Marcella — Bk. 2 Ch. 14
CHAPTER XIV.
"But this is unbearable!"
said Aldous.
"Do you mean to say that she is at home and that she will not see me?"
Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed humiliation of the man before her.
"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly.
"I remonstrated with Marcella, but I could do nothing.
I think, if you are wise, you will not for the present attempt to see her."
Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor.
After a few moments' silence he looked up again.
"And she gave you no message for me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly.
"Only that she could not bear to see anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter was still undecided."
Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room.
It was arrested by a chair beside him.
On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of which the handwriting seemed to him familiar.
A needle with some black silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair;
the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter.
She had been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled before him.
The door into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.
He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the writing.
Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside her.
"Will you tell me," he said steadily--"I think you will admit I have a right to know--is Marcella in constant correspondence now with Henry Wharton?"
Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.
"I believe so," she quickly replied.
"So far as I can judge, he writes to her almost every other day."
"Does she show you his letters?"
"Very often.
They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews and efforts on Hurd's behalf."
"Would you not say," he asked, after another pause, raising his clear grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December Marcella's whole views and thoughts have been largely--perhaps vitally--influenced by this man?"
Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind--had, indeed, often marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before.
Now that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them with common sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both parties.
The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and oppressed the mother.
For herself she asked to see things in a dry light.
Yet she knew well that the moment was critical.
Her feeling was more mixed than it had been.
On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's side--with qualifications and impatiences, however.
She took up her embroidery again before she answered him.
In her opinion the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the diplomatist.
"Yes, certainly," she said at last.
"He has done a great deal to form her opinions.
He has made her both read and think on all those subjects she has so long been fond of talking about."
She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with him.
"Has there been nothing else than that in it?"
said Aldous, in an odd voice.
Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions.
She looked at him straight, her slight, energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind her.
"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real truth.
I _think_ there is nothing else.
But let me tell you what more I think."
Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant.
In his pity and liking for her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.
"If you would," he entreated.
"Leave Marcella quite alone--for the present.
She is not herself--not normal, in any way.
Nor will she be till this dreadful thing is over.
But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a little, _then_"--her thin voice expressed all the emphasis it could--"_then_ assert yourself!
Ask her that question you have asked me--and get your answer."
He understood.
Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past.
But there was a proud and sensitive instinct in him which both told him that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.
"You have come from London to-day?"
said Mrs. Boyce, changing the subject.
All intimate and personal conversation was distasteful to her, and she admitted few responsibilities.
Her daughter hardly counted among them.
"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said, trying to smile.
"I must get back to-night."
"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs. Boyce.
He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and trouble I am, he must be spared.
Indeed, since the night of the trial, I feel as though I had been of very little use to any human being."
He spoke simply, but every word touched her.
What an inconceivable entanglement the whole thing was!
Yet she was no longer merely contemptuous of it.
"Look!"
she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the ground beside the chair which held the envelope; "she is already making the mourning for the children.
I can see she despairs."
He made a sound of horror.
"Can you do nothing?"
he cried reproachfully.
"To think of her dwelling upon this--nothing but this, day and night--and I, banished and powerless!"
He buried his head in his hands.
"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately.
Then, after a pause, "You do not imagine there is any chance of success for her?"
He looked up and shook his head.
"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know.
Wharton is managing it with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the House.
But I happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I certainly gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm.
There may be some delay.
The new ministry will not kiss hands till Saturday.
But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home Secretary.
--By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my seeing Judge Cartwright," he added hastily--almost imploringly.
"I could not bear that she should suppose--" Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have imagined such a man in such a plight.
"I must go," he said, rising.
"Will you tell her from me," he added slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty--without a word?"
"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.
"Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you.
Mr. Wharton, in his letter this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which were important to him.
She specially wished you to be thanked for it."
His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was genuinely glad to hear.
In her opinion he was much too apt to forget that the world yields itself only to the "violent."
He walked away from the house without once looking back.
Marcella, from, her window, watched him go.
"How _could_ she see him?"
she asked herself passionately, both then and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days.
His turn would come, and it should be amply given him.
But _now_ the very thought of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears.
The time for entreaty--for argument--was gone by, so far as he was concerned.
He might have been her champion, and would not.
She threw herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her lover's. It had become to her a _fight_--with society, with the law, with Aldous--in which her whole nature was absorbed.
In the course of the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter offence to her.
How little she could do after all!
She gathered together all the newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line;
she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters;
she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd and her children.
She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector, because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with her father were much strained.
Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of alarm as to how things might end.
He might not like the Raeburns, but that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was, notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon discovered, that he really desired.
During six months he had taken it for granted; so had the county.
He, of all men, could not afford to be made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of the matter.
He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had had a good deal to do with it.
So that between him and his daughter there were now constant sparrings--sparrings which degraded Marcella in her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from home.
The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course, was in Minta Hurd's kitchen.
Side by side with that piteous plaintive misery, her own fierceness dwindled.
She would sit with little Willie on her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and crying silently.
She never suspected that her presence was often a burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the wife herself.
While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs. Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.
The last week arrived.
Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause became more desperate.
On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man, who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope.
Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament.
Friday was the day fixed for the execution.
The question in Parliament came on late.
The Home Secretary's answer, though not final in form, was final in substance.
Wharton went out immediately and wrote to Marcella.
"She will not sleep if I telegraph to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for physical detail, which had in it something of the woman.
But, knowing that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn the news first from the papers.
Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might reach her any hour.
She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind her.
William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of understanding.
Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.
"All over.
The Home Secretary's official refusal to interfere with sentence sent to Widrington to-day.
Accept my sorrow and sympathy."
She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically.
Before her lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her father's big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied his ferrets in the winter nights.
But to-day the spring worked in it, and breathed upon it.
The young corn was already green in the furrows; the hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air, daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the wide treeless basin.
Human helplessness, human agony--set against the careless joy of nature--there is no new way of feeling these things.
But not to have felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full stature of our kind.
* * * * * "Marcella, it is my strong wish--my command--that you do _not_ go out to the village to-night."
"I must go, papa."
It was Thursday night--the night before the Friday morning fixed for Hurd's execution.
Dinner at Mellor was just over.
Mr. Boyce, who was standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter.
She had not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black cloak and black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks.
Mr. Boyce detested the garb.
"You are making yourself _ridiculous_, Marcella.
Pity for these wretched people is all very well, but you have no business to carry it to such a point that you--and we--become the talk, the laughing-stock of the county.
And I should like to see you, too, pay some attention to Aldous Raeburn's feelings and wishes."
The admonition, in her father's mouth, would almost have made her laugh, if she could have laughed at anything.
But, instead, she only repeated: "I must go, I have explained to mamma."
"Evelyn!
why do you permit it?"
cried Mr. Boyce, turning aggressively to his wife.
"Marcella explained to me, as she truly said," replied Mrs. Boyce, looking up calmly.
"It is not her habit to ask permission of any one."
"Mamma," exclaimed the girl, in her deep voice, "you would not wish to stop me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, after a pause, "no. You have gone so far, I understand your wish to do this.
Richard,"--she got up and went to him,--"don't excite yourself about it; shall I read to you, or play a game with you?"
He looked at her, trembling with anger.
But her quiet eye warned him that he had had threatenings of pain that afternoon.
His anger sank into fear.
He became once more irritable and abject.
"Let her gang her gait," he said, throwing himself into a chair.
"But I tell you I shall not put up with this kind of thing much longer, Marcella."
"I shall not ask you, papa," she said steadily, as she moved towards the door.
Mrs. Boyce paused where she stood, and looked after her daughter, struck by her words.
Mr. Boyce simply took them as referring to the marriage which would emancipate her before long from any control of his, and fumed, without finding a reply.
The maid-servant who, by Mrs. Boyce's orders, was to accompany Marcella to the village, was already at the front door.
She carried a basket containing invalid food for little Willie, and a lighted lantern.
It was a dark night and raining fast.
Marcella was fastening up her tweed skirt in the hall, when she saw Mrs. Boyce hurry along the gallery above, and immediately afterwards her mother came across the hall to her.
"You had better take the shawl, Marcella: it is cold and raw.
If you are going to sit up most of the night you will want it."
She put a wrap of her own across Marcella's arm.
"Your father is quite right," she went on.
"You have had one horrible experience to-day already--" "Don't, mamma!"
exclaimed Marcella, interrupting her.
Then suddenly she threw her arms round her mother.
"Kiss me, mamma!
please kiss me!"
Mrs. Boyce kissed her gravely, and let herself even linger a moment in the girl's strong hold.
"You are extraordinarily wilful," she said.
"And it is so strange to me that you think you do any good.
Are you sure even that she wants to have you?"
Marcella's lip quivered.
She could not speak, apparently.
Waving her hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two disappeared into the blackness.
"But _does_ it do any good?"
Mrs. Boyce repeated to herself as she went back to the drawing-room.
"_Sympathy!
_ who was ever yet fed, warmed, comforted by _sympathy_?
Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that the human being should want at such a moment--solitude.
Why should we force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?"
Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this horror which was beneath them.
At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the little maid.
"Now, Ruth, you can go home.
Run quick, it is so dark, Ruth!"
"Yes, miss." The young country girl trembled.
Miss Boyce's tragic passion in this matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she lived.
"Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the poor,--and to punish the cruel!"
"Yes, miss," said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry.
The lantern she held flashed its light on Miss Boyce's white face and tall form.
Till her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark eye, so wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.
On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused.
She heard voices inside--or rather the rector's voice reading.
A thought of scorn rose in her heart.
"How long will the poor endure this religion--this make-believe--which preaches patience, _patience_!
when it ought to be urging war?"
But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt.
The rector looked up and made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and the reading went on.
Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for.
He had bade them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a mattress had been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it.
Her huddled form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed eyelids, thrown out against the dark oak of the settle, and the disordered mass of grizzled hair, made the centre of the cottage.
Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough hand she held, her eyes red with weeping.
Fronting them, beside a little table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his Testament in his hand, his slight boy's figure cast in sharp shadow on the cottage wall.
He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light of the lamp from the wife's eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a chair to keep it from little Willie.
Between mother and child sat Ann Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from time to time--a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children and much poverty--of whom Marcella was often impatient.
"_And he said, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom.
And He said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."
_ The rector's voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt insistently on each word, then paused.
"_To-day_," whispered Mary, caressing Minta's hand, while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."
Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and sent a start through Willie's wasted body.
The reader resumed; but perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling leaven.
Nevertheless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on every pang of the Passion, putting together every sacred and sublime word.
For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held up the Man of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had come, his moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he accepted it with the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.
"_And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their breasts_."
He closed the book, and bent forward, so as to bring his voice close to the wife's ear.
"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your husband.
He has passed through death--through cruel death; and where He has gone, we poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to Him.
No sin, however black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His hand in the dark waters, if it be only repented,--thrown upon His Cross.
Let us pray for your husband, let us implore the Lord's mercy this night--this hour!
--upon his soul."
A shudder of remembrance passed through Marcella.
The rector knelt; Mrs. Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at intervals; Ann Mullins sobbed loudly; and Mary Harden wept as she prayed, lost in a mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there on the cottage floor--stretching hands of pity over the woman beside her, showing His marred side and brow.
Marcella alone sat erect, her whole being one passionate protest against a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities of this too real earth on the shadowy head of one far-off Redeemer.
"This very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort an accomplice of those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and killing, because they know of nothing better to do with the life they themselves have made outcast."
And she hardened her heart.
When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for some minutes.
So did Mary.
In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the boy's eyes unclose.
He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother and the figures beside her.
Then suddenly the gaze became eager, concrete; he sought for something.
Her eye followed his, and she perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned.
She stooped noiselessly and moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better.
The child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little, all--with just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had fascinated Wharton.
Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could have wept.
At last the rector and his sister rose.
"God be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; "God support you!"
His voice trembled.
Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.
"Oh, Mr. Harden!"
she cried with a sudden wail.
"Mr. Harden!"
Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."
The rector turned to Marcella.
"You are staying the night with her?"
he asked, under his breath.
"Yes.
Mrs. Mullins was up all last night.
I offered to come to-night."
"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Hurd?"
"For a very few minutes."
"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?"
he asked anxiously.
"Is he penitent?"
"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce humanness in her unfriendly eyes.
"I promised him that when the child died, he should be buried respectably--not by the parish.
And I told him I would always look after the little girls."
The rector sighed.
He moved away.
Then unexpectedly he came back again.
"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as not to be heard by any one else in the cottage.
"You are taking a great responsibility here to-night.
Let me implore you not to fill that poor woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her life.
That _you_ feel bitterly, I know.
Mary has explained to me--but ask yourself, I beg of you!
--how is _she_ to be helped through her misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission to the will of God?"
He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.
"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella, coldly.
She felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her.
That hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell once for all.
Mary did not venture to kiss her friend.
They all went.
Ann Mulling, who was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last.
When she was going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the skirt, saying incoherent things.
"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her, "won't you let Ann go?
