"Well"--said her father, grudgingly, "so long as you don"t promise anything on my account! I tell you, I haven"t got sixpence to spend on subscriptions to anything or anybody. By the way, if you see Reynolds anywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are going round the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what the coverts look like. The stock has all run down, and the place has been poached to death. But he thinks if we take on an extra man in the spring, and spend a little on rearing, we shall do pretty decently next year."
The colour leapt to Marcella"s cheek as she tied on her hat.
"You will set up another keeper, and you won"t do anything for the village?" she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another word she opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace, leaving her father both angered and amazed.
A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a good deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhood are expected to join. His wife had long since consented to play the game, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no dupe. As to what Marcella"s part in the affair might be going to be, her father was as yet uneasily in the dark. What constantly astonished him, as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl"s beauty. Surely she had been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not only beauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by the possession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was very accomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by misfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would have lovers--friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwell was preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that the daughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie, wherein the Raeburns" behaviour and Marcella"s unexpected gifts played about equal parts.
Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the most adorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey, mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "garden front," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunny and sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowers grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as though conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The gra.s.s indeed wanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it; the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of two gardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases, and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.
As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by the ragged charm of the old place.
On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant for beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply, shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,--in short, the general self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,--where would have been that thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely, which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to depend even upon _her_, the latest born of all its children--to ask for tendance and cherishing even from _her_. She was always planning how--with a minimum of money to spend--it could be comforted and healed, and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though she had been bred there.
But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and depression of spirit. What _was_ this past which in these new surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?
She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the truth. Yet, of whom? Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to any line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond her power. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tell me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you."
All the same, it _was_ due to them all, due to herself especially, now that she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in the dark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of the facts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, as untowardly in their, in _her_ way, as they had done in the shabby school and lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.
Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and could not, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to be insurmountable. Her instinct told her as she looked back that their relation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts and humiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts. Their poverty and the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the disrespect of one cla.s.s; and as to the acquaintances and friends of their own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool distaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget the existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, and laid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of the world. Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw no personal advantage and distinction in the Boyces" acquaintance, but rather the contrary.
As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that the breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, or his oldest friends. A little shiver pa.s.sed through her as she reflected that here, in his own country, where his history was best known, the feeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably be strongest. Well, it _was_ hard upon them!--hard upon her mother--hard upon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the dignities of her new position, how little she had thought of these things! And there they were all the time--d.o.g.g.i.ng and thwarting.
She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurel path which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the little church. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of the Park, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, of the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.
It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the name of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field, lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family of any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal, upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, on the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had given their sons to die at Quebec, and Pla.s.sy, and Trafalgar, for the making of England"s Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce"s education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections--a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, and still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.
Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--a break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend of Horace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whatever doors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper cla.s.ses of the leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly acquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome an Italian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her home to Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all its fantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted, pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collected whereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwined names of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeks mines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.
The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle life she died--much loved and pa.s.sionately mourned. Her tomb bore no long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace--for she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for it--the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante"s _Vita Nuova_.
The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her music-books survived,--a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; but the Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her own physique and her father"s were to be traced to its original, as well, no doubt, as the artistic apt.i.tudes of both--apt.i.tudes not hitherto conspicuous in her respectable race.
In reality, however, she loved every one of them--these Jacobean and Georgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood in the church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled heap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitable pride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one great lifting wave. The depression of her father"s repentances and trepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelter of her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into their guild of honour.
There were difficulties in her path, no doubt--but she had her vantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others.
_She_ had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developed individual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice and wrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last two years had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knew perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age could never venture--that she had fascination, resource, brain.
Already, in these few weeks--Smiles played about her lips as she thought of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the Hardens". His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alter the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly one of the _partis_ most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in the neighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce"s daughter--all the more marked because of the reserved manner with which it had to contend.
No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, and her parents" too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman"s charm, a woman"s energy should do it all.
Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, her mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens" injustice and distrust.
Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--of mission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her was the Boyces" family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when it came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought face to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism, but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty and upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impa.s.sive, resigned, now showing a furtive childish amus.e.m.e.nt if a schoolboy misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coa.r.s.e, or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanched and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food--these figures and types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. In London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been to her as a p.a.w.n in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh; and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk about him. Under circ.u.mstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was very clear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, and had always depended, the labourer of Mellor.
Well, she had tried to live with them ever since she came--had gone in and out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and their lives and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by their cringing; now enjoying her position among them with the natural aristocratic instinct of women, now grinding her teeth over her father"s and uncle"s behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doing for her new subjects.
What, _their_ friend and champion, and ultimately their redeemer too?
Well, and why not? Weak women have done greater things in the world. As she stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, she was conscious of a dramatic moment--would not have been sorry, perhaps, if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her.
But there was a saving sincerity at the root of her, and her strained mood sank naturally into a girlish excitement.
"We shall see!--We shall see!" she said aloud, and was startled to hear her words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she stooped to separate her flowers and see what quant.i.ties she had of each.
But while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herself again. She walked down the church and stood at the open south door, looking and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leading across the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were coming along it towards the church, both flower-laden, and beside walked a tall man in a brown shooting suit, with his gun in his hand and his dog beside him.
The excitement in Marcella"s eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as she saw the group, and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow. She waited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signals of the vicar"s sister; but inwardly she was not quiet at all. For the tall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Raeburn.
CHAPTER IV.
"How kind of you!" said the rector"s sister, enthusiastically; "but I thought you would come and help us."
And as Marcella took some of her burdens from her, Miss Harden kissed Marcella"s cheek with a sort of timid eagerness. She had fallen in love with Miss Boyce from the beginning, was now just advanced to this privilege of kissing, and being entirely convinced that her new friend possessed all virtues and all knowledge, found it not difficult to hold that she had been divinely sent to sustain her brother and herself in the disheartening task of civilising Mellor. Mary Harden was naturally a short, roundly made girl, neither pretty nor plain, with grey-blue eyes, a shy manner, and a heart all goodness. Her brother was like unto her--also short, round, and full-faced, with the same attractive eyes.
Both were singularly young in aspect--a boy and girl pair. Both had the worn, pinched look which Mrs. Boyce complained of, and which, indeed, went oddly with their whole physique. It was as though creatures built for a normal life of easy give and take with their fellows had fallen upon some unfitting and jarring experience. One striking difference, indeed, there was between them, for amid the brother"s timidity and sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of the priest--nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic.
Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure at the sight of Marcella Boyce. Aldous Raeburn was clearly embarra.s.sed thereby. Indeed, as he laid down his gun outside the low churchyard wall, while Marcella and the Hardens were greeting, that generally self-possessed though modest person was conscious of a quite disabling perturbation of mind. Why in the name of all good manners and decency had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting trim, on that particular morning, by Mr. Boyce"s daughter on her father"s land, and within a stone"s throw of her father"s house? Was he not perfectly well aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning despatched to the new owner of Mellor? Had he not ineffectually tried to delay execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his grandfather? Had not the incident weighed on him ever since, wounding an admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the dark, during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce"s acquaintance, so strong and startling did he all in a moment feel them to be?
And then to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public property, and Miss Harden"s burdens had cried aloud to any pa.s.sing male to help her. But why in this neighbourhood at all?--why not rather on the other side of the county? He could have scourged himself on the spot for an unpardonable breach of manners and feeling.
However, Miss Boyce certainly made no sign. She received him without any _empress.e.m.e.nt_, but also without the smallest symptom of offence. They all moved into the church together, Mr. Raeburn carrying a vast bundle of ivy and fern, the rector and his sister laden with closely-packed baskets of cut flowers. Everything was laid down on the chancel steps beside Marcella"s contribution, and then the Hardens began to plan out operations. Miss Harden ran over on her fingers the contributions which had been sent in to the rectory, or were presently coming over to the church in a hand-cart. "Lord Maxwell has sent the most _beautiful_ pots for the chancel," she said, with a grateful look at young Raeburn. "It will be quite a show." To which the young rector a.s.sented warmly. It was very good, indeed, of Lord Maxwell to remember them always so liberally at times like these, when they had so little direct claim upon him. They were not his church or his parish, but he never forgot them all the same, and Mellor was grateful. The rector had all his sister"s gentle effusiveness, but a professional dignity besides, even in his thanks, which made itself felt.
Marcella flushed as he was speaking.
"I went to see what I could get in the way of greenhouse things," she said in a sudden proud voice. "But we have nothing. There are the houses, but there is nothing in them. But you shall have all our out-of-door flowers, and I think a good deal might be done with autumn leaves and wild things if you will let me try."
A speech, which brought a flush to Mr. Raeburn"s cheek as he stood in the background, and led Mary Harden into an eager asking of Marcella"s counsels, and an eager praising of her flowers.
Aldous Raeburn said nothing, but his discomfort increased with every moment. Why had his grandfather been so officious in this matter of the flowers? All very well when Mellor was empty, or in the days of a miser and eccentric, without womankind, like Robert Boyce. But now--the act began to seem to him offensive, a fresh affront offered to an unprotected girl, whose quivering sensitive look as she stood talking to the Hardens touched him profoundly. Mellor church might almost be regarded as the Boyces" private chapel, so bound up was it with the family and the house. He realised painfully that he ought to be gone--yet could not tear himself away. Her pa.s.sionate willingness to spend herself for the place and people she had made her own at first sight, checked every now and then by a proud and sore reserve--it was too pretty, too sad. It stung and spurred him as he watched her; one moment his foot moved for departure, the next he was resolving that somehow or other he must make speech with her--excuse--explain.
Ridiculous! How was it possible that he should do either!
He had met her--perhaps had tried to meet her--tolerably often since their first chance encounter weeks ago in the vicarage drawing-room. All through there had been on his side the uncomfortable knowledge of his grandfather"s antipathy to Richard Boyce, and of the social steps to which that antipathy would inevitably lead. But Miss Boyce had never shown the smallest consciousness, so far, of anything untoward or unusual in her position. She had been clearly taken up with the interest and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered. The old house, its a.s.sociations, its history, the beautiful country in which it lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with that of the town,--he had heard her talk of all these things with a freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention.
The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The girl"s vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special fulness of life. So that in his new preoccupation with herself, and by contact with her frank self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her position, and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that unlucky note from Mellor; his grandfather"s prompt reply to it; his own ineffective protest; and now this tongue-tiedness--this clumsy intrusion--which she must feel to be an indelicacy--an outrage.
Suddenly he heard Miss Harden saying, with penitent emphasis, "I _am_ stupid! I have left the scissors and the wire on the table at home; we can"t get on without them; it is really too bad of me."
"I will go for them," said Marcella promptly. "Here is the hand-cart just arrived and some people come to help; you can"t be spared. I will be back directly."
And, gathering up her black skirt in a slim white hand, she sped down the church, and was out of the south door before the Hardens had time to protest, or Aldous Raeburn understood what she was doing.
A vexed word from Miss Harden enlightened him, and he went after the fugitive, overtaking her just where his gun and dog lay, outside the churchyard.
"Let me go, Miss Boyce," he said, as he caught her up. "My dog and I will run there and back."
But Marcella hardly looked at him, or paused.