Part 51 (1/2)
Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one long tumultuous succession of painful or pa.s.sionate images, interrupted none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony, peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to this pa.s.s had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, ”It is all over--they have broken his neck--and buried him”--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was ”doin'
capital” for him; but she wasn't to count on his getting off. And he didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him; the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, ”though any one can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im,” would not hear of his coming again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still survived. But it made _her_ life faint within her to talk of the murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.
When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once, and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free heaven.
As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the doctor said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but always patient, always struggling to say his painful ”thank you” when she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided from him by this pa.s.sivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.
After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.
More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved upon it the signs of ”living.” It was more beautiful than ever in its significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.
Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion and the storm for which such souls as hers are made. Rebellion most of all. She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease; she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of soul and spirit, which made the physical dest.i.tution seem to the spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or G.o.d? She would hardly let herself think of Aldous--though she _must_ think of him by-and-by! He and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day, stooping to him with a hungering pity. And Aldous stood aloof. Aldous would not help her--or not with any help worth having--in consoling this misery--binding up these sores. Her heart cried shame on him. She had a crime against him to confess--but she felt herself his superior none the less. If he cast her off--why then surely they would be quits, quits for good and all.
As she reached the front door of Mellor, she saw a little two-wheeled cart standing outside it, and William holding the pony.
Visitors were nowadays more common at Mellor than they had been, and her instinct was to escape. But as she was turning to a side door William touched his cap to her.
”Mr. Wharton's waiting to see you, miss.”
She stopped sharply.
”Where is Mrs. Boyce, William?”
”In the drawing-room, miss.”
She walked in calmly. Wharton was standing on the rug, talking; Mrs.
Boyce was listening to what he had to say with the light repellent air Marcella knew so well.
When she came in Wharton stepped forward ceremoniously to shake hands, then began to speak at once, with the manner of one who is on a business errand and has no time to waste.
”I thought it best, Miss Boyce, as I had unexpectedly a couple of spare hours this evening, to come and let you know how things were going. You understand that the case comes on at the a.s.sizes next Thursday?”
Marcella a.s.sented. She had seated herself on the old sofa beside the fire, her ungloved hands on her knee. Something in her aspect made Wharton's eyes waver an instant as he looked down upon her--but it was the only sign.
”I should like to warn you,” he said gravely, ”that I entertain no hope whatever of getting James Hurd off. I shall do my best, but the verdict will certainly be murder; and the judge, I think, is sure to take a severe view. We may get a recommendation to mercy, though I believe it to be extremely unlikely. But if so, the influence of the judge, according to what I hear, will probably be against us. The prosecution have got together extremely strong evidence--as to Hurd's long connection with the gang, in spite of the Raeburns' kindness--as to his repeated threats that he would 'do for' Westall if he and his friends were interrupted--and so on. His own story is wholly uncorroborated; and Dynes's deposition, so far as it goes, is all against it.”
He went on to elaborate these points with great clearness of exposition and at some length; then he paused.
”This being so,” he resumed, ”the question is, what can be done? There must be a pet.i.tion. Amongst my own party I shall be, of course, able to do something, but we must have men of all sides. Without some at least of the leading Conservatives, we shall fare badly. In one word--do you imagine that you can induce Mr. Raeburn and Lord Maxwell to sign?”
Mrs. Boyce watched him keenly. Marcella sat in frozen paleness.
”I will try,” she said at last, with deliberation.
”Then”--he took up his gloves--”there may be a chance for us. If you cannot succeed, no one else can. But if Lord Maxwell and Mr. Raeburn can be secured, others will easily follow. Their names--especially under all the circ.u.mstances--will carry a peculiar weight. I may say everything, in the first instance--the weight, the first effect of the pet.i.tion--depends on them. Well, then, I leave it in your hands. No time should be lost after the sentence. As to the grounds of our plea, I shall, of course, lay them down in court to the best of my ability.”
”I shall be there,” she interrupted.
He started. So did Mrs. Boyce, but characteristically she made no comment.