Marcella

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER XI.

Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window of Lady Winterbourne's drawing-room. The house—in James Street, Buckingham Gate—looked out over the exercising ground of the great barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James's Park to the left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things, and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let alone.

Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon. Marcella had her thoughts to herself.

But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling—must somehow wrestle—its passionate way. But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover, under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing—a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody.

On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she had saved—probably at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and—as Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their minds—would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.

Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest. She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible; the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little.

Childishly, angrily—she wanted him to be friends! Why shouldn't he? He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day, whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a situation?—make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.

Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle; and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained his place in Brookshire—by the mere accidents of birth. After all, aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by what he has—so far at least has "progress" brought us.

She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of "consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried; while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public. Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and various sources—mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work of England. Above all things did she love and admire power—the power of personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her imagination.

Then—apart from the political world and its judgments—the intimacy between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend, he was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to regard him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not easily yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and sweetness of disposition had full play; and although, now that Marcella was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were all so kind and indulgent to her, seeing that they cared so much for him and all that affected him.

Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as combative as ever.

Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual adornments of the "New Journalism."

The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them—comparatively a large world—fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names. To lose your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come across her again in this manner and in these circumstances—there was a dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she had claims, and was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention whatever of playing the lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for the wounded arm that its owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly, just across the Green Park.

Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had been no craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever. She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady Winterbourne neither knew him, nor apparently wished to know him—a fact which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate.

Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women, with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent lived their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the young demagogue had yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least as much duped as he. Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to his interest to break them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these people—the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his mind—seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.

Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed him, as a lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes, she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself flushing from brow to chin at the thought—"He does not want any one to suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!"

It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When it did enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his—and that he was full of doubts! The perception had given to her manner an increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not refrain, if he was to preserve his power.

So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in it neither simplicity nor joy. She was conscious of a certain dull and baffled feeling—a sense of humiliation—which hurt. Moreover, the scene of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination perpetually. She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her—the pity, the ugliness, the confusion of it.

* * * * *

The muslin curtain beside her suddenly swelled out in a draught of air, and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it should swing to. Some one had opened the door of the room.

"Did I blow you out of window?" said a girl's voice; and there behind her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty Macdonald, a vision of white muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big shady hat.

"Oh, do come in!" said Marcella, shyly; "Lady Winterbourne will be in directly."

"So Panton told me," said Betty, sinking down on a high stool beside Marcella's chair, and taking off her hat; "and Panton doesn't tell me any stories now—I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in the day? Don't you think there will be a special little corner of purgatory for London butlers? I hope Panton will get off easy!"

Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand, and studied Marcella. Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved; her pale face and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis. When Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain story, she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet, if only to prick her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she saw her close she felt herself near to falling in love with her. Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her heart, and by contrast honesty despising—for the moment—that very happy and popular person, Betty Macdonald!

"Do you like being alone?" she asked Marcella, abruptly.

Marcella coloured.

"Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company," she said. "I was very glad to see you come in."

"Were you?" said Betty, joyously, with a little gleam in her pretty eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. "May I kiss you?" she said, in the wistfullest, eagerest voice.

Marcella smiled, and, laying her hand on Betty's, shyly drew her.

"That's better!" said Betty, with a long breath. "That's the second milestone; the first was when I saw you on the Terrace. Couldn't you mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the horrid thing is when you have to mark them back again! Nobody ever did that with you!"

"Because I have no friends," said Marcella, quickly; then, when Betty clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added quickly with a smile, "except a few I make poultices for."

"There!" said Betty, enviously, "to think of being really wanted—for poultices—or, anything! I never was wanted in my life! When I die they'll put on my poor little grave—

"She's buried here—that hizzie Betty;
She did na gude—so don't ee fret ye!

"—oh, there they are!"—she ran to the window—"Lady Winterbourne and Ermyntrude. Doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterbourne doing her duties? She gets into her carriage after lunch as one might mount a tumbril. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to the scaffold at Hyde Park Corner.' She looks the unhappiest woman in England—and all the time Ermyntrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her season for the world! She gives Ermyntrude a lot of trouble, but she is a dear—a naughty dear—and mothers are such a chance! Ermyntrude! where did you get that bonnet? You got it without me—and my feelings won't stand it!"

Lady Ermyntrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together, chattering and laughing. Lady Winterbourne came up to Marcella and enquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves, when the drawing-room door opened again.

"Tea, Panton!" said Lady Winterbourne, without turning her head, and in the tone of Lady Macbeth. But the magnificent butler took no notice.

"Lady Selina Farrell!" he announced in a firm voice.

Lady Winterbourne gave a nervous start; then, with the air of a person cut out of wood, made a slight advance, and held out a limp hand to her visitor.

"Won't you sit down?" she said.

Anybody who did not know her would have supposed that she had never seen Lady Selina before. In reality she and the Alresfords were cousins. But she did not like Lady Selina, and never took any pains to conceal it—a fact which did not in the smallest degree interfere with the younger lady's performance of her family duties.

Lady Selina found a seat with easy aplomb, put up her bejewelled fingers to draw off her veil, and smilingly prepared herself for tea. She enquired of Betty how she was enjoying herself, and of Lady Ermyntrude how her husband and baby in the country were getting on without her. The tone of this last question made the person addressed flush and draw herself up. It was put as banter, but certainly conveyed that Lady Ermyntrude was neglecting her family for the sake of dissipations. Betty meanwhile curled herself up in a corner of the sofa, letting one pretty foot swing over the other, and watching the new-comer with a malicious eye, which instantly and gleefully perceived that Lady Selina thought her attitude ungraceful.

Marcella, of course, was greeted and condoled with—Lady Selina, however, had seen her since the tragedy—and then Lady Winterbourne, after every item of her family news, and every symptom of her own and her husband's health had been rigorously enquired into, began to attempt some feeble questions of her own—how, for instance, was Lord Alresford's gout?

Lady Selina replied that he was well, but much depressed by the political situation. No doubt Ministers had done their best, but he thought two or three foolish mistakes had been made during the session. Certain blunders ought at all hazards to have been avoided. He feared that the party and the country might have to pay dearly for them. But he had done his best.

Lady Winterbourne, whose eldest son was a junior whip, had been the recipient, since the advent of the new Cabinet, of so much rejoicing over the final exclusion of "that vain old idiot, Alresford," from any further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selina's talk made her at once nervous and irritable. She was afraid of being indiscreet; yet she longed to put her visitor down. In her odd disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving idealist nature—mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at her, yet had made her happy—was always trying to reconcile the ends of eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of Sisyphus; but she would not let it alone.

"I do not agree with you," she said with cold shyness in answer to Lady Selina's concluding laments—"I am told—our people say—we are doing very well—except that the session is likely to be dreadfully long."

Lady Selina raised both her eyebrows and her shoulders.

"Dear Lady Winterbourne! you really mean it?" she said with the indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded—"But just think! The session will go on, every one says, till quite the end of September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented? All our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believes so much of the friction might have been avoided. He is all in favour of doing more for Labour. He thinks these Labour men might have been easily propitiated without anything revolutionary. It's no good supposing that these poor starving people will wait for ever!"

"Oh!" said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor. To those who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more expressive. Lady Winterbourne's sense of humour had no voice, but inwardly it was busy with Lord Alresford as the "friend of the poor." Alresford!—the narrowest and niggardliest tyrant alive, so far as his own servants and estate were concerned. And as to Lady Selina, it was well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a maid to stay with her six months.

"What did you think of Mr. Wharton's speech the other night?" said
Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella.

"It was very interesting," said Marcella, stiffly—perfectly conscious that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and angry with her cheeks for reddening.

"Wasn't it?" said Lady Selina, heartily. "You can't do those things, of course! But you should show every sympathy to the clever enthusiastic young men—the men like that—shouldn't you? That's what my father says. He says we've got to win them. We've got somehow to make them feel us their friends—or we shall all go to ruin! They have the voting power—and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our cause—and at the same time give them our help—in reason—show them we want to be their friends—wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it rightly—you know so much about these things! But we can't undo '67—can we? We must get round it somehow—mustn't we? And my father thinks Ministers so unwise! But perhaps"—and Lady Selina drew herself back with a more gracious smile than ever—"I ought not to be saying these things to you—of course I know you used to think us Conservatives very bad people—but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think quite so hardly of us as you used?"

Lady Selina's head in its Paris bonnet fell to one side in a gentle interrogative sort of way.

Something roused in Marcella.

"Our cause?" she repeated, while the dark eye dilated—"I wonder what you mean?"

"Well, I mean—" said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl—"I mean, of course, the cause of the educated—of the people who have made the country."

"I think," said Marcella, quietly, "you mean the cause of the rich, don't you?"

"Marcella!" cried Lady Winterbourne, catching at the tone rather than words—"I thought you didn't feel like that any more—not about the distance between the poor and the rich—and our tyranny—and its being hopeless—and the poor always hating us—I thought you changed."

And forgetting Lady Selina, remembering only the old talks at Mellor, Lady Winterbourne bent forward and laid an appealing hand on Marcella's arm.

Marcella turned to her with an odd look.

"If you only knew," she said, "how much more possible it is to think well of the rich, when you are living amongst the poor!"

"Ah! you must be at a distance from us to do us justice?" enquired Lady
Selina, settling her bracelets with a sarcastic lip.

"I must," said Marcella, looking, however, not at her, but at Lady Winterbourne. "But then, you see,"—she caressed her friend's hand with a smile—"it is so easy to throw some people into opposition!"

"Dreadfully easy!" sighed Lady Winterbourne.

The flush mounted again in the girl's cheek. She hesitated, then felt driven to explanations.

"You see—oddly enough"—she pointed away for an instant to the north-east through the open window—"it's when I'm over there—among the people who have nothing—that it does me good to remember that there are persons who live in James Street, Buckingham Gate!"

"My dear! I don't understand," said Lady Winterbourne, studying her with her most perplexed and tragic air.

"Well, isn't it simple?" said Marcella, still holding her hand and looking up at her. "It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those streets and houses, among people who live in one room—with not a bit of prettiness anywhere—and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come home and gloat over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I can think of!"

"But don't you hate the people that have them?" said Betty, again on her stool, chin in hand.

"No! it doesn't seem to matter to me then what kind of people they are. And I don't so much want to take from them and give to the others. I only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness are _some_where—not lost out of the world."

"How strange!—in a life like yours—that one should think so much of the ugliness of being poor—more than of suffering or pain," said Betty, musing.

"Well—in some moods—you do—I do!" said Marcella; "and it is in those moods that I feel least resentful of wealth. If I say to myself that the people who have all the beauty and the leisure are often selfish and cruel—after all they die out of their houses and their parks, and their pictures, in time, like the shell-fish out of its shell. The beauty and the grace which they created or inherited remain. And why should one be envious of them personally? They have had the best chances in the world and thrown them away—are but poor animals at the end! At any rate I can't hate them—they seem to have a function—when I am moving about Drury Lane!" she added with a smile.

"But how can one help being ashamed?" said Lady Winterbourne, as her eyes wandered over her pretty room, and she felt herself driven somehow into playing devil's advocate.

"No! No!" said Marcella, eagerly, "don't be ashamed! As to the people who make beauty more beautiful—who share it and give it—I often feel as if I could say to them on my knees, Never, never be ashamed merely of being rich—of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a cripple, or having two eyes rather than one!"

"Oh, but, my dear!" cried Lady Winterbourne, piteous and bewildered, "when one has all the beauty and the freedom—and other people must die without any—"

"Oh, I know, I know!" said Marcella, with a quick gesture of despair; "that's what makes the world the world. And one begins with thinking it can be changed—that it must and shall be changed!—that everybody could have wealth—could have beauty and rest, and time to think, that is to say—if things were different—if one could get Socialism—if one could beat down the capitalist—if one could level down, and level up, till everybody had 200 l. a year. One turns and fingers the puzzle all day long. It seems so near coming right—one guesses a hundred ways in which it might be done! Then after a while one stumbles upon doubt—one begins to see that it never will, never can come right—not in any mechanical way of that sort—that that isn't what was meant!"

Her voice dropped drearily. Betty Macdonald gazed at her with a girl's nascent adoration. Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy, but absorbed like Betty in Marcella. Lady Selina, studying the three with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful attention to fringe and hairpins. As for Ermyntrude, she was no longer on the sofa; she had risen noiselessly, finger on lip, almost at the beginning of Marcella's talk, to greet a visitor. She and he were standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory, unnoticed by any of the group in the bow window.

"Don't you think," said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still busy with her bonnet, "that it would be a very good thing to send all the Radicals—the well-to-do Radicals I mean—to live among the poor? It seems to teach people such extremely useful things!"

Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her impertinently. She looked round quickly.

"I wonder what you suppose it teaches?"

"Well," said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; "well! I suppose it teaches a person to be content—and not to cry for the moon!"

"You think," said Marcella, slowly, "that to live among the poor can teach any one—any one that's human—to be content!"

Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation—without pose. At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.

Lady Selina's feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by her social inferior. She drew herself up.

"As I understand you," she said stiffly, "you yourself confessed that to live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth."

Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude's made the speaker turn her head.
She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.

"Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great discussion? Most consoling, wasn't it—on the whole—to us West End people?"

She threw back a keen glance at Marcella. Lady Ermyntrude and Raeburn came forward.

"I made him be quiet," said Ermyntrude, not looking, however, quite at her ease; "it would have been a shame to interrupt."

"I think so, indeed!" said Lady Selina, with emphasis. "Good-bye, dear Lady Winterbourne; good-bye, Miss Boyce! You have comforted me very much! Of course one is sorry for the poor; but it is a great thing to hear from anybody who knows as much about it as you do, that—after all—it is no crime—to possess a little!"

She stood smiling, looking from the girl to the man—then, escorted by
Raeburn in his very stiffest manner, she swept out of the room.

When Aldous came back, with a somewhat slow and hesitating step, he approached Marcella, who was standing silent by the window, and asked after the lame arm. He was sorry, he said, to see that it was still in its sling. His tone was a little abrupt. Only Lady Winterbourne saw the quick nervousness of the eyes,

"Oh! thank you," said Marcella, coldly, "I shall get back to work next week."

She stooped and took up her book.

"I must please go and write some letters," she said, in answer to Lady
Winterbourne's flurried look.

And she walked away. Betty and Lady Ermyntrude also went to take off their things.

"Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, holding out her hand to him.

He took it, glanced unwillingly at her wistful, agitated face, pressed the hand, and let it go.

"Isn't it sad," said his old friend, unable to help herself, "to see her battling like this with life—with thought—all alone? Isn't it sad, Aldous?"

"Yes," he said. Then, after a pause, "Why doesn't she go home? My patience gives out when I think of Mrs. Boyce."

"Oh! it isn't Mrs. Boyce's fault," said Lady Winterbourne, hopelessly.
"And I don't know why one should be sorry for her particularly—why one
should want her to change her life again. She does it splendidly. Only
I never, never feel that she is a bit happy in it."

It was Hallin's cry over again.

He said nothing for a moment; then he forced a smile.

"Well! neither you nor I can help it, can we?" he said. The grey eyes looked at her steadily—bitterly. Lady Winterbourne, with the sensation of one who, looking for softness, has lit on granite, changed the subject.

Meanwhile, Marcella upstairs was walking restlessly up and down. She could hardly keep herself from rushing off—back to Brown's Buildings at once. He in the room while she was saying those things! Lady Selina's words burnt in her ears. Her morbid, irritable sense was all one vibration of pride and revolt. Apology—appeal—under the neatest comedy guise! Of course!—now that Lord-Maxwell was dying, and the ill-used suitor was so much the nearer to his earldom. A foolish girl had repented her of her folly—was anxious to make those concerned understand—what more simple?

Her nerves were strained and out of gear. Tears came in a proud, passionate gush; and she must needs allow herself the relief of them.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Lady Selina had gone home full of new and uncomfortable feelings. She could not get Marcella Boyce out of her head—neither as she had just seen her, under the wing of "that foolish woman, Madeleine Winterbourne," nor as she had seen her first, on the terrace with Harry Wharton. It did not please Lady Selina to feel herself in any way eclipsed or even rivalled by such an unimportant person as this strange and ridiculous girl. Yet it crossed her mind with a stab, as she lay resting on the sofa in her little sitting-room before dinner, that never in all her thirty-five years had any human being looked into her face with the same alternations of eagerness and satisfied pleasure she had seen on Harry Wharton's, as he and Miss Boyce strolled the terrace together—nor even with such a look as that silly baby Betty Macdonald had put on, as she sat on the stool at the heroine's feet.

There was to be a small dinner-party at Alresford House that night. Wharton was to be among the guests. He was fast becoming one of the habitues of the house, and would often stay behind to talk to Lady Selina when the guests were gone, and Lord Alresford was dozing peacefully in a deep arm-chair.

Lady Selina lay still in the evening light, and let her mind, which worked with extraordinary shrewdness and force in the grooves congenial to it, run over some possibilities of the future.

She was interrupted by the entrance of her maid, who, with the quickened breath and heightened colour she could not repress when speaking to her formidable mistress, told her that one of the younger housemaids was very ill. Lady Selina enquired, found that the doctor who always attended the servants had been sent for, and thought that the illness might turn to rheumatic fever.

"Oh, send her off to the hospital at once!" said Lady Selina. "Let Mrs. Stewart see Dr. Briggs first thing in the morning, and make arrangements. You understand?"

The girl hesitated, and the candles she was lighting showed that she had been crying.

"If your ladyship would but let her stay," she said timidly, "we'd all take our turns at nursing her. She comes from Ireland, perhaps you'll remember, my lady. She's no friends in London, and she's frightened to death of going to the hospital."

"That's nonsense!" said Lady Selina, sternly. "Do you think I can have all the work of the house put out because some one is ill? She might die even—one never knows. Just tell Mrs. Stewart to arrange with her about her wages, and to look out for somebody else at once."

The girl's mouth set sullenly as she went about her work—put out the shining satin dress, the jewels, the hairpins, the curling-irons, the various powders and cosmetics that were wanted for Lady Selina's toilette, and all the time there was ringing in her ears the piteous cry of a little Irish girl, clinging like a child to her only friend: "O Marie! dear Marie! do get her to let me stay—I'll do everything the doctor tells me—I'll make haste and get well—I'll give no trouble. And it's all along of the work—and the damp up in these rooms—the doctor said so."

An hour later Lady Selina was in the stately drawing-room of Alresford House, receiving her guests. She was out of sorts and temper, and though Wharton arrived in due time, and she had the prospect to enliven her during dinner—when he was of necessity parted from her by people of higher rank—of a tête-à-tête with him before the evening was over, the dinner went heavily. The Duke on her right hand, and the Dean on her left, were equally distasteful to her. Neither food nor wine had savour; and once, when in an interval of talk she caught sight of her father's face and form at the further end, growing more vacant and decrepit week by week, she was seized with a sudden angry pang of revolt and repulsion. Her father wearied and disgusted her. Life was often triste and dull in the great house. Yet, when the old man should have found his grave, she would be a much smaller person than she was now, and the days would be so much the more tedious.

Wharton, too, showed less than his usual animation. She said to herself at dinner that he had the face of a man in want of sleep. His young brilliant look was somewhat tarnished, and there was worry in the restless eye. And, indeed, she knew that things had not been going so favourably for him in the House of late—that the stubborn opposition of the little group of men led by Wilkins was still hindering that concentration of the party and definition of his own foremost place in it which had looked so close and probable a few weeks before. She supposed he had been exhausting himself, too, over that shocking Midland strike. The Clarion had been throwing itself into the battle of the men with a monstrous violence, for which she had several times reproached him.

When all the guests had gone but Wharton, and Lord Alresford, duly placed for the sake of propriety in his accustomed chair, was safely asleep, Lady Selina asked what was the matter.

"Oh, the usual thing!" he said, as he leant against the mantelpiece beside her. "The world's a poor place, and my doll's stuffed with sawdust. Did you ever know any doll that wasn't?"

She looked up at him a moment without speaking.

"Which means," she said, "that you can't get your way in the House?"

"No," said Wharton, meditatively, looking down at his boots. "No—not yet."

"You think you will get it some day?"

He raised his eyes.

"Oh yes!" he said; "oh dear, yes!—some day."

She laughed.

"You had better come over to us."

"Well, there is always that to think of, isn't there? You can't deny you want all the new blood you can get!"

"If you only understood your moment and your chance," she said quickly, "you would make the opportunity and do it at once."

He looked at her aggressively.

"How easy it comes to you Tories to rat!" he said.

"Thank you! it only means that we are the party of common sense. Well, I have been talking to your Miss Boyce."

He started.

"Where?"

"At Lady Winterbourne's. Aldous Raeburn was there. Your beautiful Socialist was very interesting—and rather surprising. She talked of the advantages of wealth; said she had been converted—by living among the poor—had changed her mind, in fact, on many things. We were all much edified—including Mr. Raeburn. How long do you suppose that business will remain 'off'? To my mind I never saw a young woman more eager to undo a mistake." Then she added slowly, "The accounts of Lord Maxwell get more and more unsatisfactory."

Wharton stared at her with sparkling eyes. "How little you know her!" he said, not without a tone of contempt.

"Oh! very well," said Lady Selina, with the slightest shrug of her white shoulders.

He turned to the mantelpiece and began to play with some ornaments upon it.

"Tell me what she said," he enquired presently.

Lady Selina gave her own account of the conversation. Wharton recovered himself.

"Dear me!" he said, when she stopped. "Yes—well—we may see another act. Who knows? Well, good-night, Lady Selina."

She gave him her hand with her usual aristocrat's passivity, and he went. But it was late indeed that night before she ceased to speculate on what the real effect of her words had been upon him.

As for Wharton, on his walk home he thought of Marcella Boyce and of Raeburn with a certain fever of jealous vanity which was coming, he told himself, dangerously near to passion. He did not believe Lady Selina, but nevertheless he felt that her news might drive him into rash steps he could ill afford, and had indeed been doing his best to avoid. Meanwhile it was clear to him that the mistress of Alresford House had taken an envious dislike to Marcella. How plain she had looked to-night in spite of her gorgeous dress! and how intolerable Lord Alresford grew!