"Oh, very well! my superintendent leaves me almost alone now, which is a compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good woman,' and a sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice. Those are my chief grievances, I think."
"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"
She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her say:—
"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."
He laughed.
"How like a woman! A few ill-housed villagers made you a democrat. A few well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class. Your people were wise to let you take this work."
"Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans?" she asked him, mocking. "And I didn't say 'money' or 'comfort,' did I? but 'happiness.' As for my 'democracy,' you are not perhaps the best judge."
She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of storm in her great eyes.
"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.
"Because I have every right to be! I joined a society, pledged to work 'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what poor work I can in that spirit."
"Youare not a Socialist. Half the things you say, or imply, show it. And weareSocialists."
She hesitated, looking at him steadily.
"No!—so far as Socialism means a political system—the trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it—I find myself slipping away from it more and more. No!—as I go about among these wage-earners, the emphasis—do what I will—comes to lie less and less on possession—more and more on character. I go to two tenements in the same building. One is Hell—the other Heaven. Why? Both belong to well-paid artisans with equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and pleasant life of it. But one is a man—the other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not all, I know—oh! don't trouble to tell me so!—but it is more than I thought. No!—my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the Socialists that I know here—saving your presence! but—with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation! 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 itwilldo 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 space 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 passionate 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 passion 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 thattête-à-têtewith 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 noble, 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 passionately away. Thatheshould 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.
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 surpassed.
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—"Idotake it kind of you, Nurse, to do it soslow—oh! there were a young person before you—" or "hasn't she got nice hands, Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem tojaryer."
"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' God 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 oflife, 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'mnevergoin' 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 passion, 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 dolovea 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."
"Em'ly!" said Mrs. Jervis, with energy.
Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The glances of the two women crossed; there seemed to be a mute struggle between them. Then Emily laid down her iron, stepped quickly across to her mother, and kneeling beside her, threw her arms around her.
"Have it your own way, mother," she said, while her lip quivered; "I wasn't a-goin' to cross you."
Mrs. Jervis laid her waxen cheek against her daughter's tangle of brown hair with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might kill out the struggling flame of life.
"You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis," said Marcella, with gentle authority. "You know the dressing must tire you, though you won't confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There; aren't the pillows easier so? Now rest—and good-bye."
But Mrs. Jervis held her, while Emily slipped away.
"I shall rest soon," she said significantly. "An' it hurts me when Emily talks like that. It's the only thing that ever comes atween us. She thinks o' forms an' ceremonies; an'Ithink o'grace."
Her old woman's eyes, so clear and vivid under the blanched brow, searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood, shy and wondering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so little. So narrow a life, in these poor rooms, under these crippling conditions of disease!—and all this preoccupation with, this passion over, the things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of the spirit—wonderful!
* * * * *
On coming out from Brown's Buildings, she turned her steps reluctantly towards a street some distance from her own immediate neighbourhood, where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion and an unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman who often availed himself of the help of the St. Martin's nurses had asked the superintendent to undertake for him "a difficult case." Would one of their nurses go regularly to visit a certain house, ostensibly for the sake of a little boy of five just come back from the hospital, who required care at home for a while,reallyfor the sake of his young mother, who had suddenly developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin?
Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or three visits, always dressing the child's sore leg, and endeavouring to make acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not had much success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty, with a flighty, restless manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella, and grateful to her apparently for the ease she gave the boy. But she offered no confidences; the rooms she and her husband occupied showed them to be well-to-do; Marcella had so far found them well-kept; and though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious, she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others; and neither alternative pleased her.
To-day, however, as she stopped at the Vincents' door, she noticed that the doorstep, which was as a rule shining white, was muddy and neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang repeatedly. At last a neighbour, who had been watching the strange nurse through her own parlour window, came out to the street.
"I think, miss," she said, with an air of polite mystery, "as you'd better walk in. Mrs. Vincent 'asn't been enjyin' very good 'ealth this last few days."
Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the back of the house. But in the Vincents' front parlour the blinds were all pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of a child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door.
The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a wretched silence; but the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly throwing himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts, now crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice, for "Máma! din-din! Máma! din-din!"
Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of words. She was dirty and unkempt; the room was covered with litter; the breakfast things were still on the table; and the children were evidently starving.
Marcella, seized with pity, and divining what had happened, tried to rouse and comfort her. But she got no answer. Then she asked for matches. Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them herself, lit a tire of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of the children—the only eatables she could find—and after she had dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea things and tidy the room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her.
In the midst of her labours, an elderly woman cautiously opened the door and beckoned to her.
Marcella went out into the passage.
"I'm her mother, miss! I 'eered you were 'ere, an' I follered yer. Oh! such a business as we 'ad, 'er 'usband an' me, a gettin' of 'er 'ome last night. There's a neighbour come to me, an' she says: 'Mrs. Lucas, there's your daughter a drinkin' in that public 'ouse, an' if I was you I'd go and fetch her out; for she's got a lot o' money, an' she's treatin' everybody all round.' An' Charlie—that's 'er 'usband—ee come along too, an' between us we got holt on her. An' iver sence we brought her 'ome last night, she set there in that cheer, an' niver a word to nobody! Not to me 't any rate, nor the chillen. I believe 'er 'usband an' 'er 'ad words this mornin'. But she won't tell me nothin'. She sits there—just heart-broke"—the woman put up her apron to her eyes and began crying. "She ain't eatin' nothink all day, an' I dursen't leave the 'ouse out o' me sight—I lives close by, miss—for fear of 'er doing 'erself a mischief."
"How long has she been like this?" said Marcella, drawing the door cautiously to behind her.
"About fourteen month," said the woman, hopelessly. "An' none of us knows why. She was such a neat, pretty girl when she married 'im—an' ee such a steady fellow. An' I've donemybest. I've talked to 'er, an' I've 'id 'er 'at an' her walking things, an' taken 'er money out of 'er pockets. An', bless yer, she's been all right now for seven weeks—till last night. Oh, deary, deary, me! whatever 'ull become o' them—'er, an' 'im, an' the children!"
The tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face.
"Leave her to me a little longer," said Marcella, softly; "but come back to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be alone."
The woman nodded, and went away.
Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke for the first time:
"That was my mother you were talkin' to?"
"Yes," said Marcella, quietly, as she took the kettle off the fire. "Now I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will you, if I make it?"
The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's movements with her weary eyes. At last when Marcella knelt down beside her holding out a cup of tea and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry. Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked out of her hand.
"He struck me this morning!—Charlie did—the first time in seven years.Look here!"
She pulled up her sleeve, and on her white, delicate arm she showed a large bruise. As she pointed to it her eyes filled with miserable tears; her lips quivered; anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even in this abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her refined air. This woman drinking and treating in a low public-house at midnight!—rescued thence by a decent husband!
She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into her, she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before which she quailed. The woman clung to her, moaning about her husband, about the demon instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew how—by means it seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and small self-indulgences—and she felt herself powerless to fight; about the wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who was the respected, well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the neighbourhood. All through it came back to him.
"We had words, Nurse, this morning, when he went out to his work. He said he'd nearly died of shame last night; that he couldn't bear it no more; that he'd take the children from me. And I was all queer in the head still, and I sauced him—and then—he looked like a devil—and he took me by the arm—andthrewme down—as if I'd been a sack. An' he never,never,—touched me—before—in all his life. An' he's never come in all day. An' perhaps I shan't ever see him again. An' last time—but it wasn't so bad as this—he said he'd try an' love me again if I'd behave. An' he did try—and I tried too. But now it's no good, an' perhaps he'll not come back. Oh, what shall I do? what shall I do!" she flung her arms above her head. "Won'tanybodyfind him? won'tanybodyhelp me?"
She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching it, her wild eyes seeking her companion's.
But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could do nothing—that there was nothing in her adequate to such an appeal—nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human life thus flung upon her.
She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no efficacy—no power.
At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what to say.
"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"
The husband looked at her, and then turned away.
"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went without another word, and with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's death.
* * * * *
She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards—saying that she must write some letters and reports—she shut herself up, and bade good-night to Minta and the children.
But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time, watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the floor, with her head against a chair—an attitude of her stormy childhood—she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis—the saint—so near to death, so satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay. Both experiences had this in common—that each had had some part in plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.
What had come to her? Daring the past weeks there had been something wrestling in her—some new birth—some "conviction of sin," as Mrs. Jervis would have said. As she looked back over all her strenuous youth she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to Anthony Craven returned upon her, mocked her—made now a scourge for her own pride, not a mere, measure of blame for others. Aldous Raeburn, her father and mother, her poor—one and all rose against her—plucked at her—reproached her. "Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?" cried a voice, which was the voice of them all; "what are opinions—what is influence, beauty, cleverness?—what is anything worth butcharacter—butsoul?"
And character—soul—can only be got by self-surrender; and self-surrender comes not of knowledge but of love.
A number of thoughts and phrases, hitherto of little meaning to her, floated into her mind—sank and pressed there. That strange word "grace" for instance!
A year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school years, the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that religion was played out, that Socialism and Science were enough for mankind.
But nobody could live in hospital—nobody could go among the poor—nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward Hallin and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in the world—this "grace" that "sustaineth"—however variously interpreted, still living and working, as it worked of old, among the little Galilean towns, in Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallin it did not mean the same, perhaps, as it meant to the hard-worked clergymen she knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But to all it meant the motive power of life—something subduing, transforming, delivering—something that to-night she envied with a passion and a yearning that amazed herself.
How many things she craved, as an eager child craves them! First some moral change, she knew not what—then Aldous Raeburn's pardon and friendship—then and above all, the power to lose herself—the power tolove.
Dangerous significant moment in a woman's life—moment at once of despair and of illusion!
Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him, and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon; questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there, and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that he might verify a quotation.
An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar House-of-Commons acquaintance.
"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect firstWharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.
Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.
"Not particularly."
"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.
Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.
When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for pleasure—their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way. What had he been about all this time?Forget?—such a creature? Why, it was the merest wantonness! As if such women—with such a brow, such vitality, such a gait—passed in every street!
What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to recover the old intimacy—and as to what might come out of it, let the gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.
As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much hermétieras it was themétierof a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, andlivedemocracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique.Il ne faut pas sortir de son caractère.
The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.
Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.
"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. "Talks of his conscience—and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much harm."
"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitterness. "Goodness! let's leave him alone!"
He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics. Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself theenfant terribleof a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of to-night's debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution, pledging the House to a Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in fact gained greatly in significance and interest since it was first heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable proposals—a moderate tone—and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony and a united front among the representatives of labour—if so much at least could be attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that not only the cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the House would be found to have gained enormously.
"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said Bennett, as he was going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be till half-past ten at earliest."
Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him what line Bennett would take—with regard to one or two points. After a long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and hear a famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far from the House. The streets were full of placards.
Well!—to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.
The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference.Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.
"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front—oh! not very full yet, sir—will be directly."
Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in. Yes!—there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of Commons puts its ladies—as though its owner were already absorbed in what was passing before her.
She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.
"Oh! now, come and tell us everything—and who everybody is. Why don't we see the Speaker?—and which is the Government side?—oh, yes, I see. And who's this speaking now?"
"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"
"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella, impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!—he's just come in!—oh, don't be so superior, though youhavebeen here before—you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"
Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.
"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!—do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you sit?—I see—and there's Mr. Bennett—and that black-faced man, Mr. Wilkins, I met at the Hallins—you don't like him, do you?" she said, drawing back and looking at him sharply.
"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a fool of himself and us to-night—we shall see! It's kind of you to wish us an Irish row!—considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall never get another!"
"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh, that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"—a pause—"Dear me, how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton—I find myself terribly in love with the Government. But who's that?"
She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew hurriedly back.
"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."
A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw Aldous Raeburn.
She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.
"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much—they don't get any change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over to a friend if I may—a Staffordshire member, who has his wife here—Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you. Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion; but they will look after you."
The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.
"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty minutes. Wish me well through!"
Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn ghost should walk this particular evening.
Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.
"All that my life can do to pour good measure—down—running over—into yours, I vowed you then!"
The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain. Was it indeed this man under her eyes—so listless, so unconscious—who had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think of.
And now—never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"—separate, estranged, for ever? It was like the touch of death—the experience brought with it such a chill—such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through.
Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of family than he. And as for the girl—the little dancing, flirting girl!—why the thing happened every day.Hiswife should not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at least was clear to her—the curious recognition that never before had she considered Aldous Raeburn,in and for himself, as an independent human being.
"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"
But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn, after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her with the same fascination as before.
The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government—all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.
"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his hat.
In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and crowded House in a voice—clear, a little hard, but capable of the most accomplished and subtle variety—which for the first moment sent a shudder of memory through Marcella.
Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, anirritablesense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any effect upon such a crowd!—so irresponsive, individualist, unfused—so lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call "cheers"?
But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one wholly different—nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent sense—informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader—awoke to the peculiar conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand to succeed in it.
Why? Because here after all is power—here is the central machine. Here are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have for their span of life the leading—or the wrecking?—of this great fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our country. Here things are not only debated, but done—lamely or badly, perhaps, but stilldone—which will affect our children's children; which link us to the Past; which carry us on safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods know. And in this passage, this chequered, doubtful passage from thinking to doing, an infinite savour and passion of life is somehow disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure, public and personal; it enwraps the spectacle and the actors; it carries and supports patriot and adventurer alike.
Ideas, perceptions of this kind—the first chill over—stole upon and conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It would be a success this speech—it was a success! The House was gained, was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments, which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent—with brilliancy, moderation, practical detail—moderation above all! From the slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English "working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts—through the general description of the present situation, of the workman's present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the economic future of England—the speaker carried his thread of luminous speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life, possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of leisure, knowledge, and delight—the crowded benches before and behind him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of "flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in the utterances of the Labour men.
"'The mildest mannered man'et cetera!" said a smiling member of the late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are eager to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance on anything last year."
"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled the man addressed.
"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his hat again which he had taken up.
Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her chair with a long breath.
"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she possessed—and she was full of them—had been stirred and satisfied by the speech and the speaker.
But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time conscious of a curious growth—independence.
But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon her—in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.
Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her brothers were typical Venturists—a little cynical, therefore, towards all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it down—through him—as a first law, that sentiment in public is the abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.
"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That manWilkins!"
Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.
With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of the bill which had been sketched by Wharton—personal jealousy and distrust of the mover of the resolution—denial of his representative place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which he had nothing to do—the most violent protest against the servility with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and political enfranchisement—and the most passionate assertion that between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred, unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel—all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah Wilkins rioted in one of the best "times" of his life. That he was an orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again; and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.
The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench, caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!—you haven't even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final attack upon the Liberals—who, after ruining their own chances and the chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man whining for his support as their only hope of recovery—was delivered to a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.
Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech in a state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had come to sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down, and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Governmentnon possumus, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity as to which hand to shake and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the Opposition under the ferocities of some others of its nominal friends.
Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, thehabitué. While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come back again to his seat next to the Speaker, who was his official chief. Every now and then the Minister turned to him, and Raeburn handed him a volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other—and she, once more, looking on!
When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun—when it was seen that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House, a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be leader had been for some time considerable.
When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire, both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A man who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had given Wharton the warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals, to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous though still perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young and brilliant man beside him.
Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong conviction that the time had come when the Labour partymusthave separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the phrase, in the direction of Wilkins—who in the middle of the speech abruptly walked out—and before he sat down, the close attention, the looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about him,—amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in Parliament—made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary history of the great industrial movement.
The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him—perfectly white, with a lip he in vain tried to steady.
"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."
Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of the Englishman.
Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience behind him!—and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How could he get her to himself somehow for a moment—and dispose of that Craven girl?
"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of the Gallery.
But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw, the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.
"Don't let's talk here," she said. "Can't we go out? I am melted!"
"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested?"
Edith smiled demurely.
"I thought it a good debate," she said.
"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward remark as he led the way.
"How enchanting!" cried Marcella, as they emerged on the terrace, and river, shore, and sky opened upon them in all the thousand-tinted light and shade of a still and perfect evening. "Oh, how hot we were—and how badly you treat us in those dens!"
Those confident eyes of Wharton's shone as they glanced at her.
She wore a pretty white dress of some cotton stuff—it seemed to him he remembered it of old—and on the waving masses of hair lay a little bunch of black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing—the rich arresting note of the voice—the inimitable carriage of the head—Wharton realised them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was in his power, his possession.
The terrace was full of people, and alive with a Babel of talk. Yet, as he carried his companions forward in search of Mrs. Lane, he saw that Marcella was instantly marked. Every one who passed them, or made way for them, looked and looked again.
The girl, absorbed in her pleasant or agitating impressions, knew nothing of her own effect. She was drinking in the sunset light—the poetic mystery of the river—the lovely line of the bridge—the associations of the place where she stood, of this great building overshadowing her. Every now and then she started in a kind of terror lest some figure in the dusk should be Aldous Raeburn; then when a stranger showed himself she gave herself up again to her young pleasure in the crowd and the spectacle. But Wharton knew that she was observed; Wharton caught the whisper that followed her. His vanity, already so well-fed this evening, took the attention given to her as so much fresh homage to itself; and she had more and more glamour for him in the reflected light of this publicity, this common judgment.
"Ah, here are the Lanes!" he said, detecting at last a short lady in black amid a group of men.
Marcella and Edith were introduced. Then Edith found a friend in a young London member who was to be one of the party, and strolled off with him till dinner should be announced.
"I will just take Miss Boyce to the end of the terrace," said Wharton toMr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet awhile. What a crowd! TheAlresfords not come yet, I see."
Lane shrugged his shoulders as he looked round.
"Raeburn has a party to-night. And there are at least three or four others besides ourselves. I should think food and service will be equally scarce!"
Wharton glanced quickly at Marcella. But she was talking to Mrs. Lane, and had heard nothing.
"Let me just show you the terrace," he said to her. "No chance of dinner for another twenty minutes."
They strolled away together. As they moved along, a number of men waylaid the speaker of the night with talk and congratulations—glancing the while at the lady on his left. But presently they were away from the crowd which hung about the main entrance to the terrace, and had reached the comparatively quiet western end, where were only a few pairs and groups walking up and down.
"Shall I see Mr. Bennett?" she asked him eagerly, as they paused by the parapet, looking down upon the grey-brown water swishing under the fast incoming tide. "I want to."
"I asked him to dine, but he wouldn't. He has gone to a prayer-meeting—at least I guess so. There is a famous American evangelist speaking in Westminster to-night—I am as certain as I ever am of anything that Bennett is there—dining on Moody and Sankey. Men are a medley, don't you think?—So you liked his speech?"
"How coolly you ask!" she said, laughing. "Didyou?"
He was silent a moment, his smiling gaze fixed on the water. Then he turned to her.
"How much gratitude do you think I owe him?"
"As much as you can pay," she said with emphasis. "I never heard anything more complete, more generous."
"So you were carried away?"
She looked at him with a curious, sudden gravity—a touch of defiance.
"No!—neither by him, nor by you. I don't believe in your Bill—and I amsureyou will never carry it!"
Wharton lifted his eyebrows.
"Perhaps you'll tell me where you are," he said, "that I may know how to talk? When we last discussed these things at Mellor, Ithink—you were a Socialist?"
"What does it matter what I was last year?" she asked him gaily, yet with a final inflection of the voice which was not gay; "I was a baby!Nowperhaps I have earned a few poor, little opinions—but they are a ragged bundle—and I have never any time to sort them."
"Have you left the Venturists?"
"No!—but I am full of perplexities; and the Cravens, I see, will soon be for turning me out. You understand—Iknowsome working folk now!"
"So you did last year."
"No!"—she insisted, shaking her head—"that was all different. But now I amintheir world—I live with them—and they talk to me. One evening in the week I am 'at home' for all the people I know in our Buildings—men and women. Mrs. Hurd—you know who I mean?"—her brow contracted a moment—"she comes with her sewing to keep me company; so does Edith Craven; and sometimes the little room is packed. The men smoke—when we can have the windows open!—and I believe I shall soon smoke too—it makes them talk better. We get all sorts—Socialists, Conservatives, Radicals—"
"—And you don't think much of the Socialists?"
"Well! they are the interesting, dreamy fellows," she said, laughing,"who don't save, and muddle their lives. And as for argument, theSocialist workman doesn't care twopence for facts—that don't suit him.It's superb the way he treats them!"
"I should like to know who does care!" said Wharton, with a shrug. Then he turned with his back to the parapet, the better to command her. He had taken off his hat for coolness, and the wind played with the crisp curls of hair. "But tell me"—he went on—"who has been tampering with you? Is it Hallin? You told me you saw him often."
"Perhaps. But what if it's everything?—living?—saving your presence! A year ago at any rate the world was all black—orwhite—to me. Now I lie awake at night, puzzling my head about the shades between—which makes the difference. A compulsory Eight Hours' Day for all men in all trades!" Her note of scorn startled him. "Youknowyou won't get it! And all the other big exasperating things you talk about—public organisation of labour, and the rest—you won't get them till all the world is a New Jerusalem—and when the world is a New Jerusalem nobody will want them!"
Wharton made her an ironical bow.
"Nicely said!—though we have heard it before. Upon my word, you have marched!—or Edward Hallin has carried you. So now you think the poor are as well off as possible, in the best of all possible worlds—is that the result of your nursing? You agree with Denny, in fact? the man who got up after me?"
His tone annoyed her. Then suddenly the name suggested to her a recollection that brought a frown.
"That was the man, then, you attacked in theClarionthis morning!"
"Ah! you read me!" said Wharton, with sudden pleasure. "Yes—that opened the campaign. As you know, of course, Craven has gone down, and the strike begins next week. Soon we shall bring two batteries to bear, he letting fly as correspondent, and I from the office. I enjoyed writing that article."
"So I should think," she said drily; "all I know is, it madeonereader passionately certain that there was another side to the matter! There may not be. I dare say there isn't; but on me at least that was the effect. Why is it"—she broke out with vehemence—"that not a single Labour paper is ever capable of the simplest justice to an opponent?"
"You think any other sort of paper is any better?" he asked her scornfully.
"I dare say not. But that doesn't matter to me! it iswewho talk of justice, of respect, and sympathy from man to man, and then we go and blacken the men who don't agree with us—whole classes, that is to say, of our fellow-countrymen, not in the old honest slashing style, Tartuffes that we are!—but with all the delicate methods of a new art of slander, pursued almost for its own sake. We know so much better—always—than our opponents, we hardly condescend even to be angry. One is only 'sorry'—'obliged to punish'—like the priggish governess of one's childhood!"
In spite of himself, Wharton flushed.
"My best thanks!" he said. "Anything more? I prefer to take my drubbing all at once."
She looked at him steadily.
"Why did you write, or allow that article on the West Brookshire landlords two days ago?"
Wharton started.
"Well! wasn't it true?"
"No!" she said with a curling lip; "and I think you know it wasn't true."
"What! as to the Raeburns? Upon my word, I should have imagined," he said slowly, "that it represented your views at one time with tolerable accuracy."
Her nerve suddenly deserted her. She bent over the parapet, and, taking up a tiny stone that lay near, she threw it unsteadily into the river. He saw the hand shake.
"Look here," he said, turning round so that he too leant over the river, his arms on the parapet, his voice close to her ear. "Are you always going to quarrel with me like this? Don't you know that there is no one in the world I would sooner please if I could?"
She did not speak.
"In the first place," he said, laughing, "as to my speech, do you suppose that I believe in that Bill which I described just now?"
"I don't know," she said indignantly, once more playing with the stones on the wall. "It sounded like it."
"That is my gift—my littlecarillon, as Renan would say. But do you imagine I want you or any one else to tell me that we shan't get such a Bill for generations? Of course we shan't!"
"Then why do you make farcical speeches, bamboozling your friends and misleading the House of Commons?"
He saw the old storm-signs with glee—the lightning in the eye, the rose on the cheek. She was never so beautiful as when she was angry.
"Because, my dear lady—we must generate our force. Steam must be got up—I am engaged in doing it. We shan't get a compulsory eight hours' day for all trades—but in the course of the agitation for that precious illusion, and by the help of a great deal of beating of tom-toms, and gathering of clans, we shall get a great many other things by the way that wedowant. Hearten your friends, and frighten your enemies—there is no other way of scoring in politics—and the particular score doesn't matter. Now don't look at me as if you would like to impeach me!—or I shall turn the tables.Iam still fighting for my illusions in my own way—you, it seems, have given up yours!"