Marcella Part 26

"Mr. Wharton and I have met several times on public platforms," said Hallin, holding out his hand, which Wharton took with effusion. Aldous greeted him with the impa.s.sive manner, the "three finger" manner, which was with him an inheritance--though not from his grandfather--and did not contribute to his popularity in the neighbourhood. As for young Leven, he barely nodded to the Radical candidate, and threw himself into a chair as far from the fire as possible.

"Frank and I have met before to-day!" said Wharton, laughing.

"Yes, I've been trying to undo some of your mischief," said the boy, bluntly. "I found him, Miss Boyce, haranguing a lot of men at the dinner-hour at Tudley End--one of our villages, you know--cramming them like anything--all about the game laws, and our misdeeds--my father's, of course."

Wharton raised a protesting hand.

"Oh--all very well! Of course it was us you meant! Well, when he'd driven off, I got up on a cart and had _my_ say. I asked them whether they didn't all come out at our big shoots, and whether they didn't have almost as much fun as we did--why! the schoolmaster and the postman come to ask to carry cartridges, and everybody turns out, down to the cripples!--whether they didn't have rabbits given them all the year round; whether half of them hadn't brothers and sons employed somehow about the game, well-paid, and well-treated; whether any man-jack of them would be a ha'porth better off if there were no game; whether many of them wouldn't be worse off; and whether England wouldn't be a beastly dull place to live in, if people like him"--he pointed to Wharton--"had the governing of it! And I brought 'em all round too. I got them cheering and laughing. Oh! I can tell you old Dodgson'll have to take me on. He says he'll ask me to speak for him at several places. I'm not half bad, I declare I'm not."

"I thought they gave you a holiday task at Eton," observed Wharton, blandly.

The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself--radiant:--

"I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well. But if it had only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn't I have scored--by Jove! They gave us a beastly _essay_ instead of a book. _Demagogues_!' I sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half. I'd have known something about it _now_."

And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to his candidate cousin.

Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton. Then there was a general drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped by Aldous. Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant and apart.

Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive, something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting, and glad to be silent. Yet all the time he was observing the girl presiding and the man beside her--his friend, her lover. The moment had a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him. So close had been the bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover's communication of his engagement had evoked in the friend that sense--poignant, inevitable--which in the realm of the affections always waits on something done and finished,--a leaf turned, a chapter closed. "That sad word, Joy!" Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn's letter reached him, and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor's phrase, long familiar and significant to him. His letter to his friend, and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost him an invalid's contribution of sleep and ease. The girl's answer had seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as Aldous was concerned.

Her beauty, of which he had heard much, now that he was face to face with it, was certainly striking enough--all the more because of its immaturity, the subtlety and uncertainty of its promise.

_Immaturity_--_uncertainty_--these words returned upon him as he observed her manner with its occasional awkwardness, the awkwardness which goes with power not yet fully explored or mastered by its possessor. How Aldous hung upon her, following every movement, antic.i.p.ating every want! After a while Hallin found himself half-inclined to Mr. Boyce's view, that men of Raeburn's type are never seen to advantage in this stage--this queer topsy-turvy stage--of first pa.s.sion. He felt a certain impatience, a certain jealousy for his friend's dignity. It seemed to him too, every now and then, that she--the girl--was teased by all this absorption, this deference. He was conscious of watching for something in her that did not appear; and a first prescience of things anxious or untoward stirred in his quick sense.

"You may all say what you like," said Marcella, suddenly, putting down her cup, and letting her hand drop for emphasis on her knee; "but you will never persuade me that game-preserving doesn't make life in the country much more difficult, and the difference between cla.s.ses much wider and bitterer, than they need be."

The remark cut across some rattling talk of Frank Leven's, who was in the first flush of the sportsman's ardour, and, though by no means without parts, could at the present moment apply his mind to little else than killing of one kind or another, unless it were to the chances of keeping his odious cousin out of Parliament.

Leven stared. Miss Boyce's speech seemed to him to have no sort of _a propos_. Aldous looked down upon her as he stood beside her, smiling.

"I wish you didn't trouble yourself so much about it," he said.

"How can I help it?" she answered quickly; and then flushed, like one who has drawn attention indiscreetly to their own personal situation.

"Trouble herself!" echoed young Leven. "Now, look here Miss Boyce, will you come for a walk with me? I'll convince you, as I convinced those fellows over there. I know I could, and you won't give me the chance; it's too bad."

"Oh, you!" she said, with a little shrug; "what do you know about it?

One might as well consult a gambler about gambling when he is in the middle of his first rush of luck. I have ten times more right to an opinion than you have. I can keep my head cool, and notice a hundred things that _you_ would never see. I come fresh into your country life, and the first thing that strikes me is that the whole machinery of law and order seems to exist for nothing in the world but to protect your pheasants! There are policemen--to catch poachers; there are magistrates--to try them. To judge from the newspapers, at least, they have nothing else to do. And if _you_ follow your sporting instincts, you are a very fine fellow, and everybody admires you. But if a shoemaker's son in Mellor follows his, he is a villain and a thief, and the policeman and the magistrate make for him at once."

"But I don't steal his chickens!" cried the lad, choking with arguments and exasperation; "and why should he steal my pheasants? I paid for the eggs, I paid for the hens to sit on 'em, I paid for the coops to rear them in, I paid the men to watch them, I paid for the barley to feed them with: why is he to be allowed to take my property, and I am to be sent to jail if I take his?"

"_Property_!" said Marcella, scornfully. "You can't settle everything nowadays by that big word. We are coming to put the public good before property. If the nation should decide to curtail your 'right,' as you call it, in the general interest, it will do it, and you will be left to scream."

She had flung her arm round the back of her chair, and all her lithe young frame was tense with an eagerness, nay, an excitement, which drew Hallin's attention. It was more than was warranted by the conversation, he thought.

"Well, if you think the abolition of game preserving would be popular in the country, Miss Boyce, I'm certain you make a precious mistake," cried Leven. "Why, even you don't think it would be, do you, Mr. Hallin?" he said, appealing at random in his disgust.

"I don't know," said Hallin, with his quiet smile. "I rather think, on the whole, it would be. The farmers put up with it, but a great many of them don't like it. Things are mended since the Ground Game Act, but there are a good many grievances still left."

"I should think there are!" said Marcella, eagerly, bending forward to him. "I was talking to one of our farmers the other day whose land goes up to the edge of Lord Winterbourne's woods. '_They_ don't keep their pheasants, miss,' he said. '_I_ do. I and my corn. If I didn't send a man up half-past five in the morning, when the ears begin to fill, there'd be nothing left for _us_.' 'Why don't you complain to the agent?' I said. 'Complain! Lor' bless you, miss, you may complain till you're black in the face. I've allus found--an' I've been here, man and boy, thirty-two year--as how _Winterbournes generally best it.'_ There you have the whole thing in a nutsh.e.l.l. It's a tyranny--a tyranny of the rich."

Flushed and sarcastic, she looked at Frank Leven; but Hallin had an uncomfortable feeling that the sarcasm was not all meant for him. Aldous was sitting with his hands on his knees, and his head bent forward a little. Once, as the talk ran on, Hallin saw him raise his grey eyes to the girl beside him, who certainly did not notice it, and was not thinking of him. There was a curious pain and perplexity in the expression, but something else too--a hunger, a dependence, a yearning, that for an instant gripped the friend's heart.

"Well, I know Aldous doesn't agree with you, Miss Boyce," cried Leven, looking about him in his indignation for some argument that should be final. "You don't, do you, Aldous? You don't think the country would be the better, if we could do away with game to-morrow?"

"No more than I think it would be the better," said Aldous, quietly, "if we could do away with gold-plate and false hair to-morrow. There would be too many hungry goldsmiths and wig-makers on the streets."

Marcella turned to him, half defiant, half softened.

"Of course, your point lies in _to-morrow,"_ she said. "I accept that.

We can't carry reform by starving innocent people. But the question is, what are we to work towards? Mayn't we regard the game laws as one of the obvious crying abuses to be attacked first--in the great campaign!--the campaign which is to bring liberty and self-respect back to the country districts, and make the labourer feel himself as much of a man as the squire?"

"What a head! What an att.i.tude!" thought Hallin, half repelled, half fascinated. "But a girl that can talk politics--hostile politics--to her lover, and mean them too--or am I inexperienced?--and is it merely that she is so much interested in him that she wants to be quarrelling with him?"

Aldous looked up. "I am not _sure_," he said, answering her. "That is always my difficulty, you know," and he smiled at her. "Game preserving is not to me personally an attractive form of private property, but it seems to me bound up with other forms, and I want to see where the attack is going to lead me. But I would protect your farmer--mind!--as zealously as you."

Hallin caught the impatient quiver of the girl's lip. The tea had just been taken away, and Marcella had gone to sit upon an old sofa near the fire, whither Aldous had followed her. Wharton, who had so far said nothing, had left his post of observation on the hearth-rug, and was sitting under the lamp balancing a paper-knife with great attention on two fingers. In the half light Hallin by chance saw a movement of Raeburn's hand towards Marcella's, which lay hidden among the folds of her dress--quick resistance on her part, then acquiescence. He felt a sudden pleasure in his friend's small triumph.

"Aldous and I have worn these things threadbare many a time," he said, addressing his hostess. "You don't know how kind he is to my dreams. I am no sportsman and have no landowning relations, so he ought to bid me hold my tongue. But he lets me rave. To me the simple fact is that _game preserving creates crime_. Agricultural life is naturally simpler--might be, it always seems to me, so much more easily moralised and fraternised than the industrial form. And you split it up and poison it all by the emphasis laid on this cla.s.s pleasure. It is a natural pleasure, you say.

Perhaps it is--the survival, perhaps, of some primitive instinct in our northern blood--but, if so, why should it be impossible for the rich to share it with the poor? I have little plans--dreams. I throw them out sometimes to catch Aldous, but he hardly rises to them!"

"Oh! I _say_," broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer.

"Now look here, Miss Boyce,--what do you think Mr. Hallin wants? It is just sheer lunacy--it really is--though I know I'm impertinent, and he's a great man. But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common there is--oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain--on Lord Maxwell's estate, and make a _labourers'_ shoot of it! Now, I ask you!

And he vows he doesn't see why they shouldn't rear pheasants if they choose to club and pay for it. Well, I will say that much for him, Aldous didn't see his way to _that_, though he isn't the kind of Conservative _I_ want to see in Parliament by a long way. Besides, it's such stuff! They say sport brutalises _us_, and then they want to go and contaminate the labourer. But we won't take the responsibility. We've got our own vices, and we'll stick to them; we're used to them; but we won't hand them on: we'd scorn the action."

The flushed young barbarian, driven to bay, was not to be resisted.

Marcella laughed heartily, and Hallin laid an affectionate hand on the boy's shoulder, patting him as though he were a restive horse.

"Yes, I remember I was puzzled as to the details of Hallin's scheme,"

said Aldous, his mouth twitching. "I wanted to know who was to pay for the licences; how game enough for the number of applicants was to be got without preserving; and how men earning twelve or fourteen s.h.i.+llings a week were to pay a keeper. Then I asked a clergyman who has a living near this common what he thought would be the end of it. 'Well,' he said, 'the first day they'd shoot every animal on the place; the second day they'd shoot each other. Universal carnage--I should say that would be about the end of it.' These were trifles, of course--details."

Hallin shook his head serenely.

"I still maintain," he said, "that a little practical ingenuity might have found a way."

"And I will support you," said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and bending over to Hallin, "with good reason. For three years and a few months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own estate, and it has not worked badly at all."

"There!" cried Marcella. "There! I knew something could be done, if there was a will. I have always felt it."

She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and eloquent.

"Of course, there was nothing to shoot!" exclaimed Frank Leven.

"On the contrary," said Wharton, smiling, "we are in the middle of a famous partridge country."

"How your neighbours must dote on you!" cried the boy. But Wharton took no notice.

"And my father preserved strictly," he went on. "It is quite a simple story. When I inherited, three years ago, I thought the whole thing detestable, and determined I wouldn't be responsible for keeping it up.

So I called the estate together--farmers and labourers--and we worked out a plan. There are keepers, but they are the estate servants, not mine. Everybody has his turn according to the rules--I and my friends along with the rest. Not everybody can shoot every year, but everybody gets his chance, and, moreover, a certain percentage of all the game killed is public property, and is distributed every year according to a regular order."