CHAPTER VIII.
Scarcely a word was exchanged between Marcella and her mother on thedrive home. Yet under ordinary circumstances Marcella's imaginationwould have found some painful exercise in the effort to find out in whatspirit her mother had taken the evening--the first social festivity inwhich Richard Boyce's wife had taken part for sixteen years. In fact,Mrs. Boyce had gone through it very quietly. After her first publicentry on Lord Maxwell's arm she had sat in her corner, taking keen noteof everything, enjoying probably the humours of her kind. Several oldacquaintances who had seen her at Mellor as a young wife in her firstmarried years had come up with some trepidation to speak to her. She hadreceived them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had goneaway under the impression that she regarded herself as restored tosociety by this great match that her daughter was making. LadyWinterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; andboth Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested insmoothing the effort to her as much as they could. She meanwhile watchedMarcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she didnot see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and toHallin.
Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxiousto get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticingMarcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in theball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done. Yet the mother_had_ observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhatdifferent from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had beengentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken somepains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her. LordMaxwell--ignorant of the Wandle incident--was charmed with her, andopenly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his heartyold man's way. Only Miss Raeburn held indignantly aloof, and would notpretend, even to Mrs. Boyce.
And now Marcella was tired--dead tired, she said to herself, both inmind and body. She lay back in the carriage, trying to sink herself inher own fatigue, to forget everything, to think of nothing. Outside thenight was mild, and the moon clear. For some days past, after the breakup of the long frost, there had been heavy rain. Now the rain hadcleared away, and in the air there was already an early promise ofspring. As she walked home from the village that afternoon she had feltthe buds and the fields stirring.
When they got home, Mrs. Boyce turned to her daughter at the head of thestairs, "Shall I unlace your dress, Marcella?"
"Oh no, thank you. Can I help you?"
"No. Good-night."
"Mamma!" Marcella turned and ran after her. "I should like to know howpapa is. I will wait here if you will tell me."
Mrs. Boyce looked surprised. Then she went into her room and shut thedoor. Marcella waited outside, leaning against the old oak gallery whichran round the hall, her candle the one spot of light and life in thegreat dark house.
"He seems to have slept well," said Mrs. Boyce, reappearing, andspeaking under her breath. "He has not taken the opiate I left for him,so he cannot have been in pain. Good-night."
Marcella kissed her and went. Somehow, in her depression of nerve andwill, she was loth to go away by herself. The loneliness of the night,and of her wing of the house, weighed upon her; the noises made by theold boards under her steps, the rustling draughts from the dark passagesto right and left startled and troubled her; she found herselfchildishly fearing lest her candle should go out.
Yet, as she descended the two steps to the passage outside her door, shecould have felt little practical need of it, for the moonlight wasstreaming in through its uncovered windows, not directly, but reflectedfrom the Tudor front of the house which ran at right angles to thispassage, and was to-night a shining silver palace, every battlement,window, and moulding in sharpest light and shade under the radiance ofthe night. Beneath her feet, as she looked out into the Cedar Garden,was a deep triangle of shadow, thrown by that part of the building inwhich she stood; and beyond the garden the barred black masses of thecedars closing up the view lent additional magic to the glitteringunsubstantial fabric of the moonlit house, which was, as it were,embosomed and framed among them. She paused a moment, struck by thestrangeness and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air ofsome fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weirdgathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatientlylonging in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments andtumble into sleep.
Yet she made no hurry. She fell on the first chair that offered. Hercandle behind her had little power over the glooms of the darktapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her ownform, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straightin front of her. She sat with her hands round her knees, absentlylooking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of thedarkness. But she was conscious of nothing save one mountingoverwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.
Mr. Wharton must go away--he _must_--or she could not bear it.
Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender,rose and broke upon her. At last, physical weariness recalled her. Sheput up her hands to take off her pearls.
As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head.Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from hercorridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, andopened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.
Steps surely--light steps--along the corridor outside, and on thestaircase. Nor did they die away. She could still hear them,--as shesat, arrested, straining her ears,--pacing slowly along the lowerpassage.
Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life. This room ofhers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented thatpart of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung mostpersistently. Substantially the block of building was of early Tudordate, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made withsome clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-centuryfront, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan.Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce whowas supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at leastforty years before the staircase was made. None the less, no servantwould go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark;and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep whereshe did. Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic,of steps, groans, lights in the library, and the rest. Marcella hadconsistently laughed at her.
Yet all the same she had made in secret a very diligent pursuit of thisghost, settling in the end to a certain pique with him that he would notshow himself to so ardent a daughter of the house. She had sat upwaiting for him; she had lingered in the corridor outside, and on thestairs, expecting him. By the help of a favourite carpenter she had maderesearches into roofs, water-pipes, panelling, and old cupboards, in thehope of finding a practical clue to him. In vain.
Yet here were the steps--regular, soft, unmistakable. The colour rushedback into her cheeks! Her eager healthy youth forgot its woes, flung offits weariness, and panted for an adventure, a discovery. Springing up,she threw her fur wrap round her again, and gently opened the door,listening.
For a minute, nothing--then a few vague sounds as of something livingand moving down below--surely in the library? Then the steps again.Impossible that it should be any one breaking in. No burglar would walkso leisurely. She closed her door behind her, and, gathering her whitesatin skirts about her, she descended the staircase.
The corridor below was in radiant moonlight, chequered by the few piecesof old furniture it contained, and the black and white of the oldportrait prints hanging on the walls. At first her seeking, excited eyescould make out nothing. Then in a flash they perceived the figure ofWharton at the further end near the garden door, leaning against one ofthe windows. He was apparently looking out at the moonlit house, and shecaught the faint odour of a cigarette.
Her first instinct was to turn and fly. But Wharto
n had seen her. As helooked about him at the sound of her approach, the moon, which was justrounding the corner of the house, struck on her full, amid the shadowsof the staircase, and she heard his exclamation.
Dignity--a natural pride--made her pause. She came forward slowly--heeagerly.
"I heard footsteps," she said, with a coldness under which he plainlysaw her embarrassment. "I could not suppose that anybody was still up,so I came down to see."
He was silent a moment, scanning her with laughing eyes. Then he shookhis head. "Confess you took me for the ghost?" he said.
She hesitated; then must laugh too. She herself had told him thestories, so that his guess was natural.
"Perhaps I did," she said. "One more disappointment! Good-night."
He looked after her a quick undecided moment as she made a step in frontof him, then at the half-burnt cigarette he held in his hand, threw theend away with a hasty gesture, overtook her and walked beside her alongthe corridor.
"I heard you and your mother come in," he said, as though explaininghimself. "Then I waited till I thought you must both be asleep, and camedown here to look at that wonderful effect on the old house." He pointedto the silver palace outside. "I have a trick of being sleepless--atrick, too, of wandering at night. My own people know it, and bear withme, but I am abashed that you should have found me out. Just tell me--inone word--how the ball went?"
He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenlywide-awake as though it were three o'clock in the afternoon instead ofthree in the morning.
Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.
"It went very well," she said perversely, putting her satin-slipperedfoot on the first step. "There were six hundred people upstairs, andfour hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man.Everybody said it was splendid."
His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her. As he had often franklywarned her, he was a man in quest of sensations. Certainly, in thisstrange meeting with Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, in the midst of thesleep-bound house, he had found one. Her eyes were heavy, her cheekpale. But in this soft vague light--white arms and neck now hidden, nowrevealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin--she wasmore enchanting than he had ever seen her. His breath quickened.
He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him.What harm--to her or to Raeburn? Raeburn would have chances enoughbefore long. Why admit his monopoly before the time? She was not in lovewith him! As to Mrs. Grundy--absurd! What in the true reasonableness ofthings was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well asby day?
"One moment"--he said, delaying her. "You must be dead tired--too tiredfor romance. Else I should say to you, turn aside an instant and look atthe library. It is a sight to remember."
Inevitably she glanced behind her, and saw that the library door wasajar. He flung it open, and the great room showed wide, its high domedroof lost in shadow, while along the bare floor and up the latticedbooks crept, here streaks and fingers, and there wide breadths of lightfrom the unshuttered and curtainless windows.
"Isn't it the very poetry of night and solitude?" he said, looking inwith her. "You love the place; but did you ever see it so lovable? Thedead are here; you did right to come and seek them! Look at yournamesake, in that ray. To-night she lives! She knows that is her husbandopposite--those are her books beside her. And the rebel!"--he pointedsmiling to the portrait of John Boyce. "When you are gone I shall shutmyself up here--sit in his chair, invoke him--and put my speechtogether. I am nervous about to-morrow" (he was bound, as she knew, to alarge Labour Congress in the Midlands, where he was to preside), "andsleep will make no terms with me. Ah!--how strange! Who can that bepassing the avenue?"
He made a step or two into the room, and put up his hand to his brow,looking intently. Involuntarily, yet with a thrill, Marcella followed.They walked to the window.
"It is _Hurd_!" she cried in a tone of distress, pressing her faceagainst the glass. "Out at this time, and with a gun! Oh, dear, dear!"
There could be no question that it was Hurd. Wharton had seen him lingerin the shadowy edge of the avenue, as though reconnoitring, and now, ashe stealthily crossed the moonlit grass, his slouching dwarf's figure,his large head, and the short gun under his arm, were all plainlyvisible.
"What do you suppose he is after?" said Wharton, still gazing, his handsin his pockets.
"I don't know; he wouldn't poach on _our_ land; I'm sure he wouldn't!Besides, there is nothing to poach."--Wharton smiled.--"He must begoing, after all, to Lord Maxwell's coverts! They are just beyond theavenue, on the side of the hill. Oh! it is too disappointing! Can we doanything?"
She looked at her companion with troubled eyes. This incursion ofsomething sadly and humanly real seemed suddenly to have made it naturalto be standing beside him there at that strange hour. Her conscience wassoothed.
Wharton shook his head.
"I don't see what we could do. How strong the instinct is! I told youthat woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form--the squalidpeasant's form--of the same instinct which sends the young fellows ofour class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is theinstinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one'sinnings against the powers that be--Nature, or the law, or convention."
"I know all that--I never blame them!"--cried Marcella--"but just now itis so monstrous--so dangerous! Westall specially alert--and this gangabout! Besides, I got him work from Lord Maxwell, and made him promiseme--for the wife and children's sake."
Wharton shrugged his shoulders.
"I should think Westall is right, and that the gang have got hold ofhim. It is what always happens. The local man is the catspaw.--So youare sorry for him--this man?" he said in another tone, facing round uponher.
She looked astonished, and drew herself up nervously, turning at thesame time to leave the room. But before she could reply he hurried on:
"He--may escape his risk. Give your pity, Miss Boyce, rather toone--who has not escaped!"
"I don't know what you mean," she said, unconsciously laying a hand onone of the old chairs beside her to steady herself. "But it is too lateto talk. Good-night, Mr. Wharton."
"Good-bye," he said quietly, yet with a low emphasis, at the same timemoving out of her path. She stopped, hesitating. Beneath the lace andfaded flowers on her breast he could see how her heart beat.
"Not good-bye? You are coming back after the meeting?"
"I think not. I must not inflict myself--on Mrs. Boyce--any more. Youwill all be very busy during the next three weeks. It would be anintrusion if I were to come back at such a time--especially--consideringthe fact"--he spoke slowly--"that I am as distasteful as I now knowmyself to be, to your future husband. Since you all left to-night thehouse has been very quiet. I sat over the fire thinking. It grew clearto me. I must go, and go at once. Besides--a lonely man as I am must notrisk his nerve. His task is set him, and there are none to stand by himif he fails."
She trembled all over. Weariness and excitement made normal self-controlalmost impossible.
"Well, then, I must say thank you," she said indistinctly, "for you havetaught me a great deal."
"You will unlearn it!" he said gaily, recovering his self-possession, soit seemed, as she lost hers. "Besides, before many weeks are over youwill have heard hard things of me. I know that very well. I can saynothing to meet them. Nor should I attempt anything. It may soundbrazen, but that past of mine, which I can see perpetually present inAldous Raeburn's mind, for instance, and which means so much to his goodaunt, means to me just nothing at all! The doctrine of identity must betrue--I must be the same person I was then. But, all the same, what Idid then does not matter a straw to me now. To all practical purposes Iam another man. I was then a youth, idle, _desoeuvre_, playing with allthe keys of life in turn. I have now unlocked the path that suits me.Its quest has transformed me--as I believe, ennobled me. I do not askRaeburn or any one else to believe it. It is
my own affair. Only, if weever meet again in life, you and I, and you think you have reason to askhumiliation of me, do not ask it, do not expect it. The man you willhave in your mind has nothing to do with me. I will not be answerablefor his sins."
As he said these things he was leaning lightly forward, looking up ather, his arms resting on the back of one of the old chairs, one footcrossed over the other. The attitude was easy calm itself. Thetone--indomitable, analytic, reflective--matched it. Yet, all the same,her woman's instinct divined a hidden agitation, and, woman-like,responded to that and that only.
"Mr. Raeburn will never tell me old stories about anybody," she saidproudly. "I asked him once, out--out of curiosity--about you, and hewould tell me nothing."
"Generous!" said Wharton, drily. "I am grateful."
"No!" cried Marcella, indignantly, rushing blindly at the outlet foremotion. "No!--you are not grateful; you are always judging himharshly--criticising, despising what he does."
Wharton was silent a moment. Even in the moonlight she could see thereddening of his cheek.
"So be it," he said at last. "I submit. You must know best. But you? areyou always content? Does this _milieu_ into which you are passing alwayssatisfy you? To-night, did your royalty please you? will it soon beenough for you?"
"You know it is not enough," she broke out, hotly; "it is insulting thatyou should ask in that tone. It means that you think me ahypocrite!--and I have given you no cause--"
"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed, interrupting her, and speaking in alow, hurried voice. "I had no motive, no reason for what Isaid--none--but this, that you are going--that we are parting. I spokein gibes to make you speak--somehow to strike--to reach you. To-morrowit will be too late!"
And before, almost, she knew that he had moved, he had stooped forward,caught a fold of her dress, pressed it to his lips, and dropped it.
"Don't speak," he said brokenly, springing up, and standing before herin her path. "You shall forgive me--I will compel it! See! here we areon this moonlit space of floor, alone, in the night. Very probably weshall never meet again, except as strangers. Put off convention, andspeak to me, soul to soul! You are not happy altogether in thismarriage. I know it. You have as good as confessed it. Yet you will gothrough with it. You have given your word--your honour holds you. Irecognise that it holds you. I say nothing, not a syllable, against yourbond! But here, to-night, tell me, promise me that you will make thismarriage of yours serve _our_ hopes and ends, the ends that you and Ihave foreseen together--that it shall be your instrument, not yourchain. We have been six weeks together. You say you have learnt from me;you have! you have given me your mind, your heart to write on, and Ihave written. Henceforward you will never look at life as you might havedone if I had not been here. Do you think I triumph, that I boast? Ah!"he drew in his breath--"What if in helping you, and teaching you--for Ihave helped and taught you!--I have undone myself? What if I came herethe slave of impersonal causes, of ends not my own? What if Ileave--maimed--in face of the battle? Not your fault? No, perhaps not!but, at least, you owe me some gentleness now, in these last words--somekindness in farewell."
He came closer, held out his hands. With one of her own she put hisback, and lifted the other dizzily to her forehead.
"Don't come near me!" she said, tottering. "What is it? I cannot see.Go!"
And guiding herself, as though blindfold, to a chair, she sank upon it,and her head dropped. It was the natural result of a moment of intenseexcitement coming upon nerves already strained and tried to theirutmost. She fought desperately against her weakness; but there was amoment when all around her swam, and she knew nothing.
Then came a strange awakening. What was this room, this weird light,these unfamiliar forms of things, this warm support against which hercheek lay? She opened her eyes languidly. They met Wharton's half inwonder. He was kneeling beside her, holding her. But for an instant sherealised nothing except his look, to which her own helplessly replied.
"Once!" she heard him whisper. "Once! Then nothing more--for ever."
And stooping, slowly, deliberately, he kissed her.
In a stinging flow, life, shame, returned upon her. She struggled to herfeet, pushing him from her.
"You dared," she said, "_dared_ such a thing!"
She could say no more; but her attitude, fiercely instinct, through allher physical weakness, with her roused best self, was speech enough. Hedid not venture to approach her. She walked away. He heard the doorclose, hurrying steps on the little stairs, then silence.
He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wallfor some time. When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhairwhich had dropped from her dress.
"That was a scene!" he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of hisown hand. "It carries one back to the days of the Romantics. Was IAlfred de Musset?--and she George Sand? Did any of them ever taste amore poignant moment than I--when she--lay upon my breast? To behelpless--yet yield nothing--it challenged me! Yet I took noadvantage--none. When she _looked_--when her eye, her _soul_, was, forthat instant, mine, then!--Well!--the world has rushed with me since Isaw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a qualityagain. What did I say?--how much did I mean? My God! how can I tell? Ibegan as an actor, did I finish as a man?"
He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron willquieting down each rebellious pulse.
"That poacher fellow did me a good turn. _Dare_! the word galled. But,after all, what woman could say less? And what matter? I have held herin my arms, in a setting--under a moon--worthy of her. Is not lifeenriched thereby beyond robbery? And what harm? Raeburn is not injured._She_ will never tell--and neither of us will ever forget. Ah!--what wasthat?"
He walked quickly to the window. What he had heard had been a dullreport coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of theavenue. As he reached the window it was followed by a second.
"That poacher's gun?--no doubt!"--he strained his eyes invain--"Collision perhaps--and mischief? No matter! I have nothing to dowith it. The world is all lyric for me to-night. I can hear in it noother rhythm."
* * * * *
The night passed away. When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lyingwith wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it. Her candle stillburnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallestdesire for sleep. She had gone through shame and anguish. But she wouldhave scorned to pity herself. Was it not her natural, inevitableportion?
"I will tell Aldous everything--_everything_," she said to herself forthe hundredth time, as the light penetrated. "Was _that_ only sevenstriking--_seven_--impossible!"
She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of thehours that must pass before she could see Aldous--put all to the touch.
Suddenly she remembered Hurd--then old Patton.
"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment--herpassion to get away from herself. "Is he gone? This is the hour when oldpeople die--the dawn. I will go and see--go at once."
She sprang up. To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance,of social amends, however small, however futile--to propitiate herself,if but by a hairbreadth--this, no doubt, was the instinct at work. Shedressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to makeagainst the stiffness of her own young bones--glad of her hunger andfaintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought andconquered.
In a very short time she had passed quietly downstairs and through thehall, greatly to the amazement of William, who opened the front door forher. Once in the village road the damp raw air revived her greatly. Shelifted her hot temples to it, welcoming the waves of wet mist that sweptalong the road, feeling her youth come back to her.
Suddenly as she was nearing the end of a narrow bit of lane betweenhigh hedges, and the first houses of the village were in sight, she wasstopped by a noise behind her--a strange unaccountable noise as ofwomen's voices,
calling and wailing. It startled and frightened her, andshe stood in the middle of the road waiting.
Then she saw coming towards her two women running at full speed, cryingand shouting, their aprons up to their faces.
"What is it? What is the matter?" she asked, going to meet them, andrecognising two labourers' wives she knew.
"Oh! miss--oh! miss!" said the foremost, too wrapt up in her news to besurprised at the sight of her. "They've just found him--they're bringin'ov 'im home; they've got a shutter from Muster Wellin! 'im at DisleyFarm. It wor close by Disley wood they found 'em. And there's one ov 'ismen they've sent off ridin' for the inspector--here he come, miss! Comeout o' th' way!"
They dragged her back, and a young labourer galloped past them on a farmcolt, urging it on to its full pace, his face red and set.
"Who is found?" cried Marcella--"What is it?"
"Westall, miss--Lor' bless you--Shot him in the head they did--blowedhis brains right out--and Charlie Dynes--oh! he's knocked aboutshamful--the doctor don't give no hopes of him. Oh deary--deary me! Andwe're goin' for Muster Harden--ee must tell the widder--or MissMary--none on us can!"
"And who did it?" said Marcella, pale with horror, holding her.
"Why the poachers, miss. Them as they've bin waitin' for all along--andthey do say as Jim Hurd's in it. Oh Lord, oh Lord!"
Marcella stood petrified, and let them hurry on.