Marcella

"It"s not broken--it"s wrenched; I can"t use it. There--that"s all we can do--till she gets--to hospital."

Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little.

Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing at the woman"s marred face--indescribably patient in its deep unconsciousness--at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair--with tears that ran unheeded down her cheeks, in a pa.s.sion of anguished pity, which touched a chord of memory in Raeburn"s mind. He had seen her look so once before--beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd"s capture.

At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.

"You can"t do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her.

"Won"t you let me take you home?--you want it sorely. The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They will remove her with every care--he will see to it."

Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he was--where they were--how they had last met. And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness.

She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her anymore--after this! When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now.

No!--after this he _must_ be friends with her.

"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a quivering, appealing accent--and so they fell silent.

Aldous looked round the room--at the miserable filthy garret with its begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty gin-bottles here and there--all the familiar, one might almost say conventionalised, signs of human ruin and d.a.m.nation--then at this breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling was one of fierce and natural protest against circ.u.mstance--against her mother!--against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a hopeless struggle with devildom.

"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not much worse than others--though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing--used to come in and out--when I was nursing him--Oh, I wish--I _wish_ they would come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form--"every moment is of importance!"

As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and skill. Then Raeburn a.s.sisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.

Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police, who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning against the pa.s.sage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and seemed to him on the point of fainting.

"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.

"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They will not trouble you any more for the present."

He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab.

Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to control herself and not to faint.

He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was this what her new career--her enthusiasms--meant, or might mean!

Twenty-three!--in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.

Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such scenes--such gross physical abominations. Amazing!--how meanly, pa.s.sionately timorous the man of Raeburn"s type can be for the woman! He himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern joy of the fight. But she!--let her leave the human brute and his unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne--it was never meant--that she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in the cottage.

In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely.

Presently, as he watched her--hating the man for driving and the cab for shaking--he saw her white lips suddenly smile.

"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing is all like that!"

"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.

"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again.

"n.o.body is ever rude to us--I often pine for experiences!"

How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.

"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your arm hurt you much?"

"Yes,--but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up work for a bit.--Mr. Raeburn!"

"Yes." His heart beat.

"We may meet often--mayn"t we?--at Lady Winterbourne"s--or in the country? Couldn"t we be friends? You don"t know how often--" She turned away her weary head a moment--gathered strength to begin again--"--how often I have regretted--last year. I see now--that I behaved--more unkindly"--her voice was almost a whisper--"than I thought then. But it is all done with--couldn"t we just be good friends--understand each other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"

She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.

As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the Terrace--was Wharton"s advancing figure. But her state--the moment--coerced him.

"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.

She put out her hand.

"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh no!"

Then suddenly a pa.s.sion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But she hardly heard him.

At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of Brown"s Buildings.

"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs--then I shan"t be any more trouble."

So, leaning on Raeburn"s arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the court of Brown"s Buildings and through the gaping groups of children.

Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him with a wan smile.

"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"

Aldous looked round him well at Brown"s Buildings as he departed. Then he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne"s house, and implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.

After which he spent--poor Aldous!--one of the most restless and miserable nights of his life.

CHAPTER XI.

Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window of Lady Winterbourne"s drawing-room. The house--in James Street, Buckingham Gate--looked out over the exercising ground of the great barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James"s Park to the left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things, and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open s.p.a.ces of sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown"s Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let alone.

Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon.

Marcella had her thoughts to herself.

But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling--must somehow wrestle--its pa.s.sionate way.

But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover, under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing--a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody.

On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she _had_ saved--probably at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and--as Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their minds--would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.

Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest.

She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible; the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little.