CHAPTER III.
Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part ofthe stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the housein the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. Thedecorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed bytheir eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at anyrate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the wornand discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, andpetticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760,besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed onthem by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaboratelycarved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of amiscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indiancarpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudelyGothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to thepurposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, whichdisturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, andits modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one.Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of hertall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily tillnow, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.
Her father and mother were already at table, together with Mrs. Boyce'sbrown spaniel Lynn.
Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn andgreasy livery coat, who represented the men-service of theestablishment; his wife was talking to her dog, but from the lift of hereyebrows, and the twitching of her thin lips, it was plain to Marcellathat her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behavingfoolishly.
"There, for goodness' sake, cut some bread on the sideboard," said theangry master, "and hand it round instead of staring about you like astuck pig. What they taught you at Sir William Jute's I can't conceive._I_ didn't undertake to make a man-servant of you, sir."
The pale, harassed lad flew at the bread, cut it with a vast scatteringof crumbs, handed it clumsily round, and then took glad advantage of ashort supply of coffee to bolt from the room to order more.
"Idiot!" said Mr. Boyce, with an angry frown, as he disappeared.
"If you would allow Ann to do her proper parlour work again," said hiswife blandly, "you would, I think, be less annoyed. And as I believeWilliam was boot boy at the Jutes', it is not surprising that he did notlearn waiting."
"I tell you, Evelyn, that our position _demands_ a man-servant!" was thehot reply. "None of my family have ever attempted to run this house withwomen only. It would be unseemly--unfitting--incon--"
"Oh, I am no judge of course of what a Boyce may do!" said his wifecarelessly. "I leave that to you and the neighbourhood."
Mr. Boyce looked uncomfortable, cooled down, and presently when thecoffee came back asked his wife for a fresh supply in tones from whichall bellicosity had for the time departed. He was a small and singularlythin man, with blue wandering eyes under the blackest possible eyebrowsand hair. The cheeks were hollow, the complexion as yellow as that ofthe typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hiddenby a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied betweenirritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes wereas a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright andself-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce,of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect withthe pride of old family; his dress was careful and correct to the lastdetail; and his hands with their long fingers were of an excessivedelicacy, though marred as to beauty by a thinness which nearly amountedto emaciation.
"The servants say they must leave unless the ghost does, Marcella," saidMrs. Boyce, suddenly, laying a morsel of toast as she spoke on Lynn'snose. "Someone from the village of course has been talking--the cooksays she heard _something_ last night, though she will not condescend toparticulars--and in general it seems to me that you and I may be leftbefore long to do the house work."
"What do they say in the village?" asked Marcella eagerly.
"Oh! they say there was a Boyce two hundred years ago who fled downhere from London after doing something he shouldn't--I really forgetwhat. The sheriff's officers were advancing on the house. Their approachdispleased him, and he put an end to himself at the head of the littlestaircase leading from the tapestry-room down to my sitting-room. Whydid he choose the _staircase_?" said Mrs. Boyce with lightreflectiveness.
"It won't do," said Marcella, shaking her head. "I know the Boyce theymean. He was a ruffian, but he shot himself in London; and, any way, hewas dead long before that staircase was built."
"Dear me, how well up you are!" said her mother. "Suppose you give alittle lecture on the family in the servants' hall. Though I never knewa ghost yet that was undone by dates."
There was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply withMarcella's amused but sympathetic interest. _Detachment_ was perhaps thecharacteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner,--a curious separateness, asit were, from all the things and human beings immediately about her.
Marcella pondered.
"I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently. "He willhave heard them in the village. I am going to the church this morning."
Her mother looked at her--a look of quiet examination--and smiled. TheLady Bountiful airs that Marcella had already assumed during the sixweeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly.
"Harden!" said Mr. Boyce, catching the name. "I wish that man wouldleave me alone. What have I got to do with a water-supply for thevillage? It will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a water-tightroof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert hasbehaved."
Marcella's cheek flushed.
"The village water-supply is a _disgrace_," she said with low emphasis."I never saw such a crew of unhealthy, wretched-looking children in mylife as swarm about those cottages. We take the rent, and we ought tolook after them. I believe you could be _forced_ to do something,papa--if the local authority were of any use."
She looked at him defiantly.
"Nonsense," said Mr. Boyce testily. "They got along in your UncleRobert's days, and they can get along now. Charity, indeed! Why, thestate of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough, Ishould think, to take a man's mind. Don't you go talking to Mr. Hardenin the way you do, Marcella. I don't like it, and I won't have it. Youhave the interests of your family and your home to think of first."
"Poor starved things!" said Marcella sarcastically--"living in such a_den_!"
And she swept her white hand round, as though calling to witness theroom in which they sat.
"I tell you," said Mr. Boyce, rising and standing before the fire,whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth solittle known to him, and whose nature and aims during the close contactof the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity anddisturbance to him,--"I tell you our great effort, the effort of us all,must be to keep up the family position!--_our_ position. Look at thatlibrary, and its condition; look at the state of these wall-papers; lookat the garden; look at the estate books if it comes to that. Why, itwill be years before, even with all my knowledge of affairs, I can pullthe thing through--years!"
Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough--she had pushed back her chair, and wasalternately studying her husband and daughter. They might have beenactors performing for her amusement. And yet, amusement is not preciselythe word. For that hazel eye, with its frequent smile, had not a sparkof geniality. After a time those about her found something scathing inits dry light.
Now, as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him, hislook wavered, and his mood collapsed. He threw her a curious furtiveglance, and fell silent.
"I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London Socialistfriends, Marcella?" asked Mrs. Boyce lightly, in the pause thatfollowed. "You have, I see, taken a great liking for them."
"Oh! well--I don't know,"
said Marcella, with a shrug, and something ofa proud reticence. "Mr. Harden is very kind--but--he doesn't seem tohave thought much about things."
She never talked about her London friends to her mother, if she couldhelp it. The sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when theycould. Marcella being all sentiment and impulse, was constantly hermother's victim, do what she would. But in her quiet moments she stoodon the defensive.
"So the Socialists are the only people who think?" said Mrs. Boyce, whowas now standing by the window, pressing her dog's head against herdress as he pushed up against her. "Well, I am sorry for the Hardens.They tell me they give all their substance away--already--and every onesays it is going to be a particularly bad winter. The living, I hear, isworth nothing. All the same, I should wish them to look more cheerful.It is the first duty of martyrs."
Marcella looked at her mother indignantly. It seemed to her often thatshe said the most heartless things imaginable.
"Cheerful!" she said--"in a village like this--with all the young mendrifting off to London, and all the well-to-do people dissenters--no oneto stand by him--no money and no helpers--the people always ill--wageseleven and twelve shillings a week--and only the old wrecks of men leftto do the work! He might, I think, expect the people in _this_ house toback him up a little. All he asks is that papa should go and satisfyhimself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property andLord Maxwell's--"
"Lord Maxwell's!" cried Mr. Boyce, rousing himself from a state ofhalf-melancholy, half-sleepy reverie by the fire, and throwing away hiscigarette--"Lord Maxwell! Difference! I should think so. Thirty thousanda year, if he has a penny. By the way, I wish he would just have thecivility to answer my note about those coverts over by Willow Scrubs!"
He had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William thefootman, in his usual tremor of nervousness, carrying a salver and anote.
"The man says, please sir, is there any answer, sir?"
"Well, that's odd!" said Mr. Boyce, his look brightening. "Here _is_Lord Maxwell's answer, just as I was talking of it."
His wife turned sharply and watched him take it; her lips parted, astrange expectancy in her whole attitude. He tore it open, read it, andthen threw it angrily under the grate.
"No answer. Shut the door." The lad retreated. Mr. Boyce sat down andbegan carefully to put the fire together. His thin left hand shook uponhis knee.
There was a moment's pause of complete silence. Mrs. Boyce's face mighthave been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as shestood in the light of the window, a tall and queenly figure in hersweeping black. But she said not a word, and presently left the room.
Marcella watched her father.
"Papa--_was_ that a note from Lord Maxwell?"
Mr. Boyce looked round with a start, as though surprised that any onewas still there. It struck Marcella that he looked yellow andshrunken--years older than her mother. An impulse of tenderness, joinedwith anger and a sudden sick depression--she was conscious of them allas she got up and went across to him, determined to speak out. Herparents were not her friends, and did not possess her confidence; buther constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimesthe result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger mighthave had. She had no habitual deference to break through, and thehindering restraints of memory, though strong, were still less strongthan they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and yearby year, and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessingat them, as was now so often the case with her.
"Papa, is Lord Maxwell's note an uncivil one?"
Mr. Boyce stooped forward and began to rub his chilly hand over theblaze.
"Why, that man's only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play crickettogether from morning till night when we were boys. Henry Raeburn was abit older than I, and he lent me the gun with which I shot my firstrabbit. It was in one of the fields over by Soleyhurst, just where thetwo estates join. After that we were always companions--we used to goout at night with the keepers after poachers; we spent hours in the snowwatching for wood-pigeons; we shot that pair of kestrels over the innerhall door, in the Windmill Hill fields--at least I did--I was a bettershot than he by that time. He didn't like Robert--he always wanted me."
"Well, papa, but what does he say?" asked Marcella, impatiently. Shelaid her hand, however, as she spoke, on her father's shoulder.
Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her. He and her mother had originallysent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the dailyworry of her awakening curiosities, and one of his resolutions in comingto Mellor Park had been to keep up his dignity with her. But the sightof her dark face bent upon him, softened by a quick and womanlycompassion, seemed to set free a new impulse in him.
"He writes in the third person, if you want to know, my dear, and refersme to his agent, very much as though I were some London grocer who hadjust bought the place. Oh, it is quite evident what he means. They werehere without moving all through June and July, and it is now three weeksat least since he and Miss Raeburn came back from Scotland, and not acard nor a word from either of them! Nor from the Winterbournes, nor theLevens. Pleasant! Well, my dear, you must make up your mind to it. I didthink--I was fool enough to think--that when I came back to the oldplace, my father's old friends would let bygones be bygones. I never did_them_ any harm. Let them 'gang their gait,' confound them!"--the littledark man straightened himself fiercely--"I can get my pleasure out ofthe land; and as for your mother, she'd not lift a finger to propitiateone of them!"
In the last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympatheticpride which the ear expected, but rather fresh bitterness and grievance.
Marcella stood thinking, her mind travelling hither and thither withlightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks--nowover incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the secondvolume beginning--the natural sequel to those old mysterious historiesof shrinking, disillusion, and repulse?
"What was it you wanted about those coverts, papa?" she asked presently,with a quick decision.
"What the deuce does it matter? If you want to know, I proposed to himto exchange my coverts over by the Scrubs, which work in with hisshooting, for the wood down by the Home Farm. It was an exchange madeyear after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I foundit had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack andruin after Harold's death. It gave me something to write about, and Iwas determined to know where I stood--Well! the old Pharisee can go hisway: I'll go mine."
And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his nativeheath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height,and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns--a picturesque andelegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.
"I shall ask Mr. Aldous Raeburn about it, if I see him in the villageto-day," said Marcella, quietly.
Her father started, and looked at her with some attention.
"What have you seen of Aldous Raeburn?" he inquired. "I remember hearingthat you had come across him."
"Certainly I have come across him. I have met him once or twice at theVicarage--and--oh! on one or two other occasions," said Marcella,carelessly. "He has always made himself agreeable. Mr. Harden says hisgrandfather is devoted to him, and will hardly ever let him go away fromhome. He does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now: writes for him, andhelps to manage the estate; and next year, when the Tories come back andLord Maxwell is in office again--"
"Why, of course, there'll be plums for the grandson," said Mr. Boycewith a sneer. "That goes without saying--though we are such a virtuouslot."
"Oh yes, he'll get on--everybody says so. And he'll deserve it too!" sheadded, her eye kindling combatively as she surveyed her father. "Hetakes a lot of trouble down here, about the cottages and the board ofguardians and the farms. The Hardens like him very much, but he is notexactly popular, according to them. His manners are someti
mes shy andawkward, and the poor people think he's proud."
"Ah! a prig I dare say--like some of his uncles before him," said Mr.Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, you say?"
And again he turned a quick considering eye on his daughter.
"Oh dear! yes," said Marcella, with a little proud smile. There was apause; then she spoke again. "I must go off to the church; the Hardenshave hard work just now with the harvest festival, and I promised totake them some flowers."
"Well"--said her father, grudgingly, "so long as you don't promiseanything on my account! I tell you, I haven't got sixpence to spend onsubscriptions to anything or anybody. By the way, if you see Reynoldsanywhere about the drive, you can send him to me. He and I are goinground the Home Farm to pick up a few birds if we can, and see what thecoverts look like. The stock has all run down, and the place has beenpoached to death. But he thinks if we take on an extra man in thespring, and spend a little on rearing, we shall do pretty decently nextyear."
The colour leapt to Marcella's cheek as she tied on her hat.
"You will set up another keeper, and you won't do anything for thevillage?" she cried, her black eyes lightening, and without another wordshe opened the French window and walked rapidly away along the terrace,leaving her father both angered and amazed.
A man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without agood deal of masquerading in which those in his immediate neighbourhoodare expected to join. His wife had long since consented to play thegame, on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was nodupe. As to what Marcella's part in the affair might be going to be, herfather was as yet uneasily in the dark. What constantly astonished him,as she moved and talked under his eye, was the girl's beauty. Surely shehad been a plain child, though a striking one. But now she had not onlybeauty, but the air of beauty. The self-confidence given by thepossession of good looks was very evident in her behaviour. She was veryaccomplished, too, and more clever than was always quite agreeable to afather whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him bymisfortune. Such a girl was sure to be admired. She would havelovers--friends of her own. It seemed that already, while Lord Maxwellwas preparing to insult the father, his grandson had discovered that thedaughter was handsome. Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie,wherein the Raeburns' behaviour and Marcella's unexpected gifts playedabout equal parts.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the "Cedar garden," the mostadorable corner of Mellor Park, where the original Tudor house, grey,mullioned and ivy-covered, ran at right angles into the later "gardenfront," which projected beyond it to the south, making thereby a sunnyand sheltered corner where roses, clematis, hollyhocks, and sunflowersgrew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere, as thoughconscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty. The grass indeedwanted mowing, and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it;the flowers were untied and untrimmed. But under the condition of twogardeners to ten acres of garden, nature does very much as she pleases,and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain.
As for Marcella, she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness bythe ragged charm of the old place.
On the one hand, it angered her that anything so plainly meant forbeauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, ifhouse and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of theneighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply,shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,--in short, the generalself-complacent air of a well-kept country house,--where would have beenthat thrilling intimate appeal, as for something forlornly lovely,which the old place so constantly made upon her? It seemed to dependeven upon _her_, the latest born of all its children--to ask fortendance and cherishing even from _her_. She was always planninghow--with a minimum of money to spend--it could be comforted and healed,and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as thoughshe had been bred there.
But this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult anddepression of spirit. What _was_ this past which in these newsurroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again?She energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand thetruth. Yet, of whom? Marcella knew very well that to force her mother toany line of action Mrs. Boyce was unwilling to follow, was beyond herpower. And it was not easy to go to her father directly and say, "Tellme exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back upon you."All the same, it _was_ due to them all, due to herself especially, nowthat she was grown up and at home, that she should not be kept in thedark any longer like a baby, that she should be put in possession of thefacts which, after all, threatened to stand here at Mellor Park, asuntowardly in their, in _her_ way, as they had done in the shabby schooland lodging-house existence of all those bygone years.
Perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not, and couldnot, believe that the facts, if faced, would turn out to beinsurmountable. Her instinct told her as she looked back that theirrelation toward society in the past, though full of discomforts andhumiliations, had not been the relation of outcasts. Their poverty andthe shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them thedisrespect of one class; and as to the acquaintances and friends oftheir own rank, what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cooldistaste for their company, an insulting readiness to forget theexistence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom, andlaid themselves open to the contemptuous disapproval or pity of theworld. Everybody, it seemed, knew their affairs, and knowing them saw nopersonal advantage and distinction in the Boyces' acquaintance, butrather the contrary.
As she put the facts together a little, she realised, however, that thebreach had always been deepest between her father and his relations, orhis oldest friends. A little shiver passed through her as she reflectedthat here, in his own country, where his history was best known, thefeeling towards him, whatever it rested upon, might very probably bestrongest. Well, it _was_ hard upon them!--hard upon her mother--hardupon her. In her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and thedignities of her new position, how little she had thought of thesethings! And there they were all the time--dogging and thwarting.
She walked slowly along, with her burden of flowers, through a laurelpath which led straight to the drive, and so, across it, to the littlechurch. The church stood all alone there under the great limes of thePark, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, ofthe big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and southsides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had beenalready at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bitof necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.
It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humblegraves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at anyrate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of variousstyles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, thename of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb inthe chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce whofought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field,lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend hislater years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and thenwith the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithfulidea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a familyof any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal,upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, onthe side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who hadgiven their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for themaking of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that theterrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carriedon, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternatejustice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to themintended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce'seducation, and the
pious strength of his legitimate affections--atedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, buton the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, andstill in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.
Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--abreak corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, amoment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly intobrilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years ofpoetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce wentabroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the friend ofHorace Walpole and of Gray, and his introductions opened to him whateverdoors he might wish to enter, at a time when the upper classes of theleading European nations were far more intimately and familiarlyacquainted with each other than they are now. He married at Rome anItalian lady of high birth and large fortune. Then he brought her hometo Mellor, where straightway the garden front was built with all itsfantastic and beautiful decoration, the great avenue was planted,pictures began to invade the house, and a musical library was collectedwhereof the innumerable faded volumes, bearing each of them the entwinednames of Richard and Marcella Boyce, had been during the last few weeksmines of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of to-day.
The Italian wife bore her lord two sons, and then in early middle lifeshe died--much loved and passionately mourned. Her tomb bore nolong-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace--forshe was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better forit--the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's_Vita Nuova_.
The portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where hermusic-books survived,--a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand; butthe Marcella of to-day had long since eagerly decided that her ownphysique and her father's were to be traced to its original, as well, nodoubt, as the artistic aptitudes of both--aptitudes not hithertoconspicuous in her respectable race.
In reality, however, she loved every one of them--these Jacobean andGeorgian squires with their interminable epitaphs. Now, as she stood inthe church, looking about her, her flowers lying beside her in a tumbledheap on the chancel step, cheerfulness, delight, nay, the indomitablepride and exultation of her youth, came back upon her in one greatlifting wave. The depression of her father's repentances andtrepidations fell away; she felt herself in her place, under the shelterof her forefathers, incorporated and redeemed, as it were, into theirguild of honour.
There were difficulties in her path, no doubt--but she had hervantage-ground, and would use it for her own profit and that of others._She_ had no cause for shame; and in these days of the developedindividual the old solidarity of the family has become injustice andwrong. Her mind filled tumultuously with the evidence these last twoyears had brought her of her natural power over men and things. She knewperfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her agecould never venture--that she had fascination, resource, brain.
Already, in these few weeks--Smiles played about her lips as she thoughtof that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at theHardens'. His grandfather might write what he pleased. It did not alterthe fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Raeburn, clearly oneof the _partis_ most coveted, and one of the men most observed, in theneighbourhood, had taken and shown a very marked interest in Mr. Boyce'sdaughter--all the more marked because of the reserved manner with whichit had to contend.
No! whatever happened, she would carve her path, make her own way, andher parents' too. At twenty-one, nothing looks irrevocable. A woman'scharm, a woman's energy should do it all.
Ay, and something else too. She looked quickly round the church, hermind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust.Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--ofmission, of an urging call to the service of man. In front of her wasthe Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretchedbench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat whenit came to church. Here, for the first time, had Marcella been broughtface to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism,but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects. Men of sixty andupwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they hadworked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of theirgeneration, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but theworkhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive,resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboymisbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolidunconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse,or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanchedand emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects ofinsanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food--these figures andtypes had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella. InLondon the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had beento her as a pawn in the game of discussion. Here he was in the flesh;and she was called upon to live with him, and not only to talk abouthim. Under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too. For it was veryclear that upon the owner of Mellor depended, and had always depended,the labourer of Mellor.
Well, she had tried to live with them ever since she came--had gone inand out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and theirlives and their surroundings; alternately pleased and repelled by theircringing; now enjoying her position among them with the naturalaristocratic instinct of women, now grinding her teeth over her father'sand uncle's behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doingfor her new subjects.
What, _their_ friend and champion, and ultimately their redeemer too?Well, and why not? Weak women have done greater things in the world. Asshe stood on the chancel step, vowing herself to these great things, shewas conscious of a dramatic moment--would not have been sorry,perhaps, if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her.
But there was a saving sincerity at the root of her, and her strainedmood sank naturally into a girlish excitement.
"We shall see!--We shall see!" she said aloud, and was startled to hearher words quite plainly in the silent church. As she spoke she stoopedto separate her flowers and see what quantities she had of each.
But while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herselfagain. She walked down the church and stood at the open south door,looking and waiting. Before her stretched a green field path leadingacross the park to the village. The vicar and his sister were comingalong it towards the church, both flower-laden, and beside walked a tallman in a brown shooting suit, with his gun in his hand and his dogbeside him.
The excitement in Marcella's eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as shesaw the group, and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow. Shewaited quietly for them, hardly responding to the affectionate signalsof the vicar's sister; but inwardly she was not quiet at all. For thetall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Raeburn.