THE children were all open-eyed and open-mouthed next morning to see Paul’s friend. As for the boys, they did not feel at all sure what might have been going on during the night, or whether Paul’s friend would be visible in the morning. “It is money those sort of fellows want,” Roland said; and then the question arose whether papa being away mamma would have money enough to satisfy such a claimant. The little girls besieged Alice with questions. Who was that strange man? He looked exactly like the man that came to wind the clocks.
“He is a friend of Paul’s; hush—hush!” said Alice; “you must all be very polite and not stare at him.”
“But how can he be a friend?” demanded Bell.
“He is a bailiff,” said Roland. “In Harry Lorrequer there is somebody exactly like that.”
“Oh, hush, children, for mamma’s sake! he will come in directly. He is Paul’s friend. Grown-up people do not go by appearances like children. Paul says he has done him more good than all the dons. Most likely he is a very learned man—or an author or something,” Alice said.
“Oh, an author! they’re a queer lot,” said Harry, with relief. At all events, an author was less objectionable than a bailiff.
Lady Markham came in before these questions were over. She was not all so bright as usual. Though she smiled upon them as they all came round her, it was not her own natural smile; and she had a cap on, a thing which she only wore when she was out of sorts, a kind of signal of distress. The family were divided as to this cap. Some of them were in favour of it, some against it. The little girls thought it made their mother look old, whereas Alice was of opinion that it imparted dignity to her appearance.
“I don’t want to have a mother just as young and a great deal prettier than I am,” she said. But Bell and Marie called out, “Oh, that odious cap!”
“Why should mamma, only because she is mamma, cover up all her pretty hair? It is such pretty hair! mine is just the same colour,” said Bell, who was inclined to vanity.
Lady Markham smiled upon this charming nonsense, but it was not her own smile. “Has any one seen Paul this morning?” she said, with a sigh.
What a change there was in everything! Paul had not come into his mother’s dressing-room last night to talk over all he had been doing and meant to do, as had always been his habit when he came home. And when Lady Markham went to her boy’s room on her way down stairs, thinking of nothing but the little laughing lecture she was wont to administer on finding him not yet out of bed—which was the usual state of affairs—what was her surprise to find Paul out of his room, already dressed, and “gone for a walk.” Brown meeting her in the hall told her this with a subdued voice and mingled wonder and sympathy in his face.
“Mr. Markham is turning over a new leaf, my lady,” he said, with the license of an old servant, who had seen Paul born, so to speak.
“I am very glad to hear it—it is so much better for him,” Lady Markham said. So it was, no doubt; but this change, even of the bad habit which was familiar to her, gave her a little shock. Therefore it was with a failure of her usual bright cheerfulness that she took her place at the breakfast-table.
“Has any one seen Paul?” she said.
“Oh, fancy seeing Paul already!” cried the little girls. “He will come in when we have all done breakfast, and Brown will bring him everything quite hot, after we have waited and waited. Brown makes dreadful favourites, don’t you think so? He does not mind what he does for Paul.”
“Paul has gone out for a walk,” said Lady Markham, not without solemnity.
There was a cry of astonishment all round the table. Roland gave Harry a little nod of intelligence. (“He will have found it was no use, and he will have taken him away.”) Alice had looked up into her mother’s face with consternation; but as she was Paul’s unhesitating partisan through everything, she recovered herself at once.
“He must be showing Mr. Spears the Park,” she said. “What a good thing if he will take to getting up early.”
And nobody could say anything against that. Getting up early was a virtue in which Paul had been sadly deficient, as everybody was aware.
However, this was long enough to have been occupied about Paul, and the children, tired of the subject, had already plunged into their own affairs, when their elder brother suddenly appeared, ushering in Mr. Spears—who in the morning light looked more out of place than ever—through the great bow window which opened on the lawn. The stranger had his hat in his hand, and made an awkward sort of bow.
“I am afraid it is a liberty, my lady,” he said, stepping in with shoes all wet from the dewy grass. He did not know what to do with his hat, and ended by putting it under his chair when he got to the table. But by that time his embarrassment had disappeared, and his face grew benignant as he looked round, before sitting down, upon the girls and boys. “The sight of children is a benediction,” he said with that softening which mothers know by instinct. He was very like the man who wound up the clocks, who was a most respectable country tradesman; but this look reconciled Lady Markham to him more than anything else which had happened yet.
“You are fond of children?” she said.
“I ought to be. I have had six of my own; but they had hard times after my wife died, and there are but three left.”
“Ah!” Lady Markham cried out of the depths of her heart. She looked round upon her own children, and the tears came to her eyes. “I am very, very sorry. There can be nothing in the world so dreadful.”
“It is a pull,” said her visitor. “Yes, it is a pull. A man does not know what it is till he has gone through it. Often you think, poor things, it is better for them; you would never have been able to rear them as you ought; but when it comes it is a pull; though you may have no bread to give them, it is hard to part with them.”
He had begun to eat his breakfast very composedly, notwithstanding this. The way he held his fork was a wonder to Marie who had but recently acquired full mastery of her own, and Harry had watched with great gravity and interest the passage of the stranger’s knife to his mouth. But Lady Markham no longer noticed these things. She forgot that he was like the man that wound up the clocks.
“I always feel,” she said, “when I hear of losses like yours as if I ought to go down on my knees and beg your pardon for being so much better off—thank God!”
Spears looked up at her suddenly, putting down his knife and fork. Here was a strange thing; while all the rest were so conscious of the difference between them, the two chief persons had forgotten it. But he did not make any immediate reply. He looked at her wondering, grateful, understanding; and that piece of silent conversation was more effective than anything that could be said.
“There are not many people that feel like you,” he said at length; “those that are better off than their neighbours are apt to look as if it sprang from some virtue of theirs. They are more likely to crow over us than to beg our pardon. And just as well too, Markham,” he said with a laugh. “If they were all like your mother, they’d cut the ground from under our feet.”
“I do not see that,” said Paul. “The principle is unaltered, however well-intentioned those may be who are in the position of unjust superiority; that makes no difference so far as I can see.”
All the Markham family were roused to attention when Paul spoke. The children looked at him, stopping their private chatter, and Lady Markham cast a wondering, reproachful look at her boy. Was she in a position of unjust superiority because all her children were living, and another parent had lost the half of his? She felt wounded by this strange speech.
“Ah,” said Spears, with a twinkle in his eyes, “there is nothing like a recruit from the other side for going the whole——. You have a beautiful family, and you have a beautiful park, my lady. You have got a great deal more than the most of your fellow-creatures have. I can do nothing but stand and wonder at it for my part. Everything you see, everything you touch, is beautiful. You ought to be very sorry for all the others, so many of them, who are not so well off as you.”
“Indeed I am, Mr. Spears,” said Lady Markham, simply; but then she added, after a pause, “for those who have not the things that give happiness; but there are a great many things that are of no importance to happiness. Everybody, of course, cannot have a beautiful park, as you say, and a nice house; but——”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” She looked up surprised. “Ah, I see! You are all for equality, like Paul.”
“Like Paul! I taught him everything he knows. He had not an idea on the subject before I opened his eyes to the horrible injustice of the present state of affairs. He is my disciple, and I am his master. Now you know who I am. I cannot be in any house under false pretences,” said Spears, pushing his chair a little away from the table.
The children all looked at him aghast; and he had himself the air of having made a great and dangerous revelation, probably to be followed by his dismissal from the house as a dangerous person. “Now you know who I am.” The climax was melodramatic in its form; but there was nothing theatrical in it so far as the revolutionary was concerned. He was perfectly sincere. He felt the importance of his own position; and feeling it, could entertain no doubt as to the knowledge of him as their fellest enemy, and the horror of him which must be felt in every house like this throughout the country. He had not wished to come; he had been disappointed to find that Sir William was not there, who (he felt sure) would have refused him admittance. And he would not take advantage of my lady, who was certainly a woman to whom any man might submit himself. Had she rung the bell instantly for her menials to turn him out; had she expressed her horror at the contamination which her family had sustained by sitting down at the same table with him—he would not have been surprised. He pushed his chair gently from the table, and waited to see what she would order; though he was a revolutionary, he had unbounded respect for the mistress of this house.
Lady Markham looked at her strange visitor with bewildered eyes. She made a rapid telegraphic appeal to her son for explanation. “Now you know who I am,” but she did not in the least know who he was. He was famous enough in his way, and he thought himself more famous than he was; but Lady Markham had never heard of him. When she saw that no assistance could be afforded her by her children in this dilemma, she collected her thoughts with a desperate effort. She was one of the women who would rather die than be rude to any one. To speak to a man at her own table, under her own roof, with less than the most perfect courtesy was impossible to her. Besides, she did not really understand what he meant. She was annoyed and affronted that he should speak of her boy as Paul, but in the confusion of the moment that was all her mind took up, and as for openly resenting that, how was it possible? One time or another no doubt she would give the stranger a little return blow, a reminder of his over-familiarity, when it could be done with perfect politeness, but not now. She was startled by his solemnity; and it was very clear that he was not a man of what she called “our own class,” but Lady Markham’s high breeding was above all pettiness.
“Was it really you,” she said, “who taught my son (she would not call him Paul again) all the nonsense he has been talking to us? Yes, indeed it is great nonsense, Mr. Spears—you must let me say so. We are doing no one injustice. My husband says all young men are Radicals one time or other; but I should have expected you, a man with children of your own, to know better. Oh no, I don’t want to argue. I am not clever enough for that. Let me give you another cup of tea.”
The demagogue stared at the beautiful lady as if he could not believe his ears. Partly he was humiliated, seeing that she was not in the least afraid of him, and even did not realise at all what was the terrible disclosure he had made. This gave him that sense of having made himself ridiculous which is so intolerable to those who are unaccustomed to the world. He cast a jealous look round the table to see if he could detect any laughter.
Paul caught him by the arm at this critical moment.
“Eat your breakfast,” he said, in a wrathful undertone. “Do you hear, Spears? Do you think she knows? Have some of this fish, for Heaven’s sake, and shut up. What on earth do they care if you taught me or not? Do you think she goes into all that?”
Nobody heard this but Harry, who was listening both with ears and eyes. And Mr. Spears returned to his breakfast as commanded. He was abashed, and he was astonished, but still he made a very hearty meal when all was said. And by and by his spirit rose again; in the eyes of this lady, who had so completely got the better of him, far more than if she had turned him out, there was no way of redeeming himself, but by “bringing her over.” That would be a triumph. He immediately addressed himself to it with every art at his command. He had an extremely prepossessing and melodious voice, and he spoke with what the ladies thought a kind of old-fashioned grace. The somewhat stiff, stilted phraseology of the self-educated has always more or less a whiff of the formality of an older age. And he made observations which interested them, in spite of themselves. Lady Markham was very polite to her son’s friend.
When the children reminded her of her promise to go with them on a long-planned expedition into the woods, she put them off. “You know I cannot leave when I have visitors,” she said.
“Perhaps Mr. Spears would come too?” said Alice. And before he knew what was going to happen, he found himself pushed into the front seat of the carriage, which was like a Noah’s ark, with hampers and children. Never had this man of the people, this popular orator, occupied so strange a position. He had never known before what it was to roll luxuriously along the roads, to share in the ease and dignity of wealth. He took notes of it, like a man in a foreign country, and observed keenly all that took place—the manners of the people for whom the world was made: that was how they seemed to take it. The world was made for them. It was not a subject of arrogant satisfaction on their part, or pride in their universal dominion; they took it quite easily, gently, as a matter of course. My lady gave her orders with a gentle confidence in the obedience of everybody she addressed. It was all wonderful to the man who knew only the other side of the question. He asked about everything—the game (with an eye to the poachers); the great extent of the park (as bearing upon one of his favourite points—the abstraction from the public of so many acres which might have cultivation); and was answered with a perfect absence of all sense of guilt, which was very strange to him. They did not know they were doing wrong, these rich people. They told him all about it, simply, smilingly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. All this went against his preconceived notions, just as the manners of a foreign country so often go against the idea you have formed of them. He had all his senses keenly about him, and yet everything was so novel and surprising that he felt scarcely able to trust to his own impressions. It was the strangest position surely in which a popular agitator, a preacher of democracy and revolution, a special pleader against the rich, ever was.
“We have not many neighbours,” Lady Markham said. “That is Lord Westland’s property beyond the church. You can see Westland Towers from the turn of the road. And there are the Trevors on the other side of the parish.”
“A whole parish,” said Spears, “divided amongst three families.”
“The Trevors have very little,” said Lady Markham. “Sir William is the chief proprietor. But they are a very good family. Admiral Trevor—you must have heard of him—was once a popular hero. He did a great many daring things I have heard, but fame gets forgotten like other things. He lives very quietly now, an old man——”
“The oldest man that ever was,” said Alice. “Fancy, it was in Napoleon’s time he was so famous—the great Napoleon—before even old people were born.”
“Before I was born,” said Lady Markham, with her soft laugh; “that is something like saying before the Flood. Then there is the vicar, of course, and a few people of less importance. It is easy to go over a country neighbourhood.”
“And what do you call the people in all these cottages, my lady? The world was not made for them as it is for you. These would be the neighbours I should think of. When I hear of your three families in the parish, I wonder what all these roofs mean. Are they not flesh and blood too? Don’t they live and have things happen to them as well as you fine folks? If they were cleared away out of the place, what would become of your parish, my lady? Could you get on all the same without them that you make no account of them? These are the houses where I should feel at home, among the poor cottagers whom you don’t even know about——”
“Mamma—not know about them!” cried Alice. “Why, it is our own village! Do you think because it is a mile away that makes any difference? Why, it is our own village, Mr. Spears.”
“I dare say,” said the revolutionary—“your own village. Perhaps they pay you rent for suffering them to live there, and allowing them to do all the work of the world and keep everything going——”
“Hush, Alice,” said Lady Markham. “Perhaps Mr. Spears does not understand a little country village. They are often not at all fond of doing the work, and they do not much like to pay their rent; but we know them very well for that matter. I could tell you all about them, every house. To be sure we have not the same kind of intercourse with them as with our equals.”
“Ah, that is the whole question, Lady Markham. Pardon me; I am not your equal, and yet you let me sit in your fine carriage and talk to you. No, I am not a bit humble; I feel myself the equal of any man. There is nobody in the world whom I will acknowledge my superior—in my dignity as a man.”
Lady Markham made him a little bow; it was her way when she did not know what to say. “One does not need to be told,” she said, “that you are a very superior man, Mr. Spears; quite equal to talk with anybody, were it the greatest philosopher.” Here she stopped short in a little embarrassment. “But we are all very simple, ignorant country people,” she added with a smile, “about here.”
“Ah, you are very clever, my lady. You beg the question.”
“Do I?” said Lady Markham. “I wonder what that means. But now we are just arriving at the place for the pic-nic. When my boy comes up, I will make him take you to the most beautiful point of view. There is a waterfall which we are very proud of, and now when everything is in the first green of spring—— Paul!” she cried, “come and get your directions. I want Mr. Spears to see the view.”
“Your mother is something I don’t understand Markham,” said the demagogue. “I never came across that kind of woman before.”
“Didn’t you?” said Paul. He was ready to be taught on other points, but not on this. “You see the bondage we live in,” said the young man. “Luxury, people call it; to me it seems slavery. Oh, to be free of all this folly and finery—to feel one’s self a man among men, earning one’s bread, shaping one’s own life——”
“Ah!——” said Spears, drawing a long breath. He could not be unaffected by what was an echo of his own eloquence. “But there’s a deal to say, too, for the other side.”