Marcella | Page 3

had been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend
and excuse Marcella than any one else in the house--no one exactly
knew why.
Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold
was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the
bedclothes--for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed
you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in
the early morning with a cup of senna-tea, and at long and regular
intervals throughout the day with beef-tea and gruel; and that no one
should come to see and talk with her, unless, indeed, it were the doctor,
quiet being in all cases of sickness the first condition of recovery, and
the natural schoolgirl in Miss Frederick's persuasion being more or less
inclined to complain without cause if illness were made agreeable.
For some fourteen hours, therefore, on these days of durance Marcella
was left almost wholly alone, nothing but a wild mass of black hair and
a pair of roving, defiant eyes in a pale face showing above the
bedclothes whenever the housemaid chose to visit her--a pitiable
morsel, in truth, of rather forlorn humanity. For though she had her

movements of fierce revolt, when she was within an ace of throwing
the senna-tea in Martha's face, and rushing downstairs in her nightgown
to denounce Miss Frederick in the midst of an astonished schoolroom,
something generally interposed; not conscience, it is to be feared, or
any wish "to be good," but only an aching, inmost sense of childish
loneliness and helplessness; a perception that she had indeed tried
everybody's patience to the limit, and that these days in bed represented
crises which must be borne with even by such a rebel as Marcie Boyce.
So she submitted, and presently learnt, under dire stress of boredom, to
amuse herself a good deal by developing a natural capacity for
dreaming awake. Hour by hour she followed out an endless story of
which she was always the heroine. Before the annoyance of her
afternoon gruel, which she loathed, was well forgotten, she was in full
fairy-land again, figuring generally as the trusted friend and companion
of the Princess of Wales--of that beautiful Alexandra, the top and
model of English society whose portrait in the window of the little
stationer's shop at Marswell--the small country town near Cliff
House--had attracted the child's attention once, on a dreary walk, and
had ever since governed her dreams. Marcella had no fairy-tales, but
she spun a whole cycle for herself around the lovely Princess who came
to seem to her before long her own particular property. She had only to
shut her eyes and she had caught her idol's attention--either by some
look or act of passionate yet unobtrusive homage as she passed the
royal carriage in the street--or by throwing herself in front of the
divinity's runaway horses--or by a series of social steps easily devised
by an imaginative child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she
was of an old family and had aristocratic relations. Then, when the
Princess had held out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight!
Marcella grew up on the instant: she was beautiful, of course; she had,
so people said, the "Boyce eyes and hair;" she had sweeping gowns,
generally of white muslin with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here
and there with the Princess, laughing and talking quite calmly with the
greatest people in the land, her romantic friendship with the adored of
England making her all the time the observed of all observers, bringing
her a thousand delicate flatteries and attentions.
Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest
summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening

her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare
white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper
opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet
stretching away on either hand. The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the
depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of
the Princess's maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty
child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her,
who in contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party
frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another
dumb day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her
cold was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a
page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom,
at seven.
Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious
Marcie of