"Because a man is harsh and masterful, and uses stinging language, is he
to be shot down like a dog?"

There was a silence. Marcella was lashing herself up by thoughts of the
deformed man in his cell, looking forward after the wretched,
unsatisfied life, which was all society had allowed him, to the violent
death by which society would get rid of him--of the wife yearning her
heart away--of the boy, whom other human beings, under the name of law,
were about to separate from his father for ever. At last she broke out
thickly and indistinctly:

"The terrible thing is that I cannot count upon you--that now I cannot
make you feel as I do--feel with me. And by-and-by, when I shall want
your help desperately, when your help might be everything--I suppose it
will be no good to ask it."

He started, and bending forward he possessed himself of both her
hands--her hot trembling hands--and kissed them with a passionate
tenderness.

"What help will you ask of me that I cannot give? That would be hard to
bear!"

Still held by him, she answered his question by another:

"Give me your idea of what will happen. Tell me how you think it will
end."

"I shall only distress you, dear," he said sadly.

"No; tell me. You think him guilty. You believe he will be convicted."

"Unless some wholly fresh evidence is forthcoming," he said reluctantly,
"I can see no other issue."

"Very well; then he will be sentenced to death. But, after sentence--I
know--that man from Widrington, that solicitor told me--if--if strong
influence is brought to bear--if anybody whose word counts--if Lord
Maxwell and you, were to join the movement to save him--There is sure to
be a movement--the Radicals will take it up. Will you do it--will you
promise me now--for my sake?"

He was silent.

She looked at him, all her heart burning in her eyes, conscious of her
woman's power too, and pressing it.

"If that man is hung," she said pleadingly, "it will leave a mark on my
life nothing will ever smooth out. I shall feel myself somehow
responsible. I shall say to myself, if I had not been thinking about my
own selfish affairs--about getting married--about the straw-plaiting--I
might have seen what was going on. I might have saved these people, who
have been my friends--my _real_ friends--from this horror."

She drew her hands away and fell back on the sofa, pressing her
handkerchief to her eyes. "If you had seen her this morning!" she said
in a strangled voice. "She was saying, 'Oh, miss, if they do find him
guilty, they can't hang him--not my poor deformed Jim, that never had a
chance of being like the others. Oh, we'll beg so hard. I know there's
many people will speak for him. He was mad, miss, when he did it. He'd
never been himself, not since last winter, when we all sat and starved,
and he was driven out of his senses by thinking of me and the children.
You'll get Mr. Raeburn to speak--won't you, miss?--and Lord Maxwell? It
was their game. I know it was their game. But they'll forgive him.
They're such great people, and so rich--and we--we've always had such a
struggle. Oh, the bad times we've had, and no one know! They'll try and
get him off, miss? Oh, I'll go and _beg_ of them.'"

She stopped, unable to trust her voice any further. He stooped over her
and kissed her brow. There was a certain solemnity in the moment for
both of them. The pity of human fate overshadowed them. At last he said
firmly, yet with great feeling:

"I will not prejudge anything, that I promise you. I will keep my mind
open to the last. But--I should like to say--it would not be any easier
to me to throw myself into an agitation for reprieve because this man
was tempted to crime by _my_ property--on _my_ land. I should think it
right to look at it altogether from the public point of view. The
satisfaction of my own private compunctions--of my own private
feelings--is not what I ought to regard. My own share in the
circumstances, in the conditions which made such an act possible does
indeed concern me deeply. You cannot imagine but that the moral problem
of it has possessed me ever since this dreadful thing happened. It
troubled me much before. Now, it has become an oppression--a torture. I
have never seen my grandfather so moved, so distressed, in all my
remembrance of him. Yet he is a man of the old school, with the old
standards. As for me, if ever I come to the estate I will change the
whole system, I will run no risks of such human wreck and ruin as
this--"

His voice faltered.

"But," he resumed, speaking steadily again, "I ought to warn you that
such considerations as these will not affect my judgment of this
particular case. In the first place, I have no quarrel with capital
punishment as such. I do not believe we could rightly give it up. Your
attitude properly means that wherever we can legitimately feel pity for
a murderer, we should let him escape his penalty. I, on the other hand,
believe that if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would
himself _claim_ his own death, as his best chance, his only chance--in
this mysterious universe!--of self-recovery. Then it comes to this--was
the act murder? The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears
to me to be substantially just, and guided by it--"

"You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the
world," she interrupted wildly; "as if law were not made and
administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the
lawbreaker!"

He looked troubled.

"Ah, but _law_ is something beyond laws or those who administer them,"
he said in a lower tone; "and the law--the _obligation-sense_--of our
own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because
it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to
what it is, out of our own best life--ours, yet not ours--the best proof
we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in
ourselves of some diviner power than our own will--our best clue to what
that power may be!"

He spoke at first, looking away--wrestling out his thought, as it were,
by himself--then turning back to her, his eyes emphasised the appeal
implied, though not expressed, in what he said--intense appeal to her
for sympathy, forbearance, mutual respect, through all acuteness of
difference. His look both promised and implored.

He bad spoken to her but very rarely or indirectly as yet of his own
religious or philosophical beliefs. She was in a stage when such things
interested her but little, and reticence in personal matters was so much
the law of his life that even to her expansion was difficult. So
that--inevitably--she was arrested, for the moment, as any quick
perception must be, by the things that unveil character.

Then an upheaval of indignant feeling swept the impression away. All
that he said might be ideally, profoundly true--_but_--the red blood of
the common life was lacking in every word of it! He ought to be
incapable of saying it _now_. Her passionate question was, how could he
_argue_--how could he hold and mark the ethical balance--when a _woman_
was suffering, when _children_ were to be left fatherless? Besides--the
ethical balance itself--does it not alter according to the hands that
hold it--poacher or landlord, rich or poor?

But she was too exhausted to carry on the contest in words. Both felt it
would have to be renewed. But she said to herself secretly that Mr.
Wharton, when he got to work, would alter the whole aspect of affairs.
And she knew well that her vantage-ground as towards Aldous was strong.

Then at last he was free to turn his whole attention for a little to her
and her physical state, which made him miserable. He had never imagined
that any one, vigorous and healthy as she was, could look so worn out in
so short a time. She let him talk to her--lament, entreat, advise--and
at last she took advantage of his anxiety and her admissions to come to
the point, to plead that the marriage should be put off.

She used the same arguments that she had done to her mother.

"How can I bear to be thinking of these things?"--she pointed a shaking
finger at the dress patterns lying scattered on the table--"with this
agony, this death, under my eyes?"

It was a great blow to him, and the practical inconveniences involved
were great. But the fibre of him--of which she had just felt the
toughness--was delicate and sensitive as her own, and after a very short
recoil he met her with great chivalry and sweetness, agreeing that
everything should be put off for six weeks, till Easter in fact. She
would have been very grateful to him but that something--some secret
thought--checked the words she tried to say.

"I must go home then," he said, rising and trying to smile. "I shall
have to make things straight with Aunt Neta, and set a great many
arrangements in train. Now, you will _try_ to think of something else?
Let me leave you with a book that I can imagine you will read."

She let herself be tended and thought for. At the last, just as he was
going, he said:

"Have you seen Mr. Wharton at all since this happened?"

His manner was just as usual. She felt that her eye was guilty, but the
darkness of the firelit room shielded her.

"I have not seen him since we met him in the drive. I saw the solicitor
who is working up the case for him yesterday. He came over to see Mrs.
Hurd and me. I had not thought of asking him, but we agreed that, if he
would undertake it, it would be the best chance."

"It _is_ probably the best chance," said Aldous, thoughtfully. "I
believe Wharton has not done much at the Bar since he was called, but
that, no doubt, is because he has had so much on his hands in the way of
journalism and politics. His ability is enough for anything, and he will
throw himself into this. I do not think Hurd could do better."

She did not answer. She felt that he was magnanimous, but felt it
coldly, without emotion.

He came and stooped over her.

"Good-night--good-night--tired child--dear heart! When I saw you in that
cottage this morning I thought of the words, 'Give, and it shall be
given unto you.' All that my life can do to pour good measure, pressed
down, running over, into yours, I vowed you then!"

When the door closed upon him, Marcella, stretched in the darkness, shed
the bitterest tears that had ever yet been hers--tears which transformed
her youth--which baptised her, as it were, into the fulness of our
tragic life.

She was still weeping when she heard the door softly opened. She sprang
up and dried her eyes, but the little figure that glided in was not one
to shrink from. Mary Harden came and sat down beside her.

"I knew you would be miserable. Let me come and cry too. I have been my
round--have seen them all--and I came to bring you news."

"How has she taken--the verdict?" asked Marcella, struggling with her
sobs, and succeeding at last in composing herself.

"She was prepared for it. Charlie told her when he saw her after you
left this afternoon that she must expect it."

There was a pause.

"I shall soon hear, I suppose," said Marcella, in a hardening voice, her
hands round her knees, "what Mr. Wharton is doing for the defence. He
will appear before the magistrates, I suppose."

"Yes; but Charlie thinks the defence will be mainly reserved. Only a
little more than a fortnight to the assizes! The time is so short. But
now this man has turned informer, they say the case is quite
straightforward. With all the other evidence the police have there will
be no difficulty in trying them all. Marcella!"

"Yes."

Had there been light enough to show it, Mary's face would have revealed
her timidity.

"Marcella, Charlie asked me to give you a message. He begs you not
to--not to make Mrs. Hurd hope too much. He himself believes there is no
hope, and it is not kind."

"Are you and he like all the rest," cried Marcella, her passion breaking
out again, "only eager to have blood for blood?"

Mary waited an instant.

"It has almost broken Charlie's heart," she said at last; "but he thinks
it was murder, and that Hurd will pay the penalty; nay, more "--she
spoke with a kind of religious awe in her gentle voice--"that he ought
to be glad to pay it. He believes it to be God's will, and I have heard
him say that he would even have executions in public again--under
stricter regulations of course--that we may not escape, as we always do
if we can--from all sight and thought of God's justice and God's
punishments."

Marcella shuddered and rose. She almost threw Mary's hand away from her.

"Tell your brother from me, Mary," she said, "that his God is to _me_
just a constable in the service of the English game-laws! If He _is_
such a one, I at least will fling my Everlasting No at him while I
live."

And she swept from the room, leaving Mary aghast.

Meanwhile there was consternation and wrath at Maxwell Court, where
Aldous, on his return from Mellor, had first of all given his great-aunt
the news of the coroner's verdict, and had then gone on to break to her
the putting-off of the marriage. His championship of Marcella in the
matter, and his disavowal of all grievance were so quiet and decided,
that Miss Raeburn had been only able to allow herself a very modified
strain of comment and remonstrance, so long as he was still there to
listen. But she was all the more outspoken when he was gone, and Lady
Winterbourne was sitting with her. Lady Winterbourne, who was at home
alone, while her husband was with a married daughter on the Riviera, had
come over to dine _tête-à-tête_ with her friend, finding it impossible
to remain solitary while so much was happening.

"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, shortly, as her guest entered the
room, "I may as well tell you at once that Aldous's marriage is put
off."

"Put off!" exclaimed Lady Winterbourne, bewildered. "Why it was only
Thursday that I was discussing it all with Marcella, and she told me
everything was settled."

"Thursday!--I dare say!" said Miss Raeburn, stitching away with fiery
energy, "but since then a poacher has murdered one of our gamekeepers,
which makes all the difference."

"What _do_ you mean, Agneta?"

"What I say, my dear. The poacher was Marcella's friend, and she cannot
now distract her mind from him sufficiently to marry Aldous, though
every plan he has in the world will be upset by her proceedings. And as
for his election, you may depend upon it she will never ask or know
whether he gets in next Monday or no. That goes without saying. She is
meanwhile absorbed with the poacher's defence, _Mr. Wharton_, of course,
conducting it. This is your modern young woman, my dear--typical, I
should think."

Miss Raeburn turned her buttonhole in fine style, and at lightning
speed, to show the coolness of her mind, then with a rattling of all her
lockets, looked up and waited for Lady Winterbourne's reflections.

"She has often talked to me of these people--the Hurds," said Lady
Winterbourne, slowly. "She has always made special friends with them.
Don't you remember she told us about them that day she first came back
to lunch?"

"Of course I remember! That day she lectured Maxwell, at first sight,
on his duties. She began well. As for these people," said Miss Raeburn,
more slowly, "one is, of course, sorry for the wife and children, though
I am a good deal sorrier for Mrs. Westall, and poor, poor Mrs. Dynes.
The whole affair has so upset Maxwell and me, we have hardly been able
to eat or sleep since. I thought it made Maxwell look dreadfully old
this morning, and with all that he has got before him too! I shall
insist on sending for Clarke to-morrow morning if he does not have a
better night. And now this postponement will be one more trouble--all
the engagements to alter, and the invitations. _Really_! that girl."

And Miss Raeburn broke off short, feeling simply that the words which
were allowed to a well-bred person were wholly inadequate to her state
of mind.

"But if she feels it--as you or I might feel such a thing about some one
we knew or cared for, Agneta?"

"How can she feel it like that?" cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated. "How
can she know any one of--of that class well enough? It is not seemly, I
tell you, Adelaide, and I don't believe it is sincere. It's just done to
make herself conspicuous, and show her power over Aldous. For other
reasons too, if the truth were known!"

Miss Raeburn turned over the shirt she was making for some charitable
society and drew out some tacking threads with a loud noise which
relieved her. Lady Winterbourne's old and delicate cheek had flushed.

"I'm sure it's sincere," she said with emphasis. "Do you mean to say,
Agneta, that one can't sympathise, in such an awful thing, with people
of another class, as one would with one's own flesh and blood?"

Miss Raeburn winced. She felt for a moment the pressure of a democratic
world--a hated, formidable world--through her friend's question. Then
she stood to her guns.

"I dare say you'll think it sounds bad," she said stoutly; "but in my
young days it would have been thought a piece of posing--of
sentimentalism--something indecorous and unfitting--if a girl had put
herself in such a position. Marcella _ought_ to be absorbed in her
marriage; that is the natural thing. How Mrs. Boyce can allow her to mix
herself with such things as this murder--to _live_ in that cottage, as I
hear she has been doing, passes my comprehension."

"You mean," said Lady Winterbourne, dreamily, "that if one had been very
fond of one's maid, and she died, one wouldn't put on mourning for her.
Marcella would."

"I dare say," said Miss Raeburn, snappishly. "She is capable of anything
far-fetched and theatrical."

The door opened and Hallin came in. He had been suffering of late, and
much confined to the house. But the news of the murder had made a deep
and painful impression upon him, and he had been eagerly acquainting
himself with the facts. Miss Raeburn, whose kindness ran with unceasing
flow along the channels she allowed it, was greatly attached to him in
spite of his views, and she now threw herself upon him for sympathy in
the matter of the wedding. In any grievance that concerned Aldous she
counted upon him, and her shrewd eyes had plainly perceived that he had
made no great friendship with Marcella.

"I am very sorry for Aldous," he said at once; "but I understand _her_
perfectly. So does Aldous."

Miss Raeburn was angrily silent. But when Lord Maxwell, who had been
talking with Aldous, came in, he proved, to her final discomfiture, to
be very much of the same opinion.

"My dear," he said wearily as he dropped into his chair, his old face
grey and pinched, "this thing is too terrible--the number of widows and
orphans that night's work will make before the end breaks my heart to
think of. It will be a relief not to have to consider festivities while
these men are actually before the courts. What I am anxious about is
that Marcella should not make herself ill with excitement. The man she
is interested in will be hung, must be hung; and with her somewhat
volatile, impulsive nature--"

He spoke with old-fashioned discretion and measure. Then quickly he
pulled himself up, and, with some trivial question or other, offered his
arm to Lady Winterbourne, for Aldous had just come in, and dinner was
ready.

CHAPTER XII.

Nearly three weeks passed--short flashing weeks, crowded with
agitations, inward or outward, for all the persons of this story.

After the inquiry before the magistrates--conducted, as she passionately
thought, with the most marked animus on the part of the bench and police
towards the prisoners--had resulted in the committal for trial of Hurd
and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Raeburn a letter which
hurt him sorely.

"Don't come over to see me for a little while," it ran. "My mind is all
given over to feelings which must seem to you--which, I know, do seem to
you--unreasonable and unjust. But they are my life, and when they are
criticised, or even treated coldly, I cannot bear it. When you are not
there to argue with, I can believe, most sincerely, that you have a
right to see this matter as you do, and that it is monstrous of me to
expect you to yield to me entirely in a thing that concerns your sense
of public duty. But don't come now--not before the trial. I will appeal
to you if I think you can help me. I _know_ you will if you can. Mr.
Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters,
which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of
the evidence."

Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and difficulty.

"I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a burden to
you. You can hardly imagine that it is not grievous to me to think of
any trouble of yours as being made worse by my being with you. But still
I understand. One thing only I ask--that you should not imagine the
difference between us greater than it is. The two letters you enclose
have given me much to ponder. If only the course of the trial enables me
with an honest heart to throw myself into your crusade of mercy, with
what joy shall I come and ask you to lead me, and to forgive my own
slower sense and pity!

"I should like you to know that Hallin is very much inclined to agree
with you, to think that the whole affair was a 'scrimmage,' and that
Hurd at least ought to be reprieved. He would have come to talk it over
with you himself, but that Clarke forbids him anything that interests or
excites him for the present. He has been very ill and suffering for the
last fortnight, and, as you know, when these attacks come on we try to
keep everything from him that could pain or agitate him. But I see that
this whole affair is very much on his mind, in spite of my efforts.

"... Oh, my darling! I am writing late at night, with your letter open
before me and your picture close to my hand. So many things rise in my
mind to say to you. There will come a time--there _must!_--when I may
pour them all out. Meanwhile, amid all jars and frets, remember this,
that I have loved you better each day since first we met.

"I will not come to Mellor then for a little while. My election, little
heart as I have for it, will fill up the week. The nomination-day is
fixed for Thursday and the polling for Monday."

Marcella read the letter with a confusion of feeling so great as to be
in itself monstrous and demoralising. Was she never to be simple, to see
her way clearly again?

As for him, as he rode about the lanes and beechwoods in the days that
followed, alone often with that nature for which all such temperaments
as Aldous Raeburn's have so secret and so observant an affection, he was
perpetually occupied with this difficulty which had arisen between
Marcella and himself, turning it over and over in the quiet of the
morning, before the turmoil of the day began.

He had followed the whole case before the magistrates with the most
scrupulous care. And since then, he had twice run across the Widrington
solicitor for the defence, who was now instructing Wharton. This man,
although a strong Radical, and employed generally by his own side, saw
no objection at all to letting Lord Maxwell's heir and representative
understand how in his opinion the case was going. Aldous Raeburn was a
person whom everybody respected; confidences were safe with him; and he
was himself deeply interested in the affair. The Raeburns being the
Raeburns, with all that that implied for smaller people in Brookshire,
little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall's
employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the
defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was
still his, Burridge's opinion, that everything that could be advanced
would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came
into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the
only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can
always be got up in a game-preserving case.

"And is as a rule political and anti-landlord," thought Aldous, on one
of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down. He foresaw
exactly what would happen. As he envisaged the immediate future, he saw
one figure as the centre of it--not Marcella, but Wharton! Wharton was
defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for
his own support and his grandfather's, through Marcella. To Wharton
would belong not only the popular _kudos_ of the matter, but much more,
and above all, Marcella's gratitude.

Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the
road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had
asked Marcella to be his wife. The pale February sunlight was spreading
from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant
shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk
plain. Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter
birds from the branches round him. The place, the time, raised in him
all the intensest powers of consciousness. He saw himself as the man
_standing midway_ in everything--speculation, politics, sympathies--as
the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the
perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world. Wharton!
He knew him--had read him long ago--read him afresh of late. Raeburn's
lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not
repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover. Here was he, banished
from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and
sympathies, busily forging a link--

"It shall be _broken!_" said Raeburn to himself with a sudden fierce
concentration of will. "So much I will claim--and enforce."

But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence. He gathered
himself together with a long breath, and went his way.

For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in
this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The
moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane
and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that
they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like
avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates crime"
left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole
rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had suffered
all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he,
more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was
natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on
Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and
limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and
responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.

But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line
between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life
and action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers
destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no
difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the
circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to
be a murderer, no employer's interest, no landlord's desire for
vengeance, would have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as
he emphatically did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind
more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would
have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and
compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere
with a duty to justice and society.

Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and
compunctions.

Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was
conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of
trouble of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment.
Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal
humility, and interfused with all--determining all--elements of
judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which
he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance
and custom. More than this: did not the ultimate explanation of the
whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a
strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed
it? The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and
distorted; none the less, _reality_ wins the day. So Hallin read it.

Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a
bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with,
and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings,
committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either
man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything
outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of
intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a
tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of
anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.

The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and
jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks--till after
Easter--without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in
village and county. And when the reason was known--that it was because
Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that
until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or
reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates--there
was curiously little sympathy with Marcella. Most of her own class
thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss
Raeburn--something done for self-advertisement and to advance
anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive
English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the
bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.

"She can't be very fond o' 'im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can't," said
old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his
open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside.
"_Not_ what I'd call lover-y. She don't want to run in harness, she
don't, no sooner than, she need. She's a peert filly is Miss Boyce."

"I've been a-waitin', an' a-waitin'," said his wife, with her gentle
sigh, "to hear summat o' that new straw-plaitin' she talk about. But
nary a word. They do say as it's give up althegither."

"No, she's took up wi' nursin' Minta Hurd--wonderful took up," said
another woman. "They do say as Ann Mullins can't abear her. When she's
there nobody can open their mouth. When that kind o' thing happens in
the fambly it's bad enoof without havin' a lady trailin' about you all
day long, so that you have to be mindin' yersel', an' thinkin' about
givin' her a cheer, an' the like."

One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella,
coming from the Hurds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going
home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.

Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her
relations, mainly, to do her justice, from fear lest she might somehow
hurt or offend them. She had been to see Charlie Dynes's mother, but she
had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary
Harden to the keeper's widow.

Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella
came up with her.

"Oh, she's _puddlin'_ along," she said in answer to Marcella's inquiry,
using a word very familiar in the village. "She'll not do herself a
mischief while there's Nurse Ellen an' me to watch her like a pair o'
cats. She's dreadful upset, is Isabella--shouldn't ha' thought it of
her. That fust day"--a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face--"no, I'm
not a-goin' to think about that fust day, I'm not, 'tain't a ha'porth o'
good," she added resolutely; "but she was all right when they'd let her
get 'im 'ome, and wash an' settle 'im, an' put 'im comfortable like in
his coffin. He wor a big man, miss, when he wor laid out! Searle, as
made the coffin, told her as ee 'adn't made one such an extry size since
old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen year ago. Ee'd soon a done for
Jim Hurd if it 'ad been fists o' both sides. But guns is things as yer
can't reckon on.".

"Why didn't he let Hurd alone," said Marcella, sadly, "and prosecute him
next day? It's attacking men when their blood is up that brings these
awful hings about."

"Wal, I don't see that," said Mrs. Jellison, pugnaciously; "he wor paid
to do 't--an' he had the law on his side. 'Ow 's she?" she said,
lowering her voice and jerking her thumb in the direction of the Hurds'
cottage.

"She's very ill," replied Marcella, with a contraction of the brow.
"Dr. Clarke says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't."

"They're a-goin' to try 'im Thursday?" said Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly.

"Yes."

"An' Muster Wharton be a-goin' to defend 'im. Muster Wharton may be
cliver, ee may--they do say as ee can see the grass growin', ee's that
knowin'--but ee'll not get Jim Hurd off; there's nobody in the village
as b'lieves for a moment as 'ow he will. They'll best 'im. Lor' bless
yer, they'll best 'im. I was a-sayin' it to Isabella this
afternoon--ee'll not save 'is neck, don't you be afeared."

Marcella drew herself up with a shiver of repulsion.

"Will it mend your daughter's grief to see another woman's heart broken?
Don't you suppose it might bring her some comfort, Mrs. Jellison, if she
were to try and forgive that poor wretch? She might remember that her
husband gave him provocation, and that anyway, if his life is spared,
his punishment and their misery will be heavy enough!"

"Oh, lor' no!" said Mrs. Jellison, composedly. "She don't want to be
forgivin' of 'im. Mr. Harden ee come talkin' to 'er, but she isn't one
o' that sort, isn't Isabella. I'm sartin sure she'll be better in
'erself when they've put 'im out o' the way. It makes her all ov a fever
to think of Muster Wharton gettin' 'im off. _I_ don't bear Jim Hurd no
pertickler malice. Isabella may talk herself black i' the face, but she
and Johnnie'll have to come 'ome and live along o' me, whatever she may
say. She can't stay in that cottage, cos they'll be wantin' it for
another keeper. Lord Maxwell ee's givin' her a fine pension, my word ee
is! an' says ee'll look after Johnnie. And what with my bit
airnins--we'll do, yer know, miss--we'll do!"

The old woman looked up with a nod, her green eyes sparkling with the
queer inhuman light that belonged to them.

Marcella could not bring herself to say good-night to her, and was
hurrying on without a word, when Mrs. Jellison stopped her.

"An' 'ow about that straw-plaitin', miss?" she said slyly.

"I have had to put it on one side for a bit," said Marcella, coldly,
hating the woman's society. "I have had my hands full and Lady
Winterbourne has been away, but we shall, of course, take it up again
later."

She walked away quickly, and Mrs. Jellison hobbled after her, grinning
to herself every now and then as she caught the straight, tall figure
against the red evening sky.

"I'll go in ter town termorrer," she thought, "an' have a crack wi'
Jimmy Gedge; _ee_ needn't be afeard for 'is livin'. An' them great fules
as ha' bin runnin' in a string arter 'er, an' cacklin' about their
eighteen-pence a score, as I've told 'em times, I'll eat my apron the
fust week as iver they get it. I don't hold wi' ladies--no, nor passons
neither--not when it comes to meddlin' wi' your wittles, an' dictatin'
to yer about forgivin' them as ha' got the better ov yer. That young
lady there, what do she matter? That sort's allus gaddin' about? What'll
she keer about us when she's got 'er fine husband? Here o' Saturday,
gone o' Monday--that's what she is. Now Jimmy Gedge, yer kin allus count
on '_im._ Thirty-six year ee ha' set there in that 'ere shop, and I
guess ee'll set there till they call 'im ter kingdom come. Be's a
cheatin', sweatin', greedy old skinflint is Jimmy Gedge; but when yer
wants 'im yer _kin_ find 'im."

Marcella hurried home, she was expecting a letter from Wharton, the
third within a week. She had not set eyes on him since they had met that
first morning in the drive, and it was plain to her that he was as
unwilling as she was that there should be any meeting between them.
Since the moment of his taking up the case, in spite of the pressure of
innumerable engagements, he had found time to send her, almost daily,
sheets covered with his small even writing, in which every detail and
prospect of the legal situation, so far as it concerned James Hurd, were
noted and criticised with a shrewdness and fulness which never wavered,
and never lost for a moment the professional note.

"Dear Miss Boyce"--the letters began--leading up to a "Yours
faithfully," which Marcella read as carefully as the rest. Often, as she
turned them over, she asked herself whether that scene in the library
had not been a mere delusion of the brain, whether the man whose wild
words and act had burnt themselves into her life could possibly be
writing her these letters, in this key, without a reference, without an
allusion. Every day, as she opened them, she looked them through quietly
with a shaking pulse; every day she found herself proudly able to hand
them on to her mother, with the satisfaction of one who has nothing to
conceal, whatever the rest of the world may suspect. He was certainly
doing his best to replace their friendship on that level of high
comradeship in ideas and causes which, as she told herself, it had once
occupied. His own wanton aggression and her weakness had toppled it down
thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know
him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He
assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more
be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!

Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one
long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted
none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which
she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and
consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony,
peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with
the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse
her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and
body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to
this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity
in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards
all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and
sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and
gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all
comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when
the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken
his neck--and buried him"--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid
pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in
prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on
Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they
brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always
thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings
paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of
a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a
voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous
things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of
instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her
to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would
like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin'
capital" for him; but she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he
didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him;
the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one
can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming
again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his
chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a
kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still
survived. But it made _her_ life faint within her to talk of the
murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's
realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.
When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was
locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the
bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this
awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she
left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once,
and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann
Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free
heaven.

As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the doctor
said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an
infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but
always patient, always struggling to say his painful "thank you" when
she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell
Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and
understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided
from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his
state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was
strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.

After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the
February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole
upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the
swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and
out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face
kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.
More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved
upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its
significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.
Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion
and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of
all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid
their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease;
she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of
soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the
spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and
tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or God? She would hardly let
herself think of Aldous--though she _must_ think of him by-and-by! He
and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in
her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day,
stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous
would not help her--or not with any help worth having--in consoling this
misery--binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a
crime against him to confess--but she felt herself his superior none the
less. If he cast her off--why then surely they would be quits, quits for
good and all.

As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled
cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.

Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and
her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door
William touched his cap to her.

"Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss."

She stopped sharply.

"Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?"

"In the drawing-room, miss."

She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.
Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent air
Marcella knew so well.

When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands,
then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business
errand and has no time to waste.

"I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of spare
hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going. You
understand that the case comes on at the assizes next Thursday?"

Marcella assented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the
fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made
Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her--but it was
the only sign.

"I should like to warn you," he said gravely, "that I entertain no hope
whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best, but the verdict
will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure to take a
severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I believe it
to be extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the judge,
according to what I hear, will probably be against us. The prosecution
have got together extremely strong evidence--as to Hurd's long
connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness--as to his
repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends
were interrupted--and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and
Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it."

He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition
and at some length; then he paused.

"This being so," he resumed, "the question is, what can be done? There
must be a petition. Amongst my own party I shall be, of course, able to
do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without some at least
of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one word--do you
imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell to sign?"

Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.

"I will try," she said at last, with deliberation.

"Then"--he took up his gloves--"there may be a chance for us. If you
cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can
be secured, others will easily follow. Their names--especially under all
the circumstances--will carry a peculiar weight. I may say everything,
in the first instance--the weight, the first effect of the
petition--depends on them. Well, then, I leave it in your hands. No time
should be lost after the sentence. As to the grounds of our plea, I
shall, of course, lay them down in court to the best of my ability."

"I shall be there," she interrupted.

He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no
comment.

"Well, then," he resumed after a pause, "I need say no more for the
present. How is the wife?"

She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment
passed between them.

"And your election?" said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile
eyes, as he got up to take leave.

"To-morrow!" He threw up his hands with a little gesture of impatience.
"That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the way, whatever
happens. I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can carry me.
Good-bye, Miss Boyce."

Marcella went slowly upstairs. The scene which had just passed was
unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering. Then the sound of the
front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature. The first
sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness. The next--her mind
threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, "Can I, by any
means, get my way with Aldous?"

CHAPTER XIII.

"And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!" The deep-pitched words fell
slowly on Marcella's ears, as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of
the Widrington Assize Court. Women were sobbing beside and behind her.
Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon against her sister-in-law,
her face buried in Ann's black shawl. For an instant after Hurd's death
sentence had been spoken Marcella's nerves ceased to throb--the long
exhaustion of feeling stopped. The harsh light and shade of the ill-lit
room; the gas-lamps in front of the judge, blanching the ranged faces of
the jury; the long table of reporters below, some writing, but most
looking intently towards the dock; the figure of Wharton opposite, in
his barrister's gown and wig--that face of his, so small, nervous,
delicate--the frowning eyebrows a dark bar under the white of the
wig--his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon the judge; the heads and
attitudes of the condemned men, especially the form of a fair-haired
youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who stood a little in
front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his dwarf's
stature--these things Marcella saw indeed; for years after she could
have described them point by point; but for some seconds or minutes her
eyes stared at them without conscious reaction of the mind on the
immediate spectacle.

In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting
there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the
stream of impressions and images. The crushing accumulation of hostile
evidence--witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning
weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence--Wharton's irritation
under it--the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his
cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the
personal success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical
accomplishment of the manner, as one wrestling before his
equals--nothing left here of the garrulous vigour and brutality of the
labourers' meeting!--the masterly use of all that could avail, the few
quiet words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by
implication to the larger ethical sense of the community,--all this she
thought of with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous
voice rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity
were alike weary; the brain asserted itself.

The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and
during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been
largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the
gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for
East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer,
sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only
Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's
murderer.

On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh
coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up
sternly--"I cannot conceive why men and women--women especially--should
come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but if I hear another
laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose whole conscious nature
was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw Aldous flush and shrink
as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the court, she caught the
eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county magistrate. At the
judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where she and Aldous sat;
then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly looked away again. She
perfectly--passionately--understood that Brookshire was very sorry for
Aldous Raeburn that day.

The death sentences--three in number--were over. The judge was a very
ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries with
it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on voice
and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could be
felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women
broke from the gallery.

"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed, amid stifled
sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly alive to
everything around it.

The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly
pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about
face towards a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed
out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, stopped an
instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery.
Hurd also turned irresolutely.

"Look!" exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside
her, "he's goin'."

Marcella bent forward. She, rather than the wife, caught the last look
on his large dwarf's face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under
the gas.

Aldous touched her softly on the arm.

"Yes," she said quickly, "yes, we must get her out. Ann, can you lift
her?"

Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman: Ann Mullins held her on
the other. Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her
long black cloak. The gallery made way for them; every one looked and
whispered till they had passed. Below, at the foot of the stairs, they
found themselves in a passage crowded with people--lawyers, witnesses,
officials, mixed with the populace. Again a road was opened for Aldous
and his charges.

"This way, Mr. Raeburn," said a policeman, with alacrity. "Stand back,
please! Is your carriage there, sir?"

"Let Ann Mullins take her--put them into the cab--I want to speak to Mr.
Wharton," said Marcella in Aldous's ear.

"Get me a cab at once," he said to the policeman, "and tell my carriage
to wait."

"Miss Boyce!"

Marcella turned hastily and saw Wharton beside her. Aldous also saw
him, and the two men interchanged a few words.

"There is a private room close by," said Wharton, "I am to take you
there, and Mr. Raeburn will join us at once."

He led her along a corridor, and opened a door to the left. They entered
a small dingy room, looking through a begrimed window on a courtyard.
The gas was lit, and the table was strewn with papers.

"Never, never more beautiful!" flashed through Wharton's mind, "with
that knit, strenuous brow--that tragic scorn for a base world--that
royal gait--"

Aloud he said:

"I have done my best privately among the people I can get at, and I
thought, before I go up to town to-night--you know Parliament meets on
Monday?--I would show you what I had been able to do, and ask you to
take charge of a copy of the petition." He pointed to a long envelope
lying on the table. "I have drafted it myself--I think it puts all the
points we can possibly urge--but as to the names--"

He took out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.

"It won't do," he said, looking down at it, and shaking his head. "As I
said to you, it is so far political merely. There is a very strong
Liberal and Radical feeling getting up about the case. But that won't
carry us far. This petition with these names is a demonstration against
game preserving and keepers' tyranny. What we want is the co-operation
of a _neighbourhood_, especially of its leading citizens. However, I
explained all this to you--there is no need to discuss it. Will you look
at the list?"

Still holding it, he ran his finger over it, commenting here and there.
She stood beside him; the sleeve of his gown brushed her black cloak;
and under his perfect composure there beat a wild exultation in his
power--without any apology, any forgiveness--to hold her there, alone
with him, listening--her proud head stooped to his--her eye following
his with this effort of anxious attention.

She made a few hurried remarks on the names, but her knowledge of the
county was naturally not very serviceable. He folded up the paper and
put it back.

"I think we understand," he said. "You will do what you can in the only
quarter"--he spoke slowly--"that can really aid, and you will
communicate with me at the House of Commons? I shall do what I can, of
course, when the moment comes, in Parliament, and meanwhile I shall
start the matter in the Press--our best hope. The Radical papers are
already taking it up."

There was a sound of steps in the passage outside. A policeman opened
the door, and Aldous Raeburn entered. His quick look ran over the two
figures standing beside the table.

"I had some difficulty in finding a cab," he explained, "and we had to
get some brandy; but she came round, and we got her off. I sent one of
our men with her. The carriage is here."

He spoke--to Marcella--with some formality. He was very pale, but there
was both authority and tension in his bearing.

"I have been consulting with Miss Boyce," said Wharton, with equal
distance of manner, "as to the petition we are sending up to the Home
Office."

Aldous made no reply.

"One word, Miss Boyce,"--Wharton quietly turned to her. "May I ask you
to read the petition carefully, before you attempt to do anything with
it? It lays stress on the _only_ doubt that can reasonably be felt after
the evidence, and after the judge's summing up. That particular doubt I
hold to be entirely untouched by the trial; but it requires careful
stating--the issues may easily be confused."

"Will you come?" said Aldous to Marcella. What she chose to think the
forced patience of his tone exasperated her.

"I will do everything I can," she said in a low, distinct voice to
Wharton. "Good-bye."

She held out her hand. To both the moment was one of infinite meaning;
to her, in her high spiritual excitement, a sacrament of pardon and
gratitude--expressed once for all--by this touch--in Aldous Raeburn's
presence.

The two men nodded to each other. Wharton was already busy, putting his
papers together.

"We shall meet next week, I suppose, in the House?" said Wharton,
casually. "Good-night."

"Will you take me to the Court?" said Marcella to Aldous, directly the
door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping crowd that
almost filled the little market-place of Widrington, the horses moved
off. "I told mamma, that, if I did not come home, I should be with you,
and that I should ask you to send me back from the Court to-night."

She still held the packet Wharton had given her in her hand. As though
for air, she had thrown back the black gauze veil she had worn all
through the trial, and, as they passed through the lights of the town,
Aldous could see in her face the signs--the plain, startling signs--of
the effect of these weeks upon her. Pale, exhausted, yet showing in
every movement the nervous excitement which was driving her on--his
heart sank as he looked at her--foreseeing what was to come.

As soon as the main street had been left behind, he put his head out of
the window, and gave the coachman, who had been told to go to Mellor,
the new order.

"Will you mind if I don't talk?" said Marcella, when he was again beside
her. "I think I am tired out, but I might rest now a little. When we get
to the Court, will you ask Miss Raeburn to let me have some food in her
sitting-room? Then, at nine o'clock or so, may I come down and see Lord
Maxwell and you--together?"

What she said, and the manner in which she said it, could only add to
his uneasiness; but he assented, put a cushion behind her, wrapped the
rugs round her, and then sat silent, train after train of close and
anxious thought passing through his mind as they rolled along the dark
roads.

When they arrived at Maxwell Court, the sound of the carriage brought
Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn at once into the hall.

Aldous went forward in front of Marcella. "I have brought Marcella," he
said hastily to his aunt. "Will you take her upstairs to your
sitting-room, and let her have some food and rest? She is not fit for
the exertion of dinner, but she wishes to speak to my grandfather
afterwards."

Lord Maxwell had already hurried to meet the black-veiled figure
standing proudly in the dim light of the outer hall.

"My dear! my dear!" he said, drawing her arm within his, and patting her
hand in fatherly fashion. "How worn-out you look!--Yes,
certainly--Agneta, take her up and let her rest--And you wish to speak
to me afterwards? Of course, my dear, of course--at any time."

Miss Raeburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of Aldous's
manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest upstairs
straightway, put her on the sofa in a cheerful sitting-room with a
bright fire, and then, shrewdly guessing that she herself could not
possibly be a congenial companion to the girl at such a moment, whatever
might have happened or might be going to happen, she looked at her
watch, said that she must go down to dinner, and promptly left her to
the charge of a kind elderly maid, who was to do and get for her
whatever she would.

Marcella made herself swallow some food and wine. Then she said that she
wished to be alone and rest for an hour, and would come downstairs at
nine o'clock. The maid, shocked by her pallor, was loth to leave her,
but Marcella insisted.

When she was left alone she drew herself up to the fire and tried hard
to get warm, as she had tried to eat. When in this way a portion of
physical ease and strength had come back to her, she took out the
petition from its envelope and read it carefully. As she did so her lip
relaxed, her eye recovered something of its brightness. All the points
that had occurred to her confusedly, amateurishly, throughout the day,
were here thrown into luminous and admirable form. She had listened to
them indeed, as urged by Wharton in his concluding speech to the jury,
but it had not, alas! seemed so marvellous to her then, as it did now,
that, _after_ such a plea, the judge should have summed up as he did.

When she had finished it and had sat thinking awhile over the declining
fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss Raeburn's
desk, and wrote on it:

"Will you read this--and Lord Maxwell--before I come down? I forgot that
you had not seen it.--M."

A ring at the bell brought the maid.

"Will you please get this taken to Mr. Raeburn? And then, don't disturb
me again for half an hour."

And for that time she lay in Miss Raeburn's favourite chair, outwardly
at rest. Inwardly she was ranging all her arguments, marshalling all her
forces.

When the chiming clock in the great hall below struck nine, she got up
and put the lamp for a moment on the mantelpiece, which held a mirror.
She had already bathed her face and smoothed her hair. But she looked at
herself again with attention, drew down the thick front waves of hair a
little lower on the white brow, as she liked to have them, and once
more straightened the collar and cuffs which were the only relief to her
plain black dress.

The house as she stepped out into it seemed very still. Perfumed breaths
of flowers and pot-pourri ascended from the hall. The pictures along the
walls as she passed were those same Caroline and early Georgian beauties
that had so flashingly suggested her own future rule in this domain on
the day when Aldous proposed to her.

She felt suddenly very shrinking and lonely as she went downstairs. The
ticking of a large clock somewhere--the short, screaming note of Miss
Raeburn's parrot in one of the ground-floor rooms--these sounds and the
beating of her own heart seemed to have the vast house to themselves.

No!--that was a door opening--Aldous coming to fetch her. She drew a
childish breath of comfort.

He sprang up the stairs, two or three steps at a time, as he saw her
coming.

"Are you rested--were they good to you? Oh! my precious one!--how pale
you are still! Will you come and see my--grandfather now? He is quite
ready."

She let him lead her in. Lord Maxwell was standing by his writing-table,
leaning over the petition which was open before him--one hand upon it.
At sight of her he lifted his white head. His fine aquiline face was
grave and disturbed. But nothing could have been kinder or more courtly
than his manner as he came towards her.

"Sit down in that chair. Aldous, make her comfortable. Poor child, how
tired she looks! I hear you wished to speak to me on this most unhappy,
most miserable business."

Marcella, who was sitting erect on the edge of the chair into which
Aldous had put her, lifted her eyes with a sudden confidence. She had
always liked Lord Maxwell.

"Yes," she said, struggling to keep down eagerness and emotion. "Yes, I
came to bring you this petition, which is to be sent up to the Home
Secretary on behalf of Jim Hurd, and--and--to _beg_ of you and Aldous to
sign it, if in any way you can. I know it will be difficult, but I
thought I might--I might be able to suggest something to you--to
convince you--as I have known these people so well--and it is very
important to have your signatures."

How crude it sounded--how mechanical! She felt that she had not yet
command of herself. The strange place, the stately room, the
consciousness of Aldous behind her--Aldous, who should have been on her
side and was not--all combined to intimidate her.

Lord Maxwell's concern was evident. In the first place, he was
painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker. Why, what
had Aldous been about? So thin! so frail and willowy in her black
dress--monstrous!

"My dear," he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly hand on her
shoulder, "my dear, I wish I could make you understand how gladly I
would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably could. I would
do it for your sake and for your grandfather's sake. But--this is a
matter of conscience, of public duty, both for Aldous and myself. You
will not surely _wish_ even, that we should be governed in our relations
to it by any private feeling or motive?"

"No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about it--and I
take such a different view from Aldous. He knows--everybody must
know--that there is another side, another possible view from that which
the judge took. You weren't in court to-day, were you, at all?"

"No. But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great care,
and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed
everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of
Mr. Wharton's speeches."

"Aldous!"--her voice broke irrepressibly into another note--"I thought
he would have let me speak to you first!--to-night!"

Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.
Aldous bent over her chair.

"You remember," he said, "you sent down the petition. I thought that
meant that we were to read and discuss it. I am very sorry."

She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow. But already
she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.

"The whole point lies in this," she said, looking up: "_Can_ we believe
Hurd's own story? There is no evidence to corroborate it. I grant
that--the judge did not believe it--and there is the evidence of hatred.
But is it not possible and conceivable all the same? He says that he did
not go out with any thought whatever of killing Westall, but that when
Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him,
as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him.
Surely, _surely_ that is conceivable? There _is_--there _must_ be a
doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite
different from other kinds and degrees of murder."

Now she possessed herself. The gift of flowing persuasive speech which
was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had
been maturing, came to her call. She leant forward and took up the
petition. One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and
there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's life--presenting
it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of
emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the "tears of things." To
her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole matter--so sordid, commonplace,
brutal in Lord Maxwell's eyes!--had become a tragic poem, a thing of
fear and pity, to which her whole being vibrated. And as she conceived
it, so she reproduced it. Wharton's points were there indeed, but so
were Hurd's poverty, Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a
tyrant's insults, the miserable wife, the branded children--emphasised,
all of them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the
girl's voice.

Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one
knee crossed over the other. Aldous still hung over her chair. Neither
interrupted her. Once the eyes of the two men met over her head--a
distressed, significant look. Aldous heard all she said, but what
absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close
below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that
moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed.

When her voice broke--when she had said all she could think of--she
remained looking imploringly at Lord Maxwell.

He was silent a little; then he stooped forward and took her hand.

"You have spoken," he said with great feeling, "most nobly--most
well--like a good woman, with a true compassionate heart. But all these
things you have said are not new to me, my dear child. Aldous warned me
of this petition--he has pressed upon me, still more I am sure upon
himself, all that he conceived to be your view of the case--the view of
those who are now moving in the matter. But with the best will in the
world I cannot, and I believe that he cannot--though he must speak for
himself--I cannot take that view. In my belief Hurd's act was murder,
and deserves the penalty of murder. I have paid some attention to these
things. I was a practising barrister in my youth, and later I was for
two years Home Secretary. I will explain to you my grounds very
shortly."

And, bending forward, he gave the reasons for his judgment of the case
as carefully and as lucidly as though he were stating them to a
fellow-expert, and not to an agitated girl of twenty-one. Both in words
and manner there was an implied tribute, not only to Marcella, but
perhaps to that altered position of the woman in our moving world which
affects so many things and persons in unexpected ways.

Marcella listened, restlessly. She had drawn her hand away, and was
twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. The flush that had sprung
up while she was talking had died away. She grew whiter and whiter. When
Lord Maxwell ceased, she said quickly, and as he thought unreasonably--

"So you will not sign?"

"No," he replied firmly, "I cannot sign. Holding the conviction about
the matter I do, I should be giving my name to statements I do not
believe; and in order to give myself the pleasure of pleasing you, and
of indulging the pity that every man must feel for every murderer's wife
and children, I should be not only committing a public wrong, but I
should be doing what I could to lessen the safety and security of one
whole class of my servants--men who give me honourable service--and two
of whom have been so cruelly, so wantonly hurried before their Maker!"

His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the
matter. Marcella shivered.

"Then," she said slowly, "Hurd will be executed."

Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.

"Let me tell you," he said, "that that does not follow at all. There is
_some_ importance in signatures--or rather in the local movement that
the signatures imply. It enables a case to be reopened, which, in any
event, this case is sure to be. But any Home Secretary who could decide
a murder case on any other grounds whatever than those of law and his
own conscience would not deserve his place a day--an hour! Believe me,
you mistake the whole situation."

He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and
authority. Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to
throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice,
which was in itself an agony.

"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.

"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly. "Won't you try and believe
what it costs me to refuse?"

It was a heavy blow to her. Amply as she had been prepared for it, there
had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end
she would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before
that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly
conscious. Yet it had not availed her here--not even with the man who
loved her.

Lord Maxwell looked at the two--the man's face of suffering, the girl's
struggling breath.

"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave you a minute. Do
make Marcella rest--get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little.
Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above all, persuade her
that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a
matter of this kind she must leave us to do--as before God!--what we
think right."

He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity--nay,
a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the room.

Marcella sprang up.

"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled voice. "I will go
upstairs."

"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me, if it is
impossible for you to be generous?"

"Just!" she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him
back from her. "_You_ can talk of justice!"

He tried to speak, stammered, and failed. That strange paralysis of the
will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must
either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never
loved her more passionately--but as he stood there looking at her,
something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable
dawned.

"_You_," she said again, walking stormily to and fro, and catching at
her breath--"_You_, in this house, with this life--to talk of
justice--the justice that comes of slaying a man like Hurd! And I must
go back to that cottage, to that woman, and tell her there is _no_
hope--none! Because _you_ must follow your conscience--you who have
everything! Oh! I would not have your conscience--I wish you a
heart--rather! Don't come to me, please! Oh! I must think how it can be.
Things cannot go on so. I should kill myself, and make you miserable.
But now I must go to _her_--to the _poor_--to those whom I _love_, whom
I carry in my heart!"

She broke off sobbing. He saw her, in her wild excitement, look round
the splendid room as though she would wither it to ruin with one fiery,
accusing glance.

"You are very scornful of wealth," he said, catching her wrists, "but
one thing you have no right to scorn!--the man who has given you his
inmost heart--and now only asks you to believe in this, that he is not
the cruel hypocrite you are determined to make him!"

His face quivered in every feature. She was checked a moment--checked by
the moral compulsion of his tone and manner, as well as by his words.
But again she tore herself away.

"_Please_ go and order the carriage," she said. "I cannot bear any more.
I _must_ go home and rest. Some day I will ask your pardon--oh! for
this--and--and--" she was almost choked again--"other things. But now I
must go away. There is some one who will help me. I must not forget
that!"

The reckless words, the inflection, turned Aldous to stone.
Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect--their eyes met. Then he
went up to the bell and rang it.

"The brougham at once, for Miss Boyce. Will you have a maid to go with
you?" he asked, motioning the servant to stay till Miss Boyce had given
her answer.

"No, thank you. I must go and put on my things. Will you explain to Miss
Raeburn?"

The footman opened the door for her. She went.

CHAPTER XIV.

"But this is unbearable!" said Aldous. "Do you mean to say that she is
at home and that she will not see me?"

Mrs. Boyce's self-possession was shaken for once by the flushed
humiliation of the man before her.

"I am afraid it is so," she said hurriedly. "I remonstrated with
Marcella, but I could do nothing. I think, if you are wise, you will not
for the present attempt to see her."

Aldous sat down, with his hat in his hand, staring at the floor. After a
few moments' silence he looked up again.

"And she gave you no message for me?"

"No," said Mrs. Boyce, reluctantly. "Only that she could not bear to see
anybody from the Court, even you, while this matter was still
undecided."

Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was arrested by
a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of
which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some black
silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair;
the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter. She had
been there, not three minutes ago, and had fled before him. The door
into Mrs. Boyce's sitting-room was still ajar.

He looked again at the envelope on the chair, and recognised the
writing. Walking across to where Mrs. Boyce sat, he took a seat beside
her.

"Will you tell me," he said steadily--"I think you will admit I have a
right to know--is Marcella in constant correspondence now with Henry
Wharton?"

Mrs. Boyce's start was not perceptible.

"I believe so," she quickly replied. "So far as I can judge, he writes
to her almost every other day."

"Does she show you his letters?"

"Very often. They are entirely concerned with his daily interviews and
efforts on Hurd's behalf."

"Would you not say," he asked, after another pause, raising his clear
grey eyes to her, "that since his arrival here in December Marcella's
whole views and thoughts have been largely--perhaps vitally--influenced
by this man?"

Mrs. Boyce had long expected questions of this kind--had, indeed, often
marvelled and cavilled that Aldous had not asked them weeks before. Now
that they were put to her she was, first of all, anxious to treat them
with common sense, and as much plain truth as might be fair to both
parties. The perpetual emotion in which Marcella lived tired and
oppressed the mother. For herself she asked to see things in a dry
light. Yet she knew well that the moment was critical. Her feeling was
more mixed than it had been. On the whole it was indignantly on Aldous's
side--with qualifications and impatiences, however.

She took up her embroidery again before she answered him. In her
opinion the needle is to the woman what the cigarette is to the
diplomatist.

"Yes, certainly," she said at last. "He has done a great deal to form
her opinions. He has made her both read and think on all those subjects
she has so long been fond of talking about."

She saw Aldous wince; but she had her reasons for being plain with him.

"Has there been nothing else than that in it?" said Aldous, in an odd
voice.

Mrs. Boyce tried no evasions. She looked at him straight, her slight,
energetic head, with its pale gold hair lit up by the March sun behind
her.

"I do not know," she said calmly; "that is the real truth. I _think_
there is nothing else. But let me tell you what more I think."

Aldous laid his hand on hers for an instant. In his pity and liking for
her he had once or twice allowed himself this quasi-filial freedom.

"If you would," he entreated.

"Leave Marcella quite alone--for the present. She is not herself--not
normal, in any way. Nor will she be till this dreadful thing is over.
But when it is over, and she has had time to recover a little,
_then_"--her thin voice expressed all the emphasis it could--"_then_
assert yourself! Ask her that question you have asked me--and get your
answer."

He understood. Her advice to him, and the tone of it, implied that she
had not always thought highly of his powers of self-defence in the past.
But there was a proud and sensitive instinct in him which both told him
that he could not have done differently and forbade him to explain.

"You have come from London to-day?" said Mrs. Boyce, changing the
subject. All intimate and personal conversation was distasteful to her,
and she admitted few responsibilities. Her daughter hardly counted among
them.

"Yes; London is hard at work cabinet-making," he said, trying to smile.
"I must get back to-night."

"I don't know how you could be spared," said Mrs. Boyce.

He paused; then he broke out: "When a man is in the doubt and trouble I
am, he must be spared. Indeed, since the night of the trial, I feel as
though I had been of very little use to any human being."

He spoke simply, but every word touched her. What an inconceivable
entanglement the whole thing was! Yet she was no longer merely
contemptuous of it.

"Look!" she said, lifting a bit of black stuff from the ground beside
the chair which held the envelope; "she is already making the mourning
for the children. I can see she despairs."

He made a sound of horror.

"Can you do nothing?" he cried reproachfully. "To think of her dwelling
upon this--nothing but this, day and night--and I, banished and
powerless!"

He buried his head in his hands.

"No, I can do nothing," said Mrs. Boyce, deliberately. Then, after a
pause, "You do not imagine there is any chance of success for her?"

He looked up and shook his head.

"The Radical papers are full of it, as you know. Wharton is managing it
with great ability, and has got some good supporters in the House. But I
happened to see the judge the day before yesterday, and I certainly
gathered from him that the Home Office was likely to stand firm. There
may be some delay. The new ministry will not kiss hands till Saturday.
But no doubt it will be the first business of the new Home
Secretary.--By the way, I had rather Marcella did not hear of my seeing
Judge Cartwright," he added hastily--almost imploringly. "I could not
bear that she should suppose--"

Mrs. Boyce thought to herself indignantly that she never could have
imagined such a man in such a plight.

"I must go," he said, rising. "Will you tell her from me," he added
slowly, "that I could never have believed she would be so unkind as to
let me come down from London to see her, and send me away empty--without
a word?"

"Leave it to my discretion," said Mrs. Boyce, smiling and looking up.
"Oh, by the way, she told me to thank you. Mr. Wharton, in his letter
this morning, mentioned that you had given him two introductions which
were important to him. She specially wished you to be thanked for it."

His exclamation had a note of impatient contempt that Mrs. Boyce was
genuinely glad to hear. In her opinion he was much too apt to forget
that the world yields itself only to the "violent."

He walked away from the house without once looking back. Marcella, from,
her window, watched him go.

"How _could_ she see him?" she asked herself passionately, both then
and on many other occasions during these rushing, ghastly days. His turn
would come, and it should be amply given him. But _now_ the very thought
of that half-hour in Lord Maxwell's library threw her into wild tears.
The time for entreaty--for argument--was gone by, so far as he was
concerned. He might have been her champion, and would not. She threw
herself recklessly, madly into the encouragement and support of the man
who had taken up the task which, in her eyes, should have been her
lover's. It had become to her a _fight_--with society, with the law,
with Aldous--in which her whole nature was absorbed. In the course of
the fight she had realised Aldous's strength, and it was a bitter
offence to her.

How little she could do after all! She gathered together all the
newspapers that were debating the case, and feverishly read every line;
she wrote to Wharton, commenting on what she read, and on his letters;
she attended the meetings of the Reprieve Committee which had been
started at Widrington; and she passed hours of every day with Minta Hurd
and her children. She would hardly speak to Mary Harden and the rector,
because they had not signed the petition, and at home her relations with
her father were much strained. Mr. Boyce was awakening to a good deal of
alarm as to how things might end. He might not like the Raeburns, but
that anything should come in the way of his daughter's match was,
notwithstanding, the very last thing in the world, as he soon
discovered, that he really desired. During six months he had taken it
for granted; so had the county. He, of all men, could not afford to be
made ridiculous, apart from the solid, the extraordinary advantages of
the matter. He thought Marcella a foolish, unreasonable girl, and was
not the less in a panic because his wife let him understand that he had
had a good deal to do with it. So that between him and his daughter
there were now constant sparrings--sparrings which degraded Marcella in
her own eyes, and contributed not a little to make her keep away from
home.

The one place where she breathed freely, where the soul had full course,
was in Minta Hurd's kitchen. Side by side with that piteous plaintive
misery, her own fierceness dwindled. She would sit with little Willie on
her knees in the dusk of the spring evenings, looking into the fire, and
crying silently. She never suspected that her presence was often a
burden and constraint, not only to the sulky sister-in-law but to the
wife herself. While Miss Boyce was there the village kept away; and Mrs.
Hurd was sometimes athirst, without knowing it, for homelier speech and
simpler consolations than any Marcella could give her.

The last week arrived. Wharton's letters grew more uncertain and
despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause
became more desperate. On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man,
who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope.
Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament. Friday was
the day fixed for the execution.

The question in Parliament came on late. The Home Secretary's answer,
though not final in form, was final in substance. Wharton went out
immediately and wrote to Marcella. "She will not sleep if I telegraph
to-night," he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for
physical detail, which had in it something of the woman. But, knowing
that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of
eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn
the news first from the papers.

Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an
oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might
reach her any hour.

She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the
house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind
her. William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of
understanding. Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out
of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.

"All over. The Home Secretary's official refusal to interfere with
sentence sent to Widrington to-day. Accept my sorrow and sympathy."

She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically. Before her
lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her father's
big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied his ferrets
in the winter nights. But to-day the spring worked in it, and breathed
upon it. The young corn was already green in the furrows; the
hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air,
daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the
flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the
wide treeless basin.

Human helplessness, human agony--set against the careless joy of
nature--there is no new way of feeling these things. But not to have
felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled
Marcella's heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full
stature of our kind.

"Marcella, it is my strong wish--my command--that you do _not_ go out to
the village to-night."

"I must go, papa."

It was Thursday night--the night before the Friday morning fixed for
Hurd's execution. Dinner at Mellor was just over. Mr. Boyce, who was
standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own
inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter. She
had not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black
cloak and black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks.
Mr. Boyce detested the garb.

"You are making yourself _ridiculous_, Marcella. Pity for these wretched
people is all very well, but you have no business to carry it to such a
point that you--and we--become the talk, the laughing-stock of the
county. And I should like to see you, too, pay some attention to Aldous
Raeburn's feelings and wishes."

The admonition, in her father's mouth, would almost have made her laugh,
if she could have laughed at anything. But, instead, she only repeated:

"I must go, I have explained to mamma."

"Evelyn! why do you permit it?" cried Mr. Boyce, turning aggressively to
his wife.

"Marcella explained to me, as she truly said," replied Mrs. Boyce,
looking up calmly. "It is not her habit to ask permission of any one."

"Mamma," exclaimed the girl, in her deep voice, "you would not wish to
stop me?"

"No," said Mrs. Boyce, after a pause, "no. You have gone so far, I
understand your wish to do this. Richard,"--she got up and went to
him,--"don't excite yourself about it; shall I read to you, or play a
game with you?"

He looked at her, trembling with anger. But her quiet eye warned him
that he had had threatenings of pain that afternoon. His anger sank into
fear. He became once more irritable and abject.

"Let her gang her gait," he said, throwing himself into a chair. "But I
tell you I shall not put up with this kind of thing much longer,
Marcella."

"I shall not ask you, papa," she said steadily, as she moved towards the
door. Mrs. Boyce paused where she stood, and looked after her daughter,
struck by her words. Mr. Boyce simply took them as referring to the
marriage which would emancipate her before long from any control of his,
and fumed, without finding a reply.

The maid-servant who, by Mrs. Boyce's orders, was to accompany Marcella
to the village, was already at the front door. She carried a basket
containing invalid food for little Willie, and a lighted lantern.

It was a dark night and raining fast. Marcella was fastening up her
tweed skirt in the hall, when she saw Mrs. Boyce hurry along the gallery
above, and immediately afterwards her mother came across the hall to
her.

"You had better take the shawl, Marcella: it is cold and raw. If you are
going to sit up most of the night you will want it."

She put a wrap of her own across Marcella's arm.

"Your father is quite right," she went on. "You have had one horrible
experience to-day already--"

"Don't, mamma!" exclaimed Marcella, interrupting her. Then suddenly she
threw her arms round her mother.

"Kiss me, mamma! please kiss me!"

Mrs. Boyce kissed her gravely, and let herself even linger a moment in
the girl's strong hold.

"You are extraordinarily wilful," she said. "And it is so strange to me
that you think you do any good. Are you sure even that she wants to have
you?"

Marcella's lip quivered. She could not speak, apparently. Waving her
hand to her mother, she joined the maid waiting for her, and the two
disappeared into the blackness.

"But _does_ it do any good?" Mrs. Boyce repeated to herself as she went
back to the drawing-room. "_Sympathy!_ who was ever yet fed, warmed,
comforted by _sympathy_? Marcella robs that woman of the only thing that
the human being should want at such a moment--solitude. Why should we
force on the poor what to us would be an outrage?"

Meanwhile Marcella battled through the wind and rain, thankful that the
warm spring burst was over, and that the skies no longer mocked this
horror which was beneath them.

At the entrance to the village she stopped, and took the basket from the
little maid.

"Now, Ruth, you can go home. Run quick, it is so dark, Ruth!"

"Yes, miss."

The young country girl trembled. Miss Boyce's tragic passion in this
matter had to some extent infected the whole household in which she
lived.

"Ruth, when you say your prayers to-night, pray God to comfort the
poor,--and to punish the cruel!"

"Yes, miss," said the girl, timidly, and ready to cry. The lantern she
held flashed its light on Miss Boyce's white face and tall form. Till
her mistress turned away she did not dare to move; that dark eye, so
wide, full, and living, roused in her a kind of terror.

On the steps of the cottage Marcella paused. She heard voices inside--or
rather the rector's voice reading.

A thought of scorn rose in her heart. "How long will the poor endure
this religion--this make-believe--which preaches patience, _patience_!
when it ought to be urging war?"

But she went in softly, so as not to interrupt. The rector looked up and
made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade
any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose
makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and
the reading went on.

Since Minta Hurd had returned with Marcella from Widrington Gaol that
afternoon, she had been so ill that a doctor had been sent for. He had
bade them make up her bed downstairs in the warm; and accordingly a
mattress had been laid on the settle, and she was now stretched upon it.
Her huddled form, the staring whiteness of the narrow face and closed
eyelids, thrown out against the dark oak of the settle, and the
disordered mass of grizzled hair, made the centre of the cottage.

Beside her on the floor sat Mary Harden, her head bowed over the rough
hand she held, her eyes red with weeping. Fronting them, beside a little
table, which held a small paraffin lamp, sat the young rector, his
Testament in his hand, his slight boy's figure cast in sharp shadow on
the cottage wall. He had placed himself so as to screen the crude light
of the lamp from the wife's eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a
chair to keep it from little Willie. Between mother and child sat Ann
Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from
time to time--a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children
and much poverty--of whom Marcella was often impatient.

"_And he said, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom. And
He said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me
in Paradise."_

The rector's voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt insistently on each
word, then paused. "_To-day_," whispered Mary, caressing Minta's hand,
while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the
Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."

Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the
cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and
sent a start through Willie's wasted body. The reader resumed; but
perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling leaven.

Nevertheless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on
every pang of the Passion, putting together every sacred and sublime
word. For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held
up the Man of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had
come, his moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he
accepted it with the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.

"_And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they
beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their breasts_."

He closed the book, and bent forward, so as to bring his voice close to
the wife's ear.

"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your husband. He has
passed through death--through cruel death; and where He has gone, we
poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to Him. No sin, however
black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His hand in the dark
waters, if it be only repented,--thrown upon His Cross. Let us pray for
your husband, let us implore the Lord's mercy this night--this
hour!--upon his soul."

A shudder of remembrance passed through Marcella. The rector knelt; Mrs.
Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at
intervals; Ann Mullins sobbed loudly; and Mary Harden wept as she
prayed, lost in a mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there
on the cottage floor--stretching hands of pity over the woman beside
her, showing His marred side and brow.

Marcella alone sat erect, her whole being one passionate protest against
a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities of
this too real earth on the shadowy head of one far-off Redeemer. "This
very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort an accomplice of
those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and killing, because they
know of nothing better to do with the life they themselves have made
outcast."

And she hardened her heart.

When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for
some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the
boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother
and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager,
concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she
perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the
rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of
pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and
moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better. The
child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton
hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little, all--with
just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had
fascinated Wharton. Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could
have wept.

At last the rector and his sister rose.

"God be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; "God
support you!"

His voice trembled. Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.

"Oh, Mr. Harden!" she cried with a sudden wail. "Mr. Harden!"

Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with
quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."

The rector turned to Marcella.

"You are staying the night with her?" he asked, under his breath.

"Yes. Mrs. Mullins was up all last night. I offered to come to-night."

"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Did you see Hurd?"

"For a very few minutes."

"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?" he asked anxiously. "Is he
penitent?"

"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce humanness in her
unfriendly eyes. "I promised him that when the child died, he should be
buried respectably--not by the parish. And I told him I would always
look after the little girls."

The rector sighed. He moved away. Then unexpectedly he came back again.

"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as not to be
heard by any one else in the cottage. "You are taking a great
responsibility here to-night. Let me implore you not to fill that poor
woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her
life. That _you_ feel bitterly, I know. Mary has explained to me--but
ask yourself, I beg of you!--how is _she_ to be helped through her
misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission
to the will of God?"

He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of
his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.

"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella, coldly. She
felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which
his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her. That
hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell
once for all.

Mary did not venture to kiss her friend. They all went. Ann Mulling, who
was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last. When she
was going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the
skirt, saying incoherent things.

"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her, "won't you
let Ann go? I am going to spend the night here, and take care of you and
Willie."

Mrs. Hurd gave a painful start.

"You're very good, miss," she said half-consciously, "very good, I'm
sure. But she's his own flesh and blood is Ann--his own flesh and blood.
Ann!"

The two women clung together, the rough, ill-tempered sister-in-law
muttering what soothing she could think of. When she was gone, Minta
Hurd turned her face to the back of the settle and moaned, her hands
clenched under her breast.

Marcella went about her preparations for the night. "She is extremely
weak," Dr. Clarke had said; "the heart in such a state she may die of
syncope on very small provocation. If she is to spend the night in
crying and exciting herself, it will go hard with her. Get her to sleep
if you possibly can."

And he had left a sleeping draught. Marcella resolved that she would
persuade her to take it. "But I will wake her before eight o'clock," she
thought. "No human being has the right to rob her of herself through
that last hour."

And tenderly she coaxed Minta to take the doctor's "medicine." Minta
swallowed it submissively, asking no questions. But the act of taking it
roused her for the time, and she would talk. She even got up and
tottered across to Willie.

"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he's got his animals--he don't think
of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won't you think of your father?--you'll
never have a father, Willie, not after to-night!"

The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his haggard,
dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the face,
and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He
looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not
speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it
struck her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and
there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced
Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had
fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same
as it had been for days; she reassured herself.

And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching
limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed
the shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of
the watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.

Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself
with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock
showed that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she
drew it upon her knee; but it lay unopened.

A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes
of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on
her cloak.

A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the
chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside
her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of
ear, and imagined more.

All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look
round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn
across one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the
light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without
at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door
of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came
out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on
the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon
him.

She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something
else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman's face!--the
powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline features--the mad
keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes looked in hungrily
at the prostrate form on the settle--at the sleeping child. Another
figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path. There was a slight
scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the curtain close with a
hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The woman who had
looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was becoming more
and more difficult to manage and to watch.

Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a
sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it
haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.

The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and
struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more
piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours passed, as all
sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence
settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to
repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with
shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife.
"He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information
which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant
sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.
"Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal
_knows_--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us
something as against the _nothing_ of death--and a man wastes them in
sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily
struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no
husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may
well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity!
Oh, why are we here--why am _I_ here--to ache like this--to hate good
people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to
madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot
forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"

She sat over the fire, Willie's hand clasped in hers. He alone in this
forlorn household _loved_ her. Mrs. Hurd and the other children feared
and depended on her. This creature of thistle-down--this little thread
and patch of humanity--felt no fear of her. It was as though his
weakness divined through her harshness and unripeness those maternal and
protecting powers with which her nature was in truth so richly dowered.
He confided himself to her with no misgivings. He was at ease when she
was there.

Little piteous hand!--its touch was to her symbolic, imperative.

Eight months had she been at Mellor? And that Marcella, who had been
living and moving amid these woods and lanes all this time--that foolish
girl, delighting in new grandeurs, and flattered by Aldous Raeburn's
attentions--that hot, ambitious person who had meant to rule a county
through a husband--what had become of her? Up to the night of Hurd's
death sentence she had still existed in some sort, with her obligations,
qualms, remorses. But since then--every day, every hour had been
grinding, scorching her away--fashioning in flame and fever this new
Marcella who sat here, looking impatiently into another life, which
should know nothing of the bonds of the old.

Ah, yes!--her _thought_ could distinguish between the act and the man,
between the man and his class; but in her _feeling_ all was confounded.
This awful growth of sympathy in her--strange irony!--had made all
sympathy for Aldous Raeburn impossible to her. Marry him?--no!
no!--never! But she would make it quite easy to him to give her up.
Pride should come in--he should feel no pain in doing it. She had in her
pocket the letter she had received from him that afternoon. She had
hardly been able to read it. Ear and heart were alike dull to it.

From time to time she probably slept in her chair. Or else it was the
perpetual rush of images and sensations through the mind that hastened
the hours. Once when the first streaks of the March dawn were showing
through the curtains Minta Hurd sprang up with a loud cry:

"Oh, my God! Jim, _Jim!_ Oh, no!--take that off. Oh, _please_, sir,
please! Oh, for God's sake, sir!"

Agony struggled with sleep. Marcella, shuddering, held and soothed her,
and for a while sleep, or rather the drug in her veins, triumphed again.
For another hour or two she lay restlessly tossing from side to side,
but unconscious.

Willie hardly moved all night. Again and again Marcella held beef-tea or
milk to his mouth, and tried to rouse him to take it, but she could make
no impression on the passive lips; the sleeping serenity of the brow
never changed.

At last, with a start, Marcella looked round and saw that the morning
was fully there. A cold light was streaming through the curtains; the
fire was still glowing; but her limbs were stiff and chilled under her
shawl. She sprang up, horror descending on her. Her shaking fingers
could hardly draw out the watch in her belt.

_Ten minutes to eight_!

For the first time the girl felt nerve and resolution fail her. She
looked at Mrs. Hurd and wrung her hands. The mother was muttering and
moving, but not yet fully awake; and Willie lay as before. Hardly
knowing what she was doing, she drew the curtains back, as though
inspiration might come with the light. The rain-clouds trailed across
the common; water dripped heavily from the thatch of the cottage; and a
few birds twittered from some bedraggled larches at the edge of the
common. Far away, beyond and beneath those woods to the right,
Widrington lay on the plain, with that high-walled stone building at its
edge. She saw everything as it must now be happening as plainly as
though she were bodily present there--the last meal--the pinioning--the
chaplain.

Goaded by the passing seconds, she turned back at last to wake that poor
sleeper behind her. But something diverted her. With a start she saw
that Willie's eyes were open.

"Willie," she said, running to him, "how are you, dear? Shall I lift
your head a little?"

He did not answer, though she thought he tried, and she was struck by
the blueness under the eyes and nose. Hurriedly she felt his tiny feet.
They were quite cold.

"Mrs. Hurd!" she cried, rousing her in haste; "dear Mrs. Hurd, come and
see Willie!"

The mother sprang up bewildered, and, hurrying across the room, threw
herself upon him.

"Willie, what is it ails you, dear? Tell mother! Is it your feet are so
cold? But we'll rub them--we'll get you warm soon. And here's something
to make you better." Marcella handed her some brandy. "Drink it, dear;
drink it, sweetheart!" Her voice grew shrill.

"He can't," said Marcella. "Do not let us plague him; it is the end. Dr.
Clarke said it would come in the morning."

They hung over him, forgetting everything but him for the moment--the
only moment in his little life he came first even with his mother.

There was a slight movement of the hand.

"He wants his animals," said Marcella, the tears pouring down her
cheeks. She lifted them and put them on his breast, laying the cold
fingers over them.

Then he tried to speak.

"Daddy!" he whispered, looking up fully at his mother; "take 'em to
Daddy!"

She fell on her knees beside him with a shriek, hiding her face, and
shaking from head to foot. Marcella alone saw the slight, mysterious
smile, the gradual sinking of the lids, the shudder of departing life
that ran through the limbs.

A heavy sound swung through the air--a heavy repeated sound. Mrs. Hurd
held up her head and listened. The church clock tolled eight. She knelt
there, struck motionless by terror--by recollection.

"Oh, Jim!" she said, under her breath--"my Jim!"

The plaintive tone--as of a creature that has not even breath and
strength left wherewith to chide the fate that crushes it--broke
Marcella's heart. Sitting beside the dead son, she wrapt the mother in
her arms, and the only words that even her wild spirit could find
wherewith to sustain this woman through the moments of her husband's
death were words of prayer--the old shuddering cries wherewith the human
soul from the beginning has thrown itself on that awful encompassing
Life whence it issued, and whither it returns.

CHAPTER XV.

Two days later, in the afternoon, Aldous Raeburn found himself at the
door of Mellor. When he entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Boyce, who had
heard his ring, was hurrying away.

"Don't go," he said, detaining her with a certain peremptoriness. "I
want all the light on this I can get. Tell me, she has _actually_
brought herself to regard this man's death as in some sort my doing--as
something which ought to separate us?"

Mrs. Boyce saw that he held an opened letter from Marcella crushed in
his hand. But she did not need the explanation. She had been expecting
him at any hour throughout the day, and in just this condition of mind.

"Marcella must explain for herself," she said, after a moment's thought.
"I have no right whatever to speak for her. Besides, frankly, I do not
understand her, and when I argue with her she only makes me realise that
I have no part or lot in her--that I never had. It is just enough. She
was brought up away from me. And I have no natural hold. I cannot help
you, or any one else, with her."

Aldous had been very tolerant and compassionate in the past of this
strange mother's abdication of her maternal place, and of its probable
causes. But it was not in human nature that he should be either to-day.
He resumed his questioning, not without sharpness.

"One word, please. Tell me something of what has happened since
Thursday, before I see her. I have written--but till this morning I have
had not one line from her."

They were standing by the window, he with his frowning gaze, in which
agitation struggled against all his normal habits of manner and
expression, fixed upon the lawn and the avenue. She told him briefly
what she knew of Marcella's doings since the arrival of Wharton's
telegram--of the night in the cottage, and the child's death. It was
plain that he listened with a shuddering repulsion.

"Do you know," he exclaimed, turning upon her, "that she may never
recover this? Such a strain, such a horror! rushed upon so wantonly, so
needlessly."

"I understand. You think that I have been to blame? I do not wonder. But
it is not true--not in this particular case. And anyway your view is not
mine. Life--and the iron of it--has to be faced, even by women--perhaps,
most of all, by women. But let me go now. Otherwise my husband will come
in. And I imagine you would rather see Marcella before you see him or
any one."

That suggestion told. He instantly gathered himself together, and
nervously begged that she would send Marcella to him at once. He could
think of nothing, talk of nothing, till he had seen her. She went, and
Aldous was left to walk up and down the room planning what he should
say. After the ghastly intermingling of public interests and private
misery in which he had lived for these many weeks there was a certain
relief in having reached the cleared space--the decisive moment--when he
might at last give himself wholly to what truly concerned him. He would
not lose her without a struggle. None the less he knew, and had known
ever since the scene in the Court library, that the great disaster of
his life was upon him.

The handle of the door turned. She was there.

He did not go to meet her. She had come in wrought up to face
attack--reproaches, entreaties--ready to be angry or to be humble, as he
should give her the lead. But he gave her no lead. She had to break
through that quivering silence as best she could.

"I wanted to explain everything to you," she said in a low voice, as she
came near to him. "I know my note last night was very hard and abrupt. I
didn't mean to be hard. But I am still so tired--and everything that one
says, and feels, hurts so."

She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not
been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he
looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into
which she had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a
passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.

"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you read my letter
that I wrote you the day before--?"

"Yes."

"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your
grief--your suffering--or to the suffering of any human being for whom
you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"

"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking
sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have
done."

"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat
beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you
desire so passionately for others--freedom of conscience--freedom of
judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all
my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have
refused me the commonest right of love--the right to show you myself, to
prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion--misery,
much more, oh, much more to me than to you!--I was in truth bent on the
same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same
goal."

"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what
burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry--that there was a
struggle in your mind--that you pitied me--pitied _them_. But you judged
it all _from above_--you looked down--and I could not see that you had
any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I
was below--in the midst--_close_ to the horror and anguish of them."

"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I
not offer--entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed
to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented
us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke
deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement
which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?
You owe it to me to answer."

She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's
mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last
in this white heat of an accusing passion. In return she began to forget
her own resolve to bear herself gently.

"You don't remember," she cried, "that what divided us was
your--your--incapacity to put the human pity first; to think of the
surrounding circumstances--of the debt that you and I and everybody like
us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had been stunted and starved by
life as he had been."

Her lip began to tremble.

"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I had been a poor
man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my judgment of right and
wrong--in such a matter. You would have let me remember that I was a
citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice! You would have let
me plead that Hurd's sin was not against me, but against the community,
and that in determining whether to do what you wished or no, I must
think of the community and its good before even I thought of pleasing
you. If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this would have been
permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of my _money_,"--she
shrank before the accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest
moral rights. _My_ scruple, _my_ feeling, were nothing to you. Your
pride was engaged as well as your pity, and I must give way. Marcella!
you talk of justice--you talk of equality--is the only man who can get
neither at your hands--the man whom you promised to marry!"

His voice dwelt on that last word, dwelt and broke. He leant over her in
his roused strength, and tried to take her hand. But she moved away from
him with a cry.

"It is no use! Oh, don't--don't! It may be all true. I was vain, I dare
say, and unjust, and hard. But don't you see--don't you understand--if
we _could_ take such different views of such a case--if it could divide
us so deeply--what chance would there be if we were married? I ought
never--never--to have said 'Yes' to you--even as I was then. But _now_,"
she turned to him slowly, "can't you see it for yourself? I am a changed
creature. Certain things in me are gone--_gone_--and instead there is a
fire--something driving, tormenting--which must burn its way out. When I
think of what I liked so much when you asked me to marry you--being
rich, and having beautiful things, and dresses, and jewels, and
servants, and power--social power--above all _that_--I feel sick and
choked. I couldn't breathe now in a house like Maxwell Court. The poor
have come to mean to me the only people who really _live_, and really
_suffer_. I must live with them, work for them, find out what I can do
for them. You must give me up--you must indeed. Oh! and you will! You
will be glad enough, thankful enough, when--when--you know what I _am_!"

He started at the words. Where was the prophetess? He saw that she was
lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the
chair.

In an instant he was on his knees beside her.

"Marcella!" he could hardly command his voice, but he held her
struggling hand against his lips. "You think that suffering belongs to
one class? Have you really no conception of what you will be dealing to
me if you tear yourself away from me?"

She withdrew her hand, sobbing.

"Don't, don't stay near me!" she said; "there is--more--there is
something else."

Aldous rose.

"You mean," he said in an altered voice, after a pause of silence, "that
another influence--another man--has come between us?"

She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.

"If I could say to you only this," she began at last, with long pauses,
"'I mistook myself and my part in life. I did wrong, but forgive me, and
let me go for both our sakes'--that would be--well!--that would be
difficult,--but easier than this! Haven't you understood at all?
When--when Mr. Wharton came, I began to see things very soon, not in my
own way, but in his way. I had never met any one like him--not any one
who showed me such possibilities in _myself_--such new ways of using
one's life, and not only one's possessions--of looking at all the great
questions. I thought it was just friendship, but it made me critical,
impatient of everything else. I was never myself from the beginning.
Then,--after the ball,"--he stooped over her that he might hear her the
more plainly,--"when I came home I was in my room and I heard
steps--there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house.
I went out to see. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts--oh, I can't tell, I
can't tell!--anyway, he was there. We went into the library, and we
talked. He did not want to touch our marriage,--but he said all sorts of
mad things,--and at last--he kissed me."

The last words were only breathed. She had often pictured herself
confessing these things to him. But the humiliation in which she
actually found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of,
more than she could bear. All those great words of pity and mercy--all
that implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never
attain--to end in this story! The effect of it, on herself, rather than
on him, was what she had not foreseen.

Aldous raised himself slowly.

"And when did this happen?" he asked after a moment.

"I told you--the night of the ball--of the murder," she said with a
shiver; "we saw Hurd cross the avenue. I meant to have told you
everything at once."

"And you gave up that intention?" he asked her, when he had waited a
little for more, and nothing came.

She turned upon him with a flash of the old defiance.

"How could I think of my own affairs?"

"Or of mine?" he said bitterly.

She made no answer.

Aldous got up and walked to the chimney-piece. He was very pale, but his
eyes were bright and sparkling. When she looked up at him at last she
saw that her task was done. His scorn--his resentment--were they not the
expiation, the penalty she had looked forward to all along?--and with
that determination to bear them calmly? Yet, now that they were there in
front of her, they stung.

"So that--for all those weeks--while you were letting me write as I did,
while you were letting me conceive you and your action as I did, you had
this on your mind? You never gave me a hint; you let me plead; you let
me regard you as wrapped up in the unselfish end; you sent me those
letters of his--those most misleading letters!--and all the time--"

"But I meant to tell you--I always meant to tell you," she cried
passionately. "I would never have gone on with a secret like that--not
for your sake--but for my own."

"Yet you did go on so long," he said steadily; "and my agony of mind
during those weeks--my feeling towards you--my--"

He broke off, wrestling with himself. As for her, she had fallen back in
her chair, physically incapable of anything more.

He walked over to her side and took up his hat.

"You have done me wrong," he said, gazing down upon her. "I pray God you
may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future! Give me leave to
write to you once more, or to send my friend Edward Hallin to see you.
Then I will not trouble you again."

He waited, but she could give him no answer. Her form as she lay there
in this physical and moral abasement printed itself upon his heart. Yet
he felt no desire whatever to snatch the last touch--the last kiss--that
wounded passion so often craves. Inwardly, and without words, he said
farewell to her. She heard his steps across the room; the door shut; she
was alone--and free.

BOOK III.

"O Neigung, sage, wie hast du so tief
  Im Herzen dich verstecket?
Wer hat dich, die verborgen schlief,
  Gewecket?"

CHAPTER I.

"Don't suppose that I feel enthusiastic or sentimental about the 'claims
of Labour,'" said Wharton, smiling to the lady beside him. "You may get
that from other people, but not from me. I am not moral enough to be a
fanatic. My position is simplicity itself. When things are inevitable, I
prefer to be on the right side of them, and not on the wrong. There is
not much more in it than that. I would rather be on the back of the
'bore' for instance, as it sweeps up the tidal river, than the swimmer
caught underneath it."

"Well, that is intelligible," said Lady Selina Farrell, looking at her
neighbour, as she crumbled her dinner-roll. To crumble your bread at
dinner is a sign of nervousness, according to Sydney Smith, who did it
with both hands when he sat next an Archbishop; yet no one for a good
many years past had ever suspected Lady Selina of nervousness, though
her powers had probably been tried before now by the neighbourhood of
many Primates, Catholic and Anglican. For Lady Selina went much into
society, and had begun it young.

"Still, you know," she resumed after a moment's pause--"you _play_
enthusiasm in public--I suppose you must."

"Oh! of course," said Wharton, indifferently. "That is in the game."

"Why should it be--always? If you are a leader of the people, why don't
you educate them? My father says that bringing feeling into politics is
like making rhymes in one's account book."

"Well, when you have taught the masses how _not_ to feel," said Wharton,
laughing, "we will follow your advice. Meanwhile it is our brains and
their feelings that do the trick. And by the way, Lady Selina, are _you_
always so cool? If you saw the Revolution coming to-morrow into the
garden of Alresford House, would you go to the balcony and argue?"

"I devoutly hope there would be somebody ready to do something more to