* * * * *
Next morning she went down to the village meaning to satisfy herself on two or three points connected with the new cottages. On the way she knocked at the Rectory garden-door, in the hope of finding Mary Harden and persuading her to come with her.
She had not seen much of Mary since their return. Still, she had had time to be painfully struck once or twice with the white and bloodless look of the Rector's sister, and with a certain patient silence about her which seemed to Marcella new. Was it the monotony of the life? or had both of them been overworking and underfeeding as usual? The Rector had received Marcella with his old gentle but rather distant kindness. Two years before he had felt strongly about many of her proceedings, and had expressed himself frankly enough, at least to Mary. Now he had put his former disapprovals out of his mind, and was only anxious to work smoothly with the owner of Mellor. He had a great respect for "dignities," and she, as far as the village was concerned, was to be his "dignity" henceforward. Moreover, he humbly and truly hoped that she might be able to enlighten him as to a good many modern conceptions and ideas about the poor, for which, absorbed as he was, either in almsgiving of the traditional type, or spiritual ministration, or sacramental theory, he had little time, and, if the truth were known, little affinity.
In answer to her knock Marcella heard a faint "Come in" from the interior of the house. She walked into the dining-room, and found Mary sitting by the little table in tears. There were some letters before her, which she pushed away as Marcella entered, but she did not attempt to disguise her agitation.
"What is it, dear? Tell me," said Marcella, sitting down beside her, and kissing one of the hands she held.
And Mary told her. It was the story of her life—a simple tale of ordinary things, such as wring the quiet hearts and train the unnoticed saints of this world. In her first youth, when Charles Harden was for a time doing some divinity lecturing in his Oxford college, Mary had gone up to spend a year with him in lodgings. Their Sunday teas and other small festivities were frequented by her brother's friends, men of like type with himself, and most of them either clergymen or about to be ordained. Between one of them, a young fellow looking out for his first curacy, and Mary an attachment had sprung up, which Mary could not even now speak of. She hurried over it, with a trembling voice, to the tragedy beyond. Mr. Shelton got his curacy, went off to a parish in the Lincolnshire Fens, and there was talk of their being married in a year or so. But the exposure of a bitter winter's night, risked in the struggle across one of the bleakest flats of the district to carry the Sacrament to a dying parishioner, had brought on a peculiar and agonising form of neuralgia. And from this pain, so nobly earned, had sprung—oh! mystery of human fate!—a morphia-habit, with all that such a habit means for mind and body. It was discovered by the poor fellow's brother, who brought him up to London and tried to cure him. Meanwhile he himself had written to Mary to give her up. "I have no will left, and am no longer a man," he wrote to her. "It would be an outrage on my part, and a sin on yours, if we did not cancel our promise." Charles, who took a hard, ascetic view, held much the same language, and Mary submitted, heart-broken.
Then came a gleam of hope. The brother's care and affection prevailed; there were rumours of great improvement, of a resumption of work. "Just two years ago, when you first came here, I was beginning to believe"—she turned away her head to hide the rise of tears—"that it might still come right." But after some six or eight months of clerical work in London fresh trouble developed, lung mischief showed itself, and the system, undermined by long and deep depression, seemed to capitulate at once.
"He died last December, at Madeira," said Mary, quietly. "I saw him before he left England. We wrote to each other almost to the end. He was quite at peace. This letter here was from the chaplain at Madeira, who was kind to him, to tell me about his grave."
That was all. It was the sort of story that somehow might have been expected to belong to Mary Harden—to her round, plaintive face, to her narrow, refined experience; and she told it in a way eminently characteristic of her modes of thinking, religious or social, with old-fashioned or conventional phrases which, whatever might be the case with other people, had lost none of their bloom or meaning for her.
Marcella's face showed her sympathy. They talked for half an hour, and at the end of it Mary flung her arms round her companion's neck.