"I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old to begin again."
"What! you mean to say," he asked her angrily, raising his voice, "that you have never _meant_ to do your duties here--the duties of your position?"
"I did not foresee many, outside this house and land. Why should we change our ways? We have done very well of late. I have no mind to risk what I have got."
He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on.
His anger sank into moroseness.
"Then why do you let Marcella go? What good will it do her to go about without her parents? People will only despise her for a girl of no spirit--as they ought."
"It depends upon how it is done. I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs.
Boyce. "A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of health. She need never give offence if she has decent wits. It will be understood that I do not go out, and then someone--Miss Raeburn or Lady Winterbourne--will take up Marcella and mother her."
She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.
"If you were to talk of _my_ health, it would be more to the purpose,"
he said, with grim inconsequence. And raising his heavy lids he looked at her full.
She got up and went over to him.
"Do you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"
She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost touched him. A pa.s.sionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give him again.
Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.
"Clarke does me no good--not an atom," he said, rising. "There--don"t you come. I Can look after myself."
He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor G.o.d.
"I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."
A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart--pain, new-born and insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous Raeburn"s hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.
But her strong personality, her pa.s.sionate sense of a moral independence not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.
"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be all true what Mr. Raeburn said--probably a great deal more. Poor, poor mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."
Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white reflection in the old flawed gla.s.s.
She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in her service. There could be no question but that he was specially interested in her.
And he was not a man to be lightly played upon--nay, rather a singularly reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had been always held concerning him. Marcella was triumphantly conscious that he had not from the beginning given _her_ much trouble. But the common report of him made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more significant. Even the Hardens--so Marcella gathered from her friend and admirer Mary--unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the hastening of Christ"s kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take note.
It was not as though he were in the dark as to her antecedents. He knew all--at any rate, more than she did--and yet it might end in his asking her to marry him. What then?
Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the gla.s.s! _Love_, at such a thought, must have sunk upon its knees and hid its face for tender humbleness and requital. Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.
What was stirring in her was really a pa.s.sionate ambition--ambition to be the queen and arbitress of human lives--to be believed in by her friends, to make a mark for herself among women, and to make it in the most romantic and yet natural way, without what had always seemed to her the sordid and unpleasant drudgeries of the platform, of a tiresome co-operation with, or subordination to others who could not understand your ideas.
Of course, if it happened, people would say that she had tried to capture Aldous Raeburn for his money and position"s sake. Let them say it. People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it.
Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for something to carry her _deep_ into life; into the heart of its widest and most splendid opportunities!
She threw up her hands, clasping them above her head amid her clouds of curly hair--a girlish excited gesture.
"I could revive the straw-plaiting; give them better teaching and better models. The cottages should be rebuilt. Papa would willingly hand the village over to me if I found the money! We would have a parish committee to deal with the charities--oh! the Hardens would come in. The old people should have their pensions as of right. No hopeless old age, no cringing dependence! We would try co-operation on the land, and pull it through. And not in Mellor only. One might be the ruler, the regenerator of half a county!"
Memory brought to mind in vivid sequence the figures and incidents of the afternoon, of her village round with Mary Harden.
"_As the eyes of servants towards the hand of their mistress_"--the old words occurred to her as she thought of herself stepping in and out of the cottages. Then she was ashamed of herself and rejected the image with vehemence. Dependence was the curse of the poor. Her whole aim, of course, should be to teach them to stand on their own feet, to know themselves as men. But naturally they would be grateful, they would let themselves be led. Intelligence and enthusiasm give power, and ought to give it--power for good. No doubt, under Socialism, there will be less scope for either, because there will be less need. But Socialism, as a system, will not come in our generation. What we have to think for is the transition period. The Cravens had never seen that, but Marcella saw it. She began to feel herself a person of larger experience than they.
As she undressed, it seemed to her as though she still felt the clinging hands of the Hurd children round her knees, and through them, symbolised by them, the suppliant touch of hundreds of other helpless creatures.
She was just dropping to sleep when her own words to Aldous Raeburn flashed across her,--
"Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people"s lives, and look at the result!"
She must needs laugh at herself, but it made little matter. She fell asleep cradled in dreams. Aldous Raeburn"s final part in them was not great!
CHAPTER VIII.
Mrs. Boyce wrote her note to Miss Raeburn, a note containing cold though civil excuses as to herself, while accepting the invitation for Marcella, who should be sent to the Court, either in the carriage or under the escort of a maid who could bring her back. Marcella found her mother inclined to insist punctiliously on conventions of this kind. It amused her, in submitting to them, to remember the free and easy ways of her London life. But she submitted--and not unwillingly.
On the afternoon of the day which intervened between the Maxwells" call and her introduction to the Court, Marcella walked as usual down to the village. She was teeming with plans for her new kingdom, and could not keep herself out of it. And an entry in one of the local papers had suggested to her that Hurd might possibly find work in a parish some miles from Mellor. She must go and send him off there.
When Mrs. Hurd opened the door to her, Marcella was astonished to perceive behind her the forms of several other persons filling up the narrow s.p.a.ce of the usually solitary cottage--in fact, a tea-party.
"Oh, come in, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, with some embarra.s.sment, as though it occurred to her that her visitor might legitimately wonder to find a person of her penury entertaining company. Then, lowering her voice, she hurriedly explained: "There"s Mrs. Brunt come in this afternoon to help me wi" the washin" while I finished my score of plait for the woman who takes "em into town to-morrow. And there"s old Patton an" his wife--you know "em, miss?--them as lives in the parish houses top o" the common. He"s walked out a few steps to-day. It"s not often he"s able, and when I see him through the door I said to "em, "if you"ll come in an" take a cheer, I dessay them tea-leaves "ull stan" another wettin". I haven"t got nothink else." And there"s Mrs. Jellison, she came in along o" the Pattons. You can"t say her no, she"s a queer one. Do you know her, miss?"
"Oh, bless yer, yes, yes. She knows me!" said a high, jocular voice, making Mrs. Hurd start; "she couldn"t be long hereabouts without makkin"
eeaste to know me. You coom in, miss. We"re not afraid o" you--Lor"
bless you!"
Mrs. Hurd stood aside for her visitor to pa.s.s in, looking round her the while, in some perplexity, to see whether there was a spare chair and room to place it. She was a delicate, willowy woman, still young in figure, with a fresh colour, belied by the grey circles under the eyes and the pinched sharpness of the features. The upper lip, which was pretty and childish, was raised a little over the teeth; the whole expression of the slightly open mouth was unusually soft and sensitive.
On the whole, Minta Hurd was liked in the village, though she was thought a trifle "fine." The whole family, indeed, "kept theirsels to theirsels," and to find Mrs. Hurd with company was unusual. Her name, of course, was short for Araminta.
Marcella laughed as she caught Mrs. Jellison"s remarks, and made her way in, delighted. For the present, these village people affected her like figures in poetry or drama. She saw them with the eye of the imagination through a medium provided by Socialist discussion, or by certain phases of modern art; and the little scene of Mrs. Hurd"s tea-party took for her in an instant the dramatic zest and glamour.
"Look here, Mrs. Jellison," she said, going up to her; "I was just going to leave these apples for your grandson. Perhaps you"ll take them, now you"re here. They"re quite sweet, though they look green. They"re the best we"ve got, the gardener says."
"Oh, they are, are they?" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly, looking up at her. "Well, put "em down, miss. I dare say he"ll eat "em. He eats most things, and don"t want no doctor"s stuff nayther, though his mother do keep on at me for spoilin" his stummuck."