Aldous and Marcella followed. They had to pass along the great corridor which ran round the quadrangle of the house. The antique marbles which lined it were to-night masked in flowers, and seats covered in red had been fitted in wherever it was possible, and were now crowded with dancers "sitting out." From the ball-room ahead came waves of waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the swaying rhythms of the band. Beyond the windows of the corridor, which had been left uncurtained because of the beauty of the night, the stiff Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls of the corridor—here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca—and the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in cold, whitish relief.
Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that every eye was fixed upon her and her mother. "Look, there she is," she heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library, now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest. "Come, quick! There—I told you she was lovely!"
Every now and then some old friend, man or woman, rose smiling from the seats along the side, and Aldous introduced his bride.
"On her dignity!" said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they had passed. "Shy, no doubt—very natural! But nowadays girls, when they're shy, don't giggle and blush as they used to in my young days; they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren't going to allow it! Oh, very handsome—very handsome—of course. But you can see she's advanced—peculiar—or what d'ye call it?—woman's rights, I suppose, and all that kind of thing? Like to see you go in for it, Nettie, eh!"
"She's awfully handsome," sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant little daughter, still craning her neck to look—"very simply dressed too, except for those lovely pearls. She does her hair very oddly, so low down—in those plaits. Nobody does it like that nowadays."
"That's because nobody has such a head," said her brother, a young
Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship. "By
George, she's ripping—she's the best-looking girl I've seen for a good
long time. But she's a Tartar, I'll swear—looks it, anyway."
"Every one says she has the most extraordinary opinions," said the girl, eagerly. "She'll manage him, don't you think? I'm sure he's very meek and mild."
"Don't know that," said the young man, twisting his moustache with the air of exhaustive information. "Raeburn's a very good fellow—excellent fellow—see him shooting, you know—that kind of thing. I expect he's got a will when he wants it. The mother's handsome, too, and looks a lady. The father's kept out of the way, I see. Rather a blessing for the Raeburns. Can't be pleasant, you know, to get a man like that in the family. Look after your spoons—that kind of thing."
Meanwhile Marcella was standing beside Miss Raeburn, at the head of the long ball-room, and doing her best to behave prettily. One after another she bowed to, or shook hands with, half the magnates of the county—the men in pink, the women in the new London dresses, for which this brilliant and long-expected ball had given so welcome an excuse. They knew little or nothing of her, except that she was clearly good-looking, that she was that fellow Dick Boyce's daughter and was reported to be "odd." Some, mostly men, who said their conventional few words to her, felt an amused admiration for the skill and rapidity with which she had captured the parti of the county; some, mostly women, were already jealous of her. A few of the older people here and there, both men and women—but after all they shook hands like the rest!—knew perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back at her with kind eyes.
But of these last Marcella realised nothing. What she was saying to herself was that, if they knew little of her, she knew a great deal of many of them. In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book—one of the numberless!—recently issued, on the state of the midland labourer. He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner. Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county before she met it in the flesh. She knew that a great many of these men who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending. But there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly present to her than the improvements. In general, the people who thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members of a useless class. The nation would do away with them in time! Meanwhile it might at least be asked of them that they should practise their profession of landowning, such as it was, with greater conscience and intelligence—that they should not shirk its opportunities or idle them away. And she could point out those who did both—scandalously, intolerably. Once or twice she thought passionately of Minta Hurd, washing and mending all day, in her damp cottage; or of the Pattons in "the parish house," thankful after sixty years of toil for a hovel where the rain came through the thatch, and where the smoke choked you, unless, with the thermometer below freezing-point, you opened the door to the blast. Why should these people have all the gay clothes, the flowers, the jewels, the delicate food—all the delight and all the leisure? And those, nothing! Her soul rose against what she saw as she stood there, going through her part. Wharton's very words, every inflection of his voice was in her ears, playing chorus to the scene.