Marcella Part 83

He says we've got to win them. We've got somehow to make them feel us their friends--or we shall _all_ go to ruin! They have the voting power--and we are the party of education, of refinement. If we can only lead that kind of man to see the essential justice of our cause--and at the same time give them our help--in reason--show them we want to be their friends--wouldn't it be best? I don't know whether I put it rightly--you know so much about these things! But we can't undo '67--can we? We must get round it somehow--mustn't we? And my father thinks Ministers so unwise! But perhaps"--and Lady Selina drew herself back with a more gracious smile than ever--"I ought not to be saying these things to you--of course I know you _used_ to think us Conservatives very bad people--but Mr. Wharton tells me, perhaps you don't think _quite_ so hardly of us as you used?"

Lady Selina's head in its Paris bonnet fell to one side in a gentle interrogative sort of way.

Something roused in Marcella.

"Our cause?" she repeated, while the dark eye dilated--"I wonder what you mean?"

"Well, I mean--" said Lady Selina, seeking for the harmless word, in the face of this unknown explosive-looking girl--"I mean, of course, the cause of the educated--of the people who have made the country."

"I think," said Marcella, quietly, "you mean the cause of the rich, don't you?"

"Marcella!" cried Lady Winterbourne, catching at the tone rather than words--"I thought you didn't feel like that any more--not about the distance between the poor and the rich--and our tyranny--and its being hopeless--and the poor always hating us--I thought you changed."

And forgetting Lady Selina, remembering only the old talks at Mellor, Lady Winterbourne bent forward and laid an appealing hand on Marcella's arm.

Marcella turned to her with an odd look.

"If you only knew," she said, "how much more possible it is to think well of the rich, when you are living amongst the poor!"

"Ah! you must be at a distance from us to do us justice?" enquired Lady Selina, settling her bracelets with a sarcastic lip.

"_I_ must," said Marcella, looking, however, not at her, but at Lady Winterbourne. "But then, you see,"--she caressed her friend's hand with a smile--"it is so easy to throw some people into opposition!"

"Dreadfully easy!" sighed Lady Winterbourne.

The flush mounted again in the girl's cheek. She hesitated, then felt driven to explanations.

"You see--oddly enough"--she pointed away for an instant to the north-east through the open window--"it's when I'm over there--among the people who have nothing--that it does me good to remember that there are persons who live in James Street, Buckingham Gate!"

"My dear! I don't understand," said Lady Winterbourne, studying her with her most perplexed and tragic air.

"Well, isn't it simple?" said Marcella, still holding her hand and looking up at her. "It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those streets and houses, among people who live in one room--with not a bit of prettiness anywhere--and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come home and _gloat_ over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I can think of!"

"But don't you _hate_ the people that have them?" said Betty, again on her stool, chin in hand.

"No! it doesn't seem to matter to me then what kind of people they are.

And I don't so much want to take from them and give to the others. I only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness are _some_where--not lost out of the world."

"How strange!--in a life like yours--that one should think so much of the _ugliness_ of being poor--more than of suffering or pain," said Betty, musing.

"Well--in some moods--you do--_I_ do!" said Marcella; "and it is in those moods that I feel least resentful of wealth. If I say to myself that the people who have all the beauty and the leisure are often selfish and cruel--after all they die out of their houses and their parks, and their pictures, in time, like the sh.e.l.l-fish out of its sh.e.l.l. The beauty and the grace which they created or inherited remain.

And why should one be envious of _them_ personally? They have had the best chances in the world and thrown them away--are but poor animals at the end! At any rate I can't hate them--they seem to have a function--when I am moving about Drury Lane!" she added with a smile.

"But how can one help being ashamed?" said Lady Winterbourne, as her eyes wandered over her pretty room, and she felt herself driven somehow into playing devil's advocate.

"No! No!" said Marcella, eagerly, "don't be ashamed! As to the people who make beauty more beautiful--who share it and give it--I often feel as if I could say to them on my knees, Never, _never_ be ashamed merely of being rich--of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a cripple, or having two eyes rather than one!"

"Oh, but, my dear!" cried Lady Winterbourne, piteous and bewildered, "when one has all the beauty and the freedom--and other people must _die_ without any--"

"Oh, I know, I _know_!" said Marcella, with a quick gesture of despair; "that's what makes the world the world. And one begins with thinking it can be changed--that it _must_ and _shall_ be changed!--that everybody could have wealth--could have beauty and rest, and time to think, that is to say--if things were different--if one could get Socialism--if one could beat down the capitalist--if one could level down, and level up, till everybody had 200 _l._ a year. One turns and fingers the puzzle all day long. It seems so _near_ coming right--one guesses a hundred ways in which it might be done! Then after a while one stumbles upon doubt--one begins to see that it never _will_, never _can_ come right--not in any mechanical way of that sort--that _that_ isn't what was meant!"

Her voice dropped drearily. Betty Macdonald gazed at her with a girl's nascent adoration. Lady Winterbourne was looking puzzled and unhappy, but absorbed like Betty in Marcella. Lady Selina, studying the three with smiling composure, was putting on her veil, with the most careful attention to fringe and hairpins. As for Ermyntrude, she was no longer on the sofa; she had risen noiselessly, finger on lip, almost at the beginning of Marcella's talk, to greet a visitor. She and he were standing at the back of the room, in the opening of the conservatory, unnoticed by any of the group in the bow window.

"Don't you think," said Lady Selina, airily, her white fingers still busy with her bonnet, "that it would be a very good thing to send all the Radicals--the well-to-do Radicals I mean--to live among the poor? It seems to teach people such extremely useful things!"

Marcella straightened herself as though some one had touched her impertinently. She looked round quickly.

"I wonder what you suppose it teaches?"

"Well," said Lady Selina, a little taken aback and hesitating; "well! I suppose it teaches a person to be content--and not to cry for the moon!"

"You _think_," said Marcella, slowly, "that to live among the poor can teach any one--any one that's _human_--to be _content_!"

Her manner had the unconscious intensity of emphasis, the dramatic force that came to her from another blood than ours. Another woman could hardly have fallen into such a tone without affectation--without pose.

At this moment certainly Betty, who was watching her, acquitted her of either, and warmly thought her a magnificent creature.

Lady Selina's feeling simply was that she had been roughly addressed by her social inferior. She drew herself up.

"As I understand you," she said stiffly, "you yourself confessed that to live with poverty had led you to think more reasonably of wealth."

Suddenly a movement of Lady Ermyntrude's made the speaker turn her head.

She saw the pair at the end of the room, looked astonished, then smiled.

"Why, Mr. Raeburn! where have you been hiding yourself during this great discussion? Most consoling, wasn't it--on the whole--to us West End people?"

She threw back a keen glance at Marcella. Lady Ermyntrude and Raeburn came forward.

"I made him be quiet," said Ermyntrude, not looking, however, quite at her ease; "it would have been a shame to interrupt."

"I think so, indeed!" said Lady Selina, with emphasis. "Good-bye, dear Lady Winterbourne; good-bye, Miss Boyce! You have comforted me very much! Of _course_ one is sorry for the poor; but it is a great thing to hear from anybody who knows as much about it as _you_ do, that--after all--it is no crime--to possess a little!"

She stood smiling, looking from the girl to the man--then, escorted by Raeburn in his very stiffest manner, she swept out of the room.

When Aldous came back, with a somewhat slow and hesitating step, he approached Marcella, who was standing silent by the window, and asked after the lame arm. He was sorry, he said, to see that it was still in its sling. His tone was a little abrupt. Only Lady Winterbourne saw the quick nervousness of the eyes,

"Oh! thank you," said Marcella, coldly, "I shall get back to work next week."

She stooped and took up her book.

"I must please go and write some letters," she said, in answer to Lady Winterbourne's flurried look.

And she walked away. Betty and Lady Ermyntrude also went to take off their things.

"Aldous!" said Lady Winterbourne, holding out her hand to him.

He took it, glanced unwillingly at her wistful, agitated face, pressed the hand, and let it go.

"Isn't it sad," said his old friend, unable to help herself, "to see her battling like this with life--with thought--all alone? Isn't it sad, Aldous?"