Marcella. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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with an old man's indulgence, as though provoking her to talk.
Her slim fingers were nervously crumbling some bread beside her; her head was drooped a little. At his challenge she looked up with a start. She was perfectly conscious of him, as both the great magnate on his native heath, and as the trained man of affairs condescending to a girl's fancies. But she had made up her mind not to be afraid.
"What tales have you heard?" she asked him.
"You alarm us, you know," he said gallantly, waiving her question. "We can't afford a prophetess to the other side, just now."
Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.
"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what we can get out of both."
"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"
Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at luncheon.
"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I ought to be—I am in my conscience."
"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition of most of us?"
"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries and precedences—the worst part of one—that makes me waver, makes me a traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor often, I know."
"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"
"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty—such mutilation of mind and body—were meant to go on for ever!"
Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous should find those eyes of hers superb?
"Can you really imagine, my dear young lady," he asked her mildly, "that if all property were divided to-morrow the force of natural inequality would not have undone all the work the day after, and given us back our poor?"
The "newspaper cant" of this remark, as the Cravens would have put it, brought a contemptuous look for an instant into the girl's face. She began to talk eagerly and cleverly, showing a very fair training in the catch words of the school, and a good memory—as one uncomfortable person at the table soon perceived—for some of the leading arguments and illustrations of a book of Venturist Essays which had lately been much read and talked of in London.
Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, and the interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged into history, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute of Labourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other great matters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, and all with the same utter oblivion—so it seemed to her stiff indignant hostess at the other end of the table—of the manners and modesty proper to a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce's daughter!
Aldous struck in now and then, trying to soothe her by supporting her to a certain extent, and so divert the conversation. But Marcella was soon too excited to be managed; and she had her say; a very strong say often as far as language went: there could be no doubt of that.
"Ah, well," said Lord Maxwell, wincing at last under some of her phrases, in spite of his courteous savoir-faire, "I see you are of the same opinion as a good man whose book I took up yesterday: 'The landlords of England have always shown a mean and malignant passion for profiting by the miseries of others?' Well, Aldous, my boy, we are judged, you and I—no help for it!"
The man whose temper and rule had made the prosperity of a whole country
side for nearly forty years, looked at his grandson with twinkling eyes.
Miss Raeburn was speechless. Lady Winterbourne was absently staring at
Marcella, a spot of red on each pale cheek.
Then Marcella suddenly wavered, looked across at Aldous, and broke down.
"Of course, you think me very ridiculous," she said, with a tremulous change of tone. "I suppose I am. And I am as inconsistent as anybody—I hate myself for it. Very often when anybody talks to me on the other side, I am almost as much persuaded as I am by the Socialists: they always told me in London I was the prey of the last speaker. But it can't make any difference to one's feeling: nothing touches that."
She turned to Lord Maxwell, half appealing—
"It is when I go down from our house to the village; when I see the places the people live in; when one is comfortable in the carriage, and one passes some woman in the rain, ragged and dirty and tired, trudging back from her work; when one realises that they have no rights when they come to be old, nothing to look to but charity, for which we, who have everything, expect them to be grateful; and when I know that every one of them has done more useful work in a year of their life than I shall ever do in the whole of mine, then I feel that the whole state of things is somehow wrong and topsy-turvy and wicked." Her voice rose a little, every emphasis grew more passionate. "And if I don't do something—the little such a person as I can—to alter it before I die, I might as well never have lived."
Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his mouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was a forcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?
Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:
"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with you. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."
The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.
"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally characteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once, before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it—not at all. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine. Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choose between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave nobody—not even the richest—more than four hundred a year."
"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road," said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have a maid."
"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. But I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your heart and conscience have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with your class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and then—the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"—and she laid her thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's arm—"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of right in our place and position—at least I find I have. In the old days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down with a strong hand."
"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will not be we—not