Marcella | Page 8

now she never saw her. It was two years since
they parted; the school was broken up; her idol had gone to India to
join a widowed brother. It was all over--for ever. Those precious letters
had worn themselves away; so, too, had Marcella's religious feelings;
she was once more another being.
* * * * *
But these two years since she had said good-bye to Solesby and her
school days? Once set thinking of bygones by the stimulus of Mellor
and its novelty, Marcella must needs think, too, of her London life, of
all that it had opened to her, and meant for her. Fresh agitations!--fresh
passions!--but this time impersonal, passions of the mind and
sympathies.
At the time she left Solesby her father and mother were abroad, and it
was apparently not convenient that she should join them. Marcella,
looking back, could not remember that she had ever been much desired
at home. No doubt she had been often moody and tiresome in the
holidays; but she suspected--nay, was certain--that there had been other
and more permanent reasons why her parents felt her presence with
them a burden. At any rate, when the moment came for her to leave
Miss Pemberton, her mother wrote from abroad that, as Marcella had of
late shown decided aptitude both for music and painting, it would be
well that she should cultivate both gifts for a while more seriously than
would be possible at home. Mrs. Boyce had made inquiries, and was
quite willing that her daughter should go, for a time, to a lady whose
address she enclosed, and to whom she herself had written--a lady who
received girl-students working at the South Kensington art classes.
So began an experience, as novel as it was strenuous. Marcella soon
developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two
professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed
her gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and
confident critic of the art of other people--which is much. But though
art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it
was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and
motive-power of her new life--not in art, but in the birth of social and
philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social power.

One of her girl-friends and fellow-students had two brothers in London,
both at work at South Kensington, and living not far from their sister.
The three were orphans. They sprang from a nervous, artistic stock, and
Marcella had never before come near any one capable of crowding so
much living into the twenty-four hours. The two brothers, both of them
skilful and artistic designers in different lines, and hard at work all day,
were members of a rising Socialist society, and spent their evenings
almost entirely on various forms of social effort and Socialist
propaganda. They seemed to Marcella's young eyes absolutely sincere
and quite unworldly. They lived as workmen; and both the luxuries and
the charities of the rich were equally odious to them. That there could
be any "right" in private property or private wealth had become
incredible to them; their minds were full of lurid images or resentments
drawn from the existing state of London; and though one was
humorous and handsome, the other, short, sickly, and pedantic, neither
could discuss the Socialist ideal without passion, nor hear it attacked
without anger. And in milder measure their sister, who possessed more
artistic gift than either of them, was like unto them.
Marcella saw much of these three persons, and something of their
friends. She went with them to Socialist lectures, or to the public
evenings of the Venturist Society, to which the brothers belonged. Edie,
the sister, assaulted the imagination of her friend, made her read the
books of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and
dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the
herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall
enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason,
brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle,
together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they
flattered her with technical talk; they were full of the importance of
women to the new doctrine and the new era.
The handsome brother was certainly in love with her; the other,
probably. Marcella was not in love with either of them, but she was
deeply interested in all three, and for the sickly brother she felt at that
time a profound admiration--nay, reverence--which influenced her
vitally at a critical moment of life. "Blessed are the poor"--"Woe unto
you, rich men"--these were the only articles