 Marcella by Mrs Humphrey Ward. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Marcella, Chapter 4, recorded by Cheryl Martin. How kind of you, said the rector's sister enthusiastically, but I thought you would come and help us. And as Marcella took some of her burdens from her, Miss Harden kissed Marcella's cheek with a sort of timid eagerness. She had fallen in love with Miss Boyce from the beginning, was now just advanced to this privilege of kissing, and being entirely convinced that her new friend possessed all virtues and all knowledge, found it not difficult to hold that she had been divinely sent to sustain her brother and herself in the disheartening task of civilizing Melor. Mary Harden was naturally a short, roundly-made girl, neither pretty nor plain, with gray blue eyes, a shy manner, and a heart all goodness. Her brother was likened to her, also short, round, and full-faced, with the same attractive eyes. Both were singularly young in aspect, a boy and girl pair. Both had the worn, pinched look which Miss Boyce complained of and which, indeed, went oddly with their whole physique. It was as though creatures built for a normal life of easy-give-and-take with their fellows had fallen upon some unfitting and jarring experience. One striking difference indeed there was between them, for amid the brother's timidity and sweetness there lay, clearly to be felt and seen, the consciousness of the priest, nascent and immature, but already urging and characteristic. Only one face of the three showed any other emotion than quick pleasure at the sight of Marcello Boyce. Aldous Rayburn was clearly embarrassed thereby. Indeed, as he lay down his gun outside the low churchyard wall, where Marcello and the Hardens were greeting, that generally self-possessed, though modest, person was conscious of a quite disabling perturbation of mind. Why, in the name of all good manners and decency, had he allowed himself to be discovered in shooting-trim on that particular morning by Mr. Boyce's daughter on her father's land and within a stone-throw of her father's house? Was he not perfectly well aware of the curt note which his grandfather had that morning dispatched to the new owner of Melor? Had he not ineffectually tried to delay execution the night before, thereby puzzling and half-offending his grandfather? Had not the incident weighed on him ever since? Wounding and admiration and sympathy which seemed to have stolen upon him in the dark during these few weeks since he had made Miss Boyce's acquaintance so strong and starling did he all in a moment feel them to be? And then to intrude upon her thus out of nothing apparently but sheer, moth-like incapacity to keep away? The church footpath indeed was public property and Miss Hardens' burdens had cried aloud to any passing male to help her. But why in this neighborhood at all? Why not rather on the other side of the county? He could have scourged himself on the spot for an unpardonable breach of manners and feeling. However, Miss Boyce certainly made no sign. She received him without any impressment, but also without the smallest symptom of offense. They all moved into the church together, Mr. Rayburn carrying a vast bundle of ivy and fern, the rector and his sister laid in with closely packed baskets of cut flowers. Everything was laid down on the chancel steps beside Marcella's contribution and then the Hardens began to plan out operations. Miss Harden ran over on her fingers the contributions which had been sent in to the rectory or were presently coming over to the church in a handcart. Lord Maxwell has sent the most beautiful pots for the chancel, she said, with a grateful look at young Rayburn. It will be quite a show, to which the young rector assented warmly. It was very good indeed of Lord Maxwell to remember them always so liberally at times like these when they had so little direct claim upon him. They were not his church or his parish, but he never forgot them all the same and Miller was grateful. The rector had all his sister's gentle abusiveness, but a professional dignity besides, even in his thanks, which made itself felt. Marcella flushed as he was speaking. I went to see what I could get in the way of greenhouse things, she said in her proud voice, but we have nothing. There are the houses, but there is nothing in them. But you shall have all our out-of-door flowers and I think a good deal might be done with autumn leaves and wild things, if you will let me try. A speech which brought a flush to Mr. Rayburn's cheek as he stood in the background and led Mary Hardin into an eager asking of Marcella's councils and an eager praising of her flowers. Aldous Rayburn said nothing, but his discomfort increased with every moment. Why had his grandfather been so officious in this matter of the flowers? All very well when Miller was empty, or in the days of a miser and eccentric without woman kind like Robert Boyce. But now the act began to seem to him offensive. A fresh affront offered to an unprotected girl whose quivering, sensitive look as she stood talking to the Hardins touched him profoundly. Mellor Church might almost be regarded as the Boyce's private chapel, so bound up was it with the family and the house. He realized painfully that he ought to be gone, yet could not tear himself away. Her passionate willingness to spend herself for the place and people she had made her own at first sight checked every now and then by a proud and sore reserve. It was too pretty, too sad. It stung and spurred him as he watched her. One moment his foot moved for departure. The next he was resolving that somehow or other he must make speech with her. Excuse. Explain. Ridiculous. How was it possible that he should do either? He had met her, perhaps had tried to meet her, tolerably often since their first chance encounter weeks ago in the vicarage drawing room. All through there had been on his side the uncomfortable knowledge of his grandfather's antipathy to Richard Boyce and of the social steps to which that antipathy would inevitably lead. But Miss Boyce had never shown the smallest consciousness so far of anything untoward or unusual in her position. She had been clearly taken up with the interest and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered. The old house, its associations, its history, the beautiful country in which it lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with that of the town. He had heard her talk of all these things with a freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase and, no doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance which riveted attention. The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The girl's vivid beauty glorified them, made them seem to him a mere special fullness of life, so that in his new preoccupation with herself and by contact with her frank self-confidence he had almost forgotten her position and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that unlucky note from Melor, his grandfather's prompt reply to it, his own ineffective protest, and now this tongue-tiedness, this clumsy intrusion which she must feel to be an indulgacy, an outrage. Suddenly he heard Miss Harden saying with penitent emphasis, I am stupid. I have left the scissors and the wire on the table at home. We can't go on without them. It is really too bad of me. I will go for them, said Marcella promptly. Here is the handcart just arrived and some people come to help. You can't be spared. I will be back directly. And gathering up her black skirt in a slim white hand, she sped down the church and was out of the south door before the Hardens had time to protest, or Aldous Rayburn understood what she was doing. A vexed word from Miss Harden enlightened him, and he went after the fugitive, overtaking her just to wear his gun and dog-lay outside the churchyard. Let me go, Miss Boyce, he said, as he caught her up. My dog and I will run there and back. But Marcella hardly looked at him or paused. Oh no, she said quickly, I should like the walk. He hesitated. Then, with a flush which altered his usually quiet self-contained expression, he moved on beside her. Allow me to go with you then. You are sure to find fresh loads to bring back? If it's like our harvest festival, the things keep dropping in all day. Marcella's eyes were still on the ground. I thought you were on your way to shoot, Mr. Rayburn. So I was, but there is no hurry, if I can be useful. Both the birds and the keeper can wait. Where are you going? To some outlying fields of ours on the Windmill Hill, there is a tenant there who wants to see me. He is a prosy person with a host of grievances. I took my gun as a possible means of escape from him. Windmill Hill? I know the name. Oh, I remember. It was there. My father has just been telling me that your father and he shot the pair of kestrels when they were boys together. Her tone was quite light, but somehow it had an accent, an emphasis which made all this Rayburn supremely uncomfortable. In his disquiet he thought of various things to say, but he was not ready nor naturally effusive. The turn of them did not please him and he remained silent. Meantime Marcella's heart was beating fast. She was meditating a coup. Mr Rayburn? Yes. Will you thank me a very extraordinary person if I ask you a question? Your father and mine were great friends, weren't they? As boys? Your family and mine were friends altogether? I believe so. I have always heard so, said her companion, flushing still redder. You knew Uncle Robert? Lord Maxwell did. Yes, as much as anyone knew him, but oh, I know, he shut himself up and hated his neighbors. Still, you knew him, and Papa and your father were boys together. Well then, if you won't mind telling me. I know it's bold to ask, but I have reasons. Why does Lord Maxwell write to Papa in the third person? And why has your aunt, Miss Rayburn, never found time in all these weeks to call on Mama? She turned and faced him, her splendid eyes, one challenge. The glow and fire of the whole gesture, the daring of it, and yet the suggestion of womanish weakness in the hand which trembled against her dress and then the twitching lip. If it had been fine acting, it could not have been more complete, and, in a sense, acting there was in it. Marcel's emotions were real, but her mind seldom deserted her. One half of her was impulsive and passionate. The other half looked on and put in finishing touches. Acting or no, the surprise of her outburst swept the man beside her off his feet. He found himself floundering in a sea of excuses, not for his relations, but for himself. He ought never to have intruded. It was odious, unpardonable. He had no business whatever to put himself in her way. Would she please understand that it was an accident? It should not happen again. He quite understood that she could not regard him with friendliness, and so on. He had never so lost his self-possession. Meanwhile, Marcel's brows contracted. She took his excuses as a fresh offence. You mean I suppose that I have no right to ask such questions, she cried, that I am not behaving like a lady as one of your relations would? Well, I dare say I was not brought up like that. I was not brought up at all. I have had to make myself, so you must avoid me if you like. Of course you will. But I resolved there, in the church, that I would make just one effort before everything crystallizes to break through. If we must live on here hating our neighbors and being cut by them, I thought I would just ask you why first? There is no one else to ask. Hardly anybody has called except the hardens, and a few new people that don't matter. And I have nothing to be ashamed of, said the girl passionately, nor has Mama. Papa, I suppose, did some bad things long ago. I have never known. I don't know now what they were. But I should like to understand. Is everybody going to cut us because of that? With a great effort Aldous Rayburn pulled himself together, certain fine instincts both of race and conduct coming to his help. He met her excited luck by one which had both dignity and friendliness. I will tell you what I can, Miss Boyce. If you ask me, it is right I should. You must forgive me if I say anything that hurts you. I will try not. I will try not, he repeated earnestly. In the first place, I know hardly anything in detail. I do not remember that I have ever wished to know. But I gather that some years ago, when I was still a lad, something in Mr. Boyce's life, some financial matters, I believe, during the time that he was member of parliament, made a scandal, and especially among his family and old friends. It was the effect upon his old father, I think, who, as you know, died soon afterwards. Marcella started. I didn't know, she said quickly. Aldous Rayburn's distress grew. I really oughtn't to speak of these things, he said, for I don't know them accurately. But I want to answer what you said. I do indeed. It was that, I think, chiefly. But he here respected and loved your grandfather. My grandfather did. And there was great feeling for him. I see, I see, said Marcella, her chest heaving, and against Papa. She walked on quickly, hardly seeing where she was going, her eyes dimmed with tears. There was a wretched pause. Then Aldous Rayburn broke out. But after all, it is very long ago, and there may have been some harsh judgment. My grandfather may have been misinformed as to some of the facts. And I, he hesitated, struck with the awkwardness of what he was going to say. But Marcella understood him. And you will try and make him alter his mind, she said, not ungratefully, but still with a touch of sarcasm in her tone. No, Mr. Rayburn, I don't think that will succeed. They walked on in silence for a little while. At last he said, turning upon her a face in which she could not but see the true feeling of a just and kindly man. I meant that if my grandfather could be led to express himself in a way which Mr. Boyce could accept, even if there were no great friendship as there used to be, there might be something better than this, this which is so painful. And anyway, Miss Boyce, whatever happens, will you let me say this once? That there is no word, no feeling in this neighborhood. How could there be, towards you and your mother, but one of respect and admiration? Do believe that, even if you feel that you can never be friendly towards me and mine again, or forget the things I have said. Respect and admiration, said Marcella, wondering and still scornful. Pity, perhaps. There might be that. But anyway, Mama goes with Papa. She always has done. She always will. So shall I, of course. But I am sorry, horribly sore and sorry. I was so delighted to come here. I have been very little at home and understood hardly anything about this worry, not how serious it was, nor what it meant. Oh, I am sorry. There was so much I wanted to do here, if anybody could only understand what it means to me to come to this place. They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them, beyond a stubble field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners, lay the small scattered tillage, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning against a great belt of distant beech wood, which beguirred the hamlet and the common along which it lay. The stubble field was a feast of shade and tint, of apricots and gold shot with the subtlest purples and browns. The flame of the wild cherry leaf and the deeper crimson of the haws made every hedge a wonder. The apples gleamed in the cottage garden, and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers which made the village. Instinctively, both stopped. Marcella locked her hands behind her in a gesture familiar to her in moments of excitement. The light wind blew back her dress in soft, eddying folds. For the moment, in her tall grace, she had the air of some young victory poised upon a height, till you looked at her face which was, indeed, not exultant at all, but tragic, extravagantly tragic, as Aldous Rayburn, in his English reserve, would perhaps have thought in the case of any woman with tamer eyes and a less winning mouth. I don't want to talk about myself, she began. But you know, Mr. Rayburn, you must know what a state of things there is here. You know what a disgrace that village is. Oh, one reads books, but I never thought people could actually live like that, here in the wide country, with room for all. It makes me lie awake at night. We are not rich. We are very poor. The house is all out of repair, and the estate, as, of course, you know, is in a wretched condition. But when I see these cottages, and the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to anything we get. I had some friends in London who were socialists, and I followed and agreed with them. But here one sees. Yes, indeed, it is too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives depend upon him. Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser. And look at the death rate of the village. Look at the children. You can see how it has crushed the hardens already. No, we have no right to it. It ought to be taken from us. Someday it will be taken from us. Aldis Rayburn smiled and was himself again. A woman's speculations were easier to deal with than a woman's distress. It is not so hopeless as that, I think, he said kindly. The Mellor cottages are in a bad state, certainly. But you have no idea how soon a little energy and money and thought sets things to right. But we have no money, cried Marcella. And if he is miserable here, my father will have no energy to do anything. He will not care what happens. He will defy everybody and just spend what he has on himself. And it will make me wretched. Wretched. Look at that cottage to the right, Mr. Rayburn. It is Jim Hurds, a man who works mainly on the church farm when he is in work. But he is deformed and not so strong as others. The farmers too seem to be cutting down labor everywhere. Of course I don't understand. I am so new to it. Hurd and his family had an awful winter, last winter. Harley kept body and soul together. And now he is out of work already. The man at the church farm turned him off directly after harvest. He sees no prospect of getting work by the winter. He spends his days tramping to look for it. But nothing turns up. Last winter they parted with all they could sell. This winter it must be the workhouse. It's heartbreaking. And he has a mind he can feel. I lend him the labor paper I take in and get him to talk. He has more education than most and, oh, the bitterness at the bottom of him. But not against persons, individuals. It is like a sort of blind patience when you come to that. They make excuses even for Uncle Robert to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a crime. Yes, a crime. The woman must have been such a pretty creature. And refined too. She is consumptive, of course. What else could you expect with that cottage and that food? So is the eldest boy a little white atomy. And the other children. Talk of London. I never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village. Twelve shillings a week. And work about half the year. Oh, they ought to hate us. I try to make them cried Marcella her eyes gleaming. They ought to hate all of us landowners and the whole wicked system. It keeps them from the land which they ought to be sharing with us. It makes one man master instead of all men brothers. And who is fit to be master? Which of us? Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people's lives and then look at the result. Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad, said Aldous Rayburn, smiling a little, but more coley. Marcella, glancing at him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and class pride in him. A pride which was not going to assert itself, but nonetheless implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and him. In an instant her quick imagination realized herself as the daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class. When she attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her, any man in similar circumstances, must naturally think, Ah well, poor girl, Dick Boyce's daughter, what can you expect? Whereas Aldous Rayburn, she thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for honorable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or towards their neighbors and dependents. A shiver of passionate vanity, wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frames diffant. There are model squires, of course, she said slowly, striving at least for a personal dignity which should match his. There are plenty of land owners who do their duty as they understand it. No one denies that. But that does not affect the system. The grandson of the best man may be the worst, but his one man power remains the same. No, the time has come for a wider basis. Paternal government and charity were very well in their way. Democratic self-government will manage to do without them. She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look. It delighted her to pit these wide and threatening generalizations against the Maxwell power. To show the air of it that she at least, father or no father, was no hereditary subject of his and bound to no blind admiration of the Maxwell methods and position. Aldous Rayburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at her indeed all the time. Miss Boyce's opinions could hardly matter to him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her talk. This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class went, as it happened, very deep with him. Too deep for chance discussion. What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself, seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous type pick up from newspapers and magazines. She had touched his family pride for an instant, but only for an instant. What he was abidingly conscious of was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more determined, absurdly determined, to help her. Oh, no doubt the world will do very well without us some day, he said lightly, an answer to her tirade. No one is indispensable. But are you so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had observed, pardon me for saying it, on the two or three occasions we have met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the old place, you say? You were delighted to come and live where your ancestors lived before you? You were full of desires to pull these poor people out of the mire in your own way? No, I don't feel that you are thorough going. Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful laugh, a laugh of humorous confession which changed her whole look and mood. Is that all you have noticed? If you wish to know, Mr. Rayburn, I love the laborers for touching their hats to me. I love the school children for bobbing to me. I love my very self, ridiculous as you may think it, for being Miss Boyce of Mallor. Don't say things like that, please, he interrupted. I think I have not deserved them. His tone made her repent her jive. No, indeed you have been most kind to me, she cried. I don't know how it is. I am bitter and personal in a moment, when I don't mean to be. Yes, you are quite right. I am proud of it all. If nobody comes to see us and we are left all alone out in the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in. Proud of the old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the beaches. How absurd it would seem to other people who have so much more, but I have had so little, so little. Her voice had a hungry, lingering note. And as for the people? Yes, I am proud too that they like me, and that already I can influence them. Oh, I will do my best for them, my very best, but it will be hard, very hard, if there is no one to help me. She heaved alongside. In spite of the words, what she had said did not seem to be an appeal for his pity. Rather, there was in it a sweet, self-dedicating note, as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a note which once more left Aldous Rayburn's self-restraint tottering. She was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside him. After all her profitesce airs, a pensive, womanly thing, that must surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat. He bent over to her. Don't talk of there being no one to help. There may be many ways out of present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be large-minded enough to count one person here, your friend? She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller. She liked that. She liked, too, the quiet, cautious strength of his English expression and bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no thrill, but inwardly her quick, dramatizing imagination was already constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her, and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own power, and of the general fullness of her new life, that she said. I am large-minded enough. You have been very kind, and I have been very wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret. I am sure, if you can help me, you will. There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before the Myrie Village Road began, and almost in sight of the little vicarage. Tall as Rayburn, with his hand on the gate, suddenly gathered a spray of traveler's joy out of the hedge beside him. That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it, he said, and with a smile put the cluster of white seed tufts and green leaves into one of the pockets of his shooting jacket. Oh, don't tie me down, said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also. And don't you think, Mr. Rayburn, that you might open that gate? At least we can't get the scissors and the wires unless you do. Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward Book 1, Chapter 5 The autumn evening was far advanced, when Aldous Rayburn, after his days shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home. He glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a glimpse to the left of the little church and to the right of the long eastern front of the house, lingered a moment to watch the sunset light streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards, in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both desires and dreads. He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of him in the shooting cart which his master had declined. His dog, a black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous Rayburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court. About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodlands. After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its three-cornered piece of open common and its patches of arable, representing the original forest clearing made centuries ago by the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern Uplands. The Beech Woods closed thickly round him. Beech Woods of all kinds, from forest slopes where majestic trees, grey and soaring pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the dead leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished faces, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings crowded on each other, and here and there, amid the airless tangle of leaf and branch, some long pheasant drive cut straight through the green heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and far receding path. Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far within the trees the sounds of Hatchet and Turner's Wheel, which told him he was passing one of the woodcutter's huts, that in the hilly parts of this district, supply the first steps of the chair-making industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous malleys. And two or three times also he passed a string of the great timber carts, which haunt the Chiltern Lanes. The patient team of brown horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the Carter's Pipes, rising slowly into the damp, sunset air. But for the most part the road along which he walked was utterly forsaken of humankind, nor were there any signs of habitation, no cottages, no farms. He was scarcely more than thirty miles from London, yet in this solemn evening glow it would have been hardly possible to find a remotor, lonelier nature, than that through which he was passing. And presently the solitude took a grander note. He was nearing the edge of the high upland along which he had been walking. In front of him the long road with its gleaming pools bent sharply to the left, showing pale and distinct against a darkening heaven and the wide-grave fields which had now, on one side of his path, replaced the serried growth of young plantations. The night was fast advancing from south and east over the upland. But straight in front of him and on his right the forest trees, still flooded with sunsets, fell in sharp steeps towards the plain. Through their straight stems glowed the blues and purples of that lower world. And when the slopes broke and opened here and there, above the rounded masses of their red and golden leaf, the level distances of the plain could be seen stretching away, the limitable in the evening dusk, to a west of glory, just vacant of the sun. The golden ball had sunk into the mists awaiting it, but the splendor of its last rays was still on all the western front of the hills, bathing the beech woods as they rose and fell with the large undulations of the ground. Insensibly, Rayburn, felt as he was, with a new and surging emotion, drew the solemnity of the forest glades and of the rolling distances into his heart. When he reached the point where the road diverged to the left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, once he commanded the whole sweep of the hill ramparts from north to west, and the whole expanse of the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost in many thoughts, while the night fell. He looked over the central plain of England, the plain which stretches westward to the Thames and the Berkshire Hills, and northward through the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent. An historic plain, symbolic, all of it, to an English eye. There in the western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford, in front of him was the site of Shawgrove Fields, where Hamden got his clumsy death wound, and Thame, where he died, and far away to his right, where the hill swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the face of the down, the vast scarred cross, whereby a Saxon king had blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath. Aldous Rayburn was a man to feel these things. He had seldom stood on this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous. If it had not been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul. For the great view had an interest for him, personally, it could hardly have possessed to the same degree for any other man. On his left hand, Maxwell Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill, a splendid pile, which some day would be his. Behind him, through all the uplands he had just reversed, beneath the point where he stood, along the sides of the hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land, which also would be his, which indeed, practically, was already his. For his grandfather was an old man, with a boundless trust in the air on whom his affections and hopes were centered. The dim churches scattered over the immediate plain below. The villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers in these endless fields, the farms amid their trees, the cottages, showing here and there on the fringes of the woods, all the equipment and organization of popular life, over an appreciable part of the English midland at his feet, intended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated under the conditions of the England of today, upon him, upon his one man's brain in conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity. In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's tremulous elation and sense of romance. Since his Cambridge days, and of late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot in life had been want to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight than of inspiration. Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed by remorses and scruples, which had never plagued his forefathers. During his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation, which, as had happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men. The responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the relation of the state to the individual, of the old radical dogma of free contract, to the thwarting facts of social inequality, the Tory ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the liberal ideal of self-government by the many, these common places of economical and political discussion had very early become living and often saw realities in Audius Rayburn's mind, because of the long conflict in him dating from his Cambridge life between the influences of birth and early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world. Towards the close of his first year at Trinity, a young man joined the college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages, a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows. He was poor and held a small scholarship, but it was soon plain that his health was not equal to the trippus routine and that the prices of the place, brilliant as was his intellectual endowment, were not for him. After an inward struggle, of which none perhaps but Audius Rayburn had any exact knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to another career. A couple of hours serious brainwork in the day was all that was ever possible to him hence-forward. He spent it, as well as thoughts in the conversation, of his less strenuous moments on the study of history and sociology with a view to joining the staff of lectures for the manufacturing in country towns, which the two great universities, touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organize. He came of a stock which promised well for such a pioneer's task. His father had been an able factory inspector, well known for his share in the inauguration and revision of certain important factory reforms. The son inherited a passionate humanity of soul and added to it a magnetic and personal charm which soon made him a remarkable power, not only in his own college, but among the finer spirits of the university generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour, the river, the dons, the schools, to arguments of great pith and moment, discussions that searched the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the utmost without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative opposition. Edward Talant could do this without a pose, without a false note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish intensity and simplicity. To many a trinity man in after life, the memory of his slight figure and fair head, of the eager, slightly parted mouth, of the eyes glowing with some inward vision, and of the gesture with which he would spring up at some critical point to deliver himself, standing amid his seated and often dissentient auditors, came back vivid and ineffacable as only youth can make the image of its profits. Upon audious rayburn, Edward Talant produced, from the first, a deep impression. The interests to which Talant's mind soon became exclusively devoted, such as the systematic study of English poverty or of the relation of religion to social life, reforms of the land and of the church overflowed upon rayburn with a kindling and disturbing force. Edward Talant was his gadfly, and he had no resource because he loved his tormentor. Fundamentally the two men were widely different. Rayburn was a true son of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob reason and all the vulgarities of popular rhetoric, steeped too in a number of subtle prejudices and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and conclusions of Talant's intellect. Temperance and the Cambridge discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar. His mind worked slowly yet with a delicate precision, and his generally cold manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet, except in the case of his friendship with Edward Talant, led him to much personal happiness. Talant left Cambridge after a past degree to become lecturer on industrial and economical questions in the northern English towns. Rayburn stayed on a year longer, and then, sacrificing the idea of a fellowship, returned to Maxwell Court to be his grandfather's companion and helper in the work of the estate, his family proposing that, after a few years' practical experience of the life and occupations of a country gentleman, he should enter Parliament and make a career in politics. Since then five or six years had passed, during which he had been a great leader during which he had learned to know the estate thoroughly and to take his normal share in the business and pleasures of the neighborhood. For the last two years he had been his grandfather's sole agent, a poor law guardian and magistrate besides, and a member of most of the various committees for social and educational purposes in the country. He was a sufficiently keen sportsman to save appearances with his class, enjoyed a walk after the partridges indeed, with a friend or two as much as most men, and played the host at the two or three great batches of the year with a propriety which his grandfather, however, no longer mistook for enthusiasm. There was nothing much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank. His neighbors felt him to be a personality but thought him reserved and difficult. He respected, but he was not popular like his grandfather. People speculated as to how he would get on in parliament, or whom he was to marry, but except to the dwellers in Maxwell Court itself, or of late to the farmers and laborers on the estate, it would not have mattered much to anybody if he had not been there. Nobody ever connected any romantic thought with him. There was something in his strong builds, with the aquiline face, his inconspicuous brown eyes and hair, which seemed from the beginning to mark him out as the ordinary earthly dweller in an earthly world. Nevertheless, these years had been to Aldous Rayburn, years marked by an expansion and deepening of the whole man, such as few are capable of. Edward Helens visits to the court, the walking tours which brought the two friends together almost every year in Switzerland, or the Highlands, the course of a full and intimate correspondence, and the various calls made for public purposes by the enthusiast and pioneer upon the pocket and social power of the rich man. These things and influences, together, of course, with the pressure of an environing world, ever more real, and, on the whole, ever more oppressive, as it was better understood, had confronted Aldous Rayburn before now with a good many teasing problems of conduct and experience. His tastes, his sympathies, his affinities were all with the old order, but the old faiths, economical, social, religious, were fermenting within him in different stages of disintegration and reconstruction, and his reserved habit and often solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over refinement. His future career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him. One thing only was clear to him that to dogmatize about any subject under heaven at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot. So that Aldous Rayburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed with struggle of different kinds. And the particular point of view where he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his memory with flashes of self-realization which were, on the whole, more of a torment to him than a joy. If he had not been Aldous Rayburn or any other person tied to a particular individuality with a particular place in the label in the world, the task of the analytic mind in face of the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one. So it had often seemed to him. But tonight all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away. A transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot, a man once more young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at last through all his being, the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long-missed, long-hungered for. Six weeks was it since he had first seen her, this tall, straight, Marcella Boyce. He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had walked beside him across the church-fields in that thin black dress, with the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes, the small white teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its gesture, so restless, so alive. What a presence, how absorbing, troubling, preoccupying. No one in her company could forget her, nay, could fail to observe her. What ease and daring, and yet no hardness with it, rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion beneath it all. How straight she had flung her questions at him, her most awkward embarrassing questions. What other woman would have dared such candor, unless perhaps as a stroke of fine art, he had known women indeed who could have done it so. But where could be the art, the policy, he asked himself indignantly, in the sudden outburst of a young girl, pleading with her companion sense of truth and good feeling, in behalf of those nearest to her. As to her dilemma itself, in his excitement he thought of it with nothing but the purest pleasure. She had let him see that she did not expect him to be able to do much for her, though she was ready to believe him her friend. Ah, well, he drew a long breath. For once, Rayburn, strange compound that he was of the man of rank and the philosopher, remembered his own social power and position with an exultant satisfaction. No doubt Dick Boyce had misbehaved himself badly. The strength of Lord Maxwell's feeling was sufficient proof thereof. No doubt the country, as Rayburn knew himself in some detail, were disposed to leave Miller Park severely alone. What of that? Was it for nothing that the Maxwell's had been for generations at the head of the country, i.e. of that circle of neighbouring families connected by the ties of ancestral friendship or of intermarriage, on whom in this purely agricultural and rural district the social pleasure and comfort of Miss Boyce and her mother must depend? He, like Marcella, did not believe that Richard Boyce's offences were of great unpardonable order. Although, owing to a certain absent and preoccupied temper, he had never yet taken the trouble to inquire into them in detail. As to any real restoration of cordiality between the owner of Miller and his father's old friends and connections, that, of course, was not to be looked for, but there should be decent social recognition, and, in the case of Miss Boyce and her daughter, there should be homage and warm welcome, simply because she wished it, and it was absurd she should not have it. Rayburn, whose mind was ordinarily destitute of the most elementary capacity for social intrigue, began to plot in detail how it should be done. He relied first upon winning his grandfather, his popular, distinguished grandfather, whose lightest word had weights in Brookshire. And then he himself had two or three women friends in the country, not more, for women had not occupied much place in his thoughts till now. But they were good friends, and, from the social point of view, important. He would set them to work at once. These things should be chiefly managed by women. But no patronage, she would never bear that, the glancing proud creature. She must guess, indeed, let him tread as delicately as he might, that he and others were at work for her. But, oh, she should be softly handled, as far as he could achieve it, she should, in a very little while, live and breathe, compassed with warm airs of goodwill and consideration. He felt himself happy, amazingly happy, that at the very beginning of his love it should be thus open to him in these trivial, foolish ways to please and befriend her. Her social dilemma and discomfort one moment, indeed, made him sore for her. The next, they were a kind of joy, since it was they, gave him this opportunity to put out a strong right arm. Everything about her at this moment was divine and lovely to him. All the qualities of her rich, uneven youth, which she had shown in their short intercourse, her rashness, her impulsiveness, her generosity. Let her but trust herself to him and she should try her social experiments as she pleased. She should plan utopias and he would be her hajman to build them. The man perplexed with too much thinking remembered the girls innocent, ignorant readiness to stamp the world's stuff anew after the forms of her own pitting thought with a positive thirst of sympathy. The deep poetry and ideality at the root of him under all the weight of intellectual and critical debate leapt towards her. He thought of the rapid talk she had poured out upon him after their compact friendship in their walk back to the church, of her enthusiasm for her socialist friends and their ideals with a momentary madness of self-suppression and tender humility. In reality, a man like Algeus Rayburn is born to be the judge and touchstone of natures like Marcella Boyce. But the illusion of passion may deal as disturbingly with moral rank as with social. It was his first love. Years before in the vacation before he went to college his boyish mind had been crossed by a fancy for a pretty cousin a little older than himself who had been very kind indeed to Lord Maxwell's heir. But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental life, his friendship with Edward Hallan, and the beginnings of a moral storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met he was quite cold to her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery endowed with a trick of parrot phrases. She, on her part, thought him detestable. She married shortly afterwards and often spoke to her husband in private of her escape from that queer fellow Algeus Rayburn. Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women both in London and in the country and had made friends with some of them in his quiet, serious way. But none of them had roused in him even a passing thrill of passion. He had despised himself for it, had told himself again and again that he was but half a man. Ah! He had done himself injustice. He had done himself injustice. His heart was light as air. When at last the sound of a clock striking in the plane roused him with a start and he sprang up from the heap of stones where he had been sitting in the dusk he bent down a moment to give a gay caress to his dog and then trudged off briskly home whistling under the emerging stars. End of Chapter 5 Recording by Katie Riley December 2009 Book 1, Chapter 6 of Marcella This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward Chapter 6 By the time, however, Prince Rayburn came within sight of the windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down. The lover had fallen, for the first time, into the background and the capable, serious man of thirty with a considerable experience of the world behind him was perfectly conscious that there were many difficulties in his path. He could not induce his grandfather to move in a matter of Richard Boyce without a statement of his own feelings and aims. Nor would he have avoided frankness if he could. On every ground it was his grandfather's do. The Rayburns were reserved towards the rest of the world, but amongst themselves there had always been a fine tradition of mutual trust. And Lord Maxwell amply deserved that at this particular moment his grandson should maintain it. But Rayburn could not and did not flatter himself that his grandfather would to begin with receive his news, even with toleration. The grim satisfaction with which that note about the shooting had been dispatched was very clear in the grandson's memory. At the same time it said much for the history of those long years during which the old man and his heir had been left to console each other for the terrible bereavements which had thrown them together that Audius Rayburn never for an instant feared the kind of violent outbursts and opposition that other men in similar circumstances might have looked forward to. The just living of a lifetime makes a man incapable of any mere selfish handling of another's interests, a fact on which the bystander may reckon. It was quite dark by the time he entered the large open-roofed hall of the court. Is his lordship in? He asked of a passing footman. Yes, sir. In the library. He has been asking for you, sir. Audius turned to the right along the fine corridor lighted with tutor-windows to an inner quadrangle and filled with Greco-Roman statuary and sarcophagi which made one of the principal features of the court. The great house was warm and scented and the various open doors which he passed on his way to the library disclosed large, fire-lit rooms with paneling, tapestry, pictures, books everywhere. The color of the hall was dim and rich. Antiquity, refinement reigned together with an exquisite quiet and order. No one was to be seen and not a voice was to be heard but there was no impression of solitude. These warm, darkly glowing rooms seemed to be waiting for the return of guests just gone out of them. Not one of them, but had an air of cheerful company. For once, as he walked through it, Audius Rabern spared the old house an affectionate, possessive thought. Its size and wealth, with all that both implied, had often weighed upon him. Tonight his breath quickened as he passed the range of family portraits leading to the library door. There was a vacant space here and there. Room for your Mrs. II, my boy, when you get her, as his grandfather had once put it. Why, you've had a long day, Audius, all by yourself, said Lord Maxwell, turning sharply round at the sound of the opening of the door. What's kept you so late? His spectacles fell forward as he spoke and the old man shut them in his hand, peering at his grandson through the shadows of the room. He was sitting by a huge fire an Edinburgh view, open on his knee. Lamp and firelight showed a finely carried head with a high wave of snowy hair thrown back, a long face delicately sharp in the lines and an attitude instinct with the alertness of an unimpaired bodily vigor. The birds were scarce and we followed them a good way, said Audius, as he came up to the fire. Rickman kept me on the farm, too, a good while with interminable screeds about the things he once done for him. Oh, there is no end to Rickman, said Lord Maxwell, good-humoredly. He pays his rent for the amusement of getting it back again. Land-owning will soon be the most disinterested form of philanthropy known to mankind. But I have some news for you. Here is a letter from Barton by the Second Post. He named an old friend of his own and a cabinet minister of the day. Look at it. You will see he says they can't possibly carry on beyond January. Half their men are becoming unmanageable and S is Bill, to which they are committed, will certainly dish them. Parliament will meet in January and he thinks an amendment to the address will finish it. All this confidential, of course, but he saw no harm in letting me know. So now, my boy, you will have your work cut out for you this winter. Two or three evenings a week, you will not get off with less. Nobody's plum drops into his mouth nowadays. Barton tells me, too, that he hears young Wharton will certainly stand for the Dunford Division and will be down upon us directly. He will make himself as disagreeable to us and the leavens as he can, that we may be sure of. We may be thankful for one small mercy that his mother has departed this life, otherwise you and I would have known Florence Quid Femina Pozzette. The old man looked up at his grandson with a humorous eye. August was standing absently before the fire and did not reply immediately. Come, come, August, said Lord Maxwell with a touch of impatience. Don't overdo the philosopher. Though I am getting old, the next government can't deny me a finger in the pie. You and I between us will be able to pull through two or three of the things we care about in the next house with ordinary luck. It is my firm belief that the next election will give our side the best chance that we have had for half a generation. Throw up your cap, sir. The world may be of green cheese, but we have got to live in it. August smiled suddenly, uncontrollably, with a look which left his grandfather staring. He had been appealing to the man of maturity standing on the threshold of a possibly considerable career, and, as he did so, it was as though he saw the boy of eighteen reappear. Je ne demande pas mieux, said August, with a quick lift of the voice above its ordinary key. The fact is, grandfather, I have come home with something in my mind very different from politics, and you must give me time to change the focus. I did not come home as straight as I might, for I wanted to be sure of myself before I spoke to you. During the last few weeks, Gone! cried Lord Maxwell. But August did not find it easy to go on. It suddenly struck him that it was, after all, absurd that he should be confiding in any one at such a stage, and his tongue stumbled. But he had gone too far for retreats. Lord Maxwell sprang up and seized him by the arms. You are in love, sir. Out with it. I have seen the only woman in the world I have ever wished to marry, said August, fleshing, but with deliberation. Whether she will ever have me, I have no idea, but I can conceive no greater happiness than to win her. And as I want you, grandfather, to do something for her and for me, it seemed to me I had no right to keep my feelings to myself. Besides, I am not accustomed to his voice wavered a little. You have treated me as more than a son. Lord Maxwell pressed his arm affectionately. My dear boy, but don't keep me on tender hooks like this. Tell me the name. The name. And two or three long meditated possibilities flashed through the old man's mind. August replied with a certain slow stiffness. Marcella Boyce. Richard Boyce's daughter. I saw her first six weeks ago. God bless my soul, exclaimed Lord Maxwell, felling back a step or two and staring at his companion. August watched him with anxiety. You know that fellow's history, August. Richard Boyce? Not in detail. If you will tell me now all you know, it will be a help. Of course, I see that you and the neighborhood mean to cut him, and for the sake of of Miss Boyce and her mother, I should be glad to find a way out. Good heavens, said Lord Maxwell, beginning to pace the room, hands pressed behind him, head bent. Good heavens, what a business! What an extraordinary business! He stopped short in front of Aldis. Where have you been meeting her, this young lady? At the Hardins, sometimes in Mellor Village, she goes about among the cottages a great deal. You have not proposed to her? I was not certain of myself till to-day. Besides, it would have been presumption so far. She has shown me nothing but the mirror's trendliness. What! You can suppose she would refuse you? Cried Lord Maxwell, and could not for the life of him keep the sarcastic intonation out of his voice. Aldis's look showed distress. You have not seen her grandfather? He said quietly. Lord Maxwell began to pace again, trying to restrain the painful emotion that filled him. Of course Aldis had been entrapped. The girl had played upon his pity, his chivalry, for obvious reasons. Aldis tried to soothe him, to explain, but Lord Maxwell hardly listened. At last he threw himself into his chair again with a long breath. Give me time, Aldis. Give me time. The thought of marrying my heir to that man's daughter knocks me over a little. There was silence again. Then Lord Maxwell looked at his watch with old-fashioned precision. There is half an hour before dinner. Sit down, and let us talk this thing out. The conversation, thus started, however, was only begun by dinnertime. Was resumed after Miss Rayburn, the small, shrewd, bright-eyed person who governed Lord Maxwell's household, had withdrawn, and was continued in the library for a time beyond his lordship's usual retiring hour. It was for the most part a monologue on the part of the grandfather, broken by occasional words from his companion. And for some time Marcella Boyce herself, the woman whom Aldis desired to marry, was hardly mentioned in it. Oppressed and tormented by a surprise which struck, or seemed to strike, at some of his most cherished ideals and just resentments, Lord Maxwell was bent upon letting his grandson know, in all their fullness, the reasons why no daughter of Richard Boyce could ever be, in a true sense, fit wife for a Rayburn. Aldis was, of course, perfectly familiar with the creed implied in it all. A Maxwell should give himself no heirs whatever, should feel indeed no pride whatever, towards men of goodwill, whether peasant, professional, or noble. Such heirs, or such feeling, would be both vulgar and un-Christian. But when it came to marriage, then it behooved him to see that, the family, that carefully grafted and selected stock to which he owed so much, should suffer no loss or deterioration through him. Marriage with the fit woman meant for a Rayburn the preservation of a pure blood, of a dignified and honorable family habit, and, moreover, the securing to his children such an atmosphere of self-respect within and of consideration from without, as he had himself grown up in. And a woman could not be fit, in this sense, who came either of an insignificant stock, untrained to large uses and opportunities, or of a stock which had degenerated and lost its right of equal mating with the vigorous owners of unblemished names. Money was, of course, important and not to be despised, but the present Lord Maxwell, at any rate, large-minded and conscious of wealth he could never spend, laid comparatively little stress upon it, whereas, in his old age, the other instinct had but grown the stronger with him, as the world waxed more democratic and the influence of the great family's wanes. Nor could I just pretend to be insensible to such feelings and beliefs. Supposing the daughter could be one, there was no doubt whatever that Richard Boyce would be a cross and burden to a rabid son-in-law. But then, after all, love for once made philosophy easy, made class tradition set light. Impatience grew, a readiness to believe Richard Boyce as black as Arabus and be done with it so that one might get to the point, the real point. As to the story, it came to this. In his youth Richard Boyce had been the younger and favourite son of his father. He possessed some ability, some good looks, some manners, all of which were wanting in his loudish elder brother. Sacrifices were accordingly made for him. He was sent to the bar. When he stood for parliament his election expenses were jubilantly paid and his father afterwards maintained him with as generous a hand as the estate could possibly bear, often in the teeth of the grudging resentment of Robert his first-born. Richard showed signs of making a rapid success at any rate on the political platform. He spoke with facility and grappled with a drudgery of committees during his first two years at Westminster in a way to win him the favourable attention of the Tory whips. He had a gift for modern languages and spoke chiefly on foreign affairs so that when an important eastern commission had to be appointed in connection with some troubles in the Balkan states his merits and his father's exertions with certain old family friends suffice to place him upon it. The commission was headed by a remarkable man and was able to do valuable work at a moment of great public interest under the eyes of Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction and were much-feeted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to see Dick's success for himself and his Rebicant Country Gentleman's face and white head might have been observed at many a London party beside the small Italiante, Physique of his son and Love, as he is want, came in the wake of fortune. A certain fresh West Country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season fell across Mr. Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as unspoiled as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys. And her character, a character of much complexity and stoical strength, was little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce through a mist of romance, forgot herself absolutely in idealizing him and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him. Five years of parliament and marriage followed and then a crash. It was a common and sorted story made tragic by the quality of the wife and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities of Dick Boyce himself. First the desire to maintain a position to make play in society with a pretty wife and in the city with a marketable reputation, then company promoting of a more and more doubtful kind, and finally a swindle more energetic and less skillful than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public, filling the air with noise, lamentations and unsavory odors. Nor was this all. A man has many warnings of ruin and when things were going badly in the stock market, Dick Boyce, who on his return from the East had been elected by acclimation, a member of several fashionable clubs, tried to retrieve himself at the gaming table. Lastly when money matters at home and abroad, when the anxieties of his wife and the altered manners of his acquaintance in and out of the House of Commons grew more than usually disagreeable, a certain little chorus girl came upon the scene and served to make both money and repentance scarcer even than they were before. No story could be more commonplace or more detestable. Ah, how well I remember that poor old fellow, old John Boyce, said Lord Maxwell slowly, shaking his stately white head over it as he lends talking and musing against the mantelpiece. I saw him the day he came back from the attempt to hush up the company business. I met him in the road and could not help pulling up to speak to him. I was so sorry for him we had been friends for many years, he and I. Oh, good God, he said when he saw me. Don't stop me, don't speak to me. And he lashed his horse up as white as a sheet, fat, fresh-colored man that he was in general, and was off. I never saw him again till after his death. First came the trial and Dick Boyce got three months imprisonment on a minor count while several others of the precious slot he was mixed up with came in for penal servitude. There was some technical flaw in the evidence with regard to him and the clever lawyers they put on made the most of it. But we all thought, and society thought, that Dick was morally as bad as any of them. Then the papers got hold of the gambling debts and the woman. She made a disturbance at his club, I believe, during the trial, while he was out on bail. Anyway, it all came out. Two or three other people were implicated in the gambling business, men of good family. Altogether it was one of the biggest scandals I remember in my time. The old man paused. The long frowning face starantly said, I'll just gazed at him in silence. It was certainly pretty bad, worse than he had thought. And the wife and child, he said presently. Oh, poor things, said Lord Maxwell, forgetting everything for the moment, but his story. When Boyce's imprisonment was up, they disappeared with him. His constituents held indignation meetings, of course. He gave up his seat, and his father allowed him a small fixed income. She had, beside some little money of her own, which was secured him afterwards, I believe, on the estate during his brother's lifetime. Some of her people would have gladly persuaded her to leave him, for his behaviour towards her had been particularly odious. And they were afraid, too, I think, that he might come to worse grief yet and make her life unbearable. But she wouldn't, and she would have no sympathy and no talk. I never saw her after the first year of their marriage, when she was a most radiant and beautiful creature. But by all accounts of her behaviour at the time, she must be a remarkable woman. One of her family told me that she broke with all of them. She would know nobody who would not know him. Nor would she take money, though they were wretchedly poor, and Dick Boyce was not squeamish. She went off to little lodgings in the country or abroad with him without a word. At the same time it was plain that her life was withered. She could make one great effort, but, according to my informant, she had no energy left for anything else, not even to take interest in her little girl. Algis made a movement. Suppose we talk about her? He said, rather shortly. Lord Maxwell started and recollected himself. After a pause he said, looking down under his spectacles and his grandson with an expression in which discomfort strove with humour, I see. You think we are beating about the bush? Perhaps we are. It is the difference between being old and being young, Algis, my boy. Well, now then, for Miss Boyce. How much have you seen of her? How deep has it gone? You can't wonder that I am knocked over to bring that man amongst us. Why, the hound! cried the old man suddenly. We could not even get him to come and see his father when he was dying. John had lost his memory, mostly, had forgotten any way, to be angry, and just craved for Dick, for the only creature he had ever loved. With great difficulty I traced the man and tried my utmost. No good! He came when his father no longer knew him, and now are before the end. His nerves, I understood, were delicate. Not so delicate, however, as to prevent his being present at the reading of the will. I have never forgiven him that cruelty to the old man, and never will. And Lord Maxwell began to pace the library again by way of working off memory and indignation. Algis watched him rather gloomily. They had now been discussing Boyce's criminalities in great detail for a considerable time, and nothing else seemed to have any power to touch or at any rate to hold Lord Maxwell's attention. A certain deep pride in Algis, the pride of intimate affection, felt itself wounded. I see that you have grave cause to think badly of her father, he said at last, rising as he spoke. I must think how it concerns me. And tomorrow you must let me tell you something about her. After all, she has done none of these things. But I ought not to keep you up like this. You will remember Clark was very emphatic about your not exhausting yourself at night last time he was here. Lord Maxwell turned and stared. Why? Why, what is the matter with you, Algis? Offended? Well, well, there. I am an old fool. And walking up to his grandson he laid an affectionate and rather shaking hand on the younger shoulder. You have a great charge upon you, Algis. A charge for the future. It has upset me. I shall be calmer to-morrow. But as to any quarrel between us, are you a youth or am I a three-tailed bashal? As to money, you know, I care nothing. But it goes against me, my boy. It goes against me that your wife should ring such a story as that with her into this house. I understand, said Adios Winsing, but you must see her grandfather. Only let me say it again. Don't for one moment take it for granted that she will marry me. I never saw anyone so free, so unspoiled, so unconventional. His eyes glowed with the pleasure of remembering her looks, her tones. Lord Maxwell withdrew his hand and shook his head slowly. You have a great deal to offer. No woman, unless she were either foolish or totally unexperienced, could overlook that. Is she about twenty? Lord Maxwell waited a moment, then, bending over the fire, shrugged his shoulders in mock despair. It is evident you are out of love with me, Aldis. Why, I don't know yet whether she is dark or fair. The conversation jarred on both sides. Aldis made an effort. She is very dark, he said, like her mother in many ways, only quite different in color. She seems to me the most beautiful, the only beautiful woman I have ever seen. I should think she was very clever in some ways and very unformed, childish almost in others. The Hardin say she has done everything she could. Of course it isn't much for that miserable village in the time she has been there. Oh, by the way, she is a socialist. She thinks that all we landowners should be done away with. Aldis looked around at his grandfather, so soon probably to be one of the lights of a Tory cabinet, and laughed. So, to his relief, did Lord Maxwell. Well, don't let her fall into young Wharton's clutches, Aldis, or he will be setting her to canvas. So, she is beautiful, and she is clever. And good, my boy. If she comes here, she will have to fill your mother's and your grandmother's place. Aldis tried to reply once or twice, but failed. If I did not feel that she were everything in herself to be loved and respected, he said at last with some formality, I should not long, as I do, to bring you and her together. Silence fell again. But instinctively, Aldis felt that his grandfather's mood had grown gentler, his own task easier. He seized on the moment at once. In the whole business, he said, have smiling, there is only one thing clear, grandfather, and that is that, if you will, you can do me a great service with Miss Boyce. Lord Maxwell turned quickly, and was all sharp attention, the keen, commanding eyes under their fine brows absorbing, as it were, expression and life from the rest of the blanched and wrinkled face. You could, if you would, make matters easy for her and her mother in the country, said Aldis, anxious to carry it all lightly. You could, if you would, without committing yourself to any personal contact with Boyce himself, make it possible for me to bring her here, so that you and my aunt might see and judge her. The Old Man's Expression Darkens What? Take back that note, Aldis. I never wrote anything with greater satisfaction in my life. Well, more or less, said Aldis quietly. A very little would do it. A man in Richard Boyce's position will naturally not claim very much. Will take what he can get. And you mean besides, to his grandfather, interrupting him, that I must send your aunt to call. It will hardly be possible to ask Miss Boyce here unless she does, said Aldis. And you reckon that I am not likely to go to Mellor. Even to see her? And you want me to say a word to other people, to the winter-borns and the levens, for instance? Precisely, said Aldis. Lord Maxwell meditated, then rose. Let me now appease the memory of Clark by going to bed. Clark was his lordship's medical attendant in Autocrat. I must sleep upon this, Aldis. I only hope I shall not have tired you out. Aldis moved to extinguish a lamp, standing on a table nearer. Suddenly his grandfather called him. Aldis? Yes? But as no words followed, Aldis turned. He saw his grandfather standing erect before the fire and was startled by the emotion he instantly perceived. You understand, Aldis, that for twenty years, it is twenty years last month since your father died, you have been the blessing of my life. Oh, don't say anything, my boy. I don't want any more agitation. I have spoken strongly. It was hardly possible, but that on such a matter I should feel strongly. But don't come to me. It was hardly possible, but that on such a matter I should feel strongly. But don't go away misunderstanding me. Don't imagine for one instant that there is anything in the world that really matters to me in comparison with your happiness and your future. The venerable old man rung the hand he held, walked quietly to the door, and shut it behind him. An hour later, Aldis was writing in his own sitting-room, a room on the first floor at the western corner of the house, and commanding by daylight the falling slopes of wood below the court and all the wide expanses of the plain. Tonight, too, the blinds were up, and the great view drawn in black and pearl, streaked with white mists in the ground hollows and overarched by a wide sky holding a hallowed moon, lay spread before the windows. On a clear night Aldis felt himself stifled by blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not interfering with the full range of his eye over the night world without. He secretly believed that human beings see far too little of the night, and so lose a host of august or beautiful impressions, which might be honestly theirs if they pleased, without borrowing or stealing from anybody, poet or painter. The room was lined with books, partly temporary visitors from the Great Library downstairs, partly his old college books and prizes, and partly representing small collections for special studies. Here were a large number of volumes, blue books and pamphlets, bearing on the condition of agriculture and the rural poor in England and abroad. There were some shelves devoted to general economics, and on a little table by the fire lay the recent numbers of various economic journals, English and foreign. Between the windows stood a small philosophical bookcase. The volumes of it full of small reference slips and marked from end to end. And on the other side of the room was revolving book table, crowded with miscellaneous volumes of poets, critics and novelists. Mainly, however, with the first two. August Rayburn read few novels, and those with a certain impatience. His mind was mostly engaged in a slow wrestle with difficult and unmanageable facts, and for that transformation and illumination of fact in which the man of idealist temper must sometimes take refuge in comforts, he went easily and eagerly to the poets and to natural beauty. Hardly any novel writing or reading seemed to him worthwhile. A man, he thought, might be much better employed than in doing either. Above the mantelpiece was his mother's picture, the picture of a young woman in a low dress and muslin scarf, trivial and empty in point of art, yet linked in August's mind with a hundred touching recollections, buried all of them in the silence of an unbroken reserve. She had died in childbirth when he was nine, her baby had died with her, and her husband, Lord Maxwell's only son and surviving child, fell a victim two years later to a deadly form of throat disease, one of those ills which come upon strongmen by surprise, and excite in the dying a sense of helpless wrong, which even religious faith can't only partially soothe. August remembered his mother's death, still more his father's. That father who could speak no last message to his son could only lie dumb upon his pillows, with his eyes full of incommunicable pain, and the hands now restlessly seeking, now restlessly putting aside this small and trembling hand of the son. His boyhood had been spent under the shadow of these events, which had aged his grandfather, and made him to early realize himself as standing alone in the gap of loss, the only hope left to affection and to ambition. This premature development amid the most melancholy surroundings of the same sense of personal importance, not in any egotistical sense, but as a sheer matter of fact, had robbed a nervous and sensitive temperament of natural stores of gaiety and elasticity, which it could ill-do without. August Rayburn had been too much thought for and too painfully loved, but for Edward Hallan he might well have acquiesced at manhood in a certain impaired vitality, in the scholar's range of pleasures, and the landowner's customary round of duties. It was to Edward Hallan he was writing to-night, for the stress and stir of feeling caused by the events of the day, and not least by his grandfather's outburst, seemed to put sleep far off. On the table before him stood a photograph of Hallan, besides a miniature of his mother as a girl. He had drawn the miniature closer to him, with sympathy and joy in its youth, and the bright expectancy of the eyes, and so wrote, as it were, having both her and his friend in mind and sight. To Hallan he had already spoken of Miss Boyce, drawing her in light, casual and yet sympathetic strokes as the pretty girl in a difficult position, whom one would watch with curiosity and some pity. Tonight his letter, which should have discussed a home colonization scheme of Hallan's, had but one topic, and his pen flew. Would you call her beautiful? I ask myself again and again, trying to put myself behind your eyes. She has nothing at any rate in common with the beauties we have down here, or with those my aunts made me admire in London last May. The face has a strong Italian look, but not Italian of today. Do you remember the girl adagio frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, or the side groups in Andrea's frescoes at the Annousiata? Among them, among the beautiful tall women of them, there are, I am sure, noble, freely poised, suggestive heads like hers, hair, black, wavy hair, folded like hers in large, simple lines, and faces with the same long, subtle curves. It is a face of the Renaissance, extraordinarily beautiful, as it seems to me, in color and expression, imperfect in line, as the beauty which marks the meeting-point between antique perfection and modern character must always be. It has morbidezza, unquiet melancholy charm, then passionate gaiety, everything that is most modern grafted on things Greek and old. I am told that Byrne Jones drew her several times while she was in London, with delight. It is the most artistic beauty, having both the harmonies and the dissonances, that a full-grown art loves. She may be twenty or rather more. The mind has all sorts of ability, comes to the right conclusion by a divine instinct, ignoring the how and why. What does such a being want with a drudgery of learning? To such keenness, life will be master enough. Yet she has evidently read a good deal, much poetry, some scattered political economy, some modern socialistic books, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Carlisle. She takes everything dramatically, imaginatively, goes straight from it to life, and back again. Among the young people, with whom she made acquaintance while she was boarding in London and working at South Kensington, there seemed to have been two brothers, both artists and both socialists, arted young fellows, giving other spare time to good works, who must have influenced her a great deal. She is full of angers and revolts, which she would delight in. And first of all, she is applying herself to her father's wretched village, which will keep her hands full. A large and passionate humanity plays about her. What she says often seems to me foolish, in the ear, but the inner sense, the heart of it, commands me. Stare as you please, Ned. Only write to me, and come down here as soon as you can. I can and will hide nothing from you. So you will believe me when I say that all is uncertain, that I know nothing, and, though I hope everything, may just as well fear everything, too. But somehow I am another man. The world shines and glows for me by day and night. I'll just rayburn rose from his chair, and, going to the window, stood looking out at the splendor of the autumn moon. Marcella moved across the whiteness of the grass. Her voice was still speaking to his inward ear. His lips smiled, his heart was in a wild whirl of happiness. Then he walked to the table, took up his letter, read it, toured across, and locked the fragments in a drawer. Not yet, Ned, not yet, dear old fellow, he said to himself as he put out his lamp. End of Chapter 6 Recording by Katie Riley January, 2010