Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The walls, indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair, the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching over her brother.
"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have rested you more."
"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly hoped to find them alone.
"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away. Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There are some anxious things going on."
He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly wrenched himself from what were evidently recurrent thoughts.
"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said, bending forward to her. "You don't know how much I have thought of what you have told me already."
"I'm doing just the same," she said, laughing. "Don't take so much interest in it. It's the fashion just now to admire nurses; but it's ridiculous. We do our work like other people—sometimes badly, sometimes well. And some of us wouldn't do it if we could help it."
She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her kindly.
"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?" he asked.
"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more character. But there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for you—every hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And the 'off' times were no trouble—I never did anything else but walk up and down the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National Gallery if it was wet."
"And it was the monotony you liked?"
She made a sign of assent.
"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen it?"
She flushed.
"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said, not without a little impatience. "But I didn't like it all at once. I hated a great deal of it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and wash—the things they set me to at first—I thought I should have been quite happy. To see my table full of glasses without a spot, and my brass-taps shining, made me as proud as a peacock! But then of course I had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."
"How? Morally?"
She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes—it seemed to me all topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather a stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn't have spoken two words to her. And here she was ordering me about—rating me as I had never rated a house-maid—laughing at me for not knowing this or that, and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well that she had said to herself, 'Now then I must take that proud girl down a peg, or she will be no use to anybody;' and I had somehow to put up with it."
"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort yourself by reflecting that it was everybody's fate?"
Her lip twitched with amusement.
"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd ideas!—sometimes looking back I can hardly believe it—perhaps it was partly a queer state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a passion I used to try and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces. And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive sort of way that theycouldn'tknow that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor, and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village—or they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course; but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the patient's elbow in two places. Oh! thefuss, and the scolding, and the humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home next day."
"But you didn't?"
"If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have gone. But I couldn't think it out—I was toodeadtired. That is the chief feature of your first months in hospital—the utter helpless fatigue at night. You go to bed aching and you wake up aching. If you are healthy as I was, it doesn't hurt you; but, when your time comes to sleep, sleep youmust. Even that miserable night my head was no sooner on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty. Then when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so grateful to her! I could have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with delight. And—then—somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of the work seized me—I grew ambitious—they pushed me on rapidly—everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my enemy—and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and engrossing place in the whole world."
"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you had never obeyed any one in your life before?"
"Not since I was at school—and then—not much!"
Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than the woman, had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in something new—something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the pathos and the pain of growth.
"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.
"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this afternoon."
Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"
"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?" she asked him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air. "And don't suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a very rare thing for us to undertake night-nursing at all."
"Can you tell me what the case was?"
She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter withDr. Blank.
"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless look, "and that I shall be blamed."
"I should think your second doctor will take care of that!" said Hallin.
"I don't know. I couldn't help it. But it is one of our first principles not to question a doctor. And last week too I got the Association into trouble. A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got quite fond of had to be removed to hospital. She asked me to cut her hair. It was matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to the ward. So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at one to meet the doctor and help get her off. When I came, I found the whole court in an uproar. The sister of the woman, who had been watching for me, stood on the doorstep, and implored me to go away. The husband had gone out of his senses with rage because I had cut his wife's hair without his consent. 'He'll murder you, Nuss!' said the sister, 'if he sees you! Don't come in!—he's mad—he'sbeen going round on 'is 'ands and knees on the floor!'"—Hallin interrupted with a shout of laughter. Marcella laughed too; but to his amazement he saw that her hand shook, and that there were tears in her eyes.
"It's all very well," she said with a sigh, "but I had to come away in disgrace, all the street looking on. And he made such a fuss at the office as never was. It was unfortunate—we don't want the people set against the nurses. And now Dr. Blank!—I seem to be always getting into scrapes. It is different from hospital, where everything is settled for one."
Hallin could hardly believe his ears. Such womanish terrors and depressions from Marcella Boyce! Was she, after all, too young for the work, or was there some fret of the soul reducing her natural force? He felt an unwonted impulse of tenderness towards her—such as one might feel towards a tired child—and set himself to cheer and rest her.
He had succeeded to some extent, when he saw her give a little start, and following her eyes he perceived that unconsciously his arm, which was resting on the table, had pushed into her view a photograph in a little frame, which had been hitherto concealed from her by a glass of flowers. He would have quietly put it out of sight again, but she sat up in her chair.
"Will you give it me?" she said, putting out her hand.
He gave it her at once.
"Alice brought it home from Miss Raeburn the other day. His aunt made him sit to one of the photographers who are always besieging public men. We thought it good."
"It is very good," she said, after a pause. "Is the hair really—as grey as that?" She pointed to it.
"Quite. I am very glad that he is going off with Lord Maxwell to Italy. It will be ten days' break for him at any rate. His work this last year has been very heavy. He has had his grandfather's to do really, as well as his own; and this Commission has been a stiff job too. I am rather sorry that he has taken this new post."
"What post?"
"Didn't you hear? They have made him Under-secretary to the HomeDepartment. So that he is now in the Government."
She put back the photograph, and moved her chair a little so as to see more of the plane trees and the strips of sunset cloud.
"How is Lord Maxwell?" she asked presently.
"Much changed. It might end in a sudden break-up at any time."
Hallin saw a slight contraction pass over her face. He knew that she had always felt an affection for Lord Maxwell. Suddenly Marcella looked hastily round her. Miss Hallin was busy with a little servant at the other end of the room making arrangements for supper.
"Tell me," she said, bending over the arm of her chair and speaking in a low, eager voice, "he is beginning to forget it?"
Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile suggested an answer from which she turned away.
"If he only would!" she said, speaking almost to herself, with a kind of impatience. "He ought to marry, for everybody's sake."
"I see no sign of his marrying—at present," said Hallin, drily.
He began to put some papers under his hand in order. There was a cold dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood. Ever since that day—that never-forgotten day—when he had come to her the morning after her last interview with Aldous Raeburn—come with reluctance and dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him—and had gone away her friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had ever been in the days of the engagement, their relation on this subject had been the same. His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life during the past eighteen months, had been very great. In that first interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry, something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly difficult task—its simplicity, its delicate respect for her personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the stress of emotion—this something had suddenly broken down his pale, proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as amazed them both.
Experiences of this kind were not new to him. His life consecrated to ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him off from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially cut him off from marriage—together with the ardent temperament, the charm, the imaginative insight which had been his cradle-gifts—these things ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide and prop of natures stronger and stormier than his own. Often the unwilling guide; for he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of the man who has set himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will have power and time to finish it. The claims made upon him seemed to him often to cost him physical and brain energy he could ill spare.
But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey in such matters. Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and there was no help for it. Since their first memorable interview, at long intervals, he had written to her and she to him. Of her hospital life, till to-night, she had never told him much. Her letters had been the passionate outpourings of a nature sick of itself, and for the moment of living; full of explanations which really explained little; full too of the untaught pangs and questionings of a mind which had never given any sustained or exhaustive effort to any philosophical or social question, and yet was in a sense tortured by them all—athirst for an impossible justice, and aflame for ideals mocked first and above all by the writer's own weakness and defect. Hallin had felt them interesting, sad, and, in a sense, fine; but he had never braced himself to answer them without groans. There were so many other people in the world in the same plight!
Nevertheless, all through the growth of friendship one thing had never altered between them from the beginning—Hallin's irrevocable judgment of the treatment she had bestowed on Aldous Raeburn. Never throughout the whole course of their acquaintance had he expressed that judgment to her in so many words. Notwithstanding, she knew perfectly well both the nature and the force of it. It lay like a rock in the stream of their friendship. The currents of talk might circle round it, imply it, glance off from it; they left it unchanged. At the root of his mind towards her, at the bottom of his gentle sensitive nature, there was a sternness which he often forgot—she never.
This hard fact in their relation had insensibly influenced her greatly, was constantly indeed working in and upon her, especially since the chances of her nursing career had brought her to settle in this district, within a stone's throw of him and his sister, so that she saw them often and intimately. But it worked in different ways. Sometimes—as to-night—it evoked a kind of defiance.
A minute or two after he had made his remark about Aldous, she said to him suddenly,
"I had a letter from Mr. Wharton to-day. He is coming to tea with me to-morrow, and I shall probably go to the House on Friday with Edith Craven to hear him speak."
Hallin gave a slight start at the name. Then he said nothing; but went on sorting some letters of the day into different heaps. His silence roused her irritation.
"Do you remember," she said, in a low, energetic voice, "that I told youI could never be ungrateful, never forget what he had done?"
"Yes, I remember," he said, not without a certain sharpness of tone. "You spoke of giving him help if he ever asked it of you—has he asked it?"
She explained that what he seemed to be asking was Louis Craven's help, and that his overtures with regard to theLabour Clarionwere particularly opportune, seeing that Louis was pining to be able to marry, and was losing heart, hope, and health for want of some fixed employment. She spoke warmly of her friends and their troubles, and Hallin's inward distaste had to admit that all she said was plausible. Since the moment in that strange talk which had drawn them together, when she had turned upon him with the passionate cry—"I see what you mean, perfectly! but I am not going to marry Mr. Wharton, so don't trouble to warn me—for the matter of that he has warned me himself:—but mygratitudehehasearned, and if he asks for it I willneverdeny it him "—since that moment there had been no word of Wharton between them. At the bottom of his heart Hallin distrusted her, and was ashamed of himself because of it. His soreness and jealousy for his friend knew no bounds. "If that were to come on again"—he was saying to himself now, as she talked to him—"I could not bear it, I could not forgive her!"
He only wished that she would give up talking about Wharton altogether. But, on the contrary, she would talk of him—and with a curious persistence. She must needs know what Hallin thought of his career in Parliament, of his prospects, of his powers as a speaker. Hallin answered shortly, like some one approached on a subject for which he cares nothing.
"Yet, of course, it is not that; it is injustice!" she said to herself, with vehemence. "Hemustcare; they are his subjects, his interests too. But he will not look at it dispassionately, because—"
So they fell out with each other a little, and the talk dragged. Yet, all the while, Marcella's inner mind was conscious of quite different thoughts. How good it was to be here, in this room, beside these two people! She must show herself fractious and difficult with Hallin sometimes; it was her nature. But in reality, that slight and fragile form, that spiritual presence were now shrined in the girl's eager reverence and affection. She felt towards him as many a Catholic has felt towards his director; though the hidden yearning to be led by him was often oddly covered, as now, by an outer self-assertion. Perhaps her quarrel with him was that he would not lead her enough—would not tell her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.
While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.
"I say, Hallin—is this all right?"
The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the door, and cautiously put in a curly head.
"Frank!—is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.
Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the window.
"Well, Iamglad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what—"
He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair boy's face.
"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to pretend he did."
"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twiceas—I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"—this in a stage aside toHallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studyingMarcella.
"Well,Ithink she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was very welcome.
The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three others—over-driven and over-pressed, all of them—responded with a kind of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all his budget—his peacock's pride at having been just put into the 'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just scraped through his Mods.
"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared, with a child's complacency. "Brutes!I couldn't remember them. I learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards—but it was no good; they nearly dished me!"
"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to last, without a hitch."
"The winner of theDerby!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with his hands on his knees; "why, I should rather think so! That isn't memory; that'sknowledge!—Goodness! who's this?"
The last remark was addressedsotto voceto Marcella. Supper was just over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had returned to the window, while Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and set all straight.
Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking. Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to Hallin and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others were Bennett, Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders, and Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and Leven; but the new-comers took little notice of any one but their host, and were soon seated about him discussing a matter already apparently familiar to them, and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative field, replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong disagreement with the rest—a disagreement which troubled himself and irritated them.
Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.
"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it rum! isn't itrum! Look at Hallin,—those are the people whom hecaresto talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left—really an awfully cute fellow—and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason, a Socialist of course—would like to stringmeup to-morrow. Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would pray over us first and shoot us afterwards—which isn't the case, I understand, with many of 'em. Then the others—you know them? That's Bennett—regular good fellow—always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves—for which of course they love him no more than they are obliged—And Wilkins—oh!Wilkins"—he chuckled—"they say it'll come to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."
Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him. Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that, notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.
"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with a little scorn.
"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't know anything about anything!—Miss Boyce!"
He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside her.
Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she recognised the old symptoms.
"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said—"how many since we met last?"
"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his fingers—"you're like all the rest."
Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.
"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk! And yet I did want to tell you about it—you were awfully kind to me down at home. I want to tell you—and I don't want to tell you—perhaps Ioughtn'tto tell you—you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all—and yet somehow—"
The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its two years or so of time!
"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."
"No—really?—shall I?"
Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A pretty girl—or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of them—how familiar it all was!—and how many more of them there seemed to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!
"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's sofrightfullypretty—well, frightfully fetching, rather—and well dressed and all the rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls—not she. She's read alotof things—a lot! I'm sure, Miss Boyce"—he looked at her confidently,—"ifyouwere to see her you'd think her awfully clever. And yet she's so little—and so dainty—and she dances—my goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I mean—Letty Lind isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her mother's a most dreadful old bore—well, no, I didn't mean that—of course I didn't mean that!—but she's fussy, you know, and invalidy, and has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged about in bath chairs, and Betty's an angel to her—she is really—though her mother's always snapping her head off. And as to thepoor—"
Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval, sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to restrain this plunging lover.
"Look here—do come to the point—have you proposed to her?"
"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently. "About once a week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me—that sort always does—but I think I might really have a chance with her, if it weren't for her mother—horrible old—no, ofcourseI don't mean that! But now it comes in—what I oughtn't to tell you—IknowI oughtn't to tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't help talking of it!"
And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.
Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?—of course you must tell me."
"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you about—about—You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's taken a fancy to her lately—and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they asked her to go to Italy—and naturally a fellow sees whatthatmeans—and what her mother's after. I don't believe Bettywould; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"—this time he smote his knee in real desperation—"now Ihavedone it. I'm simplyburstingalways with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say. Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"
"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience—"that her mother wants her to marry Mr. Raeburn?"
He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair, her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it—what she would say.
Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.
"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr. Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't matter what I suppose—thatyouthink—about my present state of mind. It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved badly. I know it—and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."
Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.
"I never thought of that," he said.
"Well, you might, mightn't you?"
For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.
Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.
"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him, smiling, and in her most ordinary voice.
The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on chattering.
"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mrs. Macdonald—that's Betty's mother—she hasn't got a father—had talked it over. And now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too for ten days—and when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death. It's sickening!"
"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"
"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said despondently. "She's always teasing and amusing him. When she's there she never lets him alone. She harries him out. She makes him read to her and ride with her. She makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'dneverthink Aldous would discuss—her lovers and her love affairs, and being in love!—it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said; 'this'll never do! you've got to come and dance with me, andpushthose chairs and tables aside'—I can fancy the little stamp she'd give—'and make those other people dance too.' And she made him—she positively made him. Aldous declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of it—and of course the evening went like smoke."
Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on the speaker.
"And Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded incredulous.
"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that, and he told her everything—oh, well," said the lad, embarrassed, and clutching at his usual formula—"of course, I didn't mean that. And she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she adores him—that he's the only great man she's ever known—that I'm not fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me—and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall have to shoot myself—I declare I shall!"
"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over there to listen to that talk. But—first—come and see me whenever you like—3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street—and tell me how this goes on?"
She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him.
"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of course she'll get rid ofthem. Just like my luck!"
* * * * *
Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how little men knew of each other!—even the most intimate friends—and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like, married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her meant, of course, the attraction of contraries—one of the most promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's chances were poor.
Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion of his present position and prospects in the Labour party—a discussion, however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind to send all her guests away.
The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation, separate place in the House, separate Whips—they were ready, nay clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry Wharton as a leader. They spoke of theClarionwith enthusiasm, and declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was, moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.
The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair, and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!
Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably—Wilkins's dialect getting more pronounced with each step of the argument.
"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed athome, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be the People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just makuseof us all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an' ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he? Is he a man ofus—bone of our bone? He's alandlord, and an aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o'them—living on his rent and interest—grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do—is goin' to leadme, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords! Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for us? Let him go to his own class—I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of countesses, and they of him!—or let him set up as the friend of the working man just as he likes—I'm quite agreeable!—I shan't make any bones about takin' hisvote; but I'm not goin' to make him master over me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"
Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason, with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.
"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly, "and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"
"I'm not saying we shouldn'torganise," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working class—a man who has thewantsof the working class—a man whom the working class can get a hold on—to do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the coontry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"
The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold his own with the swells—and quite right too!"
"And if Mr. Whartonisa landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the shoemaker—a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about the land, and the co-operative farming. E'sstraightis Mr. Wharton. We 'aven't got Socialism yet—an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord. Ee was born it."
"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek—"he's runnin' that paper for his own hand—Haven't I had experience of him? I know it—And I'll prove it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton—and when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're iver likely to get out o'him. Hego agen the landlords when it coom to the real toossle,—I know 'em—I tell tha—I know 'em!"
A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.
"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords—no fuss about it—and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and fourpence a week!"
Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker—amazed!
Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like women—least of all, ladies.
He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said—which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe—it was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course—"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"
Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts—the difference between landlords' villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.
Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.
"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?"
After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.
"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."
"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "Iam."
He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.
When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.
"Are there many of these Labour members likethat?"
Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.
"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,—it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"
And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.
"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing—slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.
He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.
"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it teases.'Weknow very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House I'm always having rows with—and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"
Marcella flushed.
"Never mind where I got it!" she said.
In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.
* * * * *
When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.
His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."
"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into sleeping trim. But you go, Alice—good-night."
When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the thought—"She must contradict here as she contradicted there!She—and justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year—"
He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep. Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.
He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study of economical and historical questions; the expression through them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty, and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world on whom all his thoughts centred—these things had been his joy, and had led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.
And now he had come upon opposition—the first cooling of friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.
Early in the spring of this year a book calledTo-morrow and the Landhad appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It showed—or tried to show—in picturesque detail what might be the consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed fromProgress and Poverty, which also powerfully and directly affected the English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and—by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of London—treated with abundant humour.
The thing had an enormous success—in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were touched—nay, possessed—by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness—an infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense sale, and was in every one's hands.
To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.
And he had been saying his say—throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work. With the result that—for the first time in eleven years—he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few—these bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul—it had been the source of his power—and every economical or social conviction was in some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his being—his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr's fate.
Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It wasimpossiblethat Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him. Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!
He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships. Oh, forsleep—for the power to rest—to escape this corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled nothing!
"The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it." These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hiddenwisdom. Could one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?
"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven."This is Friday—say Monday?"
Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on theLabour Clarion, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.
"And I understand from you," he said, "that the papergoes infor the strike, that you will fight it through?"
He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.
"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with emphasis—"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up. There are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going."
He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.
"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just one according to his lights. There are plenty worse than he."
Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood—of not, even in small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.
"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his stick—"you see there is talk of arbitration."
"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind. The men have been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig from the neighbourhood—not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it—and, of course, the award goes against the men."
"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"
Craven took out a note-book.
"No!—The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them! I mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you read the evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let them live first!"
Craven looked up absently.
"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address?" Mr. Thorpe was the secretary.
Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it was not for Craven to take no notice.
Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of self-advertisement, held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an amazing disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.
Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave the minutest attention.
"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.
"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. "Business is up and I am off!"
He took up his hat as he spoke.
"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea-table.
Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with hertête-à-têtebefore Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He hesitated and stayed.
"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed Louis Craven on her way to get some cake.
He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.
The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded. Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?
"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent.—"You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you. Good-bye!—good-bye!"
And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in which they had been sitting, he went.
He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother, who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.
"Well—any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.
"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a salary—two hundred a year. Oh! it'll do."
He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face.
"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" saidAnthony, sourly, as he took his tea.
"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing. "Anna's got to work out her shirt-making time. She only left the tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago. And she was to have a month at each."
Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a better authority on many Labour questions than he.
Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this heat.
"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith pensively. "Louis was lodging on the second floor, she in the third floor back, and they used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him imploring the little slavey to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavey tossed her head, and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs, calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey under her thumb, got them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When Louis came home he discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course he wept—whatever he may say. But next morning Miss Anna found her shoes outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a note inside one of them. Affecting! wasn't it? Thenceforward, as long as they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked. Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."
Marcella laughed.
"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.
"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can get hold of her.But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or trying to set up Unions.She does the work of six. She'll earn nearly as much as I do when we'remarried. Oh! we shall swim!"
Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect—so unlike the gentle or satirical detachment which made his ordinary manner—with a darkening eye, as though annoyed by his effusion.
"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what Mr. Harry Wharton spends on his clothes, I should think. The Labour men tell me he is superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his clothes, he is able to buyyou, Louis, body and soul, and you seem inclined to be grateful."
"Never mind," said Louis recklessly. "He didn't buy some one else—and Iamgrateful!"
"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone. "Youthe dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent on him."
Marcella gave an angry start. Louis protested.
"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have to bear it from me, I tell you—unless you muzzle me too with an Anna."
"But I don't see whyIshould bear it," said Marcella, turning upon him. "I think you know that I owe Mr. Wharton a debt. Please remember it!"
Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A question crossed his mind concerning her. Then he made her a little clumsy bow.
"I am dumb," he said. "My manners, you perceive, are what they always were."
"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming. "How can a man who has reached the position he has in so short a time—in so many different worlds—be disposed of by calling him an ugly name? It is more than unjust—it is absurd! Besides, what can you know of him?"
"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread and butter, "that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all. I watched his beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did. And most of them—as he knows!—have pretty strong opinions by now about the man."
"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a man of that type to be the pure-eyed patriot. But neither you nor I can deny that he has done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my bosom? Not at all! He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me. I like the job, and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a bit of decent work."
"You—use Harry Wharton!" said the cripple, with a sarcasm that brought the colour to Louis's thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than before. She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough, that a man of Anthony Craven's type—poor, unsuccessful, and embittered—should dislike a popular victorious personality.
"Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?" she said with emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself back in his chair, and was silent.
It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men, especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art, and devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle, Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design. Yet he was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist of the two. Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony a counsel of despair. He loathed wealth more passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in his kind. Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot.
In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly—though with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn's name—what had happened to her at Mellor. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil—the lover! To fall a victim to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard. And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of it. At any rate he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate. He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years' interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.
After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their chat with an abrupt—
"Whatisthis job, Louis?"
"I told you. I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."
"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are too strong. I had a talk with Denny yesterday."
The Denny he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the House, but his son—a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one of the most stiff-backed and autocratic of capitalists, had developed socialist opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a member of the "intellectual proletariat," as they have been called, the free-lances of the Collectivist movement. He had lately joined the Venturists. Anthony had taken a fancy to him. Louis as yet knew little or nothing of him.
"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I don't know. I think theClarion cando something. The press grows more and more powerful in these things."
And he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made—that Wharton always did make, in talking of theClarion—as to its growth under his hands, and increasing influence in Labour disputes.
"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum! My own belief is that theClarionis a rotten property, and that he knows it!"
At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance after a certain point becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony for the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious person whom one humours but does not argue with. He accepted the part, saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing from one to the other.
However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell. It was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and her pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the right to be rude.
"How are you getting on?" he said to her abruptly as he dropped her hand.