CHAPTER X.
"Won't you sit nearer to the window? We are rather proud of our view atthis time of year," said Miss Raeburn to Marcella, taking her visitor'sjacket from her as she spoke, and laying it aside. "Lady Winterbourne islate, but she will come, I am sure. She is very precise aboutengagements."
Marcella moved her chair nearer to the great bow-window, and looked outover the sloping gardens of the Court, and the autumn splendour of thewoods girdling them in on all sides. She held her head nervously erect,was not apparently much inclined to talk, and Miss Raeburn, who hadresumed her knitting within a few paces of her guest, said to herselfpresently after a few minutes' conversation on the weather and the walkfrom Mellor: "Difficult--decidedly difficult--and too much manner for ayoung girl. But the most picturesque creature I ever set eyes on!"
Lord Maxwell's sister was an excellent woman, the inquisitive,benevolent despot of all the Maxwell villages; and one of the soundestTories still left to a degenerate party and a changing time. Her brotherand her great-nephew represented to her the flower of human kind; shehad never been capable, and probably never would be capable, ofquarrelling with either of them on any subject whatever. At the sametime she had her rights with them. She was at any rate their naturalguardian in those matters, relating to womankind, where men areconfessedly given to folly. She had accordingly kept a shrewd eye inAldous's interest on all the young ladies of the neighbourhood for manyyears past; knew perfectly well all that he might have done, and sighedover all that he had so far left undone.
At the present moment, in spite of the even good-breeding with which sheknitted and chattered beside Marcella, she was in truth consumed withcuriosity, conjecture, and alarm on the subject of this Miss Boyce.Profoundly as they trusted each other, the Raeburns were not on thesurface a communicative family. Neither her brother nor Aldous had sofar bestowed any direct confidence upon her; but the course of affairshad, notwithstanding, aroused her very keenest attention. In the firstplace, as we know, the mistress of Maxwell Court had left Mellor and itsnew occupants unvisited; she had plainly understood it to be herbrother's wish that she should do so. How, indeed, could you know thewomen without knowing Richard Boyce? which, according to Lord Maxwell,was impossible. And now it was Lord Maxwell who had suggested not onlythat after all it would be kind to call upon the poor things, who wereheavily weighted enough already with Dick Boyce for husband and father,but that it would be a graceful act on his sister's part to ask the girland her mother to luncheon. Dick Boyce of course must be made to keephis distance, but the resources of civilisation were perhaps not unequalto the task of discriminating, if it were prudently set about. At anyrate Miss Raeburn gathered that she was expected to try, and instead ofpressing her brother for explanations she held her tongue, paid her callforthwith, and wrote her note.
But although Aldous, thinking no doubt that he had been alreadysufficiently premature, had said nothing at all as to his own feelingsto his great-aunt, she knew perfectly well that he had said a great dealon the subject of Miss Boyce and her mother to Lady Winterbourne, theonly woman in the neighbourhood with whom he was ever reallyconfidential. No woman, of course, in Miss Raeburn's position, and withMiss Raeburn's general interest in her kind, could have been ignorantfor any appreciable number of days after the Boyces' arrival at Mellorthat they possessed a handsome daughter, of whom the Hardens inparticular gave striking but, as Miss Raeburn privately thought, by nomeans wholly attractive accounts. And now, after all these somewhatagitating preliminaries, here was the girl established in the Courtdrawing-room, Aldous more nervous and preoccupied than she had ever seenhim, and Lord Maxwell expressing a particular anxiety to return from hisBoard meeting in good time for luncheon, to which he had especiallydesired that Lady Winterbourne should be bidden, and no one else! It maywell be supposed that Miss Raeburn was on the alert.
As for Marcella, she was on her side keenly conscious of being observed,of having her way to make. Here she was alone among these formidablepeople, whose acquaintance she had in a manner compelled. Well--whatblame? What was to prevent her from doing the same thing againto-morrow? Her conscience was absolutely clear. If they were not readyto meet her in the same spirit in which through Mr. Raeburn she hadapproached them, she would know perfectly well how to protectherself--above all, how to live out her life in the future withouttroubling them.
Meanwhile, in spite of her dignity and those inward propitiations itfrom time to time demanded, she was, in her human vivid way, full of anexcitement and curiosity she could hardly conceal as perfectly as shedesired--curiosity as to the great house and the life in it, especiallyas to Aldous Raeburn's part therein. She knew very little indeed of theclass to which by birth she belonged; great houses and great people werestrange to her. She brought her artist's and student's eyes to look atthem with; she was determined not to be dazzled or taken in by them. Atthe same time, as she glanced every now and then round the splendid roomin which they sat, with its Tudor ceiling, its fine pictures, itscombination of every luxury with every refinement, she was distinctlyconscious of a certain thrill, a romantic drawing towards thestateliness and power which it all implied, together with a proud andcareless sense of equality, of kinship so to speak, which she made lightof, but would not in reality have been without for the world.
In birth and blood she had nothing to yield to the Raeburns--so hermother assured her. If things were to be vulgarly measured, this facttoo must come in. But they should not be vulgarly measured. She did notbelieve in class or wealth--not at all. Only--as her mother had toldher--she must hold her head up. An inward temper, which no doubt led tothat excess of manner of which Miss Raeburn was meanwhile conscious.
Where were the gentlemen? Marcella was beginning to resent and tire ofthe innumerable questions as to her likes and dislikes, heraccomplishments, her friends, her opinions of Mellor and theneighbourhood, which this knitting lady beside her poured out upon herso briskly, when to her great relief the door opened and a footmanannounced "Lady Winterbourne."
A very tall thin lady in black entered the room at the words. "My dear!"she said to Miss Raeburn, "I am very late, but the roads are abominable,and those horses Edward has just given me have to be taken such tiresomecare of. I told the coachman next time he might wrap them in shawls andput them to bed, and _I_ should walk."
"You are quite capable of it, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, kissing her."We know you! Miss Boyce--Lady Winterbourne."
Lady Winterbourne shook hands with a shy awkwardness which belied herheight and stateliness. As she sat down beside Miss Raeburn the contrastbetween her and Lord Maxwell's sister was sufficiently striking. MissRaeburn was short, inclined to be stout, and to a certain gay profusionin her attire. Her cap was made of a bright silk handkerchief edged withlace; round her neck were hung a number of small trinkets on variousgold chains; she abounded too in bracelets, most of which were clearlyold-fashioned mementos of departed relatives or friends. Her dress wasa cheerful red verging on crimson; and her general air suggested energy,bustle, and a good-humoured common sense.
Lady Winterbourne, on the other hand, was not only dressed from head tofoot in severe black without an ornament; her head and face belongedalso to the same impression, as of some strong and forcible study inblack and white. The attitude was rigidly erect; the very dark eyes,under the snowy and abundant hair, had a trick of absent staring; incertain aspects the whole figure had a tragic, nay, formidable dignity,from which one expected, and sometimes got, the tone and gesture oftragic acting. Yet at the same time, mixed in therewith, a curiousstrain of womanish, nay childish, weakness, appealingness. Altogether, agreat lady, and a personality--yet something else too--somethingill-assured, timid, incongruous--hard to be defined.
"I believe you have not been at Mellor long?" the new-comer asked, in adeep contralto voice which she dragged a little.
"About seven weeks. My father and mother have been there since May."
"You must of course think it a very interesting old place?"
/>
"Of course I do; I love it," said Marcella, disconcerted by the oddhabit Lady Winterbourne had of fixing her eyes upon a person, and then,as it were, forgetting what she had done with them.
"Oh, I haven't been there, Agneta," said the new-comer, turning after apause to Miss Raeburn, "since that summer--_you_ remember that partywhen the Palmerstons came over--so long ago--twenty years!"
Marcella sat stiffly upright. Lady Winterbourne grew a little nervousand flurried.
"I don't think I ever saw your mother, Miss Boyce--I was much away fromhome about then. Oh, yes, I did once--"
The speaker stopped, a sudden red suffusing her pale cheeks. She hadfelt certain somehow, at sight of Marcella, that she should say or dosomething untoward, and she had promptly justified her own prevision.The only time she had ever seen Mrs. Boyce had been in court, on thelast day of the famous trial in which Richard Boyce was concerned, whenshe had made out the wife sitting closely veiled as near to her husbandas possible, waiting for the verdict. As she had already confided thisreminiscence to Miss Raeburn, and had forgotten she had done so, bothladies had a moment of embarrassment.
"Mrs. Boyce, I am sorry to say, does not seem to be strong," said MissRaeburn, bending over the heel of her stocking. "I wish we could havehad the pleasure of seeing her to-day."
There was a pause. Lady Winterbourne's tragic eyes were once moreconsidering Marcella.
"I hope you will come and see me," she said at last abruptly--"and Mrs.Boyce too."
The voice was very soft and refined though so deep, and Marcella lookingup was suddenly magnetised.
"Yes, I will," she said, all her face melting into sensitive life."Mamma won't go anywhere, but I will come, if you will ask me."
"Will you come next Tuesday?" said Lady Winterbourne quickly--"come totea, and I will drive you back. Mr. Raeburn told me about you. Hesays--you read a great deal."
The solemnity of the last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, werenot to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneouslythought her extraordinarily radiant and handsome.
"How can he know? Why, I have hardly talked about books to him at all."
"Well! here he comes," said Lady Winterbourne, smiling suddenly; "so Ican ask him. But I am sure he did say so."
It was now Marcella's turn to colour. Aldous Raeburn crossed the room,greeted Lady Winterbourne, and next moment she felt her hand in his.
"You did tell me, Aldous, didn't you," said Lady Winterbourne, "thatMiss Boyce was a great reader?"
The speaker had known Aldous Raeburn as a boy, and was, moreover, a sortof cousin, which explained the Christian name.
Aldous smiled.
"I said I thought Miss Boyce was like you and me, and had a weaknessthat way, Lady Winterbourne. But I won't be cross-examined!"
"I don't think I am a great reader," said Marcella, bluntly--"at least Iread a great deal, but I hardly ever read a book through. I haven'tpatience."
"You want to get at everything so quickly?" said Miss Raeburn, lookingup sharply.
"I suppose so!" said Marcella. "There seems to be always a hundredthings tearing one different ways, and no time for any of them."
"Yes, when one is young one feels like that," said Lady Winterbourne,sighing. "When one is old one accepts one's limitations. When I wastwenty I never thought that I should still be an ignorant anddiscontented woman at nearly seventy."
"It is because you are so young still, Lady Winterbourne, that you feelso," said Aldous, laughing at her, as one does at an old friend. "Why,you are younger than any of us! I feel all brushed and stirred up--a boyat school again--after I have been to see you!"
"Well, I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Lady Winterbourne,sighing again. Then she looked at the pair beside her--at the alertbrightness in the man's strong and quiet face as he sat stoopingforward, with his hands upon his knees, hardly able to keep his eyes foran instant from the dark apparition beside him--at the girl's evidentshyness and pride.
"My dear!" she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heardwhat a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of ababy? It was born with four teeth!"
Miss Raeburn's astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two oldfriends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne'snumerous family, which was clearly meant for a _tete-a-tete_.
"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour,after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and herwalk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid mygrandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier thanthis, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kepthim an unconscionable time."
Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the roomwhere a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled thewall from side to side.
"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What adelicious thing to live with."
And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints,suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing inflowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses.Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns andpinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearledand warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. Itwas Italy at the great moment--subtle, rich, exuberant.
Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.
"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my specialdelight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of agarret. I am not sure that I don't in my heart prefer it to any of thepictures."
"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it--"look at them--the irises,the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to havewhen one was small of what it would be like to have _flowers enough_. Iwas at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed alwayscheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, andI found one here and one there--but such a beggarly, wretched few, forall one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myselfby imagining countries where the flowers grew like this--yes, just likethis, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one'shands in and gather and gather till one was really _satisfied_! That isthe worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough ofanything. One day it's flowers--but the next day it is pudding--and thenext frocks."
Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant tofeel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admirationand deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck,and vibrated happily.
"Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will makeup to you!" he said, smiling at her. "But now, I have been wondering tomyself in my room upstairs what you would like to see. There are a goodmany treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because youare an artist. But you shall not be bored with them! You shall see whatand as much as you like. You had about a quarter of an hour's talk withmy aunt, did you not?" he asked, in a quite different tone.
So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance,he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his ownpurposes! Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into hercheek.
"Miss Raeburn was very kind," she said, with a return of shyness, whichpassed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring. "Yes,she was very kind!--but all the same she doesn't like me--I don't thinkshe is going to like me--I am not her sort."
"Have you been talking Socialism to her?" he asked her, smiling.
"No, not yet--not yet," she said emphatically. "But I am dreadfullyuncertain--I can't always hold my tongue--I am afraid you will be sorryyou took me up."
"Are you so aggressive? But Aunt Neta is so mild!--she wouldn't hurt afly. She mothers every one in the house and out of it. The only peopleshe is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will
wear feathers intheir hats!"
"There!" cried Marcella, indignantly. "Why shouldn't they wear feathersin their hats? It is their form of beauty--their tapestry!"
"But if one can't have both feathers and boots?" he asked her humbly, atwinkle in his grey eye. "If one hasn't boots, one may catch a cold anddie of it--which is, after all, worse than going featherless."
"But why _can't_ they have feathers and boots? It is becauseyou--we--have got too much. You have the tapestry--and--and thepictures"--she turned and looked round the room--"and this wonderfulhouse--and the park. Oh, no--I think it is Miss Raeburn has too manyfeathers!"
"Perhaps it is," he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing andsaddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled tohim. "You see I am in a difficulty. I want to show you our feathers. Ithink they would please you--and you make me ashamed of them."
"How absurd!" cried Marcella, "when I told you how I liked the schoolchildren bobbing to me!"
They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start--"Ah, here is mygrandfather!"
Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, aftergreeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce. He saw the old man'ssomewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes whichmarked the first effect of Marcella's form and presence, the bow, thestately shake of the hand. The lover hearing his own heart beat,realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.
"You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to yourgrandfather," said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch,Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne. "He was one ofmy dearest friends."
"I'm afraid I don't know much about him," said Marcella, rather bluntly,"except what I have got out of old letters. I never saw him that Iremember."
Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a greatwish to talk to her, and make her talk. He had pleasant things to sayabout Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and someconversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to adiscussion of the part played by the different local families in theCivil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried invarious shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease withherself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the localbrotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he couldnot but divine.
The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with anindependence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life. Shewas not in the least abashed or shy. Yet it was clear that LordMaxwell's first impressions were favourable. Aldous caught every now andthen his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantlywithdrawn--comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, andtone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn's wife shouldbe. How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitelyreal! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, itsVandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun floodingthe gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass andsilver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the movingservants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, thedark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive,extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterlyunlike any other woman he had ever seen--every detail of it was chargedto him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.
For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is,almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the wholenature, into the second stage--the stage of anxiety, incredulity.Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning,seemed to him not nearer, but further from him. She was terribly on herdignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shownhim on that walk, beside the gate? There had been a touch of it, adivine touch, before luncheon. How could he get her to himself again?
Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic--thebadness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequentdepression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.
"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said LordMaxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean. To give money is easyenough. Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, andthought no more of it. We don't get through so easily."
"No," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "It weighs one down. Last winterwas a nightmare. The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!--though weseemed to be always giving. And in the middle of it Edward would buy mea new set of sables. I begged him not, but he laughed at me."
"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, "if nobody boughtsables, there'd be other poor people up in Russia, isn't it?--orHudson's Bay?--badly off. One has, to think of that. Oh, you needn'ttalk, Aldous! I know you say it's a fallacy. _I_ call it common sense."
She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago lefthis great-aunt to work out her own economics. And, anyway, she saw thathe was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne inwatching Miss Boyce.
"It's precisely as Lord Maxwell says," replied Lady Winterbourne; "thatkind of thing used to satisfy everybody. And our grandmothers were verygood women. I don't know why we, who give ourselves so much more troublethan they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they wentfree."
She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, lookinground, was glad to see the servants had left the room.
"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heardtales of Miss Boyce's opinions!" said Lord Maxwell, smiling at her, withan old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.
Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; herhead was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start.She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on hisnative heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to agirl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.
"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.
"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "Wecan't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."
Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, whichescaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.
"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "WeSocialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take whatwe can get out of both."
"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"
Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after amorning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement atluncheon.
"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least Iought to be--I am in my conscience."
"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the conditionof most of us?"
"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasmroused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me aSocialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuriesand precedences--the worst part of one--that makes me waver, makes me atraitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitoroften, I know."
"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again andhatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"
"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, aftera pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to meworse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty--suchmutilation of mind and body--were meant to go on for ever!"
Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldousshould find those eyes of hers superb?
"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her mildly,"that if all property were divided to-morrow the force of naturalinequality would not have undone all the work the day after, and givenus back our poor?"
The "newspaper cant" of this remark, as the
Cravens would have put it,brought a contemptuous look for an instant into the girl's face. Shebegan to talk eagerly and cleverly, showing a very fair training in thecatch words of the school, and a good memory--as one uncomfortableperson at the table soon perceived--for some of the leading argumentsand illustrations of a book of Venturist Essays which had lately beenmuch read and talked of in London.
Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, andthe interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged intohistory, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute ofLabourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other greatmatters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, andall with the same utter oblivion--so it seemed to her stiff indignanthostess at the other end of the table--of the manners and modesty properto a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce'sdaughter!
Aldous struck in now and then, trying to soothe her by supporting her toa certain extent, and so divert the conversation. But Marcella was soontoo excited to be managed; and she had her say; a very strong say oftenas far as language went: there could be no doubt of that.
"Ah, well," said Lord Maxwell, wincing at last under some of herphrases, in spite of his courteous _savoir-faire_, "I see you are of thesame opinion as a good man whose book I took up yesterday: 'Thelandlords of England have always shown a mean and malignant passion forprofiting by the miseries of others?' Well, Aldous, my boy, we arejudged, you and I--no help for it!"
The man whose temper and rule had made the prosperity of a whole countryside for nearly forty years, looked at his grandson with twinkling eyes.Miss Raeburn was speechless. Lady Winterbourne was absently staring atMarcella, a spot of red on each pale cheek.
Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.
"Of course, you think me very ridiculous," she said, with a tremulouschange of tone. "I suppose I am. And I am as inconsistent as anybody--Ihate myself for it. Very often when anybody talks to me on the otherside, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists: theyalways told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker. But itcan't make any difference to one's _feeling_: nothing touches that."
She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing--
"It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see theplaces the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, andone passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudgingback from her work; when one realises that they have no _rights_ whenthey come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which _we_, whohave everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that everyone of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than Ishall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state ofthings is _somehow_ wrong and topsy-turvy and _wicked_." Her voice rosea little, every emphasis grew more passionate. "And if I don't dosomething--the little such a person as I can--to alter it before I die,I might as well never have lived."
Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, hismouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was aforcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to dealconveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?
Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:
"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree withyou. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."
The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.
"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breathfrom tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equallycharacteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once,before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it--not atall. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I shoulddo without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine.Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choosebetween things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leavenobody--not even the richest--more than four hundred a year."
"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road,"said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have amaid."
"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. ButI tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your _heart_ and_conscience_ have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with yourclass, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. Mygrandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was drivinghome through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourerwho was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. Shestopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there andthen--the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then shedrove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night withmore consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the powerof the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"--and she laid herthin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell'sarm--"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of_right_ in our place and position--at least I find I have. In the olddays if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it downwith a strong hand."
"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there wereviolence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you willsee where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it willnot be _we_--not the landowners or the capitalists--who will put itdown. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something tolose--a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own builtthrough a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by theirown savings--it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friendsdown so far as they represent any real attack on property--and brutally,too, I fear, if need be."
"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never cansee how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one _rejoice_ init? How can any one _wish_ that the present state of things should goon? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, andthe starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, ofcourse, the poaching--"
Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brotherwas still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let suchtalk go on? It was too unseemly.
Lord Maxwell only laughed. "My dear young lady," he said, much amused,"are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher?Disillusion lies that way!--it does indeed. Why--Aldous!--I have beenhearing such tales from Westall this morning. I stopped at Corbett'sfarm a minute or two on the way home, and met Westall at the gate comingout. He says he and his men are being harried to death round aboutTudley End by a gang of men that come, he thinks, from Oxford, a drivinggang with a gig, who come at night or in the early morning--the smartestrascals out, impossible to catch. But he says he thinks he will soonhave his hand on the local accomplice--a Mellor man--a man named Hurd:not one of our labourers, I think."
"Hurd!" cried Marcella, in dismay. "Oh no, it _can't_ be--impossible!"
Lord Maxwell looked at her in astonishment.
"Do you know any Hurds? I am afraid your father will find that Mellor isa bad place for poaching."
"If it is, it is because they are so starved and miserable," saidMarcella, trying hard to speak coolly, but excited almost beyond boundsby the conversation and all that it implied. "And the Hurds--I don'tbelieve it a bit! But if it were true--oh! they have been in suchstraits--they were out of work most of last winter; they are out of worknow, No one _could_ grudge them. I told you about them, didn't I?" shesaid, suddenly glancing at Aldous. "I was going to ask you to-day, ifyou could help them?" Her prophetess air had altogether left her. Shefelt ready to cry; and nothing could have been more womanish than hertone.
He bent across to her. Miss Raeburn, invaded by a new and intolerablesense of calamity, could have beaten him for what she read in hisshining eyes, and in the flush on his usually pale cheek.
"Is he s
till out of work?" he said. "And you are unhappy about it? But Iam sure we can find him work: I am just now planning improvements at thenorth end of the park. We can take him on; I am certain of it. You mustgive me his full name and address."
"And let him beware of Westall," said Lord Maxwell, kindly. "Give him ahint, Miss Boyce, and nobody will rake up bygones. There is nothing Idislike so much as rows about the shooting. All the keepers know that."
"And of course," said Miss Raeburn, coldly, "if the family are in realdistress there are plenty of people at hand to assist them. The man neednot steal."
"Oh, charity!" cried Marcella, her lip curling.
"A worse crime than poaching, you think," said Lord Maxwell, laughing."Well, these are big subjects. I confess, after my morning with thelunatics, I am half inclined, like Horace Walpole, to think everythingserious ridiculous. At any rate shall we see what light a cup of coffeethrows upon it? Agneta, shall we adjourn?"