Marcella. Mrs. Humphry Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ looked at her fixedly a moment undecided, then her strong nervous youth seemed to exercise a kind of compulsion on him; perhaps, too, the pretty courtesy of her manner. He cleared his throat again, and tried to forget Mrs. Jellison, who would be sure to let him hear of it again, whatever he said.

      "Well, I can't answer for 'em, miss, I'm sure, but if you ast me, I b'lieve ther's a bit o' boath in it. Yer see it's not in human natur, when a man's young and 's got his blood up, as he shouldn't want ter have 'is sport with the wild creeturs. Perhaps he see 'em when ee's going to the wood with a wood cart—or he cooms across 'em in the turnips—wounded birds, you understan', miss, perhaps the day after the gentry 'as been bangin' at 'em all day. An' ee don't see, not for the life of 'im, why ee shouldn't have 'em. Ther's bin lots an' lots for the rich folks, an' he don't see why ee shouldn't have a few arter they've enjoyed theirselves. And mebbe he's eleven shillin' a week—an' two-threy little chillen—you understan', miss?"

      "Of course I understand!" said Marcella, eagerly, her dark cheek flushing. "Of course I do! But there's a good deal of game given away in these parts, isn't there? I know Lord Maxwell does, and they say Lord Winterbourne gives all his labourers rabbits, almost as many as they want."

      Her questions wound old Patton up as though he had been a disused clock. He began to feel a whirr among his creaking wheels, a shaking of all his rusty mind.

      "Perhaps they do, miss," he said, and his wife saw that he was beginning to tremble. "I dessay they do—I don't say nothink agen it—though theer's none of it cooms my way. But that isn't all the rights on it nayther—no, that it ain't. The labourin' man ee's glad enough to get a hare or a rabbit for 'is eatin'—but there's more in it nor that, miss. Ee's allus in the fields, that's where it is—ee can't help seein' the hares and the rabbits a-comin' in and out o' the woods, if it were iver so. Ee knows ivery run ov ivery one on 'em; if a hare's started furthest corner o' t' field, he can tell yer whar she'll git in by, because he's allus there, you see, miss, an' it's the only thing he's got to take his mind off like. And then he sets a snare or two—an' ee gits very sharp at settin' on 'em—an' ee'll go out nights for the sport of it. Ther isn't many things ee's got to liven him up; an' ee takes 'is chances o' goin' to jail—it's wuth it, ee thinks."

      The old man's hands on his stick shook more and more visibly. Bygones of his youth had come back to him.

      "Oh, I know! I know!" cried Marcella, with an accent half of indignation, half of despair. "It's the whole wretched system. It spoils those who've got, and those who haven't got. And there'll be no mending it till the people get the land back again, and till the rights on it are common to all."

      "My! she do speak up, don't she?" said Mrs. Jellison, grinning again at her companions. Then, stooping forward with one of her wild movements, she caught Marcella's arm—"I'd like to hear yer tell that to Lord Maxwell, miss. I likes a roompus, I do."

      Marcella flushed and laughed.

      "I wouldn't mind saying that or anything else to Lord Maxwell," she said proudly. "I'm not ashamed of anything I think."

      "No, I'll bet you ain't," said Mrs. Jellison, withdrawing her hand. "Now then, Patton, you say what you thinks. You ain't got no vote now you're in the parish houses—I minds that. The quality don't trouble you at 'lection times. This yoong man, Muster Wharton, as is goin' round so free, promisin' yer the sun out o' the sky, iv yer'll only vote for 'im, so th' men say—ee don't coom an' set down along o' you an' me, an' cocker of us up as ee do Joe Simmons or Jim Hurd here. But that don't matter. Yur thinkin's yur own, anyway."

      But she nudged him in vain. Patton had suddenly run down, and there was no more to be got out of him.

      Not only had nerves and speech failed him as they were wont, but in his cloudy soul there had risen, even while Marcella was speaking, the inevitable suspicion which dogs the relations of the poor towards the richer class. This young lady, with her strange talk, was the new squire's daughter. And the village had already made up its mind that Richard Boyce was "a poor sort," and "a hard sort" too, in his landlord capacity. He wasn't going to be any improvement on his brother—not a haporth! What was the good of this young woman talking, as she did, when there were three summonses as he, Patton, heard tell, just taken out by the sanitary inspector against Mr. Boyce for bad cottages? And not a farthing given away in the village neither, except perhaps the bits of food that the young lady herself brought down to the village now and then, for which no one, in truth, felt any cause to be particularly grateful. Besides, what did she mean by asking questions about the poaching? Old Patton knew as well as anybody else in the village, that during Robert Boyce's last days, and after the death of his sportsman son, the Mellor estate had become the haunt of poachers from far and near, and that the trouble had long since spread into the neighbouring properties, so that the Winterbourne and Maxwell keepers regarded it their most arduous business to keep watch on the men of Mellor. Of course the young woman knew it all, and she and her father wanted to know more. That was why she talked. Patton hardened himself against the creeping ways of the quality.

      "I don't think nought," he said roughly in answer to Mrs. Jellison. "Thinkin' won't come atwixt me and the parish coffin when I'm took. I've no call to think, I tell yer."

      Marcella's chest heaved with indignant feeling.

      "Oh, but, Mr. Patton!" she cried, leaning forward to him, "won't it comfort you a bit, even if you can't live to see it, to think there's a better time coming? There must be. People can't go on like this always—hating each other and trampling on each other. They're beginning to see it now, they are! When I was living in London, the persons I was with talked and thought of it all day. Some day, whenever the people choose—for they've got the power now they've got the vote—there'll be land for everybody, and in every village there'll be a council to manage things, and the labourer will count for just as much as the squire and the parson, and he'll be better educated and better fed, and care for many things he doesn't care for now. But all the same, if he wants sport and shooting, it will be there for him to get. For everybody will have a chance and a turn, and there'll be no bitterness between classes, and no hopeless pining and misery as there is now!"

      The girl broke off, catching her breath. It excited her to say these things to these people, to these poor tottering old things who had lived out their lives to the end under the pressure of an iron system, and had no lien on the future, whatever Paradise it might bring. Again the situation had something foreseen and dramatic in it. She saw herself, as the preacher, sitting on her stool beside the poor grate—she realised as a spectator the figures of the women and the old man played on by the firelight—the white, bare, damp-stained walls of the cottage, and in the background the fragile though still comely form of Minta Hurd, who was standing with her back to the dresser, and her head bent forward, listening to the talk while her fingers twisted the straw she plaited eternally from morning till night, for a wage of about 1s. 3d. a week:

      Her mind was all aflame with excitement and defiance—defiance of her father, Lord Maxwell, Aldous Raeburn. Let him come, her friend, and see for himself what she thought it right to do and say in this miserable village. Her soul challenged him, longed to provoke him! Well, she was soon to meet him, and in a new and more significant relation and environment. The fact made her perception of the whole situation the more rich and vibrant.

      Patton, while these broken thoughts and sensations were coursing through Marcella's head, was slowly revolving what she had been saying, and the others were waiting for him.

      At last he rolled his tongue round his dry lips and delivered himself by a final effort.

      "Them as likes, miss, may believe as how things are going to happen that way, but yer won't ketch me! Them as have got 'ull keep"—he let his stick sharply down on the floor—"an' them as 'aven't got 'ull СКАЧАТЬ