"Italian!" he said, lifting his eyebrows. "Ah, that explains. Do you know--that you have all the qualities of a leader!"--and he moved away a yard from her, studying her--"mixed blood--one must always have that to fire and fuse the English paste--and then--but no! that won"t do--I should offend you."
Her first instinct was one of annoyance--a wish to send him about his business, or rather to return him to her mother who would certainly keep him in order. Instead, however, she found herself saying, as she looked carelessly out of window--
"Oh! go on."
"Well, then"--he drew himself up suddenly and wheeled round upon her--"you have the gift of compromise. That is invaluable--that will take you far."
"Thank you!" she said. "Thank you! I know what that means--from a Venturist. You think me a mean insincere person!"
He started, then recovered himself and came to lean against the bookshelves beside her.
"I mean nothing of the sort," he said, in quite a different manner, with a sort of gentle and personal emphasis. "But--may I explain myself, Miss Boyce, in a room with a fire? I can see you shivering under your fur."
For the frost still reigned supreme outside, and the white gra.s.s and trees threw chill reflected lights into the forsaken library. Marcella controlled a pulse of excitement that had begun to beat in her, admitted that it was certainly cold, and led the way through a side door to a little flagged parlour, belonging to the oldest portion of the house, where, however, a great log-fire was burning, and some chairs drawn up round it. She took one and let the fur wrap she had thrown about her for their promenade through the disused rooms drop from her shoulders. It lay about her in full brown folds, giving special dignity to her slim height and proud head. Wharton glancing about in his curious inquisitive way, now at the neglected pictures, now on the walls, now at the old oak chairs and chests, now at her, said to himself that she was a splendid and inspiring creature. She seemed to be on the verge of offence with him too, half the time, which was stimulating. She would have liked, he thought, to play the great lady with him already, as Aldous Raeburn"s betrothed. But he had so far managed to keep her off that plane--and intended to go on doing so.
"Well, I meant this," he said, leaning against the old stone chimney and looking down upon her; "only _don"t_ be offended with me, please.
You are a Socialist, and you are going--some day--to be Lady Maxwell.
Those combinations are only possible to women. They can sustain them, because they are imaginative--not logical."
She flushed.
"And you," she said, breathing quickly, "are a Socialist and a landlord.
What is the difference?"
He laughed.
"Ah! but I have no gift--I can"t ride the two horses, as you will be able to--quite honestly. There"s the difference. And the consequence is that with my own cla.s.s I am an outcast--they all hate me. But you will have power as Lady Maxwell--and power as a Socialist--because you will give and take. Half your time you will act as Lady Maxwell should, the other half like a Venturist. And, as I said, it will give you power--a modified power. But men are less clever at that kind of thing."
"Do you mean to say," she asked him abruptly, "that you have given up the luxuries and opportunities of your cla.s.s?"
He shifted his position a little.
"That is a different matter," he said after a moment. "We Socialists are all agreed, I think, that no man can be a Socialist by himself.
Luxuries, for the present, are something personal, individual. It is only a man"s "public form" that matters. And there, as I said before, I have no gift!--I have not a relation or an old friend in the world that has not turned his back upon me--as you might see for yourself yesterday! My cla.s.s has renounced me already--which, after all, is a weakness."
"So you pity yourself?" she said.
"By no means! We all choose the part in life that amuses us--that brings us most _thrill_. I get most thrill out of throwing myself into the workmen"s war--much more than I could ever get, you will admit, out of dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great tragi-comedy of the working-cla.s.s movement. It stirs, p.r.i.c.ks, interests me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental pa.s.sions in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to some great outburst, to scenes and struggles at any rate that will make us all look alive. I am like a child with the best of its cake to come, but with plenty in hand already. Ah!--stay still a moment, Miss Boyce!"
To her amazement he stooped suddenly towards her; and she, looking down, saw that a corner of her light, black dress, which had been overhanging the low stone fender, was in flames, and that he was putting it out with his hands. She made a movement to rise, alarmed lest the flames should leap to her face--her hair. But he, releasing one hand for an instant from its task of twisting and rolling the skirt upon itself, held her heavily down.
"Don"t move; I will have it out in a moment. You won"t be burnt."
And in a second more she was looking at a ragged brown hole in her dress; and at him, standing, smiling, before the fire, and wrapping a handkerchief round some of the fingers of his left hand.
"You have burnt yourself, Mr. Wharton?"
"A little."
"I will go and get something--what would you like?"
"A little olive oil if you have some, and a bit of lint--but don"t trouble yourself."
She flew to find her mother"s maid, calling and searching on her way for Mrs. Boyce herself, but in vain. Mrs. Boyce had disappeared after breakfast, and was probably helping her husband to dress.
In a minute or so Marcella ran downstairs again, bearing various medicaments. She sped to the Stone Parlour, her cheek and eye glowing.
"Let me do it for you."
"If you please," said Wharton, meekly.
She did her best, but she was not skilful with her fingers, and this close contact with him somehow excited her.
"There," she said, laughing and releasing him. "Of course, if I were a work-girl I should have done it better. They are not going to be very bad, I think."
"What, the burns? Oh, no! They will have recovered, I am afraid, long before your dress."
"Oh, my dress! yes, it is deplorable. I will go and change it."
She turned to go, but she lingered instead, and said with an odd, introductory laugh:
"I believe you saved my life!"
"Well, I am glad I was here. You might have lost self-possession--even _you_ might, you know!--and then it would have been serious."
"Anyway"--her voice was still uncertain--"I might have been disfigured--disfigured for life!"
"I don"t know why you should dwell upon it now it"s done with," he declared, smiling.
"It would be strange, wouldn"t it, if I took it quite for granted--all in the day"s work?" She held out her hand: "I am grateful--please."
He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.
"May I exact a reward?"
"Ask it."
"Will you take me down with you to your village? I know you are going. I must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington. I have an appointment there at two o"clock. But perhaps you will introduce me to one or two of your poor people first?"
Marcella a.s.sented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother to go with them. She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and indecorously towards whom?--towards Aldous? But how, or why? She did not know. But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity, combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the day. In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.
By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella"s uncomfortable feelings had all pa.s.sed away. Without knowing it, she was becoming too much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were together. It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a few hundred yards that he was taking advantage--presuming on what had happened. He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred ways, she discovered. At the same time it was _she_ who was always on the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy"s country. He put her through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations, the incomes of the people, its local charities and inst.i.tutions, what she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought it _possible_ to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.
But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she had not even managed to _see_ these people, to interpret their lives under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.
Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner. He let her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other.
All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of society was but a n.i.g.g.ardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior"
and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to these precious efforts of the upper cla.s.s to daub the gaps in the ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so much the worse for you when the working cla.s.s came to its own; if you did do them, the burden of debt was hardly diminished, and the rope was still left on your neck.
Now Marcella herself had on one or two occasions taken a malicious pleasure in flaunting these doctrines, or some of them, under Miss Raeburn"s eyes. But somehow, as applied to herself, they were disagreeable. Each of us is to himself a "special case"; and she saw the other side. Hence a constant soreness of feeling; a constant recalling of the argument to the personal point of view; and through it all a curious growth of intimacy, a rubbing away of barriers. She had felt herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous"s company, as we know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by that pa.s.sionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty impulse in her to the n.o.blest proportions! Under Wharton"s Socratic method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish desires, worthy of her childhood--to cry, to go into a pa.s.sion!--and when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young, dropped its obsequious curtsey as they pa.s.sed, she could first have beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural relations of country life.