Raeburn smiled, and was himself again. A woman's speculations were easier to deal with than a woman's distress.
"It is not so hopeless as that, I think," he said kindly. "The Mellor cottages are in a bad state certainly. But you have no idea how soon a little energy and money and thought sets things to rights."
"But we have no money!" cried Marcella. "And if he is miserable here, my father will have no energy to do anything. He will not care what happens. He will defy everybody, and just spend what he has on himself. And it will make me wretched—wretched. Look at that cottage to the right, Mr. Raeburn. It is Jim Hurd's—a man who works mainly on the Church Farm, when he is in work. But he is deformed, and not so strong as others. The farmers too seem to be cutting down labour everywhere—of course I don't understand—I am so new to it. Hurd and his family had an awful winter, last winter—hardly kept body and soul together. And now he is out of work already—the man at the Church Farm turned him off directly after harvest. He sees no prospect of getting work by the winter. He spends his days tramping to look for it; but nothing turns up. Last winter they parted with all they could sell. This winter it must be the workhouse! It's heart-breaking. And he has a mind; he can feel! I lend him the Labour paper I take in, and get him to talk. He has more education than most, and oh! the bitterness at the bottom of him. But not against persons—individuals. It is like a sort of blind patience when you come to that—they make excuses even for Uncle Robert, to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a crime—yes, a crime! The woman must have been such a pretty creature—and refined too. She is consumptive, of course—what else could you expect with that cottage and that food? So is the eldest boy—a little white atomy! And the other children. Talk of London—I never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village. Twelve shillings a week, and work about half the year! Oh! they ought to hate us!—I try to make them," cried Marcella, her eyes gleaming. "They ought to hate all of us landowners, and the whole wicked system. It keeps them from the land which they ought to be sharing with us; it makes one man master, instead of all men brothers. And who is fit to be master? Which of us? Everybody is so ready to take the charge of other people's lives, and then look at the result!"
"Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad," said Aldous Raeburn, smiling a little, but more coldly. Marcella, glancing at him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and class pride in him—a pride which was not going to assert itself, but none the less implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and him. In an instant her quick imagination realised herself as the daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class. When she attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her—any man in similar circumstances—must naturally think: "Ah, well, poor girl—Dick Boyce's daughter—what can you expect?" Whereas—Aldous Raeburn!—she thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for honourable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or towards their neighbours and dependents. A shiver of passionate vanity, wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frame stiffened.
"There are model squires, of course," she said slowly, striving at least for a personal dignity which should match his. "There are plenty of landowners who do their duty as they understand it—no one denies that. But that does not affect the system; the grandson of the best man may be the worst, but his one-man power remains the same. No! the time has come for a wider basis. Paternal government and charity were very well in their way—democratic self-government will manage to do without them!"
She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look. It delighted her to pit these wide and threatening generalisations against the Maxwell power—to show the heir of it that she at least—father or no father—was no hereditary subject of his, and bound to no blind admiration of the Maxwell methods and position.
Aldous Raeburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at her indeed all the time. Miss Boyce's opinions could hardly matter to him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her talk. This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class went, as it happened, very deep with him—too deep for chance discussion. What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself, seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous type pick up from newspapers and magazines. She had touched his family pride for an instant; but only for an instant. What he was abidingly conscious of, was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more determined—absurdly determined—to help her.
"Oh! no doubt the world will do very well without us some day," he said lightly, in answer to her tirade; "no one is indispensable. But are you so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had observed—pardon me for saying it—on the two or three occasions we have met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor people out of the mire in your own way. No! I don't feel that you are thorough-going!"
Marcella paused a frowning moment, then broke suddenly into a delightful laugh—a laugh of humorous confession, which changed her whole look and mood.
"Is that all you have noticed? If you wish to know, Mr. Raeburn, I love the labourers for touching their hats to me. I love the school children for bobbing to me. I love my very self—ridiculous as you may think it—for being Miss Boyce of Mellor!"
"Don't say things like that, please!" he interrupted; "I think I have not deserved them."
His tone made her repent her gibe. "No, indeed, you have been most kind to me," she cried. "I don't know how it is. I am bitter and personal in a moment—when I don't mean to be. Yes! you are quite right. I am proud of it all. If nobody comes to see us, and we are left all alone out in the cold, I shall still have room enough to be proud in—proud of the old house and our few bits of pictures, and the family papers, and the beeches! How absurd it would seem to other people, who have so much more! But I have had so little—so little!" Her voice had a hungry lingering note. "And as for the people, yes, I am proud too that they like me, and that already I can influence them. Oh, I will do my best for them, my very best! But it will be hard, very hard, if there is no one to help me!"
She heaved a long sigh. In spite of the words, what she had said did not seem to be an appeal for his pity. Rather there was in it a sweet self-dedicating note as of one going sadly alone to a painful task, a note which once more left Aldous Raeburn's self-restraint tottering. She was walking gently beside him, her pretty dress trailing lightly over the dry stubble, her hand in its white ruffles hanging so close beside him—after all her prophetess airs a pensive womanly thing, that must surely hear how his strong man's heart was beginning to beat!
He bent over to her.
"Don't talk of there being no one to help! There may be many ways out of present difficulties. Meanwhile, however things go, could you be large-minded enough to count one person here your friend?"
She looked up at him. Tall as she was, he was taller—she liked that; she liked too the quiet cautious strength of his English expression and bearing. She did not think him handsome, and she was conscious of no thrill. But inwardly her quick dramatising imagination was already constructing her own future and his. The ambition to rule leapt in her, and the delight in conquest. It was with a delicious sense of her own power, and of the general fulness of her new life, that she said, "I am large-minded enough! You have been very kind, and I have been very wild and indiscreet. But I don't regret: I am sure, if you can help me, you will."
There was a little pause. They were standing at the last gate before the miry village road began,
