Marcella. Mrs. Humphry Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ way every day, and, what with securing Aldous's own seat in the next division, and helping old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full. Dick Boyce was glad of it. He was a Tory; but all the same he wished every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.

      The three sat on together for a little while in silence. Marcella kept her seat by the fire on the old gilt fenderstool, conscious in a dreamlike way of the room in front of her—the stately room with its stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert Boyce—conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had he said to Lord Maxwell?—and to the Winterbournes? She wished she could know. She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again quickly. Yet it would be awkward too.

      * * * * *

      Presently she got up and went away to take off her things. As the door closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn's note, which Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.

      "They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said. "I am not going, but I shall send her."

      He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most contradictory effects upon him.

      "Why don't you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.

      "I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old to begin again."

      "What! you mean to say," he asked her angrily, raising his voice, "that you have never meant to do your duties here—the duties of your position?"

      "I did not foresee many, outside this house and land. Why should we change our ways? We have done very well of late. I have no mind to risk what I have got."

      He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on. His anger sank into moroseness.

      "Then why do you let Marcella go? What good will it do her to go about without her parents? People will only despise her for a girl of no spirit—as they ought."

      "It depends upon how it is done. I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs. Boyce. "A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of health. She need never give offence if she has decent wits. It will be understood that I do not go out, and then someone—Miss Raeburn or Lady Winterbourne—will take up Marcella and mother her."

      She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.

      "If you were to talk of my health, it would be more to the purpose," he said, with grim inconsequence. And raising his heavy lids he looked at her full.

      She got up and went over to him.

      "Do you feel worse again? Why will you not change your things directly you come in? Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"

      She was standing close beside him; her beautiful hand, for which in their young days it had pleased his pride to give her rings, almost touched him. A passionate hunger leapt within him. She would stoop and kiss him if he asked her; he knew that. But he would not ask her; he did not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give him again.

      Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.

      "Clarke does me no good—not an atom," he said, rising. "There—don't you come. I Can look after myself."

      He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room. She put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so stood silent for long. There was no sound audible in the room, or from the house outside. And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor God.

      * * * * *

      "I shall go, for all our sakes," thought Marcella, as she stood late that night brushing her hair before her dimly-lighted and rickety dressing-table. "We have, it seems, no right to be proud."

      A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart—pain, new-born and insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself. Ever since Aldous Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden invasion of a hot and shamed misery. And to-night, after her talk with her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.

      But her strong personality, her passionate sense of a moral independence not to be undone by the acts of another, even a father, made her soon impatient of her own distress, and she flung it from her with decision.

      "No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself. "It must be all true what Mr. Raeburn said—probably a great deal more. Poor, poor mamma! But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty quarrelling and standing alone. And it was so long ago."

      Her hand fell, and she stood absently looking at her own black and white reflection in the old flawed glass.

      She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn. He had been very prompt in her service. There could be no question but that he was specially interested in her.

      And he was not a man to be lightly played upon—nay, rather a singularly reserved and scrupulous person. So, at least, it had been always held concerning him. Marcella was triumphantly conscious that he had not from the beginning given her much trouble. But the common report of him made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more significant. Even the Hardens—so Marcella gathered from her friend and admirer Mary—unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the hastening of Christ's kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take note.

      It was not as though he were in the dark as to her antecedents. He knew all—at any rate, more than she did—and yet it might end in his asking her to marry him. What then?

      Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the glass! Love, at such a thought, must have sunk upon its knees and hid its face for tender humbleness and requital. Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.

      What was stirring in her was really a passionate ambition—ambition to be the queen and arbitress of human lives—to be believed in by her friends, to make a mark for herself among women, and to make it in the most romantic and yet natural way, without what had always seemed to her the sordid and unpleasant drudgeries of the platform, of a tiresome co-operation with, or subordination to others who could not understand your ideas.

      Of course, if it happened, people would say that she had tried to capture Aldous Raeburn for his money and position's sake. Let them say it. People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it. Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for something to carry her deep into life; into the heart of its widest and most splendid opportunities!

      She threw up her hands, СКАЧАТЬ