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 still done—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 man Wilkins!"

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 Government non 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, the habitue. 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 party must have 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.



CHAPTER IX.

"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 to Mr. Lane; "we shan't get anything to eat yet awhile. What a crowd! The Alresfords 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. "Did you?"

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 am sure you 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, I think—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! Now perhaps 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—I know some working folk now!"

"So you did last year."

"No!"—she insisted, shaking her head—"that was all different. But now I am in their 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, the Socialist 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—or white—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. "You know you 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 the Clarion this 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 made one reader 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 is we who 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 little carillon, 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 we do want. 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. I am still fighting for my illusions in my own way—you, it seems, have given up yours!"

But for once he had underrated her sense of humour. She broke into a low merry laugh which a little disconcerted him.

"You mock me?" he said quickly—"think me insincere, unscrupulous?—Well, I dare say! But you have no right to mock me. Last year, again and again, you promised me guerdon. Now it has come to paying—and I claim!"

His low distinct voice in her ear had a magnetising effect upon her. She slowly turned her face to him, overcome by—yet fighting against—memory. If she had seen in him the smallest sign of reference to that scene she hated to think of, he would have probably lost this hold upon her on the spot. But his tact was perfect. She saw nothing but a look of dignity and friendship, which brought upon her with a rush all those tragic things they had shared and fought through, purifying things of pity and fear, which had so often seemed to her the atonement for, the washing away of that old baseness.

He saw her face tremble a little. Then she said proudly—

"I promised to be grateful. So I am."

"No, no!" he said, still in the same low tone. "You promised me a friend. Where is she?"

She made no answer. Her hands were hanging loosely over the water, and her eyes were fixed on the haze opposite, whence emerged the blocks of the great hospital and the twinkling points of innumerable lamps. But his gaze compelled her at last, and she turned back to him. He saw an expression half hostile, half moved, and pressed on before she could speak.

"Why do you bury yourself in that nursing life?" he said drily. "It is not the life for you; it does not fit you in the least."

"You test your friends!" she cried, her cheek flaming again at the provocative change of voice. "What possible right have you to that remark?"

"I know you, and I know the causes you want to serve. You can't serve them where you are. Nursing is not for you; you are wanted among your own class—among your equals—among the people who are changing and shaping England. It is absurd. You are masquerading."

She gave him a little sarcastic nod.

"Thank you. I am doing a little honest work for the first time in my life."

He laughed. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or posing.

"You are just what you were in one respect—terribly in the right! Be a little humble to-night for a change. Come, condescend to the classes! Do you see Mr. Lane calling us?"

And, in fact, Mr. Lane, with his arm in the air, was eagerly beckoning to them from the distance.

"Do you know Lady Selina Farrell?" he asked her, as they walked quickly back to the dispersing crowd.

"No; who is she?"

Wharton laughed.

"Providence should contrive to let Lady Selina overhear that question once a week—in your tone! Well, she is a personage—Lord Alresford's daughter—unmarried, rich, has a salon, or thinks she has—manipulates a great many people's fortunes and lives, or thinks she does, which, after all, is what matters—to Lady Selina. She wants to know you, badly. Do you think you can be kind to her? There she is—you will let me introduce you? She dines with us."

In another moment Marcella had been introduced to a tall, fair lady in a very fashionable black and pink bonnet, who held out a gracious hand.

"I have heard so much of you!" said Lady Selina, as they walked along the passage to the dining-room together. "It must be so wonderful, your nursing!"

Marcella laughed rather restively.

"No, I don't think it is," she said; "there are so many of us."

"Oh, but the things you do—Mr. Wharton told me—so interesting!"

Marcella said nothing, and as to her looks the passage was dark. Lady Selina thought her a very handsome but very gauche young woman. Still, gauche or no, she had thrown over Aldous Raeburn and thirty thousand a year; an act which, as Lady Selina admitted, put you out of the common run.

"Do you know most of the people dining?" she enquired in her blandest voice. "But no doubt you do. You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton's, I think?"

"He stayed at our house last year," said Marcella, abruptly. "No, I don't know anybody."

"Then shall I tell you? It makes it more interesting, doesn't it? It ought to be a pleasant little party."

And the great lady lightly ran over the names. It seemed to Marcella that most of them were very "smart" or very important. Some of the smart names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn's talk of last year; and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and two or three prominent members. It was all rather surprising.

At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown beauty. The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that story. His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.

Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she could not help giving to her host and his surroundings. Wharton had Lady Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella's minister on his left. At the other end of the table sat Mrs. Lane, doing her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a blind old age, gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and possible premier. But the talk, on the whole, was general—a gay and careless give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball flying from one accustomed hand to another.

And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor—the solitary, eccentric figure pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate—bringing the enmity of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead. Where even was the speaker of an hour ago? Chat of Ascot and of Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour of country-house "sets," with a patter of names which sounded in her scornful ear like a paragraph from the World; above all, a general air of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate, seemed inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the "idle rich," whereof—in the popular idea—he was held to be one of the very particular foes!—

No doubt, as the dinner moved on, this first impression changed somewhat. She began to distinguish notes that had at first been lost upon her. She caught the mocking, ambiguous tone under which she herself had so often fumed; she watched the occasional recoil of the women about him, as though they had been playing with some soft-pawed animal, and had been suddenly startled by the gleam of its claws. These things puzzled, partly propitiated her. But on the whole she was restless and hostile. How was it possible—from such personal temporising—such a frittering of the forces and sympathies—to win the single-mindedness and the power without which no great career is built? She wanted to talk with him—reproach him!

"Well—I must go—worse luck," said Wharton at last, laying down his napkin and rising. "Lane, will you take charge? I will join you outside later."

"If he ever finds us!" said her neighbour to Marcella. "I never saw the place so crowded. It is odd how people enjoy these scrambling meals in these very ugly rooms."

Marcella, smiling, looked down with him over the bare coffee-tavern place, in which their party occupied a sort of high table across the end, while two other small gatherings were accommodated in the space below.

"Are there any other rooms than this?" she asked idly.

"One more," said a young man across the table, who had been introduced to her in the dusk outside, and had not yet succeeded in getting her to look at him, as he desired. "But there is another big party there to-night—Raeburn—you know," he went on innocently, addressing the minister; "he has got the Winterbournes and the Macdonalds—quite a gathering—rather an unusual thing for him."

The minister glanced quickly at his companion. But she had turned to answer a question from Lady Selina, and thenceforward, till the party rose, she gave him little opportunity of observing her.

As the outward-moving stream of guests was once more in the corridor leading to the terrace, Marcella hurriedly made her way to Mrs. Lane.

"I think," she said—"I am afraid—we ought to be going—my friend and I. Perhaps Mr. Lane—perhaps he would just show us the way out; we can easily find a cab."

There was an imploring, urgent look in her face which struck Mrs. Lane. But Mr. Lane's loud friendly voice broke in from behind.

"My dear Miss Boyce!—we can't possibly allow it—no! no—just half an hour—while they bring us our coffee—to do your homage, you know, to the terrace—and the river—and the moon!—And then—if you don't want to go back to the House for the division, we will see you safely into your cab. Look at the moon!—and the tide"—they had come to the wide door opening on the terrace—"aren't they doing their very best for you?"

Marcella looked behind her in despair. Where was Edith? Far in the rear!—and fully occupied apparently with two or three pleasant companions. She could not help herself. She was carried on, with Mr. Lane chatting beside her—though the sight of the shining terrace, with its moonlit crowd of figures, breathed into her a terror and pain she could hardly control.

"Come and look at the water," she said to Mr. Lane; "I would rather not walk up and down if you don't mind."

He thought she was tired, and politely led her through the sitting or promenading groups till once more she was leaning over the parapet, now trying to talk, now to absorb herself in the magic of bridge, river, and sky, but in reality listening all the time with a shrinking heart for the voices and the footfalls that she dreaded. Lady Winterbourne, above all! How unlucky! It was only that morning that she had received a forwarded letter from that old friend, asking urgently for news and her address.

"Well, how did you like the speech to-night—the speech?" said Mr. Lane, a genial Gladstonian member, more heavily weighted with estates than with ideas. "It was splendid, wasn't it?—in the way of speaking. Speeches like that are a safety-valve—that's my view of it. Have 'em out—all these ideas—get 'em discussed!"—with a good-humoured shake of the head for emphasis. "Does nobody any harm and may do good. I can tell you, Miss Boyce, the House of Commons is a capital place for taming these clever young men!—you must give them their head—and they make excellent fellows after a bit. Why—who's this?—My dear Lady Winterbourne!—this is a sight for sair een!"

And the portly member with great effusion grasped the hand of a stately lady in black, whose abundant white hair caught the moonlight.

"Marcella!" cried a woman's voice.

Yes—there he was!—close behind Lady Winterbourne. In the soft darkness he and his party had run upon the two persons talking over the wall without an idea—a suspicion.

She hurriedly withdrew herself from Lady Winterbourne, hesitated a second, then held out her hand to him. The light was behind him. She could not see his face in the darkness; but she was suddenly and strangely conscious of the whole scene—of the great dark building with its lines of fairy-lit gothic windows—the blue gulf of the river crossed by lines of wavering light—the swift passage of a steamer with its illuminated saloon and crowded deck—of the wonderful mixture of moonlight and sunset in the air and sky—of this dark figure in front of her.

Their hands touched. Was there a murmured word from him? She did not know; she was too agitated, too unhappy to hear it if there was. She threw herself upon Lady Winterbourne, in whom she divined at once a tremor almost equal to her own.

"Oh! do come with me—come away!—I want to talk to you!" she said incoherently under her breath, drawing Lady Winterbourne with a strong hand.

Lady Winterbourne yielded, bewildered, and they moved along the terrace.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" cried the elder lady—"to think of finding you here! How astonishing—how—how dreadful! No!—I don't mean that. Of course you and he must meet—but it was only yesterday he told me he had never seen you again—since—and it gave me a turn. I was very foolish just now. There now—stay here a moment—and tell me about yourself."

And again they paused by the river, the girl glancing nervously behind her as though she were in a company of ghosts. Lady Winterbourne recovered herself, and Marcella, looking at her, saw the old tragic severity of feature and mien blurred with the same softness, the same delicate tremor. Marcella clung to her with almost a daughter's feeling. She took up the white wrinkled hand as it lay on the parapet, and kissed it in the dark so that no one saw.

"I am glad to see you again," she said passionately, "so glad!"

Lady Winterbourne was surprised and moved.

"But you have never written all these months, you unkind child! And I have heard so little of you—your mother never seemed to know. When will you come and see me—or shall I come to you? I can't stay now, for we were just going; my daughter, Ermyntrude Welwyn, has to take some one to a ball. How strange"—she broke off—"how very strange that you and he should have met to-night! He goes off to Italy to-morrow, you know, with Lord Maxwell."

"Yes, I had heard," said Marcella, more steadily. "Will you come to tea with me next week?—Oh, I will write.—And we must go too—where can my friend be?"

She looked round in dismay, and up and down the terrace for Edith.

"I will take you back to the Lanes, anyway," said Lady Winterbourne; "or shall we look after you?"

"No! no! Take me back to the Lanes."

"Mamma, are you coming?" said a voice like a softened version of Lady Winterbourne's. Then something small and thin ran forward, and a girl's voice said piteously:

"Dear Lady Winterbourne, my frock and my hair take so long to do! I shall be cross with my maid, and look like a fiend. Ermyntrude will be sorry she ever knew me. Do come!"

"Don't cry, Betty. I certainly shan't take you if you do!" said Lady Ermyntrude, laughing. "Mamma, is this Miss Boyce—your Miss Boyce?"

She and Marcella shook hands, and they talked a little, Lady Ermyntrude under cover of the darkness looking hard and curiously at the tall stranger whom, as it happened, she had never seen before. Marcella had little notion of what she was saying. She was far more conscious of the girlish form hanging on Lady Winterbourne's arm than she was of her own words, of "Betty's" beautiful soft eyes—also shyly and gravely fixed upon herself—under that marvellous cloud of fair hair; the long, pointed chin; the whimsical little face.

"Well, none of you are any good!" said Betty at last, in a tragic voice. "I shall have to walk home my own poor little self, and 'ask a p'leeceman.' Mr. Raeburn!"

He disengaged himself from a group behind and came—with no alacrity. Betty ran up to him.

"Mr. Raeburn! Ermyntrude and Lady Winterbourne are going to sleep here, if you don't mind making arrangements. But I want a hansom."

At that very moment Marcella caught sight of Edith strolling along towards her with a couple of members, and chatting as though the world had never rolled more evenly.

"Oh! there she is—there is my friend!" cried Marcella to Lady Winterbourne. "Good-night—good-night!"

She was hurrying off when she saw Aldous Raeburn was standing alone a moment. The exasperated Betty had made a dart from his side to "collect" another straying member of the party.

An impulse she could not master scattered her wretched discomfort—even her chafing sense of being the observed of many eyes. She walked up to him.

"Will you tell me about Lord Maxwell?" she said in a tremulous hurry. "I am so sorry he is ill—I hadn't heard—I—"

She dared not look up. Was that his voice answering?

"Thank you. We have been very anxious about him; but the doctors to-day give a rather better report. We take him abroad to-morrow."

"Marcella! at last!" cried Edith Craven, catching hold of her friend; "you lost me? Oh, nonsense; it was all the other way. But look, there is Mr. Wharton coming out. I must go—come and say good-night—everybody is departing."

Aldous Raeburn lifted his hat. Marcella felt a sudden rush of humiliation—pain—sore resentment. That cold, strange tone—those unwilling words!—She had gone up to him—as undisciplined in her repentance as she had been in aggression—full of a passionate yearning to make friends—somehow to convey to him that she "was sorry," in the old child's phrase which her self-willed childhood had used so little. There could be no misunderstanding possible! He of all men knew best how irrevocable it all was. But why, when life has brought reflection, and you realise at last that you have vitally hurt, perhaps maimed, another human being, should it not be possible to fling conventions aside, and go to that human being with the frank confession which by all the promises of ethics and religion ought to bring peace—peace and a soothed conscience?

But she had been repulsed—put aside, so she took it—and by one of the kindest and most generous of men! She moved along the terrace in a maze, seeing nothing, biting her lip to keep back the angry tears. All that obscure need, that new stirring of moral life within her—which had found issue in this little futile advance towards a man who had once loved her and could now, it seemed, only despise and dislike, her—was beating and swelling stormlike within her. She had taken being loved so easily, so much as a matter of course! How was it that it hurt her now so much to have lost love, and power, and consideration? She had never felt any passion for Aldous Raeburn—had taken him lightly and shaken him off with a minimum of remorse. Yet to-night a few cold words from him—the proud manner of a moment—had inflicted a smart upon her she could hardly bear. They had made her feel herself so alone, unhappy, uncared for!

But, on the contrary, she must be happy!—must be loved! To this, and this only, had she been brought by the hard experience of this strenuous year.

* * * * *

"Oh, Mrs. Lane, be an angel!" exclaimed Wharton's voice. "Just one turn—five minutes! The division will be called directly, and then we will all thank our stars and go to bed!"

In another instant he was at Marcella's side, bare-headed, radiant, reckless even, as he was wont to be in moments of excitement. He had seen her speak to Raeburn as he came out on the terrace, but his mind was too full for any perception of other people's situations—even hers. He was absorbed with himself, and with her, as she fitted his present need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his lips; and his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and the pleasure of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to homage; his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference, a flattery, to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the evening had lent a new prestige.

She, too, in his eyes, had triumphed—had made her mark. His ears were full of the comments made upon her to-night by the little world on the terrace. If it were not for money—hateful money!—what more brilliant wife could be desired for any rising man?

So the five minutes lengthened into ten, and by the time the division was called, and Wharton hurried off, Marcella, soothed, taken out of herself, rescued from the emptiness and forlornness of a tragic moment, had given him more conscious cause than she had ever given him yet to think her kind and fair.



CHAPTER X.

"My dear Ned, do be reasonable! Your sister is in despair, and so am I. Why do you torment us by staying on here in the heat, and taking all these engagements, which you know you are no more fit for than—"

"A sick grasshopper," laughed Hallin. "Healthy wretch! Did Heaven give you that sun-burn only that you might come home from Italy and twit us weaklings? Do you think I want to look as rombustious as you? 'Nothing too much,' my good friend!"

Aldous looked down upon the speaker with an anxiety quite untouched by Hallin's "chaff."

"Miss Hallin tells me," he persisted, "that you are wearing yourself out with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now, rest, and begin again in the winter?"

Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly joined in front of him.

"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.

Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.

"Why you should behave as though you wished to make such a prophecy true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.

Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes—coeli lucida templa—the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.

"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting up a thin hand and touching his friend—"I shall give up soon. Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures. I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead, and—I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh when no man can work."

They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk—of the political situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind. Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain current isms and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs, indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.

He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his early friends by his passionate democracy—his belief in, and trust of, the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith, but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the friendship of these two in the least.

But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with—say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his life. And not merely common property—though like all true soldiers of the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future enormously extended—but in the first place, and above all, to distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them already. And that not for wealth's sake—though a more equal distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably tend to wealth—but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual heritage.

How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have answered—"For England—mainly by a fresh distribution of the land." Not, of course, by violence—which only means the worst form of waste known to history—but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other kinds of property—by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of communal initiative and control—and above all by the continuous private effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contempt of the student—or the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A nation is not saved so cheaply!—and to see those energies turned to land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men, women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate—filled him with a growing despair.

The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the community, was everything—yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man.

So that he saw it all sub specie aeternitatis, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!—to be exhausting in him the very springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and affections as any homoousion of old? Had they not already cost him love? Were they also, in another fashion, to cost him his friend?

* * * * *

"Ah, dear old fellow—enough!" said Hallin at last—"take me back to Italy! You have told me so little—such a niggardly little!"

"I told you that we went and I came back in a water-spout," said Aldous; "the first rain in Northern Italy for four months—worse luck! 'Rain at Reggio, rain at Parma.—At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain!'—that might about stand for my diary, except for one radiant day when my aunt, Betty Macdonald, and I descended on Milan, and climbed the Duomo."

"Did Miss Betty amuse you?"

Aldous laughed.

"Well, at least she varied the programme. The greater part of our day in Milan Aunt Neta and I spent in rushing after her like its tail after a kite. First of all, she left us in the Duomo Square, running like a deer, and presently, to Aunt Neta's horror, we discovered that she was pursuing a young Italian officer in a blue cloak. When we came up with the pair she was inquiring, in her best Italian, where the 'Signor' got his cloak, because positively she must have one like it, and he, cap in hand, was explaining to the Signorina that if she would but follow him round the corner to his military tailor's, she could be supplied on the spot. So there we all went, Miss Betty insisting. You can imagine Aunt Neta. She bought a small shipload of stuff—and then positively skipped for joy in the street outside—the amazed officer looking on. And as for her career over the roof of the Duomo—the agitation of it nearly brought my aunt to destruction—and even I heaved a sigh of relief when I got them both down safe."

"Is the creature all tricks?" said Hallin, with a smile. "As you talk of her to me I get the notion of a little monkey just cut loose from a barrel organ."

"Oh! but the monkey has so much heart," said Aldous, laughing again, as every one was apt to laugh who talked about Betty Macdonald, "and it makes friends with every sick and sorry creature it comes across, especially with old maids! It amounts to genius, Betty's way with old maids. You should see her in the middle of them in the hotel salon at night—a perfect ring of them—and the men outside, totally neglected, and out of temper. I have never seen Betty yet in a room with somebody she thought ill at ease, or put in the shade—a governess, or a schoolgirl, or a lumpish boy—that she did not devote herself to that somebody. It is a pretty instinct; I have often wondered whether it is nature or art."

He fell silent, still smiling. Hallin watched him closely. Perhaps the thought which had risen in his mind revealed itself by some subtle sign or other to Aldous. For suddenly Raeburn's expression changed; the over-strenuous, harassed look, which of late had somewhat taken the place of his old philosopher's quiet, reappeared.

"I did not tell you, Hallin," he began, in a low voice, raising his eyes to his friend, "that I had seen her again."

Hallin paused a moment. Then he said:

"No. I knew she went to the House to hear Wharton's speech, and that she dined there. I supposed she might just have come across you—but she said nothing."

"Of course, I had no idea," said Aldous; "suddenly Lady Winterbourne and I came across her on the terrace. Then I saw she was with that man's party. She spoke to me afterwards—I believe now—she meant to be kind"—his voice showed the difficulty he had in speaking at all—"but I saw him coming up to talk to her. I am ashamed to think of my own manner, but I could not help myself."

His face and eye took, as he spoke, a peculiar vividness and glow. Raeburn had not for months mentioned to him the name of Marcella Boyce, but Hallin had all along held two faiths about the matter: first, that Aldous was still possessed by a passion which had become part of his life; secondly, that the events of the preceding year had produced in him an exceedingly bitter sense of ill-usage, of a type which Hallin had not perhaps expected.

"Did you see anything to make you suppose," he asked quietly, after a pause, "that she is going to marry him?"

"No—no," Aldous repeated slowly; "but she is clearly on friendly, perhaps intimate, terms with him. And just now, of course, she is more likely to be influenced by him than ever. He made a great success—of a kind—in the House a fortnight ago. People seem to think he may come rapidly to the front."

"So I understand. I don't believe it. The jealousies that divide that group are too unmanageable. If he were a Parnell! But he lacks just the qualities that matter—the reticence, the power of holding himself aloof from irrelevant things and interests, the hard self-concentration."

Aldous raised his shoulders.

"I don't imagine there is any lack of that! But certainly he holds himself aloof from nothing and nobody! I hear of him everywhere."

"What!—among the smart people?"

Aldous nodded.

"A change of policy by all accounts," said Hallin, musing. "He must do it with intention. He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all at once."

"Oh dear, no!" said Aldous, drily. "He does it with intention. Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady. All the same I think he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and its influence. Have you been following the strike 'leaders' in the Clarion?"

"No!" cried Hallin, flushing. "I would not read them for the world! I might not be able to go on giving to the strike."

Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked back to the one subject that really held the depths of it. The truest friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella Boyce—never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her. But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction.

"Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have been away," he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.

Aldous hesitated; then he said—

"Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?"

Hallin made a little face.

"Since when has she become a person likely to be 'satisfied' with anything? She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy. When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I could cry over her!"

Aldous started.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, as he too rose and laid his hand on Hallin's for a moment. "But don't tell me! It's best for me not to talk of her. If she were associated in my mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off. But this—this—" He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress. "A person you and I know said to me the other day, 'It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had thrown me over except with ill-will.' The word astonished me, but sometimes I understand it. I find myself full of anger to the most futile, the most ridiculous degree!"

He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his own breach of reticence. Hallin laid his hands on the taller man's shoulders, and there was a short pause.

"Never mind, old fellow," said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands dropped; "let's go and do our work. What is it you're after?—I forget."

Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again, meanwhile, in his usual voice. He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane. The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had finally resolved in his student's way to see for himself the state of things in two or three selected streets.

It was a matter on which Hallin was also well-informed, and felt strongly. They stayed talking about it a few minutes, Hallin eagerly directing Raeburn's attention to the two or three points where he thought the Government could really do good.

Then Raeburn turned to go.

"I shall come and drag you out to-morrow afternoon," he said, as he opened the door.

"You needn't," said Hallin, with a smile; "in fact, don't; I shall have my jaunt."

Whereby Aldous understood that he would be engaged in his common Saturday practice of taking out a batch of elder boys or girls from one or other of the schools of which he was manager, for a walk or to see some sight.

"If it's your boys," he said, protesting, "you're not fit for it. Hand them over to me."

"Nothing of the sort," said Hallin, gaily, and turned him out of the room.

* * * * *

Raeburn found the walk from Hallin's Bloomsbury quarters to Drury Lane hot and airless. The planes were already drooping and yellowing in the squares, the streets were at their closest and dirtiest, and the traffic of Holborn and its approaches had never seemed to him more bewildering in its roar and volume. July was in, and all freshness had already disappeared from the too short London summer.

For Raeburn on this particular afternoon there was a curious forlornness in the dry and tainted air. His slack mood found no bracing in the sun or the breeze. Everything was or seemed distasteful to a mind out of tune—whether this work he was upon, which only yesterday had interested him considerably, or his Parliamentary occupations, or some tiresome estate business which would have to be looked into when he got home. He was oppressed, too, by the last news of his grandfather. The certainty that this dear and honoured life, with which his own had been so closely intertwined since his boyhood, was drawing to its close weighed upon him now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an object on which affection—checked and thwarted elsewhere—was still free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for those other changes to which the first great change must lead—his transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all the ceremonial side of life—he looked forward to them with an intense and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.

He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street, and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two walked on together talking.

The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already marked for demolition—a "black street," bearing a peculiarly vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.

After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow roadway strewn with costers' refuse—it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market—its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type.

A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.

"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after. The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."

And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"—that is to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.

When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough. But his companion—a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of "big-wigs"—was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.

Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.

"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"

Shrieks—of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air. The men and women who rushed past the two strangers—hustling them, yet too excited to notice them—were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.

"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds like murder. You go back for that policeman!"

And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling—cries, groans, uproar—all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall—then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion—"Help!"

Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark passage inside—two wrestling with the third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with blood.

"Ee's done for her!" shouted one of the captors; "an' for the Sister too!"

"The Sister!" shrieked a woman behind Aldous—it's the nuss he means! I sor her go in when I wor at my window half an hour ago. Oh! yer blackguard, you!"—and she would have fallen upon the wretch, in a frenzy, had not the bystanders caught hold of her.

"Stand back!" cried a policeman. Three of them had come up at Peabody's call. The man was instantly secured, and the crowd pushed back.

Aldous was already upstairs.

"Which room?" he asked of a group of women crying and cowering on the first landing—for all sounds from above had ceased.

"Third floor front," cried one of them. "We all of us begged and implored of that young person, sir, not to go a-near him! Didn't we, Betsy?—didn't we, Doll?"

Aldous ran up.

On the third floor, the door of the front room was open. A woman lay on the ground, apparently beaten to death.

By her side, torn, dishevelled, and gasping, knelt Marcella Boyce. Two or three other women were standing by in helpless terror and curiosity. Marcella was bending over the bleeding victim before her. Her own left arm hung as though disabled by her side; but with the right hand she was doing her best to staunch some of the bleeding from the head. Her bag stood open beside her, and one of the chattering women was handing her what she asked for. The sight stamped itself in lines of horror on Raeburn's heart.

In such an exaltation of nerve she could be surprised at nothing. When she saw Raeburn enter the room, she did not even start.

"I think," she said, as he stooped down to her—speaking with pauses, as though to get her breath—"he has—killed her. But there—is a chance. Are the—police there—and a stretcher?"

Two constables entered as she spoke, and the first of them instantly sent his companion back for a stretcher. Then, noticing Marcella's nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully.

"Did you see it, miss?"

"I—I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the bandage she was applying. "But he was—such a great—powerful brute."

Aldous, hating the clumsiness of his man's fingers, knelt down and tried to help her. Her trembling hand touched, mingled with his.

"I was downstairs," she went on, while the constable took out his note-book, "attending a child—that's ill—when I heard the screams. They were on the landing; he had turned her out of the room—then rushed after her—I think—to throw her downstairs—I stopped that. Then he took up something—oh! there it is!" She shuddered, pointing to a broken piece of a chair which lay on the floor. "He was quite mad with drink—I couldn't—do much."

Her voice slipped into a weak, piteous note.

"Isn't your arm hurt?" said Aldous, pointing to it.

"It's not broken—it's wrenched; I can't use it. There—that's all we can do—till she gets—to hospital."

Then she stood up, pale and staggering, and asked the policeman if he could put on a bandage. The man had got his ambulance certificate, and was proud to say that he could. She took a roll out of her bag, and quietly pointed to her arm. He did his best, not without skill, and the deep line of pain furrowing the centre of the brow relaxed a little. Then she sank down on the floor again beside her patient, gazing at the woman's marred face—indescribably patient in its deep unconsciousness—at the gnarled and bloodstained hands, with their wedding-ring; at the thin locks of torn grey hair—with tears that ran unheeded down her cheeks, in a passion of anguished pity, which touched a chord of memory in Raeburn's mind. He had seen her look so once before—beside Minta Hurd, on the day of Hurd's capture.

At the same moment he saw that they were alone. The policeman had cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.

"You can't do anything more," said Aldous, gently, bending over her. "Won't you let me take you home?—you want it sorely. The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help. They will remove her with every care—he will see to it."

Then for the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he was—where they were—how they had last met. And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness. She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her anymore—after this! When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and so, perforce, forgiven. The same tacit thought was in her mind now. No!—after this he must be friends with her.

"I will just help to get her downstairs," she said, but with a quivering, appealing accent—and so they fell silent.

Aldous looked round the room—at the miserable filthy garret with its begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty gin-bottles here and there—all the familiar, one might almost say conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation—then at this breathing death between himself and her. Perhaps his strongest feeling was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance—against her mother!—against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a hopeless struggle with devildom.

"I have been here several times before," she said presently, in a faint voice, "and there has never been any trouble. By day the street is not much worse than others—though, of course, it has a bad name. There is a little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid. Many of the women in the house are very good to him and his mother. This poor thing—used to come in and out—when I was nursing him—Oh, I wish—I wish they would come!" she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form—"every moment is of importance!"

As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it opened, and the police came in. Marcella, herself helpless, directed the lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and skill. Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.

Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police, who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as to how and where she was to give her evidence. She was leaning against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and seemed to him on the point of fainting.

"Get a cab at once, will you!" he said peremptorily to Peabody; then going up to the inspector he drew him forward. They exchanged a few words, the inspector lifted his cap, and Aldous went back to Marcella.

"There is a cab here," he said to her. "Come, please, directly. They will not trouble you any more for the present."

He led her out through the still lingering crowd and put her into the cab. As they drove along, he felt every jolt and roughness of the street as though he were himself in anguish. She was some time before she recovered the jar of pain caused her by the act of getting into the cab. Her breath came fast, and he could see that she was trying hard to control herself and not to faint.

He, too, restrained himself so far as not to talk to her. But the exasperation, the revolt within, was in truth growing unmanageably. Was this what her new career—her enthusiasms—meant, or might mean! Twenty-three!—in the prime of youth, of charm! Horrible, unpardonable waste! He could not bear it, could not submit himself to it.

Oh! let her marry Wharton, or any one else, so long as it were made impossible for her to bruise and exhaust her young bloom amid such scenes—such gross physical abominations. Amazing!—how meanly, passionately timorous the man of Raeburn's type can be for the woman! He himself may be morally "ever a fighter," and feel the glow, the stern joy of the fight. But she!—let her leave the human brute and his unsavoury struggle alone! It cannot be borne—it was never meant—that she should dip her delicate wings, of her own free will at least, in such a mire of blood and tears. It was the feeling that had possessed him when Mrs. Boyce told him of the visit to the prison, the night in the cottage.

In her whirl of feverish thought, she divined him very closely. Presently, as he watched her—hating the man for driving and the cab for shaking—he saw her white lips suddenly smile.

"I know," she said, rousing herself to look at him; "you think nursing is all like that!"

"I hope not!" he said, with effort, trying to smile too.

"I never saw a fight before," she said, shutting her eyes again. "Nobody is ever rude to us—I often pine for experiences!"

How like her old, wild tone! His rigid look softened involuntarily.

"Well, you have got one now," he said, bending over to her. "Does your arm hurt you much?"

"Yes,—but I can bear it. What vexes me is that I shall have to give up work for a bit.—Mr. Raeburn!"

"Yes." His heart beat.

"We may meet often—mayn't we?—at Lady Winterbourne's—or in the country? Couldn't we be friends? You don't know how often—" She turned away her weary head a moment—gathered strength to begin again—"—how often I have regretted—last year. I see now—that I behaved—more unkindly"—her voice was almost a whisper—"than I thought then. But it is all done with—couldn't we just be good friends—understand each other, perhaps, better than we ever did?"

She kept her eyes closed, shaken with alternate shame and daring.

As for him, he was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the Terrace—was Wharton's advancing figure. But her state—the moment—coerced him.

"We could not be anything but friends," he said gently, but with astonishing difficulty; and then could find nothing more to say. She knew his reserve, however, and would not this time be repelled.

She put out her hand.

"No!" she said, looking at it and withdrawing it with a shudder; "oh no!"

Then suddenly a passion of tears and trembling overcame her. She leant against the side of the cab, struggling in vain to regain her self-control, gasping incoherent things about the woman she had not been able to save. He tried to soothe and calm her, his own heart wrung. But she hardly heard him.

At last they turned into Maine Street, and she saw the gateway of Brown's Buildings.

"Here we are," she said faintly, summoning all her will; "do you know you will have to help me across that court, and upstairs—then I shan't be any more trouble."

So, leaning on Raeburn's arm, Marcella made her slow progress across the court of Brown's Buildings and through the gaping groups of children. Then at the top of her flight of steps she withdrew herself from him with a wan smile.

"Now I am home," she said. "Good-bye!"

Aldous looked round him well at Brown's Buildings as he departed. Then he got into a hansom, and drove to Lady Winterbourne's house, and implored her to fetch and nurse Marcella Boyce, using her best cleverness to hide all motion of his in the matter.

After which he spent—poor Aldous!—one of the most restless and miserable nights of his life.



CHAPTER XI.

Marcella was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair at the open window of Lady Winterbourne's drawing-room. The house—in James Street, Buckingham Gate—looked out over the exercising ground of the great barracks in front, and commanded the greenery of St. James's Park to the left. The planes lining the barrack railings were poor, wilted things, and London was as hot as ever. Still the charm of these open spaces of sky and park, after the high walls and innumerable windows of Brown's Buildings, was very great; Marcella wanted nothing more but to lie still, to dally with a book, to dream as she pleased, and to be let alone.

Lady Winterbourne and her married daughter, Lady Ermyntrude, were still out, engaged in the innumerable nothings of the fashionable afternoon. Marcella had her thoughts to herself.

But they were not of a kind that any one need have wished to share. In the first place, she was tired of idleness. In the early days after Lady Winterbourne had carried her off, the soft beds and sofas, the trained service and delicate food of this small but luxurious house had been so pleasant to her that she had scorned herself for a greedy Sybaritic temper, delighted by any means to escape from plain living. But she had been here a fortnight, and was now pining to go back to work. Her mood was too restless and transitional to leave her long in love with comfort and folded hands. She told herself that she had no longer any place among the rich and important people of this world; far away beyond these parks and palaces, in the little network of dark streets she knew, lay the problems and the cares that were really hers, through which her heart was somehow wrestling—must somehow wrestle—its passionate way. But her wrenched arm was still in a sling, and was, moreover, under-going treatment at the hands of a clever specialist; and she could neither go home, as her mother had wished her to do, nor return to her nursing—a state of affairs which of late had made her a little silent and moody.

On the whole she found her chief pleasure in the two weekly visits she paid to the woman whose life, it now appeared, she had saved—probably at some risk of her own. The poor victim would go scarred and maimed through what remained to her of existence. But she lived; and—as Marcella and Lady Winterbourne and Raeburn had abundantly made up their minds—would be permanently cared for and comforted in the future.

Alas! there were many things that stood between Marcella and true rest. She had been woefully disappointed, nay wounded, as to the results of that tragic half-hour which for the moment had seemed to throw a bridge of friendship over those painful, estranging memories lying between her and Aldous Raeburn. He had called two or three times since she had been with Lady Winterbourne; he had done his best to make her inevitable appearance as a witness in the police-court, as easy to her as possible; the man who had stood by her through such a scene could do no less, in common politeness and humanity. But each time they met his manner had been formal and constrained; there had been little conversation; and she had been left to the bitterness of feeling that she had made a strange if not unseemly advance, of which he must think unkindly, since he had let it count with him so little.

Childishly, angrily—she wanted him to be friends! Why shouldn't he? He would certainly marry Betty Macdonald in time, whatever Mr. Hallin might say. Then why not put his pride away and be generous? Their future lives must of necessity touch each other, for they were bound to the same neighbourhood, the same spot of earth. She knew herself to be her father's heiress. Mellor must be hers some day; and before that day, whenever her father's illness, of which she now understood the incurable though probably tedious nature, should reach a certain stage, she must go home and take up her life there again. Why embitter such a situation?—make it more difficult for everybody concerned? Why not simply bury the past and begin again? In her restlessness she was inclined to think herself much wiser and more magnanimous than he.

Meanwhile in the Winterbourne household she was living among people to whom Aldous Raeburn was a dear and familiar companion, who admired him with all their hearts, and felt a sympathetic interest alike in his private life and his public career. Their circle, too, was his circle; and by means of it she now saw Aldous in his relations to his equals and colleagues, whether in the Ministry or the House. The result was a number of new impressions which she half resented, as we may resent the information that some stranger will give us upon a subject we imagined ourselves better acquainted with than anybody else. The promise of Raeburn's political position struck her quick mind with a curious surprise. She could not explain it as she had so often tacitly explained his place in Brookshire—by the mere accidents of birth. After all, aristocratic as we still are, no party can now afford to choose its men by any other criterion than personal profitableness. And a man nowadays is in the long run personally profitable, far more by what he is than by what he has—so far at least has "progress" brought us.

She saw then that this quiet, strong man, with his obvious defects of temperament and manner, had already gained a remarkable degree of "consideration," using the word in its French sense, among his political contemporaries. He was beginning to be reckoned upon as a man of the future by an inner circle of persons whose word counted and carried; while yet his name was comparatively little known to the public. Marcella, indeed, had gathered her impression from the most slight and various sources—mostly from the phrases, the hints, the manner of men already themselves charged with the most difficult and responsible work of England. Above all things did she love and admire power—the power of personal capacity. It had been the secret, it was still half the secret, of Wharton's influence with her. She saw it here under wholly different conditions and accessories. She gave it recognition with a kind of unwillingness. All the same, Raeburn took a new place in her imagination.

Then—apart from the political world and its judgments—the intimacy between him and the Winterbourne family showed her to him in many new aspects. To Lady Winterbourne, his mother's dear and close friend, he was almost a son; and nothing could be more charming than the affectionate and playful tolerance with which he treated her little oddities and weaknesses. And to all her children he was bound by the memories and kindnesses of many years. He was the godfather of Lady Ermyntrude's child; the hero and counsellor of the two sons, who were both in Parliament, and took his lead in many things; while there was no one with whom Lord Winterbourne could more comfortably discuss county or agricultural affairs. In the old days Marcella had somehow tended to regard him as a man of few friends. And in a sense it was so. He did not easily yield himself; and was often thought dull and apathetic by strangers. But here, amid these old companions, his delicacy and sweetness of disposition had full play; and although, now that Marcella was in their house, he came less often, and was less free with them than usual, she saw enough to make her wonder a little that they were all so kind and indulgent to her, seeing that they cared so much for him and all that affected him.

Well! she was often judged, humbled, reproached. Yet there was a certain irritation in it. Was it all her own fault that in her brief engagement she had realised him so little? Her heart was sometimes oddly sore; her conscience full of smart; but there were moments when she was as combative as ever.

Nor had certain other experiences of this past fortnight been any more soothing to this sore craving sense of hers. It appeared very soon that nothing would have been easier for her had she chosen than to become the lion of the later season. The story of the Batton Street tragedy had, of course, got into the papers, and had been treated there with the usual adornments of the "New Journalism."

The world which knew the Raeburns or knew of them—comparatively a large world—fell with avidity on the romantic juxtaposition of names. To lose your betrothed as Aldous Raeburn had lost his, and then to come across her again in this manner and in these circumstances—there was a dramatic neatness about it to which the careless Fate that governs us too seldom attains. London discussed the story a good deal; and would have liked dearly to see and to exhibit the heroine. Mrs. Lane in particular, the hostess of the House of Commons dinner, felt that she had claims, and was one of the first to call at Lady Winterbourne's and see her guest. She soon discovered that Marcella had no intention whatever of playing the lion; and must, in fact, avoid excitement and fatigue. But she had succeeded in getting the girl to come to her once or twice of an afternoon to meet two or three people. It was better for the wounded arm that its owner should walk than drive; and Mrs. Lane lived at a convenient distance, at a house in Piccadilly, just across the Green Park.

Here then, as in James Street, Marcella had met in discreet succession a few admiring and curious persons, and had tasted some of the smaller sweets of fame. But the magnet that drew her to the Lanes' house had been no craving for notoriety; at the present moment she was totally indifferent to what perhaps constitutionally she might have liked; the attraction had been simply the occasional presence there of Harry Wharton. He excited, puzzled, angered, and commanded her more than ever. She could not keep herself away from the chance of meeting him. And Lady Winterbourne neither knew him, nor apparently wished to know him—a fact which probably tended to make Marcella obstinate.

Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings! Again and again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women, with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent lived their life. The contradiction of the House of Commons evening returned upon her perpetually. She thought she saw in many of his new friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the young demagogue had yielded to their baits. No doubt they were at least as much duped as he. Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to his interest to break them. But, meanwhile, his bearing among these people—the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his mind—seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause. It was something she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.

Then as to herself. He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and Marcella sometimes resented. On the other hand, things jarred between them frequently. From day to day he varied. She had dreamt of a great friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust. On the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed him, as a lover. When they met again at Mrs. Lane's he would be sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes, she thought, even cool. Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great lady or other. On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself flushing from brow to chin at the thought—"He does not want any one to suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!"

It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects of that one moment's fancy. Till then it is the simple truth to say that she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him. When it did enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his—and that he was full of doubts! The perception had given to her manner an increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not refrain, if he was to preserve his power.