 Book 2, Chapter 11 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. Recording by Paul Stevens. Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Book 2, Chapter 11. Marcella was lying on the sofa in the Mella drawing room. The February evening had just been shut out, but she had told William not to bring the lamps till they were rung for. Even the firelight seemed more than she could bear. She was utterly exhausted both in body and mind, yet as she lay there with shut eyes, and hands clasped under her cheek, a start went through her at every sound in the house, which showed that she was not resting but listening. She had spent the morning in the Herd's Cottage, sitting by Mrs. Herd and nursing the little boy. Minter Herd, always delicate and consumptive, was now generally too ill from shock and misery to be anywhere but in her bed, and Willie was growing steadily weaker, though the child's spirit was such that he would insist on dressing, on hearing and knowing everything about his father, and on moving about the house as usual. Yet every movement of his wasted bones cost him the effort of a hero, and the dumb signs in him of longing for his father increased the general impression as of some patient creature driven by nature to monstrous and disproportionate extremity. The plight of this handful of human beings worked in Marcella like some fevering torture. She was wholly out of gear physically and morally. Another practically sleepless night, peopled with images of horror, had decreased her stock of sane self-control, already lessened by long conflict of feeling and the pressure of self-contempt. Now as she lay listening for oldest Rayburn's ring and step, she hardly knew whether to be angry with him for coming so late, or miserable that he should come at all. That there was a long score to settle between herself and him, she knew well. Shame for an experience which seemed to her maiden sense indelible, both a weakness and a treachery, lay like a dull weight on heart and conscience. But she would not realise it, she would not act upon it. She shook the moral debate from her impatiently. Older should have his due all in good time. Should have ample opportunity of deciding whether he would, after all, marry such a girl as she. Meanwhile his attitude with regard to the murder exasperated her. Yet in some strange way it relieved her to be angry and sore with him, to have a grievance she could avow, and on which she made it a merit to dwell. His gentle yet firm difference of opinion with her on the subject struck her as something new in him. It gave her a kind of fierce pleasure to fight it. He seemed somehow to be providing her with excuses, to be coming down to her level, to be equalling wrong with wrong. The door handle turned. At last she sprang up, but it was only William coming in with the evening post. Mrs. Boyce followed him. She took a quiet look at her daughter, and asked if her headache was better, and then sat down near her to some needlework. During these two days she had been unusually kind to Marcella. She had none of the little feminine arts of consolation. She was incapable of fussing, and she never caressed. But from the moment that Marcella had come home from the village that morning, a pale hollow-eyed wreck the mother had asserted her authority. She would not hear of the girls crossing the threshold again. She had put her on the sofa and dosed her with sal volatil. And Marcella was too exhausted to rebel. She had only stipulated that a note should be sent to Aldous, asking him to come on to Mella with the news as soon as the verdict of the coroner's jury should be given. The jury had been sitting all day, and the verdict was expected in the evening. Marcella turned over her letters till she came to one from a London firm which contained a number of cloth patterns. As she touched it she threw it aside with a sudden gesture of impatience, and sat upright. Mama, I have something to say to you. Yes, my dear. Mama, the wedding must be put off. It must, for some weeks. I have been thinking about it while I have been lying here. How can I? You can see for yourself. That miserable woman depends on me altogether. How can I spend my time on clothing and dress-makers? I feel as if I could think of nothing else, nothing else in the world but her and her children. She spoke with difficulty, her voice high and strained. The assizes may be held that very week. Who knows, the very day we are married. She stopped, looking at her mother almost threateningly. Mrs. Boyce showed no sign of surprise. She put her work down. I had imagined you might say something of the kind, she said, after a pause. I don't know that from your point of view it is unreasonable. But, of course, you must understand that very few people will see it from your point of view. Aldous Rayburn may. You must know best. But his people certainly won't. And your father will think it madness, she was going to say. But with her usual instinct for the moderate, fastidious word, she corrected it to foolish. Marcella's tired eyes were all willfulness and defiance. I can't help it. I couldn't do it. I will tell Aldous at once. It must be put off for a month. And even that, she added with a shudder, will be bad enough. Mrs. Boyce could not help an unperceived shrug of the shoulders, and a movement of pity towards the future husband. Then she said, dryly, You must always consider whether it is just to Mr Rayburn to let a matter of this kind interfere so considerably with his wishes and his plans. He must, I suppose, be in London for Parliament within six weeks. Marcella did not answer. She sat with her hands round her knees, lost in perplexities. The wedding, as originally fixed, was now three weeks and three days off. After it, she and Aldous would who have spent a short fortnight's honeymoon at a famous house in the north, lent them for the occasion by a duke who was a cousin of Aldous's on the mother's side, and had more houses than he knew what to do with. Then they were to go immediately up to London for the opening of Parliament. The furnishing of the Mayfair house was being pressed on. In her newborn impatience with such things, Marcella had hardly of late concerned herself with it at all, and Miss Rayburn, scandalised, yet not unwilling, had been doing the whole of it, subject to conscientious worrying of the bride, whenever she could be got hold of, on the subject of papers and curtains. As they sat silent, the unspoken idea in the mother's mind was, eight weeks more will carry us past the execution. Mrs. Boyce had already possessed herself very clearly of the facts of the case, and it was her perception that Marcella was throwing herself headlong into a hopeless struggle. Together with something else, a confession perhaps of a touch of greatness in the girl's temper, passionate and violent as it was, that had led to this unwanted softness of manner, this absence of sarcasm. Very much the same thought, only treated as a nameless horror not to be recognised or admitted, was in Marcella's mind also, joined however with another, unsuspected even by Mrs. Boyce's acuteness. Very likely, when I tell him, he will not want to marry me at all, and of course I shall tell him. But not yet, certainly not yet. She had the instinctive sense that during the next few weeks, she should want all her dignity with Aldous, that she could not afford to put herself at a disadvantage with him. To be troubled about her own sins at such a moment would be like the meanness of the lazy and canting Christian, who whines about saving his soul, while he ought to be rather occupied with feeding the bodies of his wife and children. A ring at the front door, Marcella rose, leaning one hand on the end of the sofa, a long, slim figure in her black dress, haggard and pathetic. When Aldous entered, her face was one question. He went up to her and took her hand. In the case of Westhall, the verdict is one of willful murder against her. In that of poor Charlie Dines, the court is adjourned. Enough evidence has been taken to justify burial. But there is news tonight that one of the Widington gang has turned in former, and the police say they will have their hands on them all within the next two or three days. Marcella withdrew herself from him and fell back into the corner of the sofa. Shading her eyes with her hand, she tried to be very composed and businesslike. Was heard himself examined? Yes, under the new act. He gave the account which he gave to you and to his wife. But the court did not believe it? No. The evidence of motive was too strong. It was clear from his own account that he was out for poaching purposes, that he was leading the Oxford gang, and that he had a gun while Westhall was unarmed. He admitted too that Westhall called on him to give up the bag of pheasants he held, and the gun. He refused. Then he says Westhall came at him and he fired. Dick Patton and one or two others gave evidence as to the language he has habitually used about Westhall for months past. Cowards! Curse! cried Marcella, clenching both her hands a kind of sob in her throat. Olders, already white and care-worn, showed, Mrs Boyce thought, a ray of indignation for an instant. Then he resumed steadily. Anne Brown, our steward, gave evidence as to his employment since October. The coroner summed up carefully, and I think fairly, and the verdict was given about half past six. They took him back to prison. Of course, he comes before the magistrates on Thursday. And you will be one! The girl's tone was indescribable. Olders started. Mrs Boyce reddened with anger. And checking her instinct to intervene began to put away her working materials that she might leave them together. While she was still busy, Olders said, You forget! No magistrate ever tries a case in which he is personally concerned. I shall take no part in the trial. My grandfather, of course, must prosecute. But it will be a bench of landlords, cried Marcella, of men with whom a poacher is already condemned. You are unjust to us, I think, said Olders, slowly, after a pause, during which Mrs Boyce left the room, to some of us at any rate. Besides, as of course you know, the case will be simply sent on for trial at the assizes. By the way, his tone changed. I hear tonight that Harry Wharton undertakes the defense. Yes, said Marcella defiantly. Is there anything to say against it? You wouldn't wish her not to be defended, I suppose? Marcella! Even her bitter mood was pierced by the tone. She had never wounded him so deeply yet, and for a moment he felt the situation intolerable. The surging grievance and reproach, with which his heart was really full, all but found vent in an outburst which would have wholly swept away his ordinary measure and self-control. But then, as he looked at her, it struck his lover's sense painfully how pale and miserable she was. He could not scold. But it came home to him strongly, that for her own sake and his, it would be better there should be explanations. After all, things had been going untowardly for many weeks. His nature moved slowly and with much self-doubt. But it was plain to him now that he must make a stand. After his cry, her first instinct was to apologize. Then the words stuck in her throat. To her, as to him, they seemed to be close on a trial of strength. If she could not influence him in this matter, so obvious as it seemed to her, and so near to her heart, what was to become of that lead of hers in their married life, on which she had been reckoning from the beginning? All that was worst in her, and all that was best, rose to the struggle. But, as he did not speak, she looked up at last. I was waiting, he said in a low voice. What for? Waiting till you should tell me you did not mean what you said. She saw that he was painfully moved. She also saw that he was introducing something into their relation, an element of proud self-assertion, which she had never felt in it before. Her own vanity instantly rebelled. I ought not to have said exactly what I did, she said, almost stifled by her own excitement, and making great efforts not to play the mere, woeful child. That, I admit. But it has been clear to me from the beginning that—that, her words hurried, she took up a book and restlessly lifted it and let it fall. You have never looked at this thing justly. You have looked at the crime as any one must who is a landowner. You have never allowed for the provocation. You have not let yourself feel pity. He made an exclamation. Do you know where I was before I went into the inquest? No, she said defiantly, determined not to be impressed, feeling a childish irritation at the interruption. I was with Mrs Westhall. Harden and I went in to see her. She is a hard, silent woman. She is clearly not popular in the village, and no one comes into her. Her—he hesitated—her baby is expected before long. She is in such a state of shock and excitement that Clark thinks it quite possible she may go out of her mind. I saw her sitting by the fire, quite silent, not crying, but with a wild eye that means mischief. We have sent in a nurse to help Mrs Jellison watch her. She seems to care nothing about her boy. Everything that that woman most desired in life has been struck from her at a blow. Why? That a man who was in no stress of poverty, who had friends and employment, should indulge himself in acts which he knew to be against the law, and had promised you and his wife to forego, and should at the same time satisfy a wild beast's hatred against the man who was simply defending his master's property. Have you no pity for Mrs Westhall or her child? He spoke as calmly as he could, making his appeal to reason and moral sense, but in reality every word was charged with electric feeling. I am sorry for her, cried Marcella passionately, but after all, how can one feel for the oppressor, or those connected with him, as one does for the victim? He shook his head, protesting against the word, but she rushed on. You do know, for I told you yesterday how under the shelter of this hateful game system Westhall made Herd's life a burden to him when he was a young man, how he had begun to bully him again this past year. We had the same sort of dispute the other day about that murder in Ireland. You were shocked that I would not condemn the moonlighters who had shot their landlord from behind a hedge as you did. You said the man had tried to do his duty, and that the murder was brutal and unprovoked, but I thought of the system of the memories in the minds of the murderers. There were excuses. He suffered for his father. I am not going to judge that as I judge other murders. So, when a czar of Russia is blown up, do you expect one to think only of his wife and children? No. I will think of the tyranny and the revolt. I will pray, yes, pray, that I might have courage to do as they did. You may think me wild and mad. I dare say, I am made so. I shall always feel so. She flung out her words at him, every limb quivering under the emotion of them. His cool penetrating eye, this manner she had never yet known in him, exasperated her. Where was the tyranny in this case? He asked her quietly. I agree with you that there are murders and murders, but I thought your point was that here was neither murder nor attack, but only an act of self-defense. That is Herd's plea. She hesitated and stumbled. I know, she said. I know, I believe it, but even if the attack had been on Herd's part, I should still find excuses because of the system and because of Westall's hatefulness. He shook his head again. 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 forever. 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 holy 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 Widerington, that solicitor, told me, if strong influence is brought to bear, if anybody whose word counts, if Lord Maxwell in 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-plating, 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 gym, that never had a chance of being like the others. Oh, well, beg so hard! I know there's many people who 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. Raban 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'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 I ever come to the estate, I will change the whole system. I will run the 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 judgement 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 law-breaker. 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 it's working 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 had 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 old us 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 anyone 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 Nita, 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 thoughtful. 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 violet room shielded her. I have not seen him since we met him in the drive. I saw the solicitor who was 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 poor 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 fullness 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 Hardin 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 in former. 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 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 know-it-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 Mella, 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 Rayburn 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 tete-a-tete with her friend, finding it impossible to remain solitary while so much was happening. Well, my dear, said Miss Rayburn shortly, as her guest entered the room, I may as well tell you at once that Aldous' 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 daresay, said Miss Rayburn, stitching away with fierce energy, but since then a poacher has murdered one of our gamekeepers, which makes all the difference. What do you mean, Agnita? 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 Rayburn 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 herds, 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 Rayburn more slowly, one is, of course, sorry for the wife and children. Though I am a good deal sorryer for Mrs. Westall and poor, poor Mrs. Dines, 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 Clark tomorrow 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 Rayburn 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 someone we knew or cared for, Agnita, how can she feel it like that? cried Miss Rayburn, exasperated. How can she know any one 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 inspicuous and show her power over Aldous, for other reasons, too, if the truth were known. Miss Rayburn 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, Agnita, 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 Rayburn 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 all 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 Rayburn snappishly, she is capable of anything far-fetched and theatrical. The door opened and Hallyn 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 Rayburn, 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 Rayburn was angrily silent, but when Lord Maxwell, who had been talking with Aldous, came in, he proved to her final discomforture 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. End of Book 2, Chapter 11. Book 2, Chapter 12 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. Reading by Paul Stevens Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward Book 2, Chapter 12 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 Heard and his five companions, Marcella wrote Aldous Rayburn 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 Halin is very much inclined to agree with you, to think that the whole affair was a scrimmage, and that heard at least ought to be reprieved. He would have come to talk it over with you himself, but that Clark 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 Mella, 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 wrote about the lanes and beach-woods in the days that followed, alone, often with that nature for which all such temperaments as oldest ray-bones 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 Warrington 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 air and representative understand how in his opinion the case was going. Oldest Rayburn was a person whom everybody respected. Confidences were safe with him, and he was himself deeply interested in the affair. The ray-bones being the ray-bones, 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 her 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 Oldus 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 at 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 grandfathers through Marcella. To Wharton would belong not only the popular kudos of the matter, but much more, and above all, Marcella's gratitude. Oldus pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the road, that downward-stretching glade among the beaches, 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. Rayburn'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 Rayburn 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 Disney 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 Arrhenies. Hallen'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 Dines' 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 with 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 heard 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 heard 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. I, and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and compunctions, Hallyn, 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 interfered 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. Nonetheless, reality wins the day. So Hallyn 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 Disney 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 Rayburn, something done for self-advertisement and to advance anti-social opinions. While the Mella cottages, 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 of him, not a must of Rayburn, 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 lovery. She don't want to run in harness, she don't know sooner than she need. She's a peer-at-filly as Miss Boyce. I've been awaiting, and awaiting, said his wife, with her gentle sigh, to hear some of that new straw-plateing she talk about, but nary a word. They do say, as give up altogether. No, she took up with nursing winter herd. Wonderful took up, said another woman. They do say, as Anne Mullins can't bear her. When she's there nobody can open their mouth. When that kind of thing happens in the family, it's bad enough without having a lady train about you all day long, so that you have to be minding yourself and thinking about giving her a cheer and the like. One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella, coming from the herds' cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going home after spending the afternoon with her daughter. Hither, too, 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 Dines' mother, but she had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary Hardin to the Keeper's widow. Mrs. Jellison looked at her as sconce with her old wild eyes, as Marcella came up with her. Oh, she's puddling 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 and me to watch her like a pair of cats. She's dreadful upset, is Isabella. Shouldn't have thought it of her. That first day, a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face. No, I'm not going to think about that first day, I'm not. Tain't a heap of the good, she added, resolutely. But she was all right when they'd had to get him home, and wash and settle him, and put him comfortable like in his coffin. He were a big man, miss, when he were laid out. Cyril, as made the coffin, told her as he hadn't made one such an extray size since old Ari fled the blacksmith fifteen years ago. He'd sooner done for a gym, or if it had been fists of both sides, but guns his things as you can't reckon on. Why didn't he let her alone, said Marcella sadly, and prosecute him next day? It's attacking men when their blood is up that brings these awful things about. While I don't see that, said Mrs. Jellison pugnaciously, he were paid to do it, and he had the law on his side. Oh, she, she said, lowering her voice, and jerking her thumb in the direction of the herds' cottage. She's very ill, replied Marcella, with the contraction of the brow. Dr. Clark says she ought to stay in bed, but of course she won't. They're going to try him Thursday, said Mrs. Jellison, inquiringly. Yes. And Muster Wharton, we are going to defend him. Muster Wharton may be clever, he may, they do say, as he can see the grass growing, he's not knowing, but he'll not get Jim Rudolph. There's nobody in the village as believes for a moment, as how he will. They'll best him, Lord Blessure, they'll best him. I was a-saying it to Isabella this afternoon. You'll not save his neck, don't you be a-feared? 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, Lord, no, said Mrs. Jellison, composedly. She don't want to be forgiven of him. Mr. Hardony come talking to her, but she isn't one of that sort, isn't Isabella? I'm certain, sure, she'll be better in herself when they've put him out of the way. It makes her all of a fever to think of Muster Wharton getting him off. I don't bear jimmer or no particular malice. Isabella may talk herself black in the face, but she and Johnny'll have to come home and live along on me, whatever she may say. She can't stay in that cottage, because there'll be one in it for another keeper. Lord Maxwell, he's given her a fine pension, my word he is, and says he'll look after Johnny. And what with my bitter innings? We'll do, you 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. And how about that straw plate in 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 into town tomorrow, she thought, and have a crack with Jimmy Gage. He needn't be a fear in for his living. And them great fools as I've been running in a string-arterer, and cackling about their 18 pence of score, as I've told them times, I'll eat my apron the first week as ever they get it. I don't owe with ladies. No, nor passons, neither. Not when it comes to meddling with your whittles, and dictating to your about forgiving them as I've got the better of you. That young lady there, what does she matter? That sorts all us gadden about. What'll she care about us when she's got her fine husband? Here a Saturday, gone or Monday. That's what she is. Now, Jimmy Gage, you can all us count on him. Thirty-six years you sat there in that air-shop, and I guess he'll set there till they call him to kingdom come. Bees are cheating, sweating, greedy old skinflint, is Jimmy Gage. But when you're once him, you're a kin, find him. 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 fullness 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 illusion. 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 played 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. Herd, with little willy upon her knees. The mother, always anemic 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 coughing, which would rouse her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and body. Minterherd'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 neighbour should come in and say, It's 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 Herd 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 doing 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 him, 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 peasants' 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 water 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 Anne Mullin'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 the 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 selen dines in the hedge, 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 of 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, although she must think of him by and by. He and his fared sumptuously every hour. As for her, it was 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 nonetheless. If he cast her off, why then surely they would be quits? Quits for good and all. As she reached the front door of Mella, she saw a little two-wheeled cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony. Visitors were nowadays more common at Mella 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 heard 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 Marcella, 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 Herd's long connection with the gang, in spite of the Raven's 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 Dines' 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. Raven 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. Raven 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 pass between them. And your election, said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile eyes as he got up to take leave. Tomorrow 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 Widerington as fast as my pony can carry me. Goodbye, Miss Boyce. Marcello 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? End of Book 2, Chapter 12 Book 2, Chapter 13 of Marcello This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Paul Stevens Marcello, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward Book 2, Chapter 13 And may the Lord have mercy on your soul. The deep-pitched words fell slowly on Marcello's ears as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of the Widrington Assize Court. Women were sobbing beside and behind her. Minter heard, to her left, lay in a half swoon against her sister-in-law, her face buried in Anne's black shawl. For an instant after heard's death sentence had been spoken, Marcello's nerves ceased to throb. The long exhaustion of feelings 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 of 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 Dines, who stood a little in front of the line, next to heard, and overshadowing his dwarf stature. These things Marcello 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 acridability 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 vigor and brutality of the labourer's 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 Rayburn 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 into here 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 Rayburns, 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 Rayburn 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 waters 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. Heard also turned, irresolutely. Look! exclaimed Anne Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside her. He's going! 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. Anne, can you lift her? Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman. Anne Mullins held her on the other. Marcella followed, pressing a little girl close against her long black cloak. The gallery made way for them. Everyone 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. Rayburn, said a policeman with a lacquery, stand back, please! Is your carriage there, sir? Let Anne 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. Rayburn 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 gate. Allowed, 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 Keeper's tyranny. What we want is the cooperation of a neighbourhood, especially with 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 exaltation 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 oldest Rayburn 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. Oldest 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 judges 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 oldest 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. Goodbye. 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 oldest Rayburn'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 oldest. Directly the door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping crowd that almost filled the little market place of Whidrington, the horses moved off. I tell Mamar 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 gore's veil she had worn all through the trial, and as they passed through the lights of the town, oldest 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 Mella, 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 Rayburn 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 anew, 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 Rayburn 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. Agnita, 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 Rayburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of Aldous's manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest upstairs straight away, 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 loath 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 sat thinking a while over the declining fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss Rayburn'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 Rayburn, and then don't disturb me again for half an hour? And for that time she lay in Miss Rayburn'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 potpourri 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 Rayburn'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 wish 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 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 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 today, 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 today 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, tonight. Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him. Aldous spent over her chair. You remember, he said, who 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 her 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 lent 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 heard 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 Herd's poverty, Herd's deformity, Herd as the boyish victim of a tyrant's insults. The miserable wife, the branded children, emphasized 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 practicing 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 was 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, Herd 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 manner 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 herd, 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 his 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. Someday 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 someone who will help me. I must not forget that. The reckless words, the inflection, turned oldest to stone. Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect. Their eyes met. Then he went up to the bell and rang it. The brum 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 Rayburn? The footman opened the door for her. She went. End of Book Two, Chapter 13