 Chapter 1 of Marcella. This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox Recording are in public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Shibu. Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Chapter 1. The Mids and the Sun And the first streaks of yellow in the beaches. Beautiful. Beautiful. And with a long breath of delight, Marcella boys threw herself on her knees by the window she had just opened, and propping her face upon her hands, devoured the scene before her with that passionate intensity of pleasure which had been her gift and heritage through life. She looked out upon a broad and labelled lawn, smooth by the care of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees. Some scores fires, some beaches, a shed or a tomb. Groups where the slow selective hand of time had been at work for generations, developing her the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade. And there the bold cafries of pure-fear trunks and ragged branches, standing black against the sky. Behind the lawn stretched a green descent indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular avenue, bordered by beaches of splendid maturity, ending at last in a far-distant gap where a gate and a gate of some importance clearly should have been. It was not. The size of the trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the avenue, now reaching the teens of harvest, the Ottoman sun pouring steadily through the vanishing mists, the grain-breath of the vast lawn, the unbroken piece of wood and cultivated ground, all carried with them a confused general impression of well-being and of dignity. Marcella drew it in, this impression, with heavy duty. At the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gaitless gap at the in-depth avenue, the choked condition of the garden path on either side of the lawn, and the unsightly turps of grass sporting the broad gravel terrace beneath her window. It is a heavenly place, all said and done, she protested to herself with a little frown. But no doubt it would have been better still if Uncle Robert had looked after it and we could afford to keep the garden to stand still. She dropped on a stool beside the open window and, as her eyes stepped themselves, fresh in what they saw, the frown disappeared again in the former look of glowing content. That content of youth which is never merely passive, nay, rather, contains an invariable element of covetous eagerness. It was but three months or so since Marcella's father, Mr. Richard Boyce, had succeeded to the ownership of Mellor Park, the old home of the boys. And it was little more than six weeks since Marcella had received her shaman's home from the student's boarding house in Kensington, where she had been lately living. She had urgently wished to assist in the June settling in, having not been able to apply her mind to the music or painting she was supposed to be studying. Nor indeed to any other subject, whatever, since the news of their inheritance had bridged her. But her mother, in a dry little note, had led it to be known that she preferred to manage the move for herself. Marcella had better go on with her studies as long as possible. Ed Marcella was here at last. And as she looked around her large bedroom with its old, dilapidated furniture, and then out again towards a lawn, it seemed to her that all was now well, and that her childhood with its squalors and miseries was blotted out. A tone forbid this last kind sudden stroke of fate, which might have been delayed so deplorably. Since no one could have reasonably expected that an effortlessly sound man of 60 would have succumbed in three days to the sort of common chill a hunter and sportsman must have resisted such a fully score of times before. Her great desire now was to put the past, the greater part of it at any rate, behind her all together. Its savvy worries were surely done with poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl paid for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket money, and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or fancied slur. She was no longer even the half Bohemian student of these past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity of keeping her boarding house expenses down to the lowest possible figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was Marcella Boyce, a finished and grown-up young woman of 21, the only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mallor Park, inherited dress of one of the most unseen names in mid-landing land and just entering on a life with two her own fancy and will at any rate promised the highest possible degree of interest and novelty. And in the every act of putting her past away from her, she only succeeded, so it seemed in inviting it to repose her. For Agnester Will, she fell straight away. In this quiet of the atumann morning, into a reed of memory, setting her past self-agnest her present more consciously than she had done it, recalling scene after scene and stays after stays with feelings of sarcasm or amusement or disgust, which sowed themselves freely as they came and went, in the fine plastic face turned to the September woods. She had been at school since she was 9 years old. There was the dominant fact in this mortally uncomfortable years behind her, which in her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a deep memory of seemingly infligent things, of a house in London, of a large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice of her, of games, little friends and both the parties. What had led to the complete disappearance of this earliest set to use a theatrical phrase from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet accurately know. Though she had some theories and many suspicions in the background of her mind, but at any rate this first image of memory was succeeded by another precise, as the first was the image of a tall white house, set against white chalk cliff rising into a recess behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from 9 to 14 and where if she were set down blindfold now at 21, she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and stairs with perfect and fascinated familiarity. When she entered that house, she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall for her age and endured or as she herself would have put it, crushed with an abundance of curly, unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and tending soon become to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her nose, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life, she had been an average child of the quick and clever type with average faults, but something in the pair, ugly rooms, the discipline, the teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff House School for young ladies transformed little Marcella boys for the time being into a demon. She hated her lessons, though when she chose, she could do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions. She hated getting up in the wintery dark and her cold evolutions with some doze and others in the comfortless laboratory. She hated the meals in the long-skilled room where because twice meat was forbidden and twice pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her worn-thwarted appetite as she set black broad brooding in her place. She was not of her right with her companions and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her perfectly well-intentioned school mistress. The whole of her first year was one continual series of soaks, quarrels and revolts. Poreff's her blackest days where the days she spent occasionally in bed. When Miss Frederick ate her whisked end would take advantage of one of the child's perpetual goals to try the effects of her days, seclusion and solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her charge no harm and might, she hoped, do her good. For I do believe a great part of its liver or nerves. No child in her right senses could behave so. She would declare to the mild and stout friend's lady who had been her partner for years and who was more inclined to befriend and excuse Marcella than anyone else in the house. No one exactly knew why. Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold was in the first place that she should not put her arms outside the bedclothes. For if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed you might as well be up. That the housemaid should visit her patient in the early morning with a cup of senate and at long and regular intervals throughout the day with beef tea and gruel and that no one should come to see and talk with her unless indeed it were the doctor. Quite being in all cases of sickness the first condition of recovery and the natural school goal in Miss Patrick's persuasion being more or less inclined to complain without cause. If illness were made agreeable. For some 14 hours therefore on these days of durians Marcella was left almost wholly alone. Nothing but a wild mass of black hair and a pair of robing defined eyes in a pale face showing above the bedclothes whenever the housemaid was supposed to visit her a pitiful morsel in truth of rather forlorn humanity for though she had her movements of fierce revolt when she was within an ass of throwing the senate in Martha's face and resting downstairs in her nightgown to denounce Miss Patrick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom something generally interposed not conscience it is to be feared or anyways to be good but only an etching in most sense of child's loneliness and helplessness a perception that she had indeed tried everybody's patience to the limit and that these days in bed a presented crisis which must be born with even by such a rebel as Mercy Boys so she submitted and presently learned under dire stress of boredom to amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for dreaming awake hour by hour she followed out an endless story of which she was always the heroine before the annuance of her afternoon cruel which she loathed was well forgotten she was in full fairy land again figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion of the Princess of Wells of that beautiful Alexandra the top and model of English society whose portrait in the window of the little stationers shop at Marshall the small country town near Cliff House had attracted the child's attention once on a teary walk and had ever since govern her dreams Marcella had no fairy tales but she spoon a whole cycle for herself around the lovely Princess who came to seem to her before long her own particular property she had only to shut her eyes and she had cut her idle's attention either by some look or act of passion yet an obstructive homage as she passed the royal carriage in the street or by throwing herself in front of the divinity's runways horse or by series of social steps easily devised by an imaginative child well aware in spite of appearances that she was of an old family and had aristocratic relations then when the Princess had held out a gracious hand and smile all was delight Marcella grew up on the stand she was beautiful of course she had so people said the boy's eyes and here she had sweeping groans generally of white muslin with cherry coloured ribbons she went here and there with the Princess laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land her romantic friendship with the road of England making her all the time the observed of all observers bringing her a thousand delicate flatteries and attention then when she was at the very top of ecstasy floating in the softest summer sea of fancy some little noise would startle her into opening her eyes and there beside her in the deepening dusk the pure white beds of her two dormitory companions the ugly wallpaper opposite and the uncovered birds with their furgill strips of carpet stretching away on either hand the tea bell would ring perhaps in the depths far below and the sound would complete the transformation of the Princess made of honour into marshy boys the plain naughty child whom nobody cared about whose mother never wrote to her who in contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single party for and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb day of sanity and cruel supposing she chose to plead that her cold was still of stein knit or getting up at half past six to repeat half a page of Inse's outlines of English history in the chilly classroom at seven looking back now as from another world on that unkempt frux uses mercy of cliff house the mercy of the prison show with a mixture of amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of the child's daily miseries had been a certain injured irritable sense of social difference between herself and her companions some purpose of the girl at cliff house were drawn from the Treadsman class of two or three neighboring towns their Treadsman papa's were sometimes ready to deal with terrible terms with Miss Patrick for the supply of her establishment in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt themselves very much at home and occasionally kept themselves ears which alternately mystified and invoked a little spitfire outsider like Marcella Boyce even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she was one of the boys of Brookshire and that her great uncle had been a famous speaker of the house of a commons the portrait of this great uncle had home in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed so far away her father had again and again pointed it out to the child and taught her to be proud of it and more than once her child's eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired gentleman who occasionally came to see them at home she called grand papa through one influence and another she had drawn the glory of it and the dignity of her face generally into her child's blood there they were now the glory and the dignity of Fabrice Leven driving her perpetually into the must-crood and ridiculous outbreak which could lead to nothing but humiliation I wish my great uncle were here he would make you remember you great big bully you she striked on one occasion when she had been defying a big girl in authority and the big girl the stout and calmly daughter of a local ironmonger had been successfully asserting herself the big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed your great uncle opened my world and who may he be? miss? if it comes to that I would like to show my great uncle David how you have scratched my wrist he would give it to you he is almost as strong as father though he is so old you get along with you and behave yourself and don't talk stuff to me whereupon Marshella choking with rage and tears found herself pushed out of the classroom and the doors shut up on her she rushed up to the tough terrace which was the school playground and sat there in a hidden knees of the wall shaking and crying now flanning vengeance on her conqueror and now hard all over with the relocation of her own ill-prepared and important foley now during those first two years the only pleasures so memory-declared were three the visus of the cake woman on Saturday Marshella sitting in her window could still taste the three corned pops and the small sweet pears on wheeze as much from her peers seen of freedom and self-assertation as anything else she had lavished her tiny weekly allowance the mad game of tig which she led and organized in the top playground and the kindness of fat mad remorseless Rainier Ms. Fedrick's partner who saw in likeness in Marshella to long dead small sister of her own and syrupiously indulged the little wild cat as the school generally dubbed the speaker's greatness whenever she could but with the third year fresh elements and interest had interred in romance of it and with it certain sentimental affections in the first place a taste for reading had rooted itself reading of the adventurous and poetical kind there were two or three books which Marshella had observed in a way it now made her envious to remember at 21 people who take interest in many things and are in a hurry to have opinions must scheme and turn over books rather than read them must use indeed as best they may a scattered and distract mind and suffer occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders but at 13 what concentration what devotion what joy one of these precious volumes was Bluire's Rangy another was Ms. Porter's Scottish ships a third was a little red volume of Marmune which an aunt had given her she probably never read any of them through she had not a particle of industry or method in her composition but she lived in them the parts which it poured her to read she easily invented for herself but the scenes and passages which thrilled her she knew by heart she had no gift for verse making but she lavishly wrote a long poem on the death of Rangy and she tried again and again with a knot in pat hand to illustrate for herself in pain and ink the execution of Wallace but all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in comparison with the friendship and an adoration to take the adoration first when Marcella came to Cliff House she was recommended by the same relation who give her Marmune to the kind offices of the clergyman of the Paris who happened to be known to some of the boys family he and his wife they had no children did their duty implied by the old undisciplined child they asked her to tea once or twice they invited her to the school trade where she was only self-conscious and miserably shy Mr. Allerton had at least one friendly and pastoral talk with Miss Frederick as to the difficulties of her pupil's character for a long time little came of it Marcella was hard to tame and when she went to tea at the rectory Mrs. Allerton who was refined and sensible did not know what to make of her though in some unaccountable way she was drawn to and interested by the child but with the expansion of for 13 years they've suddenly developed in Marcella's stormy breast an over mastering observing passion for these two persons she did not show it to them much but for herself it raised her to another plane of existence gave her new objects and new standards see who had hated going to chores now counted time entirely by Sundays to see the pulpit occupied by any other form and face then those of the reactor was a calamity hardly to be born if the exit of the school party were delayed by any accident so that Mr. and Mrs. Allerton overtook them in the chores yard Marcella would walk home an ear quivering with a passionate delight in the dreary afternoon of the school Sunday she would spain her time happily in trying to write down the heads of Mr. Allerton-Shermore in the natural course of things she would at this time have taken no interest in such things at all but whatever had been spoken by him had crass thrill meaning nor was the weak white barren of similar delights she was generally sent to practice on an old square piano in one of the top rooms the window in front of her overlooked the long white drive she would stand high road into which it ran three times a week on an average Mrs. Allerton's pony carries might be expected to pass along that road every day Marcella watched for it alive with expectation her fingers storming as they pleased then with the first gleam of the white pony in the distance she would go the music stool and the child dipped to the window remaining fixed to their breathing quick and eagerly till the trace on the left had hidden from her the graceful erect figure of Mrs. Allerton then her moment of paradise was over but the afterglow of it lasted for the day so much romance for feelings as much like love as a childhood can know them full of kindling, charm and mystery her friends have had been of course different but it also left a deep mark a tall, conjective girl among the cliff house peoples the motherless daughter of a crazy man friend of Miss Fredericks had for some time taken notice of Marcella and at length warm her body in the first instance then a remarkable gift for storytelling she was a pearl or a bird had a room to herself and a fire in it when the weather was cold she was not held strictly to lesson hours many delicacies in the way of food were provided for her and Miss Fredericks watched over her with the quiet maternal solitude when winter came she developed a troublesome cough and the doctor recommended that little suit of a room looking south and leading out on the middle terrace of the garden so will be given up to her there was a bedroom an intermediate dressing room and then a little sitting room built out up on the terrace with a window door opening up on it here Maryland spent week after week whenever lesson hours were done she clamored for mercy boys and Marcella was always eager to go to her she would fly up stairs and passes knock at the bedroom door run down the steps to the queer little dressing room where the roof nearly came on your head and down more steps against to the sitting room then when the door was shut and she was corning over the fire with her friend she was entirely happy the tiny room was built on the edge of the terrace the ground fell rapidly below it and the west window commanded a broad expensive tame arable country a square fields and hedges and scattered wood Marcella looking back up on the room seemed always to see it plodded with the rays of wintery sunset a kettle boiling on the fire her pale friend in the soul crouching over the warmth and the branches of a snowberry tree drabened by the wind beating against the terrace door but what a storyteller was Maryland she was the inventor of historical Joan and Julia which went on for weeks and months without ever producing the smallest satiety in Marcella unlike her books of adventure this was a domestic drama a pure result it was extremely moral and evangelical designed indeed by its sensitively religious author for mercy's correction and improvement there was in it a sublime hero who set everybody's poles to write and lecture the heroine in real life Marcella would probably before long have been found trying to kick his sins a mode of warfare of wits in her demon mode she was past mistress but as Maryland described him she not only bore with the trembled before him she adored him the test for him and his like was well as far the storyteller herself a girl of tremulous melancholy fiber, sweet, natural possessed by a clementy's faith an already prescient of death grew upon her soon her absorbing desire was to be altogether set up with Mary except on Sundays and practicing times for this purpose she gave herself the worst she could achieve and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to be a wrecking cove but Miss Frederick was deaf to the letter and only threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and sanity from the former whereupon Marcella in Elrame declared that her cold was much better and gave up the cough in despair it was her first sorrow and cost her some days of pale brooding and silence and some nights of stiff-laid tears when during an Easter holiday a letter from Miss Frederick to her mother announced the sudden death of Maryland End of Chapter 1 Recording by Sibu Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Chapter 2 Recorded by Cheryl Martin Friendship and love are humanizing things and by her fourteenth year Marcella was no longer a clever little imp but a fast maturing and, in some ways, remarkable girl with much of the woman in her already She had begun even to feel an interest in her dress to speculate occasionally on her appearance At the fourth breaking-up party after her arrival at Cliff House Marcella, who had usually figured on these occasions in a Lindsay Woolsey hide to the throat amid the frilled and sash splendors of her companions found lying on her bed when she went out with the others to dress a plain white muslin dress with blue ribbons It was the gift of old mademoiselle Renier who affectionately wished her queer neglected favorite to look well Marcella examined it and fingered it with an excited mixture of feelings First of all there was the sore and swelling bitterness that she should owe such things to the kindness of the French governess whereas finery for the occasion had been freely sent to all the other girls from home She very nearly turned her back upon the bed and it's pretty burden but then the mere snowy whiteness of the muslin and freshness of the ribbons and the burning curiosity to see herself decked therein overcame a nature which, in the midst of its penury had been always really possessed by a more than common hunger for sensuous beauty and seamliness Marcella wore it, was stormily happy in it and kissed mademoiselle Renier for it at night with an effusion, nay some tears which no one at Cliff House had ever witnessed in her before except with the accompaniments of rage and fury A little later her father came to see her the first and only visit he paid to her at school Marcella, to whom he was by now almost a stranger received him demurely, making no confidences and took him over the house and gardens When he was about to leave her a sudden upswell of paternal sentiment made him ask her if she was happy and if she wanted anything Yes, said Marcella, her large eyes gleaming tell mama I want a fringe every other girl in the school has got one and she pointed disdainfully to her plainly parted hair Her father, astonished by her unexpected vehemence put up his eyeglasses and studied the child's appearance Three days later, by her mother's permission Marcella was taken to the hairdresser at Marswell by mademoiselle Renier returned in all the glories of her fringe and, in acknowledgment thereof wrote her mother a letter which for the first time had something else than formal news in it Meanwhile, new destinies were preparing for her For a variety of small reasons Mr. Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter from a distance was not, upon personal inspection very favorably struck with his daughter's surroundings His wife remarked shortly, when he complained to her that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the daughter of persons of their means could expect to be Mr. Boyce stuck to his point He had just learnt that Harold the only son of his widowed brother Robert of Mellor Park had recently developed a deadly disease which might be long but must in the end be sure If the young man died and he outlived Robert Mellor Park would be his They would and must return in spite of certain obstacles to their natural rank in society and Marcella must of course be produced against his daughter and Aris When his wife repulsed him he went to his eldest sister an old maid with a small income of her own who happened to be staying with them and was the only member of his family with whom he was now on terms She was struck with his remarks which bore on family pride a commodity not always to be reckoned on in the Boyces but which she herself possessed in abundance and when he paused she slowly said that if an ideal school of another type could be found for Marcella she would be responsible for what it might cost over and above the present arrangement Marcella's manners were certainly rough it was difficult to say what she was learning or with whom she was associating accomplishment she appeared to have none Something should certainly be done for her considering the family contingencies but being a strong evangelical the aunt stipulated for religious influences and said she would write to a friend The result was that a month or two later Marcella, now close on her 14th birthday was transferred from Cliff House to the charge of a lady who managed a small but much sought after school for young ladies at Salisby a watering place on the east coast but when in the course of reminiscence Marcella found herself once more at Salisby memory began to halt and wander to choose another tone and method At Salisby the rough surroundings and primitive teaching of Cliff House together with her own burning sense of inferiority and disadvantage had troubled her no more She was well taught there and developed quickly from the troublesome child into the young lady duly broken into all social proprieties but it was not her lessons or dancing masters that she remembered She had made for herself agitations at Cliff House but what were they as compared to the agitations of Salisby? Life there had been one long, worth-ish romance in which there were few incidents only feelings which were themselves events It contained humiliations and pleasures but they had been all matters of spiritual relation connected with one figure only The figure of her school mistress Miss Pemberton and with one emotion only a passion, an adoration akin to that she had lavished on the Eletons but now much more expressive and mature A tall slender woman with brown, grey, besprinkled hair falling in light curls after the fashion of her grandmothers on either cheek and braided into a classic knot behind the face of a saint eyes overflowing with feeling above a thin, firm mouth the mouth of the obstinate saint yet sweet also This delicate, significant picture was stamped on Marcella's heart What tremors of fear and joy could she not remember in connection with it? What night vigils when a tired girl kept herself through long hours awake that she might see at last the door open and a figure with a night lamp in an instant in the doorway For Miss Pemberton, who slept little and red late never went to rest without softly going the rounds of her pupils' rooms What storms of contest mainly provoked by Marcella for the sake of the emotions first of combat then of reconciliation to which they led What a strange development on the pupil's side of a certain histrionic gift a turn for imaginative intrigue for endless small contrivances such as might rouse or heighten the recurrent excitements of feeling What agitated moments of religious talk What golden days in the holidays when long-lucked-for letters arrived full of religious admonition Letters which were carried about and wept over till they felt pieces under the stress of such a worship What terrors and agonies of a stimulated conscience What remorse for sins committed at school What zeal to confess them in letters of a passionate eloquence and what indifference, meanwhile to anything of the same sort that might have happened at home Strange faculty that women have for thus lavishing their heart's blood from their very cradles Marcella could hardly look back now in the quiet of thought to her five years with Miss Pemberton without a shiver of agitation Yet now she never saw her It was two years since they parted The school was broken up Her idol had gone to India to join a widowed brother It was all over, forever Those precious letters had worn themselves away So too had Marcella's religious feelings She was once more another being But these two years since she had said goodbye to Soulsby in her school days Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor and its novelty Marcella must needs think, too of her London life, of all that it had opened to her and meant for her Fresh agitations, fresh passions But this time impersonal passions of the mind and sympathies At the time she left Soulsby her father and mother were abroad and it was apparently not convenient that she should join them Marcella, looking back did not remember that she had ever much desired at home No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the holidays But she suspected, nay, was certain that there had been other and more permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with them a burden At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave Miss Pemberton her mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of late shown decided aptitude both for music and painting she knew well that she should cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than would be possible at home Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries and is quite willing that her daughter should go, for a time to a lady whose address she enclosed and to whom she herself had written a lady who received girl students working at the South Kensington art classes So began an experience as novel as it was strenuous Marcella soon developed all the heirs of independence and all the jargon of two professions Working with consuming energy and ambition she pushed her gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager and confident critic of the art of other people which is much But though art stirred and trained her gave her new horizons and new standards it was not an art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and motive power of her new life Not in art, but in the birth of social and philanthropic ardor the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power One of her girlfriends and fellow students had two brothers in London both at work at South Kensington and living not far from their sister The three were orphans They sprang from a nervous artistic stock and Marcella had never before come near anyone capable of crowding so much living into the 24 hours The two brothers, both of them skillful and artistic designers in different lines and hard at work all day were members of a rising socialistic society and spent their evenings almost entirely on various forms of social effort and socialist propaganda They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere and quite unworldly They lived as workmen and both the luxuries and the charities of the rich were equally odious to them that there could be any right in private property or private wealth had become incredible to them Their minds were full of lurid images or resentments drawn from the existing state of London and though one was humorous and handsome the other short, sickly and pedantic neither could discuss the socialist idea without passion nor hear it attacked without anger and in milder measure their sister who possessed more artistic gift than either of them was like unto them Marcella saw much of these three persons and something of their friends She went with them to socialist lectures or to the public evenings of the adventurous society to which the brothers belonged Edie, the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend made her read the books of a certain eminent poet and artist once the poet of love and dreamland a vital singer of an empty day now seer and prophet the herald of an age to come in which none shall possess though all shall enjoy The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and LaSalle together with each venturous pamphlet and essay as it appeared They flattered her with technical talk They were full of the importance of women the new doctrine and the new era The handsome brother was certainly in love with her the other, probably Marcella was not in love with either of them but she was deeply interested in all three and for the sickly brother she felt at that time a profound admiration nay, reverence which influenced her vitally at a critical moment of life Blessed are the poor woe unto you rich men These were the only articles of his scanty creed but they were held with a fervor and acted upon with a conviction which our modern religion seldom commands His influence made Marcella a rent collector under a lady friend of his in the East End Because of it she worked herself beyond her strength in a joint attempt made by some members of the Venturous Society to organize a Talaris' union and, to please him she read articles and blue books on sweating and overcrowding it was all very moving and very dramatic so too was the persuasion Marcella divined in her friends that she was destined in time with work and experience to great things and high place in the movement The wholly unexpected news of Mr. Boyce's accession to Mellor had very various effects upon this little band of comrades It revived in Marcella ambitions instincts and tastes wholly different from those of her companions but natural to her by temperament and inheritance The elder brother, Anthony Craven always melancholy and suspicious divined her immediately How glad you are to be done with Bohemia he said to her ironically one day when he had just discovered her with a photographs of Mellor about her and how rapidly it works What works, she asked him angrily The poison of possession and what a mean end it puts to things A week ago you were all given to causes not your own Now how long will it take you to think of us as poor fanatics and to be ashamed you ever knew us You mean to say that I am a mean hypocrite she cried? Do you think that because I delight in pretty things and old associations I must give up all my convictions? Shall I find no poor at Mellor, no work to do? It is unkind, unfair It is the way all reform breaks down through mutual distrust He looked at her with a cold smile in his dark sunken eyes and she turned from him indignantly When they bade her goodbye at the station she begged them to write to her No, no, said Louis the handsome younger brother If ever you want us we are there If you write we will answer but you won't need to think about us yet a while Goodbye and he pressed her hand with a smile The good fellow had put all his own dreams and hopes out of sight with a firm hand since the arrival of her great news Indeed Marcella realized in the mall that she was renounced Louis and Edith spoke with affection and regret As to Anthony, from the moment that he set eyes upon the maid sent to escort her to Mellor and the first class ticket that had been purchased for her Marcella perfectly understood that she had become to him as an enemy They shall see I will show them, she said to herself with angry energy as the train whirled her away and her sense of their unwarrantable injustice kept her tense and silent till she was aroused to a childish and passionate pleasure by a first sight of the wide lawns and time-stained front of Mellor Of such elements, such memories of persons, things and events was Marcella's reverie by the window made up One thing, however, which clearly, this report of it has not explained is that spirit of energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her musings Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and loveless But, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of many another child of impoverished parents There had been compensations all through and were not the great passion of her Soulsby days together with the interest and novelty of her London experience enough to give zest and glow to the whole retrospect Ah, but it will be observed that in this sketch of Marcella's school days nothing has been said of Marcella's holidays In this omission the narrative has but followed the hasty, half-conscious gaps and slurs of the girl's own thoughts For Marcella never thought of those holidays and all that was connected with them in detail if she could possibly avoid it But it was with them in truth and with what they implied that she was so irritably anxious to be done when she first began to be reflective by the window And it was to them she returned with vague but still intense consciousness when the rush of active reminiscence died away That surely was the breakfast bell ringing and with the dignified ancestral sound which was still so novel and attractive to Marcella's ear Recalled to Mellor Park in its circumstances she went thoughtfully downstairs pondering a little on the shallow steps of the beautiful Chacobian staircase Could she ever turn her back upon those holidays? Was she not rather, so to speak, just embarked upon their sequel or second volume? But let us go downstairs also Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward Chapter 3 Breakfast was laid in the Chinese room a room which formed part of the stately garden front added to the original structure of the house in the 18th century by a boy whose wife had money The decorations, especially of the domed and bolted roof were supposed by their 18th century designer to be oriental They were at any rate intricate and overladen Figures of mandarins on the worn and discoloured wallpaper had at least top knots, pigtails and petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishman of 1760 beside the charming melones of colour and general effect bestowed on them by time and dilapidation The marble mantelpiece was liberately carved in China men and pagodas There were Chinese curiosities of a miscellaneous kind on the tables and the beautiful remains of an Indian carpet underfoot Unluckily some later boys had thrust a crudely gothic sideboard with an arched and pillard front adapted to the purposes of a warming apparatus into the midst of the mandarins which disturbed the general effect But with all its original absurdities and its modern defacement the room was a beautiful and stately one Marcella stepped into it with the light unconscious straightening of her tall form It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till now in the ample space of these rooms and gardens Her father and mother were already at table together with Mrs. Boyce's brown spaniel Lin Mr. Boyce was employed in ordering about the tall boy in a worn and greasy livery coat who represented the men's service of the establishment His wife was talking to her dog with the lift of her eyebrows and the twitching of her thin lips it was plain to Marcella that her mother was as usual of opinion that her father was behaving foolishly There for goodness sake cut some bread on the sideboard said the angry master and handed round instead of staring about you like a stock pig what they taught you at Sir William Jutes I can't conceive I didn't undertake to make a man servant of you, sir Her arsed lad flew at the bread cut it with a vast scattering of crumbs handed it clumsily round and then took glad advantage of a short supply of coffee to bolt from the room to order more Idiot! said Mr. Boyce with an angry frown as he disappeared If you'd allow Anne to do her proper parlour work again said his wife blandly you would, I think, be less annoyed and as I believe William was but boy at the Jutes it is not surprising that he did not learn waiting I tell you, Evelyn, that our position demands a man servant was the hot reply none of my family have ever attempted to run this house with women only it would be unseemly, unfitting, incone Oh! I am no judge, of course, of what a boyce may do said his wife carelessly I leave that to you and the neighbourhood Mr. Boyce looked uncomfortable cooled down and presently when the coffee came back asked his wife for a fresh supply in tones from which all bellicosity had for the time departed he was a small and singularly thin man with blue wandering eyes under the blackest possible eyebrows and hair the cheeks were hollow the complexion as yellow as that of the typical Anglo-Indian the special character of the mouth was hidden by a fine black moustache but his prevailing expression varied between irritability and kind of plaintiveness the conspicuous blue eyes were as a rule melancholy but they could be childishly bright and self-assertive there was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce of that air at any rate which are common generalisations connect with the pride of old family his dress was careful and correct to the last tale and his hands with their long fingers were of an excessive delicacy though marred as to beauty by a thinness which nearly amounted to emaciation the servants say they must leave unless the ghost does Marcella said Mrs. Boyce suddenly laying a morsel of toast as she spoke on Lynn's nose someone from the village of course has been talking the cook says she heard something last night though she will not condescend to particulars and in general it seems to me that you and I may be left before long to do the housework what do they say in the village asked Marcella eagerly oh they say there was a boyce two hundred years ago who fled down here from London after doing something he shouldn't I really forget what the sheriff's officers were advancing on the house their approach displeased him and he put an end to himself at the head of the little staircase leading from the tapestry room down to my sitting room why did he choose the staircase said Mrs. Boyce with light reflectiveness it won't do said Marcella shaking her head I know the boys they mean he was a ruffian but he shot himself in London and anyway he was dead long before that staircase was built dear me how well up you are said her mother suppose you give a little lecture on the family in the servant's hall though I never knew a ghost yet that was undone by dates there was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply with Marcella's amused but sympathetic interest detachment was perhaps the characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner a curious separateness as it were from all the things and human beings immediately about her Marcella pondered I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories she said presently he will have heard them in the village I am going to their church this morning her mother looked at her a look of quiet examination and smiled the lady bountiful heirs that Marcella had already assumed during the six weeks she had been in the house entertained Mrs. Boyce exceedingly Harden said Mr. Boyce sketching the name I wish that one would leave me alone what have I got to do with the water supply for the village it will be as much as ever I can manage to keep a watertight roof over our heads during the winter after the way in which Robert has behaved Marcella's cheek flushed the village water supply is a disgrace she said with low emphasis I never saw such a crew of unhealthy retarded looking children in my life has swore about those cottages we take the rent and we ought to look after them I believe you could be forced to do something papa if the local authority were of any use she looked at him defiantly nonsense said Mr. Boyce testily they got along in your Uncle Robert's days and they can get along now charity indeed why the state of this house and the pinch for money altogether is enough I should think to take a man's mind don't you go talking to Mr. Harden in the way you do Marcella I don't like it and I won't have it you have the interest of your family and your home to think of first poor starved things said Marcella sarcastically living in such a den she swept her white hand round as though calling to witness the room in which they sat I tell you said Mr. Boyce rising and standing before the fire whence he angrily surveyed the handsome daughter who was in truth so little known to him and whose nature and aims during the close contact of the last few weeks had become something of a perplexity and disturbance to him I tell you our great effort the effort of us all must be to keep up the family position our position look at that library and its condition look at the state of these wallpapers look at the garden look at the estate books if it comes to that why it will be years before even with all my knowledge of affairs I can pull the thing through years Mrs. Boyce gave a slight cough she had pushed back her chair and was alternately studying her husband and daughter they might have been actors performing for her amusement and yet amusement is not precisely the word for that hazel eye with its frequent smile had not a spark of geniality after a time those about her found something scathing in its dry light now as soon as her husband became aware that she was watching him his look wavered and his mood collapsed he threw her a curious furtive glance and fell silent I suppose Mr. Harden and his sister remind you of your London socialists friends Marcella asked Mrs. Boyce lightly in the pause that followed you have, I see, taken a great liking for them oh well, I don't know said Marcella with a shrug and something of a proud reticence Mr. Harden is very kind but he doesn't seem to have thought much about things she never talked about her London friends to her mother if she could help it the sentiments of life generally avoided Mrs. Boyce when they could Marcella being all sentiment and impulse was constantly her mother's victim to what she would but in her quiet moment she stood on the defensive so the socialists are the only people who think said Mrs. Boyce who was now standing by the window pressing her dog's head against her dress as he pushed up against her well, I am sorry for the Hardens they tell me they give all their substance away already and everyone says it is going to be a particularly bad winter the living I hear is worth nothing all the same I should wish them to look more cheerful it is the first duty of Marcella Marcella looked at her mother indignantly it seems to her often that she said the most heartless things imaginable cheerful she said in a village like this with all the young men drifting off to London and all the well-to-do people dissent us no one to stand by him no money and no helpers the people always ill ages eleven and twelve shillings a week and only the old wrecks of men left to do the work he might, I think, expect the people in this house to back him up a little all he asks is that Papa should go and satisfy himself with his own eyes as to the difference between our property and Lord Maxwell's Lord Maxwell's cried Mr. Boyce rousing himself from a state of half melancholy half sleepy reverie by the fire and throwing away his cigarette Lord Maxwell, difference? I should think so thirty thousand a year if he has a penny by the way I wish he would just have the civility to answer my note about those covert over by Will's clubs he had hardly said the words when the door opened to admit William the footman in his usual tremor of nervousness carrying a salva and a note the man says please sir is there any answer sir well that's odd said Mr. Boyce his look brightening here is Lord Maxwell's answer just as I was talking of it his wife turned sharply and watched him take it her lips parted a strange expectancy in her whole attitude he tore it open read it and then threw it angrily under the grate no answer shut the door the lad retreated Mr. Boyce sat down and began carefully to put the fire together his thin left hand shook upon his knee there was a moment's pause of complete silence Mrs. Boyce's face might have been seen by a close observer to quiver and then stiffen as she stood in the light of the window a tall and queenly figure in her sweeping black but she said not a word and presently left the room Marcella watched her father Papa was that a note from Lord Maxwell Mr. Boyce looked round with a start I was so surprised that anyone was still there it struck Marcella that he looked yellow and shrunken years older than her mother an impulse of tenderness joined with anger and a sudden sick depression she was conscious of them all as she got up and went across to him determined to speak out her parents were not her friends and did not possess her confidence but her constant separation from them since her childhood had now sometimes the result of giving her the boldness with them that a stranger might have had she had no habitual deference to breakthrough and the hindering restraint of memory though strong were still less strong than they would have been if she had lived with them day by day and year by year and had known their lives in close detail instead of guessing at them as was now so often the case with her Papa is Lord Maxwell's note an uncivil one Mr. Boyce stooped forward and begun to rub his chilly hand over the blaze why that man's only son and I used to loaf and shoot and play cricket together from morning till night when we were boys Henry Rayburn was a bit older than I and he lent me the gun with which I shot my first rabbit it was in one of the fields over by solehust just where the two estates join after that we were always companions we used to go out at night with the keepers after poachers we spent hours in the snow watching for wood pigeons we shot that pair of kestrels over by the inner hall door in the windmill hill fields at least I did I was a better shot than he by that time he didn't like Robert he always wanted me well Papa what does he say asked Marcella impatiently she laid her hand however as she spoke on her father's shoulder Mr. Boyce winced and looked up at her he and her mother had originally sent their daughter away from home that they might avoid the daily worry of her awakening curiosities one of his resolutions in coming to Millor park had been to keep up his dignity with her but the sight of her dark face bent upon him softened by a quick and womanly compassion seemed to set free a new impulse in him he writes in the third person if you want to know my dear and refers me to his agent very much as though I was some London grocer who had just bought the place oh it is quite evident what he means they were here without moving and it is now three weeks at least since he and Miss Rayburn came back from Scotland and not a card nor a word from either of them nor from the winter burnt nor the leavens pleasant well my dear you must make up your mind to it I did think I was full enough to think that when I came back to the old place my father's old friends would let by cons be by cons I never did them any harm let them gang their gate confound them the little dark man straightened himself fiercely I can get my pleasure out of the land and as for your mother she'd not lift a finger to propitiate one of them in the last word however there was not a fraction of that sympathetic pride which the ear expected but rather fresh bitterness and grievance Marcella stood thinking her mind traveling hither and thither with lightning speed now over the social events of the last six weeks now over incidents of those long past holidays was this indeed the second volume beginning the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories of shrinking disillusion and repulse what was it you wanted with those covert's papa she asked presently with a quick decision what the deuce does it matter if you want to know I proposed to him to exchange my covert over by the scrubs which work in with his shooting for the wood down by the home farm it was an exchange year after year in my father's time when I spoke to the keeper I found it had been allowed to lapse your uncle let the shooting go to rack and ruin after Harold's death it gave me something to write about and I was determined to know where I stood well the old Pharisee can go his way I'll go mine and with his spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Melor in his native heath Richard Boyce rose drew his emaciated frame to its full height and stood looking out very rarely to his ancestral lawns a picturesque and elegant figure for all its weakness and pitiableness I shall ask Mr. Aldous-Rabin about it if I see him in the village today said Marcella quietly her father started and looked at her with some attention what have you seen of Aldous-Rabin he inquired I remember hearing that you had come across him suddenly I have come across him I have met him once or twice and I have become a vicarit and oh on one or two other occasions said Marcella carelessly he has always made himself agreeable Mr. Hardin says his grandfather is devoted to him and will hardly ever let him go away from home he does a great deal for Lord Maxwell now writes for him and helps to manage the estate and next year when the Tories come back and Lord Maxwell is in office again why of course there will be plums for the grandson said Mr. Boyce goes without saying though we are such a virtuous lot oh yes he'll get on everybody says so and he'll deserve it too she added her eye can link combatively as she served her father he takes a lot of trouble down here about the cottages and the board of guardians and the farms the hardens like him very much but he is not exactly popular according to them his manners are sometimes shy and awkward and the poor people think he's proud I dare say like some of his uncles before him said Mr. Boyce irritably but he was civil to you you say and again he turned a quick considering on his daughter oh dear yes said Marcella with a little proud smile there was a pause then she spoke again I must go off to the church the hardens have hard work just now with the harvest festival and I promised to take them some flowers well said her father grudgingly so long as you don't promise anything on my account I tell you I haven't got six pence to spend on subscriptions to anything or anybody by the way if you see Reynolds anywhere about the drive you can send him to me he and I are going round the home farm to pick up a few birds if we can and see what the Covert's look like the stock has all run down and the place has been poached to death but he thinks if we take on an extra man in the spring and spend a little time staring we shall do pretty decently next year the color leapt to Marcella's cheek as she tied on her hat you will set up another keeper and you wouldn't do anything for the village she cried her black eyes lightning and without another word she opened the front door and walked rapidly away along the terrace leaving her father both angered and amazed a man like Richard Boyce cannot get comfortably through life without a good deal of masquerading in which those immediate neighborhood are expected to join his wife had long since consented to play the game on condition of making it plain the whole time that she was no dupe as to what Marcella's part in the affair might be going to be her father was as yet uneasily in the dark what constantly astonished him as she moved and talked under his eye was the girl's beauty surely she had been a plain child though a striking one but now she had not only beauty but also a pair of beauty the self-confidence given by the possession of good looks was very evident in her behavior she was very accomplished too and more clever than was always quite agreeable to a father whose self-conceit was one of the few compensations left him by misfortune such a girl was sure to be admired she would have lovers friends of her own it seemed that already while Lord Maxwell was preparing to insult he discovered that the daughter was handsome Richard Boyce fell into a miserable reverie where in the Rayburn's behavior and Marcella's unexpected gifts played about equal parts meanwhile Marcella was gathering flowers in the cedar garden the most adorable corner of mellow park where the original Tudor house Gray, Mullyand and Ivy covered ran at right angles into the later garden front which projected beyondage to the south nearby a sunny and sheltered corner where roses, climates, hollyhocks and sunflowers grew with a more lavish height and blossom than elsewhere as though conscious they must do their part in a whole of beauty the grass indeed wanted mowing and the first autumn leaves lay thickly drifted upon it the flowers were untied and untrimmed but under the condition of two gardeners to ten acres of garden nature does very much as she pleases and Mr. Boyce when he came that way grumbled in vain as for Marcella she was alternately moved to revolt and tenderness by the rugged charm of the old place on the one hand it angered her that anything so plainly meant for beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt on the other if house and gardens had been spik and span like the other houses of the neighborhood if there had been sound roofs a modern water supply shutters greenhouses and heedless paths in short the general self complacent air of a well kept country house where would have been that thrilling intimate appeal as for something for a lonely lovely which the old place so constantly made upon her it seemed to depend even upon her the latest born of all its children to ask for tenderness and cherishing even from her she was always planning how with a minimum of money to spend it could be and healed and in the planning had grown in these few weeks to love it as though she had been bred there but this morning Marcella picked her roses and sunflowers in tumult and depression of spirit what was this past which in these new surroundings was like some vainly fled tyrant clutching at them again she energetically decided that the time had come for her to demand the truth yet of whom Marcella knew very well that to force her mother to any line of action Mrs. unwilling to follow was beyond her power and it was not easy to go to her father directly and say tell me exactly how and why it is that society has turned its back on you all the same it was due to them all due to herself especially now that she was grown up and at home that she should not be kept in the dark any longer like a baby that she should be put in possession of the facts which after all threatened to stand here at Malore park is untowardly in there in her way as they had done in the shabby school and lodging house existence of all those bygone years perhaps the secret of her impatience was that she did not and could not believe that the fact if faced would turn out to be insurmountable her instinct told her as she looked back that their relation to what society in the past though full of discomfort and humiliations had not been the relation of outcasts their poverty and the shifts to which poverty drives people had brought them the disrespect of one class and as to the acquaintances and friends of their own rank what had been mainly shown them had been a sort of cool distaste for their company and insulting readiness to forget the existence of people who had so to speak lost their social bloom and laid themselves open to their contemptuous disapproval or pity of the world everybody it seemed knew their affairs and knowing them so no personal advantage and distinction in the boy's acquaintance but rather the contrary as she put the facts together a little she realized however that the breach had always been deepest between her father and his relations or his oldest friends a little shiver passed through her as she reflected that here in his own country where his history was best known the feeling toward him whatever it rested upon might very probably be strongest well it was hard upon them hard upon her mother hard upon her in her first ecstasy over the old ancestral house and the dignities of her new position how little she had thought of these things and there they were all the time dogging and sorting she walked slowly along with her burden of flowers through a laurel path which led straight to the drive and so across it to the little church there under the great lines of the park far away from the parsonage and village the property it seemed of the big house when Marcella entered the doors on the north and south sides were both standing open for the vicar and his sister had been already at work there and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit of necessary business meaning to return in half an hour it was the unpretending church of a hamlet girt outside by the humble graves of toiling and forgotten relations and adorned or at any rate diversified within by a group of mural monuments of various styles and dates but all of them bearing in some way or other the name of boys conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub crowned tomb in the chancel marking the remains of that parliamentarian boys who fought side by side with Hamden his boyish friend a child grow field lived to be driven out of Westminster by carnal pride and to spend his later years at Melor in disgrace fast with the protector and then with the restoration from these monuments alone a tolerably faithful idea of the boys family could have been gathered clearly not a family of any very great pretensions a race for the most part of frugal upright country gentlemen to be found with scarcely an exception on the side of political liberty and of a wiggish religion men who had given their sons to die at Quebec to see and Trafalgar for the making of England's empire who would have voted with forks but that the terrace of Burke and a dogged sense that the country must be carried on drove them into supporting Pitt who at home dispensed alternate justice and doles and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them intended to bear witness at once to the latinity of a boy's education and the pious strength of his legitimate affections a tedious perhaps and pig-headed tyrannical too here and there but on the whole honourable English stuff the stuff which has made and still in new form sustains the fabric of a great state only once was their break in the uniform character of the monuments a break corresponding to the highest moment of the boys fortunes a moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into brilliance and the prose of generations broke into a few years of poetry somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard boys went abroad to make the grand tour he was a man of parts the friend of Horace Walpole and of Grey and his introductions opened to him whatever doors he might wish to enter at a time when the upper classes of the leading European nations were far more intimately and familiarly acquainted with each other than they are now he married at Rome an Italian lady by birth and large fortune then he brought her home to Mellore where straight away the garden front was built with all its fantastic and beautiful decoration the great avenue was planted pictures began to invade the house and a musical library was collected whereof the innumerable faded volumes bearing each of them the entwined names of Richard and Marcella boys had been during the last few weeks minds of delight and curiosity to the Marcella of today the Italian wife bore her lord two sons and then in early middle life she died much loved and passionately mourned her tomb bore no long winded panjiric her name only her parentage and birthplace for she was Italian to the last and her husband loved her the better for it the dates of her birth and death and then two lines from Dante's vita nuova the portrait of this earlier Marcella hung still in the room where her music book survived a dark blurred picture by an inferior hand but the Marcella of today had long since eagerly decided that her own physique and her fathers were to be traced to its original as well no doubt as the artistic aptitudes of both aptitudes not hitherto conspicuous in her respectable race in reality however she loved every one of them these Jacobian and Georgian fathers with their interminable epitaphs now as she stood in the church looking about her her flowers lying beside her in a tumbled heap on the chancell step cheerfulness delight nay the indomitable pride and exaltation of her youth came back upon her in one great lifting wave the depression of her fathers repentances and trepidations fell away she felt herself in her place under the shelter of her forefathers incorporated and redeemed as it were into their guild of honor there were difficulties in her path no doubt but she had her vantage ground and would use it for her own profit and that of others she had no cause for shame and in these days of the developed individual the old solidarity of the family had become injustice and wrong her mind filled tumultously with the evidence these last two years had brought her of her natural power of a men and things she knew perfectly well that she could do and dare what other girls of her age could never vent her that she had fascination resource brain already in these few weeks smiles played about her lips as she thought of that quiet grave gentleman of thirty she had been meeting at the hardens his grandfather might write as he pleased it did not alter the fact that during the last few weeks Mr. Aldous Rayburn clearly one of the party most coveted and one of the men most observed in the neighborhood had taken and shown a very market interest in Mr. Boyce's daughter all the more market because of the reserved manner with which it had to contend no whatever happened she would carve her own path make her own way and her parents too at twenty one nothing looks irrevocable a woman's charm a woman's energy should do it all I and something else too she looked quickly around the church her mind swelling with the sense of the cravings injustice and distrust never could she be more conscious than here on this very spot of mission of an urging call to the service of man in front of her was the boys his family pew carved and be cushioned but behind it stretched bench after bench of plain and humble oak on which the village sat when it came to chat here for the first time had Marcella been brought face to face with the agricultural world as it is no stage realism but the bear fact in one of its most pitiable aspects men of sixty and upwards gray and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had worked their lives not old as age goes but already the refuse of their generation unpaid for at the rate of refuse with no prospect but the workhouse if the grave should be delayed yet quiet impassive mind now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy misbehaved or a dog strayed into chat now joining with a stolid unconsciousness in this tremendous sayings of the Psalms women coarse or worn or hopeless girls and boys and young children already blanched and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of sanitary cottages bad water and starvation food these figures and types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella in London the agricultural labourer of whom she had heard so much had been to her as a pawn in the game of discussion here he was in the flesh and she was called a pawn to live with him and not only to talk about him under circumstances of peculiar responsibility too for it was very clear that upon the owner of Melor depended and had always depended the labourer of Melor well she had tried to live with him ever since she came had gone in and out of their cottages in flat horror and amazement at them and their lives and their surroundings alternately pleased and repelled by their cringing now enjoying her position among them with the natural aristocratic instinct of women now grinding her teeth over her father's and uncle's behaviour and the little good she saw any prospect of doing for her new subjects what their friend and companion and ultimately their redeemer too well and why not weak women have done greater things in the world as she stood on the chancellor's step vowing herself to these great things she was conscious of a dramatic moment would not have been sorry perhaps if some admiring eye could have seen and understood her but there was a saving sincerity at the root of her and her strained mood sunk naturally into a girlish excitement we shall see we shall see she said aloud and was startled to hear her words quite plainly in the silent church as she spoke she stooped to separate her flowers and see what quantities she had of each but while she did so a sound of distant voices made her raise herself again she walked down the church and stood at the open south door looking and waiting before her stretched a green field path leading across the park to the village the vicar and his sister were coming along it the church both flowers laden and beside walked a tall man in a brown shooting suit with his gun in his hand and his dog beside him the excitement in Marcella's eyes leapt up afresh for a moment as she saw the group and then subsided into a luminous and steady glow she waited quietly for them hardly responding to the affectionate signals of the vicar's sister but inwardly she was not quiet at all for the tall man in the brown shooting coat was Mr. Aldous Rayburn End of Chapter 3 of Marcella Recorded by Liz Delosu