Chapter IV…

Chapter IV

Marcella on her way home turned into a little street leading to a great block of model dwellings, which rose on the right hand side and made everything else, the mews entrance opposite, the lines of squalid shops on either side, look particularly small and dirty. The sun was beating fiercely down, and she was sick and tired.

As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the large asphalted court round which they ran--blazing heat on one side of it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with chalk marks for wickets--she was seized with depression. The tall yet mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of packed and crowded humanity--these things, instead of offering her rest, only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more endurance, more making the best of it.

But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her, and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of her own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her children, who had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In sets 7 and 8, on either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two widows, each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.

Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside the "home" of the district on certain conditions, which had been fulfilled in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her old friends in these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable though poor class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her to make a temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that she could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for their companionship, as she pleased.

As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the living room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back kitchen.

The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's training showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak flap tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three cane chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books on the tables--there was not one of these things that was not in its degree a pleasure to her young senses, that did not help her to live her life. This afternoon as she opened the door and looked in, the pretty colours and forms in the tiny room were as water to the thirsty. Her mother had sent her some flowers the day before. There they were on the tables, great bunches of honey-suckles, of blue-bells, and Banksia roses. And over the mantelpiece was a photograph of the place where such flowers as Mellor possessed mostly grew--the unkempt lawn, the old fountain and grey walls of the Cedar Garden.

The green blind over the one window which looked into the court, had been drawn down against the glare of the sun, as though by a careful hand. Beside a light wooden rocking chair, which was Marcella's favourite seat, a tray of tea things had been put out. Marcella drew a long breath of comfort as she put down her bag.

"Now, can I wait for my tea till I have washed and dressed?"

She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door between her rooms and the Hurds.

"Minta!"

A voice responded.

"Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there's a good soul! I will be back directly."

And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room, daintily fresh and clean but very pale. She had taken off her nurse's dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung about her in cool folds.

But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her disapprovingly.

"Whatever are you so late for?" she asked a little peevishly. "You'll get ill if you go missing your dinner."

"I couldn't help it, Minta, it was such a bad case."

Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased. Her mind was constantly full of protest against this nursing. Why should Miss Boyce do such "funny things"--why should she live as she did, at all?

Their relation to each other was a curious one. Marcella, knowing that the life of Hurd's widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent for her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service. Minta already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her. It was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine that one of the "gentlemen" who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out of pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling, and leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from Mellor. Her first instinct after her husband's execution had been to hide herself from all the world. But for a long time her precarious state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village. It was not till Marcella's proposal came that her way was clear. She sold her bits of things at once, took her children and went up to Brown's buildings.

Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man, Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she came in and found him sitting there.

Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening, had declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be that of servant in any sense, but of friend and sister; and on her and her children Marcella had spent from the beginning a number of new womanish wiles which, strangely enough, this hard, strenuous life had been developing in her. She would come and help put the children to bed; she would romp with them in their night-gowns; she would bend her imperious head over the anxious endeavour to hem a pink cotton pinafore for Daisy, or dress a doll for the baby. But the relation jarred and limped perpetually, and Marcella wistfully thought it her fault.

Just now, however, as she sat gently swaying backwards and forwards in the rocking-chair, enjoying her tea, her mood was one of nothing but content.

"Oh, Minta, give me another cup. I want to have a sleep so badly, and then I am going to see Miss Hallin, and stay to supper with them."

"Well, you mustn't go out in them nursin' things again," said Minta, quickly; "I've put you in some lace in your black dress, an' it looks beautiful."

"Oh, thank you, Minta; but that black dress always seems to me too smart to walk about these streets in."

"It's just nice," said Minta, with decision. "It's just what everybody that knows you--what your mamma--would like to see you in. I can't abide them nursin' clothes--nasty things!"

"I declare!" cried Marcella, laughing, but outraged; "I never like myself so well in anything."

Minta was silent, but her small mouth took an obstinate look. What she really felt was that it was absurd for ladies to wear caps and aprons and plain black bonnets, when there was no need for them to do anything of the kind.

"Whatever have you been doing to your cheek?" she exclaimed, suddenly, as Marcella handed her the empty cup to take away.

Marcella explained shortly, and Minta looked more discontented than ever. "A lot of low people as ought to look after themselves," that was how in her inmost mind she generally defined Marcella's patients. She had been often kind and soft to her neighbours at Mellor, but these dirty, crowded Londoners were another matter.

"Where is Daisy?" asked Marcella as Minta was going away with the tea; "she must have come back from school."

"Here I am," said Daisy, with a grin, peeping in through the door of the back kitchen. "Mother, baby's woke up."

"Come here, you monkey," said Marcella; "come and go to sleep with me. Have you had your tea?"

"Yes, lots," said Daisy, climbing up into Marcella's lap. "Are you going to be asleep a long time?"

"No--only a nap. Oh! Daisy, I'm so tired. Come and cuddlie a bit! If you don't go to sleep you know you can slip away--I shan't wake."

The child, a slight, red-haired thing, with something of the ethereal charm that her dead brother had possessed, settled herself on Marcella's knees, slipped her left thumb into her mouth, and flung her other arm round Marcella's neck. They had often gone to sleep so. Mrs. Hurd came back, drew down the blind further, threw a light shawl over them both, and left them.

An hour and a half later Minta came in again as she had been told. Daisy had slipped away, but Marcella was still lying in the perfect gentleness and relaxation of sleep.

"You said I was to come and wake you," said Minta, drawing up the blind; "but I don't believe you're a bit fit to be going about. Here's some hot water, and there's a letter just come."

Marcella woke with a start, Minta put the letter on her knee, and dream and reality flowed together as she saw her own name in Wharton's handwriting.

She read the letter, then sat flushed and thinking for a while with her hands on her knees.

A little while later she opened the Hurds' front-door.

"Minta, I am going now. I shall be back early after supper, for I haven't written my report."

"There--now you look something like!" said Minta, scanning her approvingly--the wide hat and pretty black dress. "Shall Daisy run out with that telegram?"

"No, thanks. I shall pass the post. Good-bye."

And she stooped and kissed the little withered woman. She wished, ardently wished, that Minta would be more truly friends with her!

After a brisk walk through the June evening she stopped--still within the same district--at the door of a house in a long, old-fashioned street, wherein the builder was busy on either hand, since most of the long leases had just fallen in. But the house she entered was still untouched. She climbed a last-century staircase, adorned with panels of stucco work--slender Italianate reliefs of wreaths, ribbons, and medallions on a pale green ground. The decoration was clean and cared for, the house in good order. Eighty years ago it was the home of a famous judge, who entertained in its rooms the legal and literary celebrities of his day. Now it was let out to professional people in lodgings or unfurnished rooms. Edward Hallin and his sister occupied the top floor.

Miss Hallin, a pleasant-looking, plain woman of about thirty-five, came at once in answer to Marcella's knock, and greeted her affectionately. Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.

"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had forgotten us!"

"I didn't get home till four, and then I had to have a sleep," she explained, half shyly.

"What! you haven't been night-nursing?"

"Yes, for once."

"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let's look after her."

He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window--the charming circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of the room and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of back gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane trees here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs of another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of line against the blue and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.

Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The walls, indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair, the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching over her brother.

"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have rested you more."

"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly hoped to find them alone.

"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away. Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There are some anxious things going on."

He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly wrenched himself from what were evidently recurrent thoughts.

"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said, bending forward to her. "You don't know how much I have thought of what you have told me already."

"I'm doing just the same," she said, laughing. "Don't take so much interest in it. It's the fashion just now to admire nurses; but it's ridiculous. We do our work like other people--sometimes badly, sometimes well. And some of us wouldn't do it if we could help it."

She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her kindly.

"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?" he asked.

"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more character. But there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for you--every hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And the 'off' times were no trouble--I never did anything else but walk up and down the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National Gallery if it was wet."

"And it was the monotony you liked?"

She made a sign of assent.

"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen it?"

She flushed.

"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said, not without a little impatience. "But I didn't like it all at once. I hated a great deal of it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and wash--the things they set me to at first--I thought I should have been quite happy. To see my table full of glasses without a spot, and my brass-taps shining, made me as proud as a peacock! But then of course I had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."

"How? Morally?"

She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes--it seemed to me all topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather a stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn't have spoken two words to her. And here she was ordering me about--rating me as I had never rated a house-maid--laughing at me for not knowing this or that, and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well that she had said to herself, 'Now then I must take that proud girl down a peg, or she will be no use to anybody;' and I had somehow to put up with it."

"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort yourself by reflecting that it was everybody's fate?"

Her lip twitched with amusement.

"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd ideas!--sometimes looking back I can hardly believe it--perhaps it was partly a queer state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a passion I used to try and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces. And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive sort of way that they couldn't know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor, and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village--or they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course; but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the patient's elbow in two places. Oh! the fuss, and the scolding, and the humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home next day."

"But you didn't?"

"If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have gone. But I couldn't think it out--I was too dead tired. That is the chief feature of your first months in hospital--the utter helpless fatigue at night. You go to bed aching and you wake up aching. If you are healthy as I was, it doesn't hurt you; but, when your time comes to sleep, sleep you must. Even that miserable night my head was no sooner on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty. Then when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so grateful to her! I could have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with delight. And--then--somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of the work seized me--I grew ambitious--they pushed me on rapidly--everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my enemy--and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and engrossing place in the whole world."

"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you had never obeyed any one in your life before?"

"Not since I was at school--and then--not much!"

Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than the woman, had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in something new--something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the pathos and the pain of growth.

"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.

"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this afternoon."

Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"

"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?" she asked him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air. "And don't suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a very rare thing for us to undertake night-nursing at all."

"Can you tell me what the case was?"

She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with Dr. Blank.

"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless look, "and that I shall be blamed."

"I should think your second doctor will take care of that!" said Hallin.

"I don't know. I couldn't help it. But it is one of our first principles not to question a doctor. And last week too I got the Association into trouble. A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got quite fond of had to be removed to hospital. She asked me to cut her hair. It was matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to the ward. So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at one to meet the doctor and help get her off. When I came, I found the whole court in an uproar. The sister of the woman, who had been watching for me, stood on the doorstep, and implored me to go away. The husband had gone out of his senses with rage because I had cut his wife's hair without his consent. 'He'll murder you, Nuss!' said the sister, 'if he sees you! Don't come in!--he's mad--he's been going round on 'is 'ands and knees on the floor!'"--Hallin interrupted with a shout of laughter. Marcella laughed too; but to his amazement he saw that her hand shook, and that there were tears in her eyes.

"It's all very well," she said with a sigh, "but I had to come away in disgrace, all the street looking on. And he made such a fuss at the office as never was. It was unfortunate--we don't want the people set against the nurses. And now Dr. Blank!--I seem to be always getting into scrapes. It is different from hospital, where everything is settled for one."

Hallin could hardly believe his ears. Such womanish terrors and depressions from Marcella Boyce! Was she, after all, too young for the work, or was there some fret of the soul reducing her natural force? He felt an unwonted impulse of tenderness towards her--such as one might feel towards a tired child--and set himself to cheer and rest her.

He had succeeded to some extent, when he saw her give a little start, and following her eyes he perceived that unconsciously his arm, which was resting on the table, had pushed into her view a photograph in a little frame, which had been hitherto concealed from her by a glass of flowers. He would have quietly put it out of sight again, but she sat up in her chair.

"Will you give it me?" she said, putting out her hand.

He gave it her at once.

"Alice brought it home from Miss Raeburn the other day. His aunt made him sit to one of the photographers who are always besieging public men. We thought it good."

"It is very good," she said, after a pause. "Is the hair really--as grey as that?" She pointed to it.

"Quite. I am very glad that he is going off with Lord Maxwell to Italy. It will be ten days' break for him at any rate. His work this last year has been very heavy. He has had his grandfather's to do really, as well as his own; and this Commission has been a stiff job too. I am rather sorry that he has taken this new post."

"What post?"

"Didn't you hear? They have made him Under-secretary to the Home Department. So that he is now in the Government."

She put back the photograph, and moved her chair a little so as to see more of the plane trees and the strips of sunset cloud.

"How is Lord Maxwell?" she asked presently.

"Much changed. It might end in a sudden break-up at any time."

Hallin saw a slight contraction pass over her face. He knew that she had always felt an affection for Lord Maxwell. Suddenly Marcella looked hastily round her. Miss Hallin was busy with a little servant at the other end of the room making arrangements for supper.

"Tell me," she said, bending over the arm of her chair and speaking in a low, eager voice, "he is beginning to forget it?"

Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile suggested an answer from which she turned away.

"If he only would!" she said, speaking almost to herself, with a kind of impatience. "He ought to marry, for everybody's sake."

"I see no sign of his marrying--at present," said Hallin, drily.

He began to put some papers under his hand in order. There was a cold dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood. Ever since that day--that never-forgotten day--when he had come to her the morning after her last interview with Aldous Raeburn--come with reluctance and dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him--and had gone away her friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had ever been in the days of the engagement, their relation on this subject had been the same. His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life during the past eighteen months, had been very great. In that first interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry, something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly difficult task--its simplicity, its delicate respect for her personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the stress of emotion--this something had suddenly broken down his pale, proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as amazed them both.

Experiences of this kind were not new to him. His life consecrated to ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him off from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially cut him off from marriage--together with the ardent temperament, the charm, the imaginative insight which had been his cradle-gifts--these things ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide and prop of natures stronger and stormier than his own. Often the unwilling guide; for he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of the man who has set himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will have power and time to finish it. The claims made upon him seemed to him often to cost him physical and brain energy he could ill spare.

But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey in such matters. Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and there was no help for it. Since their first memorable interview, at long intervals, he had written to her and she to him. Of her hospital life, till to-night, she had never told him much. Her letters had been the passionate outpourings of a nature sick of itself, and for the moment of living; full of explanations which really explained little; full too of the untaught pangs and questionings of a mind which had never given any sustained or exhaustive effort to any philosophical or social question, and yet was in a sense tortured by them all--athirst for an impossible justice, and aflame for ideals mocked first and above all by the writer's own weakness and defect. Hallin had felt them interesting, sad, and, in a sense, fine; but he had never braced himself to answer them without groans. There were so many other people in the world in the same plight!

Nevertheless, all through the growth of friendship one thing had never altered between them from the beginning--Hallin's irrevocable judgment of the treatment she had bestowed on Aldous Raeburn. Never throughout the whole course of their acquaintance had he expressed that judgment to her in so many words. Notwithstanding, she knew perfectly well both the nature and the force of it. It lay like a rock in the stream of their friendship. The currents of talk might circle round it, imply it, glance off from it; they left it unchanged. At the root of his mind towards her, at the bottom of his gentle sensitive nature, there was a sternness which he often forgot--she never.

This hard fact in their relation had insensibly influenced her greatly, was constantly indeed working in and upon her, especially since the chances of her nursing career had brought her to settle in this district, within a stone's throw of him and his sister, so that she saw them often and intimately. But it worked in different ways. Sometimes--as to-night--it evoked a kind of defiance.

A minute or two after he had made his remark about Aldous, she said to him suddenly,

"I had a letter from Mr. Wharton to-day. He is coming to tea with me to-morrow, and I shall probably go to the House on Friday with Edith Craven to hear him speak."

Hallin gave a slight start at the name. Then he said nothing; but went on sorting some letters of the day into different heaps. His silence roused her irritation.

"Do you remember," she said, in a low, energetic voice, "that I told you I could never be ungrateful, never forget what he had done?"

"Yes, I remember," he said, not without a certain sharpness of tone. "You spoke of giving him help if he ever asked it of you--has he asked it?"

She explained that what he seemed to be asking was Louis Craven's help, and that his overtures with regard to the Labour Clarion were particularly opportune, seeing that Louis was pining to be able to marry, and was losing heart, hope, and health for want of some fixed employment. She spoke warmly of her friends and their troubles, and Hallin's inward distaste had to admit that all she said was plausible. Since the moment in that strange talk which had drawn them together, when she had turned upon him with the passionate cry--"I see what you mean, perfectly! but I am not going to marry Mr. Wharton, so don't trouble to warn me--for the matter of that he has warned me himself:--but my gratitude he has earned, and if he asks for it I will never deny it him "--since that moment there had been no word of Wharton between them. At the bottom of his heart Hallin distrusted her, and was ashamed of himself because of it. His soreness and jealousy for his friend knew no bounds. "If that were to come on again"--he was saying to himself now, as she talked to him--"I could not bear it, I could not forgive her!"

He only wished that she would give up talking about Wharton altogether. But, on the contrary, she would talk of him--and with a curious persistence. She must needs know what Hallin thought of his career in Parliament, of his prospects, of his powers as a speaker. Hallin answered shortly, like some one approached on a subject for which he cares nothing.

"Yet, of course, it is not that; it is injustice!" she said to herself, with vehemence. "He must care; they are his subjects, his interests too. But he will not look at it dispassionately, because--"

So they fell out with each other a little, and the talk dragged. Yet, all the while, Marcella's inner mind was conscious of quite different thoughts. How good it was to be here, in this room, beside these two people! She must show herself fractious and difficult with Hallin sometimes; it was her nature. But in reality, that slight and fragile form, that spiritual presence were now shrined in the girl's eager reverence and affection. She felt towards him as many a Catholic has felt towards his director; though the hidden yearning to be led by him was often oddly covered, as now, by an outer self-assertion. Perhaps her quarrel with him was that he would not lead her enough--would not tell her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.

Chapter V

While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.

"I say, Hallin--is this all right?"

The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the door, and cautiously put in a curly head.

"Frank!--is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.

Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the window.

"Well, I am glad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what--"

He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair boy's face.

"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to pretend he did."

"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twice as--I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"--this in a stage aside to Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studying Marcella.

"Well, I think she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was very welcome.

The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three others--over-driven and over-pressed, all of them--responded with a kind of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all his budget--his peacock's pride at having been just put into the 'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just scraped through his Mods.

"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared, with a child's complacency. "Brutes! I couldn't remember them. I learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards--but it was no good; they nearly dished me!"

"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to last, without a hitch."

"The winner of the Derby!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with his hands on his knees; "why, I should rather think so! That isn't memory; that's knowledge!--Goodness! who's this?"

The last remark was addressed sotto voce to Marcella. Supper was just over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had returned to the window, while Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and set all straight.

Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking. Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to Hallin and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others were Bennett, Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders, and Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and Leven; but the new-comers took little notice of any one but their host, and were soon seated about him discussing a matter already apparently familiar to them, and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative field, replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong disagreement with the rest--a disagreement which troubled himself and irritated them.

Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.

"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it rum! isn't it rum! Look at Hallin,--those are the people whom he cares to talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left--really an awfully cute fellow--and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason, a Socialist of course--would like to string me up to-morrow. Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would pray over us first and shoot us afterwards--which isn't the case, I understand, with many of 'em. Then the others--you know them? That's Bennett--regular good fellow--always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves--for which of course they love him no more than they are obliged--And Wilkins--oh! Wilkins"--he chuckled--"they say it'll come to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."

Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him. Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that, notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.

"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with a little scorn.

"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't know anything about anything!--Miss Boyce!"

He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside her.

Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she recognised the old symptoms.

"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said--"how many since we met last?"

"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his fingers--"you're like all the rest."

Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.

"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk! And yet I did want to tell you about it--you were awfully kind to me down at home. I want to tell you--and I don't want to tell you--perhaps I oughtn't to tell you--you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all--and yet somehow--"

The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its two years or so of time!

"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."

"No--really?--shall I?"

Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A pretty girl--or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of them--how familiar it all was!--and how many more of them there seemed to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!

"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's so frightfully pretty--well, frightfully fetching, rather--and well dressed and all the rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls--not she. She's read a lot of things--a lot! I'm sure, Miss Boyce"--he looked at her confidently,--"if you were to see her you'd think her awfully clever. And yet she's so little--and so dainty--and she dances--my goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I mean--Letty Lind isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her mother's a most dreadful old bore--well, no, I didn't mean that--of course I didn't mean that!--but she's fussy, you know, and invalidy, and has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged about in bath chairs, and Betty's an angel to her--she is really--though her mother's always snapping her head off. And as to the poor--"

Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval, sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to restrain this plunging lover.

"Look here--do come to the point--have you proposed to her?"

"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently. "About once a week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me--that sort always does--but I think I might really have a chance with her, if it weren't for her mother--horrible old--no, of course I don't mean that! But now it comes in--what I oughtn't to tell you--I know I oughtn't to tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't help talking of it!"

And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.

Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?--of course you must tell me."

"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you about--about--You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's taken a fancy to her lately--and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they asked her to go to Italy--and naturally a fellow sees what that means--and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty would; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"--this time he smote his knee in real desperation--"now I have done it. I'm simply bursting always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say. Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"

"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience--"that her mother wants her to marry Mr. Raeburn?"

He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair, her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it--what she would say.

Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.

"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr. Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't matter what I suppose--that you think--about my present state of mind. It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved badly. I know it--and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."

Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.

"I never thought of that," he said.

"Well, you might, mightn't you?"

For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.

Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.

"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him, smiling, and in her most ordinary voice.

The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on chattering.

"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mrs. Macdonald--that's Betty's mother--she hasn't got a father--had talked it over. And now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too for ten days--and when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death. It's sickening!"

"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"

"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said despondently. "She's always teasing and amusing him. When she's there she never lets him alone. She harries him out. She makes him read to her and ride with her. She makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'd never think Aldous would discuss--her lovers and her love affairs, and being in love!--it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said; 'this'll never do! you've got to come and dance with me, and push those chairs and tables aside'--I can fancy the little stamp she'd give--'and make those other people dance too.' And she made him--she positively made him. Aldous declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of it--and of course the evening went like smoke."

Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on the speaker.

"And Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded incredulous.

"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that, and he told her everything--oh, well," said the lad, embarrassed, and clutching at his usual formula--"of course, I didn't mean that. And she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she adores him--that he's the only great man she's ever known--that I'm not fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me--and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall have to shoot myself--I declare I shall!"

"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over there to listen to that talk. But--first--come and see me whenever you like--3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street--and tell me how this goes on?"

She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him.

"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of course she'll get rid of them. Just like my luck!"

* * * * *

Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how little men knew of each other!--even the most intimate friends--and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like, married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her meant, of course, the attraction of contraries--one of the most promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's chances were poor.

Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion of his present position and prospects in the Labour party--a discussion, however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind to send all her guests away.

The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation, separate place in the House, separate Whips--they were ready, nay clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the Clarion with enthusiasm, and declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was, moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.

The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair, and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!

Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably--Wilkins's dialect getting more pronounced with each step of the argument.

"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at home, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be the People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak use of us all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an' ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he? Is he a man of us--bone of our bone? He's a landlord, and an aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o' them--living on his rent and interest--grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do--is goin' to lead me, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords! Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for us? Let him go to his own class--I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of countesses, and they of him!--or let him set up as the friend of the working man just as he likes--I'm quite agreeable!--I shan't make any bones about takin' his vote; but I'm not goin' to make him master over me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"

Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason, with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.

"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly, "and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"

"I'm not saying we shouldn't organise," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working class--a man who has the wants of the working class--a man whom the working class can get a hold on--to do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the coontry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"

The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold his own with the swells--and quite right too!"

"And if Mr. Wharton is a landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the shoemaker--a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about the land, and the co-operative farming. E's straight is Mr. Wharton. We 'aven't got Socialism yet--an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord. Ee was born it."

"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek--"he's runnin' that paper for his own hand--Haven't I had experience of him? I know it--And I'll prove it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton--and when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're iver likely to get out o' him. He go agen the landlords when it coom to the real toossle,--I know 'em--I tell tha--I know 'em!"

A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.

"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords--no fuss about it--and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and fourpence a week!"

Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker--amazed!

Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like women--least of all, ladies.

He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said--which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe--it was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course--"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"

Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts--the difference between landlords' villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.

Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.

"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?"

After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.

"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."

"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I am."

He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.

When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.

"Are there many of these Labour members like that?"

Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.

"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,--it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"

And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.

"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing--slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.

He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.

"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it teases.' We know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House I'm always having rows with--and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"

Marcella flushed.

"Never mind where I got it!" she said.

In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.

* * * * *

When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.

His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."

"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into sleeping trim. But you go, Alice--good-night."

When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the thought--"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! She--and justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year--"

He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep. Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.

He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study of economical and historical questions; the expression through them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty, and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world on whom all his thoughts centred--these things had been his joy, and had led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.

And now he had come upon opposition--the first cooling of friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.

Early in the spring of this year a book called To-morrow and the Land had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It showed--or tried to show--in picturesque detail what might be the consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from Progress and Poverty, which also powerfully and directly affected the English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and--by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of London--treated with abundant humour.

The thing had an enormous success--in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were touched--nay, possessed--by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness--an infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense sale, and was in every one's hands.

To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.

And he had been saying his say--throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work. With the result that--for the first time in eleven years--he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few--these bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul--it had been the source of his power--and every economical or social conviction was in some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his being--his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr's fate.

Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It was impossible that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him. Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!

He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships. Oh, for sleep--for the power to rest--to escape this corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled nothing!

"The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it." These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hidden wisdom. Could one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?

Chapter VI

"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven. "This is Friday--say Monday?"

Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the Labour Clarion, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.

"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper goes in for the strike, that you will fight it through?"

He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.

"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with emphasis--"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up. There are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going."

He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.

"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just one according to his lights. There are plenty worse than he."

Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood--of not, even in small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.

"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his stick--"you see there is talk of arbitration."

"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind. The men have been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig from the neighbourhood--not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it--and, of course, the award goes against the men."

"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"

Craven took out a note-book.

"No!--The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them! I mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you read the evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let them live first!"

Craven looked up absently.

"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address?" Mr. Thorpe was the secretary.

Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it was not for Craven to take no notice.

Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of self-advertisement, held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an amazing disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.

Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave the minutest attention.

"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.

"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. "Business is up and I am off!"

He took up his hat as he spoke.

"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea-table.

Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her tête-à-tête before Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He hesitated and stayed.

"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed Louis Craven on her way to get some cake.

He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.

The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded. Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?

"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent.--"You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you. Good-bye!--good-bye!"

And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in which they had been sitting, he went.

He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother, who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.

"Well--any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.

"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a salary--two hundred a year. Oh! it'll do."

He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face.

"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" said Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.

"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing. "Anna's got to work out her shirt-making time. She only left the tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago. And she was to have a month at each."

Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a better authority on many Labour questions than he.

Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this heat.

"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith pensively. "Louis was lodging on the second floor, she in the third floor back, and they used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him imploring the little slavey to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavey tossed her head, and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs, calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey under her thumb, got them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When Louis came home he discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course he wept--whatever he may say. But next morning Miss Anna found her shoes outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a note inside one of them. Affecting! wasn't it? Thenceforward, as long as they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked. Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."

Marcella laughed.

"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.

"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can get hold of her. But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or trying to set up Unions. She does the work of six. She'll earn nearly as much as I do when we're married. Oh! we shall swim!"

Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect--so unlike the gentle or satirical detachment which made his ordinary manner--with a darkening eye, as though annoyed by his effusion.

"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what Mr. Harry Wharton spends on his clothes, I should think. The Labour men tell me he is superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his clothes, he is able to buy you, Louis, body and soul, and you seem inclined to be grateful."

"Never mind," said Louis recklessly. "He didn't buy some one else--and I am grateful!"

"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone. "You the dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent on him."

Marcella gave an angry start. Louis protested.

"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have to bear it from me, I tell you--unless you muzzle me too with an Anna."

"But I don't see why I should bear it," said Marcella, turning upon him. "I think you know that I owe Mr. Wharton a debt. Please remember it!"

Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A question crossed his mind concerning her. Then he made her a little clumsy bow.

"I am dumb," he said. "My manners, you perceive, are what they always were."

"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming. "How can a man who has reached the position he has in so short a time--in so many different worlds--be disposed of by calling him an ugly name? It is more than unjust--it is absurd! Besides, what can you know of him?"

"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread and butter, "that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all. I watched his beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did. And most of them--as he knows!--have pretty strong opinions by now about the man."

"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a man of that type to be the pure-eyed patriot. But neither you nor I can deny that he has done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my bosom? Not at all! He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me. I like the job, and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a bit of decent work."

"You--use Harry Wharton!" said the cripple, with a sarcasm that brought the colour to Louis's thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than before. She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough, that a man of Anthony Craven's type--poor, unsuccessful, and embittered--should dislike a popular victorious personality.

"Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?" she said with emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself back in his chair, and was silent.

It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men, especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art, and devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle, Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design. Yet he was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist of the two. Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony a counsel of despair. He loathed wealth more passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in his kind. Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot.

In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly--though with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn's name--what had happened to her at Mellor. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil--the lover! To fall a victim to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard. And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of it. At any rate he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate. He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years' interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.

After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their chat with an abrupt--

"What is this job, Louis?"

"I told you. I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."

"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are too strong. I had a talk with Denny yesterday."

The Denny he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the House, but his son--a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one of the most stiff-backed and autocratic of capitalists, had developed socialist opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a member of the "intellectual proletariat," as they have been called, the free-lances of the Collectivist movement. He had lately joined the Venturists. Anthony had taken a fancy to him. Louis as yet knew little or nothing of him.

"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I don't know. I think the Clarion can do something. The press grows more and more powerful in these things."

And he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made--that Wharton always did make, in talking of the Clarion--as to its growth under his hands, and increasing influence in Labour disputes.

"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum! My own belief is that the Clarion is a rotten property, and that he knows it!"

At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance after a certain point becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony for the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious person whom one humours but does not argue with. He accepted the part, saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing from one to the other.

However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell. It was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and her pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the right to be rude.

"How are you getting on?" he said to her abruptly as he dropped her hand.

"Oh, very well! my superintendent leaves me almost alone now, which is a compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good woman,' and a sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice. Those are my chief grievances, I think."

"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"

She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her say:--

"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."

He laughed.

"How like a woman! A few ill-housed villagers made you a democrat. A few well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class. Your people were wise to let you take this work."

"Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans?" she asked him, mocking. "And I didn't say 'money' or 'comfort,' did I? but 'happiness.' As for my 'democracy,' you are not perhaps the best judge."

She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of storm in her great eyes.

"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.

"Because I have every right to be! I joined a society, pledged to work 'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what poor work I can in that spirit."

"You are not a Socialist. Half the things you say, or imply, show it. And we are Socialists."

She hesitated, looking at him steadily.

"No!--so far as Socialism means a political system--the trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it--I find myself slipping away from it more and more. No!--as I go about among these wage-earners, the emphasis--do what I will--comes to lie less and less on possession--more and more on character. I go to two tenements in the same building. One is Hell--the other Heaven. Why? Both belong to well-paid artisans with equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and pleasant life of it. But one is a man--the other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not all, I know--oh! don't trouble to tell me so!--but it is more than I thought. No!--my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the Socialists that I know here--saving your presence! but--with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation! and get all the abuse from all sides."

Anthony laughed scornfully.

"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers."

"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the thought of many days finding defiant expression--"it seems to me like all other interesting and important things--destined to help something else! Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods--it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state. The Crusades--they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord!--what they did was to increase trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It talks of a new order--what it will do is to help to make the old sound!"

Anthony clapped her ironically.

"Excellent! When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold of you--ask me to come and hear!"

Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome half-taught girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or desired to have it.

Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for him, rare effusion. Two years before, for the space of some months, he had been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her by that moment of passionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly!--she had given him his Anna.

When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Louis's thanks had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a child's brightness. The old passion for ruling and influencing was all alive and happy.

"I will see it is all right," she was saying to herself. "I will look after them."

What she meant was, "I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after them!" and through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to that tête-à-tête with him which had preceded the Cravens' arrival.

How changed he was, yet how much the same! He had not sat beside her for ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of the other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious claim to confidence, to intimacy--on the other hand a new atmosphere, a new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties of power, a great position--everything fitted to touch such an imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was noble, both in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had gained lines that pleased her--lines that a woman marks, because she thinks they mean experience an I mastery.

Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was pleasure; so too was his new connection with her old friends. And a pleasure which took nothing from self-respect; which was open, honourable, eager. As for that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at the thought of it, only to thrust the remembrance passionately away. That he should remember or allude to it, would put an end to friendship. Otherwise friends they would and should be; and the personal interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between men and women grow more possible every day. While, as for Hallin's distrust, and Anthony Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either of them? Could any one suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's would be congenial to Hallin or to Craven--or--to yet another person, of whom she did not want to think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of him? It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made its force.

* * * * *

So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who came to clear away the tea.

"Why, it is close on the half-hour!" cried Marcella, springing up. "Where are my things?"

She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.

Suddenly--the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the tea--by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on Hallin's table flashed into her mind--its look--the grizzled hair. With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her--a dumb gesture of contrition and of grief.

She!--she talk of social reform and "character," she give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.

Chapter VII

Her first case was in Brown's Buildings itself--a woman suffering from bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks. She lived on the top floor of one of the easterly blocks, with two daughters and a son of eighteen.

When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean and smelt of flowers. The windows were open, and a young woman was busy shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then, they introduced her with some ceremony to a "lady," who was sitting beside the patient, a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy. The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as "the young person," but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not have been surpassed.

Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off; but between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and grateful to her nurse. "I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle as you--" or--"I do take it kind of you, Nurse, to do it so slow--oh! there were a young person before you--" or "hasn't she got nice hands, Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem to jar yer."

"Poor foot! but I think it is looking better," said Marcella, getting up at last from her work, when all was clean and comfortable and she had replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it--for its owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old armchair. "And how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?"

"Oh! it's very bad, nights," said Mrs. Jervis, mildly--"disturbs Emily dreadful. But I always pray every night, when she lifts me into bed, as I may be took before the morning, an' God ull do it soon."

"Mother!" cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, "you know you oughtn't to say them things."

Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the frail form there breathed an indomitable air of life, a gay courage indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.

"Well, yer not to take 'em to heart, Em'ly. It ull be when it will be--for the Lord likes us to pray, but He'll take his own time--an' she's got troubles enough of her own, Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off her ring?"

Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over, and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.

"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last two days," she said with low vehemence--"as I'm never goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn me!"

Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the brutal ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen, had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from his earnings enough to teach Emily "the shirt-ironing," denying himself every indulgence till her training was over.

Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back; her earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease; while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness and care.

Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's speech.

"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that held down the shirt on the board.

Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's eyes glowed with things unsaid and inexpressible--the "eternal passion, eternal pain," which in half the human race have no voice.

"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband," said Mrs. Jervis, in her delicate thoughtful voice--"a very uncultivated man."

Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them apparently to express what had to be said.

"It's a sad thing is want of edication," Mrs. Jervis went on in the same tone. "Now there's that lady there"--with a little courtly wave of her hand towards Mrs. Burton--"she can't read yer know, Nurse, and I'm that sorry for her! But I've been reading to her, an' Emily--just while my cough's quiet--one of my ole tracks."

She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use. It was called "A Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?" Marcella looked at it in respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in her line.

"I do love a track!" said Mrs. Jervis, pensively. "That's why I don't like these buildings so well as them others, Em'ly. Here you never get no tracks; and there, what with one person and another, there was a new one most weeks. But"--her voice dropped, and she looked timidly first at her friend, and then at Marcella--"she isn't a Christian, Nurse. Isn't it sad?"

Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich mahogany complexion, with a black "front," and a mouth which turned down decisively at the corners, looked up from her embroidery with severe composure.

"No, Nurse, I'm not a Christian," she said in the tone of one stating a disagreeable fact for which they are noways responsible. "My brother is--and my sisters--real good Christian people. One of my sisters married a gentleman up in Wales. She 'as two servants, an' fam'ly prayers reg'lar. But I've never felt no 'call,' and I tell 'em I can't purtend. An' Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no different."

She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked at her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a churchwoman.

"Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton," she said indignantly. "What she means, Nurse, is she isn't a 'member' of any chapel, like mother. But she's been baptised and confirmed, for I asked her. And of course she's a Christian."

"Em'ly!" said Mrs. Jervis, with energy.

Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The glances of the two women crossed; there seemed to be a mute struggle between them. Then Emily laid down her iron, stepped quickly across to her mother, and kneeling beside her, threw her arms around her.

"Have it your own way, mother," she said, while her lip quivered; "I wasn't a-goin' to cross you."

Mrs. Jervis laid her waxen cheek against her daughter's tangle of brown hair with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might kill out the struggling flame of life.

"You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis," said Marcella, with gentle authority. "You know the dressing must tire you, though you won't confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There; aren't the pillows easier so? Now rest--and good-bye."

But Mrs. Jervis held her, while Emily slipped away.

"I shall rest soon," she said significantly. "An' it hurts me when Emily talks like that. It's the only thing that ever comes atween us. She thinks o' forms an' ceremonies; an' I think o' grace."

Her old woman's eyes, so clear and vivid under the blanched brow, searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood, shy and wondering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so little. So narrow a life, in these poor rooms, under these crippling conditions of disease!--and all this preoccupation with, this passion over, the things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of the spirit--wonderful!

* * * * *

On coming out from Brown's Buildings, she turned her steps reluctantly towards a street some distance from her own immediate neighbourhood, where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion and an unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman who often availed himself of the help of the St. Martin's nurses had asked the superintendent to undertake for him "a difficult case." Would one of their nurses go regularly to visit a certain house, ostensibly for the sake of a little boy of five just come back from the hospital, who required care at home for a while, really for the sake of his young mother, who had suddenly developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin?

Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or three visits, always dressing the child's sore leg, and endeavouring to make acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not had much success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty, with a flighty, restless manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella, and grateful to her apparently for the ease she gave the boy. But she offered no confidences; the rooms she and her husband occupied showed them to be well-to-do; Marcella had so far found them well-kept; and though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious, she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others; and neither alternative pleased her.

To-day, however, as she stopped at the Vincents' door, she noticed that the doorstep, which was as a rule shining white, was muddy and neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang repeatedly. At last a neighbour, who had been watching the strange nurse through her own parlour window, came out to the street.

"I think, miss," she said, with an air of polite mystery, "as you'd better walk in. Mrs. Vincent 'asn't been enjyin' very good 'ealth this last few days."

Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the back of the house. But in the Vincents' front parlour the blinds were all pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of a child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door.

The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a wretched silence; but the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly throwing himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts, now crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice, for "Máma! din-din! Máma! din-din!"

Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of words. She was dirty and unkempt; the room was covered with litter; the breakfast things were still on the table; and the children were evidently starving.

Marcella, seized with pity, and divining what had happened, tried to rouse and comfort her. But she got no answer. Then she asked for matches. Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them herself, lit a tire of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of the children--the only eatables she could find--and after she had dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea things and tidy the room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her.

In the midst of her labours, an elderly woman cautiously opened the door and beckoned to her.

Marcella went out into the passage.

"I'm her mother, miss! I 'eered you were 'ere, an' I follered yer. Oh! such a business as we 'ad, 'er 'usband an' me, a gettin' of 'er 'ome last night. There's a neighbour come to me, an' she says: 'Mrs. Lucas, there's your daughter a drinkin' in that public 'ouse, an' if I was you I'd go and fetch her out; for she's got a lot o' money, an' she's treatin' everybody all round.' An' Charlie--that's 'er 'usband--ee come along too, an' between us we got holt on her. An' iver sence we brought her 'ome last night, she set there in that cheer, an' niver a word to nobody! Not to me 't any rate, nor the chillen. I believe 'er 'usband an' 'er 'ad words this mornin'. But she won't tell me nothin'. She sits there--just heart-broke"--the woman put up her apron to her eyes and began crying. "She ain't eatin' nothink all day, an' I dursen't leave the 'ouse out o' me sight--I lives close by, miss--for fear of 'er doing 'erself a mischief."

"How long has she been like this?" said Marcella, drawing the door cautiously to behind her.

"About fourteen month," said the woman, hopelessly. "An' none of us knows why. She was such a neat, pretty girl when she married 'im--an' ee such a steady fellow. An' I've done my best. I've talked to 'er, an' I've 'id 'er 'at an' her walking things, an' taken 'er money out of 'er pockets. An', bless yer, she's been all right now for seven weeks--till last night. Oh, deary, deary, me! whatever 'ull become o' them--'er, an' 'im, an' the children!"

The tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face.

"Leave her to me a little longer," said Marcella, softly; "but come back to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be alone."

The woman nodded, and went away.

Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke for the first time:

"That was my mother you were talkin' to?"

"Yes," said Marcella, quietly, as she took the kettle off the fire. "Now I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will you, if I make it?"

The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's movements with her weary eyes. At last when Marcella knelt down beside her holding out a cup of tea and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry. Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked out of her hand.

"He struck me this morning!--Charlie did--the first time in seven years. Look here!"

She pulled up her sleeve, and on her white, delicate arm she showed a large bruise. As she pointed to it her eyes filled with miserable tears; her lips quivered; anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even in this abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her refined air. This woman drinking and treating in a low public-house at midnight!--rescued thence by a decent husband!

She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into her, she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before which she quailed. The woman clung to her, moaning about her husband, about the demon instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew how--by means it seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and small self-indulgences--and she felt herself powerless to fight; about the wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who was the respected, well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the neighbourhood. All through it came back to him.

"We had words, Nurse, this morning, when he went out to his work. He said he'd nearly died of shame last night; that he couldn't bear it no more; that he'd take the children from me. And I was all queer in the head still, and I sauced him--and then--he looked like a devil--and he took me by the arm--and threw me down--as if I'd been a sack. An' he never, never,--touched me--before--in all his life. An' he's never come in all day. An' perhaps I shan't ever see him again. An' last time--but it wasn't so bad as this--he said he'd try an' love me again if I'd behave. An' he did try--and I tried too. But now it's no good, an' perhaps he'll not come back. Oh, what shall I do? what shall I do!" she flung her arms above her head. "Won't anybody find him? won't anybody help me?"

She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching it, her wild eyes seeking her companion's.

But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could do nothing--that there was nothing in her adequate to such an appeal--nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human life thus flung upon her.

She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home--took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no efficacy--no power.

At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what to say.

"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"

The husband looked at her, and then turned away.

"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went without another word, and with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's death.

* * * * *

She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards--saying that she must write some letters and reports--she shut herself up, and bade good-night to Minta and the children.

But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time, watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the floor, with her head against a chair--an attitude of her stormy childhood--she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis--the saint--so near to death, so satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay. Both experiences had this in common--that each had had some part in plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.

What had come to her? Daring the past weeks there had been something wrestling in her--some new birth--some "conviction of sin," as Mrs. Jervis would have said. As she looked back over all her strenuous youth she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to Anthony Craven returned upon her, mocked her--made now a scourge for her own pride, not a mere, measure of blame for others. Aldous Raeburn, her father and mother, her poor--one and all rose against her--plucked at her--reproached her. "Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?" cried a voice, which was the voice of them all; "what are opinions--what is influence, beauty, cleverness?--what is anything worth but character--but soul?"

And character--soul--can only be got by self-surrender; and self-surrender comes not of knowledge but of love.

A number of thoughts and phrases, hitherto of little meaning to her, floated into her mind--sank and pressed there. That strange word "grace" for instance!

A year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school years, the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that religion was played out, that Socialism and Science were enough for mankind.

But nobody could live in hospital--nobody could go among the poor--nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward Hallin and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in the world--this "grace" that "sustaineth"--however variously interpreted, still living and working, as it worked of old, among the little Galilean towns, in Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallin it did not mean the same, perhaps, as it meant to the hard-worked clergymen she knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But to all it meant the motive power of life--something subduing, transforming, delivering--something that to-night she envied with a passion and a yearning that amazed herself.

How many things she craved, as an eager child craves them! First some moral change, she knew not what--then Aldous Raeburn's pardon and friendship--then and above all, the power to lose herself--the power to love.

Dangerous significant moment in a woman's life--moment at once of despair and of illusion!

Chapter VIII

Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him, and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon; questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there, and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that he might verify a quotation.

An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar House-of-Commons acquaintance.

"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.

Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.

"Not particularly."

"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.

Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.

When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for pleasure--their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way. What had he been about all this time? Forget?--such a creature? Why, it was the merest wantonness! As if such women--with such a brow, such vitality, such a gait--passed in every street!

What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to recover the old intimacy--and as to what might come out of it, let the gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.

As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much her métier as it was the métier of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and live democracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. Il ne faut pas sortir de son caractère.

The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.

Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.

"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. "Talks of his conscience--and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much harm."

"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitterness. "Goodness! let's leave him alone!"

He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics. Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the enfant terrible of a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of to-night's debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution, pledging the House to a Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in fact gained greatly in significance and interest since it was first heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable proposals--a moderate tone--and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony and a united front among the representatives of labour--if so much at least could be attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that not only the cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the House would be found to have gained enormously.

"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said Bennett, as he was going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be till half-past ten at earliest."

Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him what line Bennett would take--with regard to one or two points. After a long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and hear a famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far from the House. The streets were full of placards.

Well!--to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.

The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference. Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.

"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front--oh! not very full yet, sir--will be directly."

Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in. Yes!--there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of Commons puts its ladies--as though its owner were already absorbed in what was passing before her.

She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.

"Oh! now, come and tell us everything--and who everybody is. Why don't we see the Speaker?--and which is the Government side?--oh, yes, I see. And who's this speaking now?"

"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"

"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella, impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!--he's just come in!--oh, don't be so superior, though you have been here before--you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"

Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.

"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!--do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you sit?--I see--and there's Mr. Bennett--and that black-faced man, Mr. Wilkins, I met at the Hallins--you don't like him, do you?" she said, drawing back and looking at him sharply.

"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a fool of himself and us to-night--we shall see! It's kind of you to wish us an Irish row!--considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall never get another!"

"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh, that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"--a pause--"Dear me, how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton--I find myself terribly in love with the Government. But who's that?"

She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew hurriedly back.

"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."

A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw Aldous Raeburn.

She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.

"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much--they don't get any change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over to a friend if I may--a Staffordshire member, who has his wife here--Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you. Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion; but they will look after you."

The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.

"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty minutes. Wish me well through!"

Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn ghost should walk this particular evening.

Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.

"All that my life can do to pour good measure--down--running over--into yours, I vowed you then!"

The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain. Was it indeed this man under her eyes--so listless, so unconscious--who had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think of.

And now--never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"--separate, estranged, for ever? It was like the touch of death--the experience brought with it such a chill--such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through.

Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of family than he. And as for the girl--the little dancing, flirting girl!--why the thing happened every day. His wife should not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at least was clear to her--the curious recognition that never before had she considered Aldous Raeburn, in and for himself, as an independent human being.

"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"

But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn, after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her with the same fascination as before.

The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government--all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.

"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his hat.

In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and crowded House in a voice--clear, a little hard, but capable of the most accomplished and subtle variety--which for the first moment sent a shudder of memory through Marcella.

Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an irritable sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any effect upon such a crowd!--so irresponsive, individualist, unfused--so lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call "cheers"?

But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one wholly different--nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent sense--informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader--awoke to the peculiar conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand to succeed in it.

Why? Because here after all is power--here is the central machine. Here are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have for their span of life the leading--or the wrecking?--of this great fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our country. Here things are not only debated, but done--lamely or badly, perhaps, but still done--which will affect our children's children; which link us to the Past; which carry us on safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods know. And in this passage, this chequered, doubtful passage from thinking to doing, an infinite savour and passion of life is somehow disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure, public and personal; it enwraps the spectacle and the actors; it carries and supports patriot and adventurer alike.

Ideas, perceptions of this kind--the first chill over--stole upon and conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It would be a success this speech--it was a success! The House was gained, was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments, which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent--with brilliancy, moderation, practical detail--moderation above all! From the slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English "working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts--through the general description of the present situation, of the workman's present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the economic future of England--the speaker carried his thread of luminous speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life, possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of leisure, knowledge, and delight--the crowded benches before and behind him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of "flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in the utterances of the Labour men.

"'The mildest mannered man' et cetera!" said a smiling member of the late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are eager to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance on anything last year."

"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled the man addressed.

"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his hat again which he had taken up.

Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her chair with a long breath.

"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she possessed--and she was full of them--had been stirred and satisfied by the speech and the speaker.

But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time conscious of a curious growth--independence.

But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon her--in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.

Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her brothers were typical Venturists--a little cynical, therefore, towards all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it down--through him--as a first law, that sentiment in public is the abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.

"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That man Wilkins!"

Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.

With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of the bill which had been sketched by Wharton--personal jealousy and distrust of the mover of the resolution--denial of his representative place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which he had nothing to do--the most violent protest against the servility with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and political enfranchisement--and the most passionate assertion that between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred, unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel--all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah Wilkins rioted in one of the best "times" of his life. That he was an orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again; and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.

The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench, caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!--you haven't even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final attack upon the Liberals--who, after ruining their own chances and the chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man whining for his support as their only hope of recovery--was delivered to a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.

Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech in a state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had come to sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down, and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government non possumus, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity as to which hand to shake and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the Opposition under the ferocities of some others of its nominal friends.

Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, the habitué. While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come back again to his seat next to the Speaker, who was his official chief. Every now and then the Minister turned to him, and Raeburn handed him a volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other--and she, once more, looking on!

When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun--when it was seen that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House, a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be leader had been for some time considerable.

When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire, both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A man who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had given Wharton the warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals, to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous though still perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young and brilliant man beside him.

Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong conviction that the time had come when the Labour party must have separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the phrase, in the direction of Wilkins--who in the middle of the speech abruptly walked out--and before he sat down, the close attention, the looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about him,--amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in Parliament--made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary history of the great industrial movement.

The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him--perfectly white, with a lip he in vain tried to steady.

"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."

Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of the Englishman.

Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience behind him!--and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How could he get her to himself somehow for a moment--and dispose of that Craven girl?

"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of the Gallery.

But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw, the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.

"Don't let's talk here," she said. "Can't we go out? I am melted!"

"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested?"

Edith smiled demurely.

"I thought it a good debate," she said.

"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward remark as he led the way.

Chapter IX

"How enchanting!" cried Marcella, as they emerged on the terrace, and river, shore, and sky opened upon them in all the thousand-tinted light and shade of a still and perfect evening. "Oh, how hot we were--and how badly you treat us in those dens!"

Those confident eyes of Wharton's shone as they glanced at her.

She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff--it seemed to him he remembered it of old--and on the waving masses of hair lay a little bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing--the rich arresting note of the voice--the inimitable carriage of the head--Wharton realised them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was in his power, his possession.

The terrace was full of people, and alive with a Babel of talk. Yet, as he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that Marcella was instantly marked. Every one who passed them, or made way for them, looked and looked again.

The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew nothing of her own effect. She was drinking in the sunset light--the poetic mystery of the river--the lovely line of the bridge--the associations of the place where she stood, of this great building overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Raeburn; then when a stranger showed himself she gave herself up again to her young pleasure in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed; Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so well-fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh homage to itself; and she had more and more glamour for him in the reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment.

"Ah, here are the Lanes!" he said, detecting at last a short lady in black amid a group of men.

Marcella and Edith were introduced. Then Edith found a friend in a young London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him till dinner should be announced.

"I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace," said Wharton to Mr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet awhile. What a crowd! The Alresfords not come yet, I see."

Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round.

"Raeburn has a party to-night. And there are at least three or four others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be equally scarce!"

Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella. But she was talking to Mrs. Lane, and had heard nothing.

"Let me just show you the terrace," he said to her. "No chance of dinner for another twenty minutes."

They strolled away together. As they moved along, a number of men waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and congratulations--glancing the while at the lady on his left. But presently they were away from the crowd which hung about the main entrance to the terrace, and had reached the comparatively quiet western end, where were only a few pairs and groups walking up and down.

"Shall I see Mr. Bennett?" she asked him eagerly, as they paused by the parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing under the fast incoming tide. "I want to."

"I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a prayer-meeting--at least I guess so. There is a famous American evangelist speaking in Westminster to-night--I am as certain as I ever am of anything that Bennett is there--dining on Moody and Sankey. Men are a medley, don't you think?--So you liked his speech?"

"How coolly you ask!" she said, laughing. "Did you?"

He was silent a moment, his smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he turned to her.

"How much gratitude do you think I owe him?"

"As much as you can pay," she said with emphasis. "I never heard anything more complete, more generous."

"So you were carried away?"

She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity--a touch of defiance.

"No!--neither by him, nor by you. I don't believe in your Bill--and I am sure you will never carry it!"

Wharton lifted his eyebrows.

"Perhaps you'll tell me where you are," he said, "that I may know how to talk? When we last discussed these things at Mellor, I think--you were a Socialist?"

"What does it matter what I was last year?" she asked him gaily, yet with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay; "I was a baby! Now perhaps I have earned a few poor, little opinions--but they are a ragged bundle--and I have never any time to sort them."

"Have you left the Venturists?"

"No!--but I am full of perplexities; and the Cravens, I see, will soon be for turning me out. You understand--I know some working folk now!"

"So you did last year."

"No!"--she insisted, shaking her head--"that was all different. But now I am in their world--I live with them--and they talk to me. One evening in the week I am 'at home' for all the people I know in our Buildings--men and women. Mrs. Hurd--you know who I mean?"--her brow contracted a moment--"she comes with her sewing to keep me company; so does Edith Craven; and sometimes the little room is packed. The men smoke--when we can have the windows open!--and I believe I shall soon smoke too--it makes them talk better. We get all sorts--Socialists, Conservatives, Radicals--"

"--And you don't think much of the Socialists?"

"Well! they are the interesting, dreamy fellows," she said, laughing, "who don't save, and muddle their lives. And as for argument, the Socialist workman doesn't care twopence for facts--that don't suit him. It's superb the way he treats them!"

"I should like to know who does care!" said Wharton, with a shrug. Then he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command her. He had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the crisp curls of hair. "But tell me"--he went on--"who has been tampering with you? Is it Hallin? You told me you saw him often."

"Perhaps. But what if it's everything?--living?--saving your presence! A year ago at any rate the world was all black--or white--to me. Now I lie awake at night, puzzling my head about the shades between--which makes the difference. A compulsory Eight Hours' Day for all men in all trades!" Her note of scorn startled him. "You know you won't get it! And all the other big exasperating things you talk about--public organisation of labour, and the rest--you won't get them till all the world is a New Jerusalem--and when the world is a New Jerusalem nobody will want them!"

Wharton made her an ironical bow.

"Nicely said!--though we have heard it before. Upon my word, you have marched!--or Edward Hallin has carried you. So now you think the poor are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible worlds--is that the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in fact? the man who got up after me?"

His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a recollection that brought a frown.

"That was the man, then, you attacked in the Clarion this morning!"

"Ah! you read me!" said Wharton, with sudden pleasure. "Yes--that opened the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven has gone down, and the strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two batteries to bear, he letting fly as correspondent, and I from the office. I enjoyed writing that article."

"So I should think," she said drily; "all I know is, it made one reader passionately certain that there was another side to the matter! There may not be. I dare say there isn't; but on me at least that was the effect. Why is it"--she broke out with vehemence--"that not a single Labour paper is ever capable of the simplest justice to an opponent?"

"You think any other sort of paper is any better?" he asked her scornfully.

"I dare say not. But that doesn't matter to me! it is we who talk of justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to man, and then we go and blacken the men who don't agree with us--whole classes, that is to say, of our fellow-countrymen, not in the old honest slashing style, Tartuffes that we are!--but with all the delicate methods of a new art of slander, pursued almost for its own sake. We know so much better--always--than our opponents, we hardly condescend even to be angry. One is only 'sorry'--'obliged to punish'--like the priggish governess of one's childhood!"

In spite of himself, Wharton flushed.

"My best thanks!" he said. "Anything more? I prefer to take my drubbing all at once."

She looked at him steadily.

"Why did you write, or allow that article on the West Brookshire landlords two days ago?"

Wharton started.

"Well! wasn't it true?"

"No!" she said with a curling lip; "and I think you know it wasn't true."

"What! as to the Raeburns? Upon my word, I should have imagined," he said slowly, "that it represented your views at one time with tolerable accuracy."

Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet, and, taking up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river. He saw the hand shake.

"Look here," he said, turning round so that he too leant over the river, his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear. "Are you always going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you know that there is no one in the world I would sooner please if I could?"

She did not speak.

"In the first place," he said, laughing, "as to my speech, do you suppose that I believe in that Bill which I described just now?"

"I don't know," she said indignantly, once more playing with the stones on the wall. "It sounded like it."

"That is my gift--my little carillon, as Renan would say. But do you imagine I want you or any one else to tell me that we shan't get such a Bill for generations? Of course we shan't!"

"Then why do you make farcical speeches, bamboozling your friends and misleading the House of Commons?"

He saw the old storm-signs with glee--the lightning in the eye, the rose on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry.

"Because, my dear lady--we must generate our force. Steam must be got up--I am engaged in doing it. We shan't get a compulsory eight hours' day for all trades--but in the course of the agitation for that precious illusion, and by the help of a great deal of beating of tom-toms, and gathering of clans, we shall get a great many other things by the way that we do want. Hearten your friends, and frighten your enemies--there is no other way of scoring in politics--and the particular score doesn't matter. Now don't look at me as if you would like to impeach me!--or I shall turn the tables. I am still fighting for my illusions in my own way--you, it seems, have given up yours!"

But for once he had underrated her sense of humour. She broke into a low merry laugh which a little disconcerted him.

"You mock me?" he said quickly--"think me insincere, unscrupulous?--Well, I dare say! But you have no right to mock me. Last year, again and again, you promised me guerdon. Now it has come to paying--and I claim!"

His low distinct voice in her ear had a magnetising effect upon her. She slowly turned her face to him, overcome by--yet fighting against--memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference to that scene she hated to think of, he would have probably lost this hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all those tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things of pity and fear, which had so often seemed to her the atonement for, the washing away of that old baseness.

He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly--

"I promised to be grateful. So I am."

"No, no!" he said, still in the same low tone. "You promised me a friend. Where is she?"

She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and her eyes were fixed on the haze opposite, whence emerged the blocks of the great hospital and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But his gaze compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an expression half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could speak.

"Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life?" he said drily. "It is not the life for you; it does not fit you in the least."

"You test your friends!" she cried, her cheek flaming again at the provocative change of voice. "What possible right have you to that remark?"

"I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You can't serve them where you are. Nursing is not for you; you are wanted among your own class--among your equals--among the people who are changing and shaping England. It is absurd. You are masquerading."

She gave him a little sarcastic nod.

"Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in my life."

He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or posing.

"You are just what you were in one respect--terribly in the right! Be a little humble to-night for a change. Come, condescend to the classes! Do you see Mr. Lane calling us?"

And, in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning to them from the distance.

"Do you know Lady Selina Farrell?" he asked her, as they walked quickly back to the dispersing crowd.

"No; who is she?"

Wharton laughed.

"Providence should contrive to let Lady Selina overhear that question once a week--in your tone! Well, she is a personage--Lord Alresford's daughter--unmarried, rich, has a salon, or thinks she has--manipulates a great many people's fortunes and lives, or thinks she does, which, after all, is what matters--to Lady Selina. She wants to know you, badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is--you will let me introduce you? She dines with us."

In another moment Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a very fashionable black and pink bonnet, who held out a gracious hand.

"I have heard so much of you!" said Lady Selina, as they walked along the passage to the dining-room together. "It must be so wonderful, your nursing!"

Marcella laughed rather restively.

"No, I don't think it is," she said; "there are so many of us."

"Oh, but the things you do--Mr. Wharton told me--so interesting!"

Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady Selina thought her a very handsome but very gauche young woman. Still, gauche or no, she had thrown over Aldous Raeburn and thirty thousand a year; an act which, as Lady Selina admitted, put you out of the common run.

"Do you know most of the people dining?" she enquired in her blandest voice. "But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton's, I think?"

"He stayed at our house last year," said Marcella, abruptly. "No, I don't know anybody."

"Then shall I tell you? It makes it more interesting, doesn't it? It ought to be a pleasant little party."

And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella that most of them were very "smart" or very important. Some of the smart names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn's talk of last year; and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and two or three prominent members. It was all rather surprising.

At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown beauty. The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.

Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lady Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella's minister on his left. At the other end of the table sat Mrs. Lane, doing her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a blind old age, gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and possible premier. But the talk, on the whole, was general--a gay and careless give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball flying from one accustomed hand to another.

And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor--the solitary, eccentric figure pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate--bringing the enmity of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead. Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot and of Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour of country-house "sets," with a patter of names which sounded in her scornful ear like a paragraph from the World; above all, a general air of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate, seemed inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the "idle rich," whereof--in the popular idea--he was held to be one of the very particular foes!--

No doubt, as the dinner moved on, this first impression changed somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost upon her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself had so often fumed; she watched the occasional recoil of the women about him, as though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal, and had been suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things puzzled, partly propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and hostile. How was it possible--from such personal temporising--such a frittering of the forces and sympathies--to win the single-mindedness and the power without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk with him--reproach him!

"Well--I must go--worse luck," said Wharton at last, laying down his napkin and rising. "Lane, will you take charge? I will join you outside later."

"If he ever finds us!" said her neighbour to Marcella. "I never saw the place so crowded. It is odd how people enjoy these scrambling meals in these very ugly rooms."

Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee-tavern place, in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the end, while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space below.

"Are there any other rooms than this?" she asked idly.

"One more," said a young man across the table, who had been introduced to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to look at him, as he desired. "But there is another big party there to-night--Raeburn--you know," he went on innocently, addressing the minister; "he has got the Winterbournes and the Macdonalds--quite a gathering--rather an unusual thing for him."

The minister glanced quickly at his companion. But she had turned to answer a question from Lady Selina, and thenceforward, till the party rose, she gave him little opportunity of observing her.

As the outward-moving stream of guests was once more in the corridor leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane.

"I think," she said--"I am afraid--we ought to be going--my friend and I. Perhaps Mr. Lane--perhaps he would just show us the way out; we can easily find a cab."

There was an imploring, urgent look in her face which struck Mrs. Lane. But Mr. Lane's loud friendly voice broke in from behind.

"My dear Miss Boyce!--we can't possibly allow it--no! no--just half an hour--while they bring us our coffee--to do your homage, you know, to the terrace--and the river--and the moon!--And then--if you don't want to go back to the House for the division, we will see you safely into your cab. Look at the moon!--and the tide"--they had come to the wide door opening on the terrace--"aren't they doing their very best for you?"

Marcella looked behind her in despair. Where was Edith? Far in the rear!--and fully occupied apparently with two or three pleasant companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on, with Mr. Lane chatting beside her--though the sight of the shining terrace, with its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she could hardly control.

"Come and look at the water," she said to Mr. Lane; "I would rather not walk up and down if you don't mind."

He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for the voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Lady Winterbourne, above all! How unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a forwarded letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her address.

"Well, how did you like the speech to-night--the speech?" said Mr. Lane, a genial Gladstonian member, more heavily weighted with estates than with ideas. "It was splendid, wasn't it?--in the way of speaking. Speeches like that are a safety-valve--that's my view of it. Have 'em out--all these ideas--get 'em discussed!"--with a good-humoured shake of the head for emphasis. "Does nobody any harm and may do good. I can tell you, Miss Boyce, the House of Commons is a capital place for taming these clever young men!--you must give them their head--and they make excellent fellows after a bit. Why--who's this?--My dear Lady Winterbourne!--this is a sight for sair een!"

And the portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately lady in black, whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight.

"Marcella!" cried a woman's voice.

Yes--there he was!--close behind Lady Winterbourne. In the soft darkness he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over the wall without an idea--a suspicion.

She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winterbourne, hesitated a second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She could not see his face in the darkness; but she was suddenly and strangely conscious of the whole scene--of the great dark building with its lines of fairy-lit gothic windows--the blue gulf of the river crossed by lines of wavering light--the swift passage of a steamer with its illuminated saloon and crowded deck--of the wonderful mixture of moonlight and sunset in the air and sky--of this dark figure in front of her.

Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She threw herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a tremor almost equal to her own.

"Oh! do come with me--come away!--I want to talk to you!" she said incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winterbourne with a strong hand.

Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the terrace.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elder lady--"to think of finding you here! How astonishing--how--how dreadful! No!--I don't mean that. Of course you and he must meet--but it was only yesterday he told me he had never seen you again--since--and it gave me a turn. I was very foolish just now. There now--stay here a moment--and tell me about yourself."

And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling. She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed it in the dark so that no one saw.

"I am glad to see you again," she said passionately, "so glad!"

Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.

"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child! And I have heard so little of you--your mother never seemed to know. When will you come and see me--or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to a ball. How strange"--she broke off--"how very strange that you and he should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with Lord Maxwell."

"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily. "Will you come to tea with me next week?--Oh, I will write.--And we must go too--where can my friend be?"

She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.

"I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway," said Lady Winterbourne; "or shall we look after you?"

"No! no! Take me back to the Lanes."

"Mamma, are you coming?" said a voice like a softened version of Lady Winterbourne's. Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl's voice said piteously:

"Dear Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take so long to do! I shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend. Ermyntrude will be sorry she ever knew me. Do come!"

"Don't cry, Betty. I certainly shan't take you if you do!" said Lady Ermyntrude, laughing. "Mamma, is this Miss Boyce--your Miss Boyce?"

She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had little notion of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the girlish form hanging on Lady Winterbourne's arm than she was of her own words, of "Betty's" beautiful soft eyes--also shyly and gravely fixed upon herself--under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the long, pointed chin; the whimsical little face.

"Well, none of you are any good!" said Betty at last, in a tragic voice. "I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and 'ask a p'leeceman.' Mr. Raeburn!"

He disengaged himself from a group behind and came--with no alacrity. Betty ran up to him.

"Mr. Raeburn! Ermyntrude and Lady Winterbourne are going to sleep here, if you don't mind making arrangements. But I want a hansom."

At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world had never rolled more evenly.

"Oh! there she is--there is my friend!" cried Marcella to Lady Winterbourne. "Good-night--good-night!"

She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to "collect" another straying member of the party.

An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort--even her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes. She walked up to him.

"Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?" she said in a tremulous hurry. "I am so sorry he is ill--I hadn't heard--I--"

She dared not look up. Was that his voice answering?

"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day give a rather better report. We take him abroad to-morrow."

"Marcella! at last!" cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend; "you lost me? Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way. But look, there is Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go--come and say good-night--everybody is departing."

Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of humiliation--pain--sore resentment. That cold, strange tone--those unwilling words!--She had gone up to him--as undisciplined in her repentance as she had been in aggression--full of a passionate yearning to make friends--somehow to convey to him that she "was sorry," in the old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little. There could be no misunderstanding possible! He of all men knew best how irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the promises of ethics and religion ought to bring peace--peace and a soothed conscience?

But she had been repulsed--put aside, so she took it--and by one of the kindest and most generous of men! She moved along the terrace in a maze, seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All that obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her--which had found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike, her--was beating and swelling stormlike within her. She had taken being loved so easily, so much as a matter of course! How was it that it hurt her now so much to have lost love, and power, and consideration? She had never felt any passion for Aldous Raeburn--had taken him lightly and shaken him off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from him--the proud manner of a moment--had inflicted a smart upon her she could hardly bear. They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy, uncared for!

But, on the contrary, she must be happy!--must be loved! To this, and this only, had she been brought by the hard experience of this strenuous year.

* * * * *

"Oh, Mrs. Lane, be an angel!" exclaimed Wharton's voice. "Just one turn--five minutes! The division will be called directly, and then we will all thank our stars and go to bed!"

In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bare-headed, radiant, reckless even, as he was wont to be in moments of excitement. He had seen her speak to Raeburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind was too full for any perception of other people's situations--even hers. He was absorbed with himself, and with her, as she fitted his present need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his lips; and his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and the pleasure of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to homage; his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference, a flattery, to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the evening had lent a new prestige.

She, too, in his eyes, had triumphed--had made her mark. His ears were full of the comments made upon her to-night by the little world on the terrace. If it were not for money--hateful money!--what more brilliant wife could be desired for any rising man?

So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment, had given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet to think her kind and fair.

Chapter X

"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I. Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than--"

"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us weaklings? Do you think I want to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing too much,' my good friend!"

Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by Hallin's "chaff."

"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now, rest, and begin again in the winter?"

Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly joined in front of him.

"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.

Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.

"Why you should behave as though you wished to make such a prophecy true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.

Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes--coeli lucida templa--the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.

"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I shall give up soon. Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures. I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead, and--I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh when no man can work."

They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the political situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind. Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain current isms and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs, indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.

He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his early friends by his passionate democracy--his belief in, and trust of, the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith, but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the friendship of these two in the least.

But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with--say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his life. And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them already. And that not for wealth's sake--though a more equal distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual heritage.

How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of the land." Not, of course, by violence--which only means the worst form of waste known to history--but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other kinds of property--by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of communal initiative and control--and above all by the continuous private effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student--or the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A nation is not saved so cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men, women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a growing despair.

The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man.

So that he saw it all sub specie aeternitatis, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!--to be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affections as any homoousion of old? Had they not already cost him love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?

* * * * *

"Ah, dear old fellow--enough!" said Hallin at last--"take me back to Italy! You have told me so little--such a niggardly little!"

"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous; "the first rain in Northern Italy for four months--worse luck! 'Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma.--At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'--that might about stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."

"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"

Aldous laughed.

"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff--and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside--the amazed officer looking on. And as for her career over the roof of the Duomo--the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction--and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe."

"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a barrel organ."

"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across, especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel salon at night--a perfect ring of them--and the men outside, totally neglected, and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade--a governess, or a schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy--that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is nature or art."

He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.

"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes to his friend, "that I had seen her again."

Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:

"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you--but she said nothing."

"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's party. She spoke to me afterwards--I believe now--she meant to be kind"--his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all--"but I saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own manner, but I could not help myself."

His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow. Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce, but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had not perhaps expected.

"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a pause, "that she is going to marry him?"

"No--no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly, perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success--of a kind--in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front."

"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that group are too unmanageable. If he were a Parnell! But he lacks just the qualities that matter--the reticence, the power of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard self-concentration."

Aldous raised his shoulders.

"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him everywhere."

"What!--among the smart people?"

Aldous nodded.

"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all at once."

"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the Clarion?"

"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I might not be able to go on giving to the strike."

Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella Boyce--never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction.

"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.

Aldous hesitated; then he said--

"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"

Hallin made a little face.

"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I could cry over her!"

Aldous started.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But this--this--" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day, 'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had thrown me over except with ill-will.' The word astonished me, but sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of anger to the most futile, the most ridiculous degree!"

He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's shoulders, and there was a short pause.

"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?--I forget."

Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again, meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of things in two or three selected streets.

It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he thought the Government could really do good.

Then Raeburn turned to go.

"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he opened the door.

"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have my jaunt."

Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some sight.

"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand them over to me."

"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the room.

* * * * *

Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared from the too short London summer.

For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of tune--whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all the ceremonial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.

He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street, and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together talking.

The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a peculiarly vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.

After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow roadway strewn with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type.

A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.

"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after. The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."

And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"--that is to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.

When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough. But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of "big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.

Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.

"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"

Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air. The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling them, yet too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.

"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds like murder. You go back for that policeman!"

And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans, uproar--all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"

Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark passage inside--two wrestling with the third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with blood.

"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister too!"

"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous--it's the nuss he means! I sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer blackguard, you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.

"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.

Aldous was already upstairs.

"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the first landing--for all sounds from above had ceased.

"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us begged and implored of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we, Betsy?--didn't we, Doll?"

Aldous ran up.

On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on the ground, apparently beaten to death.

By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity. Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on Raeburn's heart.

In such an exaltation of nerve she could be surprised at nothing. When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.

"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her--speaking with pauses, as though to get her breath--"he has--killed her. But there--is a chance. Are the--police there--and a stretcher?"

Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.

"Did you see it, miss?"

"I--I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the bandage she was applying. "But he was--such a great--powerful brute."

Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.

"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his note-book, "attending a child--that's ill--when I heard the screams. They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room--then rushed after her--I think--to throw her downstairs--I stopped that. Then he took up something--oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink--I couldn't--do much."

Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.

"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.

"It's not broken--it's wrenched; I can't use it. There--that's all we can do--till she gets--to hospital."

Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little. Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing at the woman's marred face--indescribably patient in its deep unconsciousness--at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair--with tears that ran unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched a chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once before--beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.

At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.

"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her. "Won't you let me take you home?--you want it sorely. The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They will remove her with every care--he will see to it."

Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he was--where they were--how they had last met. And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness. She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her anymore--after this! When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now. No!--after this he must be friends with her.

"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a quivering, appealing accent--and so they fell silent.

Aldous looked round the room--at the miserable filthy garret with its begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty gin-bottles here and there--all the familiar, one might almost say conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation--then at this breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance--against her mother!--against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a hopeless struggle with devildom.

"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not much worse than others--though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing--used to come in and out--when I was nursing him--Oh, I wish--I wish they would come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form--"every moment is of importance!"

As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.

Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police, who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and seemed to him on the point of fainting.

"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.

"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They will not trouble you any more for the present."

He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab. Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to control herself and not to faint.

He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was this what her new career--her enthusiasms--meant, or might mean! Twenty-three!--in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.

Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such scenes--such gross physical abominations. Amazing!--how meanly, passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman! He himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern joy of the fight. But she!--let her leave the human brute and his unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne--it was never meant--that she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in the cottage.

In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely. Presently, as he watched her--hating the man for driving and the cab for shaking--he saw her white lips suddenly smile.

"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing is all like that!"

"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.

"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again. "Nobody is ever rude to us--I often pine for experiences!"

How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.

"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your arm hurt you much?"

"Yes,--but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up work for a bit.--Mr. Raeburn!"

"Yes." His heart beat.

"We may meet often--mayn't we?--at Lady Winterbourne's--or in the country? Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often--" She turned away her weary head a moment--gathered strength to begin again--"--how often I have regretted--last year. I see now--that I behaved--more unkindly"--her voice was almost a whisper--"than I thought then. But it is all done with--couldn't we just be good friends--understand each other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"

She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.

As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the Terrace--was Wharton's advancing figure. But her state--the moment--coerced him.

"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.

She put out her hand.

"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh no!"

Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But she hardly heard him.

At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of Brown's Buildings.

"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs--then I shan't be any more trouble."

So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of children. Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him with a wan smile.

"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"

Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed. Then he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.

After which he spent--poor Aldous!--one of the most restless and miserable nights of his life.