Marcella looked after them.
In the midst of the uproar about her, the babel of talk fighting against the Hungarian band, which was playing its wildest and loudest in the tea-room, she was overcome by a sudden rush of memory. Her eyes were tracing the passage of those two figures through the crowd; the man in his black court suit, stooping his refined and grizzled head to the girl beside him, or turning every now and then to greet an acquaintance, with the manner—cordial and pleasant, yet never quite gay even when he smiled—that she, Marcella, had begun to notice of late as a new thing; the girl lifting her small face to him, the gold of her hair showing against his velvet sleeve. But the inward sense was busy with a number of other impressions, past, and, as it now seemed, incredible.
The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long ago—why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his arm about her!—the drive home after the Gairsley meeting—that poignant moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball—his face, his anxious, tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather in vain:—had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part of the living world? Impossible! Why, there he was—not ten yards from her—and yet more irrevocably separate from her than if the Sahara stretched between them. The note of cold distance in his courteous manner put her further from him than the merest stranger.
Marcella felt a sudden terror rush through her as she blindly followed Lady Winterbourne; her limbs trembled under her; she took advantage of a conversation between her companion and the master of the house to sink down for a moment on a settee, where she felt out of sight and notice.
What was this intolerable sense of loss and folly, this smarting emptiness, this rage with herself and her life? She only knew that whereas the touch, the eye of Aldous Raeburn had neither compelled nor thrilled her, so long as she possessed his whole heart and life—now—that she had no right to either look or caress; now that he had ceased even to regard her as a friend, and was already perhaps making up that loyal and serious mind of his to ask from another woman the happiness she had denied him; now, when it was absurdly too late, she could—
Could what? Passionate, wilful creature that she was!—with that breath of something wild and incalculable surging through the inmost places of the soul, she went through a moment of suffering as she sat pale and erect in her corner—brushed against by silks and satins, chattered across by this person and that—such as seemed to bruise all the remaining joy and ease out of life.
But only a moment! Flesh and blood rebelled. She sprang up from her seat; told herself that she was mad or ill; caught sight of Mr. Lane coming towards them, and did her best by smile and greeting to attract him to her.
"You look very white, my dear Miss Boyce," said that cheerful and fatherly person. "Is it that tiresome arm still? Now, don't please go and be a heroine any more!"
CHAPTER XIII.
Meanwhile, in the tea-room, Betty was daintily sipping her claret-cup, while Aldous stood by her.