Marcella Part 95

But Marcella held her.

"Do you remember in the _Purgatorio_, mamma, the lines about the loser in the game: 'When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and _learning by his grief_'?

Do you remember?"

Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a little nervous, but a.s.senting. It was one of the inconsistencies of her strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante student. The taste for the most strenuous and pa.s.sionate of poets had developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of her middle life. Like everything else personal to herself she never spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to Marcella from a child.

"_E tristo impara?_" repeated Marcella, her voice wavering. "Mamma "--she laid her face against her mother's dress again--"I have lost more throws than you think in the last two years. Won't you believe I may have learnt a little?"

She raised her eyes to her mother's pinched and mask-like face. Mrs.

Boyce's lips moved as though she would have asked a question. But she did not ask it. She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew well--the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into alien fields of emotion.

"Well, but one expects persons like you to learn," she said, with a light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention. There was silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just touched her daughter's hair. "Now, will you come up in half an hour?

That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his food."

Marcella went to her father at the hour named. She found him in his wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the Cedar Garden. The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old house. It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers. The needlework hangings of the bed were full of holes; the seats of the Chippendale chairs were frayed or tattered. But, none the less, the inalienable character and dignity of his sleeping-room were a bitter satisfaction to Richard Boyce, even in his sickness. After all said and done, he was king here in his father's and grandfather's place; ruling where they ruled, and--whether they would or no--dying where they died, with the same family faces to bear him witness from the walls, and the same vault awaiting him.

When his daughter entered, he turned his head, and his eyes, deep and black still as ever, but sunk in a yellow relic of a face, showed a certain agitation. She was disagreeably aware that his thoughts were much occupied with her; that he was full of grievance towards her, and would probably before long bring the pathos of his situation as well as the weight of his dying authority to bear upon her, for purposes she already suspected with alarm.

"Are you a little easier, papa?" she said, as she came up to him.

"I should think as a nurse you ought to know better, my dear, than to ask," he said testily. "When a person is in my condition, enquiries of that sort are a mockery!"

"But one may be in less or more pain," she said gently. "I hoped Dr.

Clarke's treatment yesterday might have given you some relief."

He did not vouchsafe an answer. She took some work and sat down by him.

Mrs. Boyce, who had been tidying a table of food and medicine, came and asked him if he would be wheeled into another room across the gallery, which had been arranged as a sitting-room. He shook his head irritably.

"I am not fit for it. Can't you see? And I want to speak to Marcella."

Mrs. Boyce went away. Marcella waited, not without a tremor. She was sitting in the sun, her head bent over the muslin strings she was hemming for her nurse's bonnet. The window was wide open; outside, the leaves under a warm breeze were gently drifting down into the Cedar Garden, amid a tangled ma.s.s of flowers, mostly yellow or purple. To one side rose the dark layers of the cedars; to the other, the grey front of the library wing.

Mr. Boyce looked at her with the frown which had now become habitual to him, moved his lips once or twice without speaking; and at last made his effort.

"I should think, Marcella, you must often regret by now the step you took eighteen months ago!"

She grew pale.

"How regret it, papa?" she said, without looking up.

"Why, good G.o.d!" he said angrily; "I should think the reasons for regret are plain enough. You threw over a man who was devoted to you, and could have given you the finest position in the county, for the most nonsensical reasons in the world--reasons that by now, I am certain, you are ashamed of."

He saw her wince, and enjoyed his prerogative of weakness. In his normal health he would never have dared so to speak to her. But of late, during long fits of feverish brooding--intensified by her return home--he had vowed to himself to speak his mind.

"Aren't you ashamed of them?" he repeated, as she was silent.

She looked up.

"I am not ashamed of anything I did to save Hurd, if that is what you mean, papa."

Mr. Boyce's anger grew.

"Of course you know what everybody said?"

She stooped over her work again, and did not reply.

"It's no good being sullen over it," he said in exasperation; "I'm your father, and I'm dying. I have a right to question you. It's my duty to see something settled, if I can, before I go. Is it _true_ that all the time you were attacking Raeburn about politics and the reprieve, and what not, you were really behaving as you never ought to have behaved, with Harry Wharton?"

He gave out the words with sharp emphasis, and, bending towards her, he laid an emaciated hand upon her arm.

"What use is there, papa, in going back to these things?" she said, driven to bay, her colour going and coming. "I may have been wrong in a hundred ways, but you never understood that the real reason for it all was that--that--I never was in love with Mr. Raeburn."

"Then why did you accept him?" He fell back against his pillows with a jerk.

"As to that, I will confess my sins readily enough," she said, while her lip trembled, and he saw the tears spring into her eyes. "I accepted him for what you just now called his position in the county, though not quite in that way either."

He was silent a little, then he began again in a voice which gradually became unsteady from self-pity.

"Well, now look here! I have been thinking about this matter a great deal--and G.o.d knows I've time to think and cause to think, considering the state I'm in--and I see no reason whatever why I should not try--before I die--to put this thing _straight_. That man was head over ears in love with you, _madly_ in love with you. I used to watch him, and I know. Of course you offended and distressed him greatly. He could never have expected such conduct from you or any one else. But _he's_ not the man to change round easily, or to take up with any one else.

Now, if you regret what you did or the way in which you did it, why shouldn't I--a dying man may be allowed a little licence I should think!--give him a hint?"

"_Papa!_" cried Marcella, dropping her work, and looking at him with a pale, indignant pa.s.sion, which a year ago would have quelled him utterly. But he held up his hand.

"Now just let me finish. It would be no good my doing a thing of this kind without saying something to you first, because you'd find it out, and your pride would be the ruin of it. You always had a demoniacal pride, Marcella, even when you were a tiny child; but if you make up your mind now to let me tell him you regret what you did--just that--you'll make him happy, and yourself, for you know very well he's a man of the highest character--and your poor father, who never did _you_ much harm anyway!" His voice faltered. "I'd manage it so that there should be nothing humiliating to you in it whatever. As if there could be anything humiliating in confessing such a mistake as that; besides, what is there to be ashamed of? You're no pauper. I've pulled Mellor out of the mud for you, though you and your mother do give me credit for so precious little!"

He lay back, trembling with fatigue, yet still staring at her with glittering eyes, while his hand on the invalid table fixed to the side of his chair shook piteously. Marcella dreaded the effect the whole scene might have upon him; but, now they were in the midst of it, both feeling for herself and prudence for him drove her into the strongest speech she could devise.

"Papa, if _anything_ of that sort were done, I should take care Mr.

Raeburn knew I had had nothing to do with it--in such a way that it would be _impossible_ for him to carry it further. Dear papa, don't think of such a thing any more. Because I treated Mr. Raeburn unjustly last year, are we now to hara.s.s and persecute him? I would sooner disappear from everybody I know--from you and mamma, from England--and never be heard of again."

She stopped a moment--struggling for composure--that she might not excite him too much.

"Besides, it would be absurd! You forget I have seen a good deal of Mr.

Raeburn lately--while I have been with the Winterbournes. He has entirely given up all thought of me. Even my vanity could see that plainly enough. His best friends expect him to marry a bright, fascinating little creature of whom I saw a good deal in James Street--a Miss Macdonald."

"Miss how--much?" he asked roughly.

She repeated the name, and then dwelt, with a certain amount of confusion and repet.i.tion, upon the probabilities of the matter--half conscious all the time that she was playing a part, persuading herself and him of something she was not at all clear about in her own inner mind--but miserably, pa.s.sionately determined to go through with it all the same.

He bore with what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think it out.

Meanwhile, step by step, she brought the conversation to less dangerous things, and she was finally gliding into some chat about the Winterbournes when he interrupted her abruptly--

"And that other fellow--Wharton. Your mother tells me you have seen him in London. Has he been making love to you?"

"Suppose I won't be catechised!" she said gaily, determined to allow no more tragedy of any kind. "Besides, papa, you can't read your gossip as good people should. Mr. Wharton's engagement to a certain Lady Selina Farrell--a distant cousin of the Winterbournes--was announced, in several papers with great plainness three weeks ago."