Marcella | Page 4

Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture
of amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's
daily miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social
difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the
girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or
three neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes
ready to deal on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of
her establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently
felt themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves
airs which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider
like Marcella Boyce. Even at ten years old she perfectly understood
that she was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle
had been a famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of
this great-uncle had hung in the dining room of that pretty London
house which now seemed so far away; her father had again and again
pointed it out to the child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more
than once her childish eye had been caught by the likeness between it
and an old grey-haired gentleman who occasionally came to see them,
and whom she called "Grandpapa." Through one influence and another
she had drawn the glory of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into
her childish blood. There they were now--the glory and the dignity--a
feverish leaven, driving her perpetually into the most crude and
ridiculous outbreaks, which could lead to nothing but humiliation.

"I wish my great-uncle were here! _He'd_ make you remember--you
great--you great--big bully you!"--she shrieked on one occasion when
she had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl--the stout
and comely daughter of a local ironmonger--had been successfully
asserting herself.
The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.
"Your great-uncle! Upon my word! And who may he be, miss? If it
comes to that, I'd like to show my great-uncle David how you've
scratched my wrist. He'd give it you. He's almost as strong as father,
though he is so old. You get along with you, and behave yourself, and
don't talk stuff to me."
Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself
pushed out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her. She rushed
up to the top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in
a hidden niche of the wall, shaking and crying,--now planning
vengeance on her conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection
of her own ill-bred and impotent folly.
No--during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory
declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on
Saturday--Marcella sitting in her window could still taste the
three-cornered puffs and small sweet pears on which, as much from a
fierce sense of freedom and self-assertion as anything else, she had
lavished her tiny weekly allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she
led and organised in the top playground; and the kindnesses of fat
Mademoiselle Rénier, Miss Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in
Marcella to a long-dead small sister of her own, and surreptitiously
indulged "the little wild-cat," as the school generally dubbed the
Speaker's great-niece, whenever she could.
But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.
Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections. In the first
place, a taste for reading had rooted itself--reading of the adventurous
and poetical kind. There were two or three books which Marcella had
absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember. For at
twenty-one people who take interest in many things, and are in a hurry
to have opinions, must skim and "turn over" books rather than read
them, must use indeed as best they may a scattered and distracted mind,
and suffer occasional pangs of conscience as pretenders. But at

thirteen--what concentration! what devotion! what joy! One of these
precious volumes was Bulwer's "Rienzi"; another was Miss Porter's
"Scottish Chiefs"; a third was a little red volume of "Marmion" which
an aunt had given her. She probably never read any of them
through--she had not a particle of industry or method in her
composition--but she lived in them. The parts which it bored her to
read she easily invented for herself, but the scenes and passages which
thrilled her she knew by heart; she had no gift for verse-making, but
she laboriously wrote a long poem on the death of Rienzi, and she tried
again and again with a not inapt hand to illustrate for herself in pen and
ink the execution of Wallace.
But all these loves for things and ideas were soon as nothing in
comparison with a friendship, and an adoration.
To