"I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently. "He will have heard them in the village. I am going to the church this morning."
Her mother looked at her--a look of quiet examination--and smiled. The Lady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already a.s.sumed during the six weeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly.
"Harden!" said Mr. Boyce, catching the name. "I wish that man would leave me alone. What have I got to do with a water-supply for the village? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a water-tight roof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert has behaved."
Marcella"s cheek flushed.
"The village water-supply is a _disgrace_," she said with low emphasis.
"I never saw such a crew of unhealthy, wretched-looking children in my life as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought to look after them. I believe you could be _forced_ to do something, papa--if the local authority were of any use."
She looked at him defiantly.
"Nonsense," said Mr. Boyce testily. "They got along in your Uncle Robert"s days, and they can get along now. Charity, indeed! Why, the state of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, I should think, to take a man"s mind. Don"t you go talking to Mr. Harden in the way you do, Marcella. I don"t like it, and I won"t have it. You have the interests of your family and your home to think of first."
"Poor starved things!" said Marcella sarcastically--"living in such a _den_!"
And she swept her white hand round, as though calling to witness the room in which they sat.
"I tell you," said Mr. Boyce, rising and standing before the fire, whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth so little known to him, and whose nature and aims during the close contact of the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity and disturbance to him,--"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all, must be to keep up the family position!--_our_ position. Look at that library, and its condition; look at the state of these wall-papers; look at the garden; look at the estate books if it comes to that. Why, it will be years before, even with all my knowledge of affairs, I can pull the thing through--years!"
Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough--she had pushed back her chair, and was alternately studying her husband and daughter. They might have been actors performing for her amus.e.m.e.nt. And yet, amus.e.m.e.nt is not precisely the word. For that hazel eye, with its frequent smile, had not a spark of geniality. After a time those about her found something scathing in its dry light.
Now, as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him, his look wavered, and his mood collapsed. He threw her a curious furtive glance, and fell silent.
"I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London Socialist friends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the pause that followed. "You have, I see, taken a great liking for them."
"Oh! well--I don"t know," said Marcella, with a shrug, and something of a proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very kind--but--he doesn"t seem to have thought much about things."
She never talked about her London friends to her mother, if she could help it. The sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they could. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was constantly her mother"s victim, do what she would. But in her quiet moments she stood on the defensive.
"So the Socialists are the only people who think?" said Mrs. Boyce, who was now standing by the window, pressing her dog"s head against her dress as he pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens.
They tell me they give all their substance away--already--and every one says it is going to be a particularly bad winter. The living, I hear, is worth nothing. All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful.
It is the first duty of martyrs."
Marcella looked at her mother indignantly. It seemed to her often that she said the most heartless things imaginable.
"Cheerful!" she said--"in a village like this--with all the young men drifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters--no one to stand by him--no money and no helpers--the people always ill--wages eleven and twelve shillings a week--and only the old wrecks of men left to do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in _this_ house to back him up a little. All he asks is that papa should go and satisfy himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and Lord Maxwell"s--"
"Lord Maxwell"s!" cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state of half-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away his cigarette--"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousand a year, if he has a penny. By the way, I wish he would just have the civility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!"
He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the footman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and a note.
"The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?"
"Well, that"s odd!" said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening. "Here _is_ Lord Maxwell"s answer, just as I was talking of it."
His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, a strange expectancy in her whole att.i.tude. He tore it open, read it, and then threw it angrily under the grate.
"No answer. Shut the door." The lad retreated. Mr. Boyce sat down and began carefully to put the fire together. His thin left hand shook upon his knee.
There was a moment"s pause of complete silence. Mrs. Boyce"s face might have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she stood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in her sweeping black. But she said not a word, and presently left the room.
Marcella watched her father.
"Papa--_was_ that a note from Lord Maxwell?"
Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any one was still there. It struck Marcella that he looked yellow and shrunken--years older than her mother. An impulse of tenderness, joined with anger and a sudden sick depression--she was conscious of them all as she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out. Her parents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; but her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might have had. She had no habitual deference to break through, and the hindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strong than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year by year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing at them, as was now so often the case with her.
"Papa, is Lord Maxwell"s note an uncivil one?"
Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over the blaze.
"Why, that man"s only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket together from morning till night when we were boys. Henry Raeburn was a bit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first rabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where the two estates join. After that we were always companions--we used to go out at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snow watching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the inner hall door, in the Windmill Hill fields--at least I did--I was a better shot than he by that time. He didn"t like Robert--he always wanted me."
"Well, papa, but what does he say?" asked Marcella, impatiently. She laid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father"s shoulder.
Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her. He and her mother had originally sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily worry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in coming to Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her. But the sight of her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanly compa.s.sion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.
"He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refers me to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who had just bought the place. Oh, it is quite evident what he means. They were here without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeks at least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not a card nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor the Levens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I did think--I was fool enough to think--that when I came back to the old place, my father"s old friends would let bygones be bygones. I never did _them_ any harm. Let them "gang their gait," confound them!"--the little dark man straightened himself fiercely--"I can get my pleasure out of the land; and as for your mother, she"d not lift a finger to propitiate one of them!"
In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic pride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.
Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither with lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks--now over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second volume beginning--the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories of shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?
"What was it you wanted about those coverts, papa?" she asked presently, with a quick decision.
"What the deuce does it matter? If you want to know, I proposed to him to exchange my coverts over by the Scrubs, which work in with his shooting, for the wood down by the Home Farm. It was an exchange made year after year in my father"s time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack and ruin after Harold"s death. It gave me something to write about, and I was determined to know where I stood--Well! the old Pharisee can go his way: I"ll go mine."
And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his native heath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height, and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns--a picturesque and elegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.
"I shall ask Mr. Aldous Raeburn about it, if I see him in the village to-day," said Marcella, quietly.
Her father started, and looked at her with some attention.
"What have you seen of Aldous Raeburn?" he inquired. "I remember hearing that you had come across him."
"Certainly I have come across him. I have met him once or twice at the Vicarage--and--oh! on one or two other occasions," said Marcella, carelessly. "He has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says his grandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away from home. He does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now: writes for him, and helps to manage the estate; and next year, when the Tories come back and Lord Maxwell is in office again--"
"Why, of course, there"ll be plums for the grandson," said Mr. Boyce with a sneer. "That goes without saying--though we are such a virtuous lot."
"Oh yes, he"ll get on--everybody says so. And he"ll deserve it too!" she added, her eye kindling combatively as she surveyed her father. "He takes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board of guardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very much, but he is not exactly popular, according to them. His manners are sometimes shy and awkward, and the poor people think he"s proud."
"Ah! a prig I dare say--like some of his uncles before him," said Mr.
Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, you say?"
And again he turned a quick considering eye on his daughter.
"Oh dear! yes," said Marcella, with a little proud smile. There was a pause; then she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardens have hard work just now with the harvest festival, and I promised to take them some flowers."