Marcella. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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"The flowers!" said Marcella, absorbed in it—"look at them—the irises, the cyclamens, the lilies! It reminds one of the dreams one used to have when one was small of what it would be like to have flowers enough. I was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always cheated out of them! We walked two and two along the straight roads, and I found one here and one there—but such a beggarly, wretched few, for all one's trouble. I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this—yes, just like this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one's hands in and gather and gather till one was really satisfied! That is the worst of being at school when you are poor! You never get enough of anything. One day it's flowers—but the next day it is pudding—and the next frocks."
Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened. Not only was it pleasant to feel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admiration and deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck, and vibrated happily.
"Well, only wait till May, and the cowslips in your own fields will make up to you!" he said, smiling at her. "But now, I have been wondering to myself in my room upstairs what you would like to see. There are a good many treasures in this house, and you will care for them, because you are an artist. But you shall not be bored with them! You shall see what and as much as you like. You had about a quarter of an hour's talk with my aunt, did you not?" he asked, in a quite different tone.
So all the time while she and Miss Raeburn had been making acquaintance, he had known that she was in the house, and he had kept away for his own purposes! Marcella felt a colour she could not restrain leap into her cheek.
"Miss Raeburn was very kind," she said, with a return of shyness, which passed however the next moment by reaction, into her usual daring. "Yes, she was very kind!—but all the same she doesn't like me—I don't think she is going to like me—I am not her sort."
"Have you been talking Socialism to her?" he asked her, smiling.
"No, not yet—not yet," she said emphatically. "But I am dreadfully uncertain—I can't always hold my tongue—I am afraid you will be sorry you took me up."
"Are you so aggressive? But Aunt Neta is so mild!—she wouldn't hurt a fly. She mothers every one in the house and out of it. The only people she is hard upon are the little servant girls, who will wear feathers in their hats!"
"There!" cried Marcella, indignantly. "Why shouldn't they wear feathers in their hats? It is their form of beauty—their tapestry!"
"But if one can't have both feathers and boots?" he asked her humbly, a twinkle in his grey eye. "If one hasn't boots, one may catch a cold and die of it—which is, after all, worse than going featherless."
"But why can't they have feathers and boots? It is because you—we—have got too much. You have the tapestry—and—and the pictures"—she turned and looked round the room—"and this wonderful house—and the park. Oh, no—I think it is Miss Raeburn has too many feathers!"
"Perhaps it is," he admitted, in a different tone, his look changing and saddening as though some habitual struggle of thought were recalled to him. "You see I am in a difficulty. I want to show you our feathers. I think they would please you—and you make me ashamed of them."
"How absurd!" cried Marcella, "when I told you how I liked the school children bobbing to me!"
They laughed, and then Aldous looked round with a start—"Ah, here is my grandfather!"
Then he stood back, watching the look with which Lord Maxwell, after greeting Lady Winterbourne, approached Miss Boyce. He saw the old man's somewhat formal approach, the sudden kindle in the blue eyes which marked the first effect of Marcella's form and presence, the bow, the stately shake of the hand. The lover hearing his own heart beat, realised that his beautiful lady had so far done well.
"You must let me say that I see a decided likeness in you to your grandfather," said Lord Maxwell, when they were all seated at lunch, Marcella on his left hand, opposite to Lady Winterbourne. "He was one of my dearest friends."
"I'm afraid I don't know much about him," said Marcella, rather bluntly, "except what I have got out of old letters. I never saw him that I remember."
Lord Maxwell left the subject, of course, at once, but showed a great wish to talk to her, and make her talk. He had pleasant things to say about Mellor and its past, which could be said without offence; and some conversation about the Boyce monuments in Mellor church led to a discussion of the part played by the different local families in the Civil Wars, in which it seemed to Aldous that his grandfather tried in various shrewd and courteous ways to make Marcella feel at ease with herself and her race, accepted, as it were, of right into the local brotherhood, and so to soothe and heal those bruised feelings he could not but divine.
The girl carried herself a little loftily, answering with an independence and freedom beyond her age and born of her London life. She was not in the least abashed or shy. Yet it was clear that Lord Maxwell's first impressions were favourable. Aldous caught every now and then his quick, judging look sweeping over her and instantly withdrawn—comparing, as the grandson very well knew, every point, and tone, and gesture with some inner ideal of what a Raeburn's wife should be. How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely real! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive, extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterly unlike any other woman he had ever seen—every detail of it was charged to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.
For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is, almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole nature, into the second stage—the stage of anxiety, incredulity. Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning, seemed to him not nearer, but further from him. She was terribly on her dignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown him on that walk, beside the gate? There had been a touch of it, a divine touch, before luncheon. How could he get her to himself again?
Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic—the badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.
"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said Lord Maxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean. To give money is easy enough. Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and thought no more of it. We don't get through so easily."
"No," said Lady Winterbourne, sighing. "It weighs one down. Last winter was a nightmare. The tales one heard, and the faces one saw!—though we seemed to be always giving. And in the middle of it Edward would buy me a new set of sables. I begged him not, but he laughed at me."
"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, cheerfully, "if nobody bought sables, there'd be other poor people up in Russia, isn't it?—or Hudson's Bay?—badly off. One has, to think of that. Oh, you needn't talk, Aldous! I know you say it's a fallacy. I call it common sense."
She got, however, only a slight smile from Aldous, who had long ago left his great-aunt to work out her own economics. And, anyway, she saw that he was wholly absorbed from his seat beside Lady Winterbourne in watching Miss Boyce.
"It's precisely as Lord Maxwell says," replied Lady Winterbourne; "that kind of thing used to satisfy everybody. And our grandmothers were very good women. I don't know why we, who give ourselves so much more trouble than they did, should carry these thorns about with us, while they went free."
She drew herself up, a cloud over her fine eyes. Miss Raeburn, looking round, was glad to see the servants had left the room.
"Miss Boyce thinks we are all in a very bad way, I'm sure. I have heard tales of Miss Boyce's