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 class, 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 passionate idealist youth—opened her relation to him with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had stormy passages, 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 passion 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 passion 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 class, and a constitutional 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 friendship—of such a friendship 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 passion for tradition, and the England of tradition with that "repining restlessness" which is the best spur of noble 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 class 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 compassions 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 comradeship 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 nobly understood, had harmonised the stormy nature of the woman, and had transformed the somewhat pessimist and scrupulous character of the man. Not that life with Marcella Maxwell was always easy. Now as ever she remained on the moral side a creature of strain and effort, tormented by ideals not to be realised, and eager to drive herself and others in a breathless pursuit of them.
But if in some sort she seemed to be always dragging those that loved her through the heart of a tempest, the tempest had such golden moments! No wife had ever more capacity for all the delicacies and depths of passion towards the man of her choice. All the anxieties she brought with her, all the perplexities and difficulties she imposed, had never yet seemed to Maxwell anything but divinely worth while. So far, indeed, he had never even remotely allowed himself to put the question. Her faults were her; and she was his light of life.
For some time after their marriage, which took place about a year after his accession to the title and estates, they had lived at the stately house in Brookshire belonging to the Maxwells, and Marcella had thrown herself into the management of a large household and property with characteristic energy and originality. She had tried new ways of choosing and governing her servants; new ways of entertaining the poor, and of making Maxwell Court the centre, not of one class, but of all. She ran up a fair score of blunders, but not one of them was the blunder of meanness or vulgarity. Her nature was inventive and poetic, and the rich fulfilment that had overtaken her own personal desires did but sting her eager passion to give and to serve.
Meanwhile the family house in town was sold, and what with the birth of her son, and the multiplicity of the rural interests to which she had set her hand, Marcella felt no need of London. But towards the end of the second year she perceived—though he said little about it—that there was in her husband's mind a strong and persistent drawing towards his former political interests and associations. The late Lord Maxwell had sat in several Conservative cabinets, and his grandson, after a distinguished career in the House as a private member, had accepted a subordinate place in the Government only a few months before his grandfather's death transferred him to the Lords. After that event, a scrupulous conscience had forced him to take landowning as a profession and an arduous one. The Premier made him flattering advances, and his friends remonstrated, but he had none the less relinquished office, and buried himself on his land.
Now, however, after some three years' hard and unremitting work, the estate was in excellent condition; the "new ways" of the new owners had been well started; and both Maxwell and Marcella had fitting lieutenants who could be left in charge. Moreover, matters were being agitated at the moment in politics which had special significance for the man's idealist and reflective mind. His country friends and neighbours hardly understood why.
For it was merely a question of certain further measures of factory reform. A group of labour leaders were pressing upon the public and the Government a proposal to pass a special Factory Act for certain districts and trades of East London. In spite of Commissions, in spite of recent laws, "sweating," so it was urged, was as bad as ever—nay, in certain localities and industries was more frightful and more oppressive than ever. The waste of life and health involved in the great clothing industries of East London, for instance, which had provoked law after law, inquiry after inquiry, still went—so it was maintained—its hideous way.
"Have courage!" cried the reformers. "Take, at last, the only effectual step. Make it penal to practise certain trades in the houses of the people—drive them all into factories of a certain size, where alone these degraded