Marcella Part 33

He looked at her kindly, the look of one who saw all his fellow-creatures n.o.bly, as it were, and to their best advantage.

"One may take an interest," she said, in a dissatisfied voice, poking at the snow crystals on the road before her with the thorn-stick she carried, "but one can do so little. And I don't know anything; not even what I want myself."

"No; one can do next to nothing. And systems and theories don't matter, or, at least, very little. Yet, when you and Aldous are together, there will be more chance of _doing_, for you than for most. You will be two happy and powerful people! His power will be doubled by happiness; I have always known that."

Marcella was seized with shyness, looked away, and did not know what to answer. At last she said abruptly--her head still turned to the woods on her left--

"Are you sure he is going to be happy?"

"Shall I produce his letter to me?" he said, bantering--"or letters? For I knew a great deal about you before October 5" (their engagement-day), "and suspected what was going to happen long before Aldous did. No; after all, no! Those letters are my last bit of the old friends.h.i.+p. But the new began that same day," he hastened to add, smiling: "It may be richer than the old; I don't know. It depends on you."

"I don't think--I am a very satisfactory friend," said Marcella, still awkward, and speaking with difficulty.

"Well, let me find out, won't you? I don't think Aldous would call me exacting. I believe he would give me a decent character, though I tease him a good deal. You must let me tell you sometime what he did for me--what he was to me--at Cambridge? I shall always feel sorry for Aldous's wife that she did not know him at college."

A shock went through Marcella at the word--that tremendous word--wife.

As Hallin said it, there was something intolerable in the claim it made!

"I should like you to tell me," she said faintly. Then she added, with more energy and a sudden advance of friendliness, "But you really must come in and rest. Aldous told me he thought the walk from the Court was too much for you. Shall we take this short way?"

And she opened a little gate leading to a door at the side of the house through the Cedar Garden. The narrow path only admitted of single file, and Hallin followed her, admiring her tall youth and the fine black and white of her head and cheek as she turned every now and then to speak to him. He realised more vividly than before the rare, exciting elements of her beauty, and the truth in Aldous's comparison of her to one of the tall women in a Florentine fresco. But he felt himself a good deal baffled by her, all the same. In some ways, so far as any man who is not the lover can understand such things, he understood why Aldous had fallen in love with her; in others, she bore no relation whatever to the woman his thoughts had been shaping all these years as his friend's fit and natural wife.

Luncheon pa.s.sed as easily as any meal could be expected to do, of which Mr. Boyce was partial president. During the preceding month or two he had definitely a.s.sumed the character of an invalid, although to inexperienced eyes like Marcella's there did not seem to be very much the matter. But, whatever the facts might be, Mr. Boyce's adroit use of them had made a great difference to his position in his own household.

His wife's sarcastic freedom of manner was less apparent; and he was obviously less in awe of her. Meanwhile he was as sore as ever towards the Raeburns, and no more inclined to take any particular pleasure in Marcella's prospects, or to make himself agreeable towards his future son-in-law. He and Mrs. Boyce had been formally asked in Miss Raeburn's best hand to the Court ball, but he had at once snappishly announced his intention of staying at home. Marcella sometimes looked back with astonishment to his eagerness for social notice when they first came to Mellor. Clearly the rising irritability of illness had made it doubly unpleasant to him to owe all that he was likely to get on that score to his own daughter; and, moreover, he had learnt to occupy himself more continuously on his own land and with his own affairs.

As to the state of the village, neither Marcella's entreaties nor reproaches had any effect upon him. When it appeared certain that he would be summoned for some specially flagrant piece of neglect he would spend a few s.h.i.+llings on repairs; otherwise not a farthing. All that filial softening towards him of which Marcella had been conscious in the early autumn had died away in her. She said to herself now plainly and bitterly that it was a misfortune to belong to him; and she would have pitied her mother most heartily if her mother had ever allowed her the smallest expression of such a feeling. As it was, she was left to wonder and chafe at her mother's new-born mildness.

In the drawing-room, after luncheon, Hallin came up to Marcella in a corner, and, smiling, drew from his pocket a folded sheet of foolscap.

"I made Aldous give me his speech to show you, before to-morrow night,"

he said. "He would hardly let me take it, said it was stupid, and that you would not agree with it. But I wanted you to see how he does these things. He speaks now, on an average, two or three times a week. Each time, even for an audience of a score or two of village folk, he writes out what he has to say. Then he speaks it entirely without notes. In this way, though he has not much natural gift, he is making himself gradually an effective and practical speaker. The danger with him, of course, is lest he should be over-subtle and over-critical--not simple and popular enough."

Marcella took the paper half unwillingly and glanced over it in silence.

"You are sorry he is a Tory, is that it?" he said to her, but in a lower voice, and sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Boyce, just catching the words from where she sat with her work, at the further side of the room, looked up with a double wonder--wonder at Marcella's folly, wonder still more at the deference with which men like Aldous Raeburn and Hallin treated her. It was inevitable, of course--youth and beauty rule the world. But the mother, under no spell herself, and of keen, cool wit, resented the intellectual confusion, the lowering of standards involved.

"I suppose so," said Marcella, stupidly, in answer to Hallin's question, fidgeting the papers under her hand. Then his curious confessor's gift, his quiet questioning look with its sensitive human interest to all before him, told upon her.

"I am sorry he does not look further ahead, to the great changes that must come," she added hurriedly. "This is all about details, palliatives. I want him to be more impatient."

"Great political changes you mean?"

She nodded; then added--

"But only for the sake, of course, of great social changes to come after."

He pondered a moment.

"Aldous has never believed in _great_ changes coming suddenly. He constantly looks upon me as rash in the things _I_ adopt and believe in.

But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more equitably, I have never seen Aldous's equal--for the steady pa.s.sion, the persistence, of it."

She looked up. His pale face had taken to itself glow and fire; his eyes were full of strenuous, nay, severe expression. Her foolish pride rebelled a little.

"Of course, I haven't seen much of that yet," she said slowly.

His look for a moment was indignant, incredulous, then melted into a charming eagerness.

"But you will! naturally you will!--see everything. I hug myself sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather and I will know what Aldous is and does. Oh! the people on the estate know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high intelligence have the power I believe. But I am impatient! In the first place--I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!--I want Aldous to come out of that _manner_ of his to strangers, which is the only bit of the true Tory in him; _you_ can get rid of it, no one else can--How long shall I give you?--And in the next, I want the world not to be wasting itself on baser stuff when it might be praising Aldous!"

"Does he mean Mr. Wharton?" thought Marcella, quickly. "But this world--our world--hates him and runs him down."

But she had no time to answer, for the door opened to admit Aldous, flushed and bright-eyed, looking round the room immediately for her, and bearing a parcel in his left hand.

"Does she love him at all?" thought Hallin, with a nervous stiffening of all his lithe frame, as he walked away to talk to Mrs. Boyce, "or, in spite of all her fine talk, is she just marrying him for his money and position!"

Meanwhile, Aldous had drawn Marcella into the Stone Parlour and was standing by the fire with his arm covetously round her.

"I have lost two hours with you I might have had, just because a tiresome man missed his train. Make up for it by liking these pretty things a little, for my sake and my mother's."

He opened the jeweller's case, took out the fine old pearls--necklace and bracelets--it contained, and put them into her hand. They were his first considerable gift to her, and had been chosen for a.s.sociation's sake, seeing that his mother had also worn them before her marriage.

She flushed first of all with a natural pleasure, the girl delighting in her gaud. Then she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed, inevitable. Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he began to be puzzled by her.

"They are much too good for me. I don't know whether you ought to give me such precious things. I am dreadfully careless and forgetful. Mamma always says so."

"I shall want you to wear them so often that you won't have a chance of forgetting them," he said gaily.

"Will you? Will you want me to wear them so often?" she asked, in an odd voice. "Anyway, I should like to have just these, and nothing else. I am glad that we know n.o.body, and have no friends, and that I shall have so few presents. You won't give me many jewels, will you?" she said suddenly, insistently, turning to him. "I shouldn't know what to do with them. I used to have a magpie's wish for them; and now--I don't know, but they don't give me pleasure. Not these, of course--not these!" she added hurriedly, taking them up and beginning to fasten the bracelets on her wrists.

Aldous looked perplexed.

"My darling!" he said, half laughing, and in the tone of the apologist, "You know we _have_ such a lot of things. And I am afraid my grandfather will want to give them all to you. Need one think so much about it? It isn't as though they had to be bought fresh. They go with pretty gowns, don't they, and other people like to see them?"

"No, but it's what they imply--the wealth--the _having_ so much while other people want so much. Things begin to oppress me so!" she broke out, instinctively moving away from him that she might express herself with more energy. "I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having. You must not let me like them--you must help me not to care about them!"

Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself. He could of course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside. This question she had raised, this most th.o.r.n.y of all the personal questions of the present--the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and its vanities--was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and robustly real to him than it was to her. Every word in his few sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.

But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of another tune which she seemed to be perpetually trying to recall and piece together. Aldous's slow minor made her impatient.

He turned presently to ask her what she had been doing with her morning--asking her with a certain precision, and observing her attentively. She replied that she had been showing Mr. Wharton the house, that he had walked down with her to the village, and was gone to a meeting at Widrington. Then she remarked that he was very good company, and very clever, but dreadfully sure of his own opinion.

Finally she laughed, and said drily:

"There will be no putting him down all the same. I haven't told anybody yet, but he saved my life this morning."

Aldous caught her wrists.