“I CANNOT move him one step from his resolution,” said Lady Markham, pressing her hands over her eyes. They were aching with tears, with the sleeplessness of the past night, and that burning of anxiety which is worse than either. “He does not seem to care for what I say to him. His mind is made up, he declares. God help us! William, our eldest boy! And he used to be so good, so affectionate; but now he will not listen to a word I say.”
They were in a room in the hotel, one of those bare and loveless rooms, denuded of everything that is warm or homelike, in which so often the bitterest scenes of the tragedy of our life take place. Lady Markham sat by the bare table; Sir William paced up and down between that and the door. Outside was all the commotion of one of those big caravanserai which have become so common in England, echoes of noisy parties below, and a constant passage up and down of many feet. Trouble itself is made harder vulgarised by such contact. They were far too much absorbed to think of this, yet it made them a little more miserable unawares.
“Does he mean to marry her?” Sir William said.
“Oh!” cried Lady Markham, with a start as if she had received a blow; “I cannot think it is that. He will not allow it is that. It is, what he has always said, those new principles, those revolutionary ideas, I do not know what those men are worthy of who fill a boy’s head with ridiculous theories, who teach him to despise his home.”
“There are few who are much harmed by that. Isabel you must not be squeamish. You must forget you are a delicate lady, and speak plainly. I know what a young man is at Paul’s age; they can hold the wildest theories without feeling any necessity to act upon them. It is a privilege of youth; but against that other kind of influence, they are helpless. And a woman like you does not understand the arts and the wiles of these others. And he does not know how important it is,” said Sir William, with a piteous tone in his voice; “he does not know——”
“He knows very well what he is to me and to you,” Lady Markham said. In this particular she spoke with perfect calm, not fearing anything. “How should he not know? I have not hidden it from him that a great part of the happiness of my life hangs upon his. It seems ungrateful when one has so many blessings; but, oh! if one is in trouble, how can you be comforted though all the others are well? All your heart goes to the one. It is not that you love the others less, but him more—him more.”
Sir William listened to this outburst without a word. They were bearing one burden between them, and yet each had a separate burden to bear. His heart would not be racked like hers by the desertion of the boy. He would not concentrate his whole soul on Paul because Paul was in trouble. But on the other hand, she was altogether unaware of what was in his thoughts, the doubtful position in which perhaps Paul might one day find himself; the need there was that his future should be within his own power to shape and form. Also Sir William was aware of the disappointment and misery awaiting those who compromise their whole lives in one fit of foolish passion, and secure their own misery by a hasty marriage. These were the things he was thinking of. He saw his son waking up to the realities of a life very different from anything he had dreamed—and encumbered, he, so fastidious, so fantastical, with an uneducated woman and all the miseries of premature fatherhood. He groaned as this picture arose in his mind.
“Trouble,” he said. “Yes, I suppose if a young man allows himself to get entangled, there is trouble involved in the breaking of the tie; but not half so much trouble as will come after, when his life is dragged down by association with a woman like that,—when he has a wretched home, a sordid life, a hundred miserable necessities to provide for,—you don’t know what it is, you can’t know what it is——”
He broke off abruptly. Would she perhaps suspect him—him, her husband—of having learned by experience what these horrors were?
But no such notion entered Lady Markham’s mind. “No,” she said; “I think you are wrong, William. I think it is not that that is in my boy’s mind. Oh, if one could know—if one could feel sure, that his heart was open as it used to be!”
Here she paused; and there was silence between the two, Sir William walking slowly up and down, with his head forward, and she sitting wistful gazing into the dark air; her eyes enlarged with anxiety and pain. They were such prosperous, happy people—so well off, so full of everything that can make life smooth and sweet, that the silence of their trouble was all the more impressive—so many things that harm poorer people would have passed innocently over them. They had such a stock (people might have said) of comfort and happiness to fall back upon. Nevertheless, this blow was so skilfully dealt, that it found out the weak places in their armour at once. To Sir William, indeed, it came as a sort of retribution! but what had his wife done to have her gladness thus stolen away from her? Fortunately those who suffer thus innocently are not those who ask such questions. She shed her tears silently, with many prayers for him who was the cause; but she did not complain of the pain which was laid upon her for no fault of hers. They had talked it all over in every possible aspect, and now they were silent, saying nothing. What was there to say? They could do nothing, however they might toil or struggle. It was not in their power to change the circumstances. Even Sir William, though he was a man of much influence, a great personage, of importance in Europe—capable perhaps of stopping revolutions, of transforming the face of a country, and modifying the fortunes of a race by the advice he might give—was powerless before his boy. He could not turn Paul from the way he had chosen, nor persuade him to think differently. He might be able to destroy old corporations, to raise up new cities, to disestablish a church, or disturb an empire; but he could not make a change in the fancies of his son—whether it was in his opinions, or in his inclinations; that was altogether beyond his power. He sighed heavily as he went and came from the dull green-painted wall, to the dull table covered with a green cloth. The Queen might listen to him, and the country; but Paul would not listen. What wonder that his wife covering her hot eyes with her hand, and knowing that Paul’s contumacy would steal all the pleasure out of her life, should feel herself powerless too?
There was one thing however that threw a little light on Lady Markham’s thoughts—one person to whom she could still appeal. She did not speak of this to her husband, who might, she felt, oppose her purpose. But she told Alice, with whom her consultations were still more confidential and detailed.
“He was made welcome in our house,” she said; “he was received as well as if he had been—any one else; and he is not a man without sense or feeling. If it is put before him as it ought, he will understand. I will go and speak to Mr. Spears——”
“About—his daughter?” Alice faltered.
Lady Markham did not make any reply. She would not say anything about the chief object of her mission. What she wanted above all things was to test the truthfulness of her son’s assertion that this daughter was nothing to him. Sir William put no faith in these assertions; but Paul’s mother believed in him with trembling, even while she feared, and longed for some indirect testimony which would convince her husband. She thought over it all night, while she lay awake listening to the clocks answering each other with hour after hour.
Paul had not responded to his mother’s inquiries, as they had all hoped. He had resisted her questions proudly, and he had not attempted to explain.
“You have made up your mind, you and my father, that I have not spoken the truth,” he said. “Why should I repeat what you will not believe? I have nothing to say but what I have said.”
“Oh, Paul, look in my face, and tell me—tell me!” she said. “I will not doubt you.” But he was obdurate.
“I have told you,” he said, “and you have doubted.”
There was something even in this pride and indignant resistance of her entreaties which moved his mother to believe in him; but Sir William was of a different opinion. Her heart was torn asunder with doubt and fear; and here was the one way in which she could know. Her husband might think of Spears as a dangerous demagogue, but to her he was a man whose face had brightened at the sight of her children, a man to whom she had given her own ready sympathy—a human creature, whom she knew. Had she not a right to go to him, to appeal to him to relinquish his hold on her boy? Whether it was by his arguments, or by something less abstract, he had, it seemed, power which was almost absolute over her boy. Lady Markham did not mean to say anything to him about his daughter, to ask of him whether it was love for her which was leading Paul away; but could any one doubt that she would discover the truth if she could see him, and speak to him without any one to interfere between them? She could not endure the doubts of Paul which rose in her own mind, nor to be obliged to listen to his father’s doubts of him, and say no word in his defence.
Notwithstanding her sleepless night, she got up very early in the morning, full of this idea, and stole out of the inn unperceived. It was not till the morning air blowing in her face, and the looks of the passers-by, which, like any one unaccustomed to go about alone, she thought specially directed to her, had fully roused her out of the mist of thought in which she was enveloped, that she remembered that she did not know where Spears was to be found. What was she to do? She went along vaguely, unwilling to return, past Paul’s college, with all its vacant windows twinkling in the sun, by the way which her husband had taken when he went to seek Paul the day before. Her heart gave a little leap as she passed the gate to see some one come out whose face seemed familiar to her. Was it Paul so early? Had he changed his habits like everything else? But she saw very well it was not Paul; it was his friend who had guided Sir William in search of him on the previous day.
Young Fairfax took off his hat respectfully, and would have passed, but she stopped and beckoned to him to come to her. Here, too, Providence had thrown in her way a witness who might corroborate Paul. She was out of breath with agitation when he came across the street.
“Can I—be of any use, Lady Markham?” the young man said.
“If it will not detain you—if it is not out of your way,” she said, with anxious politeness, “would you show me where Mr. Spears lives—Mr. Spears—I think my husband said you knew him—the—the public speaker—the—very great Radical—he whom my son knows?”
Fairfax was puzzled for the moment by this respectful description.
“Oh, Spears!” he cried at last, suddenly waking to intelligence; he had not heard him called Mr. Spears before. A laugh woke about the corners of his mouth. He was apt to laugh at most things, and it amused him to hear the softening politeness with which the great lady spoke of the demagogue. But the next moment the wistful anxiety in Lady Markham’s eyes made him ashamed of his smile.
“I will show you the place if you will let me go with you,” he said.
It seemed some strange negligence on the part of the race generally that such a woman should be unattended wherever she might choose to go. He was a democrat too, mildly, with less devotion to Spears than Paul, yet with some interest in his teaching; but Paul’s mother roused within him a natural loyalty and respect which was not in accordance with these principles—loyalty in which a subtle unexpressed regard for her rank mingled with reverence for herself. It was not as a mere woman and his friend’s mother, but also as a lady—the kind that queens are made of—that she affected his mind. The idea of her required an attendant, a servant, a retainer. He put himself into the vacant place hastily, to repair the neglect of the world.
Lady Markham took an unfair advantage of this devotion. She plied him with questions—subtle and skilful—not always about Paul, but coming back to Paul with many a wily twist and turn. She threw herself with the warmest pretence of interest into his own career—what he was doing, how his studies were being directed, what his future was to be? Was it a pretence? No, it was not altogether a pretence. She could not but be polite, and true politeness cannot but be interested. She was pleased that he should tell her about himself, and a kind of shadow of an anxiety that he too should do well came into her mind—a shadow faint and vague of her great anxiety and longing that Paul should do well, better than any one had ever done before. And like a lark descending in circles of cautious approach to her home, she came back to Paul when her young companion was off his guard, when she had beguiled him to babble of himself.
“Ah!” she said, “I fear you are both idle, both Paul and you,” when Fairfax had been making confession of sundry shortcomings.
“No, Markham is not like me,” he said. “Markham puts more of himself into everything; he does not take things lightly as I do. He is a more serious fellow altogether. That makes me rather fear Spears’s influence over him, if you will let me say so.”
“Indeed I will let you say so,” Paul’s mother replied. “That is just what makes me unhappy. He is a great deal with Mr. Spears?”
“One time and another—yes, they have seen a great deal of each other,” Fairfax said. “Perhaps you don’t know, Spears is the most entertaining fellow. He has his own opinion about everything. I think myself he is wrong just as often as he is right; but he has his own way of looking at things. I don’t go with him in half he says, but I like to hear him talk——”
“And his house is a pleasant place to go to?” said the anxious mother. “Excuse me if I don’t quite know. He is not in any kind of society, but he has a family? It is a pleasant house?”
Fairfax stared and then he laughed.
“It is not a house at all, in the way you think of,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can form any idea—we go and talk to him in his workshop. There is no sort of ceremony. He will hold forth for the hour when he is in the vein, and he is very entertaining—but as for what you understand by a pleasant house——”
Lady Markham’s heart grew lighter every moment.
“But he has a family?” she said.
“Oh, yes—there are girls, I believe,” said Fairfax. Was he on his guard? She almost feared the directness of this question had put him on his guard. “One sees them sometimes running out and in, but that has nothing to do with it,” he added, carelessly. “In his class it is not at all the same as in other ranks of life.”
Here there was a pause. Not an inference was there in all this of any other influence than that of the political visionary—the influence which Paul acknowledged. Lady Markham’s heart had given a leap of pleasure. Oh, if Sir William had but heard this careless, impartial witness, every word of whose evidence supported that of Paul! But then a chill breath of suspicion came over her. What if he were less unconscious than she thought, skilfully arranging his replies so as to back up Paul’s assertions? This discouraged and silenced her, in spite of herself. How easy it is to learn the miserable alphabet of suspicion! She went along with him doubtfully, sick at heart, asking no more questions, not knowing whether there was anything in the whole matter to which she could trust.
“There is Spears’s shop. You will find him at work already; he is always early. May I come back again for you, Lady Markham, in case you should miss the way to the hotel?”
“You are very kind,” she said; but the sight of the place where Paul had spent so much of his time raised again a sick flutter in her bosom. She waved her hand to him without any further reply, with a smile which went to his heart; and then crossed over, dismissing him thus, and went direct to the fountain-head of information—to Spears’s open door.