Her eyes shone with wild tears. As he stood there before her she was seized with a piteous sense of contrast--of the irreparable--of what might have been.
"What do you mean?" he asked her, roughly.
She was silent.
His pa.s.sion rose.
"Do you remember," he said, approaching her again, "that you have given me cause to hope? It is those two fanatics that have changed you--possessed your mind."
She looked at him with a pale dignity.
"My letters must have warned you," she said simply. "If you had come to-morrow--in prosperity--you would have got the same answer, at once.
To-day--now--I have had weak moments, because--because I did not know how to add pain to pain. But they are gone--I see my way! _I do not love you_--that is the simple, the whole truth--I could not follow you!"
He stared at her an instant in a bitter silence.
"I have been warned,"--he said slowly, but in truth losing control of himself, "not only by you--and I suppose I understand! You repent last year. Your own letter said as much. You mean to recover, the ground--the place you lost. Ah, well!--most natural!--most fitting! When the time comes--and my bones are less sore--I suppose I shall have my second congratulations ready! Meanwhile--"
She gave a low cry and burst suddenly into a pa.s.sion of weeping, turning her face from him. But when in pale sudden shame he tried to excuse himself--to appease her--she moved away, with a gesture that overawed him.
"_You_ have not confessed yourself"--she said, and his look wavered under the significance of hers--"but you drive me to it. Yes, _I repent!_"--her breast heaved, she caught her breath. "I have been trying to cheat myself these last few weeks--to run away from grief--and the other night when you asked me--I would have given all I have and am to feel like any happy girl, who says "Yes" to her lover. I tried to feel so. But even then, though I was miserable and reckless, I knew in my heart--it was impossible! If you suppose--if you like to suppose--that I--I have hopes or plans--as mean as they would be silly--you must--of course. But I have given no one any _right_ to think so or say so. Mr.
Wharton--"
Gathering all her self-control, she put out her white hand to him.
"Please--please say good-bye to me. It has been hideous vanity--and mistake--and wretchedness--our knowing each other--from the beginning.
I _am_ grateful for all you did, I shall always be grateful. I hope--oh!
I hope--that--that you will find a way through this trouble. I don"t want to make it worse by a word. If I could do anything! But I can"t.
You must please go. It is late. I wish to call my friend, Mrs. Hurd."
Their eyes met--hers full of a certain stern yet quivering power, his strained and bloodshot, in his lined young face.
Then, with a violent gesture--as though he swept her out of his path--he caught up his hat, went to the door, and was gone.
She fell on her chair almost fainting, and sat there for long in the summer dark, covering her face. But it was not his voice that haunted her ears.
"_You have done me wrong--I pray G.o.d you may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future!_"
Again and again, amid the whirl of memory, she pressed the sad remembered words upon the inward wound and fever--tasting, cherishing the smart of them. And as her trance of exhaustion and despair gradually left her, it was as though she crept close to some dim beloved form in whom her heart knew henceforward the secret and sole companion of its inmost life.
BOOK IV.
"You and I-- Why care by what meanders we are here I" the centre of the labyrinth? Men have died Trying to find this place which we have found."
CHAPTER I.
Ah! how purely, cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul of yearning and of memory into the pearly silence of the morning.
High up on the distant hill to the left, beyond the avenue, the pale apricots and golds of the newly-shorn stubbles caught the mounting light. The beeches of the avenue were turning fast, and the chestnuts girdling the church on her right hand were already thin enough to let the tower show through. That was the bell--the old bell given to the church by Hampden"s friend, John Boyce--striking half-past five; and close upon it came the call of a pheasant in the avenue. There he was, fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, redeemed all at once by the sudden whirr of towering flight.
To-day Mary Harden and the Rector would be at work in the church, and to-morrow was to be the Harvest Festival. Was it two years?--or in an hour or two would she be going with her basket from the Cedar Garden, to find that figure in the brown shooting-coat standing with the Hardens on the altar steps?
Alas!--alas!--her head dropped on her hands as she knelt by the open window. How changed were all the aspects of the world! Three weeks before, the bell in that little church had tolled for one who, in the best way and temper of his own generation, had been G.o.d"s servant and man"s friend--who had been Marcella"s friend--and had even, in his last days, on a word from Edward Hallin, sent her an old man"s kindly farewell.
"Tell her," Lord Maxwell had written with his own hand to Hallin, "she has taken up a n.o.ble work, and will make, I pray G.o.d, a n.o.ble woman. She had, I think, a kindly liking for an old man, and she will not disdain his blessing."
He had died at Geneva, Aldous and Miss Raeburn with him. For instead of coming home in August, he had grown suddenly worse, and Aldous had gone out to him. They had brought him to the Court for burial, and the new Lord Maxwell, leaving his aunt at the Court, had almost immediately returned to town,--because of Edward Hallin"s state of health.
Marcella had seen much of Hallin since he and his sister had come back to London in the middle of August. Hallin"s apparent improvement had faded within a week or two of his return to his rooms; Aldous was at Geneva; Miss Hallin was in a panic of alarm; and Marcella found herself both nurse and friend. Day after day she would go in after her nursing rounds, share their evening meal, and either write for Hallin, or help the sister--by the slight extra weight of her professional voice--to keep him from writing and thinking.
He would not himself admit that he was ill at all, and his whole energies at the time were devoted to the preparation of a series of three addresses on the subject of Land Reform, which were to be delivered in October to the delegates of a large number of working-men"s clubs from all parts of London. So strong was Hallin"s position among working-men reformers, and so beloved had been his personality, that as soon as his position towards the new land nationalising movement, now gathering formidable strength among the London working men, had come to be widely understood, a combined challenge had been sent him by some half-dozen of the leading Socialist and Radical clubs, asking him to give three weekly addresses in October to a congress of London delegates, time to be allowed after the lecture for questions and debate.
Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure. For all the time he was struggling with cardiac weakness and brain irritability which would have overwhelmed any one less accustomed to make his account with illness, or to balance against feebleness of body a marvellous discipline of soul.
Lord Maxwell was still alive, and Hallin, in the midst of his work, was looking anxiously for the daily reports from Aldous, living in his friend"s life almost as much as in his own--handing on the reports, too, day by day to Marcella, with a manner which had somehow slipped into expressing a new and sure confidence in her sympathy--when she one evening found Minta Hurd watching for her at the door with a telegram from her mother: "Your father suddenly worse. Please come at once." She arrived at Mellor late that same night.
On the same day Lord Maxwell died. Less than a week later he was buried in the little Gairsley church. Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from time to time of what was pa.s.sing three miles away--of the great house in its mourning--of the figures round the grave. Hallin, of course, would be there. It was a dripping September day, and she pa.s.sed easily from moments of pa.s.sionate yearning and clairvoyance to worry herself about the damp and the fatigue that Hallin must be facing.
Since then she had heard occasionally from Miss Hallin. Everything was much as it had been, apparently. Edward was still hard at work, still ill, still serene. "Aldous"--Miss Hallin could not yet reconcile herself to the new name--was alone in the Curzon Street house, much occupied and hara.s.sed apparently by the legal business of the succession, by the election presently to be held in his own const.i.tuency, and by the winding-up of his work at the Home Office. He was to resign his under-secretaryship; but with the new session and a certain rearrangement of offices it was probable that he would be brought back into the Ministry. Meanwhile he was constantly with them; and she thought that his interest in Edward"s work and anxiety about his health were perhaps both good for him as helping to throw off something of his own grief and depression.
Whereby it will be noticed that Miss Hallin, like her brother, had by now come to speak intimately and freely to Marcella of her old lover and their friend.
Now for some days, however, she had received no letter from either brother or sister, and she was particularly anxious to hear. For this was the fourth of October, and on the second he was to have delivered the first of his addresses. How had the frail prophet sped? She had her fears. For her weekly "evenings" in Brown"s Buildings had shown her a good deal of the pa.s.sionate strength of feeling developed during the past year in connection with this particular propaganda. She doubted whether the London working man at the present moment was likely to give even Hallin a fair hearing on the point. However, Louis Craven was to be there. And he had promised to write even if Susie Hallin could find no time. Some report ought to reach Mellor by the evening.
Poor Cravens! The young wife, who was expecting a baby, had behaved with great spirit through the _Clarion_ trouble; and, selling their bits of furniture to pay their debts, they had gone to lodge near Anthony. Louis had got some odds and ends of designing and artistic work to do through his brother"s influence; and was writing where he could, here and there.
Marcella had introduced them to the Hallins, and Susie Hallin was taking a motherly interest in the coming child. Anthony, in his gloomy way, was doing all he could for them. But the struggle was likely to be a hard one, and Marcella had recognised of late that in Louis as in Anthony there were dangerous possibilities of melancholy and eccentricity. Her heart was often sore over their trouble and her own impotence.
Meantime for some wounds, at any rate, time had brought swift cautery!
Not three days after her final interview with Wharton, while the catastrophe in the Labour party was still in every one"s mouth, and the air was full of bitter speeches and recriminations, Hallin one evening laid down his newspaper with a sudden startled gesture, and then pushed it over to Marcella. There, in the columns devoted to personal news of various sorts, appeared the announcement:
"A marriage has been arranged between Mr. H.S. Wharfon, M.P. for West Brookshire, and Lady Selina Farrell, only surviving daughter of Lord Alresford. The ceremony will probably take place somewhere about Easter next. Meanwhile Mr. Wharton, whose health has suffered of late from his exertions in and out of the House, has been ordered to the East for rest by his medical advisers. He and his friend Sir William Ffolliot start for French Cochin China in a few days. Their object is to explore the famous ruined temples of Angkor in Cambodia, and if the season is favourable they may attempt to ascend the Mekong. Mr. Wharton is paired for the remainder of the session."
"Did you know anything of this?" said Hallin, with that careful carelessness in which people dress a dubious question.
"Nothing," she said quietly.
Then an impulse not to be stood against, springing from very mingled depths of feeling, drove her on. She, too, put down the paper, and laying her finger-tips together on her knee she said with an odd slight laugh:
"But I was the last person to know. About a fortnight ago Mr. Wharton proposed to me."
Hallin sprang from his chair, almost with a shout. "And you refused him?"