Marcella Part 48

"I was with Mrs. Westall. Harden and I went in to see her. She is a hard, silent woman. She is clearly not popular in the village, and no one comes in to her. Her"--he hesitated--"her baby is expected before long. She is in such a state of shock and excitement that Clarke thinks it quite possible she may go out of her mind. I saw her sitting by the fire, quite silent, not crying, but with a wild eye that means mischief.

We have sent in a nurse to help Mrs. Jellison watch her. She seems to care nothing about her boy. Everything that that woman most desired in life has been struck from her at a blow. Why? That a man who was in no stress of poverty, who had friends and employment, should indulge himself in acts which he knew to be against the law, and had promised you and his wife to forego, and should at the same time satisfy a wild beast's hatred against the man, who was simply defending his master's property. Have _you_ no pity for Mrs. Westall or her child?"

He spoke as calmly as he could, making his appeal to reason and moral sense; but, in reality, every word was charged with electric feeling.

"I _am_ sorry for her!" cried Marcella, pa.s.sionately. "But, after all, how can one feel for the oppressor, or those connected with him, as one does for the victim?" He shook his head, protesting against the word, but she rushed on. "You do know--for I told you yesterday--how under the shelter of this _hateful_ game system Westall made Kurd's life a burden to him when he was a young man--how he had begun to bully him again this past year. We had the same sort of dispute the other day about that murder in Ireland. You were shocked that I would not condemn the Moonlighters who had shot their landlord from behind a hedge, as you did. You said the man had tried to do his duty, and that the murder was brutal and unprovoked. But I thought of the _system_--of the _memories_ in the minds of the murderers. There _were_ excuses--he suffered for his father--I am not going to judge that as I judge other murders. So, when a Czar of Russia is blown up, do you expect one to think only of his wife and children? No! I will think of the tyranny and the revolt; I will pray, yes, _pray_ that I might have courage to do as they did! You may think me wild and mad. I dare say. I am made so. I shall always feel so!"

She flung out her words at him, every limb quivering under the emotion of them. His cool, penetrating eye, this manner she had never yet known in him, exasperated her.

"Where was the tyranny in this case?" he asked her quietly. "I agree with you that there are murders and murders. But I thought your point was that here was neither murder nor attack, but only an act of self-defence. That is Hurd's plea."

She hesitated and stumbled. "I know," she said, "I know. I believe it.

But, even if the attack had been on Hurd's part, I should still find excuses, because of the system, and because of Westall's hatefulness."

He shook his head again.

"Because a man is harsh and masterful, and uses stinging language, is he to be shot down like a dog?"

There was a silence. Marcella was las.h.i.+ng herself up by thoughts of the deformed man in his cell, looking forward after the wretched, unsatisfied life, which was all society had allowed him, to the violent death by which society would get rid of him--of the wife yearning her heart away--of the boy, whom other human beings, under the name of law, were about to separate from his father for ever. At last she broke out thickly and indistinctly:

"The terrible thing is that I cannot count upon you--that now I cannot make you feel as I do--feel with me. And by-and-by, when I shall want your help desperately, when your help might be everything--I suppose it will be no good to ask it."

He started, and bending forward he possessed himself of both her hands--her hot trembling hands--and kissed them with a pa.s.sionate tenderness.

"What help will you ask of me that I cannot give? That would be hard to bear!"

Still held by him, she answered his question by another:

"Give me your idea of what will happen. Tell me how you think it will end."

"I shall only distress you, dear," he said sadly.

"No; tell me. You think him guilty. You believe he will be convicted."

"Unless some wholly fresh evidence is forthcoming," he said reluctantly, "I can see no other issue."

"Very well; then he will be sentenced to death. But, after sentence--I know--that man from Widrington, that solicitor told me--if--if strong influence is brought to bear--if anybody whose word counts--if Lord Maxwell and you, were to join the movement to save him--There is sure to be a movement--the Radicals will take it up. Will you do it--will you promise me now--for my sake?"

He was silent.

She looked at him, all her heart burning in her eyes, conscious of her woman's power too, and pressing it.

"If that man is hung," she said pleadingly, "it will leave a mark on my life nothing will ever smooth out. I shall feel myself somehow responsible. I shall say to myself, if I had not been thinking about my own selfish affairs--about getting married--about the straw-plaiting--I might have seen what was going on. I might have saved these people, who have been my friends--my _real_ friends--from this horror."

She drew her hands away and fell back on the sofa, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes. "If you had seen her this morning!" she said in a strangled voice. "She was saying, 'Oh, miss, if they do find him guilty, they can't hang him--not my poor deformed Jim, that never had a chance of being like the others. Oh, we'll beg so hard. I know there's many people will speak for him. He was mad, miss, when he did it. He'd never been himself, not since last winter, when we all sat and starved, and he was driven out of his senses by thinking of me and the children.

You'll get Mr. Raeburn to speak--won't you, miss?--and Lord Maxwell? It was their game. I know it was their game. But they'll forgive him.

They're such great people, and so rich--and we--we've always had such a struggle. Oh, the bad times we've had, and no one know! They'll try and get him off, miss? Oh, I'll go and _beg_ of them.'"

She stopped, unable to trust her voice any further. He stooped over her and kissed her brow. There was a certain solemnity in the moment for both of them. The pity of human fate overshadowed them. At last he said firmly, yet with great feeling:

"I will not prejudge anything, that I promise you. I will keep my mind open to the last. But--I should like to say--it would not be any easier to me to throw myself into an agitation for reprieve because this man was tempted to crime by _my_ property--on _my_ land. I should think it right to look at it altogether from the public point of view. The satisfaction of my own private compunctions--of my own private feelings--is not what I ought to regard. My own share in the circ.u.mstances, in the conditions which made such an act possible does indeed concern me deeply. You cannot imagine but that the moral problem of it has possessed me ever since this dreadful thing happened. It troubled me much before. Now, it has become an oppression--a torture. I have never seen my grandfather so moved, so distressed, in all my remembrance of him. Yet he is a man of the old school, with the old standards. As for me, if ever I come to the estate I will change the whole system, I will run no risks of such human wreck and ruin as this--"

His voice faltered.

"But," he resumed, speaking steadily again, "I ought to warn you that such considerations as these will not affect my judgment of this particular case. In the first place, I have no quarrel with capital punishment as such. I do not believe we could rightly give it up. Your att.i.tude properly means that wherever we can legitimately feel pity for a murderer, we should let him escape his penalty. I, on the other hand, believe that if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would himself _claim_ his own death, as his best chance, his only chance--in this mysterious universe!--of self-recovery. Then it comes to this--was the act murder? The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears to me to be substantially just, and guided by it--"

"You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the world," she interrupted wildly; "as if law were not made and administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the lawbreaker!"

He looked troubled.

"Ah, but _law_ is something beyond laws or those who administer them,"

he said in a lower tone; "and the law--the _obligation-sense_--of our own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to what it is, out of our own best life--ours, yet not ours--the best proof we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in ourselves of some diviner power than our own will--our best clue to what that power may be!"

He spoke at first, looking away--wrestling out his thought, as it were, by himself--then turning back to her, his eyes emphasised the appeal implied, though not expressed, in what he said--intense appeal to her for sympathy, forbearance, mutual respect, through all acuteness of difference. His look both promised and implored.

He bad spoken to her but very rarely or indirectly as yet of his own religious or philosophical beliefs. She was in a stage when such things interested her but little, and reticence in personal matters was so much the law of his life that even to her expansion was difficult. So that--inevitably--she was arrested, for the moment, as any quick perception must be, by the things that unveil character.

Then an upheaval of indignant feeling swept the impression away. All that he said might be ideally, profoundly true--_but_--the red blood of the common life was lacking in every word of it! He ought to be incapable of saying it _now_. Her pa.s.sionate question was, how could he _argue_--how could he hold and mark the ethical balance--when a _woman_ was suffering, when _children_ were to be left fatherless? Besides--the ethical balance itself--does it not alter according to the hands that hold it--poacher or landlord, rich or poor?

But she was too exhausted to carry on the contest in words. Both felt it would have to be renewed. But she said to herself secretly that Mr.

Wharton, when he got to work, would alter the whole aspect of affairs.

And she knew well that her vantage-ground as towards Aldous was strong.

Then at last he was free to turn his whole attention for a little to her and her physical state, which made him miserable. He had never imagined that any one, vigorous and healthy as she was, could look so worn out in so short a time. She let him talk to her--lament, entreat, advise--and at last she took advantage of his anxiety and her admissions to come to the point, to plead that the marriage should be put off.

She used the same arguments that she had done to her mother.

"How can I bear to be thinking of these things?"--she pointed a shaking finger at the dress patterns lying scattered on the table--"with this agony, this death, under my eyes?"

It was a great blow to him, and the practical inconveniences involved were great. But the fibre of him--of which she had just felt the toughness--was delicate and sensitive as her own, and after a very short recoil he met her with great chivalry and sweetness, agreeing that everything should be put off for six weeks, till Easter in fact. She would have been very grateful to him but that something--some secret thought--checked the words she tried to say.

"I must go home then," he said, rising and trying to smile. "I shall have to make things straight with Aunt Neta, and set a great many arrangements in train. Now, you will _try_ to think of something else?

Let me leave you with a book that I can imagine you will read."

She let herself be tended and thought for. At the last, just as he was going, he said:

"Have you seen Mr. Wharton at all since this happened?"

His manner was just as usual. She felt that her eye was guilty, but the darkness of the firelit room s.h.i.+elded her.

"I have not seen him since we met him in the drive. I saw the solicitor who is working up the case for him yesterday. He came over to see Mrs.

Hurd and me. I had not thought of asking him, but we agreed that, if he would undertake it, it would be the best chance."

"It _is_ probably the best chance," said Aldous, thoughtfully. "I believe Wharton has not done much at the Bar since he was called, but that, no doubt, is because he has had so much on his hands in the way of journalism and politics. His ability is enough for anything, and he will throw himself into this. I do not think Hurd could do better."

She did not answer. She felt that he was magnanimous, but felt it coldly, without emotion.

He came and stooped over her.

"Good-night--good-night--tired child--dear heart! When I saw you in that cottage this morning I thought of the words, 'Give, and it shall be given unto you.' All that my life can do to pour good measure, pressed down, running over, into yours, I vowed you then!"