"You look very well, my dear. That white becomes you charmingly; so do the pearls. I don"t wonder that Aldous always knows where you are."
Marcella raised her eyes and caught those of Aldous fixed upon her from the other side of the room. She blushed, smiled slightly, and looked away.
"Who is that tall man just gone up to speak to him?" she asked of her companion.
"That is Lord Wandle," said Lady Winterbourne, "and his plain second wife behind him. Edward always scolds me for not admiring him. He says women know nothing at all about men"s looks, and that Lard Wandle was the most splendid man of his time. But I always think it an unpleasant face."
"Lord Wandle!" exclaimed Marcella, frowning. "Oh, _please_ come with me, dear Lady Winterbourne! I know he is asking Aldous to introduce him, and I won"t--no I will _not_--be introduced to him."
And laying hold of her astonished companion, she drew her hastily through a doorway near, walked quickly, still gripping her, through two connected rooms beyond, and finally landed her and herself on a sofa in Lord Maxwell"s library, pursued meanwhile through all her hurried course by the curious looks of an observant throng.
"That man!--no, that would really have been _too_ much!" said Marcella, using her large feather fan with stormy energy.
"What _is_ the matter with you, my dear?" said Lady Winterbourne in her amazement; "and what is the matter with Lord Wandle?"
"You must know!" said Marcella, indignantly. "Oh, you _must_ have seen that case in the paper last week--that _shocking_ case! A woman and two children died in one of his cottages of blood-poisoning--nothing in the world but his neglect--his _brutal_ neglect!" Her breast heaved; she seemed almost on the point of weeping. "The agent was appealed to--did nothing. Then the clergyman wrote to him direct, and got an answer. The answer was published. For cruel insolence I never saw anything like it!
He ought to be in prison for manslaughter--and he comes _here_! And people laugh and talk with him!"
She stopped, almost choked by her own pa.s.sion. But the incident, after all, was only the spark to the mine.
Lady Winterbourne stared at her helplessly.
"Perhaps it isn"t true," she suggested. "The newspapers put in so many lies, especially about _us_--the landlords. Edward says one ought never to believe them. Ah, here comes Aldous."
Aldous, indeed, with some perplexity on his brow, was to be seen approaching, looking for his betrothed. Marcella dropped her fan and sat erect, her angry colour fading into whiteness.
"My darling! I couldn"t think what had become of you. May I bring Lord Wandle and introduce him to you? He is an old friend here, and my G.o.dfather. Not that I am particularly proud of the relationship," he said, dropping his voice as he stooped over her. "He is a soured, disagreeable fellow, and I hate many of the things he does. But it is an old tie, and my grandfather is tender of such things. Only a word or two; then I will get rid of him."
"Aldous, I _can"t_," said Marcella, looking up at him. "How could I? I saw that case. I must be rude to him."
Aldous looked considerably disturbed.
"It was very bad," he said slowly. "I didn"t know you had seen it. What shall I do? I promised to go back for him."
"Lord Wandle--Miss Boyce!" said Miss Raeburn"s sharp little voice behind Aldous. Aldous, moving aside in hasty dismay, saw his aunt, looking very determined, presenting her tall neighbour, who bowed with old-fashioned deference to the girl on the sofa.
Lady Winterbourne looked with trepidation at Marcella. But the social instinct held, to some extent. Ninety-nine women can threaten a scene of the kind Lady Winterbourne dreaded, for one that can carry it through.
Marcella wavered; then, with her most forbidding air, she made a scarcely perceptible return of Lord Wandle"s bow.
"Did you escape in here out of the heat?" he asked her. "But I am afraid no one lets you escape to-night. The occasion is too interesting."
Marcella made no reply. Lady Winterbourne threw in a nervous remark on the crowd.
"Oh, yes, a great crush," said Lord Wandle. "Of course, we all come to see Aldous happy. How long is it, Miss Boyce, since you settled at Mellor?"
"Six months."
She looked straight before her and not at him as she answered, and her tone made Miss Raeburn"s blood boil.
Lord Wandle--a battered, coa.r.s.ened, but still magnificent-looking man of sixty--examined the speaker an instant from half-shut eyes, then put up his hand to his moustache with a half-smile.
"You like the country?"
"Yes."
As she spoke her reluctant monosyllable, the girl had really no conception of the degree of hostility expressed in her manner. Instead she was hating herself for her own pusillanimity.
"And the people?"
"Some of them."
And straightway she raised her fierce black eyes to his, and the man before her understood, as plainly as any one need understand, that, whoever else Miss Boyce might like, she did not like Lord Wandle, and wished for no more conversation with him.
Her interrogator turned to Aldous with smiling _aplomb_.
"Thank you, my dear Aldous. Now let me retire. No one must _monopolise_ your charming lady."
And again he bowed low to her, this time with an ironical emphasis not to be mistaken, and walked away.
Lady Winterbourne saw him go up to his wife, who had followed him at a distance, and speak to her roughly with a frown. They left the room, and presently, through the other door of the library which opened on the corridor, she saw them pa.s.s, as though they were going to their carriage.
Marcella rose. She looked first at Miss Raeburn--then at Aldous.
"Will you take me away?" she said, going up to him; "I am tired--take me to your room."
He put her hand inside his arm, and they pushed their way through the crowd. Outside in the pa.s.sage they met Hallin. He had not seen her before, and he put out his hand. But there was something distant in his gentle greeting which struck at this moment like a bruise on Marcella"s quivering nerves. It came across her that for some time past he had made no further advances to her; that his first eager talk of friendship between himself and her had dropped; that his _acceptance_ of her into his world and Aldous"s was somehow suspended--in abeyance. She bit her lip tightly and hurried Aldous along. Again the same lines of gay, chatting people along the corridor, and on either side of the wide staircase--greetings, introduction--a nightmare of publicity.
"Rather p.r.o.nounced--to carry him off like that," said a clergyman to his wife with a kindly smile, as the two tall figures disappeared along the upper gallery. "She will have him all to herself before long."
Aldous shut the door of his sitting-room behind them. Marcella quickly drew her hand out of his arm, and going forward to the mantelpiece rested both elbows upon it and hid her face.
He looked at her a moment in distress and astonishment, standing a little apart. Then he saw that she was crying. The colour flooded into his face, and going up to her he took her hand, which was all she would yield him, and, holding it to his lips, said in her ear every soothing tender word that love"s tutoring could bring to mind. In his emotion he told himself and her that he admired and loved her the more for the incident downstairs, for the temper she had shown! She alone among them all had had the courage to strike the true stern Christian note. As to the annoyance such courage might bring upon him and her in the future--even as to the trouble it might cause his own dear folk--what real matter? In these things she should lead.
What could love have asked better than such a moment? Yet Marcella"s weeping was in truth the weeping of despair. This man"s very sweetness to her, his very a.s.sumption of the right to comfort and approve her, roused in her a desperate stifled sense of bonds that should never have been made, and that now could not be broken. It was all plain to her at last. His touch had no thrill for her; his frown no terror. She had accepted him without loving him, coveting what he could give her. And now it seemed to her that she cared nothing for anything he could give!--that the life before her was to be one series of petty conflicts between her and a surrounding circ.u.mstance which must inevitably in the end be too strong for her, conflicts from which neither heart nor ambition could gain anything. She had desired a great position for what she might do with it. But could she do with it! She would be subdued--oh! very quickly!--to great houses and great people, and all the vapid pomp and idle toil of wealth. All that picture of herself, stooping from place and power, to bind up the wounds of the people, in which she had once delighted, was to her now a mere flimsy vulgarity.
She had been shown other ideals--other ways--and her pulses were still swaying under the audacity--the virile inventive force of the showman.
Everything she had once desired looked flat to her; everything she was not to have, glowed and shone. Poverty, adventure, pa.s.sion, the joys of self-realisation--these she gave up. She would become Lady Maxwell, make friends with Miss Raeburn, and wear the family diamonds!
Then, in the midst of her rage with herself and fate, she drew herself away, looked up, and caught full the eyes of Aldous Raeburn. Conscience stung and burned. What was this life she had dared to trifle with--this man she had dared to treat as a mere p.a.w.n in her own game? She gave way utterly, appalled at her own misdoing, and behaved like a penitent child. Aldous, astonished and alarmed by her emotions and by the wild incoherent things she said, won his way at last to some moments of divine happiness, when, leaving her trembling hand in his, she sat submissively beside him, gradually quieting down, summoning back her smiles and her beauty, and letting him call her all the fond names he would.
CHAPTER VIII.
Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the drive home. Yet under ordinary circ.u.mstances Marcella"s imagination would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what spirit her mother had taken the evening--the first social festivity in which Richard Boyce"s wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact, Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first public entry on Lord Maxwell"s arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several old acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She had received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to society by this great match that her daughter was making. Lady Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in smoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watched Marcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did not see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to Hallin.