So, face to face with Nature, the old house, and the night, she took passionate counsel with herself. After to-night surely, she would be no more lonely! She was going for ever from her own keeping to that of another. For she never, from the moment she wrote her letter, had the smallest doubt as to what his answer to her would be; never the smallest dread that he would, even in the lightest passing impression, connect what she was going to do with any thought of blame or wonder. Her pride and fear were gone out of her; only, she dared not think of how he would look and speak when the moment came, because it made her sick and faint with feeling.
How strange to imagine what, no doubt, would be said and thought about her return to him by the outside world! His great place in society, his wealth, would be the obvious solution of it for many—too obvious even to be debated. Looking back upon her thoughts of this night in after years, she could not remember that the practical certainty of such an interpretation had even given her a moment's pain. It was too remote from all her now familiar ways of thinking—and his. In her early Mellor days the enormous importance that her feverish youth attached to wealth and birth might have been seen in her very attacks upon them. Now all her standards were spiritualised. She had come to know what happiness and affection are possible in three rooms, or two, on twenty-eight shillings a week; and, on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous—a man of stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student's tastes, into the position of a great landowner—had shown her, in the case at least of one member of the rich class, how wealth may be a true moral burden and test, the source of half the difficulties and pains—of half the nobleness also—of a man's life. Not in mere wealth and poverty, she thought, but in things of quite another order—things of social sympathy and relation—alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions, by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man.
Had they ever really formed a part of historical time, those eight months of their engagement? Looking back upon them, she saw herself moving about in them like a creature without eyes, worked, blindfold, by a crude inner mechanism that took no account really of impressions from without. Yet that passionate sympathy with the poor—that hatred of oppression? Even these seemed to her to-night the blind, spasmodic efforts of a mind that all through saw nothing—mistook its own violences and self-wills for eternal right, and was but traitor to what should have been its own first loyalties, in seeking to save and reform.
Was true love now to deliver her from that sympathy, to deaden in her that hatred? Her whole soul cried out in denial. By daily life in natural relations with the poor, by a fruitful contact with fact, by the clash of opinion in London, by the influence of a noble friendship, by the education of awakening passion—what had once been mere tawdry and violent hearsay had passed into a true devotion, a true thirst for social good. She had ceased to take a system cut and dried from the Venturists, or any one else; she had ceased to think of whole classes of civilised society with abhorrence and contempt; and there had dawned in her that temper which is in truth implied in all the more majestic conceptions of the State—the temper that regards the main institutions of every great civilisation, whether it be property, or law, or religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, divine and sacred. For man has not been their sole artificer! Throughout there has been working with him "the spark that fires our clay."
Yes!—but modification, progress, change, there must be, for us as for our fathers! Would marriage fetter her? It was not the least probable that he and she, with their differing temperaments, would think alike in the future, any more than in the past. She would always be for experiments, for risks, which his critical temper, his larger brain, would of themselves be slow to enter upon. Yet she knew well enough that in her hands they would become bearable and even welcome to him. And for himself, she thought with a craving, remorseful tenderness of that pessimist temper of his towards his own work and function that she knew so well. In old days it had merely seemed to her inadequate, if not hypocritical. She would have liked to drive the dart deeper, to make him still unhappier! Now, would not a wife's chief function be to reconcile him with himself and life, to cheer him forward on the lines of his own nature, to believe, understand, help?
Yet always in the full liberty to make her own sacrifices, to realise her own dreamlands! She thought with mingled smiles and tears of her plans for this bit of earth that fate had brought under her hand; she pledged herself to every man, woman, and child on it so to live her life that each one of theirs should be the richer for it; she set out, so far as in her lay, to "choose equality." And beyond Mellor, in the great changing world of social speculation and endeavour, she prayed always for the open mind, the listening heart.
"There is one conclusion, one cry, I always come back to at last," she remembered hearing Hallin say to a young Conservative with whom he had been having a long economic and social argument. "Never resign yourself!—that seems to be the main note of it. Say, if you will—believe, if you will, that human nature, being what it is, and what, so far as we can see, it always must be, the motives which work the present social and industrial system can never be largely superseded; that property and saving—luck, too!—struggle, success, and failure, must go on. That is one's intellectual conclusion; and one has a right to it—you and I are at one in it. But then—on the heels of it comes the moral imperative! 'Hold what you please about systems and movements, and fight for what you hold; only, as an individual—never say—never think!—that it is in the order of things, in the purpose of God, that one of these little ones—this Board-School child, this man honestly out of work, this woman "sweated" out of her life—should perish!' A contradiction, or a commonplace, you say? Well and good. The only truths that burn themselves into the conscience, that work themselves out through the slow and manifold processes of the personal will into a pattern of social improvement, are the contradictions and the commonplaces!"
So here, in the dark, alone with the haunting, uplifting presences of "admiration, hope, and love," Marcella vowed, within the limits of her personal scope and power, never to give up the struggle for a nobler human fellowship, the lifelong toil to understand, the passionate effort to bring honour and independence and joy to those who had them not. But not alone; only, not alone! She had learnt something of the dark aspects, the crushing complexity of the world. She turned from them to-night, at last, with a natural human terror, to hide herself in her own passion, to make of love her guide and shelter. Her whole rich being was wrought to an intoxication of self-giving. Oh! let the night go faster! faster! and bring his step upon the road, her cry of repentance to his ear.
* * * * *
"I trust I am not late. Your clocks, I think, are ahead of ours. You said eleven?"