Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.
"I must go and make the tea," she said, in a light, cold tone, and turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had just been carried.
Marcella followed, reading. The note was from Miss Raeburn, and it contained an invitation to Mrs. Boyce and her daughter to take luncheon at the Court on the following Friday. The note was courteously and kindly worded. "We should be so glad," said the writer, "to show you and Miss Boyce our beautiful woods while they are still at their best, in the way of autumn colour."
"How will mamma take it?" thought Marcella anxiously. "There is not a word of papa!"
When she entered the drawing-room, she caught her mother standing absently at the tea-table. The little silver caddy was still in her hand as though she had forgotten to put it down; and her eyes, which evidently saw nothing, were turned to the window, the brows frowning. The look of suffering for an instant was unmistakable; then she started at the sound of Marcella's step, and put down the caddy amid the delicate china crowded on the tray, with all the quiet precision of her ordinary manner.
"You will have to wait for your tea," she said, "the water doesn't nearly boil."
Marcella went up to the fire and, kneeling before it, put the logs with which it was piled together. But she could not contain herself for long.
"Will you go to the Court, mamma?" she asked quickly, without turning round.
There was a pause. Then Mrs. Boyce said drily—
"Miss Raeburn's proceedings are a little unexpected. We have been here four months, within two miles of her, and it has never occurred to her to call. Now she calls and asks us to luncheon in the same afternoon. Either she took too little notice of us before, or she takes too much now—don't you think so?"
Marcella was silent a moment. Should she confess? It began to occur to her for the first time that in her wild independence she had been taking liberties with her mother.
"Mamma!"
"Yes."
"I asked Mr. Aldous Raeburn the other day whether everybody here was going to cut us! Papa told me that Lord Maxwell had written him an uncivil letter and—"
"You—asked—Mr. Raeburn—" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly. "What do you mean?"
Marcella turned round and met the flash of her mother's eyes.
"I couldn't help it," she said in a low hurried voice. "It seemed so horrid to feel everybody standing aloof—we were walking together—he was very kind and friendly—and I asked him to explain."
"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce. "And he went to his aunt—and she went to Lady Winterbourne—they were compassionate—and there are the cards. You have certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"
Marcella felt an instant's fear—fear of the ironic power in the sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother's fragile imperious beauty. Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.
"You have got used to it, mamma! I feel as if it would kill me to live here, shut off from everybody—joining with nobody—with no friendly feelings or society. It was bad enough in the old lodging-house days; but here—why should we?"
Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.
"I supposed you would ask sooner or later," she said in a low determined voice, with what to Marcella was a quite new note of reality in it. "Probably Mr. Raeburn told you—but you must of course have guessed it long ago—that society does not look kindly on us—and has its reasons. I do not deny in the least that it has its reasons. I do not accuse anybody, and resent nothing. But the question with me has always been, Shall I accept pity? I have always been able to meet it with a No! You are very different from me—but for you also I believe it would be the happiest answer."
The eyes of both met—the mother's full of an indomitable fire which had for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter's troubled and miserable.
"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly. "There are so many things I want to do here, and one can do nothing if every one is against you. People would be friends with you and me—and with papa too—through us. Some of them wish to be kind"—she added insistently, thinking of Aldous Raeburn's words and expression as he bent to her at the gate—"I know they do. And if we can't hold our heads high because—because of things in the past—ought we to be so proud that we won't take their hands when they stretch them out—when they write so kindly and nicely as this?"
And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.
Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot. Then with a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a spoon near her.
"You shall go," she said presently—"you wish it—then go—go by all means. I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage. One can put a great deal on health—mine is quite serviceable in the way of excuses. I will try and do you no harm, Marcella. If you have chosen your line and wish to make friends here—very well—I will do what I can for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life—for which, my dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."
Marcella looked at her with dismay and a yearning she had never felt before.
"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"
There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which for once suggested the normal filial relation. But Mrs. Boyce did not waver. She had long learnt perhaps to regard Marcella as a girl singularly well able to take care of herself; and had recognised the fact with relief.
"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping her tea—"in your interests as well as mine. You will make all the greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave. Those cards shall be properly returned, of course. For the rest—let no one disturb themselves till they must. And if I were you, Marcella, I would hardly discuss the family affairs any more—with Mr. Raeburn or anybody else."
And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose power over the world about her had never extended to her mother. Marcella flushed and played with the fire.
"You see, mamma," she said after a moment, still looking at the logs and the shower of sparks they made as she moved them about, "you never let me discuss them with you."
"Heaven forbid!" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly; then, after a pause: "You will find your own line in a little while, Marcella, and you will see, if you so choose it, that there will be nothing unsurmountable in your way. One piece of advice let me give you. Don't be too grateful to Miss Raeburn, or anybody else! You take great interest in your Boyce belongings, I perceive. You may remember too, perhaps, that there is other blood in you—and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to either patronage or pity."
Marcella started. Her mother had never named her own kindred to her before that she could remember. She had known for many years that there was a breach between the Merritts and themselves. The newspapers had told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the Boyces' threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother's mother. The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the Merritts.
And now this note of intense personal and family