At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral fibre, got up to go.
Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the room drew her father"s eyes after her, and for the time his feeling towards her softened curiously. Well, _she_ had not made very much of her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty, and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain balm in the idea that she too--her mother"s daughter--with her Merritt blood--could be unlucky.
Marcella went about all day under a vague sense of impending trouble--the result, no doubt, of that intolerable threat of her father"s, against which she was, after all, so defenceless.
But whatever it was, it made her all the more nervous and sensitive about the Hallins; about her one true friend, to whom she was slowly revealing herself, even without speech; whose spiritual strength had been guiding and training her; whose physical weakness had drawn to him the maternal, the _spending_ instincts which her nursing life had so richly developed.
She strolled down the drive to meet the post. But there were no letters from London, and she came in, inclined to be angry indeed with Louis Craven for deserting her, but saying to herself at the same time that she must have heard if anything had gone wrong.
An hour or so later, just as the October evening was closing in, she was sitting dreaming over a dim wood-fire in the drawing-room. Her father, as might have been expected, had been very tired and comatose all day.
Her mother was with him; the London nurse was to sit up, and Marcella felt herself forlorn and superfluous.
Suddenly, in the silence of the house, she heard the front-door bell ring. There was a step in the hall--she sprang up--the door opened, and William, with fluttered emphasis, announced--
"Lord Maxwell!"
In the dusk she could just see his tall form--the short pause as he perceived her--then her hand was in his, and the paralysing astonishment of that first instant had disappeared under the grave emotion of his look.
"Will you excuse me," he said, "for coming at this hour? But I am afraid you have heard nothing yet of our bad news--and Hallin himself was anxious I should come and tell you. Miss Hallin could not write, and Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You haven"t then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?"
"No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was nothing--"
"Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it.
But when we got down here this afternoon, and there was nothing from you, both Miss Hallin and Edward felt sure you had not heard--and I walked over. It was a most painful, distressing scene, and he--is very ill."
"But you have brought him to the Court?" she said trembling, lost in the thought of Hallin, her quick breath coming and going. "He was able to bear the journey? Will you tell me?--will you sit down?"
He thanked her hurriedly, and took a seat opposite to her, within the circle of the firelight, so that she saw his deep mourning and the look of repressed suffering.
"The whole thing was extraordinary--I can hardly now describe it," he said, holding his hat in his hands and staring into the fire. "It began excellently. There was a very full room. Bennett was in the chair--and Edward seemed much as usual. He had been looking desperately ill, but he declared that he was sleeping better, and that his sister and I coddled him. Then,--directly he was well started!--I felt somehow that the audience was very hostile. And _he_ evidently felt it more and more.
There was a good deal of interruption and hardly any cheers--and I saw after a little--I was sitting not far behind him--that he was discouraged--that he had lost touch. It was presently clear, indeed, that the real interest of the meeting lay not in the least in what he had to say, but in the debate that was to follow. They meant to let him have his hour--but not a minute more. I watched the men about me, and I could see them following the clock--thirsting for their turn. Nothing that he said seemed to penetrate them in the smallest degree. He was there merely as a ninepin to be knocked over. I never saw a meeting so _possessed_ with a madness of fanatical conviction--it was amazing!"
He paused, looking sadly before him. She made a little movement, and he roused himself instantly.
"It was just a few minutes before he was to sit down--I was thankful!--when suddenly--I heard his voice change. I do not know now what happened--but I believe he completely lost consciousness of the scene before him--the sense of strain, of exhaustion, of making no way, must have snapped something. He began a sort of confession--a reverie in public--about himself, his life, his thoughts, his prayers, his hopes--mostly his religious hopes--for the working man, for England--I _never_ heard anything of the kind from him before--you know his reserve. It was so intimate--so painful--oh! so painful!"--he drew himself together with an involuntary shudder--"before this crowd, this eager hostile crowd which was only pining for him to sit down--to get out of their way. The men near me began to look at each other and t.i.tter. They wondered what he meant by maundering on like that--"d.a.m.ned canting stuff"--I heard one man near me call it. I tore off a bit of paper, and pa.s.sed a line to Bennett asking him to get hold of Edward, to stop it. But I think Bennett had rather lost his presence of mind, and I saw him look back at me and shake his head. Then time was up, and they began to shout him down."
Marcella made an exclamation of horror. He turned to her.
"I think it was the most tragic scene I ever saw," he said with a feeling as simple as it was intense. "This crowd so angry and excited--without a particle of understanding or sympathy--laughing, and shouting at him--and he in the midst--white as death--talking this strange nonsense--his voice floating in a high key, quite unlike itself.
At last just as I was getting up to go to him, I saw Bennett rise. But we were both too late. He fell at our feet!"
Marcella gave an involuntary sob! "What a horror!" she said, "what a martyrdom!"
"It was just that," he answered in a low voice--"It was a martyrdom. And when one thinks of the way in which for years past he has held these big meetings in the hollow of his hand, and now, because he crosses their pa.s.sion, their whim,--no kindness!--no patience--nothing but a blind hostile fury! Yet _they_ thought him a traitor, no doubt. Oh! it was all a tragedy!"
There was silence an instant. Then he resumed:
"We got him into the back room. Luckily there was a doctor on the platform. It was heart failure, of course, with brain prostration. We managed to get him home, and Susie Hallin and I sat up. He was delirious all night; but yesterday he rallied, and last night he begged us to move him out of London if we could. So we got two doctors and an invalid carriage, and by three this afternoon we were all at the Court. My aunt was ready for him--his sister is there--and a nurse. Clarke was there to meet him. He thinks he cannot possibly live more than a few weeks--possibly even a few days. The shock and strain have been irreparable."
Marcella lay back in her chair, struggling with her grief, her head and face turned away from him, her eyes hidden by her handkerchief. Then in some mysterious way she was suddenly conscious that Aldous was no longer thinking of Hallin, but of her.
"He wants very much to see you," he said, bending towards her; "but I know that you have yourself serious illness to nurse. Forgive me for not having enquired after Mr. Boyce. I trust he is better?"
She sat up, red-eyed, but mistress of herself. The tone had been all gentleness, but to her quivering sense some slight indefinable change--coldness--had pa.s.sed into it.
"He _is_ better, thank you--for the present. And my mother does not let me do very much. We have a nurse too. When shall I come?"
He rose.
"Could you--come to-morrow afternoon? There is to be a consultation of doctors in the morning, which will tire him. About six?--that was what he said. He is very weak, but in the day quite conscious and rational.
My aunt begged me to say how glad she would be--"
He paused. An invincible awkwardness took possession of both of them.
She longed to speak to him of his grandfather but could not find the courage.
When he was gone, she, standing alone in the firelight, gave one pa.s.sionate thought to the fact that so--in this tragic way--they had met again in this room where he had spoken to her his last words as a lover; and then, steadily, she put everything out of her mind but her friend--and death.
CHAPTER II.
Mrs. Boyce received Marcella"s news with more sympathy than her daughter had dared to hope for, and she made no remark upon Aldous himself and his visit, for which Marcella was grateful to her.
As they left the dining-room, after their short evening meal, to go up to Mr. Boyce, Marcella detained her mother an instant.
"Mamma, will you please not tell papa that--that Lord Maxwell came here this afternoon? And will you explain to him why I am going there to-morrow?"
Mrs. Boyce"s fair cheek flushed. Marcella saw that she understood.
"If I were you, I should not let your father talk to you any more about those things," she said with a certain proud impatience.
"If I can help it!" exclaimed Marcella. "Will you tell him, mamma,--about Mr. Hallin?--and how good he has been to me?"
Then her voice failed her, and, hurriedly leaving her mother at the top of the stairs, she went away by herself to struggle with a grief and smart almost unbearable.
That night pa.s.sed quietly at the Court. Hallin was at intervals slightly delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as calmer and a little stronger. But the heart mischief was hopeless, and might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.
He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous"s sitting-room, drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide range of wood and plain that it commanded. After a very wet September, the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny peace. The great woods of the Chilterns, just yellowing towards that full golden moment--short, like all perfection,--which only beeches know, rolled down the hill-slopes to the plain, their curving lines cut here and there by straight fir stems, drawn clear and dark on the pale background of sky and lowland. In the park, immediately below the window, groups of wild cherry and of a slender-leaved maple made spots of "flame and amethyst" on the smooth falling lawns; the deer wandered and fed, and the squirrels were playing and feasting among the beech nuts.
Since Aldous and his poor sister had brought him home from the Bethnal Green hall in which the Land Reform Conference had been held, Hallin had spoken little, except in delirium, and that little had been marked by deep and painful depression. But this morning, when Aldous was summoned by the nurse, and found him propped up by the window, in front of the great view, he saw gracious signs of change. Death, indeed, already in possession, looked from the blue eyes so plainly that Aldous, on his first entrance, had need of all his own strength of will to keep his composure. But with the certainty of that great release, and with the abandonment of all physical and mental struggle--the struggle of a lifetime--Hallin seemed to-day to have recovered something of his characteristic serenity and blitheness--the temper which had made him the leader of his Oxford contemporaries, and the dear comrade of his friend"s life.
When Aldous came in, Hallin smiled and lifted a feeble hand towards the park and the woods.
"Could it have greeted me more kindly," he said, in his whispering voice, "for the end?"
Aldous sat down beside him, pressing his hand, and there was silence till Hallin spoke again.