Chapter V…

Chapter V

Before she went home, Marcella turned into the little rectory garden to see if she could find Mary Harden for a minute or two. The intimacy between them was such that she generally found entrance to the house by going round to a garden door and knocking or calling. The house was very small, and Mary's little sitting-room was close to this door.

Her knock brought Mary instantly.

"Oh! come in. You won't mind. We were just at dinner. Charles is going away directly. Do stay and talk to me a bit."

Marcella hesitated, but at last went in. The meals at the rectory distressed her--the brother and sister showed the marks of them. To-day she found their usual fare carefully and prettily arranged on a spotless table; some bread, cheese, and boiled rice--nothing else. Nor did they allow themselves any fire for meals. Marcella, sitting beside them in her fur, did not feel the cold, but Mary was clearly shivering under her shawl. They eat meat twice a week, and in the afternoon Mary lit the sitting-room fire. In the morning she contented herself with the kitchen, where, as she cooked for many sick folk, and had only a girl of fourteen whom she was training to help her with the housework, she had generally much to do.

The Rector did not stay long after her arrival. He had a distant visit to pay to a dying child, and hurried off so as to be home, if possible, before dark. Marcella admired him, but did not feel that she understood him more as they were better acquainted. He was slight and young, and not very clever; but a certain inexpugnable dignity surrounded him, which, real as it was, sometimes irritated Marcella. It sat oddly on his round face--boyish still, in spite of its pinched and anxious look--but there it was, not to be ignored. Marcella thought him a Conservative, and very backward and ignorant in his political and social opinions. But she was perfectly conscious that she must also think him a saint; and that the deepest things in him were probably not for her.

Mr. Harden said a few words to her now as to her straw-plaiting scheme, which had his warmest sympathy--Marcella contrasted his tone gratefully with that of Wharton, and once more fell happily in love with her own ideas--then he went off, leaving the two girls together.

"Have you seen Mrs. Hurd this morning?" said Mary.

"Yes, Willie seems very bad."

Mary assented.

"The doctor says he will hardly get through the winter, especially if this weather goes on. But the greatest excitement of the village just now--do you know?--is the quarrel between Hurd and Westall. Somebody told Charles yesterday that they never meet without threatening each other. Since the covers at Tudley End were raided, Westall seems to have quite lost his head. He declares Hurd knew all about that, and that he is hand and glove with the same gang still. He vows he will catch him out, and Hurd told the man who told Charles that if Westall bullies him any more he will put a knife into him. And Charles says that Hurd is not a bit like he was. He used to be such a patient, silent creature. Now--"

"He has woke up to a few more ideas and a little more life than he had, that's all," said Marcella, impatiently. "He poached last winter, and small blame to him. But since he got work at the Court in November--is it likely? He knows that he was suspected; and what could be his interest now, after a hard day's work, to go out again at night, and run the risk of falling into Westall's clutches, when he doesn't want either the food or the money?"

"I don't know," said Mary, shaking her head. "Charles says, if they once do it, they hardly ever leave it off altogether. It's the excitement and amusement of it."

"He promised me," said Marcella, proudly.

"They promise Charles all sorts of things," said Mary, slyly; "but they don't keep to them."

Warmly grateful as both she and the Rector had been from the beginning to Marcella for the passionate interest she took in the place and the people, the sister was sometimes now a trifle jealous--divinely jealous--for her brother. Marcella's unbounded confidence in her own power and right over Mellor, her growing tendency to ignore anybody else's right or power, sometimes set Mary aflame, for Charles's sake, heartily and humbly as she admired her beautiful friend.

"I shall speak to Mr. Raeburn about it," said Marcella.

She never called him "Aldous" to anybody--a stiffness which jarred a little upon the gentle, sentimental Mary.

"I saw you pass," she said, "from one of the top windows. He was with you, wasn't he?"

A slight colour sprang to her sallow cheek, a light to her eyes. Most wonderful, most interesting was this engagement to Mary, who--strange to think!--had almost brought it about. Mr. Raeburn was to her one of the best and noblest of men, and she felt quite simply, and with a sort of Christian trembling for him, the romance of his great position. Was Marcella happy, was she proud of him, as she ought to be? Mary was often puzzled by her.

"Oh no!" said Marcella, with a little laugh. "That wasn't Mr. Raeburn. I don't know where your eyes were, Mary. That was Mr. Wharton, who is staying with us. He has gone on to a meeting at Widrington."

Mary's face fell.

"Charles says Mr. Wharton's influence in the village is very bad," she said quickly. "He makes everybody discontented; sets everybody by the ears; and, after all, what can he do for anybody?"

"But that's just what he wants to do--to make them discontented," cried Marcella. "Then, if they vote for him, that's the first practical step towards improving their life."

"But it won't give them more wages or keep them out of the public house," said Mary, bewildered. She came of a homely middle-class stock, accustomed to a small range of thinking, and a high standard of doing. Marcella's political opinions were an amazement, and on the whole a scandal to her. She preferred generally to give them a wide berth.

Marcella did not reply. It was not worth while to talk to Mary on these topics. But Mary stuck to the subject a moment longer.

"You can't want him to get in, though?" she said in a puzzled voice, as she led the way to the little sitting-room across the passage, and took her workbasket out of the cupboard. "It was only the week before last Mr. Raeburn was speaking at the schoolroom for Mr. Dodgson. You weren't there, Marcella?"

"No," said Marcella, shortly. "I thought you knew perfectly well, Mary, that Mr. Raeburn and I don't agree politically. Certainly, I hope Mr. Wharton will get in!"

Mary opened her eyes in wonderment. She stared at Marcella, forgetting the sock she had just slipped over her left hand, and the darning needle in her right.

Marcella laughed.

"I know you think that two people who are going to be married ought to say ditto to each other in everything. Don't you--you dear old goose?"

She came and stood beside Mary, a stately and beautiful creature in her loosened furs. She stroked Mary's straight sandy hair back from her forehead. Mary looked up at her with a thrill, nay, a passionate throb of envy--soon suppressed.

"I think," she said steadily, "it is very strange--that love should oppose and disagree with what it loves."

Marcella went restlessly towards the fire and began to examine the things on the mantelpiece.

"Can't people agree to differ, you sentimentalist? Can't they respect each other, without echoing each other on every subject?"

"Respect!" cried Mary, with a sudden scorn, which was startling from a creature so soft.

"There, she could tear me in pieces!" said Marcella, laughing, though her lip was not steady. "I wonder what you would be like, Mary, if you were engaged."

Mary ran her needle in and out with lightning speed for a second or two, then she said almost under her breath--

"I shouldn't be engaged unless I were in love. And if I were in love, why, I would go anywhere--do anything--believe anything--if he told me!"

"Believe anything?--Mary--you wouldn't!"

"I don't mean as to religion," said Mary, hastily. "But everything else--I would give it all up!--governing one's self, thinking for one's self. He should do it, and I would bless him!"

She looked up crimson, drawing a very long breath, as though from some deep centre of painful, passionate feeling. It was Marcella's turn to stare. Never had Mary so revealed herself before.

"Did you ever love any one like that, Mary?" she asked quickly.

Mary dropped her head again over her work and did not answer immediately.

"Do you see--" she said at last, with a change of tone, "do you see that we have got our invitation?"

Marcella, about to give the rein to an eager curiosity Mary's manner had excited in her, felt herself pulled up sharply. When she chose, this little meek creature could put on the same unapproachableness as her brother. Marcella submitted.

"Yes, I see," she said, taking up a card on the mantelpiece. "It will be a great crush. I suppose you know. They have asked the whole county, it seems to me."

The card bore an invitation in Miss Raeburn's name for the Rector and his sister to a dance at Maxwell Court--the date given was the twenty-fifth of January.

"What fun!" said Mary, her eye sparkling. "You needn't suppose that I know enough of balls to be particular. I have only been to one before in my life--ever. That was at Cheltenham. An aunt took me--I didn't dance. There were hardly any men, but I enjoyed it."

"Well, you shall dance this time," said Marcella, "for I will make Mr. Raeburn introduce you."

"Nonsense, you won't have any time to think about me. You will be the queen--everybody will want to speak to you. I shall sit in a corner and look at you--that will be enough for me."

Marcella went up to her quickly and kissed her, then she said, still holding her--

"I know you think I ought to be very happy, Mary!"

"I should think I do!" said Mary, with astonished emphasis, when the voice paused--"I should think I do!"

"I am happy--and I want to make him happy. But there are so many things, so many different aims and motives, that complicate life, that puzzle one. One doesn't know how much to give of one's self, to each--"

She stood with her hand on Mary's shoulder, looking away towards the window and the snowy garden, her brow frowning and distressed.

"Well, I don't understand," said Mary, after a pause. "As I said before, it seems to me so plain and easy--to be in love, and give one's self all--to that. But you are so much cleverer than I, Marcella, you know so much more. That makes the difference. I can't be like you. Perhaps I don't want to be!"--and she laughed. "But I can admire you and love you, and think about you. There, now, tell me what you are going to wear?"

"White satin, and Mr. Raeburn wants me to wear some pearls he is going to give me, some old pearls of his mother's. I believe I shall find them at Mellor when I get back."

There was little girlish pleasure in the tone. It was as though Marcella thought her friend would be more interested in her bit of news than she was herself, and was handing it on to her to please her.

"Isn't there a superstition against doing that--before you're married?" said Mary, doubtfully.

"As if I should mind if there was! But I don't believe there is, or Miss Raeburn would have heard of it. She's a mass of such things. Well! I hope I shall behave myself to please her at this function. There are not many things I do to her satisfaction; it's a mercy we're not going to live with her. Lord Maxwell is a dear; but she and I would never get on. Every way of thinking she has, rubs me up the wrong way; and as for her view of me, I am just a tare sown among her wheat. Perhaps she is right enough!"

Marcella leant her cheek pensively on one hand, and with the other played with the things on the mantelpiece.

Mary looked at her, and then half smiled, half sighed.

"I think it is a very good thing you are to be married soon," she said, with her little air of wisdom, which offended nobody. "Then you'll know your own mind. When is it to be?"

"The end of February--after the election."

"Two months," mused Mary.

"Time enough to throw it all up in, you think?" said Marcella, recklessly, putting on her gloves for departure. "Perhaps you'll be pleased to hear that I am going to a meeting of Mr. Raeburn's next week?"

"I am glad. You ought to go to them all."

"Really, Mary! How am I to lift you out of this squaw theory of matrimony? Allow me to inform you that the following evening I am going to one of Mr. Wharton's--here in the schoolroom!"

She enjoyed her friend's disapproval.

"By yourself, Marcella? It isn't seemly!"

"I shall take a maid. Mr. Wharton is going to tell us how the people can--get the land, and how, when they have got it, all the money that used to go in rent will go in taking off taxes and making life comfortable for the poor." She looked at Mary with a teasing smile.

"Oh! I dare say he will make his stealing sound very pretty," said Mary, with unwonted scorn, as she opened the front door for her friend.

Marcella flashed out.

"I know you are a saint, Mary," she said, turning back on the path outside to deliver her last shaft. "I am often not so sure whether you are a Christian!"

Then she hurried off without another word, leaving the flushed and shaken Mary to ponder this strange dictum.

* * * * *

Marcella was just turning into the straight drive which led past the church on the left to Mellor House, when she heard footsteps behind her, and, looking round, she saw Edward Hallin.

"Will you give me some lunch, Miss Boyce, in return for a message? I am here instead of Aldous, who is very sorry for himself, and will be over later. I am to tell you that he went down to the station to meet a certain box. The box did not come, but will come this afternoon; so he waits for it, and will bring it over."

Marcella flushed, smiled, and said she understood. Hallin moved on beside her, evidently glad of the opportunity of a talk with her.

"We are all going together to the Gairsley meeting next week, aren't we? I am so glad you are coming. Aldous will do his best."

There was something very winning in his tone to her. It implied both his old and peculiar friendship for Aldous, and his eager wish to find a new friend in her--to adopt her into their comradeship. Something very winning, too, in his whole personality--in the loosely knit, nervous figure, the irregular charm of feature, the benignant eyes and brow--even in the suggestions of physical delicacy, cheerfully concealed, yet none the less evident. The whole balance of Marcella's temper changed in some sort as she talked to him. She found herself wanting to please, instead of wanting to conquer, to make an effect.

"You have just come from the village, I think?" said Hallin. "Aldous tells me you take a great interest in the people?"

He looked at her kindly, the look of one who saw all his fellow-creatures nobly, as it were, and to their best advantage.

"One may take an interest," she said, in a dissatisfied voice, poking at the snow crystals on the road before her with the thorn-stick she carried, "but one can do so little. And I don't know anything; not even what I want myself."

"No; one can do next to nothing. And systems and theories don't matter, or, at least, very little. Yet, when you and Aldous are together, there will be more chance of doing, for you than for most. You will be two happy and powerful people! His power will be doubled by happiness; I have always known that."

Marcella was seized with shyness, looked away, and did not know what to answer. At last she said abruptly--her head still turned to the woods on her left--

"Are you sure he is going to be happy?"

"Shall I produce his letter to me?" he said, bantering--"or letters? For I knew a great deal about you before October 5" (their engagement-day), "and suspected what was going to happen long before Aldous did. No; after all, no! Those letters are my last bit of the old friendship. But the new began that same day," he hastened to add, smiling: "It may be richer than the old; I don't know. It depends on you."

"I don't think--I am a very satisfactory friend," said Marcella, still awkward, and speaking with difficulty.

"Well, let me find out, won't you? I don't think Aldous would call me exacting. I believe he would give me a decent character, though I tease him a good deal. You must let me tell you sometime what he did for me--what he was to me--at Cambridge? I shall always feel sorry for Aldous's wife that she did not know him at college."

A shock went through Marcella at the word--that tremendous word--wife. As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made!

"I should like you to tell me," she said faintly. Then she added, with more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, "But you really must come in and rest. Aldous told me he thought the walk from the Court was too much for you. Shall we take this short way?"

And she opened a little gate leading to a door at the side of the house through the Cedar Garden. The narrow path only admitted of single file, and Hallin followed her, admiring her tall youth and the fine black and white of her head and cheek as she turned every now and then to speak to him. He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of her beauty, and the truth in Aldous's comparison of her to one of the tall women in a Florentine fresco. But he felt himself a good deal baffled by her, all the same. In some ways, so far as any man who is not the lover can understand such things, he understood why Aldous had fallen in love with her; in others, she bore no relation whatever to the woman his thoughts had been shaping all these years as his friend's fit and natural wife.

Luncheon passed as easily as any meal could be expected to do, of which Mr. Boyce was partial president. During the preceding month or two he had definitely assumed the character of an invalid, although to inexperienced eyes like Marcella's there did not seem to be very much the matter. But, whatever the facts might be, Mr. Boyce's adroit use of them had made a great difference to his position in his own household. His wife's sarcastic freedom of manner was less apparent; and he was obviously less in awe of her. Meanwhile he was as sore as ever towards the Raeburns, and no more inclined to take any particular pleasure in Marcella's prospects, or to make himself agreeable towards his future son-in-law. He and Mrs. Boyce had been formally asked in Miss Raeburn's best hand to the Court ball, but he had at once snappishly announced his intention of staying at home. Marcella sometimes looked back with astonishment to his eagerness for social notice when they first came to Mellor. Clearly the rising irritability of illness had made it doubly unpleasant to him to owe all that he was likely to get on that score to his own daughter; and, moreover, he had learnt to occupy himself more continuously on his own land and with his own affairs.

As to the state of the village, neither Marcella's entreaties nor reproaches had any effect upon him. When it appeared certain that he would be summoned for some specially flagrant piece of neglect he would spend a few shillings on repairs; otherwise not a farthing. All that filial softening towards him of which Marcella had been conscious in the early autumn had died away in her. She said to herself now plainly and bitterly that it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the smallest expression of such a feeling. As it was, she was left to wonder and chafe at her mother's new-born mildness.

In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.

"I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night," he said. "He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that you would not agree with it. But I wanted you to see how he does these things. He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week. Each time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes out what he has to say. Then he speaks it entirely without notes. In this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself gradually an effective and practical speaker. The danger with him, of course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical--not simple and popular enough."

Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.

"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?" he said to her, but in a lower voice, and sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder--wonder at Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her. It was inevitable, of course--youth and beauty rule the world. But the mother, under no spell herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the lowering of standards involved.

"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question, fidgeting the papers under her hand. Then his curious confessor's gift, his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all before him, told upon her.

"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that must come," she added hurriedly. "This is all about details, palliatives. I want him to be more impatient."

"Great political changes you mean?"

She nodded; then added--

"But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come after."

He pondered a moment.

"Aldous has never believed in great changes coming suddenly. He constantly looks upon me as rash in the things I adopt and believe in. But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more equitably, I have never seen Aldous's equal--for the steady passion, the persistence, of it."

She looked up. His pale face had taken to itself glow and fire; his eyes were full of strenuous, nay, severe expression. Her foolish pride rebelled a little.

"Of course, I haven't seen much of that yet," she said slowly.

His look for a moment was indignant, incredulous, then melted into a charming eagerness.

"But you will! naturally you will!--see everything. I hug myself sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather and I will know what Aldous is and does. Oh! the people on the estate know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high intelligence have the power I believe. But I am impatient! In the first place--I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!--I want Aldous to come out of that manner of his to strangers, which is the only bit of the true Tory in him; you can get rid of it, no one else can--How long shall I give you?--And in the next, I want the world not to be wasting itself on baser stuff when it might be praising Aldous!"

"Does he mean Mr. Wharton?" thought Marcella, quickly. "But this world--our world--hates him and runs him down."

But she had no time to answer, for the door opened to admit Aldous, flushed and bright-eyed, looking round the room immediately for her, and bearing a parcel in his left hand.

"Does she love him at all?" thought Hallin, with a nervous stiffening of all his lithe frame, as he walked away to talk to Mrs. Boyce, "or, in spite of all her fine talk, is she just marrying him for his money and position!"

Meanwhile, Aldous had drawn Marcella into the Stone Parlour and was standing by the fire with his arm covetously round her.

"I have lost two hours with you I might have had, just because a tiresome man missed his train. Make up for it by liking these pretty things a little, for my sake and my mother's."

He opened the jeweller's case, took out the fine old pearls--necklace and bracelets--it contained, and put them into her hand. They were his first considerable gift to her, and had been chosen for association's sake, seeing that his mother had also worn them before her marriage.

She flushed first of all with a natural pleasure, the girl delighting in her gaud. Then she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed, inevitable. Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he began to be puzzled by her.

"They are much too good for me. I don't know whether you ought to give me such precious things. I am dreadfully careless and forgetful. Mamma always says so."

"I shall want you to wear them so often that you won't have a chance of forgetting them," he said gaily.

"Will you? Will you want me to wear them so often?" she asked, in an odd voice. "Anyway, I should like to have just these, and nothing else. I am glad that we know nobody, and have no friends, and that I shall have so few presents. You won't give me many jewels, will you?" she said suddenly, insistently, turning to him. "I shouldn't know what to do with them. I used to have a magpie's wish for them; and now--I don't know, but they don't give me pleasure. Not these, of course--not these!" she added hurriedly, taking them up and beginning to fasten the bracelets on her wrists.

Aldous looked perplexed.

"My darling!" he said, half laughing, and in the tone of the apologist, "You know we have such a lot of things. And I am afraid my grandfather will want to give them all to you. Need one think so much about it? It isn't as though they had to be bought fresh. They go with pretty gowns, don't they, and other people like to see them?"

"No, but it's what they imply--the wealth--the having so much while other people want so much. Things begin to oppress me so!" she broke out, instinctively moving away from him that she might express herself with more energy. "I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having. You must not let me like them--you must help me not to care about them!"

Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself. He could of course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside. This question she had raised, this most thorny of all the personal questions of the present--the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and its vanities--was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and robustly real to him than it was to her. Every word in his few sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.

But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of another tune which she seemed to be perpetually trying to recall and piece together. Aldous's slow minor made her impatient.

He turned presently to ask her what she had been doing with her morning--asking her with a certain precision, and observing her attentively. She replied that she had been showing Mr. Wharton the house, that he had walked down with her to the village, and was gone to a meeting at Widrington. Then she remarked that he was very good company, and very clever, but dreadfully sure of his own opinion. Finally she laughed, and said drily:

"There will be no putting him down all the same. I haven't told anybody yet, but he saved my life this morning."

Aldous caught her wrists.

"Saved your life! Dear--What do you mean?"

She explained, giving the little incident all--perhaps more than--its dramatic due. He listened with evident annoyance, and stood pondering when she came to an end.

"So I shall be expected to take quite a different view of him henceforward?" he inquired at last, looking round at her, with a very forced smile.

"I am sure I don't know that it matters to him what view anybody takes of him," she cried, flushing. "He certainly takes the frankest views of other people, and expresses them."

And while she played with the pearls in their box she gave a vivid account of her morning's talk with the Radical candidate for West Brookshire, and of their village expedition.

There was a certain relief in describing the scorn with which her acts and ideals had been treated; and, underneath, a woman's curiosity as to how Aldous would take it.

"I don't know what business he had to express himself so frankly," said Aldous, turning to the fire and carefully putting it together. "He hardly knows you--it was, I think, an impertinence."

He stood upright, with his back to the hearth, a strong, capable, frowning Englishman, very much on his dignity. Such a moment must surely have become him in the eyes of a girl that loved him. Marcella proved restive under it.

"No; it's very natural," she protested quickly. "When people are so much in earnest they don't stop to think about impertinence! I never met any one who dug up one's thoughts by the roots as he does."

Aldous was startled by her flush, her sudden attitude of opposition. His intermittent lack of readiness overtook him, and there was an awkward silence. Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said:

"I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not liking Mr. Wharton?--other than politics, I mean?"

Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.

He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said:

"I had rather not rake up old scores."

She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.

"Dearest," he said, "you shall put me in charity with all the world. But the worst of it is," he added, half laughing, "that I don't see how I am to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put that fire out instead of me!"

Chapter VI

A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after years, passed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January. Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active throughout the constituencies, were carried forward with redoubled energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock--a former fag indeed of his at Eton--whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do. Under ordinary circumstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days went over, he found his appetite for the struggle flagging, and was harassed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations; and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to himself but to others.

In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could snatch from a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal fortunes were all deeply interested. In vain--with a tardy instinct that it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long stay at Mellor was largely owing--did Aldous subdue himself to propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least twice in Raeburn's hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce's indignation nor Marcella's discomfort and annoyance could restrain. Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions to the Radical candidate he was asserting his independence of the Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns' heir. Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a sickly and disappointed man. Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton. But it seemed to be no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once have taken to get rid of him.

In vain, too, did Miss Raeburn do her best for the nephew to whom she was still devoted, in spite of his deplorable choice of a wife. She took in the situation as a whole probably sooner than anybody else, and she instantly made heroic efforts to see more of Marcella, to get her to come oftener to the Court, and in many various ways to procure the poor deluded Aldous more of his betrothed's society. She paid many chattering and fussy visits to Mellor--visits which chafed Marcella--and before long, indeed, roused a certain suspicion in the girl's wilful mind. Between Miss Raeburn and Mrs. Boyce there was a curious understanding. It was always tacit, and never amounted to friendship, still less to intimacy. But it often yielded a certain melancholy consolation to Aldous Raeburn's great-aunt. It was clear to her that this strange mother was just as much convinced as she was that Aldous was making a great mistake, and that Marcella was not worthy of him. But the engagement being there--a fact not apparently to be undone--both ladies showed themselves disposed to take pains with it, to protect it against aggression. Mrs. Boyce found herself becoming more of a chaperon than she had ever yet professed to be; and Miss Raeburn, as we have said, made repeated efforts to capture Marcella and hold her for Aldous, her lawful master.

But Marcella proved extremely difficult to manage. In the first place she was a young person of many engagements. Her village scheme absorbed a great deal of time. She was deep in a varied correspondence, in the engagement of teachers, the provision of work-rooms, the collecting and registering of workers, the organisation of local committees and so forth. New sides of the girl's character, new capacities and capabilities were coming out; new forms of her natural power over her fellows were developing every day; she was beginning, under the incessant stimulus of Wharton's talk, to read and think on social and economic subjects, with some system and coherence, and it was evident that she took a passionate mental pleasure in it all. And the more pleasure these activities gave her, the less she had to spare for those accompaniments of her engagement and her position that was to be, which once, as Mrs. Boyce's sharp eyes perceived, had been quite normally attractive to her.

"Why do you take up her time so, with all these things?" said Miss Raeburn impatiently to Lady Winterbourne, who was now Marcella's obedient helper in everything she chose to initiate. "She doesn't care for anything she ought to care about at this time, and Aldous sees nothing of her. As for her trousseau, Mrs. Boyce declares she has had to do it all. Marcella won't even go up to London to have her wedding-dress fitted!"

Lady Winterbourne looked up bewildered.

"But I can't make her go and have her wedding-dress fitted, Agneta! And I always feel you don't know what a fine creature she is. You don't really appreciate her. It's splendid the ideas she has about this work, and the way she throws herself into it."

"I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, indignantly. "That's just what I object to. Why can't she throw herself into being in love with Aldous! That's her business, I imagine, just now--if she were a young woman like anybody else one had ever seen--instead of holding aloof from everything he does, and never being there when he wants her. Oh! I have no patience with her. But, of course, I must--" said Miss Raeburn, hastily correcting herself--"of course, I must have patience."

"It will all come right, I am sure, when they are married," said Lady Winterbourne, rather helplessly.

"That's just what my brother says," cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "He won't hear a word--declares she is odd and original, and that Aldous will soon know how to manage her. It's all very well; nowadays men don't manage their wives; that's all gone with the rest. And I am sure, my dear, if she behaves after she is married as she is doing now, with that most objectionable person Mr. Wharton--walking, and talking, and taking up his ideas, and going to his meetings--she'll be a handful for any husband."

"Mr. Wharton!" said Lady Winterbourne, astonished. Her absent black eyes, the eyes of the dreamer, of the person who lives by a few intense affections, saw little or nothing of what was going on immediately under them. "Oh! but that is because he is staying in the house, and he is a Socialist; she calls herself one--"

"My dear," said Miss Raeburn, interrupting emphatically; "if--you--had--now--an unmarried daughter at home--engaged or not--would you care to have Harry Wharton hanging about after her?"

"Harry Wharton?" said the other, pondering; "he is the Levens' cousin, isn't he? he used to stay with them. I don't think I have seen him since then. But yes, I do remember; there was something--something disagreeable?"

She stopped with a hesitating, interrogative air. No one talked less scandal, no one put the uglinesses of life away from her with a hastier hand than Lady Winterbourne. She was one of the most consistent of moral epicures.

"Yes, extremely disagreeable," said Miss Raeburn, sitting bolt upright. "The man has no principles--never had any, since he was a child in petticoats. I know Aldous thinks him unscrupulous in politics and everything else. And then, just when you are worked to death, and have hardly a moment for your own affairs, to have a man of that type always at hand to spend odd times with your lady love--flattering her, engaging her in his ridiculous schemes, encouraging her in all the extravagances she has got her head twice too full of already, setting her against your own ideas and the life she will have to live--you will admit that it is not exactly soothing!"

"Poor Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully, looking far ahead with her odd look of absent rigidity, which had in reality so little to do with a character essentially soft; "but you see he did know all about her opinions. And I don't think--no, I really don't think--I could speak to her."

In truth, this woman of nearly seventy--old in years, but wholly young in temperament--was altogether under Marcella's spell--more at ease with her already than with most of her own children, finding in her satisfaction for a hundred instincts, suppressed or starved by her own environment, fascinated by the girl's friendship, and eagerly grateful for her visits. Miss Raeburn thought it all both incomprehensible and silly.

"Apparently no one can!" cried that lady in answer to her friend's demurrer; "is all the world afraid of her?"

And she departed in wrath. But she knew, nevertheless, that she was just as much afraid of Marcella as anybody else. In her own sphere at the Court, or in points connected with what was due to the family, or to Lord Maxwell especially, as the head of it, this short, capable old lady could hold her own amply with Aldous's betrothed, could maintain, indeed, a sharp and caustic dignity, which kept Marcella very much in order. Miss Raeburn, on the defensive, was strong; but when it came to attacking Marcella's own ideas and proceedings, Lord Maxwell's sister became shrewdly conscious of her own weaknesses. She had no wish to measure her wits on any general field with Marcella's. She said to herself that the girl was too clever and would talk you down.

Meanwhile, things went untowardly in various ways. Marcella disciplined herself before the Gairsley meeting, and went thither resolved to give Aldous as much sympathy as she could. But the performance only repelled a mind over which Wharton was every day gaining more influence. There was a portly baronet in the chair; there were various Primrose Dames on the platform and among the audience; there was a considerable representation of clergy; and the labourers present seemed to Marcella the most obsequious of their kind. Aldous spoke well--or so the audience seemed to think; but she could feel no enthusiasm for anything that he said. She gathered that he advocated a Government inspection of cottages, more stringent precautions against cattle disease, better technical instruction, a more abundant provision of allotments and small freeholds, &c.; and he said many cordial and wise-sounding things in praise of a progress which should go safely and wisely from step to step, and run no risks of dangerous reaction. But the assumptions on which, as she told herself rebelliously, it all went--that the rich and the educated must rule, and the poor obey; that existing classes and rights, the forces of individualism and competition, must and would go on pretty much as they were; that great houses and great people, the English land and game system, and all the rest of our odious class paraphernalia were in the order of the universe; these ideas, conceived as the furniture of Aldous's mind, threw her again into a ferment of passionate opposition. And when the noble baronet in the chair--to her eye, a pompous, frock-coated stick, sacrificing his after-dinner sleep for once, that he might the more effectually secure it in the future--proposed a vote of confidence in the Conservative candidate; when the vote was carried with much cheering and rattling of feet; when the Primrose Dames on the platform smiled graciously down upon the meeting as one smiles at good children in their moments of pretty behaviour; and when, finally, scores of toil-stained labourers, young and old, went up to have a word and a hand-shake with "Muster Raeburn," Marcella held herself aloof and cold, with a look that threatened sarcasm should she be spoken to. Miss Raeburn, glancing furtively round at her, was outraged anew by her expression.

"She will be a thorn in all our sides," thought that lady. "Aldous is a fool!--a poor dear noble misguided fool!"

Then on the way home, she and Aldous drove together. Marcella tried to argue, grew vehement, and said bitter things for the sake of victory, till at last Aldous, tired, worried, and deeply wounded, could bear it no longer.

"Let it be, dear, let it be!" he entreated, snatching at her hand as they rolled along through a stormy night. "We grope in a dark world--you see some points of light in it, I see others--won't you give me credit for doing what I can--seeing what I can? I am sure--sure--you will find it easier to bear with differences when we are quite together--when there are no longer all these hateful duties and engagements--and persons--between us."

"Persons! I don't know what you mean!" said Marcella.

Aldous only just restrained himself in time. Out of sheer fatigue and slackness of nerve he had been all but betrayed into some angry speech on the subject of Wharton, the echoes of whose fantastic talk, as it seemed to him, were always hanging about Mellor when he went there. But he did refrain, and was thankful. That he was indeed jealous and disturbed, that he had been jealous and disturbed from the moment Harry Wharton had set foot in Mellor, he himself knew quite well. But to play the jealous part in public was more than the Raeburn pride could bear. There was the dread, too, of defining the situation--of striking some vulgar irrevocable note.

So he parried Marcella's exclamation by asking her whether she had any idea how many human hands a parliamentary candidate had to shake between breakfast and bed; and then, having so slipped into another tone, he tried to amuse himself and her by some of the daily humours of the contest. She lent herself to it and laughed, her look mostly turned away from him, as though she were following the light of the carriage lamps as it slipped along the snow-laden hedges, her hand lying limply in his. But neither were really gay. His soreness of mind grew as in the pauses of talk he came to realise more exactly the failure of the evening--of his very successful and encouraging meeting--from his own private point of view.

"Didn't you like that last speech?" he broke out suddenly--"that labourer's speech? I thought you would. It was entirely his own idea--nobody asked him to do it."

In reality Gairsley represented a corner of the estate which Aldous had specially made his own. He had spent much labour and thought on the improvement of what had been a backward district, and in particular he had tried a small profit-sharing experiment upon a farm there which he had taken into his own hands for the purpose. The experiment had met with fair success, and the labourer in question, who was one of the workers in it, had volunteered some approving remarks upon it at the meeting.

"Oh! it was very proper and respectful!" said Marcella, hastily.

The carriage rolled on some yards before Aldous replied. Then he spoke in a drier tone than he had ever yet used to her.

"You do it injustice, I think. The man is perfectly independent, and an honest fellow. I was grateful to him for what he said."

"Of course, I am no judge!" cried Marcella, quickly--repentantly. "Why did you ask me? I saw everything crooked, I suppose--it was your Primrose Dames--they got upon my nerves. Why did you have them? I didn't mean to vex and hurt you--I didn't indeed--it was all the other way--and now I have."

She turned upon him laughing, but also half crying, as he could tell by the flutter of her breath.

He vowed he was not hurt, and once more changed both talk and tone. They reached the drive's end without a word of Wharton. But Marcella went to bed hating herself, and Aldous, after his solitary drive home, sat up long and late, feverishly pacing and thinking.

* * * * *

Then next evening how differently things fell!

Marcella, having spent the afternoon at the Court, hearing all the final arrangements for the ball, and bearing with Miss Raeburn in a way which astonished herself, came home full of a sense of duty done, and announced to her mother that she was going to Mr. Wharton's meeting in the Baptist chapel that evening.

"Unnecessary, don't you think?" said Mrs. Boyce, lifting her eyebrows. "However, if you go, I shall go with you."

Most mothers, dealing with a girl of twenty-one, under the circumstances, would have said, "I had rather you stayed at home." Mrs. Boyce never employed locutions of this kind. She recognised with perfect calmness that Marcella's bringing up, and especially her independent years in London, had made it impossible.

Marcella fidgeted.

"I don't know why you should, mamma. Papa will be sure to want you. Of course, I shall take Deacon."

"Please order dinner a quarter of an hour earlier, and tell Deacon to bring down my walking things to the hall," was all Mrs. Boyce said in answer.

Marcella walked upstairs with her head very stiff. So her mother, and Miss Raeburn too, thought it necessary to keep watch on her. How preposterous! She thought of her free and easy relations with her Kensington student-friends, and wondered when a more reasonable idea of the relations between men and women would begin to penetrate English country society.

Mr. Boyce talked recklessly of going too.

"Of course, I know he will spout seditious nonsense," he said irritably to his wife, "but it's the fellow's power of talk that is so astonishing. He isn't troubled with your Raeburn heaviness."

Marcella came into the room as the discussion was going on.

"If papa goes," she said in an undertone to her mother as she passed her, "it will spoil the meeting. The labourers will turn sulky. I shouldn't wonder if they did or said something unpleasant. As it is, you had much better not come, mamma. They are sure to attack the cottages--and other things."

Mrs. Boyce took no notice as far as she herself was concerned, but her quiet decision at last succeeded in leaving Mr. Boyce safely settled by the fire, provided as usual with a cigarette and a French novel.

The meeting was held in a little iron Baptist chapel, erected some few years before on the outskirts of the village, to the grief and scandal of Mr. Harden. There were about a hundred and twenty labourers present, and at the back some boys and girls, come to giggle and make a noise--nobody else. The Baptist minister, a smooth-faced young man, possessed, as it turned out, of opinions little short of Wharton's own in point of vigour and rigour, was already in command. A few late comers, as they slouched in, stole side looks at Marcella and the veiled lady in black beside her, sitting in the corner of the last bench; and Marcella nodded to one or two of the audience, Jim Hurd amongst them. Otherwise no one took any notice of them. It was the first time that Mrs. Boyce had been inside any building belonging to the village.

Wharton arrived late. He had been canvassing at a distance, and neither of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for half an hour and let them go. Did you ever see such a stolid set?"

"You will rouse them," said Marcella.

Her eyes were animated, her colour high, and she took no account at all of his plea of weariness.

"You challenge me? I must rouse them--that was what you came to see? Is that it?"

She laughed and made no answer. He left her and went up to the minister's desk, the men shuffling their feet a little, and rattling a stick here and there as he did so.

The young minister took the chair and introduced the speaker. He had a strong Yorkshire accent, and his speech was divided between the most vehement attacks, couched in the most Scriptural language, upon capital and privilege--that is to say, on landlords and the land system, on State churches and the "idle rich," interspersed with quavering returns upon himself, as though he were scared by his own invective. "My brothers, let us be calm!" he would say after every burst of passion, with a long deep-voiced emphasis on the last word; "let us, above all things, be calm!"--and then bit by bit voice and denunciation would begin to mount again towards a fresh climax of loud-voiced attack, only to sink again to the same lamb-like refrain. Mrs. Boyce's thin lip twitched, and Marcella bore the good gentleman a grudge for providing her mother with so much unnecessary amusement.

As for Wharton, at the opening of his speech he spoke both awkwardly and flatly; and Marcella had a momentary shock. He was, as he said, tired, and his wits were not at command. He began with the general political programme of the party to which--on its extreme left wing--he proclaimed himself to belong. This programme was, of course, by now a newspaper commonplace of the stalest sort. He himself recited it without enthusiasm, and it was received without a spark, so far as appeared, of interest or agreement. The minister gave an "hear, hear," of a loud official sort; the men made no sign.

"They might be a set of Dutch cheeses!" thought Marcella, indignantly, after a while. "But, after all, why should they care for all this? I shall have to get up in a minute and stop those children romping."

But through all this, as it were, Wharton was only waiting for his second wind. There came a moment when, dropping his quasi-official and high political tone, he said suddenly with another voice and emphasis:

"Well now, my men, I'll be bound you're thinking, 'That's all pretty enough!--we haven't got anything against it--we dare say it's all right; but we don't care a brass ha'porth about any of it! If that's all you'd got to say to us, you might have let us bide at home. We don't have none too much time to rest our bones a bit by the fire, and talk to the missus and the kids. Why didn't you let us alone, instead of bringing us out in the cold?'

"Well, but it isn't all I've got to say--and you know it--because I've spoken to you before. What I've been talking about is all true, and all important, and you'll see it some day when you're fit. But what can men in your position know about it, or care about it? What do any of you want, but bread--"

--He thundered on the desk--

"--a bit of decent comfort--a bit of freedom--freedom from tyrants who call themselves your betters!--a bit of rest in your old age, a home that's something better than a dog-hole, a wage that's something better than starvation, an honest share in the wealth you are making every day and every hour for other people to gorge and plunder!"

He stopped a moment to see how that took. A knot of young men in a corner rattled their sticks vigorously. The older men had begun at any rate to look at the speaker. The boys on the back benches instinctively stopped scuffling.

Then he threw himself into a sort of rapid question-and-answer. What were their wages?--eleven shillings a week?

"Not they!" cried a man from the middle of the chapel. "Yer mus' reckon it wet an' dry. I wor turned back two days las' week, an' two days this, fower shillin' lost each week--that's what I call skinnin' ov yer."

Wharton nodded at him approvingly. By now he knew the majority of the men in each village by name, and never forgot a face or a biography. "You're right there, Watkins. Eleven shillings, then, when it isn't less, never more, and precious often less; and harvest money--the people that are kind enough to come round and ask you to vote Tory for them make a deal of that, don't they?--and a few odds and ends here and there--precious few of them! There! that's about it for wages, isn't it? Thirty pounds a year, somewhere about, to keep a wife and children on--and for ten hours a day work, not counting meal times--that's it, I think. Oh, you are well off!--aren't you?"

He dropped his arms, folded, on the desk in front of him, and paused to look at them, his bright kindling eye running over rank after rank. A chuckle of rough laughter, bitter and jeering, ran through the benches. Then they broke out and applauded him.

Well, and about their cottages?

His glance caught Marcella, passed to her mother sitting stiffly motionless under her veil. He drew himself up, thought a moment, then threw himself far forward again over the desk as though the better to launch what he had to say, his voice taking a grinding determined note.

He had been in all parts of the division, he said; seen everything, inquired into everything. No doubt, on the great properties there had been a good deal done of late years--public opinion had effected something, the landlords had been forced to disgorge some of the gains wrested from labour, to pay for the decent housing of the labourer. But did anybody suppose that enough had been done? Why, he had seen dens--aye, on the best properties--not fit for the pigs that the farmers wouldn't let the labourers keep, lest they should steal their straw for the littering of them!--where a man was bound to live the life of a beast, and his children after him--

A tall thin man of about sixty rose in his place, and pointed a long quavering finger at the speaker.

"What is it, Darwin? speak up!" said Wharton, dropping at once into the colloquial tone, and stooping forward to listen.

"My sleepin' room's six foot nine by seven foot six. We have to shift our bed for the rain's comin' in, an' yer may see for yoursels ther ain't much room to shift it in. An' beyont us ther's a room for the chillen, same size as ourn, an' no window, nothin' but the door into us. Ov a summer night the chillen, three on 'em, is all of a sweat afore they're asleep. An' no garden, an' no chance o' decent ways nohow. An' if yer ask for a bit o' repairs yer get sworn at. An' that's all that most on us can get out of Squire Boyce!"

There was a hasty whisper among some of the men round him, as they glanced over their shoulders at the two ladies on the back bench. One or two of them half rose, and tried to pull him down. Wharton looked at Marcella; it seemed to him he saw a sort of passionate satisfaction on her pale face, and in the erect carriage of her head. Then she stooped to the side and whispered to her mother. Mrs. Boyce shook her head and sat on, immovable. All this took but a second or two.

"Ah, well," said Wharton, "we won't have names; that'll do us no good. It's not the men you've got to go for so much--though we shall go for them too before long when we've got the law more on our side. It's the system. It's the whole way of dividing the wealth that you made, you and your children--by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant work--between you and those who don't work, who live on your labour and grow fat on your poverty! What we want is a fair division. There ought to be wealth enough--there is wealth enough for all in this blessed country. The earth gives it; the sun gives it: labour extracts and piles it up. Why should one class take three-fourths of it and leave you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which is all you have to starve and breed on? Why?--why? I say. Why!--because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited cowards, unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and your class--there, that's why it is, and I tell it you straight out!"

He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at them--scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the blaze of his blue eye. A murmur ran through the room. Some of the men laughed excitedly. Darwin sprang up again.

"You keep the perlice off us, an' gie us the cuttin' up o' their bloomin' parks an' we'll do it fast enough," he cried.

"Much good that'll do you, just at present," said Wharton, contemptuously. "Now, you just listen to me."

And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the country districts--the transference of authority within the villages from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily during the transition time for the provision of house room, water, light, education and amusement for the labourer; and ultimately land and capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and interest of the capitalist class relieves him of taxes, and the disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all. And, as a first step to this new Jerusalem--organisation!--self-sacrifice enough to form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.

"Then I suppose you think you'd be turned out of your cottages, dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow. Just you try! There are people all over the country ready to back you, if you'd only back yourselves. But you won't. You won't fight--that's the worst of you; that's what makes all of us sick when we come down to talk to you. You won't spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing--not you!--to subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men. What's the good of your grumbling? I suppose you'll go on like that--grumbling and starving and cringing--and talking big of the things you could do if you would:--and all the time not one honest effort--not one!--to better yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks! By the Lord! I tell you it's a damned sort of business talking to fellows like you!"

Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal, emphasis. The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it. Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil. Her eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.

As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them, his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even; laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.

Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these cottagers, she had never lived till now--under the blaze of these eyes--within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged, dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on his knee, against his breast. "Here," she thought, while her pulses leapt, "is the leader for me--for these. Let him call, I will follow."

It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly, when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement, hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so--with some good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the day of election--came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed, and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken bodily from the Labour Clarion of the preceding week. Then a resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was passed unanimously amid evident excitement. It was the first time that such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.

* * * * *

Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect, mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony. For one who knew her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.

As for Marcella, she said little or nothing. But Wharton, in the dark of the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response would have been electric.

When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the vestibule--Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall--he said to her, his voice hoarse with fatigue:

"Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?"

Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.

"You rated them enough."

"Well, did you disapprove?"

"Oh, no! it seems to be your way."

"My proof of friendship? Well, can there be a greater? Will you show me some to-morrow?"

"How can I?"

"Will you criticise?--tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night, or a hypocrite? Your mother would."

"I dare say!" said Marcella, her breath quickening; "but don't expect it from me."

"Why?"

"Because--because I don't pretend. I don't know whether you roused them, but you roused me."

She swept on before him into the dark hall, without giving him a moment for reply, took her candle, and disappeared.

Wharton found his own staircase, and went up to bed. The light he carried showed his smiling eyes bent on the ground, his mouth still moving as though with some pleasant desire of speech.

Chapter VII

Wharton was sitting alone in the big Mellor drawing-room, after dinner. He had drawn one of the few easy chairs the room possessed to the fire, and with his feet on the fender, and one of Mr. Boyce's French novels on his knee, he was intensely enjoying a moment of physical ease. The work of these weeks of canvassing and speaking had been arduous, and he was naturally indolent. Now, beside this fire and at a distance, it amazed him that any motive whatever, public or private, should ever have been strong enough to take him out through the mire on these winter nights to spout himself hoarse to a parcel of rustics. "What did I do it for?" he asked himself; "what am I going to do it for again to-morrow?"

Ten o'clock. Mr. Boyce was gone to bed. No more entertaining of him to be done; one might be thankful for that mercy. Miss Boyce and her mother would, he supposed, be down directly. They had gone up to dress at nine. It was the night of the Maxwell Court ball, and the carriage had been ordered for half-past ten. In a few minutes he would see Miss Boyce in her new dress, wearing Raeburn's pearls. He was extraordinarily observant, and a number of little incidents and domestic arrangements bearing on the feminine side of Marcella's life had been apparent to him from the beginning. He knew, for instance, that the trousseau was being made at home, and that during the last few weeks the lady for whom it was destined had shown an indifference to the progress of it which seemed to excite a dumb annoyance in her mother. Curious woman, Mrs. Boyce!

He found himself listening to every opening door, and already, as it were, gazing at Marcella in her white array. He was not asked to this ball. As he had early explained to Miss Boyce, he and Miss Raeburn had been "cuts" for years, for what reason he had of course left Marcella to guess. As if Marcella found any difficulty in guessing--as if the preposterous bigotries and intolerances of the Ladies' League were not enough to account for any similar behaviour on the part of any similar high-bred spinster! As for this occasion, she was far too proud both on her own behalf and Wharton's to say anything either to Lord Maxwell or his sister on the subject of an invitation for her father's guest.

It so happened, however, that Wharton was aware of certain other reasons for his social exclusion from Maxwell Court. There was no necessity, of course, for enlightening Miss Boyce on the point. But as he sat waiting for her, Wharton's mind went back to the past connected with those reasons. In that past Raeburn had had the whip-hand of him; Raeburn had been the moral superior dictating indignant terms to a young fellow detected in flagrant misconduct. Wharton did not know that he bore him any particular grudge. But he had never liked Aldous, as a boy, that he could remember; naturally he had liked him less since that old affair. The remembrance of it had made his position at Mellor particularly sweet to him from the beginning; he was not sure that it had not determined his original acceptance of the offer made to him by the Liberal Committee to contest old Dodgson's seat. And during the past few weeks the exhilaration and interest of the general position--considering all things--had been very great. Not only was he on the point of ousting the Maxwell candidate from a seat which he had held securely for years--Wharton was perfectly well aware by now that he was trespassing on Aldous Raeburn's preserves in ways far more important, and infinitely more irritating! He and Raeburn had not met often at Mellor during these weeks of fight. Each had been too busy. But whenever they had come across each other Wharton had clearly perceived that his presence in the house, his growing intimacy with Marcella Boyce, the free-masonry of opinion between them, the interest she took in his contest, the village friendships they had in common, were all intensely galling to Aldous Raeburn.

The course of events, indeed, had lately produced in Wharton a certain excitement--recklessness even. He had come down into these parts to court "the joy of eventful living"--politically and personally. But the situation had proved to be actually far more poignant and personal than he had expected. This proud, crude, handsome girl--to her certainly it was largely due that the days had flown as they had. He was perfectly, one might almost say gleefully, aware that at the present moment it was he and not Aldous Raeburn who was intellectually her master. His mind flew back at first with amusement, then with a thrill of something else, over their talks and quarrels. He smiled gaily as he recalled her fits of anger with him, her remonstrances, appeals--and then her awkward inevitable submissions when he had crushed her with sarcasm or with facts. Ah! she would go to this ball to-night; Aldous Raeburn would parade her as his possession; but she would go with thoughts, ambitions, ideals, which, as they developed, would make her more and more difficult for a Raeburn to deal with. And in those thoughts and ambitions the man who had been her tormentor, teacher, and companion during six rushing weeks knew well that he already counted for much. He had cherished in her all those "divine discontents" which were already there when he first knew her; taught her to formulate them, given her better reasons for them; so that by now she was a person with a far more defined and stormy will than she had been to begin with. Wharton did not particularly know why he should exult; but he did exult. At any rate, he was prodigiously tickled--by the whole position.

A step, a rustle outside--he hastily shut his book and listened.

The door opened, and Marcella came in--a white vision against the heavy blue of the walls. With her came, too, a sudden strong scent of flowers, for she carried a marvellous bunch of hot-house roses, Aldous's gift, which had just arrived by special messenger.

Wharton sprang up and placed a chair for her.

"I had begun to believe the ball only existed in my own imagination!" he said gaily. "Surely you are very late."

Then he saw that she looked disturbed.

"It was papa," she said, coming to the fire, and looking down into it. "It has been another attack of pain--not serious, mamma says; she is coming down directly. But I wonder why they come, and why he thinks himself so ill--do you know?" she added abruptly, turning to her companion.

Wharton hesitated, taken by surprise. During the past weeks, what with Mr. Boyce's confidence and his own acuteness, he had arrived at a very shrewd notion of what was wrong with his host. But he was not going to enlighten the daughter.

"I should say your father wants a great deal of care--and is nervous about himself," he said quietly. "But he will get the care--and your mother knows the whole state of the case."

"Yes, she knows," said Marcella. "I wish I did."

And a sudden painful expression--of moral worry, remorse--passed across the girl's face. Wharton knew that she had often been impatient of late with her father, and incredulous of his complaints. He thought he understood.

"One can often be of more use to a sick person if one is not too well acquainted with what ails them," he said. "Hope and cheerfulness are everything in a case like your father's. He will do well."

"If he does he won't owe any of it--"

She stopped as impulsively as she had begun. "To me," she meant to have said; then had retreated hastily, before her own sense of something unduly intimate and personal. Wharton stood quietly beside her, saying nothing, but receiving and soothing her self-reproach just as surely as though she had put it into words.

"You are crushing your flowers, I think," he said suddenly.

And indeed her roses were dangling against her dress, as if she had forgotten all about them.

She raised them carelessly, but he bent to smell them, and she held them out.

"Summer!" he said, plunging his face into them with a long breath of sensuous enjoyment. "How the year sweeps round in an instant! And all the effect of a little heat and a little money. Will you allow me a philosopher's remark?"

He drew back from her. His quick inquisitive but still respectful eye took in every delightful detail.

"If I don't give you leave, my experience is that you will take it!" she said, half laughing, half resentful, as though she had old aggressions in mind.

"You admit the strength of the temptation? It is very simple, no one could help making it. To be spectator of the height of anything--the best, the climax--makes any mortal's pulses run. Beauty, success, happiness, for instance?"

He paused smiling. She leant a thin hand on the mantelpiece and looked away; Aldous's pearls slipped backwards along her white arm.

"Do you suppose to-night will be the height of happiness?" she said at last with a little scorn. "These functions don't present themselves to me in such a light."

Wharton could have laughed out--her pedantry was so young and unconscious. But he restrained himself.

"I shall be with the majority to-night," he said demurely. "I may as well warn you."

Her colour rose. No other man had ever dared to speak to her with this assurance, this cool scrutinising air. She told herself to be indignant; the next moment she was indignant, but with herself for remembering conventionalities.

"Tell me one thing," said Wharton, changing his tone wholly. "I know you went down hurriedly to the village before dinner. Was anything wrong?"

"Old Patton is very ill," she said, sighing. "I went to ask after him; he may die any moment. And the Hurds' boy too."

He leant against the mantelpiece, talking to her about both cases with a quick incisive common-sense--not unkind, but without a touch of unnecessary sentiment, still less of the superior person--which represented one of the moods she liked best in him. In speaking of the poor he always took the tone of comradeship, of a plain equality, and the tone was, in fact, genuine.

"Do you know," he said presently, "I did not tell you before, but I am certain that Hurd's wife is afraid of you, that she has a secret from you?"

"From me! how could she? I know every detail of their affairs."

"No matter. I listened to what she said that day in the cottage when I had the boy on my knee. I noticed her face, and I am quite certain. She has a secret, and above all a secret from you."

Marcella looked disturbed for a moment, then she laughed.

"Oh, no!" she said, with a little superior air. "I assure you I know her better than you."

Wharton said no more.

"Marcella!" called a distant voice from the hall.

The girl gathered up her white skirts and her flowers in haste.

"Good-night!"

"Good-night! I shall hear you come home and wonder how you have sped. One word, if I may! Take your rôle and play it. There is nothing subjects dislike so much as to see royalty decline its part."

She laughed, blushed, a little proudly and uncertainly, and went without reply. As she shut the door behind her, a sudden flatness fell upon her. She walked through the dark Stone Parlour outside, seeing still the firmly-knit lightly-made figure--boyish, middle-sized, yet never insignificant--the tumbled waves of fair hair, the eyes so keenly blue, the face with its sharp mocking lines, its powers of sudden charm. Then self-reproach leapt, and possessed her. She quickened her pace, hurrying into the hall, as though from something she was ashamed or afraid of.

In the hall a new sensation awaited her. Her mother, fully dressed, stood waiting by the old billiard-table for her maid, who had gone to fetch her a cloak.

Marcella stopped an instant in surprise and delight, then ran up to her. "Mamma, how lovely you look! I haven't seen you like that, not since I was a child. I remember you then once, in a low dress, a white dress, with flowers, coming into the nursery. But that black becomes you so well, and Deacon has done your hair beautifully!"

She took her mother's hand and kissed her cheek, touched by an emotion which had many roots. There was infinite relief in this tender natural outlet; she seemed to recover possession of herself.

Mrs. Boyce bore the kiss quietly. Her face was a little pinched and white. But the unusual display Deacon had been allowed to make of her pale golden hair, still long and abundant; the unveiling of the shapely shoulders and neck, little less beautiful than her daughter's; the elegant lines of the velvet dress, all these things, had very nobly transformed her. Marcella could not restrain her admiration and delight. Mrs. Boyce winced, and, looking upward to the gallery, which ran round the hall, called Deacon impatiently.

"Only, mamma," said Marcella, discontentedly, "I don't like that little chain round your neck. It is not equal to the rest, not worthy of it."

"I have nothing else, my dear," said Mrs. Boyce, drily. "Now, Deacon, don't be all night!"

Nothing else? Yet, if she shut her eyes, Marcella could perfectly recall the diamonds on the neck and arms of that white figure of her childhood--could see herself as a baby playing with the treasures of her mother's jewel-box.

Nowadays, Mrs. Boyce was very secretive and reserved about her personal possessions. Marcella never went into her room unless she was asked, and would never have thought of treating it or its contents with any freedom.

The mean chain which went so ill with the costly hoarded dress--it recalled to Marcella all the inexorable silent miseries of her mother's past life, and all the sordid disadvantages and troubles of her own youth. She followed Mrs. Boyce out to the carriage in silence--once more in a tumult of sore pride and doubtful feeling.

* * * * *

Four weeks to her wedding-day! The words dinned in her ears as they drove along. Yet they sounded strange to her, incredible almost. How much did she know of Aldous, of her life that was to be--above all, how much of herself? She was not happy--had not been happy or at ease for many days. Yet in her restlessness she could think nothing out. Moreover, the chain that galled and curbed her was a chain of character. In spite of her modernness, and the complexity of many of her motives, there was certain inherited simplicities of nature at the bottom of her. In her wild demonic childhood you could always trust Marcie Boyce, if she had given you her word--her schoolfellows knew that. If her passions were half-civilised and southern, her way of understanding the point of honour was curiously English, sober, tenacious. So now. Her sense of bond to Aldous had never been in the least touched by any of her dissatisfactions and revolts. Yet it rushed upon her to-night with amazement, and that in four weeks she was going to marry him! Why? how?--what would it really mean for him and for her? It was as though in mid-stream, she were trying to pit herself for an instant against the current which had so far carried them all on, to see what it might be like to retrace a step, and could only realise with dismay the force and rapidity of the water.

Yet all the time another side of her was well aware that she was at that moment the envy of half a county, that in another ten minutes hundreds of eager and critical eyes would be upon her; and her pride was rising to her part. The little incident of the chain had somehow for the moment made the ball and her place in it more attractive to her.

* * * * *

They had no sooner stepped from their carriage than Aldous, who was waiting in the outer hall, joyously discovered them. Till then he had been walking aimlessly amid the crowd of his own guests, wondering when she would come, how she would like it. This splendid function had been his grandfather's idea; it would never have entered his own head for a moment. Yet he understood his grandfather's wish to present his heir's promised bride in this public ceremonious way to the society of which she would some day be the natural leader. He understood, too, that there was more in the wish than met the ear; that the occasion meant to Lord Maxwell, whether Dick Boyce were there or no, the final condoning of things past and done with, a final throwing of the Maxwell shield over the Boyce weakness, and full adoption of Marcella into her new family.

All this he understood and was grateful for. But how would she respond? How would she like it--this parade that was to be made of her--these people that must be introduced to her? He was full of anxieties.

Yet in many ways his mind had been easier of late. During the last week she had been very gentle and good to him--even Miss Raeburn had been pleased with her. There had been no quoting of Wharton when they met; and he had done his philosopher's best to forget him. He trusted her proudly, intensely; and in four weeks she would be his wife.

"Can you bear it?" he said to her in a laughing whisper as she and her mother emerged from the cloak-room.

"Tell me what to do," she said, flushing. "I will do my best. What a crowd! Must we stay very long?"

"Ah, my dear Mrs. Boyce," cried Lord Maxwell, meeting them on the steps of the inner quadrangular corridor--"Welcome indeed! Let me take you in. Marcella! with Aldous's permission!" he stooped his white head gallantly and kissed her on the cheek--"Remember I am an old man; if I choose to pay you compliments, you will have to put up with them!"

Then he offered Mrs. Boyce his arm, a stately figure in his ribbon and cross of the Bath. A delicate red had risen to that lady's thin cheek in spite of her self-possession. "Poor thing," said Lord Maxwell to himself as he led her along--"poor thing!--how distinguished and charming still! One sees to-night what she was like as a girl."

Aldous and Marcella followed. They had to pass along the great corridor which ran round the quadrangle of the house. The antique marbles which lined it were to-night masked in flowers, and seats covered in red had been fitted in wherever it was possible, and were now crowded with dancers "sitting out." From the ball-room ahead came waves of waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the swaying rhythms of the band. Beyond the windows of the corridor, which had been left uncurtained because of the beauty of the night, the stiff Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls of the corridor--here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca--and the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in cold, whitish relief.

Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that every eye was fixed upon her and her mother. "Look, there she is," she heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library, now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest. "Come, quick! There--I told you she was lovely!"

Every now and then some old friend, man or woman, rose smiling from the seats along the side, and Aldous introduced his bride.

"On her dignity!" said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they had passed. "Shy, no doubt--very natural! But nowadays girls, when they're shy, don't giggle and blush as they used to in my young days; they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren't going to allow it! Oh, very handsome--very handsome--of course. But you can see she's advanced--peculiar--or what d'ye call it?--woman's rights, I suppose, and all that kind of thing? Like to see you go in for it, Nettie, eh!"

"She's awfully handsome," sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant little daughter, still craning her neck to look--"very simply dressed too, except for those lovely pearls. She does her hair very oddly, so low down--in those plaits. Nobody does it like that nowadays."

"That's because nobody has such a head," said her brother, a young Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship. "By George, she's ripping--she's the best-looking girl I've seen for a good long time. But she's a Tartar, I'll swear--looks it, anyway."

"Every one says she has the most extraordinary opinions," said the girl, eagerly. "She'll manage him, don't you think? I'm sure he's very meek and mild."

"Don't know that," said the young man, twisting his moustache with the air of exhaustive information. "Raeburn's a very good fellow--excellent fellow--see him shooting, you know--that kind of thing. I expect he's got a will when he wants it. The mother's handsome, too, and looks a lady. The father's kept out of the way, I see. Rather a blessing for the Raeburns. Can't be pleasant, you know, to get a man like that in the family. Look after your spoons--that kind of thing."

Meanwhile Marcella was standing beside Miss Raeburn, at the head of the long ball-room, and doing her best to behave prettily. One after another she bowed to, or shook hands with, half the magnates of the county--the men in pink, the women in the new London dresses, for which this brilliant and long-expected ball had given so welcome an excuse. They knew little or nothing of her, except that she was clearly good-looking, that she was that fellow Dick Boyce's daughter and was reported to be "odd." Some, mostly men, who said their conventional few words to her, felt an amused admiration for the skill and rapidity with which she had captured the parti of the county; some, mostly women, were already jealous of her. A few of the older people here and there, both men and women--but after all they shook hands like the rest!--knew perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back at her with kind eyes.

But of these last Marcella realised nothing. What she was saying to herself was that, if they knew little of her, she knew a great deal of many of them. In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book--one of the numberless!--recently issued, on the state of the midland labourer. He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner. Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county before she met it in the flesh. She knew that a great many of these men who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending. But there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly present to her than the improvements. In general, the people who thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members of a useless class. The nation would do away with them in time! Meanwhile it might at least be asked of them that they should practise their profession of landowning, such as it was, with greater conscience and intelligence--that they should not shirk its opportunities or idle them away. And she could point out those who did both--scandalously, intolerably. Once or twice she thought passionately of Minta Hurd, washing and mending all day, in her damp cottage; or of the Pattons in "the parish house," thankful after sixty years of toil for a hovel where the rain came through the thatch, and where the smoke choked you, unless, with the thermometer below freezing-point, you opened the door to the blast. Why should these people have all the gay clothes, the flowers, the jewels, the delicate food--all the delight and all the leisure? And those, nothing! Her soul rose against what she saw as she stood there, going through her part. Wharton's very words, every inflection of his voice was in her ears, playing chorus to the scene.

But when these first introductions, these little empty talks of three or four phrases apiece, and all of them alike, were nearly done with, Marcella looked eagerly round for Mary Harden. There she was, sitting quietly against the wall in a remote corner, her plain face all smiles, her little feet dancing under the white muslin frock which she had fashioned for herself with so much pain under Marcella's directions. Miss Raeburn was called away to find an arm-chair for some dowager of importance; Marcella took advantage of the break and of the end of a dance to hurry down the room to Mary. Aldous, who was talking to old Sir Charles Leven, Frank's father, a few steps off, nodded and smiled to her as he saw her move.

"Have you been dancing, Mary?" she said severely.

"I wouldn't for worlds! I never was so much amused in my life. Look at those girls--those sisters--in the huge velvet sleeves, like coloured balloons!--and that old lady in the pink tulle and diamonds.--I do so want to get her her cloak! And those Lancers!--I never could have imagined people danced like that. They didn't dance them--they romped them! It wasn't beautiful--was it?"

"Why do you expect an English crowd to do anything beautiful? If we could do it, we should be too ashamed."

"But it is beautiful, all the same, you scornful person!" cried Mary, dragging her friend down beside her. "How pretty the girls are! And as for the diamonds, I never saw anything so wonderful. I wish I could have made Charles come!"

"Wouldn't he?"

"No"--she looked a little troubled--"he couldn't think it would be quite right. But I don't know--a sight like this takes me off my feet, shakes me up, and does me a world of good!"

"You dear, simple thing!" said Marcella, slipping her hand into Mary's as it lay on the bench.

"Oh, you needn't be so superior!" cried Mary,--"not for another year at least. I don't believe you are much more used to it than I am!"

"If you mean," said Marcella, "that I was never at anything so big and splendid as this before, you are quite right."

And she looked round the room with that curious, cold air of personal detachment from all she saw, which had often struck Mary, and to-night made her indignant.

"Then enjoy it!" she said, laughing and frowning at the same time. "That's a much more plain duty for you than it was for Charles to stay at home--there! Haven't you been dancing?"

"No, Mr. Raeburn doesn't dance. But he thinks he can get through the next Lancers if I will steer him."

"Then I shall find a seat where I can look at you," said Mary, decidedly. "Ah, there is Mr. Raeburn coming to introduce somebody to you. I knew they wouldn't let you sit here long."

Aldous brought up a young Guardsman, who boldly asked Miss Boyce for the pleasure of a dance. Marcella consented; and off they swept into a room which was only just beginning to fill for the new dance, and where, therefore, for the moment the young grace of both had free play. Marcella had been an indefatigable dancer in the old London days at those students' parties, with their dyed gloves and lemonade suppers, which were running in her head now, as she swayed to the rhythm of this perfect band. The mere delight in movement came back to her; and while they danced, she danced with all her heart. Then in the pauses she would lean against the wall beside her partner, and rack her brain to find a word to say to him. As for anything that he said, every word--whether of Ascot, or the last Academy, or the new plays, or the hunting and the elections--sounded to her more vapid than the last.

Meanwhile Aldous stood near Mary Harden and watched the dancing figure. He had never seen her dance before. Mary shyly stole a look at him from time to time.

"Well," he said at last, stooping to his neighbour, "what are you thinking of?"

"I think she is a dream!" said Mary, flushing with the pleasure of being able to say it. They were great friends, he and she, and to-night somehow she was not a bit afraid of him.

Aldous's eye sparkled a moment; then he looked down at her with a kind smile.

"If you suppose I am going to let you sit here all night, you are very much mistaken. Marcella gave me precise instructions. I am going off this moment to find somebody."

"Mr. Raeburn--don't!" cried Mary, catching at him. But he was gone, and she was left in trepidation, imagining the sort of formidable young man who was soon to be presented to her, and shaking at the thought of him.

When the dance was over Marcella returned to Miss Raeburn, who was standing at the door into the corridor and had beckoned to her. She went through a number of new introductions, and declared to herself that she was doing all she could. Miss Raeburn was not so well satisfied.

"Why can't she smile and chatter like other girls?" thought Aunt Neta, impatiently. "It's her 'ideas,' I suppose. What rubbish! There, now--just see the difference!"

For at the moment Lady Winterbourne came up, and instantly Marcella was all smiles and talk, holding her friend by both hands, clinging to her almost.

"Oh, do come here!" she said, leading her into a corner. "There's such a crowd, and I say all the wrong things. There!" with a sigh of relief. "Now I feel myself protected."

"I mustn't keep you," said Lady Winterbourne, a little taken aback by her effusion. "Everybody is wanting to talk to you."

"Oh, I know! There is Miss Raeburn looking at me severely already. But I must do as I like a little."

"You ought to do as Aldous likes," said Lady Winterbourne, suddenly, in her deepest and most tragic voice. It seemed to her a moment had come for admonition, and she seized it hastily.

Marcella stared at her in surprise. She knew by now that when Lady Winterbourne looked most forbidding she was in reality most shy. But still she was taken aback.

"Why do you say that, I wonder?" she asked, half reproachfully. "I have been behaving myself quite nicely--I have indeed; at least, as nicely as I knew how."

Lady Winterbourne's tragic air yielded to a slow smile.

"You look very well, my dear. That white becomes you charmingly; so do the pearls. I don't wonder that Aldous always knows where you are."

Marcella raised her eyes and caught those of Aldous fixed upon her from the other side of the room. She blushed, smiled slightly, and looked away.

"Who is that tall man just gone up to speak to him?" she asked of her companion.

"That is Lord Wandle," said Lady Winterbourne, "and his plain second wife behind him. Edward always scolds me for not admiring him. He says women know nothing at all about men's looks, and that Lard Wandle was the most splendid man of his time. But I always think it an unpleasant face."

"Lord Wandle!" exclaimed Marcella, frowning. "Oh, please come with me, dear Lady Winterbourne! I know he is asking Aldous to introduce him, and I won't--no I will not--be introduced to him."

And laying hold of her astonished companion, she drew her hastily through a doorway near, walked quickly, still gripping her, through two connected rooms beyond, and finally landed her and herself on a sofa in Lord Maxwell's library, pursued meanwhile through all her hurried course by the curious looks of an observant throng.

"That man!--no, that would really have been too much!" said Marcella, using her large feather fan with stormy energy.

"What is the matter with you, my dear?" said Lady Winterbourne in her amazement; "and what is the matter with Lord Wandle?"

"You must know!" said Marcella, indignantly. "Oh, you must have seen that case in the paper last week--that shocking case! A woman and two children died in one of his cottages of blood-poisoning--nothing in the world but his neglect--his brutal neglect!" Her breast heaved; she seemed almost on the point of weeping. "The agent was appealed to--did nothing. Then the clergyman wrote to him direct, and got an answer. The answer was published. For cruel insolence I never saw anything like it! He ought to be in prison for manslaughter--and he comes here! And people laugh and talk with him!"

She stopped, almost choked by her own passion. But the incident, after all, was only the spark to the mine.

Lady Winterbourne stared at her helplessly.

"Perhaps it isn't true," she suggested. "The newspapers put in so many lies, especially about us--the landlords. Edward says one ought never to believe them. Ah, here comes Aldous."

Aldous, indeed, with some perplexity on his brow, was to be seen approaching, looking for his betrothed. Marcella dropped her fan and sat erect, her angry colour fading into whiteness.

"My darling! I couldn't think what had become of you. May I bring Lord Wandle and introduce him to you? He is an old friend here, and my godfather. Not that I am particularly proud of the relationship," he said, dropping his voice as he stooped over her. "He is a soured, disagreeable fellow, and I hate many of the things he does. But it is an old tie, and my grandfather is tender of such things. Only a word or two; then I will get rid of him."

"Aldous, I can't," said Marcella, looking up at him. "How could I? I saw that case. I must be rude to him."

Aldous looked considerably disturbed.

"It was very bad," he said slowly. "I didn't know you had seen it. What shall I do? I promised to go back for him."

"Lord Wandle--Miss Boyce!" said Miss Raeburn's sharp little voice behind Aldous. Aldous, moving aside in hasty dismay, saw his aunt, looking very determined, presenting her tall neighbour, who bowed with old-fashioned deference to the girl on the sofa.

Lady Winterbourne looked with trepidation at Marcella. But the social instinct held, to some extent. Ninety-nine women can threaten a scene of the kind Lady Winterbourne dreaded, for one that can carry it through. Marcella wavered; then, with her most forbidding air, she made a scarcely perceptible return of Lord Wandle's bow.

"Did you escape in here out of the heat?" he asked her. "But I am afraid no one lets you escape to-night. The occasion is too interesting."

Marcella made no reply. Lady Winterbourne threw in a nervous remark on the crowd.

"Oh, yes, a great crush," said Lord Wandle. "Of course, we all come to see Aldous happy. How long is it, Miss Boyce, since you settled at Mellor?"

"Six months."

She looked straight before her and not at him as she answered, and her tone made Miss Raeburn's blood boil.

Lord Wandle--a battered, coarsened, but still magnificent-looking man of sixty--examined the speaker an instant from half-shut eyes, then put up his hand to his moustache with a half-smile.

"You like the country?"

"Yes."

As she spoke her reluctant monosyllable, the girl had really no conception of the degree of hostility expressed in her manner. Instead she was hating herself for her own pusillanimity.

"And the people?"

"Some of them."

And straightway she raised her fierce black eyes to his, and the man before her understood, as plainly as any one need understand, that, whoever else Miss Boyce might like, she did not like Lord Wandle, and wished for no more conversation with him.

Her interrogator turned to Aldous with smiling aplomb.

"Thank you, my dear Aldous. Now let me retire. No one must monopolise your charming lady."

And again he bowed low to her, this time with an ironical emphasis not to be mistaken, and walked away.

Lady Winterbourne saw him go up to his wife, who had followed him at a distance, and speak to her roughly with a frown. They left the room, and presently, through the other door of the library which opened on the corridor, she saw them pass, as though they were going to their carriage.

Marcella rose. She looked first at Miss Raeburn--then at Aldous.

"Will you take me away?" she said, going up to him; "I am tired--take me to your room."

He put her hand inside his arm, and they pushed their way through the crowd. Outside in the passage they met Hallin. He had not seen her before, and he put out his hand. But there was something distant in his gentle greeting which struck at this moment like a bruise on Marcella's quivering nerves. It came across her that for some time past he had made no further advances to her; that his first eager talk of friendship between himself and her had dropped; that his acceptance of her into his world and Aldous's was somehow suspended--in abeyance. She bit her lip tightly and hurried Aldous along. Again the same lines of gay, chatting people along the corridor, and on either side of the wide staircase--greetings, introduction--a nightmare of publicity.

"Rather pronounced--to carry him off like that," said a clergyman to his wife with a kindly smile, as the two tall figures disappeared along the upper gallery. "She will have him all to herself before long."

* * * * *

Aldous shut the door of his sitting-room behind them. Marcella quickly drew her hand out of his arm, and going forward to the mantelpiece rested both elbows upon it and hid her face.

He looked at her a moment in distress and astonishment, standing a little apart. Then he saw that she was crying. The colour flooded into his face, and going up to her he took her hand, which was all she would yield him, and, holding it to his lips, said in her ear every soothing tender word that love's tutoring could bring to mind. In his emotion he told himself and her that he admired and loved her the more for the incident downstairs, for the temper she had shown! She alone among them all had had the courage to strike the true stern Christian note. As to the annoyance such courage might bring upon him and her in the future--even as to the trouble it might cause his own dear folk--what real matter? In these things she should lead.

What could love have asked better than such a moment? Yet Marcella's weeping was in truth the weeping of despair. This man's very sweetness to her, his very assumption of the right to comfort and approve her, roused in her a desperate stifled sense of bonds that should never have been made, and that now could not be broken. It was all plain to her at last. His touch had no thrill for her; his frown no terror. She had accepted him without loving him, coveting what he could give her. And now it seemed to her that she cared nothing for anything he could give!--that the life before her was to be one series of petty conflicts between her and a surrounding circumstance which must inevitably in the end be too strong for her, conflicts from which neither heart nor ambition could gain anything. She had desired a great position for what she might do with it. But could she do with it! She would be subdued--oh! very quickly!--to great houses and great people, and all the vapid pomp and idle toil of wealth. All that picture of herself, stooping from place and power, to bind up the wounds of the people, in which she had once delighted, was to her now a mere flimsy vulgarity. She had been shown other ideals--other ways--and her pulses were still swaying under the audacity--the virile inventive force of the showman. Everything she had once desired looked flat to her; everything she was not to have, glowed and shone. Poverty, adventure, passion, the joys of self-realisation--these she gave up. She would become Lady Maxwell, make friends with Miss Raeburn, and wear the family diamonds!

Then, in the midst of her rage with herself and fate, she drew herself away, looked up, and caught full the eyes of Aldous Raeburn. Conscience stung and burned. What was this life she had dared to trifle with--this man she had dared to treat as a mere pawn in her own game? She gave way utterly, appalled at her own misdoing, and behaved like a penitent child. Aldous, astonished and alarmed by her emotions and by the wild incoherent things she said, won his way at last to some moments of divine happiness, when, leaving her trembling hand in his, she sat submissively beside him, gradually quieting down, summoning back her smiles and her beauty, and letting him call her all the fond names he would.

Chapter VIII

Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on the drive home. Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella's imagination would have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in what spirit her mother had taken the evening--the first social festivity in which Richard Boyce's wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact, Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first public entry on Lord Maxwell's arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen note of everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several old acquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her first married years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She had received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to society by this great match that her daughter was making. Lady Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in smoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watched Marcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did not see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to Hallin.

Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxious to get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticing Marcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in the ball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done. Yet the mother had observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhat different from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had been gentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken some pains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her. Lord Maxwell--ignorant of the Wandle incident--was charmed with her, and openly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his hearty old man's way. Only Miss Raeburn held indignantly aloof, and would not pretend, even to Mrs. Boyce.

And now Marcella was tired--dead tired, she said to herself, both in mind and body. She lay back in the carriage, trying to sink herself in her own fatigue, to forget everything, to think of nothing. Outside the night was mild, and the moon clear. For some days past, after the break up of the long frost, there had been heavy rain. Now the rain had cleared away, and in the air there was already an early promise of spring. As she walked home from the village that afternoon she had felt the buds and the fields stirring.

When they got home, Mrs. Boyce turned to her daughter at the head of the stairs, "Shall I unlace your dress, Marcella?"

"Oh no, thank you. Can I help you?"

"No. Good-night."

"Mamma!" Marcella turned and ran after her. "I should like to know how papa is. I will wait here if you will tell me."

Mrs. Boyce looked surprised. Then she went into her room and shut the door. Marcella waited outside, leaning against the old oak gallery which ran round the hall, her candle the one spot of light and life in the great dark house.

"He seems to have slept well," said Mrs. Boyce, reappearing, and speaking under her breath. "He has not taken the opiate I left for him, so he cannot have been in pain. Good-night."

Marcella kissed her and went. Somehow, in her depression of nerve and will, she was loth to go away by herself. The loneliness of the night, and of her wing of the house, weighed upon her; the noises made by the old boards under her steps, the rustling draughts from the dark passages to right and left startled and troubled her; she found herself childishly fearing lest her candle should go out.

Yet, as she descended the two steps to the passage outside her door, she could have felt little practical need of it, for the moonlight was streaming in through its uncovered windows, not directly, but reflected from the Tudor front of the house which ran at right angles to this passage, and was to-night a shining silver palace, every battlement, window, and moulding in sharpest light and shade under the radiance of the night. Beneath her feet, as she looked out into the Cedar Garden, was a deep triangle of shadow, thrown by that part of the building in which she stood; and beyond the garden the barred black masses of the cedars closing up the view lent additional magic to the glittering unsubstantial fabric of the moonlit house, which was, as it were, embosomed and framed among them. She paused a moment, struck by the strangeness and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air of some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird gathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatiently longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and tumble into sleep.

Yet she made no hurry. She fell on the first chair that offered. Her candle behind her had little power over the glooms of the dark tapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her own form, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straight in front of her. She sat with her hands round her knees, absently looking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of the darkness. But she was conscious of nothing save one mounting overwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.

Mr. Wharton must go away--he must--or she could not bear it.

Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender, rose and broke upon her. At last, physical weariness recalled her. She put up her hands to take off her pearls.

As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head. Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.

Steps surely--light steps--along the corridor outside, and on the staircase. Nor did they die away. She could still hear them,--as she sat, arrested, straining her ears,--pacing slowly along the lower passage.

Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life. This room of hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most persistently. Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan. Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least forty years before the staircase was made. None the less, no servant would go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark; and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep where she did. Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic, of steps, groans, lights in the library, and the rest. Marcella had consistently laughed at her.

Yet all the same she had made in secret a very diligent pursuit of this ghost, settling in the end to a certain pique with him that he would not show himself to so ardent a daughter of the house. She had sat up waiting for him; she had lingered in the corridor outside, and on the stairs, expecting him. By the help of a favourite carpenter she had made researches into roofs, water-pipes, panelling, and old cupboards, in the hope of finding a practical clue to him. In vain.

Yet here were the steps--regular, soft, unmistakable. The colour rushed back into her cheeks! Her eager healthy youth forgot its woes, flung off its weariness, and panted for an adventure, a discovery. Springing up, she threw her fur wrap round her again, and gently opened the door, listening.

For a minute, nothing--then a few vague sounds as of something living and moving down below--surely in the library? Then the steps again. Impossible that it should be any one breaking in. No burglar would walk so leisurely. She closed her door behind her, and, gathering her white satin skirts about her, she descended the staircase.

The corridor below was in radiant moonlight, chequered by the few pieces of old furniture it contained, and the black and white of the old portrait prints hanging on the walls. At first her seeking, excited eyes could make out nothing. Then in a flash they perceived the figure of Wharton at the further end near the garden door, leaning against one of the windows. He was apparently looking out at the moonlit house, and she caught the faint odour of a cigarette.

Her first instinct was to turn and fly. But Wharton had seen her. As he looked about him at the sound of her approach, the moon, which was just rounding the corner of the house, struck on her full, amid the shadows of the staircase, and she heard his exclamation.

Dignity--a natural pride--made her pause. She came forward slowly--he eagerly.

"I heard footsteps," she said, with a coldness under which he plainly saw her embarrassment. "I could not suppose that anybody was still up, so I came down to see."

He was silent a moment, scanning her with laughing eyes. Then he shook his head. "Confess you took me for the ghost?" he said.

She hesitated; then must laugh too. She herself had told him the stories, so that his guess was natural.

"Perhaps I did," she said. "One more disappointment! Good-night."

He looked after her a quick undecided moment as she made a step in front of him, then at the half-burnt cigarette he held in his hand, threw the end away with a hasty gesture, overtook her and walked beside her along the corridor.

"I heard you and your mother come in," he said, as though explaining himself. "Then I waited till I thought you must both be asleep, and came down here to look at that wonderful effect on the old house." He pointed to the silver palace outside. "I have a trick of being sleepless--a trick, too, of wandering at night. My own people know it, and bear with me, but I am abashed that you should have found me out. Just tell me--in one word--how the ball went?"

He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenly wide-awake as though it were three o'clock in the afternoon instead of three in the morning.

Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.

"It went very well," she said perversely, putting her satin-slippered foot on the first step. "There were six hundred people upstairs, and four hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man. Everybody said it was splendid."

His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her. As he had often frankly warned her, he was a man in quest of sensations. Certainly, in this strange meeting with Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, in the midst of the sleep-bound house, he had found one. Her eyes were heavy, her cheek pale. But in this soft vague light--white arms and neck now hidden, now revealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin--she was more enchanting than he had ever seen her. His breath quickened.

He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him. What harm--to her or to Raeburn? Raeburn would have chances enough before long. Why admit his monopoly before the time? She was not in love with him! As to Mrs. Grundy--absurd! What in the true reasonableness of things was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well as by day?

"One moment"--he said, delaying her. "You must be dead tired--too tired for romance. Else I should say to you, turn aside an instant and look at the library. It is a sight to remember."

Inevitably she glanced behind her, and saw that the library door was ajar. He flung it open, and the great room showed wide, its high domed roof lost in shadow, while along the bare floor and up the latticed books crept, here streaks and fingers, and there wide breadths of light from the unshuttered and curtainless windows.

"Isn't it the very poetry of night and solitude?" he said, looking in with her. "You love the place; but did you ever see it so lovable? The dead are here; you did right to come and seek them! Look at your namesake, in that ray. To-night she lives! She knows that is her husband opposite--those are her books beside her. And the rebel!"--he pointed smiling to the portrait of John Boyce. "When you are gone I shall shut myself up here--sit in his chair, invoke him--and put my speech together. I am nervous about to-morrow" (he was bound, as she knew, to a large Labour Congress in the Midlands, where he was to preside), "and sleep will make no terms with me. Ah!--how strange! Who can that be passing the avenue?"

He made a step or two into the room, and put up his hand to his brow, looking intently. Involuntarily, yet with a thrill, Marcella followed. They walked to the window.

"It is Hurd!" she cried in a tone of distress, pressing her face against the glass. "Out at this time, and with a gun! Oh, dear, dear!"

There could be no question that it was Hurd. Wharton had seen him linger in the shadowy edge of the avenue, as though reconnoitring, and now, as he stealthily crossed the moonlit grass, his slouching dwarf's figure, his large head, and the short gun under his arm, were all plainly visible.

"What do you suppose he is after?" said Wharton, still gazing, his hands in his pockets.

"I don't know; he wouldn't poach on our land; I'm sure he wouldn't! Besides, there is nothing to poach."--Wharton smiled.--"He must be going, after all, to Lord Maxwell's coverts! They are just beyond the avenue, on the side of the hill. Oh! it is too disappointing! Can we do anything?"

She looked at her companion with troubled eyes. This incursion of something sadly and humanly real seemed suddenly to have made it natural to be standing beside him there at that strange hour. Her conscience was soothed.

Wharton shook his head.

"I don't see what we could do. How strong the instinct is! I told you that woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form--the squalid peasant's form--of the same instinct which sends the young fellows of our class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is the instinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one's innings against the powers that be--Nature, or the law, or convention."

"I know all that--I never blame them!"--cried Marcella--"but just now it is so monstrous--so dangerous! Westall specially alert--and this gang about! Besides, I got him work from Lord Maxwell, and made him promise me--for the wife and children's sake."

Wharton shrugged his shoulders.

"I should think Westall is right, and that the gang have got hold of him. It is what always happens. The local man is the catspaw.--So you are sorry for him--this man?" he said in another tone, facing round upon her.

She looked astonished, and drew herself up nervously, turning at the same time to leave the room. But before she could reply he hurried on:

"He--may escape his risk. Give your pity, Miss Boyce, rather to one--who has not escaped!"

"I don't know what you mean," she said, unconsciously laying a hand on one of the old chairs beside her to steady herself. "But it is too late to talk. Good-night, Mr. Wharton."

"Good-bye," he said quietly, yet with a low emphasis, at the same time moving out of her path. She stopped, hesitating. Beneath the lace and faded flowers on her breast he could see how her heart beat.

"Not good-bye? You are coming back after the meeting?"

"I think not. I must not inflict myself--on Mrs. Boyce--any more. You will all be very busy during the next three weeks. It would be an intrusion if I were to come back at such a time--especially--considering the fact"--he spoke slowly--"that I am as distasteful as I now know myself to be, to your future husband. Since you all left to-night the house has been very quiet. I sat over the fire thinking. It grew clear to me. I must go, and go at once. Besides--a lonely man as I am must not risk his nerve. His task is set him, and there are none to stand by him if he fails."

She trembled all over. Weariness and excitement made normal self-control almost impossible.

"Well, then, I must say thank you," she said indistinctly, "for you have taught me a great deal."

"You will unlearn it!" he said gaily, recovering his self-possession, so it seemed, as she lost hers. "Besides, before many weeks are over you will have heard hard things of me. I know that very well. I can say nothing to meet them. Nor should I attempt anything. It may sound brazen, but that past of mine, which I can see perpetually present in Aldous Raeburn's mind, for instance, and which means so much to his good aunt, means to me just nothing at all! The doctrine of identity must be true--I must be the same person I was then. But, all the same, what I did then does not matter a straw to me now. To all practical purposes I am another man. I was then a youth, idle, désoeuvré, playing with all the keys of life in turn. I have now unlocked the path that suits me. Its quest has transformed me--as I believe, ennobled me. I do not ask Raeburn or any one else to believe it. It is my own affair. Only, if we ever meet again in life, you and I, and you think you have reason to ask humiliation of me, do not ask it, do not expect it. The man you will have in your mind has nothing to do with me. I will not be answerable for his sins."

As he said these things he was leaning lightly forward, looking up at her, his arms resting on the back of one of the old chairs, one foot crossed over the other. The attitude was easy calm itself. The tone--indomitable, analytic, reflective--matched it. Yet, all the same, her woman's instinct divined a hidden agitation, and, woman-like, responded to that and that only.

"Mr. Raeburn will never tell me old stories about anybody," she said proudly. "I asked him once, out--out of curiosity--about you, and he would tell me nothing."

"Generous!" said Wharton, drily. "I am grateful."

"No!" cried Marcella, indignantly, rushing blindly at the outlet for emotion. "No!--you are not grateful; you are always judging him harshly--criticising, despising what he does."

Wharton was silent a moment. Even in the moonlight she could see the reddening of his cheek.

"So be it," he said at last. "I submit. You must know best. But you? are you always content? Does this milieu into which you are passing always satisfy you? To-night, did your royalty please you? will it soon be enough for you?"

"You know it is not enough," she broke out, hotly; "it is insulting that you should ask in that tone. It means that you think me a hypocrite!--and I have given you no cause--"

"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed, interrupting her, and speaking in a low, hurried voice. "I had no motive, no reason for what I said--none--but this, that you are going--that we are parting. I spoke in gibes to make you speak--somehow to strike--to reach you. To-morrow it will be too late!"

And before, almost, she knew that he had moved, he had stooped forward, caught a fold of her dress, pressed it to his lips, and dropped it.

"Don't speak," he said brokenly, springing up, and standing before her in her path. "You shall forgive me--I will compel it! See! here we are on this moonlit space of floor, alone, in the night. Very probably we shall never meet again, except as strangers. Put off convention, and speak to me, soul to soul! You are not happy altogether in this marriage. I know it. You have as good as confessed it. Yet you will go through with it. You have given your word--your honour holds you. I recognise that it holds you. I say nothing, not a syllable, against your bond! But here, to-night, tell me, promise me that you will make this marriage of yours serve our hopes and ends, the ends that you and I have foreseen together--that it shall be your instrument, not your chain. We have been six weeks together. You say you have learnt from me; you have! you have given me your mind, your heart to write on, and I have written. Henceforward you will never look at life as you might have done if I had not been here. Do you think I triumph, that I boast? Ah!" he drew in his breath--"What if in helping you, and teaching you--for I have helped and taught you!--I have undone myself? What if I came here the slave of impersonal causes, of ends not my own? What if I leave--maimed--in face of the battle? Not your fault? No, perhaps not! but, at least, you owe me some gentleness now, in these last words--some kindness in farewell."

He came closer, held out his hands. With one of her own she put his back, and lifted the other dizzily to her forehead.

"Don't come near me!" she said, tottering. "What is it? I cannot see. Go!"

And guiding herself, as though blindfold, to a chair, she sank upon it, and her head dropped. It was the natural result of a moment of intense excitement coming upon nerves already strained and tried to their utmost. She fought desperately against her weakness; but there was a moment when all around her swam, and she knew nothing.

Then came a strange awakening. What was this room, this weird light, these unfamiliar forms of things, this warm support against which her cheek lay? She opened her eyes languidly. They met Wharton's half in wonder. He was kneeling beside her, holding her. But for an instant she realised nothing except his look, to which her own helplessly replied.

"Once!" she heard him whisper. "Once! Then nothing more--for ever."

And stooping, slowly, deliberately, he kissed her.

In a stinging flow, life, shame, returned upon her. She struggled to her feet, pushing him from her.

"You dared," she said, "dared such a thing!"

She could say no more; but her attitude, fiercely instinct, through all her physical weakness, with her roused best self, was speech enough. He did not venture to approach her. She walked away. He heard the door close, hurrying steps on the little stairs, then silence.

He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wall for some time. When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhair which had dropped from her dress.

"That was a scene!" he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of his own hand. "It carries one back to the days of the Romantics. Was I Alfred de Musset?--and she George Sand? Did any of them ever taste a more poignant moment than I--when she--lay upon my breast? To be helpless--yet yield nothing--it challenged me! Yet I took no advantage--none. When she looked--when her eye, her soul, was, for that instant, mine, then!--Well!--the world has rushed with me since I saw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a quality again. What did I say?--how much did I mean? My God! how can I tell? I began as an actor, did I finish as a man?"

He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron will quieting down each rebellious pulse.

"That poacher fellow did me a good turn. Dare! the word galled. But, after all, what woman could say less? And what matter? I have held her in my arms, in a setting--under a moon--worthy of her. Is not life enriched thereby beyond robbery? And what harm? Raeburn is not injured. She will never tell--and neither of us will ever forget. Ah!--what was that?"

He walked quickly to the window. What he had heard had been a dull report coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of the avenue. As he reached the window it was followed by a second.

"That poacher's gun?--no doubt!"--he strained his eyes in vain--"Collision perhaps--and mischief? No matter! I have nothing to do with it. The world is all lyric for me to-night. I can hear in it no other rhythm."

* * * * *

The night passed away. When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lying with wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it. Her candle still burnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallest desire for sleep. She had gone through shame and anguish. But she would have scorned to pity herself. Was it not her natural, inevitable portion?

"I will tell Aldous everything--everything," she said to herself for the hundredth time, as the light penetrated. "Was that only seven striking--seven--impossible!"

She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the hours that must pass before she could see Aldous--put all to the touch.

Suddenly she remembered Hurd--then old Patton.

"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment--her passion to get away from herself. "Is he gone? This is the hour when old people die--the dawn. I will go and see--go at once."

She sprang up. To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance, of social amends, however small, however futile--to propitiate herself, if but by a hairbreadth--this, no doubt, was the instinct at work. She dressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to make against the stiffness of her own young bones--glad of her hunger and faintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought and conquered.

In a very short time she had passed quietly downstairs and through the hall, greatly to the amazement of William, who opened the front door for her. Once in the village road the damp raw air revived her greatly. She lifted her hot temples to it, welcoming the waves of wet mist that swept along the road, feeling her youth come back to her.

Suddenly as she was nearing the end of a narrow bit of lane between high hedges, and the first houses of the village were in sight, she was stopped by a noise behind her--a strange unaccountable noise as of women's voices, calling and wailing. It startled and frightened her, and she stood in the middle of the road waiting.

Then she saw coming towards her two women running at full speed, crying and shouting, their aprons up to their faces.

"What is it? What is the matter?" she asked, going to meet them, and recognising two labourers' wives she knew.

"Oh! miss--oh! miss!" said the foremost, too wrapt up in her news to be surprised at the sight of her. "They've just found him--they're bringin' ov 'im home; they've got a shutter from Muster Wellin! 'im at Disley Farm. It wor close by Disley wood they found 'em. And there's one ov 'is men they've sent off ridin' for the inspector--here he come, miss! Come out o' th' way!"

They dragged her back, and a young labourer galloped past them on a farm colt, urging it on to its full pace, his face red and set.

"Who is found?" cried Marcella--"What is it?"

"Westall, miss--Lor' bless you--Shot him in the head they did--blowed his brains right out--and Charlie Dynes--oh! he's knocked about shamful--the doctor don't give no hopes of him. Oh deary--deary me! And we're goin' for Muster Harden--ee must tell the widder--or Miss Mary--none on us can!"

"And who did it?" said Marcella, pale with horror, holding her.

"Why the poachers, miss. Them as they've bin waitin' for all along--and they do say as Jim Hurd's in it. Oh Lord, oh Lord!"

Marcella stood petrified, and let them hurry on.

Chapter IX

The lane was still again, save for the unwonted sounds coming from the groups which had gathered round the two women, and were now moving beside them along the village street a hundred yards ahead.

Marcella stood in a horror of memory--seeing Hurd's figure cross the moonlit avenue from dark to dark. Where was he? Had he escaped? Suddenly she set off running, stung by the thought of what might have already happened under the eyes of that unhappy wife, those wretched children.

As she entered the village, a young fellow ran up to her in breathless excitement. "They've got 'im, miss. He'd come straight home--'adn't made no attempt to run. As soon as Jenkins" (Jenkins was the policeman) "heared of it, ee went straight across to 'is house, an' caught 'im. Ee wor goin' to make off--'is wife 'ad been persuadin' ov 'im all night. But they've got him, miss, sure enough!"

The lad's exultation was horrible. Marcella waved him aside and ran on. A man on horseback appeared on the road in front of her leading from Widrington to the village. She recognised Aldous Raeburn, who had checked his horse in sudden amazement as he saw her talking to the boy.

"My darling! what are you here for? Oh! go home--go home!--out of this horrible business. They have sent for me as a magistrate. Dynes is alive--I beg you!--go home!"

She shook her head, out of breath and speechless with running. At the same moment she and he, looking to the right, caught sight of the crowd standing in front of Hurd's cottage.

A man ran out from it, seeing the horse and its rider.

"Muster Raeburn! Muster Raeburn! They've cotched 'im; Jenkins has got 'im."

"Ah!" said Aldous, drawing a long, stern breath; "he didn't try to get off then? Marcella!--you are not going there--to that house!"

He spoke in a tone of the strongest remonstrance. Her soul rose in anger against it.

"I am going to her" she said panting;--"don't wait."

And she left him and hurried on.

As soon as the crowd round the cottage saw her coming, they divided to let her pass.

"She's quiet now, miss," said a woman to her significantly, nodding towards the hovel. "Just after Jenkins got in you could hear her crying out pitiful."

"That was when they wor a-handcuffin' him," said a man beside her.

Marcella shuddered.

"Will they let me in?" she asked.

"They won't let none ov us in," said the man. "There's Hurd's sister," and he pointed to a weeping woman supported by two others. "They've kep' her out. But here's the inspector, miss; you ask him."

The inspector, a shrewd officer of long experience, fetched in haste from a mile's distance, galloped up, and gave his horse to a boy.

Marcella went up to him.

He looked at her with sharp interrogation. "You are Miss Boyce? Miss Boyce of Mellor?"

"Yes, I want to go to the wife; I will promise not to get in your way."

He nodded. The crowd let them pass. The inspector knocked at the door, which was cautiously unlocked by Jenkins, and the two went in together.

"She's a queer one," said a thin, weasel-eyed man in the crowd to his neighbour. "To think o' her bein' in it--at this time o' day. You could see Muster Raeburn was a tellin' of her to go 'ome. But she's allus pampered them Hurds."

The speaker was Ned Patton, old Patton's son, and Hurd's companion on many a profitable night-walk. It was barely a week since he had been out with Hurd on another ferreting expedition, some of the proceeds of which were still hidden in Patton's outhouse. But at the present moment he was one of the keenest of the crowd, watching eagerly for the moment when he should see his old comrade come out, trapped and checkmated, bound safely and surely to the gallows. The natural love of incident and change which keeps life healthy had been starved in him by his labourer's condition. This sudden excitement had made a brute of him.

The man next him grimaced, and took his pipe out of his mouth a moment.

"She won't be able to do nothin' for 'im! There isn't a man nor boy in this 'ere place as didn't know as ee hated Westall like pison, and would be as like as not to do for 'im some day. That'll count agen 'im now terrible strong! Ee wor allus one to blab, ee wor."

"Well, an' Westall said jus' as much!" struck in another voice; "theer wor sure to be a fight iv ever Westall got at 'im--on the job. You see--they may bring it in manslarter after all."

"'Ow does any one know ee wor there at all? who seed him?" inquired a white-haired elderly man, raising a loud quavering voice from the middle of the crowd.

"Charlie Dynes seed 'im," cried several together.

"How do yer know ee seed 'im?"

From the babel of voices which followed the white-haired man slowly gathered the beginnings of the matter. Charlie Dynes, Westall's assistant, had been first discovered by a horsekeeper in Farmer Wellin's employment as he was going to his work. The lad had been found under a hedge, bleeding and frightfully injured, but still alive. Close beside him was the dead body of Westall with shot-wounds in the head. On being taken to the farm and given brandy, Dynes was asked if he had recognised anybody. He had said there were five of them, "town chaps"; and then he had named Hurd quite plainly--whether anybody else, nobody knew. It was said he would die, and that Mr. Raeburn had gone to take his deposition.

"An' them town chaps got off, eh?" said the elderly man.

"Clean!" said Patton, refilling his pipe. "Trust them!"

Meanwhile, inside this poor cottage Marcella was putting out all the powers of the soul. As the door closed behind her and the inspector, she saw Hurd sitting handcuffed in the middle of the kitchen, watched by a man whom Jenkins, the local policeman, had got in to help him, till some more police should arrive. Jenkins was now upstairs searching the bedroom. The little bronchitic boy sat on the fender, in front of the untidy fireless grate, shivering, his emaciated face like a yellowish white mask, his eyes fixed immovably on his father. Every now and then he was shaken with coughing, but still he looked--with the dumb devoted attention of some watching animal.

Hurd, too, was sitting silent. His eyes, which seemed wider open and more brilliant than usual, wandered restlessly from thing to thing about the room; his great earth-stained hands in their fetters twitched every now and then on his knee. Haggard and dirty as he was, there was a certain aloofness, a dignity even, about the misshapen figure which struck Marcella strangely. Both criminal and victim may have it--this dignity. It means that a man feels himself set apart from his kind.

Hurd started at sight of Marcella. "I want to speak to her," he said hoarsely, as the inspector approached him--"to that lady"--nodding towards her.

"Very well," said the inspector; "only it is my duty to warn you that anything you say now will be taken down and used as evidence at the inquest."

Marcella came near. As she stood in front of him, one trembling ungloved hand crossed over the other, the diamond in her engagement ring catching the light from the window sparkled brightly, diverting even for the moment the eyes of the little fellow against whom her skirts were brushing.

"Ee might ha' killed me just as well as I killed 'im," said Hurd, bending over to her and speaking with difficulty from the dryness of his mouth. "I didn't mean nothink o' what happened. He and Charlie came on us round Disley Wood. He didn't take no notice o' them. It was they as beat Charlie. But he came straight on at me--all in a fury--a blackguardin' ov me, with his stick up. I thought he was for beatin' my brains out, an' I up with my gun and fired. He was so close--that was how he got it all in the head. But ee might 'a' killed me just as well."

He paused, staring at her with a certain anguished intensity, as though he were watching to see how she took it--nay, trying its effect both on her and himself. He did not look afraid or cast down--nay, there was a curious buoyancy and steadiness about his manner for the moment which astonished her. She could almost have fancied that he was more alive, more of a man than she had ever seen him--mind and body better fused, more at command.

"Is there anything more you wish to say to me?" she asked him, after waiting.

Then suddenly his manner changed. Their eyes met. Hers, with all their subtle inheritance of various expression, their realised character, as it were, searched his, tried to understand them--those peasant eyes, so piercing to her strained sense in their animal urgency and shame. Why had he done this awful thing?--deceived her--wrecked his wife?--that was what her look asked. It seemed to her too childish--too stupid to be believed.

"I haven't made nobbut a poor return to you, miss," he said in a shambling way, as though the words were dragged out of him. Then he threw up his head again. "But I didn't mean nothink o' what happened," he repeated, doggedly going off again into a rapid yet, on the whole, vivid and consecutive account of Westall's attack, to which Marcella listened, trying to remember every word.

"Keep that for your solicitor," the inspector said at last, interrupting him; "you are only giving pain to Miss Boyce. You had better let her go to your wife."

Hurd looked steadily once more at Marcella. "It be a bad end I'm come to," he said, after a moment. "But I thank you kindly all the same. They'll want seein' after." He jerked his head towards the boy, then towards the outhouse or scullery where his wife was. "She takes it terr'ble hard. She wanted me to run. But I said, 'No, I'll stan' it out.' Mr. Brown at the Court'll give you the bit wages he owes me. But they'll have to go on the Union. Everybody'll turn their backs on them now."

"I will look after them," said Marcella, "and I will do the best I can for you. Now I will go to Mrs. Hurd."

Minta Hurd was sitting in a corner of the outhouse on the clay floor, her head leaning against the wall. The face was turned upward, the eyes shut, the mouth helplessly open. When Marcella saw her, she knew that the unhappy woman had already wept so much in the hours since her husband came back to her that she could weep no more. The two little girls in the scantiest of clothing, half-fastened, sat on the floor beside her, shivering and begrimed--watching her. They had been crying at the tops of their voices, but were now only whimpering miserably, and trying at intervals to dry their tear-stained cheeks with the skirts of their frocks. The baby, wrapped in an old shawl, lay on its mother's knee, asleep and unheeded. The little lean-to place, full of odds and ends of rubbish, and darkened overhead by a string of damp clothes--was intolerably cold in the damp February dawn. The children were blue; the mother felt like ice as Marcella stooped to touch her. Outcast misery could go no further.

The mother moaned as she felt Marcella's hand, then started wildly forward, straining her thin neck and swollen eyes that she might see through the two open doors of the kitchen and the outhouse.

"They're not taking him away?" she said fiercely. "Jenkins swore to me they'd give me notice."

"No, he's still there," said Marcella, her voice shaking. "The inspector's come. You shall have notice."

Mrs. Hurd recognised her voice, and looked up at her in amazement.

"You must put this on," said Marcella, taking off the short fur cape she wore. "You are perished. Give me the baby, and wrap yourself in it."

But Mrs. Hurd put it away from her with a vehement hand.

"I'm not cold, miss--I'm burning hot. He made me come in here. He said he'd do better if the children and I ud go away a bit. An' I couldn't go upstairs, because--because--" she hid her face on her knees.

Marcella had a sudden sick vision of the horrors this poor creature must have gone through since her husband had appeared to her, splashed with the blood of his enemy, under that same marvellous moon which--

Her mind repelled its own memories with haste. Moreover, she was aware of the inspector standing at the kitchen door and beckoning to her. She stole across to him so softly that Mrs. Hurd did not hear her.

"We have found all we want," he said in his official tone, but under his breath--"the clothes anyway. We must now look for the gun. Jenkins is first going to take him off to Widrington. The inquest will be held to-morrow here, at 'The Green Man.' We shall bring him over." Then he added in another voice, touching his hat, "I don't like leaving you, miss, in this place. Shall Jenkins go and fetch somebody to look after that poor thing? They'll be all swarming in here as soon as we've gone."

"No, I'll stay for a while. I'll look after her. They won't come in if I'm here. Except his sister--Mrs. Mullins--she may come in, of course, if she wants."

The inspector hesitated.

"I'm going now to meet Mr. Raeburn, miss. I'll tell him that you're here."

"He knows," said Marcella, briefly. "Now are you ready?"

He signed assent, and Marcella went back to the wife.

"Mrs. Hurd," she said, kneeling on the ground beside her, "they're going."

The wife sprang up with a cry and ran into the kitchen, where Hurd was already on his feet between Jenkins and another policeman, who were to convey him to the gaol at Widrington. But when she came face to face with her husband something--perhaps the nervous appeal in his strained eyes--checked her, and she controlled herself piteously. She did not even attempt to kiss him. With her eyes on the ground, she put her hand on his arm. "They'll let me come and see you, Jim?" she said, trembling.

"Yes; you can find out the rules," he said shortly. "Don't let them children cry. They want their breakfast to warm them. There's plenty of coal. I brought a sack home from Jellaby's last night myself. Good-bye."

"Now, march," said the inspector, sternly, pushing the wife back.

Marcella put her arm round the shaking woman. The door opened; and beyond the three figures as they passed out, her eye passed to the waiting crowd, then to the misty expanse of common and the dark woods behind, still wrapped in fog.

When Mrs. Hurd saw the rows of people waiting within a stone's throw of the door she shrank back. Perhaps it struck her, as it struck Marcella, that every face was the face of a foe. Marcella ran to the door as the inspector stepped out, and locked it after him. Mrs. Hurd, hiding herself behind a bit of baize curtain, watched the two policemen mount with Hurd into the fly that was waiting, and then followed it with her eyes along the bit of straight road, uttering sounds the while of low anguish, which wrung the heart in Marcella's breast. Looking back in after days it always seemed to her that for this poor soul the true parting, the true wrench between life and life, came at this moment.

She went up to her, her own tears running over.

"You must come and lie down," she said, recovering herself as quickly as possible. "You and the children are both starved, and you will want your strength if you are to help him. I will see to things."

She put the helpless woman on the wooden settle by the fireplace, rolling up her cloak to make a pillow.

"Now, Willie, you sit by your mother. Daisy, where's the cradle? Put the baby down and come and help me make the fire."

The dazed children did exactly as they were told, and the mother lay like a log on the settle. Marcella found coal and wood under Daisy's guidance, and soon lit the fire, piling on the fuel with a lavish hand. Daisy brought her water, and she filled the kettle and set it on to boil, while the little girl, still sobbing at intervals like some little weeping automaton, laid the breakfast. Then the children all crouched round the warmth, while Marcella rubbed their cold hands and feet, and "mothered" them. Shaken as she was with emotion and horror, she was yet full of a passionate joy that this pity, this tendance was allowed to her. The crushing weight of self-contempt had lifted. She felt morally free and at ease.

Already she was revolving what she could do for Hurd. It was as clear as daylight to her that there had been no murder but a free fight--an even chance between him and Westall. The violence of a hard and tyrannous man had provoked his own destruction--so it stood, for her passionate protesting sense. That at any rate must be the defence, and some able man must be found to press it. She thought she would write to the Cravens and consult them. Her thoughts carefully avoided the names both of Aldous Raeburn and of Wharton.

She was about to make the tea when some one knocked at the door. It proved to be Hurd's sister, a helpless woman, with a face swollen by crying, who seemed to be afraid to come into the cottage, and afraid to go near her sister-in-law. Marcella gave her money, and sent her for some eggs to the neighbouring shop, then told her to come back in half an hour and take charge. She was an incapable, but there was nothing better to be done. "Where is Miss Harden?" she asked the woman. The answer was that ever since the news came to the village the rector and his sister had been with Mrs. Westall and Charlie Dyne's mother. Mrs. Westall had gone into fit after fit; it had taken two to hold her, and Charlie's mother, who was in bed recovering from pneumonia, had also been very bad.

Again Marcella's heart contracted with rage rather than pity. Such wrack and waste of human life, moral and physical! for what? For the protection of a hateful sport which demoralised the rich and their agents, no less than it tempted and provoked the poor!

When she had fed and physically comforted the children, she went and knelt down beside Mrs. Hurd, who still lay with closed eyes in heavy-breathing stupor.

"Dear Mrs. Hurd," she said, "I want you to drink this tea and eat something."

The half-stupefied woman signed refusal. But Marcella insisted.

"You have got to fight for your husband's life," she said firmly, "and to look after your children. I must go in a very short time, and before I go you must tell me all that you can of this business. Hurd would tell you to do it. He knows and you know that I am to be trusted. I want to save him. I shall get a good lawyer to help him. But first you must take this--and then you must talk to me."

The habit of obedience to a "lady," established long ago in years of domestic service, held. The miserable wife submitted to be fed, looked with forlorn wonder at the children round the fire, and then sank back with a groan. In her tension of feeling Marcella for an impatient moment thought her a poor creature. Then with quick remorse she put her arms tenderly round her, raised the dishevelled grey-streaked head on her shoulder, and stooping, kissed the marred face, her own lips quivering.

"You are not alone," said the girl with her whole soul. "You shall never be alone while I live. Now tell me."

She made the white and gasping woman sit up in a corner of the settle, and she herself got a stool and established herself a little way off, frowning, self-contained, and determined to make out the truth.

"Shall I send the children upstairs?" she asked.

"No!" said the boy, suddenly, in his husky voice, shaking his head with energy, "I'm not a-going."

"Oh! he's safe--is Willie," said Mrs. Hurd, looking at him, but strangely, and as it were from a long distance, "and the others is too little."

Then gradually Marcella got the story out of her--first, the misery of alarm and anxiety in which she had lived ever since the Tudley End raid, owing first to her knowledge of Hurd's connection with it, and with the gang that had carried it out; then to her appreciation of the quick and ghastly growth of the hatred between him and Westall; lastly, to her sense of ingratitude towards those who had been kind to them.

"I knew we was acting bad towards you. I told Jim so. I couldn't hardly bear to see you come in. But there, miss,--I couldn't do anything. I tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried! There was never no happiness between us at last, I talked so. But I don't believe he could help himself--he's not made like other folks, isn't Jim--"

Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech. Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close. Gradually she made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over Westall's discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth out of him by degrees. Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his, lest affection should lose its miserable all.

As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it than--suddenly--she would allow herself to say. For in the midst of her out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell silent.

"I don't know nothing about it, miss," she stubbornly declared at last, with an inconsequent absurdity which smote Marcella's pity afresh. "How am I to know? There was seven o' them Oxford fellows at Tudley End--that I know. Who's to say as Jim was with 'em at all last night? Who's to say as it wasn't them as--"

She stopped, shivering. Marcella held her reluctant hand.

"You don't know," she said quietly, "that I saw your husband in here for a minute before I came in to you, and that he told me, as he had already told Jenkins, that it was in a struggle with him that Westall was shot, but that he had fired in self-defence because Westall was attacking him. You don't know, too, that Charlie Dynes is alive, and says he saw Hurd--"

"Charlie Dynes!" Mrs. Hurd gave a shriek, and then fell to weeping and trembling again, so that Marcella had need of patience.

"If you can't help me more," she said at last in despair, "I don't know what we shall do. Listen to me. Your husband will be charged with Westall's murder. That I am sure of. He says it was not murder--that it happened in a fight. I believe it. I want to get a lawyer to prove it. I am your friend--you know I am. But if you are not going to help me by telling me what you know of last night I may as well go home--and get your sister-in-law to look after you and the children."

She rose as she spoke. Mrs. Hurd clutched at her.

"Oh, my God!" she said, looking straight before her vacantly at the children, who at once began to cry again. "Oh, my God! Look here, miss"--her voice dropped, her swollen eyes fixed themselves on Marcella--the words came out in a low, hurried stream--"It was just after four o'clock I heard that door turn; I got up in my nightgown and ran down, and there was Jim. 'Put that light out,' he says to me, sharp like. 'Oh, Jim,' says I, 'wherever have you been? You'll be the death o' me and them poor children!' 'You go to bed,' says he to me, 'and I'll come presently.' But I could see him, 'cos of the moon, almost as plain as day, an' I couldn't take my eyes off him. And he went about the kitchen so strange like, puttin' down his hat and takin' it up again, an' I saw he hadn't got his gun. So I went up and caught holt on him. An' he gave me a push back. 'Can't you let me alone?' he says; 'you'll know soon enough.' An' then I looked at my sleeve where I'd touched him--oh, my God! my God!"

Marcella, white to the lips and shuddering too, held her tight. She had the seeing faculty which goes with such quick, nervous natures, and she saw the scene as though she had been there--the moonlit cottage, the miserable husband and wife, the life-blood on the woman's sleeve.

Mrs. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments of remembered talk. She told her husband's story of the encounter with the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business was known. But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out. Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so. But she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he should go to bed and get some sleep. She would make a fool of him, and he should want all his wits. She followed him up the steep ladder to their room, weeping. And there was little Willie sitting up in bed, choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because of the voices below.

"And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs and feet to warm them, an' I could hear him groanin'. And I says to him, 'Jim, if you won't go for my sake, will you go for the boy's?' For you see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an' I thought he'd hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps, and off to the States. An' it seemed as though my head would burst with listening for people comin', and him taken up there like a rat in a trap, an' no way of provin' the truth, and everybody agen him, because of the things he'd said. And he burst out a-cryin', an' Willie cried. An' I came an' entreated of him. An' he kissed me; an' at last he said he'd go. An' I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an' just as he'd got to the foot of the stairs, an' I was holding little Willie in my arms an' saying good-bye to him--"

She let her head sink against the settle. There was no more to say, and Marcella asked no more questions--she sat thinking. Willie stood, a wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoarse breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.

Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door. She got up and looked through the casement window. The crowd had mostly dispersed, but a few people stood about on the green, and a policeman was stationed outside the cottage. On the steps stood Aldous Raeburn, his horse held behind him by a boy.

She went and opened the door.

"I will come," she said at once. "There--I see Mrs. Mullins crossing the common. Now I can leave her."

Aldous, taking off his hat, closed the door behind him and stood with his hand on Marcella's arm, looking at the huddled woman on the settle, at the pale children. There was a solemnity in his expression, a mixture of judgment and pity which showed that the emotion of other scenes also--scenes through which he had just passed--was entering into it.

"Poor unhappy souls," he said slowly, under his breath. "You say that you have got some one to see after her. She looks as though it might kill her, too."

Marcella nodded. Now that her task, for the moment, was nearly over, she could hardly restrain herself nervously or keep herself from crying. Aldous observed her with disquiet as she put on her hat. His heart was deeply stirred. She had chosen more nobly for herself than he would have chosen for her, in thus daring an awful experience for the sake of mercy. His moral sense, exalted and awed by the sight of death, approved, worshipped her. His man's impatience pined to get her away, to cherish and comfort hen Why, she could hardly have slept three hours since they parted on the steps of the Court, amidst the crowd of carriages!

Mrs. Mullins came in still scared and weeping, and dropping frightened curtseys to "Muster Raeburn." Marcella spoke to her a little in a whisper, gave some counsels which filled Aldous with admiration for the girl's practical sense and thoughtfulness, and promised to come again later. Mrs. Hurd neither moved nor opened her eyes.

"Can you walk?" said Aldous, bending over her, as they stood outside the cottage. "I can see that you are worn out. Could you sit my horse if I led him?"

"No, let us walk."

They went on together, followed by the eyes of the village, the boy leading the horse some distance behind.

"Where have you been?" said Marcella, when they had passed the village. "Oh, please don't think of my being tired! I had so much rather know it all. I must know it all."

She was deathly pale, but her black eyes flashed impatience and excitement. She even drew her hand out of the arm where Aldous was tenderly holding it, and walked on erect by herself.

"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his deposition. He died while I was there."

"He died?"

"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he lived long enough, thank God, to give the information which will, I think, bring them to justice!"

The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella's quivering nerves.

"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in protecting your tame pheasants?"

A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter sigh--the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as it were, one long scruple.

"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's bedside."

They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep, inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack. At last he resumed:

"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present case is surely clear--horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition. They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"

Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.

"It was not deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in Hurd's case. I have heard it all from his own mouth. It was a struggle--he might have been killed instead of Westall--Westall attacked, Hurd defended himself."

Aldous shook his head.

"Of course Hurd would tell you so," he said sadly, "and his poor wife. He is not a bad or vicious fellow, like the rest of the rascally pack. Probably when he came to himself, after the moment of rage, he could not simply believe what he had done. But that makes no difference. It was murder; no judge or jury could possibly take any other view. Dynes's evidence is clear, and the proof of motive is overwhelming."

Then, as he saw her pallor and trembling, he broke off in deep distress. "My dear one, if I could but have kept you out of this!"

They were alone in the misty road. The boy with the horse was out of sight. He would fain have put his arm round her, have consoled and supported her. But she would not let him.

"Please understand," she said in a sort of gasp, as she drew herself away, "that I do not believe Hurd is guilty--that I shall do my very utmost to defend him. He is to me the victim of unjust, abominable laws! If you will not help me to protect him--then I must look to some one else."

Aldous felt a sudden stab of suspicion--presentiment.

"Of course he will be well defended; he will have every chance; that you may be sure of," he said slowly.

Marcella controlled herself, and they walked on. As they entered the drive of Mellor, Aldous thought passionately of those divine moments in his sitting-room, hardly yet nine hours old. And now--now!--she walked beside him as an enemy.

The sound of a step on the gravel in front of them made them look up. Past, present, and future met in the girl's bewildered and stormy sense as she recognised Wharton.

Chapter X

The first sitting of the Birmingham Labour Congress was just over, and the streets about the hall in which it had been held were beginning to fill with the issuing delegates. Rain was pouring down and umbrellas were plentiful.

Harry Wharton, accompanied by a group of men, left the main entrance of the hall,--releasing himself with difficulty from the friendly crowd about the doors--and crossed the street to his hotel.

"Well, I'm glad you think I did decently," he said, as they mounted the hotel stairs. "What a beastly day, and how stuffy that hall was! Come in and have something to drink."

He threw open the door of his sitting-room as he spoke. The four men with him followed him in.

"I must go back to the hall to see two or three men before everybody disperses," said the one in front. "No refreshment for me, thank you, Mr. Wharton. But I want to ask a question--what arrangements have you made for the reporting of your speech?"

The man who spoke was thin and dark, with a modest kindly eye. He wore a black frock coat, and had the air of a minister.

"Oh, thank you, Bennett, it's all right. The Post, the Chronicle, and the Northern Guardian will have full copies. I sent them off before the meeting. And my own paper, of course. As to the rest they may report it as they like. I don't care."

"They'll all have it," said another man, bluntly. "It's the best speech you've ever made--the best president's speech we've had yet, I say,--don't you think so?"

The speaker, a man called Casey, turned to the two men behind him. Both nodded.

"Hallin's speech last year was first-rate," he continued, "but somehow Hallin damps you down, at least he did me last year; what you want just now is fight--and, my word! Mr. Wharton let 'em have it!"

And standing with his hands on his sides, he glanced round from one to another. His own face was flushed, partly from the effects of a crowded hall and bad air, but mostly with excitement. All the men present indeed--though it was less evident in Bennett and Wharton than in the rest--had the bright nervous look which belongs to leaders keenly conscious of standing well with the led, and of having just emerged successfully from an agitating ordeal. As they stood together they went over the speech to which they had been listening, and the scene which had followed it, in a running stream of talk, laughter, and gossip. Wharton took little part, except to make a joke occasionally at his own expense, but the pleasure on his smiling lip, and in his roving, contented eye was not to be mistaken. The speech he had just delivered had been first thought out as he paced the moonlit library and corridor at Mellor. After Marcella had left him, and he was once more in his own room, he had had the extraordinary self-control to write it out, and make two or three machine-copies of it for the press. Neither its range nor its logical order had suffered for that intervening experience. The programme of labour for the next five years had never been better presented, more boldly planned, more eloquently justified. Hallin's presidential speech of the year before, as Casey said, rang flat in the memory when compared with it. Wharton knew that he had made a mark, and knew also that his speech had given him the whip-hand of some fellows who would otherwise have stood in his way.

Casey was the first man to cease talking about the speech. He had already betrayed himself about it more than he meant. He belonged to the New Unionism, and affected a costume in character--fustian trousers, flannel shirt, a full red tie and work-man's coat, all well calculated to set off a fine lion-like head and broad shoulders. He had begun life as a bricklayer's labourer, and was now the secretary of a recently formed Union. His influence had been considerable, but was said to be already on the wane; though it was thought likely that he would win a seat in the coming Parliament.

The other two men were Molloy, secretary to the congress, short, smooth-faced, and wiry, a man whose pleasant eye and manner were often misleading, since he was in truth one of the hottest fighting men of a fighting movement; and Wilkins, a friend of Casey's--ex-iron worker, Union official, and Labour candidate for a Yorkshire division--an uneducated, passionate fellow, speaking with a broad, Yorkshire accent, a bad man of affairs, but honest, and endowed with the influence which comes of sincerity, together with a gift for speaking and superhuman powers of physical endurance.

"Well, I'm glad it's over," said Wharton, throwing himself into a chair with a long breath, and at the same time stretching out his hand to ring the bell. "Casey, some whisky? No? Nor you, Wilkins? nor Molloy? As for you, Bennett, I know it's no good asking you. By George! our grandfathers would have thought us a poor lot! Well, some coffee at any rate you must all of you have before you go back. Waiter! coffee. By the way, I have been seeing something of Hallin, Bennett, down in the country."

He took out his cigarette case as he spoke, and offered it to the others. All refused except Molloy. Casey took his half-smoked pipe out of his pocket and lit up. He was not a teetotaler as the others were, but he would have scorned to drink his whisky and water at the expense of a "gentleman" like Wharton, or to smoke the "gentleman's" cigarettes. His class-pride was irritably strong. Molloy, who was by nature anybody's equal, took the cigarette with an easy good manners, which made Casey look at him askance.

Mr. Bennett drew his chair close to Wharton's. The mention of Hallin had roused a look of anxiety in his quick dark eyes.

"How is he, Mr. Wharton? The last letter I had from him he made light of his health. But you know he only just avoided a breakdown in that strike business. We only pulled him through by the skin of his teeth--Mr. Raeburn and I."

"Oh, he's no constitution; never had, I suppose. But he seemed much as usual. He's staying with Raeburn, you know, and I've been staying with the father of the young lady whom Raeburn 's going to marry."

"Ah! I've heard of that," said Bennett, with a look of interest. "Well, Mr. Raeburn isn't on our side, but for judgment and fair dealing there are very few men of his class and circumstances I would trust as I would him. The lady should be happy."

"Of course," said Wharton, drily. "However, neither she nor Raeburn are very happy just at this moment. A horrible affair happened down there last night. One of Lord Maxwell's gamekeepers and a 'helper,' a lad of seventeen, were killed last night in a fight with poachers. I only just heard the outlines of it before I came away, but I got a telegram just before going into congress, asking me to defend the man charged with the murder."

A quick expression of repulsion and disgust crossed Bennett's face.

"There have been a whole crop of such cases lately," he said. "How shall we ever escape from the curse of this game system?"

"We shan't escape it," said Wharton, quietly, knocking the end off his cigarette, "not in your lifetime or mine. When we get more Radicals on the bench we shall lighten the sentences; but that will only exasperate the sporting class into finding new ways of protecting themselves. Oh! the man will be hung--that's quite clear to me. But it will be a good case--from the public point of view--will work up well--"

He ran his hand through his curls, considering.

"Will work up admirably," he added in a lower tone of voice, as though to himself, his eyes keen and brilliant as ever, in spite of the marks of sleeplessness and fatigue visible in the rest of the face, though only visible there since he had allowed himself the repose of his cigarette and arm-chair.

"Are yo' comin' to dine at the 'Peterloo' to-night, Mr. Wharton?" said Wilkins, as Wharton handed him a cup of coffee; "but of coorse you are--part of yower duties, I suppose?"

While Molloy and Casey were deep in animated discussion of the great meeting of the afternoon he had been sitting silent against the edge of the table--a short-bearded sombre figure, ready at any moment to make a grievance, to suspect a slight.

"I'm afraid I can't," said Wharton, bending forward and speaking in a tone of concern; "that was just what I was going to ask you all--if you would make my excuses to-night? I have been explaining to Bennett. I have an important piece of business in the country--a labourer has been getting into trouble for shooting a keeper; they have asked me to defend him. The assizes come on in little more than a fortnight, worse luck! so that the time is short--"

And he went on to explain that, by taking an evening train back to Widrington, he could get the following (Saturday) morning with the solicitor in charge of the case, and be back in Birmingham, thanks to the convenience of a new line lately opened, in time for the second meeting of the congress, which was fixed for the early afternoon.

He spoke with great cordiality and persuasiveness. Among the men who surrounded him, his youth, good looks, and easy breeding shone out conspicuous. In the opinion of Wilkins, indeed, who followed his every word and gesture, he was far too well dressed and too well educated. A day would soon come when the labour movement would be able to show these young aristocrats the door. Not yet, however.

"Well, I thowt you wouldn't dine with us," he said, turning away with a blunt laugh.

Bennett's mild eye showed annoyance. "Mr. Wharton has explained himself very fully, I think," he said, turning to the others. "We shall miss him at dinner--but this matter seems to be one of life and death. And we mustn't forget anyway that Mr. Wharton is fulfilling this engagement at great inconvenience to himself. We none of us knew when we elected him last year that he would have to be fighting his election at the same time. Next Saturday, isn't it?"

Bennett rose as he spoke and carefully buttoned his coat. It was curious to contrast his position among his fellows--one of marked ascendency and authority--with his small insignificant physique. He had a gentle deprecating eye, and the heart of a poet. He played the flute and possessed the gift of repeating verse--especially Ebenezer Eliot's Corn Law Rhymes--so as to stir a great audience to enthusiasm or tears. The Wesleyan community of his native Cheshire village owned no more successful class-leader, and no humbler Christian. At the same time he could hold a large business meeting sternly in check, was the secretary of one of the largest and oldest Unions in the country, had been in Parliament for years, and was generally looked upon even by the men who hated his "moderate" policy, as a power not to be ignored.

"Next Saturday. Yes!" said Wharton, nodding in answer to his inquiry.

"Well, are you going to do it?" said Casey, looking round at him.

"Oh, yes!" said Wharton, cheerfully; "oh, yes! we shall do it. We shall settle old Dodgson, I think."

"Are the Raeburns as strong as they were?" asked Molloy, who knew Brookshire.

"What landlord is? Since '84 the ground is mined for them all--good and bad--and they know it."

"The mine takes a long time blowing up--too long for my patience," said Wilkins, gruffly. "How the country can go on year after year paying its tribute to these plunderers passes my comprehension. But you may attack them as you please. You will never get any forrarder so long as Parliament and the Cabinet is made up of them and their hangers on."

Wharton looked at him brightly, but silently, making a little assenting inclination of the head. He was not surprised that anything should pass Wilkins's comprehension, and he was determined to give him no opening for holding forth.

"Well, we'll let you alone," said Bennett. "You'll have very little time to get off in. We'll make your excuses, Mr. Wharton. You may be sure everybody is so pleased with your speech we shall find them all in a good temper. It was grand!--let me congratulate you again. Good-night--I hope you'll get your poacher off!"

The others followed suit, and they all took leave in character;--Molloy, with an eager business reference to the order of the day for Saturday,--"Give me your address at Widrington; I'll post you everything to-night, so that you may have it all under your eye"--Casey, with the off-hand patronage of the man who would not for the world have his benevolence mistaken for servility,--and Wilkins with as gruff a nod and as limp a shake of the hand as possible. It might perhaps have been read in the manner of the last two, that although this young man had just made a most remarkable impression, and was clearly destined to go far, they were determined not to yield themselves to him a moment before they must. In truth, both were already jealous of him; whereas Molloy, absorbed in the business of the congress, cared for nothing except to know whether in the next two days' debates Wharton would show himself as good a chairman as he was an orator; and Bennett, while saying no word that he did not mean, was fully conscious of an inner judgment, which pronounced five minutes of Edward Hallin's company to be worth more to him than anything which this brilliant young fellow could do or say.

* * * * *

Wharton saw them out, then came back and threw himself again into his chair by the window. The venetian blinds were not closed, and he looked out on a wide and handsome street of tall red-brick houses and shops, crowded with people and carriages, and lit with a lavishness of gas which overcame even the February dark and damp. But he noticed nothing, and even the sensation of his triumph was passing off. He was once more in the Mellor drive; Aldous Raeburn and Marcella stood in front of him; the thrill of the moment beat once more in his pulse.

He buried his head in his hands and thought. The news of the murder had reached him from Mr. Boyce. The master of Mellor had heard the news from William, the man-servant, at half-past seven, and had instantly knocked up his guest, by way of sharing the excitement with which his own feeble frame was throbbing.

"By Gad! I never heard such an atrocious business," said the invalid, his thin hand shaking against his dressing-gown. "That's what your Radical notions bring us to! We shall have them plundering and burning the country houses next."

"I don't think my Radical notions have much to do with it," said Wharton, composedly.

But there was a red spot in his cheeks which belied his manner. So when he--they--saw Hurd cross the avenue he was on his way to this deed of blood. The shot that he, Wharton, had heard had been the shot which slew Westall? Probably. Well, what was the bearing of it? Could she keep her own counsel or would they find themselves in the witness box? The idea quickened his pulse amazingly.

"Any clue? Any arrests?" he asked of his host. "Why, I told you," said Boyce, testily, though as a matter of fact he had said nothing. "They have got that man Hurd. The ruffian has been a marked man by the keepers and police, they tell me, for the last year or more. And there's my daughter has been pampering him and his wife all the time, and preaching to me about them! She got Raeburn even to take him on at the Court. I trust it will be a lesson to her."

Wharton drew a breath of relief. So the man was in custody, and there was other evidence. Good! There was no saying what a woman's conscience might be capable of, even against her friends and herself.

When Mr. Boyce at last left him free to dress and make his preparations for the early train, by which the night before, after the ladies' departure for the ball, he had suddenly made up his mind to leave Mellor, it was some time before Wharton could rouse himself to action. The situation absorbed him. Miss Boyce's friend was now in imminent danger of his neck, and Miss Boyce's thoughts must be of necessity concentrated upon his plight and that of his family. He foresaw the passion, the saeva indignatio, that she must ultimately throw--the general situation being what it was--into the struggle for Hurd's life. Whatever the evidence might be, he would be to her either victim or champion--and Westall, of course, merely the Holofernes of the piece.

How would Raeburn take it? Ah, well! the situation must develop. It occurred to him, however, that he would catch an earlier train to Widrington than the one he had fixed on, and have half an hour's talk with a solicitor who was a good friend of his before going on to Birmingham. Accordingly, he rang for William--who came, all staring and dishevelled, fresh from the agitation of the servants' hall--gave orders for his luggage to be sent after him, got as much fresh information as he could from the excited lad, plunged into his bath, and finally emerged, fresh and vigorous in every nerve, showing no trace whatever of the fact that two hours of broken sleep had been his sole portion for a night, in which he had gone through emotions and sustained a travail of brain either of which would have left their mark on most men.

* * * * *

Then the meeting in the drive! How plainly he saw them both--Raeburn grave and pale, Marcella in her dark serge skirt and cap, with an eye all passion and a cheek white as her hand.

"A tragic splendour enwrapped her!--a fierce heroic air. She was the embodiment of the moment--of the melancholy morning with its rain and leafless woods--of the human anguish throbbing in the little village. And I, who had seen her last in her festal dress, who had held her warm perfumed youth in my arms, who had watched in her white breast the heaving of the heart that I--I had troubled!--how did I find it possible to stand and face her? But I did. It rushed through me at once how I would make her forgive me--how I would regain possession of her. I had thought the play was closed: it was suddenly plain to me that the second act was but just beginning. She and Raeburn had already come to words--I knew it directly I saw them. This business will divide them more and more. His conscience will come in--and a Raeburn's conscience is the devil!

"By now he hates me; every word I speak to him--still more every word to her--galls him. But he controlled himself when I made him tell me the story--I had no reason to complain--though every now and then I could see him wince under the knowledge I must needs show of the persons and places concerned--a knowledge I could only have got from her. And she stood by meanwhile like a statue. Not a word, not a look, so far, though she had been forced to touch my hand. But my instinct saved me. I roused her--I played upon her! I took the line that I was morally certain she had been taking in their tête-à-tête. Why not a scuffle?--a general scrimmage?--in which it was matter of accident who fell? The man surely was inoffensive and gentle, incapable of deliberate murder. And as to the evidence of hatred, it told both ways. He stiffened and was silent. What a fine brow he has--a look sometimes, when he is moved, of antique power and probity! But she--she trembled--animation came back. She would almost have spoken to me--but I did well not to prolong it--to hurry on."

Then he took the telegram out of his pocket which had been put into his hands as he reached the hotel, his mouth quivering again with the exultation which he had felt when he had received it. It recalled to his ranging memory all the details of his hurried interview with the little Widrington solicitor, who had already scented a job in the matter of Hurd's defence. This man--needy, shrewd, and well equipped with local knowledge--had done work for Wharton and the party, and asked nothing better than to stand well with the future member for the division. "There is a lady," Wharton had said, "the daughter of Mr. Boyce of Mellor, who is already very much interested in this fellow and his family. She takes this business greatly to heart. I have seen her this morning, but had no time to discuss the matter with her. She will, I have little doubt, try to help the relations in the arrangements for the defence. Go to her this morning--tell her that the case has my sympathy--that, as she knows, I am a barrister, and, if she wishes it, I will defend Hurd. I shall be hard put to it to get up the case with the election coming on, but I will do it--for the sake of the public interest involved. You understand? Her father is a Tory--and she is just about to marry Mr. Raeburn. Her position, therefore, is difficult. Nevertheless, she will feel strongly--she does feel strongly about this case, and about the whole game system--and I feel moved to support her. She will take her own line, whatever happens. See her--see the wife, too, who is entirely under Miss Boyce's influence--and wire to me at my hotel at Birmingham. If they wish to make other arrangements, well and good. I shall have all the more time to give to the election."

Leaving this commission behind him, he had started on his journey. At the end of it a telegram had been handed to him on the stairs of his hotel:

"Have seen the lady, also Mrs. Hurd. You are urgently asked to undertake defence."

He spread it out before him now, and pondered it. The bit of flimsy paper contained for him the promise of all he most coveted,--influence, emotion, excitement. "She will have returns upon herself," he thought smiling, "when I see her again. She will be dignified, resentful; she will suspect everything I say or do--still more, she will suspect herself. No matter! The situation is in my hands. Whether I succeed or fail, she will be forced to work with me, to consult with me--she will owe me gratitude. What made her consent?--she must have felt it in some sort a humiliation. Is it that Raeburn has been driving her to strong measures--that she wants, woman-like, to win, and thought me after all her best chance, and put her pride in her pocket? Or is it?--ah! one should put that out of one's head. It's like wine--it unsteadies one. And for a thing like this one must go into training. Shall I write to her--there is just time now, before I start--take the lofty tone, the equal masculine tone, which I have noticed she likes?--ask her pardon for an act of madness--before we go together to the rescue of a life? It might do--it might go down. But no, I think not! Let the situation develop itself. Action and reaction--the unexpected--I commit myself to that. She--marry Aldous Raeburn in a month? Well, she may--certainly she may. But there is no need for me, I think, to take it greatly into account. Curious! twenty-four hours ago I thought it all done with--dead and done with. 'So like Provvy,' as Bentham used to say, when he heard of anything particularly unseemly in the way of natural catastrophe. Now to dine, and be off! How little sleep can I do with in the next fortnight?"

He rang, ordered his cab, and then went to the coffee-room for some hasty food. As he was passing one of the small tables with which the room was filled, a man who was dining there with a friend recognised him and gave him a cold nod. Wharton walked on to the further end of the room, and, while waiting for his meal, buried himself in the local evening paper, which already contained a report of his speech.

"Did you see that man?" asked the stranger of his friend.

"The small young fellow with the curly hair?"

"Small young fellow, indeed! He is the wiriest athlete I know--extraordinary physical strength for his size--and one of the cleverest rascals out as a politician. I am a neighbour of his in the country. His property joins mine. I knew his father--a little, dried-up old chap of the old school--very elegant manners and very obstinate--worried to death by his wife--oh, my goodness! such a woman!"

"What's the name?" said the friend, interrupting.

"Wharton--H.S. Wharton. His mother was a daughter of Lord Westgate, and her mother was an actress whom the old lord married in his dotage. Lady Mildred Wharton was like Garrick, only natural when she was acting, which she did on every possible occasion. A preposterous woman! Old Wharton ought to have beaten her for her handwriting, and murdered her for her gowns. Her signature took a sheet of note-paper, and as for her dress I never could get out of her way. Whatever part of the room I happened to be in I always found my feet tangled in her skirts. Somehow, I never could understand how she was able to find so much stuff of one pattern. But it was only to make you notice her, like all the rest. Every bit of her was a pose, and the maternal pose was the worst of all."

"H.S. Wharton?" said the other. "Why, that's the man who has been speaking here to-day. I've just been reading the account of it in the Evening Star. A big meeting--called by a joint committee of the leading Birmingham trades to consider the Liberal election programme as it affects labour--that's the man--he's been at it hammer and tongs--red-hot--all the usual devices for harrying the employer out of existence, with a few trifles--graduated income-tax and land nationalisation--thrown in. Oh! that's the man, is it?--they say he had a great reception--spoke brilliantly--and is certainly going to get into Parliament next week."

The speaker, who had the air of a shrewd and prosperous manufacturer, put up his eyeglass to look at this young Robespierre. His vis-à-vis--a stout country gentleman who had been in the army and knocked about the world before coming into his estate--shrugged his shoulders.

"So I hear--he daren't show his nose as a candidate in our part of the world, though of course he does us all the harm he can. I remember a good story of his mother--she quarrelled with her husband and all her relations, his and hers, and then she took to speaking in public, accompanied by her dear boy. On one occasion she was speaking at a market town near us, and telling the farmers that as far as she was concerned she would like to see the big properties cut up to-morrow. The sooner her father's and husband's estates were made into small holdings stocked with public capital the better. After it was all over, a friend of mine, who was there, was coming home in a sort of omnibus that ran between the town and a neighbouring village. He found himself between two fat farmers, and this was the conversation--broad Lincolnshire, of course: 'Did tha hear Lady Mildred Wharton say them things, Willum?' 'Aye, a did.' 'What did tha think, Willum?' 'What did tha think, George?' 'Wal, aa thowt Laady Mildred Wharton wor a graät fule, Willum, if tha asks me.' 'I'll uphowd tha, George! I'll uphowd tha!' said the other, and then they talked no more for the rest of the journey."

The friend laughed.

"So it was from the dear mamma that the young man got his opinions?"

"Of course. She dragged him into every absurdity she could from the time he was fifteen. When the husband died she tried to get the servants to come in to meals, but the butler struck. So did Wharton himself, who, for a Socialist, has always showed a very pretty turn for comfort. I am bound to say he was cut up when she died. It was the only time I ever felt like being civil to him--in those months after she departed. I suppose she was devoted to him--which after all is something."

"Good heavens!" said the other, still lazily turning over the pages of the newspaper as they sat waiting for their second course, "here is another poaching murder--in Brookshire--the third I have noticed within a month. On Lord Maxwell's property--you know them?"

"I know the old man a little--fine old fellow! They'll make him President of the Council, I suppose. He can't have much work left in him; but it is such a popular, respectable name. Ah! I'm sorry; the sort of thing to distress him terribly."

"I see the grandson is standing."

"Oh yes; will get in too. A queer sort of man--great ability and high character. But you can't imagine him getting on in politics, unless it's by sheer weight of wealth and family influence. He'll find a scruple in every bush--never stand the rough work of the House, or get on with the men. My goodness! you have to pull with some queer customers nowadays. By the way, I hear he is making an unsatisfactory marriage--a girl very handsome, but with no manners, and like nobody else--the daughter, too, of an extremely shady father. It's surprising; you'd have thought a man like Aldous Raeburn would have looked for the pick of things."

"Perhaps it was she looked for the pick of things!" said the other, with a blunt laugh. "Waiter, another bottle of champagne."