Marcella. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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the room at the words. "My dear!" she said to Miss Raeburn, "I am very late, but the roads are abominable, and those horses Edward has just given me have to be taken such tiresome care of. I told the coachman next time he might wrap them in shawls and put them to bed, and I should walk."
"You are quite capable of it, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, kissing her.
"We know you! Miss Boyce—Lady Winterbourne."
Lady Winterbourne shook hands with a shy awkwardness which belied her height and stateliness. As she sat down beside Miss Raeburn the contrast between her and Lord Maxwell's sister was sufficiently striking. Miss Raeburn was short, inclined to be stout, and to a certain gay profusion in her attire. Her cap was made of a bright silk handkerchief edged with lace; round her neck were hung a number of small trinkets on various gold chains; she abounded too in bracelets, most of which were clearly old-fashioned mementos of departed relatives or friends. Her dress was a cheerful red verging on crimson; and her general air suggested energy, bustle, and a good-humoured common sense.
Lady Winterbourne, on the other hand, was not only dressed from head to foot in severe black without an ornament; her head and face belonged also to the same impression, as of some strong and forcible study in black and white. The attitude was rigidly erect; the very dark eyes, under the snowy and abundant hair, had a trick of absent staring; in certain aspects the whole figure had a tragic, nay, formidable dignity, from which one expected, and sometimes got, the tone and gesture of tragic acting. Yet at the same time, mixed in therewith, a curious strain of womanish, nay childish, weakness, appealingness. Altogether, a great lady, and a personality—yet something else too—something ill-assured, timid, incongruous—hard to be defined.
"I believe you have not been at Mellor long?" the new-comer asked, in a deep contralto voice which she dragged a little.
"About seven weeks. My father and mother have been there since May."
"You must of course think it a very interesting old place?"
"Of course I do; I love it," said Marcella, disconcerted by the odd habit Lady Winterbourne had of fixing her eyes upon a person, and then, as it were, forgetting what she had done with them.
"Oh, I haven't been there, Agneta," said the new-comer, turning after a pause to Miss Raeburn, "since that summer—you remember that party when the Palmerstons came over—so long ago—twenty years!"
Marcella sat stiffly upright. Lady Winterbourne grew a little nervous and flurried.
"I don't think I ever saw your mother, Miss Boyce—I was much away from home about then. Oh, yes, I did once—"
The speaker stopped, a sudden red suffusing her pale cheeks. She had felt certain somehow, at sight of Marcella, that she should say or do something untoward, and she had promptly justified her own prevision. The only time she had ever seen Mrs. Boyce had been in court, on the last day of the famous trial in which Richard Boyce was concerned, when she had made out the wife sitting closely veiled as near to her husband as possible, waiting for the verdict. As she had already confided this reminiscence to Miss Raeburn, and had forgotten she had done so, both ladies had a moment of embarrassment.
"Mrs. Boyce, I am sorry to say, does not seem to be strong," said Miss Raeburn, bending over the heel of her stocking. "I wish we could have had the pleasure of seeing her to-day."
There was a pause. Lady Winterbourne's tragic eyes were once more considering Marcella.
"I hope you will come and see me," she said at last abruptly—"and Mrs.
Boyce too."
The voice was very soft and refined though so deep, and Marcella looking up was suddenly magnetised.
"Yes, I will," she said, all her face melting into sensitive life.
"Mamma won't go anywhere, but I will come, if you will ask me."
"Will you come next Tuesday?" said Lady Winterbourne quickly—"come to tea, and I will drive you back. Mr. Raeburn told me about you. He says—you read a great deal."
The solemnity of the last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, were not to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneously thought her extraordinarily radiant and handsome.
"How can he know? Why, I have hardly talked about books to him at all."
"Well! here he comes," said Lady Winterbourne, smiling suddenly; "so I can ask him. But I am sure he did say so."
It was now Marcella's turn to colour. Aldous Raeburn crossed the room, greeted Lady Winterbourne, and next moment she felt her hand in his.
"You did tell me, Aldous, didn't you," said Lady Winterbourne, "that
Miss Boyce was a great reader?"
The speaker had known Aldous Raeburn as a boy, and was, moreover, a sort of cousin, which explained the Christian name.
Aldous smiled.
"I said I thought Miss Boyce was like you and me, and had a weakness that way, Lady Winterbourne. But I won't be cross-examined!"
"I don't think I am a great reader," said Marcella, bluntly—"at least I read a great deal, but I hardly ever read a book through. I haven't patience."
"You want to get at everything so quickly?" said Miss Raeburn, looking up sharply.
"I suppose so!" said Marcella. "There seems to be always a hundred things tearing one different ways, and no time for any of them."
"Yes, when one is young one feels like that," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "When one is old one accepts one's limitations. When I was twenty I never thought that I should still be an ignorant and discontented woman at nearly seventy."
"It is because you are so young still, Lady Winterbourne, that you feel so," said Aldous, laughing at her, as one does at an old friend. "Why, you are younger than any of us! I feel all brushed and stirred up—a boy at school again—after I have been to see you!"
"Well, I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing again. Then she looked at the pair beside her—at the alert brightness in the man's strong and quiet face as he sat stooping forward, with his hands upon his knees, hardly able to keep his eyes for an instant from the dark apparition beside him—at the girl's evident shyness and pride.
"My dear!" she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heard what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a baby? It was born with four teeth!"
Miss Raeburn's astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two old friends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne's numerous family, which was clearly meant for a tête-à-tête.
"Will you come and look at our tapestry?" said Aldous to his neighbour, after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her walk from Mellor. "I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my grandfather will be a few minutes yet. He hoped to get home earlier than this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept him an unconscionable time."
Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the wall from side to side.
"How beautiful!" cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight. "What a delicious thing to live with."
And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints, suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses. Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It was Italy at the great moment—subtle, rich, exuberant.
Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.
"I thought you would like it; I hoped you would. It has been my special delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a garret. I am not sure