with tears that ran unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched a chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once before—beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.
At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.
"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her. "Won't you let me take you home?—you want it sorely. The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They will remove her with every care—he will see to it."
Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he was—where they were—how they had last met. And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness. She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her anymore—after this! When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now. No!—after this he must be friends with her.
"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a quivering, appealing accent—and so they fell silent.
Aldous looked round the room—at the miserable filthy garret with its begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty gin-bottles here and there—all the familiar, one might almost say conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation—then at this breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance—against her mother!—against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a hopeless struggle with devildom.
"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not much worse than others—though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing—used to come in and out—when I was nursing him—Oh, I wish—I wish they would come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form—"every moment is of importance!"
As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.
Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police, who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and seemed to him on the point of fainting.
"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.
"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They will not trouble you any more for the present."
He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab. Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to control herself and not to faint.
He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was this what her new career—her enthusiasms—meant, or might mean! Twenty-three!—in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.
Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such scenes—such gross physical abominations. Amazing!—how meanly, passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman! He himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern joy of the fight. But she!—let her leave the human brute and his unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne—it was never meant—that she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in the cottage.
In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely. Presently, as he watched her—hating the man for driving and the cab for shaking—he saw her white lips suddenly smile.
"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing is all like that!"
"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.
"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again.
"Nobody is ever rude to us—I often pine for experiences!"
How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.
"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your arm hurt you much?"
"Yes,—but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up work for a bit.—Mr. Raeburn!"
"Yes." His heart beat.
"We may meet often—mayn't we?—at Lady Winterbourne's—or in the country? Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often—" She turned away her weary head a moment—gathered strength to begin again—"—how often I have regretted—last year. I see now—that I behaved—more unkindly"—her voice was almost a whisper—"than I thought then. But it is all done with—couldn't we just be good friends—understand each other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"
She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.
As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the Terrace—was Wharton's advancing figure. But her state—the moment—coerced him.
"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.
She put out her hand.
"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh no!"
Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But she hardly heard him.
At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of
Brown's Buildings.
"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs—then I shan't be any more trouble."
So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of children. Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him with a wan smile.
"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"
Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed. Then he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.
After which he spent—poor Aldous!—one of the most restless and miserable nights of his life.