Nearly three weeks passed—short flashing weeks, crowded with agitations, inward or outward, for all the persons of this story.
After the inquiry before the magistrates—conducted, as she passionately thought, with the most marked animus on the part of the bench and police towards the prisoners—had resulted in the committal for trial of Hurd and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Raeburn a letter which hurt him sorely.
"Don't come over to see me for a little while," it ran. "My mind is all given over to feelings which must seem to you—which, I know, do seem to you—unreasonable and unjust. But they are my life, and when they are criticised, or even treated coldly, I cannot bear it. When you are not there to argue with, I can believe, most sincerely, that you have a right to see this matter as you do, and that it is monstrous of me to expect you to yield to me entirely in a thing that concerns your sense of public duty. But don't come now—not before the trial. I will appeal to you if I think you can help me. Iknowyou will if you can. Mr. Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters, which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of the evidence."
Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and difficulty.
"I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a burden to you. You can hardly imagine that it is not grievous to me to think of any trouble of yours as being made worse by my being with you. But still I understand. One thing only I ask—that you should not imagine the difference between us greater than it is. The two letters you enclose have given me much to ponder. If only the course of the trial enables me with an honest heart to throw myself into your crusade of mercy, with what joy shall I come and ask you to lead me, and to forgive my own slower sense and pity!
"I should like you to know that Hallin is very much inclined to agree with you, to think that the whole affair was a 'scrimmage,' and that Hurd at least ought to be reprieved. He would have come to talk it over with you himself, but that Clarke forbids him anything that interests or excites him for the present. He has been very ill and suffering for the last fortnight, and, as you know, when these attacks come on we try to keep everything from him that could pain or agitate him. But I see that this whole affair is very much on his mind, in spite of my efforts.
"… Oh, my darling! I am writing late at night, with your letter open before me and your picture close to my hand. So many things rise in my mind to say to you. There will come a time—theremust!—when I may pour them all out. Meanwhile, amid all jars and frets, remember this, that I have loved you better each day since first we met.
"I will not come to Mellor then for a little while. My election, little heart as I have for it, will fill up the week. The nomination-day is fixed for Thursday and the polling for Monday."
Marcella read the letter with a confusion of feeling so great as to be in itself monstrous and demoralising. Was she never to be simple, to see her way clearly again?
As for him, as he rode about the lanes and beechwoods in the days that followed, alone often with that nature for which all such temperaments as Aldous Raeburn's have so secret and so observant an affection, he was perpetually occupied with this difficulty which had arisen between Marcella and himself, turning it over and over in the quiet of the morning, before the turmoil of the day began.
He had followed the whole case before the magistrates with the most scrupulous care. And since then, he had twice run across the Widrington solicitor for the defence, who was now instructing Wharton. This man, although a strong Radical, and employed generally by his own side, saw no objection at all to letting Lord Maxwell's heir and representative understand how in his opinion the case was going. Aldous Raeburn was a person whom everybody respected; confidences were safe with him; and he was himself deeply interested in the affair. The Raeburns being the Raeburns, with all that that implied for smaller people in Brookshire, little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall's employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was still his, Burridge's opinion, that everything that could be advanced would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can always be got up in a game-preserving case.
"And is as a rule political and anti-landlord," thought Aldous, on one of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down. He foresaw exactly what would happen. As he envisaged the immediate future, he saw one figure as the centre of it—not Marcella, but Wharton! Wharton was defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for his own support and his grandfather's, through Marcella. To Wharton would belong not only the popularkudosof the matter, but much more, and above all, Marcella's gratitude.
Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had asked Marcella to be his wife. The pale February sunlight was spreading from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk plain. Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter birds from the branches round him. The place, the time, raised in him all the intensest powers of consciousness. He saw himself as the manstanding midwayin everything—speculation, politics, sympathies—as the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world. Wharton! He knew him—had read him long ago—read him afresh of late. Raeburn's lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover. Here was he, banished from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and sympathies, busily forging a link—
"It shall bebroken!" said Raeburn to himself with a sudden fierce concentration of will. "So much I will claim—and enforce."
But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence. He gathered himself together with a long breath, and went his way.
* * * * *
For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates crime" left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had suffered all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he, more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.
But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life and action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to be a murderer, no employer's interest, no landlord's desire for vengeance, would have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as he emphatically did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere with a duty to justice and society.
Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and compunctions.
Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of trouble of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment. Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal humility, and interfused with all—determining all—elements of judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and distorted; none the less,realitywins the day. So Hallin read it.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with, and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings, committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.
The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks—till after Easter—without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in village and county. And when the reason was known—that it was because Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates—there was curiously little sympathy with Marcella. Most of her own class thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss Raeburn—something done for self-advertisement and to advance anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.
"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside. "Notwhat I'd call lover-y. She don't want to run in harness, she don't, no sooner than, she need. She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."
"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife, with her gentle sigh, "to hear summat o' that new straw-plaitin' she talk about. But nary a word. They do say as it's give up althegither."
"No, she's took up wi' nursin' Minta Hurd—wonderful took up," said another woman. "They do say as Ann Mullins can't abear her. When she's there nobody can open their mouth. When that kind o' thing happens in the fambly it's bad enoof without havin' a lady trailin' about you all day long, so that you have to be mindin' yersel', an' thinkin' about givin' her a cheer, an' the like."
One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella, coming from the Hurds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.
Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her relations, mainly, to do her justice, from fear lest she might somehow hurt or offend them. She had been to see Charlie Dynes's mother, but she had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary Harden to the keeper's widow.
Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella came up with her.
"Oh, she'spuddlin'along," she said in answer to Marcella's inquiry, using a word very familiar in the village. "She'll not do herself a mischief while there's Nurse Ellen an' me to watch her like a pair o' cats. She's dreadful upset, is Isabella—shouldn't ha' thought it of her. That fust day"—a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face—"no, I'm not a-goin' to think about that fust day, I'm not, 'tain't a ha'porth o' good," she added resolutely; "but she was all right when they'd let her get 'im 'ome, and wash an' settle 'im, an' put 'im comfortable like in his coffin. He wor a big man, miss, when he wor laid out! Searle, as made the coffin, told her as ee 'adn't made one such an extry size since old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen year ago. Ee'd soon a done for Jim Hurd if it 'ad been fists o' both sides. But guns is things as yer can't reckon on.".
"Why didn't he let Hurd alone," said Marcella, sadly, "and prosecute him next day? It's attacking men when their blood is up that brings these awful hings about."
"Wal, I don't see that," said Mrs. Jellison, pugnaciously; "he wor paid to do 't—an' he had the law on his side. 'Ow 's she?" she said, lowering her voice and jerking her thumb in the direction of the Hurds' cottage.
"She's very ill," replied Marcella, with a contraction of the brow."Dr. Clarke says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't."
"They're a-goin' to try 'im Thursday?" said Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly.
"Yes."
"An' Muster Wharton be a-goin' to defend 'im. Muster Wharton may be cliver, ee may—they do say as ee can see the grass growin', ee's that knowin'—but ee'll not get Jim Hurd off; there's nobody in the village as b'lieves for a moment as 'ow he will. They'll best 'im. Lor' bless yer, they'll best 'im. I was a-sayin' it to Isabella this afternoon—ee'll not save 'is neck, don't you be afeared."
Marcella drew herself up with a shiver of repulsion.
"Will it mend your daughter's grief to see another woman's heart broken? Don't you suppose it might bring her some comfort, Mrs. Jellison, if she were to try and forgive that poor wretch? She might remember that her husband gave him provocation, and that anyway, if his life is spared, his punishment and their misery will be heavy enough!"
"Oh, lor' no!" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly. "She don't want to be forgivin' of 'im. Mr. Harden ee come talkin' to 'er, but she isn't one o' that sort, isn't Isabella. I'm sartin sure she'll be better in 'erself when they've put 'im out o' the way. It makes her all ov a fever to think of Muster Wharton gettin' 'im off.Idon't bear Jim Hurd no pertickler malice. Isabella may talk herself black i' the face, but she and Johnnie'll have to come 'ome and live along o' me, whatever she may say. She can't stay in that cottage, cos they'll be wantin' it for another keeper. Lord Maxwell ee's givin' her a fine pension, my word ee is! an' says ee'll look after Johnnie. And what with my bit airnins—we'll do, yer know, miss—we'll do!"
The old woman looked up with a nod, her green eyes sparkling with the queer inhuman light that belonged to them.
Marcella could not bring herself to say good-night to her, and was hurrying on without a word, when Mrs. Jellison stopped her.
"An' 'ow about that straw-plaitin', miss?" she said slyly.
"I have had to put it on one side for a bit," said Marcella, coldly, hating the woman's society. "I have had my hands full and Lady Winterbourne has been away, but we shall, of course, take it up again later."
She walked away quickly, and Mrs. Jellison hobbled after her, grinning to herself every now and then as she caught the straight, tall figure against the red evening sky.
"I'll go in ter town termorrer," she thought, "an' have a crack wi' Jimmy Gedge;eeneedn't be afeard for 'is livin'. An' them great fules as ha' bin runnin' in a string arter 'er, an' cacklin' about their eighteen-pence a score, as I've told 'em times, I'll eat my apron the fust week as iver they get it. I don't hold wi' ladies—no, nor passons neither—not when it comes to meddlin' wi' your wittles, an' dictatin' to yer about forgivin' them as ha' got the better ov yer. That young lady there, what do she matter? That sort's allus gaddin' about? What'll she keer about us when she's got 'er fine husband? Here o' Saturday, gone o' Monday—that's what she is. Now Jimmy Gedge, yer kin allus count on 'im.Thirty-six year ee ha' set there in that 'ere shop, and I guess ee'll set there till they call 'im ter kingdom come. Be's a cheatin', sweatin', greedy old skinflint is Jimmy Gedge; but when yer wants 'im yerkinfind 'im."
* * * * *
Marcella hurried home, she was expecting a letter from Wharton, the third within a week. She had not set eyes on him since they had met that first morning in the drive, and it was plain to her that he was as unwilling as she was that there should be any meeting between them. Since the moment of his taking up the case, in spite of the pressure of innumerable engagements, he had found time to send her, almost daily, sheets covered with his small even writing, in which every detail and prospect of the legal situation, so far as it concerned James Hurd, were noted and criticised with a shrewdness and fulness which never wavered, and never lost for a moment the professional note.
"Dear Miss Boyce"—the letters began—leading up to a "Yours faithfully," which Marcella read as carefully as the rest. Often, as she turned them over, she asked herself whether that scene in the library had not been a mere delusion of the brain, whether the man whose wild words and act had burnt themselves into her life could possibly be writing her these letters, in this key, without a reference, without an allusion. Every day, as she opened them, she looked them through quietly with a shaking pulse; every day she found herself proudly able to hand them on to her mother, with the satisfaction of one who has nothing to conceal, whatever the rest of the world may suspect. He was certainly doing his best to replace their friendship on that level of high comradeship in ideas and causes which, as she told herself, it had once occupied. His own wanton aggression and her weakness had toppled it down thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!
Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs. Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony, peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison—Jim on the scaffold with the white cap over his eyes—Jim in the prison coffin—which would rouse her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all comforting—to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over—they have broken his neck—and buried him"—it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after—if they brought him in guilty—they would let her say good-bye. She was always thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous things—breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin' capital" for him; but she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him; the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still survived. But it madeherlife faint within her to talk of the murdered man—wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence. When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once, and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann Mullins's rough face waiting for her—of the outer air and the free heaven.
As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two—the doctor said—no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but always patient, always struggling to say his painful "thank you" when she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.
After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole upon her—the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison. More than that—the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its significant black and white, but it was older—awomanspoke from it. Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease; she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature—or God? She would hardly let herself think of Aldous—though shemustthink of him by-and-by! He and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day, stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous would not help her—or not with any help worth having—in consoling this misery—binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a crime against him to confess—but she felt herself his superior none the less. If he cast her off—why then surely they would be quits, quits for good and all.
As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.
Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door William touched his cap to her.
"Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss."
She stopped sharply.
"Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?"
"In the drawing-room, miss."
She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent airMarcella knew so well.
When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands, then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business errand and has no time to waste.
"I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of spare hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going. You understand that the case comes on at the assizes next Thursday?"
Marcella assented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her—but it was the only sign.
"I should like to warn you," he said gravely, "that I entertain no hope whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best, but the verdict will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure to take a severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I believe it to be extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the judge, according to what I hear, will probably be against us. The prosecution have got together extremely strong evidence—as to Hurd's long connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness—as to his repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends were interrupted—and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it."
He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition and at some length; then he paused.
"This being so," he resumed, "the question is, what can be done? There must be a petition. Amongst my own party I shall be, of course, able to do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without some at least of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one word—do you imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell to sign?"
Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.
"I will try," she said at last, with deliberation.
"Then"—he took up his gloves—"there may be a chance for us. If you cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can be secured, others will easily follow. Their names—especially under all the circumstances—will carry a peculiar weight. I may say everything, in the first instance—the weight, the first effect of the petition—depends on them. Well, then, I leave it in your hands. No time should be lost after the sentence. As to the grounds of our plea, I shall, of course, lay them down in court to the best of my ability."
"I shall be there," she interrupted.
He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no comment.
"Well, then," he resumed after a pause, "I need say no more for the present. How is the wife?"
She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment passed between them.
"And your election?" said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile eyes, as he got up to take leave.
"To-morrow!" He threw up his hands with a little gesture of impatience."That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the way, whateverhappens. I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can carry me.Good-bye, Miss Boyce."
Marcella went slowly upstairs. The scene which had just passed was unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering. Then the sound of the front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature. The first sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness. The next—her mind threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, "Can I, by any means, get my way with Aldous?"
"And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!" The deep-pitched words fell slowly on Marcella's ears, as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of the Widrington Assize Court. Women were sobbing beside and behind her. Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon against her sister-in-law, her face buried in Ann's black shawl. For an instant after Hurd's death sentence had been spoken Marcella's nerves ceased to throb—the long exhaustion of feeling stopped. The harsh light and shade of the ill-lit room; the gas-lamps in front of the judge, blanching the ranged faces of the jury; the long table of reporters below, some writing, but most looking intently towards the dock; the figure of Wharton opposite, in his barrister's gown and wig—that face of his, so small, nervous, delicate—the frowning eyebrows a dark bar under the white of the wig—his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon the judge; the heads and attitudes of the condemned men, especially the form of a fair-haired youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who stood a little in front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his dwarf's stature—these things Marcella saw indeed; for years after she could have described them point by point; but for some seconds or minutes her eyes stared at them without conscious reaction of the mind on the immediate spectacle.
In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the stream of impressions and images. The crushing accumulation of hostile evidence—witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence—Wharton's irritation under it—the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the personal success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical accomplishment of the manner, as one wrestling before his equals—nothing left here of the garrulous vigour and brutality of the labourers' meeting!—the masterly use of all that could avail, the few quiet words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by implication to the larger ethical sense of the community,—all this she thought of with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous voice rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity were alike weary; the brain asserted itself.
The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer, sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's murderer.
On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up sternly—"I cannot conceive why men and women—women especially—should come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but if I hear another laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose whole conscious nature was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw Aldous flush and shrink as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the court, she caught the eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county magistrate. At the judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where she and Aldous sat; then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly looked away again. She perfectly—passionately—understood that Brookshire was very sorry for Aldous Raeburn that day.
The death sentences—three in number—were over. The judge was a very ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries with it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on voice and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could be felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women broke from the gallery.
"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed, amid stifled sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly alive to everything around it.
The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about face towards a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, stopped an instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery. Hurd also turned irresolutely.
"Look!" exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside her, "he's goin'."
Marcella bent forward. She, rather than the wife, caught the last look on his large dwarf's face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under the gas.
Aldous touched her softly on the arm.
"Yes," she said quickly, "yes, we must get her out. Ann, can you lift her?"
Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman: Ann Mullins held her on the other. Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her long black cloak. The gallery made way for them; every one looked and whispered till they had passed. Below, at the foot of the stairs, they found themselves in a passage crowded with people—lawyers, witnesses, officials, mixed with the populace. Again a road was opened for Aldous and his charges.
"This way, Mr. Raeburn," said a policeman, with alacrity. "Stand back, please! Is your carriage there, sir?"
"Let Ann Mullins take her—put them into the cab—I want to speak to Mr.Wharton," said Marcella in Aldous's ear.
"Get me a cab at once," he said to the policeman, "and tell my carriage to wait."
"Miss Boyce!"
Marcella turned hastily and saw Wharton beside her. Aldous also saw him, and the two men interchanged a few words.
"There is a private room close by," said Wharton, "I am to take you there, and Mr. Raeburn will join us at once."
He led her along a corridor, and opened a door to the left. They entered a small dingy room, looking through a begrimed window on a courtyard. The gas was lit, and the table was strewn with papers.
"Never, never more beautiful!" flashed through Wharton's mind, "with that knit, strenuous brow—that tragic scorn for a base world—that royal gait—"
Aloud he said:
"I have done my best privately among the people I can get at, and I thought, before I go up to town to-night—you know Parliament meets on Monday?—I would show you what I had been able to do, and ask you to take charge of a copy of the petition." He pointed to a long envelope lying on the table. "I have drafted it myself—I think it puts all the points we can possibly urge—but as to the names—"
He took out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
"It won't do," he said, looking down at it, and shaking his head. "As I said to you, it is so far political merely. There is a very strong Liberal and Radical feeling getting up about the case. But that won't carry us far. This petition with these names is a demonstration against game preserving and keepers' tyranny. What we want is the co-operation of aneighbourhood, especially of its leading citizens. However, I explained all this to you—there is no need to discuss it. Will you look at the list?"
Still holding it, he ran his finger over it, commenting here and there. She stood beside him; the sleeve of his gown brushed her black cloak; and under his perfect composure there beat a wild exultation in his power—without any apology, any forgiveness—to hold her there, alone with him, listening—her proud head stooped to his—her eye following his with this effort of anxious attention.
She made a few hurried remarks on the names, but her knowledge of the county was naturally not very serviceable. He folded up the paper and put it back.
"I think we understand," he said. "You will do what you can in the only quarter"—he spoke slowly—"that can really aid, and you will communicate with me at the House of Commons? I shall do what I can, of course, when the moment comes, in Parliament, and meanwhile I shall start the matter in the Press—our best hope. The Radical papers are already taking it up."
There was a sound of steps in the passage outside. A policeman opened the door, and Aldous Raeburn entered. His quick look ran over the two figures standing beside the table.
"I had some difficulty in finding a cab," he explained, "and we had to get some brandy; but she came round, and we got her off. I sent one of our men with her. The carriage is here."
He spoke—to Marcella—with some formality. He was very pale, but there was both authority and tension in his bearing.
"I have been consulting with Miss Boyce," said Wharton, with equal distance of manner, "as to the petition we are sending up to the Home Office."
Aldous made no reply.
"One word, Miss Boyce,"—Wharton quietly turned to her. "May I ask you to read the petition carefully, before you attempt to do anything with it? It lays stress on theonlydoubt that can reasonably be felt after the evidence, and after the judge's summing up. That particular doubt I hold to be entirely untouched by the trial; but it requires careful stating—the issues may easily be confused."
"Will you come?" said Aldous to Marcella. What she chose to think the forced patience of his tone exasperated her.
"I will do everything I can," she said in a low, distinct voice toWharton. "Good-bye."
She held out her hand. To both the moment was one of infinite meaning; to her, in her high spiritual excitement, a sacrament of pardon and gratitude—expressed once for all—by this touch—in Aldous Raeburn's presence.
The two men nodded to each other. Wharton was already busy, putting his papers together.
"We shall meet next week, I suppose, in the House?" said Wharton, casually. "Good-night."
* * * * *
"Will you take me to the Court?" said Marcella to Aldous, directly the door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping crowd that almost filled the little market-place of Widrington, the horses moved off. "I told mamma, that, if I did not come home, I should be with you, and that I should ask you to send me back from the Court to-night."
She still held the packet Wharton had given her in her hand. As though for air, she had thrown back the black gauze veil she had worn all through the trial, and, as they passed through the lights of the town, Aldous could see in her face the signs—the plain, startling signs—of the effect of these weeks upon her. Pale, exhausted, yet showing in every movement the nervous excitement which was driving her on—his heart sank as he looked at her—foreseeing what was to come.
As soon as the main street had been left behind, he put his head out of the window, and gave the coachman, who had been told to go to Mellor, the new order.
"Will you mind if I don't talk?" said Marcella, when he was again beside her. "I think I am tired out, but I might rest now a little. When we get to the Court, will you ask Miss Raeburn to let me have some food in her sitting-room? Then, at nine o'clock or so, may I come down and see Lord Maxwell and you—together?"
What she said, and the manner in which she said it, could only add to his uneasiness; but he assented, put a cushion behind her, wrapped the rugs round her, and then sat silent, train after train of close and anxious thought passing through his mind as they rolled along the dark roads.
When they arrived at Maxwell Court, the sound of the carriage broughtLord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn at once into the hall.
Aldous went forward in front of Marcella. "I have brought Marcella," he said hastily to his aunt. "Will you take her upstairs to your sitting-room, and let her have some food and rest? She is not fit for the exertion of dinner, but she wishes to speak to my grandfather afterwards."
Lord Maxwell had already hurried to meet the black-veiled figure standing proudly in the dim light of the outer hall.
"My dear! my dear!" he said, drawing her arm within his, and patting her hand in fatherly fashion. "How worn-out you look!—Yes, certainly—Agneta, take her up and let her rest—And you wish to speak to me afterwards? Of course, my dear, of course—at any time."
Miss Raeburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of Aldous's manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest upstairs straightway, put her on the sofa in a cheerful sitting-room with a bright fire, and then, shrewdly guessing that she herself could not possibly be a congenial companion to the girl at such a moment, whatever might have happened or might be going to happen, she looked at her watch, said that she must go down to dinner, and promptly left her to the charge of a kind elderly maid, who was to do and get for her whatever she would.
Marcella made herself swallow some food and wine. Then she said that she wished to be alone and rest for an hour, and would come downstairs at nine o'clock. The maid, shocked by her pallor, was loth to leave her, but Marcella insisted.
When she was left alone she drew herself up to the fire and tried hard to get warm, as she had tried to eat. When in this way a portion of physical ease and strength had come back to her, she took out the petition from its envelope and read it carefully. As she did so her lip relaxed, her eye recovered something of its brightness. All the points that had occurred to her confusedly, amateurishly, throughout the day, were here thrown into luminous and admirable form. She had listened to them indeed, as urged by Wharton in his concluding speech to the jury, but it had not, alas! seemed so marvellous to her then, as it did now, that,aftersuch a plea, the judge should have summed up as he did.
When she had finished it and had sat thinking awhile over the declining fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss Raeburn's desk, and wrote on it:
"Will you read this—and Lord Maxwell—before I come down? I forgot that you had not seen it.—M."
A ring at the bell brought the maid.
"Will you please get this taken to Mr. Raeburn? And then, don't disturb me again for half an hour."
And for that time she lay in Miss Raeburn's favourite chair, outwardly at rest. Inwardly she was ranging all her arguments, marshalling all her forces.
When the chiming clock in the great hall below struck nine, she got up and put the lamp for a moment on the mantelpiece, which held a mirror. She had already bathed her face and smoothed her hair. But she looked at herself again with attention, drew down the thick front waves of hair a little lower on the white brow, as she liked to have them, and once more straightened the collar and cuffs which were the only relief to her plain black dress.
The house as she stepped out into it seemed very still. Perfumed breaths of flowers and pot-pourri ascended from the hall. The pictures along the walls as she passed were those same Caroline and early Georgian beauties that had so flashingly suggested her own future rule in this domain on the day when Aldous proposed to her.
She felt suddenly very shrinking and lonely as she went downstairs. The ticking of a large clock somewhere—the short, screaming note of Miss Raeburn's parrot in one of the ground-floor rooms—these sounds and the beating of her own heart seemed to have the vast house to themselves.
No!—that was a door opening—Aldous coming to fetch her. She drew a childish breath of comfort.
He sprang up the stairs, two or three steps at a time, as he saw her coming.
"Are you rested—were they good to you? Oh! my precious one!—how pale you are still! Will you come and see my—grandfather now? He is quite ready."
She let him lead her in. Lord Maxwell was standing by his writing-table, leaning over the petition which was open before him—one hand upon it. At sight of her he lifted his white head. His fine aquiline face was grave and disturbed. But nothing could have been kinder or more courtly than his manner as he came towards her.
"Sit down in that chair. Aldous, make her comfortable. Poor child, how tired she looks! I hear you wished to speak to me on this most unhappy, most miserable business."
Marcella, who was sitting erect on the edge of the chair into which Aldous had put her, lifted her eyes with a sudden confidence. She had always liked Lord Maxwell.
"Yes," she said, struggling to keep down eagerness and emotion. "Yes, I came to bring you this petition, which is to be sent up to the Home Secretary on behalf of Jim Hurd, and—and—tobegof you and Aldous to sign it, if in any way you can. I know it will be difficult, but I thought I might—I might be able to suggest something to you—to convince you—as I have known these people so well—and it is very important to have your signatures."
How crude it sounded—how mechanical! She felt that she had not yet command of herself. The strange place, the stately room, the consciousness of Aldous behind her—Aldous, who should have been on her side and was not—all combined to intimidate her.
Lord Maxwell's concern was evident. In the first place, he was painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker. Why, what had Aldous been about? So thin! so frail and willowy in her black dress—monstrous!
"My dear," he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly hand on her shoulder, "my dear, I wish I could make you understand how gladly I would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably could. I would do it for your sake and for your grandfather's sake. But—this is a matter of conscience, of public duty, both for Aldous and myself. You will not surelywisheven, that we should be governed in our relations to it by any private feeling or motive?"
"No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about it—and I take such a different view from Aldous. He knows—everybody must know—that there is another side, another possible view from that which the judge took. You weren't in court to-day, were you, at all?"
"No. But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great care, and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of Mr. Wharton's speeches."
"Aldous!"—her voice broke irrepressibly into another note—"I thought he would have let me speak to you first!—to-night!"
Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.Aldous bent over her chair.
"You remember," he said, "you sent down the petition. I thought that meant that we were to read and discuss it. I am very sorry."
She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow. But already she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.
"The whole point lies in this," she said, looking up: "Canwe believe Hurd's own story? There is no evidence to corroborate it. I grant that—the judge did not believe it—and there is the evidence of hatred. But is it not possible and conceivable all the same? He says that he did not go out with any thought whatever of killing Westall, but that when Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him, as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him. Surely,surelythat is conceivable? Thereis—theremustbe a doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite different from other kinds and degrees of murder."
Now she possessed herself. The gift of flowing persuasive speech which was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had been maturing, came to her call. She leant forward and took up the petition. One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's life—presenting it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the "tears of things." To her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole matter—so sordid, commonplace, brutal in Lord Maxwell's eyes!—had become a tragic poem, a thing of fear and pity, to which her whole being vibrated. And as she conceived it, so she reproduced it. Wharton's points were there indeed, but so were Hurd's poverty, Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a tyrant's insults, the miserable wife, the branded children—emphasised, all of them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the girl's voice.
Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one knee crossed over the other. Aldous still hung over her chair. Neither interrupted her. Once the eyes of the two men met over her head—a distressed, significant look. Aldous heard all she said, but what absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed.
When her voice broke—when she had said all she could think of—she remained looking imploringly at Lord Maxwell.
He was silent a little; then he stooped forward and took her hand.
"You have spoken," he said with great feeling, "most nobly—most well—like a good woman, with a true compassionate heart. But all these things you have said are not new to me, my dear child. Aldous warned me of this petition—he has pressed upon me, still more I am sure upon himself, all that he conceived to be your view of the case—the view of those who are now moving in the matter. But with the best will in the world I cannot, and I believe that he cannot—though he must speak for himself—I cannot take that view. In my belief Hurd's act was murder, and deserves the penalty of murder. I have paid some attention to these things. I was a practising barrister in my youth, and later I was for two years Home Secretary. I will explain to you my grounds very shortly."
And, bending forward, he gave the reasons for his judgment of the case as carefully and as lucidly as though he were stating them to a fellow-expert, and not to an agitated girl of twenty-one. Both in words and manner there was an implied tribute, not only to Marcella, but perhaps to that altered position of the woman in our moving world which affects so many things and persons in unexpected ways.
Marcella listened, restlessly. She had drawn her hand away, and was twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. The flush that had sprung up while she was talking had died away. She grew whiter and whiter. When Lord Maxwell ceased, she said quickly, and as he thought unreasonably—
"So you will not sign?"
"No," he replied firmly, "I cannot sign. Holding the conviction about the matter I do, I should be giving my name to statements I do not believe; and in order to give myself the pleasure of pleasing you, and of indulging the pity that every man must feel for every murderer's wife and children, I should be not only committing a public wrong, but I should be doing what I could to lessen the safety and security of one whole class of my servants—men who give me honourable service—and two of whom have been so cruelly, so wantonly hurried before their Maker!"
His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the matter. Marcella shivered.
"Then," she said slowly, "Hurd will be executed."
Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.
"Let me tell you," he said, "that that does not follow at all. There issomeimportance in signatures—or rather in the local movement that the signatures imply. It enables a case to be reopened, which, in any event, this case is sure to be. But any Home Secretary who could decide a murder case on any other grounds whatever than those of law and his own conscience would not deserve his place a day—an hour! Believe me, you mistake the whole situation."
He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and authority. Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice, which was in itself an agony.
"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.
"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly. "Won't you try and believe what it costs me to refuse?"
It was a heavy blow to her. Amply as she had been prepared for it, there had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end she would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly conscious. Yet it had not availed her here—not even with the man who loved her.
Lord Maxwell looked at the two—the man's face of suffering, the girl's struggling breath.
"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave you a minute. Do make Marcella rest—get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little. Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above all, persuade her that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a matter of this kind she must leave us to do—as before God!—what we think right."
He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity—nay, a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the room.
Marcella sprang up.
"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled voice. "I will go upstairs."
"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me, if it is impossible for you to be generous?"
"Just!" she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him back from her. "Youcan talk of justice!"
He tried to speak, stammered, and failed. That strange paralysis of the will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never loved her more passionately—but as he stood there looking at her, something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable dawned.
"You," she said again, walking stormily to and fro, and catching at her breath—"You, in this house, with this life—to talk of justice—the justice that comes of slaying a man like Hurd! And I must go back to that cottage, to that woman, and tell her there isnohope—none! Becauseyoumust follow your conscience—you who have everything! Oh! I would not have your conscience—I wish you a heart—rather! Don't come to me, please! Oh! I must think how it can be. Things cannot go on so. I should kill myself, and make you miserable. But now I must go toher—to thepoor—to those whom Ilove, whom I carry in my heart!"
She broke off sobbing. He saw her, in her wild excitement, look round the splendid room as though she would wither it to ruin with one fiery, accusing glance.
"You are very scornful of wealth," he said, catching her wrists, "but one thing you have no right to scorn!—the man who has given you his inmost heart—and now only asks you to believe in this, that he is not the cruel hypocrite you are determined to make him!"
His face quivered in every feature. She was checked a moment—checked by the moral compulsion of his tone and manner, as well as by his words. But again she tore herself away.
"Pleasego and order the carriage," she said. "I cannot bear any more. Imustgo home and rest. Some day I will ask your pardon—oh! for this—and—and—" she was almost choked again—"other things. But now I must go away. There is some one who will help me. I must not forget that!"
The reckless words, the inflection, turned Aldous to stone. Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect—their eyes met. Then he went up to the bell and rang it.
"The brougham at once, for Miss Boyce. Will you have a maid to go with you?" he asked, motioning the servant to stay till Miss Boyce had given her answer.
"No, thank you. I must go and put on my things. Will you explain to MissRaeburn?"
The footman opened the door for her. She went.
"But this is unbearable!" said Aldous. "Do you mean to say that she is at home and that she will not see me?"
Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed humiliation of the man before her.
"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly. "I remonstrated with Marcella, but I could do nothing. I think, if you are wise, you will not for the present attempt to see her."
Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor. After a few moments' silence he looked up again.
"And she gave you no message for me?"
"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly. "Only that she could not bear to see anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter was still undecided."
Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was arrested by a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some black silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair; the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter. She had been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled before him. The door into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.
He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the writing. Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside her.
"Will you tell me," he said steadily—"I think you will admit I have a right to know—is Marcella in constant correspondence now with Henry Wharton?"
Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.
"I believe so," she quickly replied. "So far as I can judge, he writes to her almost every other day."
"Does she show you his letters?"
"Very often. They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews and efforts on Hurd's behalf."
"Would you not say," he asked, after another pause, raising his clear grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December Marcella's whole views and thoughts have been largely—perhaps vitally—influenced by this man?"
Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind—had, indeed, often marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before. Now that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them with common sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both parties. The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and oppressed the mother. For herself she asked to see things in a dry light. Yet she knew well that the moment was critical. Her feeling was more mixed than it had been. On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's side—with qualifications and impatiences, however.
She took up her embroidery again before she answered him. In her opinion the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the diplomatist.
"Yes, certainly," she said at last. "He has done a great deal to form her opinions. He has made her both read and think on all those subjects she has so long been fond of talking about."
She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with him.
"Has there been nothing else than that in it?" said Aldous, in an odd voice.
Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions. She looked at him straight, her slight, energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind her.
"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real truth. Ithinkthere is nothing else. But let me tell you what more I think."
Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant. In his pity and liking for her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.
"If you would," he entreated.
"Leave Marcella quite alone—for the present. She is not herself—not normal, in any way. Nor will she be till this dreadful thing is over. But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a little,then"—her thin voice expressed all the emphasis it could—"thenassert yourself! Ask her that question you have asked me—and get your answer."
He understood. Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past. But there was a proud and sensitive instinct in him which both told him that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.
"You have come from London to-day?" said Mrs. Boyce, changing the subject. All intimate and personal conversation was distasteful to her, and she admitted few responsibilities. Her daughter hardly counted among them.
"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said, trying to smile."I must get back to-night."
"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs. Boyce.
He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and trouble I am, he must be spared. Indeed, since the night of the trial, I feel as though I had been of very little use to any human being."
He spoke simply, but every word touched her. What an inconceivable entanglement the whole thing was! Yet she was no longer merely contemptuous of it.
"Look!" she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the ground beside the chair which held the envelope; "she is already making the mourning for the children. I can see she despairs."
He made a sound of horror.
"Can you do nothing?" he cried reproachfully. "To think of her dwelling upon this—nothing but this, day and night—and I, banished and powerless!"
He buried his head in his hands.
"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately. Then, after a pause, "You do not imagine there is any chance of success for her?"
He looked up and shook his head.
"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know. Wharton is managing it with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the House. But I happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I certainly gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm. There may be some delay. The new ministry will not kiss hands till Saturday. But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home Secretary.—By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my seeing Judge Cartwright," he added hastily—almost imploringly. "I could not bear that she should suppose—"
Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have imagined such a man in such a plight.
"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from me," he added slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty—without a word?"
"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up. "Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton, in his letter this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which were important to him. She specially wished you to be thanked for it."
His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget that the world yields itself only to the "violent."
He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from, her window, watched him go.
"Howcouldshe see him?" she asked herself passionately, both then and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days. His turn would come, and it should be amply given him. Butnowthe very thought of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears. The time for entreaty—for argument—was gone by, so far as he was concerned. He might have been her champion, and would not. She threw herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her lover's. It had become to her afight—with society, with the law, with Aldous—in which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter offence to her.
How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line; she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters; she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd and her children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector, because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with her father were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of alarm as to how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was, notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon discovered, that he really desired. During six months he had taken it for granted; so had the county. He, of all men, could not afford to be made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of the matter. He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had had a good deal to do with it. So that between him and his daughter there were now constant sparrings—sparrings which degraded Marcella in her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from home.
The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course, was in Minta Hurd's kitchen. Side by side with that piteous plaintive misery, her own fierceness dwindled. She would sit with little Willie on her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and crying silently. She never suspected that her presence was often a burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the wife herself. While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs. Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.
The last week arrived. Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause became more desperate. On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man, who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope. Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament. Friday was the day fixed for the execution.
The question in Parliament came on late. The Home Secretary's answer, though not final in form, was final in substance. Wharton went out immediately and wrote to Marcella. "She will not sleep if I telegraph to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for physical detail, which had in it something of the woman. But, knowing that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn the news first from the papers.
Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might reach her any hour.
She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind her. William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of understanding. Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.