Chapter XI…

Chapter XI

Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window of Lady Winterbourne's drawing-room. The house--in James Street, Buckingham Gate--looked out over the exercising ground of the great barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James's Park to the left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things, and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let alone.

Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon. Marcella had her thoughts to herself.

But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling--must somehow wrestle--its passionate way. But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover, under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing--a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody.

On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she had saved--probably at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and--as Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their minds--would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.

Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest. She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible; the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little.

Childishly, angrily--she wanted him to be friends! Why shouldn't he? He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day, whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a situation?--make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.

Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle; and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained his place in Brookshire--by the mere accidents of birth. After all, aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by what he has--so far at least has "progress" brought us.

She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of "consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried; while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public. Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and various sources--mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work of England. Above all things did she love and admire power--the power of personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her imagination.

Then--apart from the political world and its judgments--the intimacy between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend, he was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to regard him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not easily yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and sweetness of disposition had full play; and although, now that Marcella was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were all so kind and indulgent to her, seeing that they cared so much for him and all that affected him.

Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as combative as ever.

Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual adornments of the "New Journalism."

The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them--comparatively a large world--fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names. To lose your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come across her again in this manner and in these circumstances--there was a dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she had claims, and was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention whatever of playing the lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for the wounded arm that its owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly, just across the Green Park.

Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had been no craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever. She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady Winterbourne neither knew him, nor apparently wished to know him--a fact which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate.

Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women, with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent lived their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the young demagogue had yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least as much duped as he. Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to his interest to break them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these people--the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his mind--seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.

Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed him, as a lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes, she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself flushing from brow to chin at the thought--"He does not want any one to suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!"

It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When it did enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his--and that he was full of doubts! The perception had given to her manner an increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not refrain, if he was to preserve his power.

So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in it neither simplicity nor joy. She was conscious of a certain dull and baffled feeling--a sense of humiliation--which hurt. Moreover, the scene of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination perpetually. She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her--the pity, the ugliness, the confusion of it.

* * * * *

The muslin curtain beside her suddenly swelled out in a draught of air, and she put out her hand quickly to catch the French window lest it should swing to. Some one had opened the door of the room.

"Did I blow you out of window?" said a girl's voice; and there behind her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty Macdonald, a vision of white muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big shady hat.

"Oh, do come in!" said Marcella, shyly; "Lady Winterbourne will be in directly."

"So Panton told me," said Betty, sinking down on a high stool beside Marcella's chair, and taking off her hat; "and Panton doesn't tell me any stories now--I've trained him. I wonder how many he tells in the day? Don't you think there will be a special little corner of purgatory for London butlers? I hope Panton will get off easy!"

Then she laid her sharp chin on her tiny hand, and studied Marcella. Miss Boyce was in the light black dress that Minta approved; her pale face and delicate hands stood out from it with a sort of noble emphasis. When Betty had first heard of Marcella Boyce as the heroine of a certain story, she had thought of her as a girl one would like to meet, if only to prick her somehow for breaking the heart of a good man. Now that she saw her close she felt herself near to falling in love with her. Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her heart, and by contrast honesty despising--for the moment--that very happy and popular person, Betty Macdonald!

"Do you like being alone?" she asked Marcella, abruptly.

Marcella coloured.

"Well, I was just getting very tired of my own company," she said. "I was very glad to see you come in."

"Were you?" said Betty, joyously, with a little gleam in her pretty eyes. Then suddenly the golden head bent forward. "May I kiss you?" she said, in the wistfullest, eagerest voice.

Marcella smiled, and, laying her hand on Betty's, shyly drew her.

"That's better!" said Betty, with a long breath. "That's the second milestone; the first was when I saw you on the Terrace. Couldn't you mark all your friendships by little white stones? I could. But the horrid thing is when you have to mark them back again! Nobody ever did that with you!"

"Because I have no friends," said Marcella, quickly; then, when Betty clapped her hands in amazement at such a speech, she added quickly with a smile, "except a few I make poultices for."

"There!" said Betty, enviously, "to think of being really wanted--for poultices--or, anything! I never was wanted in my life! When I die they'll put on my poor little grave--

"She's buried here--that hizzie Betty; She did na gude--so don't ee fret ye!

"--oh, there they are!"--she ran to the window--"Lady Winterbourne and Ermyntrude. Doesn't it make you laugh to see Lady Winterbourne doing her duties? She gets into her carriage after lunch as one might mount a tumbril. I expect to hear her tell the coachman to drive to the scaffold at Hyde Park Corner.' She looks the unhappiest woman in England--and all the time Ermyntrude declares she likes it, and wouldn't do without her season for the world! She gives Ermyntrude a lot of trouble, but she is a dear--a naughty dear--and mothers are such a chance! Ermyntrude! where did you get that bonnet? You got it without me--and my feelings won't stand it!"

Lady Ermyntrude and Betty threw themselves on a sofa together, chattering and laughing. Lady Winterbourne came up to Marcella and enquired after her. She was still slowly drawing off her gloves, when the drawing-room door opened again.

"Tea, Panton!" said Lady Winterbourne, without turning her head, and in the tone of Lady Macbeth. But the magnificent butler took no notice.

"Lady Selina Farrell!" he announced in a firm voice.

Lady Winterbourne gave a nervous start; then, with the air of a person cut out of wood, made a slight advance, and held out a limp hand to her visitor.

"Won't you sit down?" she said.

Anybody who did not know her would have supposed that she had never seen Lady Selina before. In reality she and the Alresfords were cousins. But she did not like Lady Selina, and never took any pains to conceal it--a fact which did not in the smallest degree interfere with the younger lady's performance of her family duties.

Lady Selina found a seat with easy aplomb, put up her bejewelled fingers to draw off her veil, and smilingly prepared herself for tea. She enquired of Betty how she was enjoying herself, and of Lady Ermyntrude how her husband and baby in the country were getting on without her. The tone of this last question made the person addressed flush and draw herself up. It was put as banter, but certainly conveyed that Lady Ermyntrude was neglecting her family for the sake of dissipations. Betty meanwhile curled herself up in a corner of the sofa, letting one pretty foot swing over the other, and watching the new-comer with a malicious eye, which instantly and gleefully perceived that Lady Selina thought her attitude ungraceful.

Marcella, of course, was greeted and condoled with--Lady Selina, however, had seen her since the tragedy--and then Lady Winterbourne, after every item of her family news, and every symptom of her own and her husband's health had been rigorously enquired into, began to attempt some feeble questions of her own--how, for instance, was Lord Alresford's gout?

Lady Selina replied that he was well, but much depressed by the political situation. No doubt Ministers had done their best, but he thought two or three foolish mistakes had been made during the session. Certain blunders ought at all hazards to have been avoided. He feared that the party and the country might have to pay dearly for them. But he had done his best.

Lady Winterbourne, whose eldest son was a junior whip, had been the recipient, since the advent of the new Cabinet, of so much rejoicing over the final exclusion of "that vain old idiot, Alresford," from any further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selina's talk made her at once nervous and irritable. She was afraid of being indiscreet; yet she longed to put her visitor down. In her odd disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving idealist nature--mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at her, yet had made her happy--was always trying to reconcile the ends of eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of Sisyphus; but she would not let it alone.

"I do not agree with you," she said with cold shyness in answer to Lady Selina's concluding laments--"I am told--our people say--we are doing very well--except that the session is likely to be dreadfully long."

Lady Selina raised both her eyebrows and her shoulders.

"Dear Lady Winterbourne! you really mean it?" she said with the indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded--"But just think! The session will go on, every one says, till quite the end of September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented? All our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believes so much of the friction might have been avoided. He is all in favour of doing more for Labour. He thinks these Labour men might have been easily propitiated without anything revolutionary. It's no good supposing that these poor starving people will wait for ever!"

"Oh!" said Lady Winterbourne, and sat staring at her visitor. To those who knew its author well, the monosyllable could not have been more expressive. Lady Winterbourne's sense of humour had no voice, but inwardly it was busy with Lord Alresford as the "friend of the poor." Alresford!--the narrowest and niggardliest tyrant alive, so far as his own servants and estate were concerned. And as to Lady Selina, it was well known to the Winterbourne cousinship that she could never get a maid to stay with her six months.

"What did you think of Mr. Wharton's speech the other night?" said Lady Selina, bending suavely across the tea-table to Marcella.

"It was very interesting," said Marcella, stiffly--perfectly conscious that the name had pricked the attention of everybody in the room, and angry with her cheeks for reddening.

"Wasn't it?" said Lady Selina, heartily. "You can't do those things, of course! But you should show every sympathy to the clever enthusiastic young men--the men like that--shouldn't you? That's what my father says. He says we've got to win them. We've got somehow to make them feel us their friends--or we shall all go to ruin! They have the voting power--and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our cause--and at the same time give them our help--in reason--show them we want to be their friends--wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it rightly--you know so much about these things! But we can't undo '67--can we? We must get round it somehow--mustn't we? And my father thinks Ministers so unwise! But perhaps"--and Lady Selina drew herself back with a more gracious smile than ever--"I ought not to be saying these things to you--of course I know you used to think us Conservatives very bad people--but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think quite so hardly of us as you used?"

Lady Selina's head in its Paris bonnet fell to one side in a gentle interrogative sort of way.

Something roused in Marcella.

"Our cause?" she repeated, while the dark eye dilated--"I wonder what you mean?"

"Well, I mean--" said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl--"I mean, of course, the cause of the educated--of the people who have made the country."

"I think," said Marcella, quietly, "you mean the cause of the rich, don't you?"

"Marcella!" cried Lady Winterbourne, catching at the tone rather than words--"I thought you didn't feel like that any more--not about the distance between the poor and the rich--and our tyranny--and its being hopeless--and the poor always hating us--I thought you changed."

And forgetting Lady Selina, remembering only the old talks at Mellor, Lady Winterbourne bent forward and laid an appealing hand on Marcella's arm.

Marcella turned to her with an odd look.

"If you only knew," she said, "how much more possible it is to think well of the rich, when you are living amongst the poor!"

"Ah! you must be at a distance from us to do us justice?" enquired Lady Selina, settling her bracelets with a sarcastic lip.

"I must," said Marcella, looking, however, not at her, but at Lady Winterbourne. "But then, you see,"--she caressed her friend's hand with a smile--"it is so easy to throw some people into opposition!"

"Dreadfully easy!" sighed Lady Winterbourne.

The flush mounted again in the girl's cheek. She hesitated, then felt driven to explanations.

"You see--oddly enough"--she pointed away for an instant to the north-east through the open window--"it's when I'm over there--among the people who have nothing--that it does me good to remember that there are persons who live in James Street, Buckingham Gate!"

"My dear! I don't understand," said Lady Winterbourne, studying her with her most perplexed and tragic air.

"Well, isn't it simple?" said Marcella, still holding her hand and looking up at her. "It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those streets and houses, among people who live in one room--with not a bit of prettiness anywhere--and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come home and gloat over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I can think of!"

"But don't you hate the people that have them?" said Betty, again on her stool, chin in hand.

"No! it doesn't seem to matter to me then what kind of people they are. And I don't so much want to take from them and give to the others. I only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness are _some_where--not lost out of the world."

"How strange!--in a life like yours--that one should think so much of the ugliness of being poor--more than of suffering or pain," said Betty, musing.

"Well--in some moods--you do--I do!" said Marcella; "and it is in those moods that I feel least resentful of wealth. If I say to myself that the people who have all the beauty and the leisure are often selfish and cruel--after all they die out of their houses and their parks, and their pictures, in time, like the shell-fish out of its shell. The beauty and the grace which they created or inherited remain. And why should one be envious of them personally? They have had the best chances in the world and thrown them away--are but poor animals at the end! At any rate I can't hate them--they seem to have a function--when I am moving about Drury Lane!" she added with a smile.

"But how can one help being ashamed?" said Lady Winterbourne, as her eyes wandered over her pretty room, and she felt herself driven somehow into playing devil's advocate.

"No! No!" said Marcella, eagerly, "don't be ashamed! As to the people who make beauty more beautiful--who share it and give it--I often feel as if I could say to them on my knees, Never, never be ashamed merely of being rich--of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a cripple, or having two eyes rather than one!"

"Oh, but, my dear!" cried Lady Winterbourne, piteous and bewildered, "when one has all the beauty and the freedom--and other people must die without any--"

"Oh, I know, I know!" said Marcella, with a quick gesture of despair; "that's what makes the world the world. And one begins with thinking it can be changed--that it must and shall be changed!--that everybody could have wealth--could have beauty and rest, and time to think, that is to say--if things were different--if one could get Socialism--if one could beat down the capitalist--if one could level down, and level up, till everybody had 200 l. a year. One turns and fingers the puzzle all day long. It seems so near coming right--one guesses a hundred ways in which it might be done! Then after a while one stumbles upon doubt--one begins to see that it never will, never can come right--not in any mechanical way of that sort--that that isn't what was meant!"

Her voice dropped drearily. Betty Macdonald gazed at her with a girl's nascent adoration. Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy, but absorbed like Betty in Marcella. Lady Selina, studying the three with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful attention to fringe and hairpins. As for Ermyntrude, she was no longer on the sofa; she had risen noiselessly, finger on lip, almost at the beginning of Marcella's talk, to greet a visitor. She and he were standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory, unnoticed by any of the group in the bow window.

"Don't you think," said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still busy with her bonnet, "that it would be a very good thing to send all the Radicals--the well-to-do Radicals I mean--to live among the poor? It seems to teach people such extremely useful things!"

Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her impertinently. She looked round quickly.

"I wonder what you suppose it teaches?"

"Well," said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; "well! I suppose it teaches a person to be content--and not to cry for the moon!"

"You think," said Marcella, slowly, "that to live among the poor can teach any one--any one that's human--to be content!"

Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation--without pose. At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.

Lady Selina's feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by her social inferior. She drew herself up.

"As I understand you," she said stiffly, "you yourself confessed that to live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth."

Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude's made the speaker turn her head. She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.

"Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great discussion? Most consoling, wasn't it--on the whole--to us West End people?"

She threw back a keen glance at Marcella. Lady Ermyntrude and Raeburn came forward.

"I made him be quiet," said Ermyntrude, not looking, however, quite at her ease; "it would have been a shame to interrupt."

"I think so, indeed!" said Lady Selina, with emphasis. "Good-bye, dear Lady Winterbourne; good-bye, Miss Boyce! You have comforted me very much! Of course one is sorry for the poor; but it is a great thing to hear from anybody who knows as much about it as you do, that--after all--it is no crime--to possess a little!"

She stood smiling, looking from the girl to the man--then, escorted by Raeburn in his very stiffest manner, she swept out of the room.

When Aldous came back, with a somewhat slow and hesitating step, he approached Marcella, who was standing silent by the window, and asked after the lame arm. He was sorry, he said, to see that it was still in its sling. His tone was a little abrupt. Only Lady Winterbourne saw the quick nervousness of the eyes,

"Oh! thank you," said Marcella, coldly, "I shall get back to work next week."

She stooped and took up her book.

"I must please go and write some letters," she said, in answer to Lady Winterbourne's flurried look.

And she walked away. Betty and Lady Ermyntrude also went to take off their things.

"Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, holding out her hand to him.

He took it, glanced unwillingly at her wistful, agitated face, pressed the hand, and let it go.

"Isn't it sad," said his old friend, unable to help herself, "to see her battling like this with life--with thought--all alone? Isn't it sad, Aldous?"

"Yes," he said. Then, after a pause, "Why doesn't she go home? My patience gives out when I think of Mrs. Boyce."

"Oh! it isn't Mrs. Boyce's fault," said Lady Winterbourne, hopelessly. "And I don't know why one should be sorry for her particularly--why one should want her to change her life again. She does it splendidly. Only I never, never feel that she is a bit happy in it."

It was Hallin's cry over again.

He said nothing for a moment; then he forced a smile.

"Well! neither you nor I can help it, can we?" he said. The grey eyes looked at her steadily--bitterly. Lady Winterbourne, with the sensation of one who, looking for softness, has lit on granite, changed the subject.

Meanwhile, Marcella upstairs was walking restlessly up and down. She could hardly keep herself from rushing off--back to Brown's Buildings at once. He in the room while she was saying those things! Lady Selina's words burnt in her ears. Her morbid, irritable sense was all one vibration of pride and revolt. Apology--appeal--under the neatest comedy guise! Of course!--now that Lord-Maxwell was dying, and the ill-used suitor was so much the nearer to his earldom. A foolish girl had repented her of her folly--was anxious to make those concerned understand--what more simple?

Her nerves were strained and out of gear. Tears came in a proud, passionate gush; and she must needs allow herself the relief of them.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Lady Selina had gone home full of new and uncomfortable feelings. She could not get Marcella Boyce out of her head--neither as she had just seen her, under the wing of "that foolish woman, Madeleine Winterbourne," nor as she had seen her first, on the terrace with Harry Wharton. It did not please Lady Selina to feel herself in any way eclipsed or even rivalled by such an unimportant person as this strange and ridiculous girl. Yet it crossed her mind with a stab, as she lay resting on the sofa in her little sitting-room before dinner, that never in all her thirty-five years had any human being looked into her face with the same alternations of eagerness and satisfied pleasure she had seen on Harry Wharton's, as he and Miss Boyce strolled the terrace together--nor even with such a look as that silly baby Betty Macdonald had put on, as she sat on the stool at the heroine's feet.

There was to be a small dinner-party at Alresford House that night. Wharton was to be among the guests. He was fast becoming one of the habitues of the house, and would often stay behind to talk to Lady Selina when the guests were gone, and Lord Alresford was dozing peacefully in a deep arm-chair.

Lady Selina lay still in the evening light, and let her mind, which worked with extraordinary shrewdness and force in the grooves congenial to it, run over some possibilities of the future.

She was interrupted by the entrance of her maid, who, with the quickened breath and heightened colour she could not repress when speaking to her formidable mistress, told her that one of the younger housemaids was very ill. Lady Selina enquired, found that the doctor who always attended the servants had been sent for, and thought that the illness might turn to rheumatic fever.

"Oh, send her off to the hospital at once!" said Lady Selina. "Let Mrs. Stewart see Dr. Briggs first thing in the morning, and make arrangements. You understand?"

The girl hesitated, and the candles she was lighting showed that she had been crying.

"If your ladyship would but let her stay," she said timidly, "we'd all take our turns at nursing her. She comes from Ireland, perhaps you'll remember, my lady. She's no friends in London, and she's frightened to death of going to the hospital."

"That's nonsense!" said Lady Selina, sternly. "Do you think I can have all the work of the house put out because some one is ill? She might die even--one never knows. Just tell Mrs. Stewart to arrange with her about her wages, and to look out for somebody else at once."

The girl's mouth set sullenly as she went about her work--put out the shining satin dress, the jewels, the hairpins, the curling-irons, the various powders and cosmetics that were wanted for Lady Selina's toilette, and all the time there was ringing in her ears the piteous cry of a little Irish girl, clinging like a child to her only friend: "O Marie! dear Marie! do get her to let me stay--I'll do everything the doctor tells me--I'll make haste and get well--I'll give no trouble. And it's all along of the work--and the damp up in these rooms--the doctor said so."

An hour later Lady Selina was in the stately drawing-room of Alresford House, receiving her guests. She was out of sorts and temper, and though Wharton arrived in due time, and she had the prospect to enliven her during dinner--when he was of necessity parted from her by people of higher rank--of a tête-à-tête with him before the evening was over, the dinner went heavily. The Duke on her right hand, and the Dean on her left, were equally distasteful to her. Neither food nor wine had savour; and once, when in an interval of talk she caught sight of her father's face and form at the further end, growing more vacant and decrepit week by week, she was seized with a sudden angry pang of revolt and repulsion. Her father wearied and disgusted her. Life was often triste and dull in the great house. Yet, when the old man should have found his grave, she would be a much smaller person than she was now, and the days would be so much the more tedious.

Wharton, too, showed less than his usual animation. She said to herself at dinner that he had the face of a man in want of sleep. His young brilliant look was somewhat tarnished, and there was worry in the restless eye. And, indeed, she knew that things had not been going so favourably for him in the House of late--that the stubborn opposition of the little group of men led by Wilkins was still hindering that concentration of the party and definition of his own foremost place in it which had looked so close and probable a few weeks before. She supposed he had been exhausting himself, too, over that shocking Midland strike. The Clarion had been throwing itself into the battle of the men with a monstrous violence, for which she had several times reproached him.

When all the guests had gone but Wharton, and Lord Alresford, duly placed for the sake of propriety in his accustomed chair, was safely asleep, Lady Selina asked what was the matter.

"Oh, the usual thing!" he said, as he leant against the mantelpiece beside her. "The world's a poor place, and my doll's stuffed with sawdust. Did you ever know any doll that wasn't?"

She looked up at him a moment without speaking.

"Which means," she said, "that you can't get your way in the House?"

"No," said Wharton, meditatively, looking down at his boots. "No--not yet."

"You think you will get it some day?"

He raised his eyes.

"Oh yes!" he said; "oh dear, yes!--some day."

She laughed.

"You had better come over to us."

"Well, there is always that to think of, isn't there? You can't deny you want all the new blood you can get!"

"If you only understood your moment and your chance," she said quickly, "you would make the opportunity and do it at once."

He looked at her aggressively.

"How easy it comes to you Tories to rat!" he said.

"Thank you! it only means that we are the party of common sense. Well, I have been talking to your Miss Boyce."

He started.

"Where?"

"At Lady Winterbourne's. Aldous Raeburn was there. Your beautiful Socialist was very interesting--and rather surprising. She talked of the advantages of wealth; said she had been converted--by living among the poor--had changed her mind, in fact, on many things. We were all much edified--including Mr. Raeburn. How long do you suppose that business will remain 'off'? To my mind I never saw a young woman more eager to undo a mistake." Then she added slowly, "The accounts of Lord Maxwell get more and more unsatisfactory."

Wharton stared at her with sparkling eyes. "How little you know her!" he said, not without a tone of contempt.

"Oh! very well," said Lady Selina, with the slightest shrug of her white shoulders.

He turned to the mantelpiece and began to play with some ornaments upon it.

"Tell me what she said," he enquired presently.

Lady Selina gave her own account of the conversation. Wharton recovered himself.

"Dear me!" he said, when she stopped. "Yes--well--we may see another act. Who knows? Well, good-night, Lady Selina."

She gave him her hand with her usual aristocrat's passivity, and he went. But it was late indeed that night before she ceased to speculate on what the real effect of her words had been upon him.

As for Wharton, on his walk home he thought of Marcella Boyce and of Raeburn with a certain fever of jealous vanity which was coming, he told himself, dangerously near to passion. He did not believe Lady Selina, but nevertheless he felt that her news might drive him into rash steps he could ill afford, and had indeed been doing his best to avoid. Meanwhile it was clear to him that the mistress of Alresford House had taken an envious dislike to Marcella. How plain she had looked to-night in spite of her gorgeous dress! and how intolerable Lord Alresford grew!

Chapter XII

But what right had Wharton to be thinking of such irrelevant matters as women and love-making at all? He had spoken of public worries to Lady Selina. In reality his public prospects in themselves were, if anything, improved. It was his private affairs that were rushing fast on catastrophe, and threatening to drag the rest with them.

He had never been so hard pressed for money in his life. In the first place his gambling debts had mounted up prodigiously of late. His friends were tolerant and easy-going. But the more tolerant they were the more he was bound to frequent them. And his luck for some time had been monotonously bad. Before long these debts must be paid, and some of them--to a figure he shrank from dwelling upon--were already urgent.

Then as to the Clarion, it became every week a heavier burden. The expenses of it were enormous; the returns totally inadequate. Advertisements were falling off steadily; and whether the working cost were cut down, or whether a new and good man like Louis Craven, whose letters from the strike district were being now universally read, were put on, the result financially seemed to be precisely the same. It was becoming even a desperate question how the weekly expenses were to be met; so that Wharton's usual good temper now deserted him entirely as soon as he had crossed the Clarion threshold; bitterness had become the portion of the staff, and even the office boys walked in gloom.

Yet, at the same time, withdrawing from the business, was almost as difficult as carrying it on. There were rumours in the air which had, already seriously damaged the paper as a saleable concern. Wharton, indeed, saw no prospect whatever of selling except at ruinous loss. Meanwhile, to bring the paper to an abrupt end would have not only precipitated a number of his financial obligations; it would have been politically, a dangerous confession of failure made at a very critical moment. For what made the whole thing the more annoying was that the Clarion had never been so important politically, never so much read by the persons on whom Wharton's parliamentary future depended, as it was at this moment. The advocacy of the Damesley strike had been so far a stroke of business for Wharton as a Labour Member.

It was now the seventh week of the strike, and Wharton's "leaders," Craven's letters from the seat of war, and the Clarion strike fund, which articles and letters had called into existence, were as vigorous as ever. The struggle itself had fallen into two chapters. In the first the metal-workers concerned, both men and women, had stood out for the old wages unconditionally and had stoutly rejected all idea of arbitration. At the end of three or four weeks, however, when grave suffering had declared itself among an already half-starved population, the workers had consented to take part in the appointment of a board of conciliation. This board, including the workmen's delegates, overawed by the facts of foreign competition as they were disclosed by the masters, recommended terms which would have amounted to a victory for the employers.

The award was no sooner known in the district than the passionate indignation of the great majority of the workers knew no bounds. Meetings were held everywhere; the men's delegates at the board were thrown over, and Craven, who with his new wife was travelling incessantly over the whole strike area, wrote a letter to the Clarion on the award which stated the men's case with extreme ability, was immediately backed up by Wharton in a tremendous "leader," and was received among the strikers with tears almost of gratitude and enthusiasm.

Since then all negotiations had been broken off. The Clarion had gone steadily against the masters, against the award, against further arbitration. The theory of the "living wage," of which more recent days have heard so much, was preached in other terms, but with equal vigour; and the columns of the Clarion bore witness day by day in the long lists of subscriptions to the strike fund, to the effects of its eloquence on the hearts and pockets of Englishmen.

Meanwhile there were strange rumours abroad. It was said that the trade was really on the eve of a complete and striking revolution in its whole conditions--could this labour war be only cleared out of the way. The smaller employers had been for long on the verge of ruin; and the larger men, so report had it, were scheming a syndicate on the American plan to embrace the whole industry, cut down the costs of production, and regulate the output.

But for this large capital would be wanted. Could capital be got? The state of things in the trade, according to the employers, had been deplorable for years; a large part of the market had been definitely forfeited, so they declared, for good, to Germany and Belgium. It would take years before even a powerful syndicate could work itself into a thoroughly sound condition. Let the men accept the award of the conciliation board; let there be some stable and reasonable prospect of peace between masters and men, say, for a couple of years; and a certain group of bankers would come forward; and all would be well. The men under the syndicate would in time get more than their old wage. But the award first; otherwise the plan dropped, and the industry must go its own way to perdition.

"'Will you walk into my parlour?'" said Wharton, scornfully, to the young Conservative member who, with a purpose, was explaining these things to him in the library of the House of Commons, "the merest trap! and, of course, the men will see it so. Who is to guarantee them even the carrying through, much less the success, of your precious syndicate? And, in return for your misty millennium two years hence, the men are to join at once in putting the employers in a stronger position than ever? Thank you! The 'rent of ability' in the present state of things is, no doubt, large. But in this particular case the Clarion will go on doing its best--I promise you--to nibble some of it away!"

The Conservative member rose in indignation.

"I should be sorry to have as many starving people on my conscience as you'll have before long!" he said as he took up his papers.

At that moment Denny's rotund and square-headed figure passed along the corridor, to which the library door stood open.

"Well, if I thrive upon it as well as Denny does, I shall do!" returned Wharton, with his usual caustic good-humour, as his companion departed.

And it delighted him to think as he walked home that Denny, who had again of late made himself particularly obnoxious in the House of Commons, on two or three occasions, to the owner of the Clarion, had probably instigated the quasi-overtures he had just rejected, and must be by now aware of their result.

Then he sent for Craven to come and confer with him.

Craven accordingly came up from the Midlands, pale, thin, and exhausted, with the exertions and emotions of seven weeks' incessant labour. Yet personally Wharton found him, as before, dry and unsympathetic; and disliked him, and his cool, ambiguous manner, more than ever. As to the strike, however, they came to a complete understanding. The Clarion, or rather the Clarion fund, which was doing better and better, held the key of the whole situation. If that fund could be maintained, the men could hold out. In view of the possible formation of the syndicate, Craven denounced the award with more fierceness than ever, maintaining the redoubled importance of securing the men's terms before the syndicate was launched. Wharton promised him with glee that he should be supported to the bitter end.

If, that is to say--a proviso he did not discuss with Craven--the Clarion itself could be kept going. In August a large sum, obtained two years before on the security of new "plant," would fall due. The time for repayment had already been extended; and Wharton had ascertained that no further extension was possible.

Well! bankruptcy would be a piquant interlude in his various social and political enterprises! How was it to be avoided? He had by now plenty of rich friends in the City or elsewhere, but none, as he finally decided, likely to be useful to him at the present moment. For the amount of money that he required was large--larger, indeed, than he cared to verify with any strictness, and the security that he could offer, almost nil.

As to friends in the City, indeed, the only excursion of a business kind that he had made into those regions since his election was now adding seriously to his anxieties--might very well turn out, unless the matter were skilfully managed, to be one of the blackest spots on his horizon.

In the early days of his parliamentary life, when, again, mostly for the Clarion's sake, money happened to be much wanted, he had become director of what promised to be an important company, through the interest and good nature of a new and rich acquaintance, who had taken a liking to the young member. The company had been largely "boomed," and there had been some very profitable dealing in the original shares. Wharton had made two or three thousand pounds, and contributed both point and finish to some of the early prospectuses.

Then, after six months, he had withdrawn from the Board, under apprehensions that had been gradually realised with alarming accuracy. Things, indeed, had been going very wrong indeed; there were a number of small investors; and the annual meeting of the company, to be held now in some ten days, promised a storm. Wharton discovered, partly to his own amazement, for he was a man who quickly forgot, that during his directorate he had devised or sanctioned matters that were not at all likely to commend themselves to the shareholders, supposing the past were really sifted. The ill-luck of it was truly stupendous; for on the whole he had kept himself financially very clean since he had become a member; having all through a jealous eye to his political success.

* * * * *

As to the political situation, nothing could be at once more promising or more anxious!

An important meeting of the whole Labour group had been fixed for August 10, by which time it was expected that a great measure concerning Labour would be returned from the House of Lords with highly disputable amendments. The last six weeks of the session would be in many ways more critical for Labour than its earlier months had been; and it would be proposed by Bennett, at the meeting on the 10th, to appoint a general chairman of the party, in view of a campaign which would fill the remainder of the session and strenuously occupy the recess.

That Bennett would propose the name of the member for West Brookshire was perfectly well known to Wharton and his friends. That the nomination would meet with the warmest hostility from Wilkins and a small group of followers was also accurately forecast.

To this day, then, Wharton looked forward as to the crisis of his parliamentary fortunes. All his chances, financial or social, must now be calculated with reference to it. Every power, whether of combat or finesse, that he commanded must be brought to bear upon the issue.

What was, however, most remarkable in the man and the situation at the moment was that, through all these gathering necessities, he was by no means continuously anxious or troubled in his mind. During these days of July he gave himself, indeed, whenever he could, to a fatalist oblivion of the annoyances of life, coupled with a passionate pursuit of all those interests where his chances were still good and the omens still with him.

Especially--during the intervals of ambition, intrigue, journalism, and unsuccessful attempts to raise money--had he meditated the beauty of Marcella Boyce and the chances and difficulties of his relation to her. As he saw her less, he thought of her more, instinctively looking to her for the pleasure and distraction that life was temporarily denying him elsewhere.

At the same time, curiously enough, the stress of his financial position was reflected even in what, to himself, at any rate, he was boldly beginning to call his "passion" for her. It had come to his knowledge that Mr. Boyce had during the past year succeeded beyond all expectation in clearing the Mellor estate. He had made skilful use of a railway lately opened on the edge of his property; had sold building land in the neighbourhood of a small country town on the line, within a convenient distance of London; had consolidated and improved several of his farms and relet them at higher rents; was, in fact, according to Wharton's local informant, in a fair way to be some day, if he lived, quite as prosperous as his grandfather, in spite of old scandals and invalidism. Wharton knew, or thought he knew, that he would not live, and that Marcella would be his heiress. The prospect was not perhaps brilliant, but it was something; it affected the outlook.

Although, however, this consideration counted, it was, to do him justice, Marcella, the creature herself, that he desired. But for her presence in his life he would probably have gone heiress-hunting with the least possible delay. As it was, his growing determination to win her, together with his advocacy of the Damesley workers--amply sufficed, during the days that followed his evening talk with Lady Selina, to maintain his own illusions about himself and so to keep up the zest of life.

Yes!--to master and breathe passion into Marcella Boyce, might safely be reckoned on, he thought, to hurry a man's blood. And after it had gone so far between them--after he had satisfied himself that her fancy, her temper, her heart, were all more or less occupied with him--was he to see her tamely recovered by Aldous Raeburn--by the man whose advancing parliamentary position was now adding fresh offence to the old grievance and dislike? No! not without a dash--a throw for it!

For a while, after Lady Selina's confidences, jealous annoyance, together with a certain reckless state of nerves, turned him almost into the pining lover. For he could not see Marcella. She came no more to Mrs. Lane; and the house in James Street was not open to him. He perfectly understood that the Winterbournes did not want to know him.

At last Mrs. Lane, a shrewd little woman with a half contemptuous liking for Wharton, let him know--on the strength of a chance meeting with Lady Ermyntrude--that the Winterbournes would be at the Masterton party on the 26th. They had persuaded Miss Boyce to stay for it, and she would go back to her work the Monday after. Wharton carelessly replied that he did not know whether he would be able to put in an appearance at the Mastertons'. He might be going out of town.

Mrs. Lane looked at him and said, "Oh, really!" with a little laugh.

* * * * *

Lady Masterton was the wife of the Colonial Secretary, and her grand mansion in Grosvenor Square was the principal rival to Alresford House in the hospitalities of the party. Her reception on July 25 was to be the last considerable event of a protracted but now dying season. Marcella, detained in James Street day after day against her will by the weakness of the injured arm and the counsels of her doctor, had at last extracted permission to go back to work on the 27th; and to please Betty Macdonald she had promised to go with the Winterbournes to the Masterton party on the Saturday. Betty's devotion, shyly as she had opened her proud heart to it, had begun to mean a good deal to her. There was balm in it for many a wounded feeling; and, besides, there was the constant, half eager, half painful interest of watching Betty's free and childish ways with Aldous Raeburn, and of speculating upon what would ultimately come out of them.

So, when Betty first demanded to know what she was going to wear, and then pouted over the dress shown her, Marcella submitted humbly to being "freshened up" at the hands of Lady Ermyntrude's maid, bought what Betty told her, and stood still while Betty, who had a genius for such things, chattered, and draped, and suggested.

"I wouldn't make you fashionable for the world!" cried Betty, with a mouthful of pins, laying down masterly folds of lace and chiffon the while over the white satin with which Marcella had provided her. "What was it Worth said to me the other day?--Ce qu'on porte, Mademoiselle? O pas grand'chose!--presque pas de corsage, et pas du tout de manches!'--No, that kind of thing wouldn't suit you. But distinguished you shall be, if I sit up all night to think it out!"

In the end Betty was satisfied, and could hardly be prevented from hugging Marcella there and then, out of sheer delight in her own handiwork, when at last the party emerged from the cloak-room into the Mastertons' crowded hall. Marcella too felt pleasure in the reflections of herself as they passed up the lavishly bemirrored staircase. The chatter about dress in which she had been living for some days had amused and distracted her; for there were great feminine potentialities in her; though for eighteen months she had scarcely given what she wore a thought, and in her pre-nursing days had been wont to waver between a kind of proud neglect, which implied the secret consciousness of beauty, and an occasional passionate desire to look well. So that she played her part to-night very fairly; pinched Betty's arm to silence the elf's tongue; and held herself up as she was told, that Betty's handiwork might look its best. But inwardly the girl's mood was very tired and flat. She was pining for her work; pining even for Minta Hurd's peevish look, and the children to whom she was so easily an earthly providence.

In spite of the gradual emptying of London, Lady Masterton's rooms were very full. Marcella found acquaintances. Many of the people whom she had met at Mrs. Lane's, the two Cabinet Ministers of the House of Commons dinner, Mr. Lane himself--all were glad or eager to recall themselves to her as she stood by Lady Winterbourne, or made her way half absently through the press. She talked, without shyness--she had never been shy, and was perhaps nearer now to knowing what it might mean than she had been as a schoolgirl--but without heart; her black eye wandering meanwhile, as though in quest. There was a gay sprinkling of uniforms in the crowd, for the Speaker was holding a levée, and as it grew late his guests began to set towards Lady Masterton. Betty, who had been turning up her nose at the men she had so far smiled upon, all of whom she declared were either bald or seventy, was a little propitiated by the uniforms; otherwise, she pronounced the party very dull.

"Well, upon my word!" she cried suddenly, in a tone that made Marcella turn upon her. The child was looking very red and very upright--was using her fan with great vehemence, and Frank Leven was humbly holding out his hand to her.

"I don't like being startled," said Betty, pettishly. "Yes, you did startle me--you did--you did! And then you begin to contradict before I've said a word! I'm sure you've been contradicting all the way upstairs--and why don't you say 'How do you do?' to Miss Boyce?"

Frank, looking very happy, but very nervous, paid his respects rather bashfully to Marcella--she laughed to see how Betty's presence subdued him--and then gave himself up wholly to Betty's tender mercies.

Marcella observed them with an eager interest she could not wholly explain to herself. It was clear that all thought of anything or anybody else had vanished for Frank Leven at the sight of Betty. Marcella guessed, indeed knew, that they had not met for some little time; and she was touched by the agitation and happiness on the boy's handsome face. But Betty? what was the secret of her kittenish, teasing ways--or was there any secret? She held her little head very high and chattered very fast--but it was not the same chatter that she gave to Marcella, nor, so far as Marcella could judge, to Aldous Raeburn. New elements of character came out in it. It was self-confident, wilful, imperious. Frank was never allowed to have an opinion; was laughed at before his words were out of his mouth; was generally heckled, played with, and shaken in a way which seemed alternately to enrage and enchant him. In the case of most girls, such a manner would have meant encouragement; but, as it was Betty, no one could be sure. The little thing was a great puzzle to Marcella, who had found unexpected reserves in her. She might talk of her love affairs to Aldous Raeburn; she had done nothing of the sort with her new friend. And in such matters Marcella herself was far more reserved than most modern women.

"Betty!" cried Lady Winterbourne, "I am going on into the next room."

Then in a lower tone she said helplessly to Marcella:

"Do make her come on!"

Marcella perceived that her old friend was in a fidget. Stooping her tall head, she said with a smile:

"But look how she is amusing herself!"

"My dear!--that's just it! If you only knew how her mother--tiresome woman--has talked to me! And the young man has behaved so beautifully till now--has given neither Ermyntrude nor me any trouble."

Was that why Betty was leading him such a life? Marcella wondered,--then suddenly--was seized with a sick distaste for the whole scene--for Betty's love affairs--for her own interest in them--for her own self and personality above all. Her great black eyes gazed straight before them, unseeing, over the crowd, the diamonds, the lights; her whole being gave itself to a quick, blind wrestle with some vague overmastering pain, some despair of life and joy to which she could give no name.

She was roused by Betty's voice:

"Mr. Raeburn! will you tell me who people are? Mr. Leven's no more use than my fan. Just imagine--I asked him who that lady in the tiara is--and he vows he doesn't know! Why, it just seems that when you go to Oxford, you leave the wits you had before, behind! And then--of course"--Betty affected a delicate hesitation--"there's the difficulty of being quite sure that you'll ever get any new ones!--But there--look!--I'm in despair!--she's vanished--and I shall never know!"

"One moment!" said Raeburn, smiling, "and I will take you in pursuit. She has only gone into the tea-room."

His hand touched Marcella's.

"Just a little better," he said, with a sudden change of look, in answer to Lady Winterbourne's question. "The account to-night is certainly brighter. They begged me not to come, or I should have been off some days ago. And next week, I am thankful to say, they will be home."

Why should she be standing there, so inhumanly still and silent?--Marcella asked herself. Why not take courage again--join in--talk--show sympathy? But the words died on her lips. After to-night--thank heaven!--she need hardly see him again.

He asked after herself as usual. Then, just as he was turning away with Betty, he came back to her, unexpectedly.

"I should like to tell you about Hallin," he said gently. "His sister writes to me that she is happier about him, and that she hopes to be able to keep him away another fortnight. They are at Keswick."

For an instant there was pleasure in the implication of common ground, a common interest--here if no-where else. Then the pleasure was lost in the smart of her own strange lack of self-government as she made a rather stupid and awkward reply.

Raeburn's eyes rested on her for a moment. There was in them a flash of involuntary expression, which she did not notice--for she had turned away--which no one saw--except Betty. Then the child followed him to the tea-room, a little pale and pensive.

Marcella looked after them.

In the midst of the uproar about her, the babel of talk fighting against the Hungarian band, which was playing its wildest and loudest in the tea-room, she was overcome by a sudden rush of memory. Her eyes were tracing the passage of those two figures through the crowd; the man in his black court suit, stooping his refined and grizzled head to the girl beside him, or turning every now and then to greet an acquaintance, with the manner--cordial and pleasant, yet never quite gay even when he smiled--that she, Marcella, had begun to notice of late as a new thing; the girl lifting her small face to him, the gold of her hair showing against his velvet sleeve. But the inward sense was busy with a number of other impressions, past, and, as it now seemed, incredible.

The little scene when Aldous had given her the pearls, returned so long ago--why! she could see the fire blazing in the Stone Parlour, feel his arm about her!--the drive home after the Gairsley meeting--that poignant moment in his sitting-room the night of the ball--his face, his anxious, tender face, as she came down the wide stairs of the Court towards him on that terrible evening when she pleaded with him and his grandfather in vain:--had these things, incidents, relations, been ever a real part of the living world? Impossible! Why, there he was--not ten yards from her--and yet more irrevocably separate from her than if the Sahara stretched between them. The note of cold distance in his courteous manner put her further from him than the merest stranger.

Marcella felt a sudden terror rush through her as she blindly followed Lady Winterbourne; her limbs trembled under her; she took advantage of a conversation between her companion and the master of the house to sink down for a moment on a settee, where she felt out of sight and notice.

What was this intolerable sense of loss and folly, this smarting emptiness, this rage with herself and her life? She only knew that whereas the touch, the eye of Aldous Raeburn had neither compelled nor thrilled her, so long as she possessed his whole heart and life--now--that she had no right to either look or caress; now that he had ceased even to regard her as a friend, and was already perhaps making up that loyal and serious mind of his to ask from another woman the happiness she had denied him; now, when it was absurdly too late, she could--

Could what? Passionate, wilful creature that she was!--with that breath of something wild and incalculable surging through the inmost places of the soul, she went through a moment of suffering as she sat pale and erect in her corner--brushed against by silks and satins, chattered across by this person and that--such as seemed to bruise all the remaining joy and ease out of life.

But only a moment! Flesh and blood rebelled. She sprang up from her seat; told herself that she was mad or ill; caught sight of Mr. Lane coming towards them, and did her best by smile and greeting to attract him to her.

"You look very white, my dear Miss Boyce," said that cheerful and fatherly person. "Is it that tiresome arm still? Now, don't please go and be a heroine any more!"

Chapter XIII

Meanwhile, in the tea-room, Betty was daintily sipping her claret-cup, while Aldous stood by her.

"No," said Betty, calmly, looking straight at the lady in the tiara who was standing by the buffet, "she's not beautiful, and I've torn my dress running after her. There's only one beautiful person here to-night!"

Aldous found her a seat, and took one himself beside her, in a corner out of the press. But he did not answer her remark.

"Don't you think so, Mr. Aldous?" said Betty, persisting, but with a little flutter of the pulse.

"You mean Miss Boyce?" he said quietly, as he turned to her.

"Of course!" cried Betty, with a sparkle in her charming eyes; "what is it in her face? It excites me to be near her. One feels that she will just have lived twice as much as the rest of us by the time she comes to the end. You don't mind my talking of her, Mr. Aldous?"

There was an instant's silence on his part. Then he said in a constrained voice, looking away from his companion, "I don't mind it, but I am not going to pretend to you that I find it easy to talk of her."

"It would be a shame of you to pretend anything," said Betty, fervently, "after all I've told you! I confessed all my scrapes to you, turned out all my rubbish bag of a heart--well, nearly all"--she checked herself with a sudden flush--"And you've been as kind to me as any big brother could be. But you're dreadfully lofty, Mr. Aldous! You keep yourself to yourself. I don't think it's fair!"

Aldous laughed.

"My dear Miss Betty, haven't you found out by now that I am a good listener and a bad talker? I don't talk of myself or"--he hesitated--"the things that have mattered most to me--because, in the first place, it doesn't come easy to me--and, in the next, I can't, you see, discuss my own concerns without discussing other people's."

"Oh, good gracious!" said Betty, "what you must have been thinking about me! I declare I'll never tell you anything again!"--and, beating her tiny foot upon the ground, she sat, scarlet, looking down at it.

Aldous made all the smiling excuses he could muster. He had found Betty a most beguiling and attaching little companion, both at the Court in the Easter recess, and during the Italian journey. Her total lack of reserve, or what appeared so, had been first an amazement to him, and then a positive pleasure and entertainment. To make a friend of him--difficult and scrupulous as he was, and now more than ever--a woman must be at the cost of most of the advances. But, after the first evening with him, Betty had made them in profusion, without the smallest demur, though perfectly well aware of her mother's ambitions. There was a tie of cousinship between them, and a considerable difference of age. Betty had decided at once that a mother was a dear old goose, and that great friends she and Aldous Raeburn should be--and, in a sense, great friends they were.

Aldous was still propitiating her, when Lady Winterbourne came into the tea-room, followed by Marcella. The elder lady threw a hurried and not very happy glance at the pair in the corner. Marcella appeared to be in animated talk with a young journalist whom Raeburn knew, and did not look their way.

"Just one thing!" said Betty, bending forward and speaking eagerly in Aldous's ear. "It was all a mistake--wasn't it? Now I know her I feel sure it was. You don't--you don't--really think badly of her?"

Aldous heard her unwillingly. He was looking away from her towards the buffet, when she saw a change in the eyes--a tightening of the lip--a something keen and hostile in the whole face.

"Perhaps Miss Boyce will be less of a riddle to all of us before long!" he said hastily, as though the words escaped him. "Shall we get out of this very uncomfortable corner?"

Betty looked where he had looked, and saw a young man greeting Marcella with a manner so emphatic and intimate, that the journalist had instantly moved out of his way. The young man had a noticeable pile of fair curls above a very white and rounded forehead.

"Who is that talking to Miss Boyce?" she asked of Aldous; "I have seen him, but I can't remember the name."

"That is Mr. Wharton, the member for one of our divisions," said Aldous, as he rose from his chair.

Betty gave a little start, and her brow puckered into a frown. As she too rose, she said resentfully to Aldous:

"Well, you have snubbed me!"

As usual, he could not find the effective or clever thing to say.

"I did not mean to," he replied simply; but Betty, glancing at him, saw something in his face which gripped her heart. A lump rose in her throat.

"Do let's go and find Ermyntrude!" she said.

* * * * *

But Wharton had barely begun his talk with Marcella when a gentleman, on his way to the buffet with a cup to set down, touched him on the arm. Wharton turned in some astonishment and annoyance. He saw a youngish, good-looking man, well known to him as already one of the most important solicitors in London, largely trusted by many rich or eminent persons.

"May I have a word with you presently?" said Mr. Pearson, in a pleasant undertone. "I have something of interest to say to you, and it occurred to me that I might meet you to-night. Excuse my interrupting you."

He glanced with admiration at Marcella, who had turned away.

Wharton had a momentary qualm. Then it struck him that Mr. Pearson's manner was decidedly friendly.

"In a moment," he said. "We might find a corner, I think, in that further room."

He made a motion of the head towards a little boudoir which lay beyond the tea-room.

Mr. Pearson nodded and passed on.

Wharton returned to Marcella, who had fallen back on Frank Leven. At the approach of the member for West Brookshire, Lady Winterbourne and her daughter had moved severely away to the further end of the buffet.

"A tiresome man wants me on business for a moment," he said; then he dropped his voice a little; "but I have been looking forward to this evening, this chance, for days--shall I find you here again in five minutes?"

Marcella, who had flushed brightly, said that would depend on the time and Lady Winterbourne. He hurried away with a little gesture of despair. Frank followed him with a sarcastic eye.

"Any one would think he was prime minister already! I never met him yet anywhere that he hadn't some business on hand. Why does he behave as though he had the world on his shoulders? Your real swells always seem to have nothing to do."

"Do you know so many busy people?" Marcella asked him sweetly.

"Oh, you shan't put me down, Miss Boyce!" said the boy, sulkily thrusting his hands into his pockets. "I am going to work like blazes this winter, if only my dons will let a fellow alone. I say, isn't she ripping to-night--Betty?"

And, pulling his moustache in helpless jealousy and annoyance, he stared at the Winterbourne group across the room, which had been now joined by Aldous Raeburn and Betty, standing side by side.

"What do you want me to say?" said Marcella, with a little cold laugh. "I shall make you worse if I praise her. Please put my cup down."

At the same moment she saw Wharton coming back to her--Mr. Pearson behind him, smiling, and gently twirling the seals of his watch-chain. She was instantly struck by Wharton's look of excitement, and by the manner in which--with a momentary glance aside at the Winterbourne party--he approached her.

"There is such a charming little room in there," he said, stooping his head to her, "and so cool after this heat. Won't you try it?"

The energy of his bright eye took possession of her. He led the way; she followed. Her dress almost brushed Aldous Raeburn as she passed.

He took her into a tiny room. There was no one else there, and he found a seat for her by an open window, where they were almost hidden from view by a stand of flowers.

As he sat down again by her, she saw that a decisive moment had come, and blanched almost to the colour of her dress. Oh! what to do! Her heart cried out vaguely to some power beyond itself for guidance, then gave itself up again to the wayward thirst for happiness.

He took her hand strongly in both his own, and bending towards her as she sat bowered among the scent and colours of the flowers, he made her a passionate declaration. From the first moment that he had seen her under the Chiltern beeches, so he vowed, he had felt in her the supreme, incomparable attraction which binds a man to one woman, and one only. His six weeks under her father's roof had produced in him feelings which he knew to be wrong, without thereby finding in himself any power to check them. They had betrayed him into a mad moment, which he had regretted bitterly because it had given her pain. Otherwise--his voice dropped and shook, his hand pressed hers--"I lived for months on the memory of that one instant." But he had respected her suffering, her struggle, her need for rest of mind and body. For her sake he had gone away into silence; he had put a force upon himself which had alone enabled him to get through his parliamentary work.

Then, with his first sight of her in that little homely room and dress--so changed, but so lovely!--everything--admiration, passion--had revived with double strength. Since that meeting he must have often puzzled her, as he had puzzled himself. His life had been a series of perplexities. He was not his own master; he was the servant of a cause, in which--however foolishly a mocking habit might have led him at times to be-little his own enthusiasms and hers--his life and honour were engaged; and this cause and his part in it had been for long hampered, and all his clearness of vision and judgment dimmed by the pressure of a number of difficulties and worries he could not have discussed with her--worries practical and financial, connected with the Clarion, with the experiments he had been carrying out on his estate, and with other troublesome matters. He had felt a thousand times that his fortunes, political or private, were too doubtful and perilous to allow him to ask any woman to share them.--Then, again, he had seen her--and his resolution, his scruple, had melted in his breast!

Well! there were still troubles in front! But he was no longer cowed by them. In spite of them, he dared now to throw himself at her feet, to ask her to come and share a life of combat and of labour, to bring her beauty and her mind to the joint conduct of a great enterprise. To her a man might show his effort and his toil,--from her he might claim a sympathy it would be vain to ask of any smaller woman.

Then suddenly he broke down. Speech seemed to fail him. Only his eyes--more intense and piercing under their straight brows than she had ever known them--beseeched her--his hand sought hers.

She meanwhile sat in a trance of agitation, mistress neither of reason nor of feeling. She felt his spell, as she had always done. The woman in her thrilled at last to the mere name and neighbourhood of love. The heart in her cried out that pain and loss could only be deadened so--the past could only be silenced by filling the present with movement and warm life.

Yet what tremors of conscience--what radical distrust of herself and him! And the first articulate words she found to say to him were very much what she had said to Aldous so long ago--only filled with a bitterer and more realised content.

"After all, what do we know of each other! You don't know me--not as I am. And I feel--"

"Doubts?" he said, smiling. "Do you imagine that that seems anything but natural to me? I can have none; but you--After all, we are not quite boy and girl, you and I; we have lived, both of us! But ask yourself--has not destiny brought us together? Think of it all!"

Their eyes met again. Hers sank under the penetration, the flame of his. Yet, throughout, he was conscious of the doorway to his right, of the figures incessantly moving across it. His own eloquence had convinced and moved himself abundantly. Yet, as he saw her yielding, he was filled with the strangest mixture of passion--and a sort of disillusion--almost contempt! If she had turned from him with the dignity worthy of that head and brow, it flashed across him that he could have tasted more of the abandonment of love--have explored his own emotion more perfectly.

Still, the situation was poignant enough--in one sense complete. Was Raeburn still there--in that next room?

"My answer?" he said to her, pressing her hand as they sat in the shelter of the flowers. For he was aware of the practical facts--the hour, the place--if she was not.

She roused herself.

"I can't," she said, making a movement to rise, which his strong grasp, however, prevented. "I can't answer you to-night, Mr. Wharton. I should have much to think over--so much! It might all look quite different to me. You must give me time."

"To-morrow?" he said quietly.

"No!" she said impetuously, "not to-morrow; I go back to my work, and I must have quiet and time. In a fortnight--not before. I will write."

"Oh, impossible!" he said, with a little frown.

And still holding her, he drew her towards him. His gaze ran over the face, the warm whiteness under the lace of the dress, the beautiful arms. She shrank from it--feeling a sudden movement of dislike and fear; but before she could disengage herself he had pressed his lips on the arm nearest to him.

"I gave you no leave!" she said passionately, under her breath, as he let her go.

He met her flashing look with tender humbleness.

"Marcella!"

The word was just breathed into the air. She wavered--yet a chill had passed over her. She could not recover the moment of magic.

"Not to-morrow," she repeated steadily, though dreading lest she should burst into tears, "and not till I see clearly--till I can--" She caught her breath. "Now I am going back to Lady Winterbourne."

Chapter XIV

For some hours after he reached his own room, Wharton sat in front of his open window, sunk in the swift rushing of thought, as a bramble sways in a river. The July night first paled, then flushed into morning; the sun rose above the empty street and the light mists enwrapping the great city, before he threw himself on his bed, exhausted enough at last to fall into a restless sleep.

The speculation of those quick-pulsed hours was in the end about equally divided between Marcella and the phrases and turns of his interview with Mr. Pearson. It was the sudden leap of troubled excitement stirred in him by that interview--heightened by the sight of Raeburn--that had driven him past recall by the most natural of transitions, into his declaration to Marcella.

But he had no sooner reached his room than, at first with iron will, he put the thought of Marcella, of the scene which had just passed, away from him. His pulses were still quivering. No matter! It was the brain he had need of. He set it coolly and keenly to work.

Mr. Pearson? Well!--Mr. Pearson had offered him a bribe; there could be no question as to that. His clear sense never blinked the matter for an instant. Nor had he any illusions as to his own behaviour. Even now he had no further right to the sleep of the honest man.

Let him realise, however, what had happened. He had gone to Lady Masterton's party, in the temper of a man who knows that ruin is upon him, and determined, like the French criminal, to exact his cigar and eau de vie before the knife falls. Never had things looked so desperate; never had all resource seemed to him so completely exhausted. Bankruptcy must come in the course of a few weeks; his entailed property would pass into the hands of a receiver; and whatever recovery might be ultimately possible, by the end of August he would be, for the moment, socially and politically undone.

There could be no question of his proposing seriously to Marcella Boyce. Nevertheless, he had gone to Lady Masterton's on purpose to meet her; and his manner on seeing her had asserted precisely the same intimate claim upon her, which, during the past six weeks, had alternately attracted and repelled her.

Then Mr. Pearson had interrupted.

Wharton, shutting his eyes, could see the great man lean against the window-frame close to the spot where, a quarter of an hour later, Marcella had sat among the flowers--the dapper figure, the long, fair moustaches, the hand playing with the eye-glass.

"I have been asked--er--er--" What a conceited manner the fellow had!--"to get some conversation with you, Mr. Wharton, on the subject of the Damesley strike. You give me leave?"

Whereupon, in less than ten minutes, the speaker had executed an important commission, and, in offering Wharton a bribe of the most bare-faced kind, had also found time for supplying him with a number of the most delicate and sufficient excuses for taking it.

The masters, in fact, sent an embassy. They fully admitted the power of the Clarion and its owner. No doubt, it would not be possible for the paper to keep up its strike fund indefinitely; there were perhaps already signs of slackening. Still it had been maintained for a considerable time; and so long as it was reckoned on, in spite of the wide-spread misery and suffering now prevailing, the men would probably hold out.

In these circumstances, the principal employers concerned had thought it best to approach so formidable an opponent and to put before him information which might possibly modify his action. They had authorised Mr. Pearson to give him a full account of what was proposed in the way of re-organisation of the trade, including the probable advantages which the work-people themselves would be likely to reap from it in the future.

Mr. Pearson ran in a few sentences through the points of the scheme. Wharton stood about a yard away from him, his hands in his pockets, a little pale and frowning--looking intently at the speaker.

Then Mr. Pearson paused and cleared his throat.

Well!--that was the scheme. His principals believed that, when both it and the employers' determination to transfer their business to the Continent rather than be beaten by the men were made fully known to the owner of the Clarion, it must affect his point of view. Mr. Pearson was empowered to give him any details he might desire. Meanwhile--so confident were they in the reasonableness of the case that they even suggested that the owner of the Clarion himself should take part in the new Syndicate. On condition of his future co-operation--it being understood that the masters took their stand irrevocably on the award--the men at present responsible for the formation of the Syndicate proposed to allot Mr. Wharton ten Founder's Shares in the new undertaking.

Wharton, sitting alone, recalling these things, was conscious again of that start in every limb, that sudden rush of blood to the face, as though a lash had struck him.

For in a few seconds his mind took in the situation. Only the day before, a city acquaintance had said to him, "If you and your confounded paper were out of the way, and this thing could be placed properly on the market, there would be a boom in it at once. I am told that in twenty-four hours the Founder's Shares would be worth 2,000 l. apiece!"

There was a pause of silence. Then Wharton threw a queer dark look at the solicitor, and was conscious that his pulse was thumping.

"There can be no question I think, Mr. Pearson--between you and me--as to the nature of such a proposal as that!"

"My dear sir," Mr. Pearson had interrupted hastily, "let me, above all, ask you to take time--time enough, at any rate, to turn the matter well over in your mind. The interests of a great many people, besides yourself, are concerned. Don't give me an answer to-night; it is the last thing I desire. I have thrown out my suggestion. Consider it. To-morrow is Sunday. If you are disposed to carry it further, come and see me Monday morning--that's all. I will be at your service at any hour, and I can then give you a much more complete outline of the intentions of the Company. Now I really must go and look for Mrs. Pearson's carriage."

Wharton followed the great man half mechanically across the little room, his mind in a whirl of mingled rage and desire. Then suddenly he stopped his companion:

"Has George Denny anything to do with this proposal, Mr. Pearson?"

Mr. Pearson paused, with a little air of vague cogitation.

"George Denny? Mr. George Denny, the member for Westropp? I have had no dealings whatever with that gentleman in the matter."

Wharton let him pass.

Then as he himself entered the tea-room, he perceived the bending form of Aldous Raeburn chatting to Lady Winterbourne on his right, and that tall whiteness close in front, waiting for him.

His brain cleared in a flash. He was perfectly conscious that a bribe had just been offered him, of the most daring and cynical kind, and that he had received the offer in the tamest way. An insult had been put upon him which had for ever revealed the estimate held of him by certain shrewd people, for ever degraded him in his own eyes.

Nevertheless, he was also conscious that the thing was done. The bribe would be accepted, the risk taken. So far as his money-matters were concerned he was once more a free man. The mind had adjusted itself, reached its decision in a few minutes.

And the first effect of the mingled excitement and self-contempt which the decision brought with it had been to drive him into the scene with Marcella. Instinctively he asked of passion to deliver him quickly from the smart of a new and very disagreeable experience.

* * * * *

Well! why should he not take these men's offer?

He was as much convinced as they that this whole matter of the strike had of late come to a deadlock. So long as the public would give, the workers, passionately certain of the justice of their own cause, and filled with new ambitions after more decent living, would hold out. On the other hand, he perfectly understood that the masters had also in many ways a strong case, that they had been very hard hit by the strike, and that many of them would rather close their works or transfer them bodily to the Continent than give way. Some of the facts Pearson had found time to mention had been certainly new and striking.

At the same time he never disguised from himself for an instant that but for a prospective 20,000 l. the facts concerned would not have affected him in the least. Till to-night it had been to his interest to back the strike, and to harass the employers. Now things were changed; and he took a curious satisfaction in the quick movements of his own intelligence, as his thought rapidly sketched the "curve" the Clarion would have to take, and the arguments by which he would commend it.

As to his shares, they would be convertible of course into immediate cash. Some man of straw would be forthcoming to buy what he would possess in the name of another man of straw. It was not supposed--he took for granted--by the men who had dared to tempt him, that he would risk his whole political reputation and career for anything less than a bird in the hand.

Well! what were the chances of secrecy?

Naturally they stood to lose less by disclosure, a good deal, than he did. And Denny, one of the principal employers, was his personal enemy. He would be likely enough for the present to keep his name out of the affair. But no man of the world could suppose that the transaction would pass without his knowledge. Wharton's own hasty question to Mr. Pearson on the subject seemed to himself now, in cold blood, a remarkably foolish one.

He walked up and down thinking this point out. It was the bitter pill of the whole affair.

In the end, with a sudden recklessness of youth and resource, he resolved to dare it. There would not be much risk. Men of business do not as a rule blazon their own dirty work, and public opinion would be important to the new Syndicate.

Some risk, of course, there would be. Well! his risks, as they stood, were pretty considerable. He chose the lesser--not without something of a struggle, some keen personal smart. He had done a good many mean and questionable things in his time, but never anything as gross as this. The thought of what his relation to a certain group of men--to Denny especially--would be in the future, stung sharply. But it is the part of the man of action to put both scruple and fear behind him on occasion. His career was in question.

Craven? Well, Craven would be a difficulty. He would telegraph to him first thing in the morning before the offices closed, and see him on Monday. For Marcella's sake the man must be managed--somehow.

And--Marcella! How should she ever know, ever suspect! She already disliked the violence with which the paper had supported the strike. He would find no difficulty whatever in justifying all that she or the public would see, to her.

Then insensibly he let his thoughts glide into thinking of the money. Presently he drew a sheet of paper towards him and covered it with calculations as to his liabilities. By George! how well it worked out! By the time he threw it aside, and walked to the window for air, he already felt himself a bonâ-fide supporter of the Syndicate--the promoter in the public interest of a just and well-considered scheme.

Finally, with a little joyous energetic movement which betrayed the inner man, he flung down his cigarette, and turned to write an ardent letter to Marcella, while the morning sun stole into the dusty room.

Difficult? of course! Both now and in the future. It would take him half his time yet--and he could ill afford it--to bring her bound and captive. He recognised in her the southern element, so strangely mated with the moral English temper. Yet he smiled over it. The subtleties of the struggle he foresaw enchanted him.

And she would be mastered! In this heightened state of nerve his man's resolution only rose the more fiercely to the challenge of her resistance.

Nor should she cheat him with long delays. His income would be his own again, and life decently easy. He already felt himself the vain showman of her beauty.

A thought of Lady Selina crossed his mind, producing amusement and compassion--indulgent amusement, such as the young man is apt to feel towards the spinster of thirty-five who pays him attention. A certain sense of re-habilitation, too, which at the moment was particularly welcome. For, no doubt, he might have married her and her fortune had he so chosen. As it was, why didn't she find some needy boy to take pity on her? There were plenty going, and she must have abundance of money. Old Alresford, too, was fast doddering off the stage, and then where would she be--without Alresford House, or Busbridge, or those various other pedestals which had hitherto held her aloft?

* * * * *

Early on Sunday morning Wharton telegraphed to Craven, directing him to "come up at once for consultation." The rest of the day the owner of the Clarion spent pleasantly on the river with Mrs. Lane and a party of ladies, including a young Duchess, who was pretty, literary, and socialistic. At night he went down to the Clarion office, and produced a leader on the position of affairs at Damesley which, to the practised eye, contained one paragraph--but one only--wherein the dawn of a new policy might have been discerned.

Naturally the juxtaposition of events at the moment gave him considerable anxiety. He knew very well that the Damesley bargain could not be kept waiting. The masters were losing heavily every day, and were not likely to let him postpone the execution of his part of the contract for a fortnight or so to suit his own convenience. It was like the sale of an "old master." His influence must be sold now--at the ripe moment--or not at all.

At the same time it was very awkward. In one short fortnight the meeting of the party would be upon him. Surrender on the Damesley question would give great offence to many of the Labour members. It would have to be very carefully managed--very carefully thought out.

By eleven o'clock on Monday he was in Mr. Pearson's office. After the first involuntary smile, concealed by the fair moustaches, and instantly dismissed, with which the eminent lawyer greeted the announcement of his visitor's name, the two augurs carried through their affairs with perfect decorum. Wharton realised, indeed, that he was being firmly handled. Mr. Pearson gave the Clarion a week in which to accomplish its retreat and drop its strike fund. And the fund was to be "checked" as soon as possible.

A little later, when Wharton abruptly demanded a guarantee of secrecy, Mr. Pearson allowed himself his first--visible--smile.

"My dear sir, are such things generally made public property? I can give you no better assurance than you can extract yourself from the circumstances. As to writing--well!--I should advise you very strongly against anything of the sort. A long experience has convinced me that in any delicate negotiation the less that is written the better."

Towards the end Wharton turned upon his companion sharply, and asked:

"How did you discover that I wanted money?"

Mr. Pearson lifted his eyebrows pleasantly.

"Most of the things in this world, Mr. Wharton, that one wants to know, can be found out. Now--I have no wish to hurry you--not in the least, but I may perhaps mention that I have an important appointment directly. Don't you think--we might settle our business?"

Wharton was half-humorously conscious of an inward leap of fury with the necessities which had given this man--to whom he had taken an instantaneous dislike--the power of dealing thus summarily with the member for West Brookshire. However, there was no help for it; he submitted, and twenty minutes afterwards he left Lincoln's Inn carrying documents in the breast-pocket of his coat which, when brought under his bankers' notice, would be worth to him an immediate advance of some eight thousand pounds. The remainder of the purchase-money for his "shares" would be paid over to him as soon as his part of the contract had been carried out.

He did not, however, go to his bank, but straight to the Clarion office, where he had a mid-day appointment with Louis Craven.

At first sight of the tall, narrow-shouldered form and anxious face waiting for him in his private room, Wharton felt a movement of ill-humour.

Craven had the morning's Clarion in his hand.

"This cannot mean"--he said, when they had exchanged a brief salutation--"that the paper is backing out?"

He pointed to the suspicious paragraph in Wharton's leader, his delicate features quivering with an excitement he could ill repress.

"Well, let us sit down and discuss the thing," said Wharton, closing the door, "that's what I wired to you for."

He offered Craven a cigarette, which was refused, took one himself, and the two men sat confronting each other with a writing-table between them. Wharton was disagreeably conscious at times of the stiff papers in his coat-pocket, and was perhaps a little paler than usual. Otherwise he showed no trace of mental disturbance; and Craven, himself jaded and sleepless, was struck with a momentary perception of his companion's boyish good looks--the tumbling curls, that Wharton straightened now and then, the charming blue eyes, the athlete's frame. Any stranger would have taken Craven for the older man; in reality it was the other way.

The conversation lasted nearly an hour. Craven exhausted both argument and entreaty, though when the completeness of the retreat resolved upon had been disclosed to him, the feeling roused in him was so fierce that he could barely maintain his composure. He had been living among scenes of starvation and endurance, which, to his mind, had all the character of martyrdom. These men and women were struggling for two objects--the power to live more humanly, and the free right of combination--to both of which, if need were, he would have given his own life to help them without an instant's hesitation. Behind his blinking manner he saw everything with the idealist's intensity, the reformer's passion. To be fair to an employer was not in his power. To spend his last breath, were it called for, in the attempt to succour the working-man against his capitalist oppressors, would have seemed to him the merest matter of course.

And his mental acuteness was quite equal to his enthusiasm, and far more evident. In his talk with Wharton, he for a long time avoided, as before, out of a certain inner disdain, the smallest touch of sentiment. He pointed out--what, indeed, Wharton well knew--that the next two or three weeks of the strike would be the most critical period in its history; that, if the work-people could only be carried through them, they were almost sure of victory. He gave his own reasons for believing that the employers could ultimately be coerced, he offered proof of yielding among them, proof also that the better men in their ranks were fully alive to and ashamed of the condition of the workers. As to the Syndicate, he saw no objection to it, provided the workers' claims were first admitted. Otherwise it would only prove a more powerful engine of oppression.

Wharton's arguments may perhaps be left to the imagination. He would have liked simply to play the proprietor and the master--to say, "This is my decision, those are my terms--take my work or leave it." But Craven was Miss Boyce's friend; he was also a Venturist. Chafing under both facts, Wharton found that he must state his case.

And he did state it with his usual ability. He laid great stress on "information from a private source which I cannot disregard," to the effect that, if the resistance went on, the trade would be broken up; that several of the largest employers were on the point of making arrangements for Italian factories.

"I know," he said finally, "that but for the Clarion the strike would drop. Well! I have come to the conclusion that the responsibility is too heavy. I shall be doing the men themselves more harm than good. There is the case in a nutshell. We differ--I can't help that. The responsibility is mine."

Craven rose with a quick, nervous movement. The prophet spoke at last.

"You understand," he said, laying a thin hand on the table, "that the condition of the workers in this trade is infamous!--that the award and your action together plunge them back into a state of things which is a shame and a curse to England!"

Wharton made no answer. He, too, had risen, and was putting away some papers in a drawer. A tremor ran through Craven's tall frame; and for an instant, as his eye rested on his companion, the idea of foul play crossed his mind. He cast it out, that he might deal calmly with his own position.

"Of course, you perceive," he said, as he took up his hat, "that I can no longer on these terms remain the Clarion's correspondent. Somebody else must be found to do this business."

"I regret your decision, immensely," said Wharton, with perfect suavity, "but of course I understand it. I trust, however, that you will not leave us altogether. I can give you plenty of work that will suit you. Here, for instance"--he pointed to a pile of Blue Books from the Labour Commission lying on the table--"are a number of reports that want analysing and putting before the public. You could do them in town at your leisure."

Craven struggled with himself. His first instinct was to fling the offer in Wharton's face. Then he thought of his wife; of the tiny new household just started with such small, happy, self-denying shifts; of the woman's inevitable lot, of the hope of a child.

"Thank you," he said, in a husky voice. "I will consider, I will write."

Wharton nodded to him pleasantly, and he went.

The owner of the Clarion drew a long breath.

"Now I think on the whole it would serve my purpose best to sit down and write to her--after that. It would be well that my account should come first."

A few hours later, after an interview with his bankers and a further spell of letter-writing, Wharton descended the steps of his club in a curious restless state. The mortgage on the Clarion had been arranged for, his gambling debts settled, and all his other money matters were successfully in train. Nevertheless, the exhilaration of the morning had passed into misgiving and depression.

Vague presentiments hung about him all day, whether in the House of Commons or elsewhere, and it was not till he found himself on his legs at a crowded meeting at Rotherhithe, violently attacking the Government Bill and the House of Lords, that he recovered that easy confidence in the general favourableness of the universe to Harry Wharton, and Harry Wharton's plans, which lent him so much of his power.

A letter from Marcella--written before she had received either of his--reached him at the House just before he started for his meeting. A touching letter!--yet with a certain resolution in it which disconcerted him.

"Forget, if you will, everything that you said to me last night. It might be--I believe it would be--best for us both. But if you will not--if I must give my answer, then, as I said, I must have time. It is only quite recently that I have realised the enormity of what I did last year. I must run no risks of so wrenching my own life--or another's--a second time. Not to be sure is for me torment. Why perfect simplicity of feeling--which would scorn the very notion of questioning itself--seems to be beyond me, I do not know. That it is so fills me with a sort of shame and bitterness. But I must follow my nature.

"So let me think it out. I believe you know, for one thing, that your 'cause,' your life-work, attracts me strongly. I should not any longer accept all you say, as I did last year. But mere opinion matters infinitely less to me than it did. I can imagine now agreeing with a friend 'in everything except opinion.' All that would matter to me now would be to feel that your heart was wholly in your work, in your public acts, so that I might still admire and love all that I might differ from. But there--for we must be frank with each other--is just my difficulty. Why do you do so many contradictory things? Why do you talk of the poor, of labour, of self-denial, and live whenever you can with the idle rich people, who hate all three in their hearts? You talk their language; you scorn what they scorn, or so it seems; you accept their standards. Oh!--to the really 'consecrate' in heart and thought I could give my life so easily, so slavishly even! There is no one weaker than I in the world. I must have strength to lean upon--and a strength, pure at the core, that I can respect and follow.

"Here in this nursing life of mine, I go in and out among people to the best of whom life is very real and simple--and often, of course, very sad. And I am another being in it from what I was at Lady Winterbourne's. Everything looks differently to me. No, no! you must please wait till the inner voice speaks so that I can hear it plainly--for your sake at least as much as for mine. If you persisted in coming to see me now, I should have to put an end to it all."

"Strange is the modern woman!" thought Wharton to himself, not without sharp pique, as he pondered that letter in the course of his drive home from the meeting. "I talk to her of passion, and she asks me in return why I do things inconsistent with my political opinions! puts me through a moral catechism, in fact! What is the meaning of it all--confound it! --her state of mind and mine? Is the good old ars amandi perishing out of the world? Let some Stendhal come and tell us why!"

But he sat up to answer her, and could not get free from an inward pleading or wrestle with her, which haunted him through all the intervals of these rapid days.

Life while they lasted was indeed a gymnast's contest of breath and endurance. The Clarion made its retreat in Wharton's finest style, and the fact rang through labouring England. The strike-leaders came up from the Midlands; Wharton had to see them. He was hotly attacked in the House privately, and even publicly by certain of his colleagues. Bennett showed concern and annoyance. Meanwhile the Conservative papers talked the usual employers' political economy; and the Liberal papers, whose support of the strike had been throughout perfunctory, and of no particular use to themselves or to other people, took a lead they were glad to get, and went in strongly for the award.

Through it all Wharton showed extraordinary skill. The columns of the Clarion teemed with sympathetic appeals to the strikers, flanked by long statements of "hard fact"--the details of foreign competition and the rest, the plans of the masters--freely supplied him by Mr. Pearson. With Bennett and his colleagues in the House he took a bold line; admitted that he had endangered his popularity both inside Parliament and out of it at a particularly critical moment; and implied, though he did not say, that some men were still capable of doing independent things to their own hurt. Meanwhile he pushed a number of other matters to the front, both in the paper and in his own daily doings. He made at least two important speeches in the provinces, in the course of these days, on the Bill before the House of Lords; he asked questions in Parliament on the subject of the wages paid to Government employés; and he opened an attack on the report of a certain Conservative Commission which had been rousing the particular indignation of a large mass of South London working men.

At the end of ten days the strike was over; the workers, sullen and enraged, had submitted, and the plans of the Syndicate were in all the papers. Wharton, looking round him, realised to his own amazement that his political position had rather gained than suffered. The general impression produced by his action had been on the whole that of a man strong enough to take a line of his own, even at the risk of unpopularity. There was a new tone of respect among his opponents, and, resentful as some of the Labour members were, Wharton did not believe that what he had done would ultimately damage his chances on the 10th at all. He had vindicated his importance, and he held his head high, adopting towards his chances of the leadership a strong and careless tone that served him well.

Meanwhile there were, of course, clever people behind the scenes who looked on and laughed. But they held their tongues, and Wharton, who had carefully avoided the mention of names during the negotiations with Pearson, did his best to forget them. He felt uncomfortable, indeed, when he passed the portly Denny in the House or in the street. Denny had a way of looking at the member for West Brookshire out of the corner of a small, slit-like eye. He did it more than usual during these days, and Wharton had only to say to himself that for all things there is a price--which the gods exact.

Wilkins, since the first disclosure of the Clarion change of policy, had been astonishingly quiet. Wharton had made certain of violent attack from him. On the contrary, Wilkins wore now in the House a subdued and pre-occupied air that escaped notice even with his own party in the general fulness of the public mind. A few caustic north-countryisms on the subject of the Clarion and its master did indeed escape him now and then, and were reported from mouth to mouth; but on the whole he lay very low.

Still, whether in elation or anxiety, Wharton seemed to himself throughout the whole period to be a fighter, straining every muscle, his back to the wall and his hand against every man. There at the end of the fortnight stood the three goal-posts that must be passed, in victory or defeat; the meeting that would for the present decide his parliamentary prospects, his interview with Marcella, and--the confounded annual meeting of the "People's Banking Company," with all its threatened annoyances.

He became, indeed, more and more occupied with this latter business as the days went on. But he could see no way of evading it. He would have to fight it; luckily, now, he had the money.

The annual meeting took place two days before that fixed for the committee of the Labour party. Wharton was not present at it, and in spite of ample warning he gave way to certain lively movements of disgust and depression when at his club he first got hold of the evening papers containing the reports. His name, of course, figured amply in the denunciations heaped upon the directors of all dates; the sums which he with others were supposed to have made out of the first dealings with the shares on the Stock Exchange were freely mentioned; and the shareholders as a body had shown themselves most uncomfortably violent. He at once wrote off a letter to the papers disclaiming all responsibility for the worst irregularities which had occurred, and courting full enquiry--a letter which, as usual, both convinced and affected himself.

Then he went, restless and fuming, down to the House. Bennett passed him in the lobby with an uneasy and averted eye. Whereupon Wharton seized upon him, carried him into the Library, and talked to him, till Bennett, who, in spite of his extraordinary shrewdness and judgment in certain departments, was a babe in matters of company finance, wore a somewhat cheered countenance.

They came out into the lobby together, Wharton holding his head very high.

"I shall deal with the whole thing in my speech on Thursday!" he said aloud, as they parted.

Bennett gave him a friendly nod and smile.

There was in this little man, with his considerable brain and his poet's heart, something of the "imperishable child." Like a wholesome child, he did not easily "think evil"; his temper towards all men--even the owners of "way-leaves" and mining royalties--was optimist. He had the most naïve admiration for Wharton's ability, and for the academic attainments he himself secretly pined for; and to the young complex personality itself he had taken from the beginning an unaccountable liking. The bond between the two, though incongruous and recent, was real; Wharton was as glad of Bennett's farewell kindness as Bennett had been of the younger man's explanations.

So that during that day and the next, Bennett went about contradicting, championing, explaining; while Wharton, laden with parliamentary business, vivid, unabashed, and resourceful, let it be known to all whom it concerned that in his solicitor's opinion he had a triumphant answer to all charges; and that meanwhile no one could wonder at the soreness of those poor devils of shareholders.

The hours passed on. Wednesday was mainly spent by Wharton in a series of conferences and intrigues either at the House or at his club; when he drove home exhausted at night he believed that all was arranged--the train irrevocably laid, and his nomination to the chairmanship of the party certain.

Wilkins and six or seven others would probably prove irreconcilable; but the vehemence and rancour shown by the great Nehemiah during the summer in the pursuit of his anti-Wharton campaign had to some extent defeated themselves. A personal grudge in the hands of a man of his type is not a formidable weapon. Wharton would have felt perfectly easy on the subject but for some odd bits of manner on Wilkins's part during the last forty-eight hours--whenever, in fact, the two men had run across each other in the House--marked by a sort of new and insolent good humour, that puzzled him. But there is a bravado of defeat. Yes!--he thought Wilkins was disposed of.

From his present point of ease--debts paid, banker propitiated, income assured--it amazed him to look back on his condition of a fortnight before. Had the Prince of Darkness himself offered such a bargain it must have been accepted. After all his luck had held! Once get through this odious company business--as to which, with a pleasing consciousness of turning the tables, he had peremptorily instructed Mr. Pearson himself--and the barque of his fortunes was assured.

Then, with a quick turn of the mind, he threw the burden of affairs from him. His very hopefulness and satisfaction had softened his mood. There stole upon him the murmurs and voices of another world of thought--a world well known to his versatility by report, though he had as a rule small inclination to dwell therein. But he was touched and shaken to-night by his own achievement. The heavenly powers had been unexpectedly kind to him, and he was half moved to offer them something in return.

"Do as you are done by"--that was an ethic he understood. And in moments of feeling he was as ready to apply it to great Zeus himself as to his friends or enemies in the House of Commons. He had done this doubtful thing--but why should it ever be necessary for him to do another? Vague philosophic yearnings after virtue, moderation, patriotism, crossed his mind. The Pagan ideal sometimes smote and fired him, the Christian never. He could still read his Plato and his Cicero, whereas gulfs of unfathomable distaste rolled between him and the New Testament. Perhaps the author of all authors for whom he had most relish was Montaigne. He would have taken him down to-night had there been nothing more kindling to think of.

Marcella!--ah! Marcella! He gave himself to the thought of her with a new and delightful tenderness which had in it elements of compunction. After those disagreeable paragraphs in the evening papers, he had instantly written to her. "Every public man"--he had said to her, finding instinctively the note of dignity that would appeal to her--"is liable at some period of his career to charges of this sort. They are at once exaggerated and blackened, because he is a public man. To you I owe perfect frankness, and you shall have it. Meanwhile I do not ask--I know--that you will be just to me, and put the matter out of your thoughts till I can discuss it with you. Two days more till I see your face! The time is long!"

To this there had been no answer. Her last letter indeed had rung sadly and coldly. No doubt Louis Craven had something to do with it. It would have alarmed him could he simply have found the time to think about it. Yet she was ready to see him on the 11th; and his confidence in his own powers of managing fate was tougher than ever. What pleasant lies he had told her at Lady Masterton's! Well! What passion ever yet but had its subterfuges? One more wrestle, and he would have tamed her to his wish, wild falcon that she was. Then--pleasure and brave living! And she also should have her way. She should breathe into him the language of those great illusions he had found it of late so hard to feign with her; and they two would walk and rule a yielding world together. Action, passion, affairs--life explored and exploited--and at last--"que la mort me treuve plantant mes choulx--mais nonchalant d'elle!--et encore plus de mon jardin imparfaict!"

He declaimed the words of the great Frenchman with something of the same temper in which the devout man would have made an act of faith. Then, with a long breath and a curious emotion, he went to try and sleep himself into the new day.

Chapter XV

The following afternoon about six o'clock Marcella came in from her second round. After a very busy week, work happened to be slack; and she had been attending one or two cases in and near Brown's Buildings rather because they were near than because they seriously wanted her. She looked to see whether there was any letter or telegram from the office which would have obliged her to go out again. Nothing was to be seen; and she put down her bag and cloak, childishly glad of the extra hour of rest.

She was, indeed, pale and worn. The moral struggle which had filled the past fortnight from end to end had deepened all the grooves and strained the forces of life; and the path, though glimmering, was not wholly plain.

A letter lay unfinished in her drawer--if she sent it that night, there would be little necessity or inducement for Wharton to climb those stairs on the morrow. Yet, if he held her to it, she must see him.

As the sunset and the dusk crept on she still sat silent and alone, sunk in a depression which showed itself in every line of the drooping form. She was degraded in her own eyes. The nature of the impulses which had led her to give Wharton the hold upon her she had given him had become plain to her. What lay between them, and the worst impulses that poison the lives of women, but differences of degree, of expression? After those wild hours of sensuous revolt, a kind of moral terror was upon her.

What had worked in her? What was at the root of this vehemence of moral reaction, this haunting fear of losing for ever the best in life--self-respect, the comradeship of the good, communion with things noble and unstained--which had conquered at last the mere woman, the weakness of vanity and of sex? She hardly knew. Only there was in her a sort of vague thankfulness for her daily work. It did not seem to be possible to see one's own life solely under the aspects of selfish desire while hands and mind were busy with the piteous realities of sickness and of death. From every act of service--from every contact with the patience and simplicity of the poor--something had spoken to her, that divine ineffable something for ever "set in the world," like beauty, like charm, for the winning of men to itself. "Follow truth!" it said to her in faint mysterious breathings--"the truth of your own heart. The sorrow to which it will lead you is the only joy that remains to you."

Suddenly she looked round her little room with a rush of tenderness. The windows were open to the evening and the shouts of children playing in the courtyard came floating up. A bowl of Mellor roses scented the air; the tray for her simple meal stood ready, and beside it a volume of "The Divine Comedy," one of her mother's very rare gifts to her, in her motherless youth--for of late she had turned thirstily to poetry. There was a great peace and plainness about it all; and, besides, touches of beauty--tokens of the soul. Her work spoke in it; called to her; promised comfort and ennobling. She thought with yearning, too, of her parents; of the autumn holiday she was soon to spend with them. Her heart went out--sorely--to all the primal claims upon it.

* * * * *

Nevertheless, clear as was the inner resolution, the immediate future filled her with dread. Her ignorance of herself--her excitable folly--had given Wharton rights which her conscience admitted. He would not let her go without a struggle, and she must face it.

As to the incidents which had happened during the fortnight--Louis Craven's return, and the scandal of the "People's Banking Company"--they had troubled and distressed her; but it would not be true to say that they had had any part in shaping her slow determination. Louis Craven was sore and bitter. She was very sorry for him; and his reports of the Damesley strikers made her miserable. But she took Wharton's "leaders" in the Clarion for another equally competent opinion on the same subject; and told herself that she was no judge. As for the Company scandal, she had instantly and proudly responded to the appeal of his letter, and put the matter out of her thoughts, till at least he should give his own account. So much at any rate she owed to the man who had stood by her through the Hurd trial. Marcella Boyce would not readily believe in his dishonour! She did not in fact believe it. In spite of later misgivings, the impression of his personality, as she had first conceived it, in the early days at Mellor, was still too strong.

No--rather--she had constantly recollected throughout the day what was going on in Parliament. These were for him testing and critical hours, and she felt a wistful sympathy. Let him only rise to his part--take up his great task.

* * * * *

An imperious knocking on her thin outer door roused her. She went to open it and saw Anthony Craven,--the perspiration standing on his brow, his delicate cripple's face white and fierce.

"I want to talk to you," he said without preface. "Have you seen the afternoon papers?"

"No," she said in astonishment, "I was just going to send for them. What is wrong?"

He followed her into the sitting-room without speaking; and then he unfolded the Pall Mall he had in his hand and pointed to a large-print paragraph on the central page with a shaking hand.

Marcella read:

"EXCITING SCENES IN THE HOUSE.--MEETING OF THE LABOUR MEMBERS.--A committee of the Labour representatives in Parliament met this afternoon at 2 o'clock for the purpose of electing a chairman, and appointing whips to the party, thus constituting a separate parliamentary group. Much interest was felt in the proceedings, which it was universally supposed would lead to the appointment of Mr. H. S. Wharton, the member for West Brookshire, as chairman and leader of the Labour party. The excitement of the meeting and in the House may be imagined when--after a short but very cordial and effective speech from Mr. Bennett, the member for North Whinwick, in support of Mr. Wharton's candidature--Mr. Wilkins, the miner's member for Derlingham, rose and made a series of astounding charges against the personal honour of the member for West Brookshire. Put briefly, they amount to this: that during the recent strike at Damesley the support of the Clarion newspaper, of which Mr. Wharton is owner and practically editor, was bought by the employers in return for certain shares in the new Syndicate; that the money for these shares--which is put as high as 20,000 l.--had already gone into Mr. Wharton's private pocket; and that the change of policy on the part of the Clarion, which led to the collapse of the strike, was thus entirely due to what the Labour members can only regard under the circumstances as a bribe of a most disgraceful kind. The effect produced has been enormous. The debate is still proceeding, and reporters have been excluded. But I hope to send a fuller account later."

Marcella dropped the paper from her hand.

"What does it mean?" she said to her companion.

"Precisely what it says," replied Anthony, with a nervous impatience he could not repress. "Now," he added, as his lameness forced him to sit down, "will you kindly allow me some conversation with you? It was you--practically--who introduced Louis to that man. You meant well to Louis, and Mr. Wharton has been your friend. We therefore feel that we owe you some explanation. For that paragraph"--he pointed to the paper--"is, substantially--Louis's doing, and mine."

"Yours?" she said mechanically. "But Louis has been going on working for the paper--I persuaded him."

"I know. It was not we who actually discovered the thing. But we set a friend to work. Louis has had his suspicions all along. And at last--by the merest chance--we got the facts."

Then he told the story, staring at her the while with his sparkling eyes, his thin invalid's fingers fidgeting with his hat. If there was in truth any idea in his mind that the relations between his companion and Harry Wharton were more than those of friendship, it did not avail to make him spare her in the least. He was absorbed in vindictive feeling, which applied to her also. He might say for form's sake that she had meant well; but in fact he regarded her at this moment as a sort of odious Canidia whose one function had been to lure Louis to misfortune. Cut off himself, by half a score of peculiarities, physical and other, from love, pleasure, and power, Anthony Craven's whole affections and ambitions had for years centred in his brother. And now Louis was not only violently thrown out of employment, but compromised by the connection with the Clarion; was, moreover, saddled with a wife--and in debt.

So that his explanation was given with all the edge he could put upon it. Let her stop him, if she pleased!--but she did not stop him.

The facts were these:

Louis had, indeed, been persuaded by Marcella, for the sake of his wife and bread and butter, to go on working for the Clarion, as a reviewer. But his mind was all the time feverishly occupied with the apostasy of the paper and its causes. Remembering Wharton's sayings and letters throughout the struggle, he grew less and less able to explain the incident by the reasons Wharton had himself supplied, and more and more convinced that there was some mystery behind.

He and Anthony talked the matter over perpetually. One evening Anthony brought home from a meeting of the Venturists that George Denny, the son of one of the principal employers in the Damesley trade, whose name he had mentioned once before in Marcella's ears. Denny was by this time the candidate for a Labour constituency, an ardent Venturist, and the laughing-stock of his capitalist family, with whom, however, he was still on more or less affectionate terms. His father thought him an incorrigible fool, and his mother wailed over him to her friends. But they were still glad to see him whenever he would condescend to visit them; and all friction on money matters was avoided by the fact that Denny had for long refused to take any pecuniary help from his father, and was nevertheless supporting himself tolerably by lecturing and literature.

Denny was admitted into the brothers' debate, and had indeed puzzled himself a good deal over the matter already. He had taken a lively interest in the strike, and the articles in the Clarion which led to its collapse had seemed to him both inexplicable and enraging.

After his talk with the Cravens, he went away, determined to dine at home on the earliest possible opportunity. He announced himself accordingly in Hertford Street, was received with open arms, and then deliberately set himself, at dinner and afterwards, to bait his father on social and political questions, which, as a rule, were avoided between them.

Old Denny fell into the trap, lost his temper and self-control completely, and at a mention of Harry Wharton--skilfully introduced at the precisely right moment--as an authority on some matter connected with the current Labour programme, he threw himself back in his chair with an angry laugh.

"Wharton? Wharton? You quote that fellow to me?"

"Why shouldn't I?" said the son, quietly.

"Because, my good sir,--he's a rogue,--that's all!--a common rogue, from my point of view even--still more from yours."

"I know that any vile tale you can believe about a Labour leader you do, father," said George Denny, with dignity.

Whereupon the older man thrust his hand into his coat-pocket, and drawing out a small leather case, in which he was apt to carry important papers about with him, extracted from it a list containing names and figures, and held it with a somewhat tremulous hand under his son's eyes.

"Read it, sir! and hold your tongue! Last week my friends and I bought that man--and his precious paper--for a trifle of 20,000 l. or thereabouts. It paid us to do it, and we did it. I dare say you will think the preceding questionable. In my eyes it was perfectly legitimate, a piece of bonne guerre. The man was ruining a whole industry. Some of us had taken his measure, had found out too--by good luck!--that he was in sore straits for money--mortgages on the paper, gambling debts, and a host of other things--discovered a shrewd man to play him, and made our bid! He rose to it like a gudgeon--gave us no trouble whatever. I need not say, of course"--he added, looking up at his son--"that I have shown you that paper in the very strictest confidence. But it seemed to me it was my duty as a father to warn you of the nature of some of your associates!"

"I understand," said George Denny, as, after a careful study of the paper--which contained, for the help of the writer's memory, a list of the sums paid and founders' shares allotted to the various "promoters" of the new Syndicate--he restored it to its owner. "Well, I, father, have this to say in return. I came here to-night in the hope of getting from you this very information, and in the public interest I hold myself not only free but bound to make public use of it, at the earliest possible opportunity!"

The family scene may be imagined. But both threats and blandishments were entirely lost upon the son. There was in him an idealist obstinacy which listened to nothing but the cry of a cause, and he declared that nothing would or should prevent him from carrying the story of the bribe direct to Nehemiah Wilkins, Wharton's chief rival in the House, and so saving the country and the Labour party from the disaster and disgrace of Wharton's leadership. There was no time to lose, the party meeting in the House was only two days off.

At the end of a long struggle, which exhausted everybody concerned, and was carried on to a late hour of the night, Denny père, influenced by a desire to avoid worse things--conscious, too, of the abundant evidence he possessed of Wharton's acceptance and private use of the money--and, probably, when it came to the point, not unwilling,--under compulsion!--to tumble such a hero from his pedestal, actually wrote, under his son's advice, a letter to Wilkins. It was couched in the most cautious language, and professed to be written in the interests of Wharton himself, to put an end "to certain ugly and unfounded rumours that have been brought to my knowledge." The negotiation itself was described in the driest business terms. "Mr. Wharton, upon cause shown, consented to take part in the founding of the Syndicate, and in return for his assistance, was allotted ten founders' shares in the new company. The transaction differed in nothing from those of ordinary business"--a last sentence slily added by the Socialist son, and innocently accepted by one of the shrewdest of men.

After which Master George Denny scarcely slept, and by nine o'clock next morning was in a hansom on his way to Wilkins's lodgings in Westminster. The glee of that black-bearded patriot hardly needs description. He flung himself on the letter with a delight and relief so exuberant that George Denny went off to another more phlegmatic member of the anti-Wharton "cave," with entreaties that an eye should be kept on the member for Derlingham, lest he should do or disclose anything before the dramatic moment.

Then he himself spent the next forty-eight hours in ingenious efforts to put together certain additional information as to the current value of founders' shares in the new company, the nature and amount of Wharton's debts, and so on. Thanks to his father's hints he was able in the end to discover quite enough to furnish forth a supplementary statement. So that, when the 10th arrived, the day rose upon a group of men breathlessly awaiting a play within a play--with all their parts rehearsed, and the prompter ready.

* * * * *

Such in substance, was Anthony's story. So carried away was he by the excitement and triumph of it, that he soon ceased to notice what its effect might be upon his pale and quick-breathing companion.

"And now what has happened?" she asked him abruptly, when at last he paused.

"Why, you saw!" he said in astonishment, pointing to the evening paper--"at least the beginning of it. Louis is at the House now. I expect him every moment. He said he would follow me here."

Marcella pressed her hands upon her eyes a moment as though in pain. Anthony looked at her with a tardy prick of remorse.

"I hear Louis's knock!" he said, springing up. "May I let him in?" And, without waiting for reply, he hobbled as fast as his crutch would carry him to the outer door. Louis came in. Marcella rose mechanically. He paused on the threshold, his short sight trying to make her out in the dusk. Then his face softened and quivered. He walked forward quickly.

"I know you have something to forgive us," he said, "and that this will distress you. But we could not give you warning. Everything was so rapid, and the public interests involved so crushing."

He was flushed with vengeance and victory, but as he approached her his look was deprecating--almost timid. Only the night before, Anthony for the first time had suggested to him an idea about her. He did not believe it--had had no time in truth to think of it in the rush of events. But now he saw her, the doubt pulled at his heart. Had he indeed stabbed the hand that had tried to help him?

Anthony touched him impatiently on the arm. "What has happened, Louis? I have shown Miss Boyce the first news."

"It is all over," said Louis, briefly. "The meeting was breaking up as I came away. It had lasted nearly five hours. There was a fierce fight, of course, between Wharton and Wilkins. Then Bennett withdrew his resolution, refused to be nominated himself--nearly broke down, in fact, they say; he had always been attached to Wharton, and had set his heart upon making him leader--and finally, after a long wrangle, Molloy was appointed chairman of the party."

"Good!" cried Anthony, not able to suppress the note of exultation.

Louis did not speak. He looked at Marcella.

"Did he defend himself?" she asked in a low, sharp voice.

Louis shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, yes. He spoke--but it did him no good. Everybody agreed that the speech was curiously ineffective. One would have expected him to do it better. But he seemed to be knocked over. He said, of course, that he had satisfied himself, and given proof in the paper, that the strike could not be maintained, and that being so he was free to join any syndicate he pleased. But he spoke amid dead silence, and there was a general groan when he sat down. Oh, it was not this business only! Wilkins made great play in part of his speech with the Company scandal too. It is a complete smash all round."

"Which he will never get over?" said Marcella, quickly.

"Not with our men. What he may do elsewhere is another matter. Anthony has told you how it came out?"

She made a sign of assent. She was sitting erect and cold, her hands round her knees.

"I did not mean to keep anything from you," he said in a low voice, bending to her. "I know--you admired him--that he had given you cause. But--my mind has been on fire--ever since I came back from those Damesley scenes!"

She offered no reply. Silence fell upon all three for a minute or two; and in the twilight each could hardly distinguish the others. Every now and then the passionate tears rose in Marcella's eyes; her heart contracted. That very night when he spoke to her, when he used all those big words to her about his future, those great ends for which he had claimed her woman's help--he had these things in his mind.

"I think," said Louis Craven presently, touching her gently on the arm--he had tried once in vain to attract her attention--"I think I hear some one asking for you outside on the landing--Mrs. Hurd seems to be bringing them in."

As he spoke, Anthony suddenly sprang to his feet, and the outer door opened.

"Louis!" cried Anthony, "it is he!"

"Are yer at home, miss?" said Minta Hurd, putting in her head; "I can hardly see, it's so dark. Here's a gentleman wants to see you."

As she spoke, Wharton passed her, and stood--arrested--by the sight of the three figures. At the same moment Mrs. Hurd lit the gas in the little passage. The light streamed upon his face, and showed him the identity of the two men standing beside Marcella.

Never did Marcella forget that apparition--the young grace and power of the figure--the indefinable note of wreck, of catastrophe--the Lucifer brightness of the eyes in the set face. She moved forward. Anthony stopped her.

"Good-night, Miss Boyce!"

She shook hands unconsciously with him and with Louis. The two Cravens turned to the door. Wharton advanced into the room, and let them pass.

"You have been in a hurry to tell your story!" he said, as Louis walked by him.

Contemptuous hate breathed from every feature, but he was perfectly self-controlled.

"Yes--" said Craven, calmly--"Now it is your turn."

The door was no sooner shut than Wharton strode forward and caught her hand.

"They have told you everything? Ah!--"

His eye fell upon the evening paper. Letting her go, he felt for a chair and dropped into it. Throwing himself back, his hands behind his head, he drew a long breath and his eyes closed. For the first time in his life or hers she saw him weak and spent like other men. Even his nerve had been worn down by the excitement of these five fighting hours. The eyes were lined and hollow--the brow contracted; the young roundness of the cheek was lost in the general pallor and patchiness of the skin; the lower part of the face seemed to have sharpened and lengthened,--and over the whole had passed a breath of something aging and withering the traces of which sent a shiver through Marcella. She sat down near him, still in her nurse's cloak, one trembling hand upon her lap.

"Will you tell me what made you do this?" she asked, not being able to think of anything else to say.

He opened his eyes with a start.

In that instant's quiet the scene he had just lived through had been rushing before him again--the long table in the panelled committee-room, the keen angry faces gathered about it. Bennett, in his blue tie and shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable--Molloy, small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the midst of tumult--and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out Denny's letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.

"Spies, yo call us?" with a finger like a dart, threatening the enemy--"Aye; an' yo're aboot reet! I and my friends--we have been trackin' and spyin' for weeks past. We knew those men, those starvin' women and bairns, were bein' sold, but we couldn't prove it. Now we've come at the how and the why of it! And we'll make it harder for men like you to sell 'em again! Yo call it infamy?--well, we call it detection."

Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which followed on the director of "The People's Banking Association," the injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year--and finally the last dramatic cry:

"But it's noa matter, yo say! Mester Wharton has nobbut played his party and the workin' man a dirty trick or two--an' yo mun have a gentleman! Noa--the workin' man isn't fit himself to speak wi' his own enemies i' th' gate--yo mun have a gentleman!--an' Mester Wharton, he says he'll tak' the post, an' dea his best for yo--an', remember, yo mun have a gentleman! Soa now--Yes! or No!--wull yo?--or woan't yo?"

And at that, the precipitation of the great unwieldy form half across the table towards Wharton's seat--the roar of the speaker's immediate supporters thrown up against the dead silence of the rest!

As to his own speech--he thought of it with a soreness, a disgust which penetrated to bones and marrow. He had been too desperately taken by surprise--had lost his nerve--missed the right tone throughout. Cool defiance, free self-justification, might have carried him through. Instead of which--faugh!

All this was the phantom-show of a few seconds' thought. He roused himself from a miserable reaction of mind and body to attend to Marcella's question.

"Why did I do it?" he repeated; "why--"

He broke off, pressing both his hands upon his brow. Then he suddenly sat up and pulled himself together.

"Is that tea?" he said, touching the tray. "Will you give me some?"

Marcella went into the back kitchen and called Minta. While the boiling water was brought and the tea was made, Wharton sat forward with his face on his hands and saw nothing. Marcella whispered a word in Minta's ear as she came in. The woman paused, looked at Wharton, whom she had not recognised before in the dark--grew pale--and Marcella saw her hands shaking as she set the tray in order. Wharton knew nothing and thought nothing of Kurd's widow, but to Marcella the juxtaposition of the two figures brought a wave of complex emotion.

Wharton forced himself to eat and drink, hardly speaking the while. Then, when the tremor of sheer exhaustion had to some extent abated, he suddenly realised who this was that was sitting opposite to him ministering to him.

She felt his hand--his quick powerful hand--on hers.

"To you I owe the whole truth--let me tell it!"

She drew herself away instinctively--but so softly that he did not realise it. He threw himself back once more in the chair beside her--one knee over the other, the curly head so much younger to-night than the face beneath it supported on his arms, his eyes closed again for rest--and plunged into the story of the Clarion.

It was admirably told. He had probably so rehearsed it to himself several times already. He described his action as the result of a double influence working upon him--the influence of his own debts and necessities, and the influence of his growing conviction that the maintenance of the strike had become a blunder, even a misfortune for the people themselves.

"Then--just as I was at my wit's end, conscious besides that the paper was on a wrong line, and must somehow be got out of it--came the overtures from the Syndicate. I knew perfectly well I ought to have refused them--of course my whole career was risked by listening to them. But at the same time they gave me assurances that the workpeople would ultimately gain--they proved to me that I was helping to extinguish the trade. As to the money--when a great company has to be launched, the people who help it into being get paid for it--it is invariable--it happens every day. I like the system no more than you may do--or Wilkins. But consider. I was in such straits that bankruptcy lay between me and my political future. Moreover--I had lost nerve, sleep, balance. I was scarcely master of myself when Pearson first broached the matter to me--"

"Pearson!" cried Marcella, involuntarily. She recalled the figure of the solicitor; had heard his name from Frank Leven. She remembered Wharton's impatient words--"There is a tiresome man wants to speak to me on business--"

It was then I--that evening! Something sickened her.

Wharton raised himself in his chair and looked at her attentively with his young haggard eyes. In the faint lamplight she was a pale vision of the purest and noblest beauty. But the lofty sadness of her face filled him with a kind of terror. Desire--impotent pain--violent resolve, swept across him. He had come to her, straight from the scene of his ruin, as to the last bulwark left him against a world bent on his destruction, and bare henceforward of all delights.

"Well, what have you to say to me?" he said, suddenly, in a low changed voice--"as I speak--as I look at you--I see in your face that you distrust--that you have judged me; those two men, I suppose, have done their work! Yet from you--you of all people--I might look not only for justice--but--I will dare say it--for kindness!"

She trembled. She understood that he appealed to the days at Mellor, and her lips quivered.

"No," she exclaimed, almost timidly--"I try to think the best. I see the pressure was great."

"And consider, please," he said proudly, "what the reasons were for that pressure."

She looked at him interrogatively--a sudden softness in her eyes. If at that moment he had confessed himself fully, if he had thrown himself upon her in the frank truth of his mixed character--and he could have done it, with a Rousseau-like completeness--it is difficult to say what the result of this scene might have been. In the midst of shock and repulsion, she was filled with pity; and there were moments when she was more drawn to his defeat and undoing, than she had ever been to his success.

Yet how question him? To do so, would be to assume a right, which in turn would imply his rights. She thought of that mention of "gambling debts," then of his luxurious habits, and extravagant friends. But she was silent. Only, as she sat there opposite to him, one slim hand propping the brow, her look invited him.

He thought he saw his advantage.

"You must remember," he said, with the same self-assertive bearing, "that I have never been a rich man, that my mother spent my father's savings on a score of public objects, that she and I started a number of experiments on the estate, that my expenses as a member of Parliament are very large, and that I spent thousands on building up the Clarion. I have been ruined by the Clarion, by the cause the Clarion supported. I got no help from my party--where was it to come from? They are all poor men. I had to do everything myself, and the struggle has been more than flesh and blood could bear! This year, often, I have not known how to move, to breathe, for anxieties of every sort. Then came the crisis--my work, my usefulness, my career, all threatened. The men who hated me saw their opportunity. I was a fool and gave it them. And my enemies have used it--to the bitter end!"

Tone and gesture were equally insistent and strong. What he was saying to himself was that, with a woman of Marcella's type, one must "bear it out." This moment of wreck was also with him the first moment of all-absorbing and desperate desire. To win her--to wrest her from the Cravens' influence--that had been the cry in his mind throughout his dazed drive from the House of Commons. Her hand in his--her strength, her beauty, the romantic reputation that had begun to attach to her, at his command--and he would have taken the first step to recovery, he would see his way to right himself.

Ah! but he had missed his chance! Somehow, every word he had been saying rang false to her. She could have thrown herself as a saving angel on the side of weakness and disaster which had spoken its proper language, and with a reckless and confiding truth had appealed to the largeness of a woman's heart. But this patriot--ruined so nobly--for such disinterested purposes--left her cold! She began to think even--hating herself--of the thousands he was supposed to have made in the gambling over that wretched company--no doubt for the "cause" too!

But before she could say a word he was kneeling beside her.

"Marcella I give me my answer!--I am in trouble and defeat--be a woman, and come to me!"

He had her hands. She tried to recover them.

"No!" she said, with passionate energy, "that is impossible. I had written to you before you came, before I had heard a word of this. Please, please let me go!"

"Not till you explain!"--he said, still holding her, and roused to a white heat of emotion--"why is it impossible? You said to me once, with all your heart, that you thanked me, that I had taught you, helped you. You cannot ignore the bond between us! And you are free. I have a right to say to you--you thirst to save, to do good--come and save a man that cries to you!--he confesses to you, freely enough, that he has made a hideous mistake--help him to redeem it!"

She rose suddenly with all her strength, freeing herself from him, so that he rose too, and stood glowering and pale.

"When I said that to you," she cried, "I was betraying "--her voice failed her an instant--"we were both false--to the obligation that should have held us--restrained us. No! no! I will never be your wife! We should hurt each other--poison each other!"

Her eyes shone with wild tears. As he stood there before her she was seized with a piteous sense of contrast--of the irreparable--of what might have been.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, roughly.

She was silent.

His passion rose.

"Do you remember," he said, approaching her again, "that you have given me cause to hope? It is those two fanatics that have changed you--possessed your mind."

She looked at him with a pale dignity.

"My letters must have warned you," she said simply. "If you had come to-morrow--in prosperity--you would have got the same answer, at once. To-day--now--I have had weak moments, because--because I did not know how to add pain to pain. But they are gone--I see my way! I do not love you--that is the simple, the whole truth--I could not follow you!"

He stared at her an instant in a bitter silence.

"I have been warned,"--he said slowly, but in truth losing control of himself, "not only by you--and I suppose I understand! You repent last year. Your own letter said as much. You mean to recover, the ground--the place you lost. Ah, well!--most natural!--most fitting! When the time comes--and my bones are less sore--I suppose I shall have my second congratulations ready! Meanwhile--"

She gave a low cry and burst suddenly into a passion of weeping, turning her face from him. But when in pale sudden shame he tried to excuse himself--to appease her--she moved away, with a gesture that overawed him.

"You have not confessed yourself"--she said, and his look wavered under the significance of hers--"but you drive me to it. Yes, I repent!"--her breast heaved, she caught her breath. "I have been trying to cheat myself these last few weeks--to run away from grief--and the other night when you asked me--I would have given all I have and am to feel like any happy girl, who says 'Yes' to her lover. I tried to feel so. But even then, though I was miserable and reckless, I knew in my heart--it was impossible! If you suppose--if you like to suppose--that I--I have hopes or plans--as mean as they would be silly--you must--of course. But I have given no one any right to think so or say so. Mr. Wharton--"

Gathering all her self-control, she put out her white hand to him. "Please--please say good-bye to me. It has been hideous vanity--and mistake--and wretchedness--our knowing each other--from the beginning. I am grateful for all you did, I shall always be grateful. I hope--oh! I hope--that--that you will find a way through this trouble. I don't want to make it worse by a word. If I could do anything! But I can't. You must please go. It is late. I wish to call my friend, Mrs. Hurd."

Their eyes met--hers full of a certain stern yet quivering power, his strained and bloodshot, in his lined young face.

Then, with a violent gesture--as though he swept her out of his path--he caught up his hat, went to the door, and was gone.

She fell on her chair almost fainting, and sat there for long in the summer dark, covering her face. But it was not his voice that haunted her ears.

"You have done me wrong--I pray God you may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future!"

Again and again, amid the whirl of memory, she pressed the sad remembered words upon the inward wound and fever--tasting, cherishing the smart of them. And as her trance of exhaustion and despair gradually left her, it was as though she crept close to some dim beloved form in whom her heart knew henceforward the secret and sole companion of its inmost life.

Book IV

"You and I-- Why care by what meanders we are here I' the centre of the labyrinth? Men have died Trying to find this place which we have found."

Chapter I

Ah! how purely, cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul of yearning and of memory into the pearly silence of the morning.

High up on the distant hill to the left, beyond the avenue, the pale apricots and golds of the newly-shorn stubbles caught the mounting light. The beeches of the avenue were turning fast, and the chestnuts girdling the church on her right hand were already thin enough to let the tower show through. That was the bell--the old bell given to the church by Hampden's friend, John Boyce--striking half-past five; and close upon it came the call of a pheasant in the avenue. There he was, fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, redeemed all at once by the sudden whirr of towering flight.

To-day Mary Harden and the Rector would be at work in the church, and to-morrow was to be the Harvest Festival. Was it two years?--or in an hour or two would she be going with her basket from the Cedar Garden, to find that figure in the brown shooting-coat standing with the Hardens on the altar steps?

Alas!--alas!--her head dropped on her hands as she knelt by the open window. How changed were all the aspects of the world! Three weeks before, the bell in that little church had tolled for one who, in the best way and temper of his own generation, had been God's servant and man's friend--who had been Marcella's friend--and had even, in his last days, on a word from Edward Hallin, sent her an old man's kindly farewell.

"Tell her," Lord Maxwell had written with his own hand to Hallin, "she has taken up a noble work, and will make, I pray God, a noble woman. She had, I think, a kindly liking for an old man, and she will not disdain his blessing."

He had died at Geneva, Aldous and Miss Raeburn with him. For instead of coming home in August, he had grown suddenly worse, and Aldous had gone out to him. They had brought him to the Court for burial, and the new Lord Maxwell, leaving his aunt at the Court, had almost immediately returned to town,--because of Edward Hallin's state of health.

Marcella had seen much of Hallin since he and his sister had come back to London in the middle of August. Hallin's apparent improvement had faded within a week or two of his return to his rooms; Aldous was at Geneva; Miss Hallin was in a panic of alarm; and Marcella found herself both nurse and friend. Day after day she would go in after her nursing rounds, share their evening meal, and either write for Hallin, or help the sister--by the slight extra weight of her professional voice--to keep him from writing and thinking.

He would not himself admit that he was ill at all, and his whole energies at the time were devoted to the preparation of a series of three addresses on the subject of Land Reform, which were to be delivered in October to the delegates of a large number of working-men's clubs from all parts of London. So strong was Hallin's position among working-men reformers, and so beloved had been his personality, that as soon as his position towards the new land nationalising movement, now gathering formidable strength among the London working men, had come to be widely understood, a combined challenge had been sent him by some half-dozen of the leading Socialist and Radical clubs, asking him to give three weekly addresses in October to a congress of London delegates, time to be allowed after the lecture for questions and debate.

Hallin had accepted the invitation with eagerness, and was throwing an intensity of labour into the writing of his three lectures which often seemed to his poor sister to be not only utterly beyond his physical strength, but to carry with it a note as of a last effort, a farewell message, such as her devoted affection could ill endure. For all the time he was struggling with cardiac weakness and brain irritability which would have overwhelmed any one less accustomed to make his account with illness, or to balance against feebleness of body a marvellous discipline of soul.

Lord Maxwell was still alive, and Hallin, in the midst of his work, was looking anxiously for the daily reports from Aldous, living in his friend's life almost as much as in his own--handing on the reports, too, day by day to Marcella, with a manner which had somehow slipped into expressing a new and sure confidence in her sympathy--when she one evening found Minta Hurd watching for her at the door with a telegram from her mother: "Your father suddenly worse. Please come at once." She arrived at Mellor late that same night.

On the same day Lord Maxwell died. Less than a week later he was buried in the little Gairsley church. Mr. Boyce was then alarmingly ill, and Marcella sat in his darkened room or in her own all day, thinking from time to time of what was passing three miles away--of the great house in its mourning--of the figures round the grave. Hallin, of course, would be there. It was a dripping September day, and she passed easily from moments of passionate yearning and clairvoyance to worry herself about the damp and the fatigue that Hallin must be facing.

Since then she had heard occasionally from Miss Hallin. Everything was much as it had been, apparently. Edward was still hard at work, still ill, still serene. "Aldous"--Miss Hallin could not yet reconcile herself to the new name--was alone in the Curzon Street house, much occupied and harassed apparently by the legal business of the succession, by the election presently to be held in his own constituency, and by the winding-up of his work at the Home Office. He was to resign his under-secretaryship; but with the new session and a certain rearrangement of offices it was probable that he would be brought back into the Ministry. Meanwhile he was constantly with them; and she thought that his interest in Edward's work and anxiety about his health were perhaps both good for him as helping to throw off something of his own grief and depression.

Whereby it will be noticed that Miss Hallin, like her brother, had by now come to speak intimately and freely to Marcella of her old lover and their friend.

Now for some days, however, she had received no letter from either brother or sister, and she was particularly anxious to hear. For this was the fourth of October, and on the second he was to have delivered the first of his addresses. How had the frail prophet sped? She had her fears. For her weekly "evenings" in Brown's Buildings had shown her a good deal of the passionate strength of feeling developed during the past year in connection with this particular propaganda. She doubted whether the London working man at the present moment was likely to give even Hallin a fair hearing on the point. However, Louis Craven was to be there. And he had promised to write even if Susie Hallin could find no time. Some report ought to reach Mellor by the evening.

Poor Cravens! The young wife, who was expecting a baby, had behaved with great spirit through the Clarion trouble; and, selling their bits of furniture to pay their debts, they had gone to lodge near Anthony. Louis had got some odds and ends of designing and artistic work to do through his brother's influence; and was writing where he could, here and there. Marcella had introduced them to the Hallins, and Susie Hallin was taking a motherly interest in the coming child. Anthony, in his gloomy way, was doing all he could for them. But the struggle was likely to be a hard one, and Marcella had recognised of late that in Louis as in Anthony there were dangerous possibilities of melancholy and eccentricity. Her heart was often sore over their trouble and her own impotence.

Meantime for some wounds, at any rate, time had brought swift cautery! Not three days after her final interview with Wharton, while the catastrophe in the Labour party was still in every one's mouth, and the air was full of bitter speeches and recriminations, Hallin one evening laid down his newspaper with a sudden startled gesture, and then pushed it over to Marcella. There, in the columns devoted to personal news of various sorts, appeared the announcement:

"A marriage has been arranged between Mr. H.S. Wharfon, M.P. for West Brookshire, and Lady Selina Farrell, only surviving daughter of Lord Alresford. The ceremony will probably take place somewhere about Easter next. Meanwhile Mr. Wharton, whose health has suffered of late from his exertions in and out of the House, has been ordered to the East for rest by his medical advisers. He and his friend Sir William Ffolliot start for French Cochin China in a few days. Their object is to explore the famous ruined temples of Angkor in Cambodia, and if the season is favourable they may attempt to ascend the Mekong. Mr. Wharton is paired for the remainder of the session."

"Did you know anything of this?" said Hallin, with that careful carelessness in which people dress a dubious question.

"Nothing," she said quietly.

Then an impulse not to be stood against, springing from very mingled depths of feeling, drove her on. She, too, put down the paper, and laying her finger-tips together on her knee she said with an odd slight laugh:

"But I was the last person to know. About a fortnight ago Mr. Wharton proposed to me."

Hallin sprang from his chair, almost with a shout. "And you refused him?"

She nodded, and then was angrily aware that, totally against her will or consent, and for the most foolish and remote reasons, those two eyes of hers had grown moist.

Hallin went straight over to her.

"Do you mind letting me shake hands with you?" he said, half ashamed of his outburst, a dancing light of pleasure transforming the thin face. "There--I am an idiot! We won't say a word more--except about Lady Selina. Have you seen her?"

"Three or four times."

"What is she like?"

Marcella hesitated.

"Is she fat--and forty?" said Hallin, fervently--she beat him?"

"Not at all. She is very thin--thirty-five, elegant, terribly of her own opinion--and makes a great parade of 'papa.'"

She looked round at him, unsteadily, but gaily.

"Oh! I see," said Hallin, with disappointment, "she will only take care he doesn't beat her--which I gather from your manner doesn't matter. And her politics?"

"Lord Alresford was left out of the Ministry," said Marcella slily. "He and Lady Selina thought it a pity."

"Alresford--Alresford? Why, of course! He was Lord Privy Seal in their last Cabinet--a narrow-minded old stick!--did a heap of mischief in the Lords. Well!"--Hallin pondered a moment--"Wharton will go over!"

Marcella was silent. The tremor of that wrestler's hour had not yet passed away. The girl could find no words in which to discuss Wharton himself, this last amazing act, or its future.

As for Hallin, he sat lost in pleasant dreams of a whitewashed Wharton, comfortably settled at last below the gangway on the Conservative side, using all the old catch-words in slightly different connections, and living gaily on his Lady Selina. Fragments from the talk of Nehemiah--Nehemiah the happy and truculent, that new "scourge of God" upon the parasites of Labour--of poor Bennett, of Molloy, and of various others who had found time to drop in upon him since the Labour smash, kept whirling in his mind. The same prediction he had just made to Marcella was to be discerned in several of them. He vowed to himself that he would write to Raeburn that night, congratulate him and the party on the possibility of so eminent a recruit--and hint another item of news by the way. She had trusted her confidence to him without any pledge--an act for which he paid her well thenceforward, in the coin of a friendship far more intimate, expansive, and delightful than anything his sincerity had as yet allowed him to show her.

But these London incidents and memories, near as they were in time, looked many of them strangely remote to Marcella in this morning silence. When she drew back from the window, after darkening the now sun-flooded room in a very thorough business-like way, in order that she might have four or five hours' sleep, there was something symbolic in the act. She gave back her mind, her self, to the cares, the anxieties, the remorses of the past three weeks. During the night she had been sitting up with her father that her mother might rest. Now, as she lay down, she thought with the sore tension which had lately become habitual to her, of her father's state, her mother's strange personality, her own short-comings.

* * * * *

By the middle of the morning she was downstairs again, vigorous and fresh as ever. Mrs. Boyce's maid was for the moment in charge of the patient, who was doing well. Mrs. Boyce was writing some household notes in the drawing-room. Marcella went in search of her.

The bare room, just as it ever was--with its faded antique charm--looked bright and tempting in the sun. But the cheerfulness of it did but sharpen the impression of that thin form writing in the window. Mrs. Boyce looked years older. The figure had shrunk and flattened into that of an old woman; the hair, which two years before had been still young and abundant, was now easily concealed under the close white cap she had adopted very soon after her daughter had left Mellor. The dress was still exquisitely neat; but plainer and coarser. Only the beautiful hands and the delicate stateliness of carriage remained--sole relics of a loveliness which had cost its owner few pangs to part with.

Marcella hovered near her--a little behind her--looking at her from time to time with a yearning compunction--which Mrs. Boyce seemed to be aware of, and to avoid.

"Mamma, can't I do those letters for you? I am quite fresh."

"No, thank you. They are just done."

When they were all finished and stamped, Mrs. Boyce made some careful entries in a very methodical account-book, and then got up, locking the drawers of her little writing-table behind her.

"We can keep the London nurse another week I think," she said.

"There is no need," said Marcella, quickly. "Emma and I could divide the nights now and spare you altogether. You see I can sleep at any time."

"Your father seems to prefer Nurse Wenlock," said Mrs. Boyce.

Marcella took the little blow in silence. No doubt it was her due. During the past two years she had spent two separate months at Mellor; she had gone away in opposition to her father's wish; and had found herself on her return more of a stranger to her parents than ever. Mr. Boyce's illness, involving a steady extension of paralytic weakness, with occasional acute fits of pain and danger, had made steady though very gradual progress all the time. But it was not till some days after her return home that Marcella had realised a tenth part of what her mother had undergone since the disastrous spring of the murder.

She passed now from the subject of the nurse with a half-timid remark about "expense."

"Oh! the expense doesn't matter!" said Mrs. Boyce, as she stood absently before the lately kindled fire, warming her chilled fingers at the blaze.

"Papa is more at ease in those ways?" Marcella ventured. And kneeling down beside her mother she gently chafed one of the cold hands.

"There seems to be enough for what is wanted," said Mrs. Boyce, bearing the charing with patience. "Your father, I believe, has made great progress this year in freeing the estate. Thank you, my dear. I am not cold now."

And she gently withdrew her hand.

Marcella, indeed, had already noticed that there were now no weeds on the garden-paths, that instead of one gardener there were three, that the old library had been decently patched and restored, that there was another servant, that William, grown into a very--tolerable footman, wore a reputable coat, and that a plain but adequate carriage and horse had met her at the station. Her pity even understood that part of her father's bitter resentment of his ever-advancing disablement came from his feeling that here at last--just as death was in sight--he, that squalid failure, Dick Boyce, was making a success of something.

Presently, as she knelt before the fire, a question escaped her, which, when it was spoken, she half regretted.

"Has papa been able to do anything for the cottages yet?"

"I don't think so," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly. After a minute's pause she added, "That will be for your reign, my dear."

Marcella looked up with a sharp thrill of pain.

"Papa is better, mamma, and--and I don't know what you mean. I shall never reign here without you."

Mrs. Boyce began to fidget with the rings on her thin left hand.

"When Mellor ceases to be your father's it will be yours," she said, not without a certain sharp decision; "that was settled long ago. I must be free--and if you are to do anything with this place, you must give your youth and strength to it. And your father is not better--except for the moment. Dr. Clarke exactly foretold the course of his illness to me two years ago, on my urgent request. He may live four months--six, if we can get him to the South. More is impossible."

There was something ghastly in her dry composure. Marcella caught her hand again and leant her trembling young cheek against it.

"I could not live here without you, mamma!"

Mrs. Boyce could not for once repress the inner fever which in general her will controlled so well.

"I hardly think it would matter to you so much, my dear."

Marcella shrank.

"I don't wonder you say that!" she said in a low voice. "Do you think it was all a mistake, mamma, my going away eighteen months ago--a wrong act?"

Mrs. Boyce grew restless.

"I judge nobody, my dear!--unless I am obliged. As you know, I am for liberty--above all"--she spoke with emphasis--"for letting the past alone. But I imagine you must certainly have learnt to do without us. Now I ought to go to your father."

But Marcella held her.

"Do you remember in the Purgatorio, mamma, the lines about the loser in the game: 'When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and learning by his grief'? Do you remember?"

Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a little nervous, but assenting. It was one of the inconsistencies of her strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante student. The taste for the most strenuous and passionate of poets had developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of her middle life. Like everything else personal to herself she never spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to Marcella from a child.

"E tristo impara?" repeated Marcella, her voice wavering. "Mamma "--she laid her face against her mother's dress again--"I have lost more throws than you think in the last two years. Won't you believe I may have learnt a little?"

She raised her eyes to her mother's pinched and mask-like face. Mrs. Boyce's lips moved as though she would have asked a question. But she did not ask it. She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew well--the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into alien fields of emotion.

"Well, but one expects persons like you to learn," she said, with a light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention. There was silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just touched her daughter's hair. "Now, will you come up in half an hour? That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his food."

* * * * *

Marcella went to her father at the hour named. She found him in his wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the Cedar Garden. The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old house. It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers. The needlework hangings of the bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed or tattered. But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity of his sleeping-room were a bitter satisfaction to Richard Boyce, even in his sickness. After all said and done, he was king here in his father's and grandfather's place; ruling where they ruled, and--whether they would or no--dying where they died, with the same family faces to bear him witness from the walls, and the same vault awaiting him.

When his daughter entered, he turned his head, and his eyes, deep and black still as ever, but sunk in a yellow relic of a face, showed a certain agitation. She was disagreeably aware that his thoughts were much occupied with her; that he was full of grievance towards her, and would probably before long bring the pathos of his situation as well as the weight of his dying authority to bear upon her, for purposes she already suspected with alarm.

"Are you a little easier, papa?" she said, as she came up to him.

"I should think as a nurse you ought to know better, my dear, than to ask," he said testily. "When a person is in my condition, enquiries of that sort are a mockery!"

"But one may be in less or more pain," she said gently. "I hoped Dr. Clarke's treatment yesterday might have given you some relief."

He did not vouchsafe an answer. She took some work and sat down by him. Mrs. Boyce, who had been tidying a table of food and medicine, came and asked him if he would be wheeled into another room across the gallery, which had been arranged as a sitting-room. He shook his head irritably.

"I am not fit for it. Can't you see? And I want to speak to Marcella."

Mrs. Boyce went away. Marcella waited, not without a tremor. She was sitting in the sun, her head bent over the muslin strings she was hemming for her nurse's bonnet. The window was wide open; outside, the leaves under a warm breeze were gently drifting down into the Cedar Garden, amid a tangled mass of flowers, mostly yellow or purple. To one side rose the dark layers of the cedars; to the other, the grey front of the library wing.

Mr. Boyce looked at her with the frown which had now become habitual to him, moved his lips once or twice without speaking; and at last made his effort.

"I should think, Marcella, you must often regret by now the step you took eighteen months ago!"

She grew pale.

"How regret it, papa?" she said, without looking up.

"Why, good God!" he said angrily; "I should think the reasons for regret are plain enough. You threw over a man who was devoted to you, and could have given you the finest position in the county, for the most nonsensical reasons in the world--reasons that by now, I am certain, you are ashamed of."

He saw her wince, and enjoyed his prerogative of weakness. In his normal health he would never have dared so to speak to her. But of late, during long fits of feverish brooding--intensified by her return home--he had vowed to himself to speak his mind.

"Aren't you ashamed of them?" he repeated, as she was silent.

She looked up.

"I am not ashamed of anything I did to save Hurd, if that is what you mean, papa."

Mr. Boyce's anger grew.

"Of course you know what everybody said?"

She stooped over her work again, and did not reply.

"It's no good being sullen over it," he said in exasperation; "I'm your father, and I'm dying. I have a right to question you. It's my duty to see something settled, if I can, before I go. Is it true that all the time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved, with Harry Wharton?"

He gave out the words with sharp emphasis, and, bending towards her, he laid an emaciated hand upon her arm.

"What use is there, papa, in going back to these things?" she said, driven to bay, her colour going and coming. "I may have been wrong in a hundred ways, but you never understood that the real reason for it all was that--that--I never was in love with Mr. Raeburn."

"Then why did you accept him?" He fell back against his pillows with a jerk.

"As to that, I will confess my sins readily enough," she said, while her lip trembled, and he saw the tears spring into her eyes. "I accepted him for what you just now called his position in the county, though not quite in that way either."

He was silent a little, then he began again in a voice which gradually became unsteady from self-pity.

"Well, now look here! I have been thinking about this matter a great deal--and God knows I've time to think and cause to think, considering the state I'm in--and I see no reason whatever why I should not try--before I die--to put this thing straight. That man was head over ears in love with you, madly in love with you. I used to watch him, and I know. Of course you offended and distressed him greatly. He could never have expected such conduct from you or any one else. But he's not the man to change round easily, or to take up with any one else. Now, if you regret what you did or the way in which you did it, why shouldn't I--a dying man may be allowed a little licence I should think!--give him a hint?"

"Papa!" cried Marcella, dropping her work, and looking at him with a pale, indignant passion, which a year ago would have quelled him utterly. But he held up his hand.

"Now just let me finish. It would be no good my doing a thing of this kind without saying something to you first, because you'd find it out, and your pride would be the ruin of it. You always had a demoniacal pride, Marcella, even when you were a tiny child; but if you make up your mind now to let me tell him you regret what you did--just that--you'll make him happy, and yourself, for you know very well he's a man of the highest character--and your poor father, who never did you much harm anyway!" His voice faltered. "I'd manage it so that there should be nothing humiliating to you in it whatever. As if there could be anything humiliating in confessing such a mistake as that; besides, what is there to be ashamed of? You're no pauper. I've pulled Mellor out of the mud for you, though you and your mother do give me credit for so precious little!"

He lay back, trembling with fatigue, yet still staring at her with glittering eyes, while his hand on the invalid table fixed to the side of his chair shook piteously. Marcella dreaded the effect the whole scene might have upon him; but, now they were in the midst of it, both feeling for herself and prudence for him drove her into the strongest speech she could devise.

"Papa, if anything of that sort were done, I should take care Mr. Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it--in such a way that it would be impossible for him to carry it further. Dear papa, don't think of such a thing any more. Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly last year, are we now to harass and persecute him? I would sooner disappear from everybody I know--from you and mamma, from England--and never be heard of again."

She stopped a moment--struggling for composure--that she might not excite him too much.

"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr. Raeburn lately--while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright, fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street--a Miss Macdonald."

"Miss how--much?" he asked roughly.

She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of confusion and repetition, upon the probabilities of the matter--half conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner mind--but miserably, passionately determined to go through with it all the same.

He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.

Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly--

"And that other fellow--Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him in London. Has he been making love to you?"

"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina Farrell--a distant cousin of the Winterbournes--was announced, in several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."

At that moment her mother came in, looking anxiously at them both, and half resentfully at Marcella. Marcella, sore and bruised in every moral fibre, got up to go.

Something in the involuntary droop of her beautiful head as she left the room drew her father's eyes after her, and for the time his feeling towards her softened curiously. Well, she had not made very much of her life so far! That old strange jealousy of her ability, her beauty, and her social place, he had once felt so hotly, died away. He wished her, indeed, to be Lady Maxwell. Yet for the moment there was a certain balm in the idea that she too--her mother's daughter--with her Merritt blood--could be unlucky.

Marcella went about all day under a vague sense of impending trouble--the result, no doubt, of that intolerable threat of her father's, against which she was, after all, so defenceless.

But whatever it was, it made her all the more nervous and sensitive about the Hallins; about her one true friend, to whom she was slowly revealing herself, even without speech; whose spiritual strength had been guiding and training her; whose physical weakness had drawn to him the maternal, the spending instincts which her nursing life had so richly developed.

She strolled down the drive to meet the post. But there were no letters from London, and she came in, inclined to be angry indeed with Louis Craven for deserting her, but saying to herself at the same time that she must have heard if anything had gone wrong.

An hour or so later, just as the October evening was closing in, she was sitting dreaming over a dim wood-fire in the drawing-room. Her father, as might have been expected, had been very tired and comatose all day. Her mother was with him; the London nurse was to sit up, and Marcella felt herself forlorn and superfluous.

Suddenly, in the silence of the house, she heard the front-door bell ring. There was a step in the hall--she sprang up--the door opened, and William, with fluttered emphasis, announced--

"Lord Maxwell!"

In the dusk she could just see his tall form--the short pause as he perceived her--then her hand was in his, and the paralysing astonishment of that first instant had disappeared under the grave emotion of his look.

"Will you excuse me," he said, "for coming at this hour? But I am afraid you have heard nothing yet of our bad news--and Hallin himself was anxious I should come and tell you. Miss Hallin could not write, and Mr. Craven, I was to tell you, had been ill for a week with a chill. You haven't then seen any account of the lecture in the papers?"

"No; I have looked yesterday and to-day in our paper, but there was nothing--"

"Some of the Radical papers reported it. I hoped you might have seen it. But when we got down here this afternoon, and there was nothing from you, both Miss Hallin and Edward felt sure you had not heard--and I walked over. It was a most painful, distressing scene, and he--is very ill."

"But you have brought him to the Court?" she said trembling, lost in the thought of Hallin, her quick breath coming and going. "He was able to bear the journey? Will you tell me?--will you sit down?"

He thanked her hurriedly, and took a seat opposite to her, within the circle of the firelight, so that she saw his deep mourning and the look of repressed suffering.

"The whole thing was extraordinary--I can hardly now describe it," he said, holding his hat in his hands and staring into the fire. "It began excellently. There was a very full room. Bennett was in the chair--and Edward seemed much as usual. He had been looking desperately ill, but he declared that he was sleeping better, and that his sister and I coddled him. Then,--directly he was well started!--I felt somehow that the audience was very hostile. And he evidently felt it more and more. There was a good deal of interruption and hardly any cheers--and I saw after a little--I was sitting not far behind him--that he was discouraged--that he had lost touch. It was presently clear, indeed, that the real interest of the meeting lay not in the least in what he had to say, but in the debate that was to follow. They meant to let him have his hour--but not a minute more. I watched the men about me, and I could see them following the clock--thirsting for their turn. Nothing that he said seemed to penetrate them in the smallest degree. He was there merely as a ninepin to be knocked over. I never saw a meeting so possessed with a madness of fanatical conviction--it was amazing!"

He paused, looking sadly before him. She made a little movement, and he roused himself instantly.

"It was just a few minutes before he was to sit down--I was thankful!--when suddenly--I heard his voice change. I do not know now what happened--but I believe he completely lost consciousness of the scene before him--the sense of strain, of exhaustion, of making no way, must have snapped something. He began a sort of confession--a reverie in public--about himself, his life, his thoughts, his prayers, his hopes--mostly his religious hopes--for the working man, for England--I never heard anything of the kind from him before--you know his reserve. It was so intimate--so painful--oh! so painful!"--he drew himself together with an involuntary shudder--"before this crowd, this eager hostile crowd which was only pining for him to sit down--to get out of their way. The men near me began to look at each other and titter. They wondered what he meant by maundering on like that--'damned canting stuff'--I heard one man near me call it. I tore off a bit of paper, and passed a line to Bennett asking him to get hold of Edward, to stop it. But I think Bennett had rather lost his presence of mind, and I saw him look back at me and shake his head. Then time was up, and they began to shout him down."

Marcella made an exclamation of horror. He turned to her.

"I think it was the most tragic scene I ever saw," he said with a feeling as simple as it was intense. "This crowd so angry and excited--without a particle of understanding or sympathy--laughing, and shouting at him--and he in the midst--white as death--talking this strange nonsense--his voice floating in a high key, quite unlike itself. At last just as I was getting up to go to him, I saw Bennett rise. But we were both too late. He fell at our feet!"

Marcella gave an involuntary sob! "What a horror!" she said, "what a martyrdom!"

"It was just that," he answered in a low voice--"It was a martyrdom. And when one thinks of the way in which for years past he has held these big meetings in the hollow of his hand, and now, because he crosses their passion, their whim,--no kindness!--no patience--nothing but a blind hostile fury! Yet they thought him a traitor, no doubt. Oh! it was all a tragedy!"

There was silence an instant. Then he resumed:

"We got him into the back room. Luckily there was a doctor on the platform. It was heart failure, of course, with brain prostration. We managed to get him home, and Susie Hallin and I sat up. He was delirious all night; but yesterday he rallied, and last night he begged us to move him out of London if we could. So we got two doctors and an invalid carriage, and by three this afternoon we were all at the Court. My aunt was ready for him--his sister is there--and a nurse. Clarke was there to meet him. He thinks he cannot possibly live more than a few weeks--possibly even a few days. The shock and strain have been irreparable."

Marcella lay back in her chair, struggling with her grief, her head and face turned away from him, her eyes hidden by her handkerchief. Then in some mysterious way she was suddenly conscious that Aldous was no longer thinking of Hallin, but of her.

"He wants very much to see you," he said, bending towards her; "but I know that you have yourself serious illness to nurse. Forgive me for not having enquired after Mr. Boyce. I trust he is better?"

She sat up, red-eyed, but mistress of herself. The tone had been all gentleness, but to her quivering sense some slight indefinable change--coldness--had passed into it.

"He is better, thank you--for the present. And my mother does not let me do very much. We have a nurse too. When shall I come?"

He rose.

"Could you--come to-morrow afternoon? There is to be a consultation of doctors in the morning, which will tire him. About six?--that was what he said. He is very weak, but in the day quite conscious and rational. My aunt begged me to say how glad she would be--"

He paused. An invincible awkwardness took possession of both of them. She longed to speak to him of his grandfather but could not find the courage.

When he was gone, she, standing alone in the firelight, gave one passionate thought to the fact that so--in this tragic way--they had met again in this room where he had spoken to her his last words as a lover; and then, steadily, she put everything out of her mind but her friend--and death.

Chapter II

Mrs. Boyce received Marcella's news with more sympathy than her daughter had dared to hope for, and she made no remark upon Aldous himself and his visit, for which Marcella was grateful to her.

As they left the dining-room, after their short evening meal, to go up to Mr. Boyce, Marcella detained her mother an instant.

"Mamma, will you please not tell papa that--that Lord Maxwell came here this afternoon? And will you explain to him why I am going there to-morrow?"

Mrs. Boyce's fair cheek flushed. Marcella saw that she understood.

"If I were you, I should not let your father talk to you any more about those things," she said with a certain proud impatience.

"If I can help it!" exclaimed Marcella. "Will you tell him, mamma,--about Mr. Hallin?--and how good he has been to me?"

Then her voice failed her, and, hurriedly leaving her mother at the top of the stairs, she went away by herself to struggle with a grief and smart almost unbearable.

That night passed quietly at the Court. Hallin was at intervals slightly delirious, but less so than the night before; and in the early morning the young doctor, who had sat up with him, reported him to Aldous as calmer and a little stronger. But the heart mischief was hopeless, and might bring the bruised life to an end at any moment.

He could not, however, be kept in bed, owing to restlessness and difficulty of breathing, and by midday he was in Aldous's sitting-room, drawn close to the window, that he might delight his eyes with the wide range of wood and plain that it commanded. After a very wet September, the October days were now following each other in a settled and sunny peace. The great woods of the Chilterns, just yellowing towards that full golden moment--short, like all perfection,--which only beeches know, rolled down the hill-slopes to the plain, their curving lines cut here and there by straight fir stems, drawn clear and dark on the pale background of sky and lowland. In the park, immediately below the window, groups of wild cherry and of a slender-leaved maple made spots of "flame and amethyst" on the smooth falling lawns; the deer wandered and fed, and the squirrels were playing and feasting among the beech nuts.

Since Aldous and his poor sister had brought him home from the Bethnal Green hall in which the Land Reform Conference had been held, Hallin had spoken little, except in delirium, and that little had been marked by deep and painful depression. But this morning, when Aldous was summoned by the nurse, and found him propped up by the window, in front of the great view, he saw gracious signs of change. Death, indeed, already in possession, looked from the blue eyes so plainly that Aldous, on his first entrance, had need of all his own strength of will to keep his composure. But with the certainty of that great release, and with the abandonment of all physical and mental struggle--the struggle of a lifetime--Hallin seemed to-day to have recovered something of his characteristic serenity and blitheness--the temper which had made him the leader of his Oxford contemporaries, and the dear comrade of his friend's life.

When Aldous came in, Hallin smiled and lifted a feeble hand towards the park and the woods.

"Could it have greeted me more kindly," he said, in his whispering voice, "for the end?"

Aldous sat down beside him, pressing his hand, and there was silence till Hallin spoke again.

"You will keep this sitting-room, Aldous?"

"Always."

"I am glad. I have known you in it so long. What good talks we have had here in the old hot days! I was hot, at least, and you bore with me. Land Reform--Church Reform--Wages Reform--we have threshed them all out in this room. Do you remember that night I kept you up till it was too late to go to bed, talking over my Church plans? How full I was of it!--the Church that was to be the people--reflecting their life, their differences--governed by them--growing with them. You wouldn't join it, Aldous--our poor little Association!"

Aldous's strong lip quivered.

"Let me think of something I did join in," he said.

Hallin's look shone on him with a wonderful affection.

"Was there anything else you didn't help in? I don't remember it. I've dragged you into most things. You never minded failure. And I have not had so much of it--not till this last. This has been failure--absolute and complete."

But there was no darkening of expression. He sat quietly smiling.

"Do you suppose anybody who could look beyond the moment would dream of calling it failure?" said Aldous, with difficulty.

Hallin shook his head gently, and was silent for a little time, gathering strength and breath again.

"I ought to suffer"--he said, presently. "Last week I dreaded my own feeling if I should fail or break down--more than the failure itself. But since yesterday--last night--I have no more regrets. I see that my power is gone--that if I were to live I could no longer carry on the battle--or my old life. I am out of touch. Those whom I love and would serve, put me aside. Those who invite me, I do not care to join. So I drop--into the gulf--and the pageant rushes on. But the curious thing is now--I have no suffering. And as to the future--do you remember Jowett in the Introduction to the Phaedo--"

He feebly pointed to a book beside him, which Aldous took up. Hallin guided him and he read--

"Most persons when the last hour comes are resigned to the order of nature and the will of God. They are not thinking of Dante's 'Inferno' or 'Paradiso,' or of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Heaven and Hell are not realities to them, but words or ideas--the outward symbols of some great mystery, they hardly know what."

"It is so with me," said Hallin, smiling, as, at his gesture, Aldous laid the book aside; "yet not quite. To my mind, that mystery indeed is all unknown and dark--but to the heart it seems unveiled--with the heart, I see."

A little later Aldous was startled to hear him say, very clearly and quickly:

"Do you remember that this is the fifth of October?"

Aldous drew his chair closer, that he might not raise his voice.

"Yes, Ned."

"Two years, wasn't it, to-day? Will you forgive me if I speak of her?"

"You shall say anything you will."

"Did you notice that piece of news I sent you, in my last letter to Geneva? But of course you did. Did it please you?"

"Yes, I was glad of it," said Aldous, after a pause, "extremely glad. I thought she had escaped a great danger."

Hallin studied his face closely.

"She is free, Aldous--and she is a noble creature--she has learnt from life--and from death--this last two years. And--you still love her. Is it right to make no more effort?"

Aldous saw the perspiration standing on the wasted brow--would have given the world to be able to content or cheer him--yet would not, for the world, at such a moment be false to his own feeling or deceive his questioner.

"I think it is right," he said deliberately, "--for a good many reasons, Edward. In the first place I have not the smallest cause--not the fraction of a cause--to suppose that I could occupy with her now any other ground than that I occupied two years ago. She has been kind and friendly to me--on the whole--since we met in London. She has even expressed regret for last year--meaning, of course, as I understood, for the pain and trouble that may be said to have come from her not knowing her own mind. She wished that we should be friends. And"--he turned his head away--"no doubt I could be, in time.... But, you see--in all that, there is nothing whatever to bring me forward again. My fatal mistake last year, I think now, lay in my accepting what she gave me--accepting it so readily, so graspingly even. That was my fault, my blindness, and--it was as unjust to her--as it was hopeless for myself. For hers is a nature"--his eyes came back to his friend; his voice took a new force and energy--"which, in love at any rate, will give all or nothing--and will never be happy itself, or bring happiness, till it gives all. That is what last year taught me. So that even if she--out of kindness or remorse for giving pain--were willing to renew the old tie--I should be her worst enemy and my own if I took a single step towards it. Marriage on such terms as I was thankful for last year, would be humiliation to me, and bring no gain to her. It will never serve a man with her"--his voice broke into emotion--"that he should make no claims! Let him claim the uttermost far-thing--her whole self. If she gives it, then he may know what love means!"

Hallin had listened intently. At Aldous's last words his expression showed pain and perplexity. His mind was full of vague impressions, memories, which seemed to argue with and dispute one of the chief things Aldous had been saying. But they were not definite enough to be put forward. His sensitive chivalrous sense, even in this extreme weakness, remembered the tragic weight that attaches inevitably to dying words. Let him not do more harm than good.

He rested a little. They brought him food; and Aldous sat beside him making pretence to read, so that he might be encouraged to rest. His sister came and went; so did the doctor. But when they were once more alone, Hallin put out his hand and touched his companion.

"What is it, dear Ned?"

"Only one thing more, before we leave it. Is that all that stands between you now--the whole? You spoke to me once in the summer of feeling angry, more angry than you could have believed. Of course, I felt the same. But just now you spoke of its all being your fault. Is there anything changed in your mind?"

Aldous hesitated. It was extraordinarily painful to him to speak of the past, and it troubled him that at such a moment it should trouble Hallin.

"There is nothing changed, Ned, except that perhaps time makes some difference always. I don't want now"--he tried to smile--"as I did then, to make anybody else suffer for my suffering. But perhaps I marvel even more than I did at first, that--that--she could have allowed some things to happen as she did!"

The tone was firm and vibrating; and, in speaking, the whole face had developed a strong animation most passionate and human.

Hallin sighed.

"I often think," he said, "that she was extraordinarily immature--much more immature than most girls of that age--as to feeling. It was really the brain that was alive."

Aldous silently assented; so much so that Hallin repented himself.

"But not now," he said, in his eager dying whisper; "not now. The plant is growing full and tall, into the richest life."

Aldous took the wasted hand tenderly in his own. There was something inexpressibly touching in this last wrestle of Hallin's affection with another's grief. But it filled Aldous with a kind of remorse, and with the longing to free him from that, as from every other burden, in these last precious hours of life. And at last he succeeded, as he thought, in drawing his mind away from it. They passed to other things. Hallin, indeed, talked very little more during the day. He was very restless and weak, but not in much positive suffering. Aldous read to him at intervals, from Isaiah or Plato, the bright sleepless eyes following every word.

At last the light began to sink. The sunset flooded in from the Berkshire uplands and the far Oxford plain, and lay in gold and purple on the falling woods and the green stretches of the park. The distant edges of hill were extraordinarily luminous and clear, and Aldous, looking into the west with the eye of one to whom every spot and line were familiar landmarks, could almost fancy he saw beyond the invisible river, the hill, the "lovely tree against the western sky," which keep for ever the memory of one with whose destiny it had often seemed to him that Hallin's had something in common. To him, as to Thyrsis, the same early joy, the same "happy quest," the same "fugitive and gracious light" for guide and beacon, that--

does not come with houses or with gold, With place, with honour and a flattering crew;

and to him, too, the same tasked pipe and tired throat, the same struggle with the "life of men unblest," the same impatient tryst with death.

The lovely lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief, beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane into the evening haze. His soul followed the quiet deer, the homing birds, loosening itself gently the while from pain and from desire, saying farewell to country, to the poor, to the work left undone, and the hopes unrealised--to everything except to love.

It had just struck six when he bent forward to the window beneath which ran the wide front terrace.

"That was her step!" he said, while his face lit up, "will you bring her here?"

* * * * *

Marcella rang the bell at the Court with a fast beating heart. The old butler who came gave what her shrinking sense thought a forbidding answer to her shy greeting of him, and led her first into the drawing-room. A small figure in deep black rose from a distant chair and came forward stiffly. Marcella found herself shaking hands with Miss Raeburn.

"Will you sit and rest a little before you go upstairs?" said that lady with careful politeness, "or shall I send word at once? He is hardly worse--but as ill as he can be."

"I am not the least tired," said Marcella, and Miss Raeburn rang.

"Tell his lordship, please, that Miss Boyce is here."

The title jarred and hurt Marcella's ear. But she had scarcely time to catch it before Aldous entered, a little bent, as it seemed to her, from his tall erectness, and speaking with an extreme quietness, even monotony of manner.

"He is waiting for you--will you come at once?"

He led her up the central staircase and along the familiar passages, walking silently a little in front of her. They passed the long line of Caroline and Jacobean portraits in the upper gallery, till just outside his own door Aldous paused.

"He ought not to talk long," he said, hesitating, "but you will know--of course--better than any of us."

"I will watch him," she said, almost inaudibly, and he gently opened the door and let her pass, shutting it behind her.

The nurse, who was sitting beside her patient, got up as Marcella entered, and pointed her to a low chair on his further side. Susie Hallin rose too, and kissed the new-comer hurriedly, absently, without a word, lest she should sob. Then she and the nurse disappeared through an inner door. The evening light was still freely admitted; and there were some candles. By the help of both she could only see him indistinctly. But in her own mind, as she sat down, she determined that he had not even days to live.

Yet as she bent over him she saw a playful gleam on the cavernous face.

"You won't scold me?" said the changed voice--"you did warn me--you and Susie--but--I was obstinate. It was best so!"

She pressed her lips to his hand and was answered by a faint pressure from the cold fingers.

"If I could have been there!" she murmured.

"No--I am thankful you were not. And I must not think of it--or of any trouble. Aldous is very bitter--but he will take comfort by and by--he will see it--and them--more justly. They meant me no unkindness. They were full of an idea, as I was. When I came back to myself--first--all was despair. I was in a blank horror of myself and life. Now it has gone--I don't know how. It is not of my own will--some hand has lifted a weight. I seem to float--without pain."

He closed his eyes, gathering strength again in the interval, by a strong effort of will--calling up in the dimming brain what he had to say. She meanwhile, spoke to him in a low voice, mainly to prevent his talking, telling him of her father, of her mother's strain of nursing--of herself--she hardly knew what. Hew grotesque to be giving him these little bits of news about strangers--to him, this hovering, consecrated soul, on the brink of the great secret!

In the intervals, while he was still silent, she could not sometimes prevent the pulse of her own life from stirring. Her eye wandered round the room--Aldous's familiar room. There, on the writing-table with its load of letters and books, stood the photograph of Hallin; another, her own, used to stand beside it; it was solitary now.

Otherwise, all was just as it had been--flowers, books, newspapers--the signs of familiar occupation, the hundred small details of character and personality which in estrangement take to themselves such a smarting significance for the sad and craving heart. The date--the anniversary--echoed in her mind.

Then, with a rush of remorseful pain, her thoughts came back to the present and to Hallin. At the same moment she saw that his eyes were open, and fixed upon her with a certain anxiety and expectancy. He made a movement as though to draw her towards him; and she stooped to him.

"I feel," he said, "as though my strength were leaving me fast. Let me ask you one question--because of my love for you--and him. I have fancied--of late--things were changed. Can you tell me--will you?--or is it unfair?"--the words had all their bright, natural intonation--"Is your heart--still where it was?--or, could you ever--undo the past--"

He held her fast, grasping the hand she had given him with unconscious force. She had looked up startled, her lip trembling like a child's. Then she dropped her head against the arm of her chair, as though she could not speak.

He moved restlessly, and sighed.

"I should not," he said to himself; "I should not--it was wrong. The dying are tyrannous."

He even began a word of sweet apology. But she shook her head.

"Don't!" she said, struggling with herself; "don't say that! It would do me good to speak--to you--"

An exquisite smile dawned on Hallin's face.

"Then!"--he said--"confess!"

* * * * *

A few minutes later they were still sitting together. She strongly wished to go; but he would not yet allow it. His face was full of a mystical joy--a living faith, which must somehow communicate itself in one last sacramental effort.

"How strange that you--and I--and he--should have been so mixed together in this queer life. Now I seem to regret nothing--I hope everything. One more little testimony let me bear!--the last. We disappear one by one--into the dark--but each may throw his comrades--a token--before he goes. You have been in much trouble of mind and spirit--I have seen it. Take my poor witness. There is one clue, one only--goodness--the surrendered will. Everything is there--all faith--all religion--all hope for rich or poor.--Whether we feel our way through consciously to the Will--that asks our will--matters little. Aldous and I have differed much on this--in words--never at heart! I could use words, symbols he cannot--and they have given me peace. But half my best life I owe to him."

At this he made a long pause--but, still, through that weak grasp, refusing to let her go--till all was said. Day was almost gone; the stars had come out over the purple dusk of the park.

"That Will--we reach--through duty and pain," he whispered at last, so faintly she could hardly hear him, "is the root, the source. It leads us in living--it--carries us in death. But our weakness and vagueness--want help--want the human life and voice--to lean on--to drink from. We Christians--are orphans--without Christ! There again--what does it matter what we think--about him--if only we think--of him. In one such life are all mysteries, and all knowledge--and our fathers have chosen for us--"

The insistent voice sank lower and lower into final silence--though the lips still moved. The eyelids too fell. Miss Hallin and the nurse came in. Marcella rose and stood for one passionate instant looking down upon him. Then, with a pressure of the hand to the sister beside her, she stole out. Her one prayer was that she might see and meet no one. So soft was her step that even the watching Aldous did not hear her. She lifted the heavy latch of the outer door without the smallest noise, and found herself alone in the starlight.

* * * * *

After Marcella left him, Hallin remained for some hours in what seemed to those about him a feverish trance. He did not sleep, but he showed no sign of responsive consciousness. In reality his mind all through was full of the most vivid though incoherent images and sensations. But he could no longer distinguish between them and the figures and movements of the real people in his room. Each passed into and intermingled with the other. In some vague, eager way he seemed all the time to be waiting or seeking for Aldous. There was the haunting impression of some word to say--some final thing to do--which would not let him rest. But something seemed always to imprison him, to hold him back, and the veil between him and the real Aldous watching beside him grew ever denser.

At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the half-sitting posture in which he had passed the day. Death had come too near. His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him from London watched with him. The curtains were drawn back from both the windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.

Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of purpose and of strength. He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to be alone with him. But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of his showed no change. Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of anguish and of struggle. Three words to say--only three words; but those he must say! He tried again, but Aldous's dumb grief still sat motionless. Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, "Speech is gone; I shall speak no more!"

It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt. But something checked both, and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.

What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking fingers, and Hallin's latest movement--which death stopped half-way--was to raise it to his lips.

* * * * *

So Marcella's confession--made in the abandonment, the blind passionate trust, of a supreme moment--bore no fruit. It went with Hallin to the grave.