Marcella Part 28

"How tired you look!" said Aldous, coming up to them, and speaking in the same undertone. "Will you not let Marcella take you to rest?"

He was always deeply, unreasonably touched by any sign of stoicism, of defied suffering in women. Mrs. Boyce had proved it many times already.

On the present occasion she put his sympathy by, but she lingered to talk with him. Hallin from a distance noticed first of all her tall thinness and fairness, and her wonderful dignity of carriage; then the cordiality of her manner to her future son-in-law. Marcella stood by listening, her young shoulders somewhat stiffly set. Her consciousness of her mother's respect and admiration for the man she was to marry was, oddly enough, never altogether pleasant to her. It brought with it a certain discomfort, a certain wish to argue things out.

Hallin and Aldous parted with Frank Leven at Mellor gate, and turned homeward together under a starry heaven already whitening to the coming moon.

"Do you know that man Wharton is getting an extraordinary hold upon the London working men?" said Hallin. "I have heard him tell that story of the game-preserving before. He was speaking for one of the Radical candidates at Hackney, and I happened to be there. It brought down the house. The _role_ of your Socialist aristocrat, of your land-nationalising landlord, is a very telling one."

"And comparatively easy," said Aldous, "when you know that neither Socialism nor land-nationalisation will come in your time!"

"Oh! so you think him altogether a windbag?"

Aldous hesitated and laughed.

"I have certainly no reason to suspect him of principles. His conscience as a boy was of pretty elastic stuff."

"You may be unfair to him," said Hallin, quickly. Then, after a pause: "How long is he staying at Mellor?"

"About a week, I believe," said Aldous, shortly. "Mr. Boyce has taken a fancy to him."

They walked on in silence, and then Aldous turned to his friend in distress.

"You know, Hallin, this wind is much too cold for you. You are the most wilful of men. Why would you walk?"

"Hold your tongue, sir, and listen to me. I think your Marcella is beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!"

Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him.

"You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint.

"Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you think, Aldous?"

"No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully. "Her sympathies and convictions go with them."

Then, as they pa.s.sed through the village, he began to talk of quite other things--college friends, a recent volume of philosophical essays, and so on. Hallin, accustomed and jealously accustomed as he was to be the one person in the world with whom Raeburn talked freely, would not to-night have done or said anything to force a strong man's reserve. But his own mind was full of anxiety.

CHAPTER IV.

"I _love_ this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper cla.s.ses are!

Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save our lives."

They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to eighteenth-century taste. But the old books in the old latticed shelves which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old friend--on the wrong side--Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there were rotten places in the carpetless floor.

"I have tried my best," said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a hole in the floor. "I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to mend some of these places myself. But I only broke the rotten wood away; and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good. I did get a carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn't know where to begin. I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but--"

She looked sadly round the musty, forlorn place.

"But not so well, I am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's maddening to think what duffers we gentlefolks are!"

"Why do you harp on that?" said Marcella, quickly. She had been taking him over the house, and was in twenty minds again as to whether and how much she liked him.

"Because I have been reading some Board of Trade reports before breakfast," said Wharton, "on one or two of the Birmingham industries in particular. Goodness! what an amount of knowledge and skill and resource these fellows have that I go about calling the 'lower orders.' I wonder how long they are going to let me rule over them!"

"I suppose brain-power and education count for something still?" said Marcella, half scornfully.

"I am greatly obliged to the world for thinking so," said Wharton with emphasis, "and for thinking so about the particular kind of brain-power I happen to possess, which is the point. The processes by which a Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to 'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are, of course, mere imbecility--compared to my performances in Responsions.

Lucky for _me_, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a good time of it--and the Birmingham jeweller calls me 'sir.'"

"Oh! the skilled labour! that can take care of itself, and won't go on calling you 'sir' much longer. But what about the unskilled--the people here for instance--the villagers? We talk of their governing themselves; we wish it, and work for it. But which of us _really_ believes that they are fit for it, or that they are ever going to get along without _our_ brain-power?"

"No--poor souls!" said Wharton, with a peculiar vibrating emphasis.

"'_By their stripes we are healed, by their death we have lived_.' Do you remember your Carlyle?"

They had entered one of the bays formed by the bookcases which on either side of the room projected from the wall at regular intervals, and were standing by one of the windows which looked out on the great avenue.

Beside the window on either side hung a small portrait--in the one case of an elderly man in a wig, in the other of a young, dark-haired woman.

"Plenty in general, but nothing in particular," said Marcella, laughing.

"Quote."

He was leaning against the angle formed by the wall and the bookcase.

The half-serious, half-provocative intensity of his blue eyes under the brow which drooped forward contrasted with the careless, well-appointed ease of his general att.i.tude and dress.

"'_Two men I honour, and no third_,'" he said, quoting in a slightly dragging, vibrating voice: "'_First, the toil-worn craftsman that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's.--Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred_.' Heavens! how the words swing! But it is great nonsense, you know, for you and me--Venturists--to be maundering like this.

Charity--benevolence--that is all Carlyle is leading up to. He merely wants the cash nexus supplemented by a few good offices. But we want something much more unpleasant! 'Keep your subscriptions--hand over your dividends--turn out of your land--and go to work!' Nowadays society is trying to get out of doing what _we_ want, by doing what Carlyle wanted."

"_Do_ you want it?" said Marcella.

"I don't know," he said, laughing. "It won't come in our time."

Her lip showed her scorn.

"That's what we all think. Meanwhile you will perhaps admit that a little charity greases the wheels."

"_You_ must, because you are a woman; and women are made for charity--and aristocracy."

"Do you suppose you know so much about women?" she asked him, rather hotly. "I notice it is always the a.s.sumption of the people who make most mistakes."

"Oh! I know enough to steer by!" he said, smiling, with a little inclination of his curly head, as though to propitiate her. "How like you are to that portrait!"

Marcella started, and saw that he was pointing to the woman's portrait beside the window--looking from it to his hostess with a close considering eye.

"That was an ancestress of mine," she said coldly, "an Italian lady. She was rich and musical. Her money built these rooms along the garden, and these are her music books."

She showed him that the shelves against which she was leaning were full of old music.