Marcella — Bk. 2 Ch. 7

CHAPTER VII.

Wharton was sitting alone in the big Mellor drawing-room, after dinner.

He had drawn one of the few easy chairs the room possessed to the fire, and with his feet on the fender, and one of Mr. Boyce's French novels on his knee, he was intensely enjoying a moment of physical ease.

The work of these weeks of canvassing and speaking had been arduous, and he was naturally indolent.

Now, beside this fire and at a distance, it amazed him that any motive whatever, public or private, should ever have been strong enough to take him out through the mire on these winter nights to spout himself hoarse to a parcel of rustics.

"What did I do it for?"

he asked himself; "what am I going to do it for again to-morrow?"

Ten o'clock.

Mr. Boyce was gone to bed.

No more entertaining of _him_ to be done; one might be thankful for that mercy.

Miss Boyce and her mother would, he supposed, be down directly.

They had gone up to dress at nine.

It was the night of the Maxwell Court ball, and the carriage had been ordered for half-past ten.

In a few minutes he would see Miss Boyce in her new dress, wearing Raeburn's pearls.

He was extraordinarily observant, and a number of little incidents and domestic arrangements bearing on the feminine side of Marcella's life had been apparent to him from the beginning.

He knew, for instance, that the trousseau was being made at home, and that during the last few weeks the lady for whom it was destined had shown an indifference to the progress of it which seemed to excite a dumb annoyance in her mother.

Curious woman, Mrs. Boyce!

He found himself listening to every opening door, and already, as it were, gazing at Marcella in her white array.

He was not asked to this ball.

As he had early explained to Miss Boyce, he and Miss Raeburn had been "cuts" for years, for what reason he had of course left Marcella to guess.

As if Marcella found any difficulty in guessing--as if the preposterous bigotries and intolerances of the Ladies' League were not enough to account for any similar behaviour on the part of any similar high-bred spinster!

As for this occasion, she was far too proud both on her own behalf and Wharton's to say anything either to Lord Maxwell or his sister on the subject of an invitation for her father's guest.

It so happened, however, that Wharton was aware of certain other reasons for his social exclusion from Maxwell Court.

There was no necessity, of course, for enlightening Miss Boyce on the point.

But as he sat waiting for her, Wharton's mind went back to the past connected with those reasons.

In that past Raeburn had had the whip-hand of him; Raeburn had been the moral superior dictating indignant terms to a young fellow detected in flagrant misconduct.

Wharton did not know that he bore him any particular grudge.

But he had never liked Aldous, as a boy, that he could remember; naturally he had liked him less since that old affair.

The remembrance of it had made his position at Mellor particularly sweet to him from the beginning; he was not sure that it had not determined his original acceptance of the offer made to him by the Liberal Committee to contest old Dodgson's seat.

And during the past few weeks the exhilaration and interest of the general position--considering all things--had been very great.

Not only was he on the point of ousting the Maxwell candidate from a seat which he had held securely for years--Wharton was perfectly well aware by now that he was trespassing on Aldous Raeburn's preserves in ways far more important, and infinitely more irritating!

He and Raeburn had not met often at Mellor during these weeks of fight.

Each had been too busy.

But whenever they had come across each other Wharton had clearly perceived that his presence in the house, his growing intimacy with Marcella Boyce, the free-masonry of opinion between them, the interest she took in his contest, the village friendships they had in common, were all intensely galling to Aldous Raeburn.

The course of events, indeed, had lately produced in Wharton a certain excitement--recklessness even.

He had come down into these parts to court "the joy of eventful living"--politically and personally.

But the situation had proved to be actually far more poignant and personal than he had expected.

This proud, crude, handsome girl--to her certainly it was largely due that the days had flown as they had.

He was perfectly, one might almost say gleefully, aware that at the present moment it was he and not Aldous Raeburn who was intellectually her master.

His mind flew back at first with amusement, then with a thrill of something else, over their talks and quarrels.

He smiled gaily as he recalled her fits of anger with him, her remonstrances, appeals--and then her awkward inevitable submissions when he had crushed her with sarcasm or with facts.

Ah!

she would go to this ball to-night; Aldous Raeburn would parade her as his possession; but she would go with thoughts, ambitions, ideals, which, as they developed, would make her more and more difficult for a Raeburn to deal with.

And in those thoughts and ambitions the man who had been her tormentor, teacher, and companion during six rushing weeks knew well that he already counted for much.

He had cherished in her all those "divine discontents" which were already there when he first knew her; taught her to formulate them, given her better reasons for them; so that by now she was a person with a far more defined and stormy will than she had been to begin with.

Wharton did not particularly know why he should exult; but he did exult.

At any rate, he was prodigiously tickled--by the whole position.

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

The door opened, and Marcella came in--a white vision against the heavy blue of the walls.

With her came, too, a sudden strong scent of flowers, for she carried a marvellous bunch of hot-house roses, Aldous's gift, which had just arrived by special messenger.

Wharton sprang up and placed a chair for her.

"I had begun to believe the ball only existed in my own imagination!"

he said gaily.

"Surely you are very late."

Then he saw that she looked disturbed.

"It was papa," she said, coming to the fire, and looking down into it.

"It has been another attack of pain--not serious, mamma says; she is coming down directly.

But I wonder why they come, and why he thinks himself so ill--do you know?"

she added abruptly, turning to her companion.

Wharton hesitated, taken by surprise.

During the past weeks, what with Mr. Boyce's confidence and his own acuteness, he had arrived at a very shrewd notion of what was wrong with his host.

But he was not going to enlighten the daughter.

"I should say your father wants a great deal of care--and is nervous about himself," he said quietly.

"But he will get the care--and your mother knows the whole state of the case."

"Yes, she knows," said Marcella.

"I wish I did."

And a sudden painful expression--of moral worry, remorse--passed across the girl's face.

Wharton knew that she had often been impatient of late with her father, and incredulous of his complaints.

He thought he understood.

"One can often be of more use to a sick person if one is not too well acquainted with what ails them," he said.

"Hope and cheerfulness are everything in a case like your father's. He will do well."

"If he does he won't owe any of it--" She stopped as impulsively as she had begun.

"To me," she meant to have said; then had retreated hastily, before her own sense of something unduly intimate and personal.

Wharton stood quietly beside her, saying nothing, but receiving and soothing her self-reproach just as surely as though she had put it into words.

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

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

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

"Summer!"

he said, plunging his face into them with a long breath of sensuous enjoyment.

"How the year sweeps round in an instant!

And all the effect of a little heat and a little money.

Will you allow me a philosopher's remark?"

He drew back from her.

His quick inquisitive but still respectful eye took in every delightful detail.

"If I don't give you leave, my experience is that you will take it!"

she said, half laughing, half resentful, as though she had old aggressions in mind.

"You admit the strength of the temptation?

It is very simple, no one could help making it.

To be spectator of the _height_ of anything--the best, the climax--makes any mortal's pulses run.

Beauty, success, happiness, for instance?"

He paused smiling.

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

"Do you suppose to-night will be the height of happiness?"

she said at last with a little scorn.

"These functions don't present themselves to _me_ in such a light."

Wharton could have laughed out--her pedantry was so young and unconscious.

But he restrained himself.

"I shall be with the majority to-night," he said demurely.

"I may as well warn you."

Her colour rose.

No other man had ever dared to speak to her with this assurance, this cool scrutinising air.

She told herself to be indignant;

the next moment she _was_ indignant, but with herself for remembering conventionalities.

"Tell me one thing," said Wharton, changing his tone wholly.

"I know you went down hurriedly to the village before dinner.

Was anything wrong?"

"Old Patton is very ill," she said, sighing.

"I went to ask after him;

he may die any moment.

And the Hurds' boy too."

He leant against the mantelpiece, talking to her about both cases with a quick incisive common-sense--not unkind, but without a touch of unnecessary sentiment, still less of the superior person--which represented one of the moods she liked best in him.

In speaking of the poor he always took the tone of comradeship, of a plain equality, and the tone was, in fact, genuine.

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

"From me!

how could she?

I know every detail of their affairs."

"No matter.

I listened to what she said that day in the cottage when I had the boy on my knee.

I noticed her face, and I am quite certain.

She has a secret, and above all a secret from you."

Marcella looked disturbed for a moment, then she laughed.

"Oh, no!"

she said, with a little superior air.

"I assure you I know her better than you."

Wharton said no more.

"Marcella!"

called a distant voice from the hall.

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

"Good-night!"

"Good-night!

I shall hear you come home and wonder how you have sped.

One word, if I may!

Take your _rôle_ and play it.

There is nothing subjects dislike so much as to see royalty decline its part."

She laughed, blushed, a little proudly and uncertainly, and went without reply.

As she shut the door behind her, a sudden flatness fell upon her.

She walked through the dark Stone Parlour outside, seeing still the firmly-knit lightly-made figure--boyish, middle-sized, yet never insignificant--the tumbled waves of fair hair, the eyes so keenly blue, the face with its sharp mocking lines, its powers of sudden charm.

Then self-reproach leapt, and possessed her.

She quickened her pace, hurrying into the hall, as though from something she was ashamed or afraid of.

In the hall a new sensation awaited her.

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

Marcella stopped an instant in surprise and delight, then ran up to her.

"Mamma, how _lovely_ you look!

I haven't seen you like that, not since I was a child.

I remember you then once, in a low dress, a white dress, with flowers, coming into the nursery.

But that black becomes you so well, and Deacon has done your hair beautifully!"

She took her mother's hand and kissed her cheek, touched by an emotion which had many roots.

There was infinite relief in this tender natural outlet; she seemed to recover possession of herself.

Mrs. Boyce bore the kiss quietly.

Her face was a little pinched and white.

But the unusual display Deacon had been allowed to make of her pale golden hair, still long and abundant; the unveiling of the shapely shoulders and neck, little less beautiful than her daughter's; the elegant lines of the velvet dress, all these things, had very nobly transformed her.

Marcella could not restrain her admiration and delight.

Mrs. Boyce winced, and, looking upward to the gallery, which ran round the hall, called Deacon impatiently.

"Only, mamma," said Marcella, discontentedly, "I don't like that little chain round your neck.

It is not equal to the rest, not worthy of it."

"I have nothing else, my dear," said Mrs. Boyce, drily.

"Now, Deacon, don't be all night!"

Nothing else?

Yet, if she shut her eyes, Marcella could perfectly recall the diamonds on the neck and arms of that white figure of her childhood--could see herself as a baby playing with the treasures of her mother's jewel-box.

Nowadays, Mrs. Boyce was very secretive and reserved about her personal possessions.

Marcella never went into her room unless she was asked, and would never have thought of treating it or its contents with any freedom.

The mean chain which went so ill with the costly hoarded dress--it recalled to Marcella all the inexorable silent miseries of her mother's past life, and all the sordid disadvantages and troubles of her own youth.

She followed Mrs. Boyce out to the carriage in silence--once more in a tumult of sore pride and doubtful feeling.

* * * * * Four weeks to her wedding-day!

The words dinned in her ears as they drove along.

Yet they sounded strange to her, incredible almost.

How much did she know of Aldous, of her life that was to be--above all, how much of herself?

She was not happy--had not been happy or at ease for many days.

Yet in her restlessness she could think nothing out.

Moreover, the chain that galled and curbed her was a chain of character.

In spite of her modernness, and the complexity of many of her motives, there was certain inherited simplicities of nature at the bottom of her.

In her wild demonic childhood you could always trust Marcie Boyce, if she had given you her word--her schoolfellows knew that.

If her passions were half-civilised and southern, her way of understanding the point of honour was curiously English, sober, tenacious.

So now.

Her sense of bond to Aldous had never been in the least touched by any of her dissatisfactions and revolts.

Yet it rushed upon her to-night with amazement, and that in four weeks she was going to marry him!

Why?

how?

--what would it really _mean_ for him and for her?

It was as though in mid-stream, she were trying to pit herself for an instant against the current which had so far carried them all on, to see what it might be like to retrace a step, and could only realise with dismay the force and rapidity of the water.

Yet all the time another side of her was well aware that she was at that moment the envy of half a county, that in another ten minutes hundreds of eager and critical eyes would be upon her; and her pride was rising to her part.

The little incident of the chain had somehow for the moment made the ball and her place in it more attractive to her.

* * * * * They had no sooner stepped from their carriage than Aldous, who was waiting in the outer hall, joyously discovered them.

Till then he had been walking aimlessly amid the crowd of his own guests, wondering when she would come, how she would like it.

This splendid function had been his grandfather's idea; it would never have entered his own head for a moment.

Yet he understood his grandfather's wish to present his heir's promised bride in this public ceremonious way to the society of which she would some day be the natural leader.

He understood, too, that there was more in the wish than met the ear; that the occasion meant to Lord Maxwell, whether Dick Boyce were there or no, the final condoning of things past and done with, a final throwing of the Maxwell shield over the Boyce weakness, and full adoption of Marcella into her new family.

All this he understood and was grateful for.

But how would _she_ respond?

How would she like it--this parade that was to be made of her--these people that must be introduced to her?

He was full of anxieties.

Yet in many ways his mind had been easier of late.

During the last week she had been very gentle and good to him--even Miss Raeburn had been pleased with her.

There had been no quoting of Wharton when they met;

and he had done his philosopher's best to forget him.

He trusted her proudly, intensely; and in four weeks she would be his wife.

"Can you bear it?"

he said to her in a laughing whisper as she and her mother emerged from the cloak-room.

"Tell me what to do," she said, flushing.

"I will do my best.

What a crowd!

Must we stay very long?"

"Ah, my dear Mrs. Boyce," cried Lord Maxwell, meeting them on the steps of the inner quadrangular corridor--"Welcome indeed!

Let me take you in.

Marcella!

with Aldous's permission!"

he stooped his white head gallantly and kissed her on the cheek--"Remember I am an old man; if I choose to pay you compliments, you will have to put up with them!"

Then he offered Mrs. Boyce his arm, a stately figure in his ribbon and cross of the Bath.

A delicate red had risen to that lady's thin cheek in spite of her self-possession.

"Poor thing," said Lord Maxwell to himself as he led her along--"poor thing!

--how distinguished and charming still!

One sees to-night what she was like as a girl."

Aldous and Marcella followed.

They had to pass along the great corridor which ran round the quadrangle of the house.

The antique marbles which lined it were to-night masked in flowers, and seats covered in red had been fitted in wherever it was possible, and were now crowded with dancers "sitting out."

From the ball-room ahead came waves of waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the swaying rhythms of the band.

Beyond the windows of the corridor, which had been left uncurtained because of the beauty of the night, the stiff Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls of the corridor--here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca--and the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in cold, whitish relief.

Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that every eye was fixed upon her and her mother.

"Look, there she is," she heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library, now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest.

"Come, quick!

There--I told you she was lovely!"

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

"On her dignity!"

said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they had passed.

"Shy, no doubt--very natural!

But nowadays girls, when they're shy, don't giggle and blush as they used to in _my_ young days;

they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren't going to allow it!

Oh, very handsome--very handsome--of course.

But you can see she's advanced--peculiar--or what d'ye call it?

--woman's rights, I suppose, and all that kind of thing?

Like to see you go in for it, Nettie, eh!"

"She's _awfully_ handsome," sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant little daughter, still craning her neck to look--"very simply dressed too, except for those lovely pearls.

She does her hair very oddly, so low down--in those plaits.

Nobody does it like that nowadays."

"That's because nobody has such a head," said her brother, a young Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship.

"By George, she's ripping--she's the best-looking girl I've seen for a good long time.

But she's a Tartar, I'll swear--looks it, anyway."

"Every one says she has the most extraordinary opinions," said the girl, eagerly.

"She'll manage him, don't you think?

I'm sure he's very meek and mild."

"Don't know that," said the young man, twisting his moustache with the air of exhaustive information.

"Raeburn's a very good fellow--excellent fellow--see him shooting, you know--that kind of thing.

I expect he's got a will when he wants it.

The mother's handsome, too, and looks a lady.

The father's kept out of the way, I see.

Rather a blessing for the Raeburns.

Can't be pleasant, you know, to get a man like that in the family.

Look after your spoons--that kind of thing."

Meanwhile Marcella was standing beside Miss Raeburn, at the head of the long ball-room, and doing her best to behave prettily.

One after another she bowed to, or shook hands with, half the magnates of the county--the men in pink, the women in the new London dresses, for which this brilliant and long-expected ball had given so welcome an excuse.

They knew little or nothing of her, except that she was clearly good-looking, that she was that fellow Dick Boyce's daughter and was reported to be "odd."

Some, mostly men, who said their conventional few words to her, felt an amused admiration for the skill and rapidity with which she had captured the _parti_ of the county; some, mostly women, were already jealous of her.

A few of the older people here and there, both men and women--but after all they shook hands like the rest!

--knew perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back at her with kind eyes.

But of these last Marcella realised nothing.

What she was saying to herself was that, if they knew little of her, she knew a great deal of many of them.

In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book--one of the numberless!

--recently issued, on the state of the midland labourer.

He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner.

Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county before she met it in the flesh.

She knew that a great many of these men who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending.

But there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly present to her than the improvements.

In general, the people who thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members of a useless class.

The nation would do away with them in time!

Meanwhile it might at least be asked of them that they should practise their profession of landowning, such as it was, with greater conscience and intelligence--that they should not shirk its opportunities or idle them away.

And she could point out those who did both--scandalously, intolerably.

Once or twice she thought passionately of Minta Hurd, washing and mending all day, in her damp cottage; or of the Pattons in "the parish house," thankful after sixty years of toil for a hovel where the rain came through the thatch, and where the smoke choked you, unless, with the thermometer below freezing-point, you opened the door to the blast.

Why should _these_ people have all the gay clothes, the flowers, the jewels, the delicate food--all the delight and all the leisure?

And those, nothing!

Her soul rose against what she saw as she stood there, going through her part.

Wharton's very words, every inflection of his voice was in her ears, playing chorus to the scene.

But when these first introductions, these little empty talks of three or four phrases apiece, and all of them alike, were nearly done with, Marcella looked eagerly round for Mary Harden.

There she was, sitting quietly against the wall in a remote corner, her plain face all smiles, her little feet dancing under the white muslin frock which she had fashioned for herself with so much pain under Marcella's directions.

Miss Raeburn was called away to find an arm-chair for some dowager of importance; Marcella took advantage of the break and of the end of a dance to hurry down the room to Mary.

Aldous, who was talking to old Sir Charles Leven, Frank's father, a few steps off, nodded and smiled to her as he saw her move.

"Have you been dancing, Mary?"

she said severely.

"I wouldn't for worlds!

I never was so much amused in my life.

Look at those girls--those sisters--in the huge velvet sleeves, like coloured balloons!

--and that old lady in the pink tulle and diamonds.

--I do so want to get her her cloak!

_And_ those Lancers!

--I never could have imagined people danced like that.

They didn't dance them--they romped them!

It wasn't beautiful--was it?"

"Why do you expect an English crowd to do anything beautiful?

If we could do it, we should be too ashamed."

"But it _is_ beautiful, all the same, you scornful person!"

cried Mary, dragging her friend down beside her.

"How pretty the girls are!

And as for the diamonds, I never saw anything so wonderful.

I wish I could have made Charles come!"

"Wouldn't he?"

"No"--she looked a little troubled--"he couldn't think it would be quite right.

But I don't know--a sight like this takes me off my feet, shakes me up, and does _me_ a world of good!"

"You dear, simple thing!"

said Marcella, slipping her hand into Mary's as it lay on the bench.

"Oh, you needn't be so superior!"

cried Mary,--"not for another year at least.