Marcella

"You--asked--Mr. Raeburn--" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly. "What do you mean?"

Marcella turned round and met the flash of her mother"s eyes.

"I couldn"t help it," she said in a low hurried voice. "It seemed so horrid to feel everybody standing aloof--we were walking together--he was very kind and friendly--and I asked him to explain."

"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce. "And he went to his aunt--and she went to Lady Winterbourne--they were compa.s.sionate--and there are the cards. You have certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"

Marcella felt an instant"s fear--fear of the ironic power in the sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother"s fragile imperious beauty. Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.

"You have got used to it, mamma! I feel as if it would kill me to live here, shut off from everybody--joining with n.o.body--with no friendly feelings or society. It was bad enough in the old lodging-house days; but here--why _should_ we?"

Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.

"I supposed you would ask sooner or later," she said in a low determined voice, with what to Marcella was a quite new note of reality in it.

"Probably Mr. Raeburn told you--but you must of course have guessed it long ago--that society does not look kindly on us--and has its reasons.

I do not deny in the least that it has its reasons. I do not accuse anybody, and resent nothing. But the question with me has always been, Shall I accept pity? I have always been able to meet it with a No! You are very different from me--but for you also I believe it would be the happiest answer."

The eyes of both met--the mother"s full of an indomitable fire which had for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter"s troubled and miserable.

"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly. "There are so many things I want to do here, and one can do nothing if every one is against you.

People would be friends with you and me--and with papa too,--through us.

Some of them wish to be kind"--she added insistently, thinking of Aldous Raeburn"s words and expression as he bent to her at the gate--"I know they do. And if we can"t hold our heads high because--because of things in the past--ought we to be so proud that we won"t take their hands when they stretch them out--when they write so kindly and nicely as this?"

And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.

Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot. Then with a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a spoon near her.

"You shall go," she said presently--"you wish it--then go--go by all means. I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage.

One can put a great deal on health--mine is quite serviceable in the way of excuses. I will try and do you no harm, Marcella. If you have chosen your line and wish to make friends here--very well--I will do what I can for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life--for which, my dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."

Marcella looked at her with dismay and a yearning she had never felt before.

"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"

There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which for once suggested the normal filial relation. But Mrs. Boyce did not waver. She had long learnt perhaps to regard Marcella as a girl singularly well able to take care of herself; and had recognised the fact with relief.

"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping her tea--"in your interests as well as mine. You will make all the greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave.

Those cards shall be properly returned, of course. For the rest--let no one disturb themselves till they must. And if I were you, Marcella, I would hardly discuss the family affairs any more--with Mr. Raeburn or anybody else."

And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose power over the world about her had never extended to her mother.

Marcella flushed and played with the fire.

"You see, mamma," she said after a moment, still looking at the logs and the shower of sparks they made as she moved them about, "you never let me discuss them with you."

"Heaven forbid!" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly; then, after a pause: "You will find your own line in a little while, Marcella, and you will see, if you so choose it, that there will be nothing unsurmountable in your way. One piece of advice let me give you. Don"t be too _grateful_ to Miss Raeburn, or anybody else! You take great interest in your Boyce belongings, I perceive. You may remember too, perhaps, that there is other blood in you--and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to either patronage or pity."

Marcella started. Her mother had never named her own kindred to her before that she could remember. She had known for many years that there was a breach between the Merritts and themselves. The newspapers had told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the Boyces" threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother"s mother. The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the Merritts.

And now this note of intense personal and family pride, under which Mrs.

Boyce"s voice had for the first time quivered a little! Marcella had never heard it before, and it thrilled her. She sat on by the fire, drinking her tea and every now and then watching her companion with a new and painful curiosity. The tacit a.s.sumption of many years with her had been that her mother was a dry limited person, clever and determined in small ways, that affected her own family, but on the whole characterless as compared with other people of strong feelings and responsive susceptibilities. But her own character had been rapidly maturing of late, and her insight sharpening. During these recent weeks of close contact, her mother"s singularity had risen in her mind to the dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.

Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.

"Your father will be in, I suppose. Yes, I hear the front door."

As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her dress was very different from Marcella"s, which, when they were not in mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks, generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various fanciful and distinguished trifles--rings, an old chatelaine, a diamond brooch--which Marcella remembered, the same, and worn in the same way, since her childhood. Mrs. Boyce, however, wore her clothes so daintily, and took such scrupulous and ingenious care of them, that her dress cost, in truth, extremely little--certainly less than Marcella"s.

There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.

"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry by the fire. He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.

"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her silver kettle.

"_I_ don"t want any of their precious society," he said irritably. "They should have done their calling long ago. There"s no grace in it now; I don"t know that one isn"t inclined to think it an intrusion."

But the women were silent. Marcella"s attention was diverted from her mother to the father"s small dark head and thin face. There was a great repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against circ.u.mstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and silenced her. He stood in her way--terribly in her way--and yet it strangely seemed to her, that never before till these last few weeks had she felt herself a daughter.

"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she took his cup; "don"t you think you had better go at once and change?"

"I"m all right," he said shortly--"as right as I"m likely to be, anyway.

As for the shooting, it"s nothing but waste of time and shoe leather. I shan"t go out any more. The place has been clean swept by some of those brutes in the village--your friends, Marcella. By the way, Evelyn, I came across young Wharton in the road just now."

"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively. "I don"t remember--ought I?"

"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said testily. "I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on. He is working like a horse, he tells me. Dodgson, the Raeburns" candidate, has got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him up. I like him. I won"t vote for him; but I"ll see fair play. I"ve asked him to come to tea here on Sat.u.r.day, Evelyn. He"ll be back again by the end of the week. He stays at Dell"s farm when he comes--pretty bad accommodation, I should think. We must show him some civility."

He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening under his nervous determination to a.s.sert himself--to hold up his head physically and morally against those who would repress him.

Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly. He had pa.s.sed his first weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father"s old family and country friends should recognise him again and condone his "irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had pa.s.sed through his head. He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour if they would give him the chance--not like that miserly fool, his brother Robert. The past was so much past; who now was more respectable or more well intentioned than he? He was an impressionable imaginative man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts, partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store of virtue he had so laboriously acc.u.mulated since that long-past catastrophe. Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after such a lapse? He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child. These things, if the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in him, than to self-conquest; but he was no doubt ent.i.tled to make the most of them.

There were signs indeed that his forecast had been not at all unreasonable. His womenkind _were_ making their way. At the very moment when Lord Maxwell had written him a quelling letter, he had become aware that Marcella was on good terms with Lord Maxwell"s heir. Had he not also been stopped that morning in a remote lane by Lord Winterbourne and Lord Maxwell on their way back from the meet, and had not both recognised and shaken hands with him? And now there were these cards.

Unfortunately, in spite of Raeburn"s opinion to the contrary, no man in such a position and with such a temperament ever gets something without claiming more--and more than he can conceivably or possibly get.

Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had pa.s.sed his afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So these were the terms he was to be on with them--the deuce take them and their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look foolish; and the men who thanked G.o.d that they were not as other men, soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished he had not answered them; he would show them in the future that he would eat no dirt for them or anybody else.

So on the way home there had been a particular zest in his chance encounter with the young man who was likely to give the Raeburns and their candidate--so all the world said--a very great deal of trouble.

The seat had been held to be an entirely safe one for the Maxwell nominee. Young Wharton, on the contrary, was making way every day, and, what with securing Aldous"s own seat in the next division, and helping old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full.

d.i.c.k Boyce was glad of it. He was a Tory; but all the same he wished every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.

The three sat on together for a little while in silence. Marcella kept her seat by the fire on the old gilt fenderstool, conscious in a dreamlike way of the room in front of her--the stately room with its stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert Boyce--conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had he said to Lord Maxwell?--and to the Winterbournes? She wished she could know. She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again quickly. Yet it would be awkward too.

Presently she got up and went away to take off her things. As the door closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn"s note, which Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.

"They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said. "I am not going, but I shall send her."

He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most contradictory effects upon him.

"Why don"t you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.