"Why, how late you are! Betty left reproaches for you."
"I had a walk with Dowson. Then two or three people caught me on the way back--Rashdell among others." (Lord Rashdell was Foreign Secretary.) "There are some interesting telegrams from Paris--I copied them out for you."
The country happened to be at the moment in the midst of one of its periodical difficulties with France. There had been a good deal of diplomatic friction, and a certain amount of anxiety at the Foreign Office. Marcella lit the silver kettle again and made her man some fresh tea, while he told her the news, and they discussed the various points of the telegrams he had copied for her, with a comrade"s freedom and vivacity. Then she said:
"Well, I have had an interesting time too! That young Tressady has been to tea."
"Oh! has he? They say there is a lot of stuff in him, and he may do us a great deal of mischief. How did you find him?"
"Oh, very clever, very limited--and a ma.s.s of prejudices," she said, laughing. "I never saw an odder mixture of knowledge and ignorance."
"What? Knowledge of India and the East?--that kind of thing?"
She nodded.
"Knowledge of everything except the subject he has come home to fight about! Do you know, Aldous--"
She paused. She was sitting on a stool beside him, her arm upon his knee.
"What do I know?" he said, his hand seeking hers.
"Well, I can"t help feeling that that man might live and learn. He isn"t a mere obstructive block--like the rest."
Maxwell laughed.
"Then Fontenoy is not as shrewd as usual. They say he regards him as their best recruit."
"Never mind. I rather wish you"d try to make friends with him."
Maxwell, however, helped himself to cake and made no response. On the two or three occasions on which he had met George Tressady, he had been conscious, if the truth were told, of a certain vague antipathy to the young man.
Marcella pondered.
"No," she said, "no--I don"t think after all he"s your sort. Suppose _I_ see what can be done!"
And she got up with her flashing smile--half love, half fun--and crossed the room to summon her little boy, Hallin, for his evening play. Maxwell looked after her, not heeding at all what she was saying, heeding only herself, her voice, the atmosphere of charm and life she carried with her.
CHAPTER VII
Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now filled all the horizon of her life. At the time when Aldous Raeburn, as he then was--the grandson and heir of old Lord Maxwell--came across her first she was a handsome, undeveloped girl, of a type not uncommon in our modern world, belonging by birth to the country-squire cla.s.s, and by the chances of a few years of student life in London to the youth that takes nothing on authority, and puts to fierce question whatever it finds already on its path--Governments, Churches, the powers of family and wealth--that takes, moreover, its social pity for the only standard, and spends that pity only on one sort and type of existence. She accepted Raeburn, then the best _parti_ in the county, without understanding or loving him, simply that she might use his power and wealth for certain social ends to which the crude philanthropy of her youth had pledged itself. Naturally, they were no sooner engaged than Raeburn found himself launched upon a long wrestle with the girl who had thus--in the selfishness of her pa.s.sionate idealist youth--opened her relation to him with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had stormy pa.s.sages, and was for a time wholly broken off. Aldous was made bitterly jealous, or miserably unhappy. Marcella left the old house in the neighbourhood of the Maxwell property, where her lover had first seen and courted her. She plunged into London life, and into nursing, that common outlet for the woman at war with herself or society. She suffered and struggled, and once or twice she came very near to throwing away all her chances of happiness. But in the end, Maxwell tamed her; Maxwell recovered her. The rise of love in the unruly, impetuous creature, when the rise came, was like the sudden growth of some great forest flower. It spread with transforming beauty over the whole nature, till at last the girl who had once looked upon him as the mere tool of her own moral ambitions threw herself upon Maxwell"s heart with a self-abandoning pa.s.sion and penitence, which her developed powers and her adorable beauty made a veritable intoxication.
And Maxwell was worthy that she should do this thing. When he and Marcella first met, he was a man of thirty, very able, very reserved, and often painfully diffident as to his own powers and future. He was the only young representative of a famous stock, and had grown up from his childhood under the shadow of great sorrows and heavy responsibilities.
The stuff of the poet and the thinker lay hidden behind his shy manners; and he loved Marcella Boyce with all the delicacy, all the idealising respect, that pa.s.sion generates in natures so strong and so highly tempered. At the same time, he had little buoyancy or gaiety; he had a belief in his cla.s.s, and a const.i.tutional dislike of change, which were always fighting in his mind with the energies of moral debate; and he acquiesced very easily--perhaps indifferently--in many outward conventions and prejudices.
The crisis through which Marcella put him developed and matured the man.
To the influences of love, moreover, were added the influences of friendship--of such a friendship as our modern time but seldom rears to perfection. In Raeburn"s college days, a man of rare and delicate powers had possessed himself of Raeburn"s tenacious affection, and had thenceforward played the leader to Raeburn"s strength, physical and moral, availing himself freely, wherever his own failed him, of the powers and capacities of his friend. For he himself bore in him from his youth up the seeds of physical failure and early death. It was partly the marvellous struggle in him of soul with body that subdued to him the homage of the stronger man. And it was clearly his influence that broke up and fired Raeburn"s slower and more distrustful temper, informing an inbred Toryism, a natural pa.s.sion for tradition, and the England of tradition with that "repining restlessness" which is the best spur of n.o.ble living.
Hallin was a lecturer and an economist; a man who lived in the perception of the great paradox that in our modern world political power has gone to the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast between the huge and growing "tyranny" of the working cla.s.s and the individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn and the young revolts and compa.s.sions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin"s death, in their sore and tender wish to make his thoughts tell upon the English world.
The Maxwells had now been married some five years, years of almost incredible happiness. The equal comradeship of marriage at its best and finest, all the daily disciplines, the profound and painless lessons of love, the covetous bliss of parentage, the constant anxieties of power n.o.bly understood, had harmonised the stormy nature of the woman, and had transformed the somewhat pessimist and scrupulous character of the man.
Not that life with Marcella Maxwell was always easy. Now as ever she remained on the moral side a creature of strain and effort, tormented by ideals not to be realised, and eager to drive herself and others in a breathless pursuit of them.
But if in some sort she seemed to be always dragging those that loved her through the heart of a tempest, the tempest had such golden moments! No wife had ever more capacity for all the delicacies and depths of pa.s.sion towards the man of her choice. All the anxieties she brought with her, all the perplexities and difficulties she imposed, had never yet seemed to Maxwell anything but divinely worth while. So far, indeed, he had never even remotely allowed himself to put the question. Her faults were her; and she was his light of life.
For some time after their marriage, which took place about a year after his accession to the t.i.tle and estates, they had lived at the stately house in Brookshire belonging to the Maxwells, and Marcella had thrown herself into the management of a large household and property with characteristic energy and originality. She had tried new ways of choosing and governing her servants; new ways of entertaining the poor, and of making Maxwell Court the centre, not of one cla.s.s, but of all. She ran up a fair score of blunders, but not one of them was the blunder of meanness or vulgarity. Her nature was inventive and poetic, and the rich fulfilment that had overtaken her own personal desires did but sting her eager pa.s.sion to give and to serve.
Meanwhile the family house in town was sold, and what with the birth of her son, and the multiplicity of the rural interests to which she had set her hand, Marcella felt no need of London. But towards the end of the second year she perceived--though he said little about it--that there was in her husband"s mind a strong and persistent drawing towards his former political interests and a.s.sociations. The late Lord Maxwell had sat in several Conservative cabinets, and his grandson, after a distinguished career in the House as a private member, had accepted a subordinate place in the Government only a few months before his grandfather"s death transferred him to the Lords. After that event, a scrupulous conscience had forced him to take landowning as a profession and an arduous one. The Premier made him flattering advances, and his friends remonstrated, but he had none the less relinquished office, and buried himself on his land.
Now, however, after some three years" hard and unremitting work, the estate was in excellent condition; the "new ways" of the new owners had been well started; and both Maxwell and Marcella had fitting lieutenants who could be left in charge. Moreover, matters were being agitated at the moment in politics which had special significance for the man"s idealist and reflective mind. His country friends and neighbours hardly understood why.
For it was merely a question of certain further measures of factory reform. A group of labour leaders were pressing upon the public and the Government a proposal to pa.s.s a special Factory Act for certain districts and trades of East London. In spite of Commissions, in spite of recent laws, "sweating," so it was urged, was as bad as ever--nay, in certain localities and industries was more frightful and more oppressive than ever. The waste of life and health involved in the great clothing industries of East London, for instance, which had provoked law after law, inquiry after inquiry, still went--so it was maintained--its hideous way.
"Have courage!" cried the reformers. "Take, at last, the only effectual step. Make it penal to practise certain trades in the houses of the people--drive them all into factories of a certain size, where alone these degraded industries can be humanised and controlled. Above all, make up your mind to a legal working day for East London men as well as East London women. Try the great experiment first of all in this omnivorous, inarticulate London, this dustbin for the rubbish of all nations. Here the problem is worst--here the victims are weakest and most manageable. London will bear what would stir a riot in Birmingham or Leeds. Make the experiment as partial and as tentative as you please--give the Home Office power to extend or revoke it at will--but _try it_!"
The change proposed was itself of vast importance, and was, moreover, but a prelude to things still more far-reaching. But, critical as it was, Maxwell was prepared for it. During the later years of his friend Hallin"s life the two men had constantly discussed the industrial consequences of democracy with unflagging eagerness and intelligence. To both it seemed not only inevitable, but the object of the citizen"s dearest hopes, that the rule of the people should bring with it, in ever-ascending degree, the ordering and moralising of the worker"s toil.
Yet neither had the smallest belief that any of the great civilised communities would ever see the State the sole landlord and the sole capitalist; or that Collectivism as a system has, or deserves to have, any serious prospects in the world. To both, possession--private and personal possession--from the child"s first toy, or the tiny garden where it sows its pa.s.sionately watched seeds, to the great business or the great estate, is one of the first and chiefest elements of human training, not to be escaped by human effort, or only at such a cost of impoverishment and disaster that mankind would but take the step--supposing it conceivable that it should take it--to retrace it instantly.
Maxwell"s _heart_, however, was much less concerned with this belief, tenaciously as he held it, than with its relative--the limitation of private possession by the authority of the common conscience. That "we are not our own" has not, indeed, been left to La.s.salle or Marx to discover. But if you could have moved this quiet Englishman to speak, he would have said--his strong, brooding face all kindled and alive--that the enormous industrial development of the past century has shown us the forces at work in the evolution of human societies on a gigantic scale, and by thus magnifying them has given us a new understanding of them. The vast extension of the individual will and power which science has brought to humanity during the last hundred years was always present to him as food for a natural exultation--a kind of pledge of the boundless prospects of the race. On the other hand the struggle of society brought face to face with this huge increment of the individual power, forced to deal with it for its own higher and mysterious ends, to moralise and socialise it lest it should destroy itself and the State together; the slow steps by which the modern community has succeeded in a.s.serting itself against the individual, in protecting the weak from his weakness, the poor from his poverty, in defending the woman and child from the fierce claims of capital, in forcing upon trade after trade the axiom that no man may lawfully build his wealth upon the exhaustion and degradation of his fellow--these things stirred in him the far deeper enthusiasms of the moral nature. Nay more! Together with all the other main facts which mark the long travail of man"s ethical and social life, they were among the only "evidences" of religion a critical mind allowed itself--the most striking signs of something "greater than we know"
working among the dust and ugliness of our common day. Attack wealth as wealth, possession as possession, and civilisation is undone. But bring the force of the social conscience to bear as keenly and ardently as you may, upon the separate activities of factory and household, farm and office; and from the results you will only get a richer individual freedom, one more ill.u.s.tration of the divinest law man serves--that he must "die to live," must surrender to obtain.
Such at least was Maxwell"s persuasion; though as a practical man he admitted, of course, many limitations of time, occasion, and degree. And long companionship with him had impressed the same faith also on Marcella. With the natural conceit of the shrewd woman, she would probably have maintained that her social creed came entirely of mother-wit and her own exertions--her experiences in London, reading, and the rest. In reality it was in her the pure birth of a pure pa.s.sion.
She had learnt it while she was learning to love Aldous Raeburn; and it need astonish no one that the more dependent all her various philosophies of life had become on the mere personal influence and joy of marriage, the more agile had she grown in all that concerned the mere intellectual defence of them. She could argue better and think better; but at bottom, if the truth were told, they were Maxwell"s arguments and Maxwell"s thoughts.
So that when this particular agitation began, and he grew restless in his silent way, she grew restless too. They took down the old worn portfolios of Hallin"s papers and letters, and looked through them, night after night, as they sat alone together in the great library of the Court. Both Marcella and Aldous could remember the writing of many of these innumerable drafts of Acts, these endless memoranda on special points, and must needs try, for love"s sake, to forget the terrible strain and effort with which a dying man had put them together. She was led by them to think of the many workmen friends she had made during the year of her nursing life; while he had remembrances of much personal work and investigation of his own, undertaken during the time of his under-secretaryship, to add to hers. Another Liberal government was slipping to its fall--if a Conservative government came in, with a possible opening in it for Aldous Maxwell, what then? Was the chance to be seized?
One May twilight, just before dinner, as the two were strolling up and down the great terrace just in front of the Court, Aldous paused and looked at the majestic house beside them.
"What"s the good of talking about these things while we live _there_?" he said, with a gesture towards the house, half impatient, half humorous.
Marcella laughed. Then she sprang away from him, considering, a sudden brightness in her eye. She had an idea.
The idea after all was a very simple one. But the probability is that, had she not been there to carry him through, Maxwell would have neither found it nor followed it. However that may be, in a very few days she had clothed it with fact, and made so real a thing of it that she was amazed at her own success. She and Maxwell had settled themselves in a small furnished house in the Mile End Road, and Maxwell was once more studying the problems of his measure that was to be in the midst of the populations to whom it applied. The house had been recently let in "apartments" by a young tradesman and his wife, well known to Marcella.
In his artisan days the man had been her friend, and for a time her patient. She knew how to put her hand on him at once.
They spent five months in the little house, while the London that knew them in St. James"s Square looked on, and made the comments--half amused, half inquisitive--that the act seemed to invite. There was of course no surprise. Nothing surprises the London of to-day. Or if there were any, it was all Marcella"s. In spite of her pa.s.sionate sympathy with the mult.i.tude who live in disagreeable homes on about a pound a week, she herself was very sensitive to the neighbourhood of beautiful things, to the charm of old homes, cool woods, green lawns, and the rise and fall of Brookshire hills. Against her wish, she had thought of sacrifice in thinking of the Mile End Road in August.
But there was no sacrifice. Frankly, these five months were among the happiest of her life. She and Maxwell were constantly together, from morning till night, doing the things that were congenial to them, and seeing the things that interested them. They went in and out of every factory and workshop in which certain trades were practised, within a three-mile radius; they became the intimate friends of every factory inspector and every trade-union official in the place. Luckily, Maxwell"s shyness--at least in Mile End--was not of the sort that can be readily mistaken for a haughty mind. He was always ready to be informed; his diffident kindness asked to be set at ease; while in any real ardour of debate his trained capacity and his stores of knowledge would put even the expert on his mettle.
As for Marcella, it was her idiosyncrasy that these tailors, furriers, machinists, shirtmakers, by whom she was surrounded in East London, stirred her imagination far more readily than the dwellers in great houses and the wearers of fine raiment had ever stirred it. And Marcella, in the kindled sympathetic state, was always delightful to herself and others. She revelled in the little house and its ugly, druggetted rooms; in the absence of all the usual paraphernalia of their life; in her undisturbed possession of the husband who was at once her lover and the best company she knew or could desire. On the few days when he left her for the day on some errand in which she could not share, to meet him at the train in the evening like any small clerk"s wife, to help him carry the books and papers with which he was generally laden along the hot and dingy street, to make him tea from her little spirit kettle, and then to hear the news of the day in the shade of the little s.m.u.tty back-garden, while the German charwoman who cooked for them had her way with the dinner--there was not an incident in the whole trivial procession that did not amuse and delight her. She renewed her youth; she escaped from the burdensome "glories of our birth, and state"; from that teasing "duty to our equals" on which only the wisest preachers have ever laid sufficient stress; and her one trouble was that the little masquerade must end.
One other drawback indeed, one more blight upon a golden time, there was.
Not even Marcella could make up her mind to transplant little Hallin, her only child, from Maxwell Court to East London. It was springtime, and the woods about the Court were breaking into sheets of white and blue.
Marcella must needs leave the boy to his flowers and his "grandame earth," sadly warned thereto by the cheeks of other little boys in and about the Mile End Road. But every Friday night she and Maxwell said good-bye to the two little workhouse girls, and the German charwoman, and the village boy from Mellor, who supplied them with all the service they wanted in Mile End, took with them the ancient maid who had been Marcella"s mother"s maid, and fled home to Brookshire. So on Sat.u.r.day mornings it generally happened that little Hallin went out to inform his particular friend among the garden boys, that "Mummy had tum ome," and that he was not therefore so much his own master as usual. He explained that he had to show mummy "_eaps_ of things"--the two new kittens, the "edge-sparrer"s nest," and the "ump they"d made in the churchyard over old Tom Collins from the parish ouses," the sore place on the pony"s shoulder, the "ole that mummy"s orse had kicked in the stable door," and a host of other curiosities. By way of linking the child with the soil and its people, Marcella had taken care to give him nursemaids from the village. And the village being only some thirty miles from London, talked in the main the language of London, a language which it soon communicated to the tongue of Maxwell"s heir. Marcella tried to school her boy in vain. Hallin chattered, laughed, broadened his a"s and dropped all his h"s into a bottomless limbo none the less.