Marcella | Page 2

past--the greater part of it at any
rate--behind her altogether. Its shabby worries were surely done with,
poor as she and her parents still were, relatively to their present
position. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid
for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money,
and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or
fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these
past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity
of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible
figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was
Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of
twenty-one, the only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park,
inheritress of one of the most ancient names in Midland England, and

just entering on a life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate,
promised the highest possible degree of interest and novelty.
Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only
succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.
For against her will, she fell straightway--in this quiet of the autumn
morning--into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her present
more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after scene and
stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or disgust,
which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the fine
plastic face turned to the September woods.
She had been at school since she was nine years old--there was the
dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which,
in her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so
impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a
dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a
large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice
of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to the
complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical phrase,
from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet adequately
know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in the
background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory was
succeeded by another precise as the first was vague--the image of a tall
white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces behind it
and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to fourteen,
and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one, she
could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and
stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.
When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall
for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed
with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing
and tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted
from her nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her
home life she had been an average child of the quick and clever type,
with average faults. But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the
discipline, the teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff
House School for Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for
the time being, into a demon. She hated her lessons, though, when she

chose, she could do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her
companions; she hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold
ablutions with some dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated
the meals in the long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was
forbidden and twice pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely
for more mutton and scorned her second course, making a sort of
dramatic story to herself out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her own
thwarted appetite as she sat black-browed and brooding in her place.
She was not a favourite with her companions, and she was a perpetual
difficulty and trouble to her perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress.
The whole of her first year was one continual series of sulks, quarrels,
and revolts.
Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed,
when Miss Frederick, at her wit's end, would take advantage of one of
the child's perpetual colds to try the effects of a day's seclusion and
solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her
charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good. "For I do believe a
great part of it's liver or nerves! No child in her right senses could
behave so," she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who