Volume I Part 18 (1/2)
”Why, how late you are! Betty left reproaches for you.”
”I had a walk with Dowson. Then two or three people caught me on the way back--Rashdell among others.” (Lord Rashdell was Foreign Secretary.) ”There are some interesting telegrams from Paris--I copied them out for you.”
The country happened to be at the moment in the midst of one of its periodical difficulties with France. There had been a good deal of diplomatic friction, and a certain amount of anxiety at the Foreign Office. Marcella lit the silver kettle again and made her man some fresh tea, while he told her the news, and they discussed the various points of the telegrams he had copied for her, with a comrade's freedom and vivacity. Then she said:
”Well, I have had an interesting time too! That young Tressady has been to tea.”
”Oh! has he? They say there is a lot of stuff in him, and he may do us a great deal of mischief. How did you find him?”
”Oh, very clever, very limited--and a ma.s.s of prejudices,” she said, laughing. ”I never saw an odder mixture of knowledge and ignorance.”
”What? Knowledge of India and the East?--that kind of thing?”
She nodded.
”Knowledge of everything except the subject he has come home to fight about! Do you know, Aldous--”
She paused. She was sitting on a stool beside him, her arm upon his knee.
”What do I know?” he said, his hand seeking hers.
”Well, I can't help feeling that that man might live and learn. He isn't a mere obstructive block--like the rest.”
Maxwell laughed.
”Then Fontenoy is not as shrewd as usual. They say he regards him as their best recruit.”
”Never mind. I rather wish you'd try to make friends with him.”
Maxwell, however, helped himself to cake and made no response. On the two or three occasions on which he had met George Tressady, he had been conscious, if the truth were told, of a certain vague antipathy to the young man.
Marcella pondered.
”No,” she said, ”no--I don't think after all he's your sort. Suppose _I_ see what can be done!”
And she got up with her flas.h.i.+ng smile--half love, half fun--and crossed the room to summon her little boy, Hallin, for his evening play. Maxwell looked after her, not heeding at all what she was saying, heeding only herself, her voice, the atmosphere of charm and life she carried with her.
CHAPTER VII
Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now filled all the horizon of her life. At the time when Aldous Raeburn, as he then was--the grandson and heir of old Lord Maxwell--came across her first she was a handsome, undeveloped girl, of a type not uncommon in our modern world, belonging by birth to the country-squire cla.s.s, and by the chances of a few years of student life in London to the youth that takes nothing on authority, and puts to fierce question whatever it finds already on its path--Governments, Churches, the powers of family and wealth--that takes, moreover, its social pity for the only standard, and spends that pity only on one sort and type of existence. She accepted Raeburn, then the best _parti_ in the county, without understanding or loving him, simply that she might use his power and wealth for certain social ends to which the crude philanthropy of her youth had pledged itself. Naturally, they were no sooner engaged than Raeburn found himself launched upon a long wrestle with the girl who had thus--in the selfishness of her pa.s.sionate idealist youth--opened her relation to him with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had stormy pa.s.sages, and was for a time wholly broken off. Aldous was made bitterly jealous, or miserably unhappy. Marcella left the old house in the neighbourhood of the Maxwell property, where her lover had first seen and courted her. She plunged into London life, and into nursing, that common outlet for the woman at war with herself or society. She suffered and struggled, and once or twice she came very near to throwing away all her chances of happiness. But in the end, Maxwell tamed her; Maxwell recovered her. The rise of love in the unruly, impetuous creature, when the rise came, was like the sudden growth of some great forest flower. It spread with transforming beauty over the whole nature, till at last the girl who had once looked upon him as the mere tool of her own moral ambitions threw herself upon Maxwell's heart with a self-abandoning pa.s.sion and penitence, which her developed powers and her adorable beauty made a veritable intoxication.
And Maxwell was worthy that she should do this thing. When he and Marcella first met, he was a man of thirty, very able, very reserved, and often painfully diffident as to his own powers and future. He was the only young representative of a famous stock, and had grown up from his childhood under the shadow of great sorrows and heavy responsibilities.
The stuff of the poet and the thinker lay hidden behind his shy manners; and he loved Marcella Boyce with all the delicacy, all the idealising respect, that pa.s.sion generates in natures so strong and so highly tempered. At the same time, he had little buoyancy or gaiety; he had a belief in his cla.s.s, and a const.i.tutional dislike of change, which were always fighting in his mind with the energies of moral debate; and he acquiesced very easily--perhaps indifferently--in many outward conventions and prejudices.
The crisis through which Marcella put him developed and matured the man.
To the influences of love, moreover, were added the influences of friends.h.i.+p--of such a friends.h.i.+p as our modern time but seldom rears to perfection. In Raeburn's college days, a man of rare and delicate powers had possessed himself of Raeburn's tenacious affection, and had thenceforward played the leader to Raeburn's strength, physical and moral, availing himself freely, wherever his own failed him, of the powers and capacities of his friend. For he himself bore in him from his youth up the seeds of physical failure and early death. It was partly the marvellous struggle in him of soul with body that subdued to him the homage of the stronger man. And it was clearly his influence that broke up and fired Raeburn's slower and more distrustful temper, informing an inbred Toryism, a natural pa.s.sion for tradition, and the England of tradition with that ”repining restlessness” which is the best spur of n.o.ble living.
Hallin was a lecturer and an economist; a man who lived in the perception of the great paradox that in our modern world political power has gone to the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast between the huge and growing ”tyranny” of the working cla.s.s and the individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn and the young revolts and compa.s.sions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin's death, in their sore and tender wish to make his thoughts tell upon the English world.
The Maxwells had now been married some five years, years of almost incredible happiness. The equal comrades.h.i.+p of marriage at its best and finest, all the daily disciplines, the profound and painless lessons of love, the covetous bliss of parentage, the constant anxieties of power n.o.bly understood, had harmonised the stormy nature of the woman, and had transformed the somewhat pessimist and scrupulous character of the man.