Marcella Part 104

"On the contrary, it is they who have an excuse. They have no natural opening, perhaps--no plain call. You have both, and, as I said before, you have no _right_ to take holidays before you have earned them. You have got to learn your business first, and then do it. Give your eight hours' day like other people! Who are you that you should have all the cake of the world, and other people the crusts?"

Frank walked to the window, and stood staring out, with his back turned to her. Her words stung and tingled; and he was too miserable to fight.

"I shouldn't care whether it were cake or crusts," he said at last, in a low voice, turning round to her, "if only Betty would have me."

"Do you think she is any the more likely to have you," said Marcella, unrelenting, "if you behave as a loafer and a runaway? Don't you suppose that Betty has good reasons for hesitating when she sees the difference between you--and--and other people?"

Frank looked at her sombrely--a queer mixture of expressions on the face, in which the maturer man was already to be discerned at war with the powerful young animal.

"I suppose you mean Lord Maxwell?"

There was a pause.

"You may take what I said," she said at last, looking into the fire, "as meaning anybody who pays honestly with work and brains for what society has given him--as far as he can pay, at any rate."

"Now look here," said Frank, coming dolefully to sit down beside her; "don't slate me any more. I'm a bad lot, I know--well, an idle lot--I don't think I am a _bad_ lot--But it's no good your preaching to me while Betty's sticking pins into me like this. Now just let me tell you how she's been behaving."

Marcella succ.u.mbed, and heard him. He glanced at her surrept.i.tiously from time to time, but he could make nothing of her. She sat very quiet while he described the constant companionship between Aldous and Betty, and the evident designs of Miss Raeburn. Just as when he made his first confidences to her in London, he was vaguely conscious that he was doing a not very gentlemanly thing. But again, he was too unhappy to restrain himself, and he longed somehow to make an ally of her.

"Well, I have only one thing to say," she said at last, with an odd nervous impatience--"go and ask her, and have done with it! She might have some respect for you then. No, I won't help you; but if you don't succeed, I'll pity you--I promise you that. And now you must go away."

He went, feeling himself hardly treated, yet conscious nevertheless of a certain stirring of the moral waters which had both stimulus and balm in it.

She, left behind, sat quiet in the old library for a few lonely minutes.

The boy's plight made her alternately scornful and repentant of her sharpness to him. As to his report, one moment it plunged her in an anguish she dared not fathom; the next she was incredulous--could not simply make herself take the thing as real.

But one thing had been real--that word from Aldous to her of "_marriage_"! The nostril dilated, the breast heaved, as she lost all thought of Frank in a resentful pa.s.sion that could neither justify nor calm itself. It seemed still as though he had struck her. Yet she knew well that she had nothing to forgive.

Next morning she went down to the village meaning to satisfy herself on two or three points connected with the new cottages. On the way she knocked at the Rectory garden-door, in the hope of finding Mary Harden and persuading her to come with her.

She had not seen much of Mary since their return. Still, she had had time to be painfully struck once or twice with the white and bloodless look of the Rector's sister, and with a certain patient silence about her which seemed to Marcella new. Was it the monotony of the life? or had both of them been overworking and underfeeding as usual? The Rector had received Marcella with his old gentle but rather distant kindness.

Two years before he had felt strongly about many of her proceedings, and had expressed himself frankly enough, at least to Mary. Now he had put his former disapprovals out of his mind, and was only anxious to work smoothly with the owner of Mellor. He had a great respect for "dignities," and she, as far as the village was concerned, was to be his "dignity" henceforward. Moreover, he humbly and truly hoped that she might be able to enlighten him as to a good many modern conceptions and ideas about the poor, for which, absorbed as he was, either in almsgiving of the traditional type, or spiritual ministration, or sacramental theory, he had little time, and, if the truth were known, little affinity.

In answer to her knock Marcella heard a faint "Come in" from the interior of the house. She walked into the dining-room, and found Mary sitting by the little table in tears. There were some letters before her, which she pushed away as Marcella entered, but she did not attempt to disguise her agitation.

"What is it, dear? Tell me," said Marcella, sitting down beside her, and kissing one of the hands she held.

And Mary told her. It was the story of her life--a simple tale of ordinary things, such as wring the quiet hearts and train the unnoticed saints of this world. In her first youth, when Charles Harden was for a time doing some divinity lecturing in his Oxford college, Mary had gone up to spend a year with him in lodgings. Their Sunday teas and other small festivities were frequented by her brother's friends, men of like type with himself, and most of them either clergymen or about to be ordained. Between one of them, a young fellow looking out for his first curacy, and Mary an attachment had sprung up, which Mary could not even now speak of. She hurried over it, with a trembling voice, to the tragedy beyond. Mr. Shelton got his curacy, went off to a parish in the Lincolnshire Fens, and there was talk of their being married in a year or so. But the exposure of a bitter winter's night, risked in the struggle across one of the bleakest flats of the district to carry the Sacrament to a dying parishioner, had brought on a peculiar and agonising form of neuralgia. And from this pain, so n.o.bly earned, had sprung--oh! mystery of human fate!--a morphia-habit, with all that such a habit means for mind and body. It was discovered by the poor fellow's brother, who brought him up to London and tried to cure him. Meanwhile he himself had written to Mary to give her up. "I have no will left, and am no longer a man," he wrote to her. "It would be an outrage on my part, and a sin on yours, if we did not cancel our promise." Charles, who took a hard, ascetic view, held much the same language, and Mary submitted, heart-broken.

Then came a gleam of hope. The brother's care and affection prevailed; there were rumours of great improvement, of a resumption of work. "Just two years ago, when you first came here, I was beginning to believe"--she turned away her head to hide the rise of tears--"that it might still come right." But after some six or eight months of clerical work in London fresh trouble developed, lung mischief showed itself, and the system, undermined by long and deep depression, seemed to capitulate at once.

"He died last December, at Madeira," said Mary, quietly. "I saw him before he left England. We wrote to each other almost to the end. He was quite at peace. This letter here was from the chaplain at Madeira, who was kind to him, to tell me about his grave."

That was all. It was the sort of story that somehow might have been expected to belong to Mary Harden--to her round, plaintive face, to her narrow, refined experience; and she told it in a way eminently characteristic of her modes of thinking, religious or social, with old-fashioned or conventional phrases which, whatever might be the case with other people, had lost none of their bloom or meaning for her.

Marcella's face showed her sympathy. They talked for half an hour, and at the end of it Mary flung her arms round her companion's neck.

"There!" she said, "now we must not talk any more about it. I am glad I told you. It was a comfort. And somehow--I don't mean to be unkind; but I couldn't have told you in the old days--it's wonderful how much better I like you now than I used to do, though perhaps we don't agree much better."

Both laughed, though the eyes of both were full of tears.

Presently they were in the village together. As they neared the Hurds'

old cottage, which was now empty and to be pulled down, a sudden look of disgust crossed Marcella's face.

"Did I tell you my news of Minta Hurd?" she said.

No; Mary had heard nothing. So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi. Jim Hurd's widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky "professor of elocution," with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the floor beneath her in Brown's Buildings, and had been wont to come in of an evening and play comic songs to her and the children. Marcella was vehemently sure that he was a charlatan--that he got his living by a number of small dishonesties, that he had scented Minta's pension. But apart from the question whether he would make Minta a decent husband, or live upon her and beat her, was the fact itself of her re-marriage, in itself hideous to the girl.

"_Marry_ him!" she said. "Marry any one! Isn't it incredible?"

They were in front of the cottage. Marcella paused a moment and looked at it. She saw again in sharp vision the miserable woman fainting on the settle, the dwarf sitting, handcuffed, under the eye of his captors; she felt again the rush of that whirlwind of agony through which she had borne the wife's helpless soul in that awful dawn.

And after that--exit!--with her "professor of elocution." It made the girl sick to think of. And Mary, out of a Puseyite dislike of second marriage, felt and expressed much the same repulsion.

Well--Minta Hurd was far away, and if she had been there to defend herself her powers of expression would have been no match for theirs.

Nor does youth understand such pleas as she might have urged.

"Will Lord Maxwell continue the pension?" said Mary.

Marcella stopped again, involuntarily.

"So that was his doing?" she said. "I supposed as much."

"You did not know?" cried Mary, in distress. "Oh! I believe I ought not to have said anything about it."

"I always guessed it," said Marcella, shortly, and they walked on in silence.

Presently they found themselves in front of Mrs. Jellison's very trim and pleasant cottage, which lay farther along the common, to the left of the road to the Court. There was an early pear-tree in blossom over the porch, and a swelling greenery of buds in the little garden.

"Will you come in?" said Mary. "I should like to see Isabella Westall."

Marcella started at the name.

"How is she?" she asked.

"Just the same. She has never been in her right mind since. But she is quite harmless and quiet."

They found Mrs. Jellison on one side of the fire, with her daughter on the other, and the little six-year-old Johnnie playing between them.

Mrs. Jellison was straw-plaiting, twisting the straws with amazing rapidity, her fingers stained with red from the dye of them. Isabella was, as usual, doing nothing. She stared when Marcella and Mary came in, but she took no other notice of them. Her powerful and tragic face had the look of something originally full of intention, from which spirit and meaning had long departed, leaving a fine but lifeless outline.

Marcella had seen it last on the night of the execution, in ghastly apparition at Minta Hurd's window, when it might have been caught by some sculptor in quest of the secrets of violent expression, fixed in clay or marble, and labelled "Revenge," or "Pa.s.sion."

Its pa.s.sionless emptiness now filled her with pity and horror. She sat down beside the widow and took her hand. Mrs. Westall allowed it for a moment, then drew her own away suddenly, and Marcella saw a curious and sinister contraction of the eyes.

"Ah! yo never know how much Isabella unnerstan's, an' how much she don't," Mrs. Jellison was saying to Mary. "I can't allus make her out, but she don't give no trouble. An' as for that boy, he's a chirruper, he is. He gives 'em fine times at school, he do. Miss Barton, she ast him in cla.s.s, Thursday, 'bout Ananias and Sappira. 'Johnnie,' says she, 'whatever made 'em do sich a wicked thing?' 'Well, _I_ do'n' know,' says he; 'it was jus' their na.s.sty good-for-nothink,' says he; 'but they was great sillies,' says he. Oh! he don't mean no harm!--lor' bless yer, the men is all born contrary, and they can't help themselves. Oh! thank yer, miss, my 'ealth is pretty tidy, though I 'ave been plagued this winter with a something they call the 'flenzy. I wor very bad! 'Yo go to bed, Mrs. Jellison,' says Dr. Sharpe, 'or yo'll know of it.' But I worn't goin' to be talked to by 'im. Why, I knowed 'im when he wor no 'igher nor Johnnie. An' I kep' puddlin' along, an' one mornin' I wor fairly choked, an' I just crawled into that parlour, an' I took a sup o'

brandy out o' the bottle"--she looked complacently at Mary, quite conscious that the Rector's sister must be listening to her with disapproving ears--"an', lor' bless yer, it cut the phlegm, it did, that very moment. My! I did cough. I drawed it up by the yard, I did--and I crep' back along the wall, and yo cud ha' knocked me down wi' one o' my own straws. But I've been better iver since, an' beginnin' to eat my vittles, too, though I'm never no great p.e.c.k.e.r--I ain't--not at no time."