Marcella Part 72

and get all the abuse from all sides."

Anthony laughed scornfully.

"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers."

"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the thought of many days finding defiant expression--"it seems to me like all other interesting and important things--destined to help something else!

Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods--it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state. The Crusades--they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord!--what they did was to increase trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It talks of a new order--what it _will_ do is to help to make the old sound!"

Anthony clapped her ironically.

"Excellent! When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold of you--ask me to come and hear!"

Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome half-taught girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or desired to have it.

Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for him, rare effusion. Two years before, for the s.p.a.ce of some months, he had been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her by that moment of pa.s.sionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly!--she had given him his Anna.

When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Louis's thanks had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a child's brightness. The old pa.s.sion for ruling and influencing was all alive and happy.

"I will see it is all right," she was saying to herself. "I will look after them."

What she meant was, "I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after them!" and through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to that _tete-a-tete_ with him which had preceded the Cravens' arrival.

How changed he was, yet how much the same! He had not sat beside her for ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of the other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious claim to confidence, to intimacy--on the other hand a new atmosphere, a new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties of power, a great position--everything fitted to touch such an imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was n.o.ble, both in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had gained lines that pleased her--lines that a woman marks, because she thinks they mean experience an I mastery.

Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was pleasure; so too was his new connection with her old friends. And a pleasure which took nothing from self-respect; which was open, honourable, eager. As for that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at the thought of it, only to thrust the remembrance pa.s.sionately away.

That _he_ should remember or allude to it, would put an end to friendship. Otherwise friends they would and should be; and the personal interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between men and women grow more possible every day. While, as for Hallin's distrust, and Anthony Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either of them? Could any one suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's would be congenial to Hallin or to Craven--or--to yet another person, of whom she did not want to think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of him? It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made its force.

So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who came to clear away the tea.

"Why, it is close on the half-hour!" cried Marcella, springing up.

"Where are my things?"

She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.

Suddenly--the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the tea--by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on Hallin's table flashed into her mind--its look--the grizzled hair. With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her--a dumb gesture of contrition and of grief.

She!--she talk of social reform and "character," she give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.

CHAPTER VII.

Her first case was in Brown's Buildings itself--a woman suffering from bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks. She lived on the top floor of one of the easterly blocks, with two daughters and a son of eighteen.

When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean and smelt of flowers. The windows were open, and a young woman was busy shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then, they introduced her with some ceremony to a "lady," who was sitting beside the patient, a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy.

The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as "the young person," but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not have been surpa.s.sed.

Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off; but between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and grateful to her nurse. "I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle as you--" or--"I _do_ take it kind of you, Nurse, to do it so _slow_--oh!

there were a young person before you--" or "hasn't she got nice hands, Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem to _jar_ yer."

"Poor foot! but I think it is looking better," said Marcella, getting up at last from her work, when all was clean and comfortable and she had replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it--for its owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old armchair. "And how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?"

"Oh! it's very bad, nights," said Mrs. Jervis, mildly--"disturbs Emily dreadful. But I always pray every night, when she lifts me into bed, as I may be took before the morning, an' G.o.d ull do it soon."

"Mother!" cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, "you know you oughtn't to say them things."

Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the frail form there breathed an indomitable air of _life_, a gay courage indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.

"Well, yer not to take 'em to heart, Em'ly. It ull be when it will be--for the Lord likes us to pray, but He'll take his own time--an'

she's got troubles enough of her own, Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off her ring?"

Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over, and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.

"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last two days," she said with low vehemence--"as I'm _never_ goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn me!"

Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the brutal ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen, had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from his earnings enough to teach Emily "the shirt-ironing," denying himself every indulgence till her training was over.

Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back; her earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease; while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness and care.

Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's speech.

"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that held down the shirt on the board.

Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's eyes glowed with things unsaid and inexpressible--the "eternal pa.s.sion, eternal pain,"

which in half the human race have no voice.

"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband," said Mrs. Jervis, in her delicate thoughtful voice--"a very uncultivated man."

Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them apparently to express what had to be said.

"It's a sad thing is want of edication," Mrs. Jervis went on in the same tone. "Now there's that lady there"--with a little courtly wave of her hand towards Mrs. Burton--"she can't read yer know, Nurse, and I'm that sorry for her! But I've been reading to her, an' Emily--just while my cough's quiet--one of my ole tracks."

She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use. It was called "A Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?" Marcella looked at it in respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in her line.

"I do _love_ a track!" said Mrs. Jervis, pensively. "That's why I don't like these buildings so well as them others, Em'ly. Here you never get no tracks; and there, what with one person and another, there was a new one most weeks. But"--her voice dropped, and she looked timidly first at her friend, and then at Marcella--"she isn't a Christian, Nurse. Isn't it sad?"

Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich mahogany complexion, with a black "front," and a mouth which turned down decisively at the corners, looked up from her embroidery with severe composure.

"No, Nurse, I'm not a Christian," she said in the tone of one stating a disagreeable fact for which they are noways responsible. "My brother is--and my sisters--real good Christian people. One of my sisters married a gentleman up in Wales. She 'as two servants, an' fam'ly prayers reg'lar. But I've never felt no 'call,' and I tell 'em I can't purtend. An' Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no different."

She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked at her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a churchwoman.

"Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton," she said indignantly. "What she means, Nurse, is she isn't a 'member' of any chapel, like mother.

But she's been baptised and confirmed, for I asked her. And of course she's a Christian."