Marcella Part 100

But that evening, for the first time, she let Marcella put her on the sofa, tend her, and read to her. More wonderful still, she went to sleep while Marcella was reading. In the lamplight her face looked piteously old and worn. The girl sat for long with her hands clasped round her knees, gazing down upon it, in a trance of pain and longing.

Marcella was awake early next morning, listening to the full voice of the sea as it broke three hundred feet below, against the beach and rocky walls of the little town. She was lying in a tiny white room, one of the cells of the old monastery, and the sun as it rose above the Salernian mountains--the mountains that hold Paestum in their blue and purple shadows--danced in gold on the white wall. The bell of the cathedral far below tolled the hour. She supposed it must be six o'clock. Two hours more or so, and Lord Maxwell's letter might be looked for.

She lay and thought of it--longed for it, and for the time of answering it, with the same soreness that had marked all the dreams of a restless night. If she could only see her father's letter! It was inconceivable that he should have mentioned _her_ name in his plea. He might have appealed to the old friends.h.i.+p between the families. That was possible, and would have, at any rate, an _appearance_ of decency. But who could answer for it--or for him? She clasped her hands rigidly behind her head, her brows frowning, bending her mind with an intensity of will to the best means of a.s.suring Aldous Raeburn that she and her mother would not encroach upon him. She had a perpetual morbid vision of herself as the pursuer, attacking him now through his friend, now through her father. Oh! when would that letter come, and let her write her own!

She tried to read, but in reality listened for every sound of awakening life in the hotel. When at last her mother's maid came in to call her, she sprang up with a start.

"Deacon, are the letters come?"

"There are two for your mother, miss; none for you."

Marcella threw on her dressing-gown, watched her opportunity, and slipped in to her mother, who occupied a similar cell next door.

Mrs. Boyce was sitting up in bed, with a letter before her, her pale blue eyes fixed absently on the far stretch of sea.

She looked round with a start as Marcella entered. "The letter is to me, of course," she said.

Marcella read it breathlessly.

"Dear Mrs. Boyce,--I have this morning received from your solicitor, Mr.

French, a letter written by Mr. Boyce to myself in November of last year. In it he asks me to undertake the office of executor, to which, I hear from Mr. French, he has named me in his will. Mr. French also enquires whether I shall be willing to act, and asks me to communicate with you.

"May I, then, venture to intrude upon you with these few words? Mr.

Boyce refers in his touching letter to the old friends.h.i.+p between our families, and to the fact that similar offices have often been performed by his relations for mine, or _vice versa_. But no reminder of the kind was in the least needed. If I can be of any service to yourself and to Miss Boyce, neither your poor husband nor you could do me any greater kindness than to command me.

"I feel naturally some diffidence in the matter. I gather from Mr.

French that Miss Boyce is her father's heiress, and comes at once into the possession of Mellor. She may not, of course, wish me to act, in which case I should withdraw immediately; but I sincerely trust that she will not forbid me the very small service I could so easily and gladly render.

"I cannot close my letter without venturing to express the deep sympathy I have felt for you and yours during the past six months. I have been far from forgetful of all that you have been going through, though I may have seemed so. I trust that you and your daughter will not hurry home for any business cause, if it is still best for your health to stay in Italy. With your instructions Mr. French and I could arrange everything.

"Believe me,

"Yours most sincerely,

"MAXWELL."

"You will find it difficult, my dear, to write a snub in answer to that letter," said Mrs. Boyce, drily, as Marcella laid it down.

Marcella's face was, indeed, crimson with perplexity and feeling.

"Well, we can think it over," she said as she went away.

Mrs. Boyce pondered the matter a good deal when she was left alone. The signs of reaction and change in Marcella were plain enough. What they precisely meant, and how much, was another matter. As to him, Marcella's idea of another attachment might be true, or might be merely the creation of her own irritable pride. Anyway, he was in the mood to write a charming letter. Mrs. Boyce's blanched lip had all its natural irony as she thought it over. To her mind Aldous Raeburn's manners had always been a trifle too good, whether for his own interests or for this wicked world. And if he had any idea now of trying again, let him, for Heaven's sake, not be too yielding or too eager! "It was always the way," thought Mrs. Boyce, remembering a child in white frock and baby shoes--"if you wished to make her want anything, you had to take it away from her."

Meanwhile the mere thought that matters might even yet so settle themselves drew from the mother a long breath of relief. She had spent an all but sleepless night, tormented by Marcella's claim upon her.

After twenty years of self-suppression this woman of forty-five, naturally able, original, and independent, had seen a glimpse of liberty. In her first youth she had been betrayed as a wife, degraded as a member of society. A pa.s.sion she could not kill, combined with some stoical sense of inalienable obligation, had combined to make her both the slave and guardian of her husband up to middle life; and her family and personal pride, so strong in her as a girl, had found its only outlet in this singular estrangement she had achieved between herself and every other living being, including her own daughter. Now her husband was dead, and all sorts of crushed powers and desires, mostly of the intellectual sort, had been strangely reviving within her. Just emerged, as she was, from the long gloom of nursing, she already wished to throw it all behind her--to travel, to read, to make acquaintances--she who had lived as a recluse for twenty years! There was in it a last clutch at youth, at life. And she had no desire to enter upon this new existence--in comrades.h.i.+p with Marcella. They were independent and very different human beings. That they were mother and daughter was a mere physical accident.

Moreover, though she was amply conscious of the fine development in Marcella during the past two years, it is probable that she felt her daughter even less congenial to her now than of old. For the rich, emotional nature had, as we have seen, "suffered conviction," had turned in the broad sense to "religion," was more and more sensitive, especially since Hallin's death, to the spiritual things and symbols in the world. At Naples she had haunted churches; had read, as her mother knew, many religious books.

Now Mrs. Boyce in these matters had a curious history. She had begun life as an ardent Christian, under evangelical influences. Her husband, on the other hand, at the time she married him was a man of purely sceptical opinions, a superficial disciple of Mill and Comte, and fond of an easy profanity which seemed to place him indisputably with the superior persons of this world. To the amazement and scandal of her friends, Evelyn Merritt had not been three months his wife before she had adopted his opinions _en bloc_, and was carrying them out to their logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher.

Thenceforward her conception of things--of which, however, she seldom spoke--had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that, in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things orthodox and established.

Then, in his last illness, he had finally broken away from her, and his own past. "Evelyn, I should like to see a clergyman," he had said to her in his piteous voice, "and I shall ask him to give me the Sacrament." She had made every arrangement accordingly; but her bitter soul could see nothing in the step but fear and hypocrisy; and he knew it. And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy. Had not the hard devotion of twenty years made him at least her own? And here was this black-coated reciter of incredible things stepping into her place. Only in death she recovered him wholly. No priest interfered while he drew his last breath upon her bosom.

And now Marcella! Yet the girl's voice and plea tugged at her withered heart. She felt a dread of unknown softnesses--of being invaded and weakened by things in her akin to her daughter, and so captured afresh.

Her mind fell upon the bare idea of a revival of the Maxwell engagement, and caressed it.

Meanwhile Marcella stood dressing by the open window in the sunlight, which filled the room with wavy reflections caught from the sea.

Fis.h.i.+ng-boats were putting off from the beach, three hundred feet below her; she could hear the grating of the keels, the songs of the boatmen.

On the little breakwater to the right an artist's white umbrella shone in the sun; and a half-naked boy, poised on the bows of a boat moored beside the painter, stood bent in the eager att.i.tude of one about to drop the bait into the blue wave below. His brown back burnt against the water. Cliff, houses, sea, glowed in warmth and light; the air was full of roses and orange-blossom; and to an English sense had already the magic of summer.

And Marcella's hands, as she coiled and plaited her black hair, moved with a new lightness; for the first time since her father's death her look had its normal fire, crossed every now and then by something that made her all softness and all woman. No! as her mother said, one could not snub that letter or its writer. But how to answer it! In imagination she had already penned twenty different replies. How not to be grasping or effusive, and yet to show that you could feel and repay kindness--there was the problem!

Meanwhile, from that letter, or rather in subtle connection with it, her thoughts at last went wandering off with a natural zest to her new realm of Mellor, and to all that she would and could do for the dwellers therein.

CHAPTER IV.

It was a bleak east-wind day towards the end of March. Aldous was at work in the library at the Court, writing at his grandfather's table, where in general he got through his estate and county affairs, keeping his old sitting-room upstairs for the pursuits that were more particularly his own.

All the morning he had been occupied with a tedious piece of local business, wading through endless doc.u.ments concerning a dispute between the head-master of a neighbouring grammar-school and his governing body, of which Aldous was one. The affair was difficult, personal, odious. To have wasted nearly three hours upon it was, to a man of Aldous's type, to have lost a day. Besides he had not his grandfather's knack in such things, and was abundantly conscious of it.

However, there it was, a duty which none but he apparently could or would do, and he had been wrestling with it. With more philosophy than usual, too, since every tick of the clock behind him bore him nearer to an appointment which, whatever it might be, would not be tedious.

At last he got up and went to the window to look at the weather. A cutting wind, clearly, but no rain. Then he walked into the drawing-room, calling for his aunt. No one was to be seen, either there or in the conservatory, and he came back to the library and rang.

"Roberts, has Miss Raeburn gone out?"

"Yes, my lord," said the old butler addressed. "She and Miss Macdonald have gone out driving, and I was to tell your lords.h.i.+p that Miss Raeburn would drop Miss Macdonald at Mellor on her way home."

"Is Sir Frank anywhere about?"

"He was in the smoking-room a little while ago, my lord."

"Will you please try and find him?"

"Yes, my lord."

Aldous's mouth twitched with impatience as the old servant shut the door.

"How many times did Roberts manage to be-lord me in a minute?" he asked himself; "yet if I were to remonstrate, I suppose I should only make him unhappy."

And walking again to the window, he thrust his hands into his pockets and stood looking out with a far from cheerful countenance.