He that will not when he may: Volume I by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XV.

LADY MARKHAM walked away quickly, tingling in every nerve. She felt herself insulted and betrayed. She had gone to this poor man as if he had been a gentleman, with full confidence in him, and he had not justified her faith. A poor gentleman would have felt the impossibility, would have seen that a girl of no importance, without money, or rank, or connections, could not expect to marry Paul Markham, the heir of all the family honours. A person of any cultivation would have felt this, had there been the best blood in England in his veins. But this clown did not feel it; this common workman, wood-carver, tradesman, he did not see it. He ventured to look her in the face and tell her that they must make up their minds to it.

Lady Markham was angry; she could not help it. And there was an additional sting in the situation from the fact that she felt she had brought it upon herself. She had taken an injudicious step. In her desire to relieve her own mind, she had compromised Paul. Her own alarms, her suspicion and doubt, had realised themselves. She blamed Spears all the more bitterly that in her heart she wanted not to be obliged to blame herself. But by and by the needle veered round to that point of the moral compass which in a candid mind it is so ready to stop at, self-accusation. Why did she give this man the occasion of insulting her, and the girl the occasion of defying her? It was her own fault. She ought not, above all, to have compromised her son. This became the most terrible thought of all as she dwelt upon it. Instead of doing good she had done harm; instead of relieving Paul from the influence of the demagogue, she had riveted and strengthened his connection with the demagogue’s family who were worse, much worse than himself. Was it possible that Paul, her son, the brother of Alice, could have chosen from all the world such a girl as Janet Spears? Her heart thrilled with the wonder of it, the disappointment of it. Was that all he could find in woman? and she herself had helped to cement the tie between them. How could she ever forgive herself? She walked along quickly, recovering her outward composure, but more and more troubled in mind as she thought upon what she had done. Why did she go? how, she asked herself, being, like most women, ready to distrust herself and give in to the common opinion on the subject whenever anything went wrong with her—how could she forget that it was always dangerous for a woman to interfere? She was in the very deepest of these painful thoughts, angry with herself, and deeply distressed by the apparent consequences of her ill-advised mission, when, turning the corner of the little street which brought her into one of the larger thoroughfares, she suddenly, without any warning, found herself face to face with Paul. The surprise was so great that she had no time to put on any defences, to prepare for questions and astonishment on his side. They met without a moment’s warning, the two people who might have been supposed least likely to encounter each other at such a time and place.

“Paul!” she cried, with a sensation of fright. And he stopped, looked at her sternly, and cast a jealous inquiring look along the street by which she had so evidently come.

“Mother! what are you doing here?” he said.

“I came out—to take a walk, as it was so fine a morning,” she said, forcing a smile. Then Lady Markham came to herself and perceived the folly of false pretences. “No—I will not try to deceive you, Paul. I have been visiting Mr. Spears,” she said.

“Visiting Spears!”

“Yes; what is there wonderful in that?—you brought him to visit me. Other people may blame me for it, but I don’t see how you can. I had a kind of faith in him.”

“You had; has it been disappointed then, mother, your faith?”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “No doubt it was foolish. A man of his class—must feel like his class no doubt. It was foolish on my part.”

“What was there,” said Paul, with a sort of contempt which he hid under exaggerated politeness, “that Lady Markham could want with a man of his class—with a demagogue and Radical?”

“Paul,” she said, her voice faltering a little, “it does not become you, however wise and superior you may feel yourself, to assume this tone to your mother. This is to change our positions altogether. I have done a thing which has proved ill-advised and may turn out badly, but I did it for the best. I will not hide it from you who are the chief person concerned. I went to ask him to use his influence with you, my own having failed, to induce you to think a little of your actual duties to your family. He did not take the same view of it as I do, which perhaps was natural; and I saw, though without wishing it,” she added, in a still more tremulous tone, “the—young woman——”

“What young woman?” His voice was angry, almost threatening. He came a step nearer, and stood over her with a cloud upon his face. “What young woman is it? whom do you mean?”

“It is a poor thing to make a mystery of it when it has gone so far. I confess my mistake, and why should you conceal your intentions on your side? This can only have the effect of making everything worse. I was made to see her against my will, and to hear from her own lips——”

“Mother!” cried Paul, violently, stopping her. Then he said, endeavouring again to calm himself, “I have heard often that it is only women who can be thoroughly cruel to other women.”

“Then you have heard what is false, Paul, what is entirely and cruelly false; though you boys toss about such accusations at your pleasure, insulting the women who bear with you, and suffer for you. I tell you because I feel it would have been wiser had I taken no part in the matter; had I kept away; said nothing, and done nothing.”

“And I tell you—” cried Paul, in vehement indignation; then he stopped short and cried out with an anxious voice, “Mother, what is it you have done?”

“Everything that is unwise,” she said. “I have been rebuffed by your friend. I will tell you the truth, Paul. When he said that he had no wish to have you as a fellow emigrant, I, in my folly, asked, Was it his daughter? And she was not so reticent as you are. She owned that it was so. She was more frank than you are; and to do him justice I will allow that her father looked as much surprised as I.”

“She owned it was so!” Paul’s face became ghastly in the morning light. Then after a minute’s blank silence, he said, with a harsh laugh, “Surprised? Yes, her father might be surprised; but why you? You seem to have been the only person who knew all about it, who had got it all cut and dry to be produced at a moment’s notice. Oh, mother!” he cried, bitterly, “your morning’s work will cost me dear—it will cost me dear!”

Lady Markham stood with bowed head to receive her son’s reproaches. “I was wrong,” she said; “I was wrong. Oh, Paul, my dearest boy, come home with me; let us talk it all over; let us think of everything! If you knew how hard it is for me to oppose you! and all the more when your heart is engaged. Am I one to set myself against love?” She blushed as she looked at him with a woman’s reverence for the centre of all affections, and a mother’s shamefacedness in opening such a subject with her son. “But, Paul, there are so many things—oh, so many things to think of! and you are so young—and——”

“Mother, stop!” he said, “your arguments have nothing to do with me; they are wrong altogether. If my life is spoiled, it will be your doing; not mine, but yours—not mine, but yours.”

Lady Markham lifted her head with the surprise and something of the indignation of a person unjustly accused. “This is going too far,” she said. “I have been wrong, but to throw the total blame upon me is unreasonable. In this, as in other things, nobody could harm you; nobody could make your position worse, if you had not risked and lost it yourself.”

There were few passengers in the streets, silent and semi-deserted as always in summer, and yet more because it was still so early. The two figures which stood there together breaking the sunshine were almost the only people visible, and the closeness of the discussion between them had hitherto been witnessed by nobody; just at this point, however, some one issued suddenly from the gate of one of the colleges near, and came down the steps into the street. They were scared by the appearance of any one in this dreary city, and it was not expedient that the warmth of their conversation should be apparent to others.

“Walk along with me,” she said. “Do not let us stand here.”

Paul looked round him for a moment on either hand. On one side was the narrow street in which Spears lived, the line of colleges and better houses on the other. Lady Markham’s face was turned towards the better side. This was enough to decide him, foolish as he was. He turned the other way.

“What is the good of discussing—of talking over? All the harm is done that can be done,” he said, with a wave of his hand. Then he crossed the road quite suddenly, leaving his mother standing looking after him. Very miserable was the young man as he went away. He went down Spears’ street, but he had no intention of going to see Spears. Everything seemed, against him. The best thing for him to do, he thought, would be to get out of sight of everybody—to fly from the evils of fate that were gathering round his feet. What had he done to be caught like this in a tangle which he had not himself sought, from which indeed he had always done his best to keep free? It was no doing of his: chance and his parents had done it, and the detestable conventionalities of society, which made it impossible for a man to be civil to a girl out of his own class without laying himself open to remark. If he had not met her here, yesterday, so innocently, without premeditation! Already, by the folly of everybody concerned, this girl had got to be her to the young man; no name needed to distinguish the creature in whose hands some blind hazard seemed to have placed his life. Blind hazard—aided by his father and mother. How bitter were his thoughts as he went on. What was he to do? She had owned to it. Half he hated her for being so foolishly deceived, half his heart melted to her for the deception which only some latent tenderness could have produced. Must he wring the girl’s heart by making it all plain to her, and humble her in her own eyes? or must he accept a position he had not sought, which he no more desired than they desired it, and of which he saw all the inappropriateness, all the disadvantages? As he went on with that cruel question in his mind, there rose out of the morning air, appearing not much less suddenly than his mother had done, running towards him, the figure of the girl of whom he was thinking. To Paul it was as if his thoughts had taken shape. She came towards him, not seeing him, with all the ease of motion which unconsciousness gives—tall and graceful in her plain black gown. The girl’s head was full of a subdued triumph, but for the moment all she was consciously thinking of was how to get to her shop as quickly as possible. She ran like another Atalanta, skimming along the unlovely street, her feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground. This sudden apparition filled Paul with excitement. She had changed to him altogether since yesterday, when she was nothing but Spears’ daughter. Now she was suddenly identified, separated from all the world, and become herself. How could he help but be interested in her? She had owned to it. To what had she owned? It seemed for the moment almost a relief, bitterly as he resented her introduction into his life, to turn to her, who knew none of the complications involved, who was unaware of his fury and indignation against everybody round him—to turn to her, whose mind must be entirely single and simple, torn by no conflict. He did not know why he wanted to speak to her, what he wanted to say to her; but he stepped into her way with a certain imperiousness, making her stop short in her rapid career. Janet, thus arrested, gave a sudden cry. She stopped, the breath coming quick on her lips, and put her hand to her breast; her heart gave a sudden leap, the colour flew over her face in a sudden wave of crimson.

“Oh, Mr. Markham!” she said.

“Where are you going so fast?” Somehow it seemed to him, with a half-consolatory sense of proprietorship, that here was a creature who belonged to him, who would find no fault with him as the others did, who was his. He put himself in her way, stopping her—not as if by accident, but of set purpose—assuming the right which she for her part never resisted. There were troubles and difficulties with every one else; but with her no difficulties, no troubles. She acknowledged his sway at once, stopped herself, blushed, and drooped her head. There was no question of approving or disapproving here. She answered his voice instantly, like a slave. There are many people who only see a thing in its best aspect when it becomes their own. For the moment Paul Markham became one of those. He had never thought her so handsome before; perhaps indeed in all her life she had never been so handsome as when she stopped all blushing and glowing at his call, acknowledging in her every look the proprietorship which it gave him a sort of pleasure to claim. “Where are you going so fast?” he said.

“Oh, Mr. Markham, I am in a great hurry! I don’t know what Miss Stichel will say: I never was so late before in my life!”

“What has kept you so late?”

He was far more imperious in his tone than he had ever been when she was nothing to him. Then he had been courtly and polite, frightening the girl with a courtesy which she did not understand. She liked this roughness much better. It meant—it would be impossible to tell all it meant.

“I was kept by—visitors. Oh, Mr. Markham! don’t keep me any longer now. I don’t know what Miss Stichel will say to me. She will be so angry.”

“She must not be angry. How does she dare to show her anger to you? You had visitors. I know: my mother.”

“Oh, Mr. Markham!” Janet said again, faintly, drooping her head; and then there was a momentary pause.

“I know,” he said.

He did not know, and could not tell afterwards by what impulse he did it. Some infatuation took possession of him. He took her hand in the middle of the street, in sight of any one that might be looking. There was nobody looking, which vexed Janet, but he did it without thought of that. It would have made no difference if all the world had been there.

“That is how it is, I suppose,” he said, holding her hand. And then he added, somewhat drearily, “If there is anything wrong in it, it is their own doing, there is always that to be said.”

This somewhat chilled Janet, who expected a warmer address; but she reflected that the street was scarcely a place for love-making; and Miss Stichel, though not so important as usual, had still to be considered.

“Let me go, please, Mr. Markham,” she said; “I mustn’t be late: for whatever may happen afterwards I am still their servant at the shop.”

He dropped her hand as if it burnt him, and grew red with anger and uneasy shame.

“This must not be,” he said. “I will go and speak to Spears.”

Though he was so firm in his democratic principles, the idea that any one connected with himself should be under the orders of a mistress galled him beyond bearing. It was a thing that could not be.

“It will not be for long,” Janet said, cheerfully.

She, for her part, rather liked the shop. It was more cheerful than the other shop which was home.

“I cannot suffer it,” he said, “for another day. I will speak to Spears.”

This was all he said, but he kept standing there looking at her with eyes which were more investigating than admiring. If he had nothing more to say than this, why should he keep her standing there and expose her to Miss Stichel’s scolding? But she did not like to burst away as she would have done from a less stately wooer. She was much intimidated by a lover like Paul, though very proud of him. She stood with her eyes cast down, waiting till he should let her go free. The thing that would have made Janet most happy would have been that he should walk to the shop with her, showing that he was not ashamed of her, and give her the pride and glory of being seen by the other young ladies in company with the gentleman she was going to marry, the gentleman who had vowed that she should not remain there—not another day. This would have been the natural thing to do, Janet thought. But it did not seem to occur to Paul in the same light. He looked at her, examining her appearance with anxious and critical, yet with very sober and calm inspection. They were neither of them so happily fluttered, so excited as they might have been. She was not exacting, did not ask too much; and he was critical with the discrimination of a superior, a judge whose powers of judgment were biassed by no glamour of partiality.

“We shall see each other later in the evening. I will not detain you longer,” he said, in a tone of gentle politeness.

He even gave a little sigh of relief as he turned away. Janet, not knowing whether she was more sorry or glad to be liberated, cast more than one furtive glance behind her at his departing figure. But it did not seem to have occurred to Paul to look after her. He walked on stately and straight, turning neither to one side nor the other, towards Spears’s shop. He had not meant to go, but neither had he intended any of the other things that had come to pass. Fate seemed to have got possession of him. He walked into the shop with the same straightforward steady tread, not as usual, that was impossible. Most likely there would have to be something said—but for that, too, he felt himself ready, if need were.

Spears was no longer working at the simple work of his picture-frames. He had thrown them into a heap—all the little bits of carved work which he had been glueing and fitting into each other—and with a large sheet of paper on the table before him was drawing with much intentness and preoccupation. He had set the plume of the foxglove upright before him, and was bending his brows and contorting both limbs and features over his drawing as he had done over the lily he had designed for Alice. The handful of coloured gladiolus which had been lying on the table he had pushed impatiently aside, and they lay at his feet, here and there, scattered under the table and about the floor like things rejected, while he drew in the foxglove boldly with a blue pencil. All his soul seemed to be in his drawing. He scarcely took any notice of Paul—a half glance up, a hurried nod, and that was all. Presently, however, he took up one of the gladiolus stalks and laid it tentatively across the foxglove; then with a pshaw! of angry impatience tossed it away again.

“That won’t do,” he said, half to himself, “none o’ that. Nature will not stand it. The free-growing, wild thing is grand, but that poor stiff, conventional rubbish, manufactured out of some gardener’s brains, out of his bad dreams, is good for nothing; and it’s everywhere the same, so far as I can see. Things must be wedded after their kind.”

“Do you mean that for me, Spears?”

“Do I mean that for you? Which are you? the grand tower of the foxglove that’s good for everything—strength and continuance and beauty—or that poor spiky trash? I don’t know. I mean nothing that I don’t understand.”

Then there was silence once more. Paul took up some of the bits of uncompleted work and fixed them together. He would not open the subject, but he knew Spears well enough to know that it must have been some great agitation which had driven him away from his pot-boiling to the work of designing. That was not a work that would ever “pay.” The frames answered the purpose of daily bread; but the designs into which all the rude artist’s soul was thrown were not profitable. A few of the young men who were his friends had bought some plaques and panels of his finer original work; but such purchasers were few and far between; and to spend a whole morning making a design for one of these delicate unprofitable carvings showed that the workman had certainly for the moment lost command of himself.

After a few minutes, during which he measured the little lathes together and fitted them carelessly, Paul went quietly to the back of the room, and taking an old coat which hung there put it on and sat down to do the work which the other had left undone. This was not a kind of work he had ever attempted before. He had been a student of carving, not because of any natural impulse towards the art, but partly for Spears’s company, partly in order to be able to aid in some small way his struggle for a living. This eventful morning brought him a new impulse. While his master laboured impetuously at his drawing, Paul took the humbler work in hand. After all the distraction that had been in his mind, there was something in this homely effort that soothed him. Cast upon it on all hands, in all ways, it was a sort of relief to him to identify himself altogether with this other sphere, which he had chosen and sought out, yet into which he had never cast himself so completely, so fully, as his own family had cast him. He smiled at this within himself, as he began to work at Spears’s everyday vulgar work. Well! if they would have it so, so be it! He had played with the notion of equality, of democratic simplicity, with the doctrine that it was every man’s duty to earn his own living, and give up to humanity the full enjoyment of the land and accumulations of money, which no individual had a right to retain. All this he had held hotly in theory; but in the meantime had lived in his college rooms, and according to his natural position—an anomaly which only now appeared to him in its full vividness. Yes, now he saw it. He smiled to himself, no longer with bitterness, with a lofty disdain of his own past, of all his traditions, of his family, which by way of opposition and resistance to his purpose and principles had pushed him over the verge on which he had been hesitating. Perhaps but for them he might still have hesitated before he took the final step. It was they who had decided it, who had given him the last impulse. He smiled with a sense of the weakness of efforts which thus naturally balked themselves, feeling superior in his calm certainty of decision to all these agitations. Yes, it was over; there was no longer any question of what might or might not be. His fate was settled; he was a member of Spears’s family, not of Sir William Markham’s. That sense of calm which follows a great decision, and at the same time of proud resignation which succeeds a sacrifice exacted, calmed his mind. Somehow, Paul could not have told how, he felt himself a sort of sacrificial offering to justice and nature, making the most eloquent of protests against wrong, tyranny, injustice, and everything that was evil in society. With the dignity of a noble victim, and with a consciousness of innate, inborn, but most illogical superiority to fate, he drew the glue-pot and the tools towards him, and began to do the workman’s work. Nothing could have been more illogical; for the superiority of labour was one of the first principles of his creed, and to make pictures-frames was a respectable occupation by which a man might live. Yet it was with a smile of unspeakable superiority that he began his first day’s real work, enjoying the sensation of voluntary humility, of doing what it was beneath him to do.

Thus they went on in silence for some time: Paul working clumsily enough, with a sense of the humour implied in his adoption of the trade, which made it amusing in its novelty and inappropriateness, but which was most unlike the steady devotion of a man who felt this work to be his duty; while Spears pursued his with a fury of invention which denoted the perturbation of his mind. He flung the drooping bells of the foxglove upon his paper and erected its splendid stalk with an energy and force which was like a defiance, holding the somewhat coarse blue pencil in his hand like a sword, screwing his mouth and putting his limbs into every contortion possible, as he sat, with his stool pushed as far as might be from the table, and all the upper part of his person overhanging it. If it had been an eagle or a lion he was drawing the force and expression of his whole figure would have been more appropriate. As it was, the foxglove bristled with a kind of scornful defiance, yet drooped with something of melancholy, as an eagle might have done in all its pride of strength, yet with the pathos of all speechless creatures in its eyes. In this particular, though he was an actor, he was speechless as the eagle or the wildly noble flower. He had seen a sight which had taken all speech out of him, as it might have done from Shakespeare. He had seen a something unknown, a small, vulgar, incomprehensible spirit, to him unrecognisable, a thing out of his cognisance, looking at him through the eyes of his child. What could he say to such a revelation? Nothing. It took his voice from him and almost his breath. He had not been able to endure the placid work which left him free for thought. Say that his designing did not reach a very ethereal point of art; but it was the highest exercise of skill to him. He flung himself upon the paper, thrusting away all the painful enlightenments and contradictions of his life as he thrust away the gay-coloured spike of the gladiolus. He would have crushed them under foot if he had been able, but this he could not do. They would not disappear from his memory as the others did from his table. Thus he worked on, with a fervour which was almost savage, while Paul, with a proud smile on his face, handled the glue-pot. After a while the mere sense of companionship mollified the elder man. He was wounded, and wanted just such soothing as the sight of his disciple sitting quietly by gave him. His work grew less firm, his hand less rigid; the great pencil ceased to dig into the paper with its violent lines. Insensibly the softening went on. First, he threw a hasty glance from beneath his bushy eyebrows at the young man tranquilly seated near him. Then his fiery inspiration slackened; he paused to look at his model, to devise the next line, and doing so let his eyes rest upon Paul with a growing softness. At last he got up, threw down his pencil, and coming up to his companion struck him on the shoulder.

“Well!” he said. “Boy! So that was how it was. You listened to the father—old fool! but your thoughts were with the girl. That was how it was.” This was not the thing that gnawed at Spears’s heart, but he put it forward by way perhaps of persuading himself, as we all do sometimes, that it was the lesser matter that hurt him most.

Paul paused in his work, and looked up. His face was very serious, with none of that glow of happiness in it which belongs to an accepted lover—as the man beside him, who had been a true lover himself, was quick to see.

“Who said that? Not I, Spears—not I.”

“Who said it? Well, I cannot tell you. The women among them; they have their own way of looking at things.”

And then the two men paused, looking at each other. This was the moment in which it was natural that Janet’s lover should make his own explanation to the father of the girl whom he loved. The whole life of two people at least, and of many more in a secondary point of view, hung upon Paul’s lips, to be decided by the next impulse that might move him, by the next fantastic words which, out of the mist of unreal fact in which he had got himself enveloped, he might be moved to say.

END OF VOL. I.