Marcella Part 80

"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I could cry over her!"

Aldous started.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to talk of her. If she were a.s.sociated in my mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But this--this--" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day, 'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had thrown me over except _with ill-will._' The word astonished me, but sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of _anger_ to the most futile, the most ridiculous degree!"

He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's shoulders, and there was a short pause.

"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?--I forget."

Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again, meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of things in two or three selected streets.

It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he thought the Government could really do good.

Then Raeburn turned to go.

"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he opened the door.

"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have my jaunt."

Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common Sat.u.r.day practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some sight.

"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand them over to me."

"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the room.

Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared from the too short London summer.

For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of tune--whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly n.o.ble and tender; and as for those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all the ceremonial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.

He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street, and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together talking.

The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a peculiarly vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.

After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its condemned houses, many of them sh.o.r.ed up and windowless, its narrow roadway strewn with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type.

A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they had pa.s.sed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.

"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after.

The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."

And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly peopled by women of the very lowest cla.s.s and their "bullies"--that is to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circ.u.mstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.

When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough. But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of "big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.

Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.

"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"

Shrieks--of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air.

The men and women who rushed past the two strangers--hustling them, yet too excited to notice them--were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.

"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds like murder. You go back for that policeman!"

And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling--cries, groans, uproar--all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall--then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion--"Help!"

Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark pa.s.sage inside--two wrestling with the third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with blood.

"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister too!"

"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous--it's the nuss he means! I sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer _blackguard_, you!"--and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.

"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.

Aldous was already upstairs.

"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the first landing--for all sounds from above had ceased.

"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us _begged_ and _implored_ of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we, Betsy?--didn't we, Doll?"

Aldous ran up.

On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on the ground, apparently beaten to death.

By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity.

Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on Raeburn's heart.

In such an exaltation of nerve _she_ could be surprised at nothing.

When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.

"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her--speaking with pauses, as though to get her breath--"he has--killed her. But there--is a chance.

Are the--police there--and a stretcher?"

Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.

"Did you see it, miss?"

"I--I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the bandage she was applying. "But he was--such a great--powerful brute."

Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.

"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his note-book, "attending a child--that's ill--when I heard the screams.

They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room--then rushed after her--I _think_--to throw her downstairs--I stopped that. Then he took up something--oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink--I couldn't--do much."

Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.

"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.