Part 34 (1/2)
”Saved your life! Dear--What do you mean?”
She explained, giving the little incident all--perhaps more than--its dramatic due. He listened with evident annoyance, and stood pondering when she came to an end.
”So I shall be expected to take quite a different view of him henceforward?” he inquired at last, looking round at her, with a very forced smile.
”I am sure I don't know that it matters to him what view anybody takes of him,” she cried, flus.h.i.+ng. ”He certainly takes the frankest views of other people, and expresses them.”
And while she played with the pearls in their box she gave a vivid account of her morning's talk with the Radical candidate for West Brooks.h.i.+re, and of their village expedition.
There was a certain relief in describing the scorn with which her acts and ideals had been treated; and, underneath, a woman's curiosity as to how Aldous would take it.
”I don't know what business he had to express himself so frankly,” said Aldous, turning to the fire and carefully putting it together. ”He hardly knows you--it was, I think, an impertinence.”
He stood upright, with his back to the hearth, a strong, capable, frowning Englishman, very much on his dignity. Such a moment must surely have become him in the eyes of a girl that loved him. Marcella proved restive under it.
”No; it's very natural,” she protested quickly. ”When people are so much in earnest they don't stop to think about impertinence! I never met any one who dug up one's thoughts by the roots as he does.”
Aldous was startled by her flush, her sudden att.i.tude of opposition. His intermittent lack of readiness overtook him, and there was an awkward silence. Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley meeting, and of Hallin. But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said:
”I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not liking Mr. Wharton?--other than politics, I mean?”
Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.
He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said:
”I had rather not rake up old scores.”
She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.
”Dearest,” he said, ”you shall put me in charity with all the world. But the worst of it is,” he added, half laughing, ”that I don't see how I am to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put that fire out instead of me!”
CHAPTER VI.
A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after years, pa.s.sed quickly by. Parliament met in the third week of January.
Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by a small majority. A dissolution and appeal to the country followed immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active throughout the const.i.tuencies, were carried forward with redoubled energy. In the Tudley End division, Aldous Raeburn was fighting a somewhat younger opponent of the same country-gentleman stock--a former f.a.g indeed of his at Eton--whose zeal and fluency gave him plenty to do.
Under ordinary circ.u.mstances Aldous would have thrown himself with all his heart and mind into a contest which involved for him the most stimulating of possibilities, personal and public. But, as these days went over, he found his appet.i.te for the struggle flagging, and was hara.s.sed rather than spurred by his adversary's activity. The real truth was that he could not see enough of Marcella! A curious uncertainty and unreality, moreover, seemed to have crept into some of their relations; and it had begun to gall and fever him that Wharton should be staying there, week after week, beside her, in her father's house, able to spend all the free intervals of the fight in her society, strengthening an influence which Raeburn's pride and delicacy had hardly allowed him as yet, in spite of his instinctive jealousy from the beginning, to take into his thoughts at all, but which was now apparent, not only to himself but to others.
In vain did he spend every possible hour at Mellor he could s.n.a.t.c.h from a conflict in which his party, his grandfather, and his own personal fortunes were all deeply interested. In vain--with a tardy instinct that it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long stay at Mellor was largely owing--did Aldous subdue himself to propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least twice in Raeburn's hearing to make Mellor his head-quarters so long as it suited him, and behaved with an irritable malice with regard to some of the details of the wedding arrangements, which neither Mrs. Boyce's indignation nor Marcella's discomfort and annoyance could restrain.
Clearly there was in him a strong consciousness that by his attentions to the Radical candidate he was a.s.serting his independence of the Raeburns, and nothing for the moment seemed to be more of an object with him, even though his daughter was going to marry the Raeburns' heir.
Meanwhile, Wharton was always ready to walk or chat or play billiards with his host in the intervals of his own campaign; and his society had thus come to count considerably among the scanty daily pleasures of a sickly and disappointed man. Mrs. Boyce did not like her guest, and took no pains to disguise it, least of all from Wharton. But it seemed to be no longer possible for her to take the vigorous measures she would once have taken to get rid of him.
In vain, too, did Miss Raeburn do her best for the nephew to whom she was still devoted, in spite of his deplorable choice of a wife. She took in the situation as a whole probably sooner than anybody else, and she instantly made heroic efforts to see more of Marcella, to get her to come oftener to the Court, and in many various ways to procure the poor deluded Aldous more of his betrothed's society. She paid many chattering and fussy visits to Mellor--visits which chafed Marcella--and before long, indeed, roused a certain suspicion in the girl's wilful mind.
Between Miss Raeburn and Mrs. Boyce there was a curious understanding.
It was always tacit, and never amounted to friends.h.i.+p, still less to intimacy. But it often yielded a certain melancholy consolation to Aldous Raeburn's great-aunt. It was clear to her that this strange mother was just as much convinced as she was that Aldous was making a great mistake, and that Marcella was not worthy of him. But the engagement being there--a fact not apparently to be undone--both ladies showed themselves disposed to take pains with it, to protect it against aggression. Mrs. Boyce found herself becoming more of a _chaperon_ than she had ever yet professed to be; and Miss Raeburn, as we have said, made repeated efforts to capture Marcella and hold her for Aldous, her lawful master.
But Marcella proved extremely difficult to manage. In the first place she was a young person of many engagements. Her village scheme absorbed a great deal of time. She was deep in a varied correspondence, in the engagement of teachers, the provision of work-rooms, the collecting and registering of workers, the organisation of local committees and so forth. New sides of the girl's character, new capacities and capabilities were coming out; new forms of her natural power over her fellows were developing every day; she was beginning, under the incessant stimulus of Wharton's talk, to read and think on social and economic subjects, with some system and coherence, and it was evident that she took a pa.s.sionate mental pleasure in it all. And the more pleasure these activities gave her, the less she had to spare for those accompaniments of her engagement and her position that was to be, which once, as Mrs. Boyce's sharp eyes perceived, had been quite normally attractive to her.