SIR WILLIAM was better when he got home. When he reached his own house he began to hold up his head, to hold himself, if not erect as of old, yet in a way more like himself. He walked firmly into the house, always with Fairfax’s arm, and said, “I am better, Brown; yes, much better,” when Brown met him, very anxious and effusive, at the door. “I feel almost myself,” he said, turning round to Lady Markham. And so he looked—himself ten years older, but yet with something of the old firmness and precise composure. How he could thus recover, though the letter in his pocket-book bore the postmark of Markham Royal, and he had come back into the very presence of the danger which at a distance had overwhelmed him, it would be difficult to tell. “He’s picked up wonderful,” Mr. Jarvis, Sir William’s own man, said to Mr. Brown; “but for all that, he’s got notice to quit—he have. Just see if I ain’t right.” Mrs. Fry was of the same opinion when she saw her master. She had never had any comfort in her mind, she declared, since she heard of these faintings. All the Markhams went like that. The late Sir Paul had done just the same—nothing to speak of at first, and nobody alarmed—but it was a thing that went fast, that was, Mrs. Fry said. They were all very gloomy about Sir William down stairs, but in the family there was no such alarm. He put away his trouble, or rather, as he emerged out of the suffering of his attack into physical comfort again, and no longer felt the blood ebbing, as it were, from his heart, and consciousness failing in the giddy void into which he had seemed to sink, nature in him declined to remember it, turned away from it. The familiar house, the waving of the woods, the stately quiet about him, healed him, and he would not allow himself to be pulled back. He came to dinner, and occupied his place as usual, looking really, his wife and daughter thought, almost quite himself. This almost made up to them, poor ladies, for the moment—for all that it had cost them to leave Oxford in such melancholy uncertainty about Paul.
But there was one of the party who was not at his ease. Fairfax, who had come away on the spur of the moment without any provision for a visit, and who felt his presence here to be mere accident, nothing more, scarcely knew what to do or say. After he had helped Sir William up stairs on their arrival, he came to Lady Markham, confused yet smiling, with his hat in his hand. “I must take my leave now. I hope Sir William will go on mending, and no longer have need of my arm as a walking-stick.”
“Your leave!” said Lady Markham, “what does that mean? Do you think after taking the use of you all the way here that I am going to let you go away without making acquaintance with Markham? No, no; you are going to stay.”
“I came as a walking-stick,” said the young man; “and I have brought nothing,” he added, laughing. “That is the disadvantage of a walking-stick which is human, which wants tooth-brushes and all kinds of things. Besides, I am of no further use. Sir William is better, and there are shoals of men here.”
“You make us out to be pleasant people,” said Lady Markham, “getting rid of our friends as soon as we have need of them no longer. That will never do. You must send for your things, and in the meantime there is Paul’s wardrobe to fall back upon. He always leaves a number of things here.”
“But——” said Fairfax, flushing very deeply. He was not handsome, like Paul. There was a look of easy good-humour, kindness, sympathy about him, a desire to please, a readiness to be serviceable. He had brown eyes, which were clear and kind; brown hair, crisp and curling; a pleasant mouth; but nothing in his features or his aspect that could be called distinguished. Pleasure, embarrassment, difficulty, a desire to say something, yet a reluctance to say it, were all mingled in his face; but the pleasure was the strongest. He gave an appealing look at Alice, as if entreating her to help him out.
“I want no buts,” said Lady Markham. “I want to go to Sir William, and you are detaining me with a foolish argument which you know you cannot convince me by. Send for your things, and Brown will show you your room: and we can talk it all over,” she said, smiling, “as soon as your portmanteau is here.”
Fairfax made her an obeisance as he might have done to a queen. He stood with his hat in his hand and his head bowed while she passed him going out of the room. Every young man, it is to be supposed, has some youthful feminine ideal in his mind, but to Fairfax Lady Markham was a new revelation. He knew, if not by experience, yet from all the poets, that there were creatures like her daughter in the world; that they were the flower and blossom of humanity, supposed to be the most beautiful things in life; but the next step from the Alices of creation was into a darkness he knew nothing of. Age, or a youth that was pretended, false, and disgusting, swallowed up all the rest. A mother (he had never known his own) was an old stager or an old campaigner, a dragon or a matchmaker, the gaoler or the executioner of her girls, the greatest danger to all men; scheming with deadly wiles to get rid of her daughters; then, in the terrible capacity of mother-in-law, using all these wiles to get the girls who had escaped from her, back, and make the lives of their husbands miserable. This is the conception which the common Englishman gets from his light literature of all women who are not young. Fairfax was no worse than his kind; he had never known his own mother, and the name was not sacred to him. But when Lady Markham came within his ken the young man was bewildered. He could understand Alice, but he could not understand the woman who was so beautiful and gracious, and yet Markham’s mother. She dazzled him, and filled him with shame and generous compunction. Her very smile was a fresh wonder. He was half afraid of her, yet to disobey or rebel against her seemed to him a thing impossible. The revelation of this mother even changed the character of his relations with Alice, for whom, on the first sight of her, the natural attraction of the natural mate, the wondering interest, admiration, and pleasure, which, if not love, is the first beginning of the state of love—had caught him all at once. The mother brought a softening as of domestic trust and affection into this nascent feeling. Alice was brought the nearer to him, by some in explainable magic, because of the dazzling superiority of this elder unknown princess, whose very existence was a miracle to him. When Lady Markham had gone out, with a smile and gracious bend of her head in answer to his reverential salutation, Fairfax came back to Alice with a certain awe in his look, which was half contradicted, half heightened, by the wavering of the smile upon his face, in which there mingled something like amusement at his own sense of awe.
“Miss Markham, may I ask your advice?” he said.
“You are frightened at mamma,” said Alice, with a soft laugh. “Oh, but you need not! She is as kind—as kind—as if she were only old nurse,” Alice said, in despair of finding a better illustration.
“Don’t be profane!” cried Fairfax, with uplifted hands. “Yes, I am frightened. I never knew that anybody’s mother could be like that. But, Miss Markham, will you give me your advice?”
“Is your mother—not living, Mr. Fairfax?”
“She never has been for me—she died so long ago; I am afraid I have never thought much about her. Ought I to stay, Miss Markham?” He raised his eyes to her with a piteous look, yet one that was half comic in its earnestness, and a sudden blush, unawares, as their eyes met, flamed over both faces. For why? How could they tell? It was so, and they knew no more.
“Surely,” Alice said; “mamma wishes it, and we all wish it. After showing us so much kindness, you would not go away the moment you have come here?”
“But that is not the question,” said Fairfax. “The fact is, I am nobody. Don’t laugh, or I shall laugh too, and I am much more disposed to cry. I have a tolerable name, haven’t I? but alas! it does not mean anything. I don’t know what it means, nor how we came by it. I am one of the unfortunate men, Miss Markham, who—never had a grandfather.”
Alice had been waiting with much solemnity for the secret which made him so profoundly grave (yet there was a twinkle, too, which nothing but the deepest misfortune could quench, in the corner of his eye). When this statement came, however, she was taken with a sudden fit of laughter. Could anything be more absurd? And yet in her heart she felt a sudden chill, a sense of horror. Alice would not have owned it, but this was a terrible statement for any young man on the verge of intimacy to make. No grandfather! It was a misfortune she could not understand.
“At least, none to speak of,” he said, the fun growing in his eyes. “You should not laugh, Miss Markham. Don’t you think it is hard upon a man? To come to an enchanted palace, where he would give his head to be allowed to stay, and to feel that for no fault of his, for a failure which he is not responsible for, which can be laid only to the score of those ancestors who did not exist——”
“Mr. Fairfax, no one was thinking of your grandfather.”
“I know that; but, dear Miss Markham, you know very well that to-night, or to-morrow night, or a year hence, your mother, before whom I feel disposed to go down upon my knees, will say with her smile, ‘Are you of the Norfolk Fairfaxes, or the Westchester family, or——?’ And I, with shame, will begin to say, ‘Madam, of no Fairfaxes at all.’ What will she think of me then? Will not she think that I have done wrong to be here—that I had no right to stay?”
“Oh, Mr. Fairfax!” cried Alice, somewhat pale and troubled; “how can I advise you? Mamma is not a fanatic about family. She does not build upon it to that extent. I do not see why she should ever ask you. It is no business of ours.” Alice was not strong enough to have such a tremendous question thrown upon her to decide. As a matter of fact, she knew that her mother would very soon make those inquiries about the Westchester family and the Norfolk Fairfaxes. Already Lady Markham had indulged in speculations on the subject, and had begun to remember that in the one case she “used to know” a cousin of his, and in the other had met his uncle, the ambassador, and saw a great deal of him once in Paris. She grew quite pale, and her eyes puckered up and took the most anxious aspect. Besides, it was a shock to herself. That absence of a grandfather was a want which was almost indecent. She did not understand it, and she was extremely sorry for him. He had no home then—no house that his people had lived in for ages—no people. Poor boy!
And Fairfax’s countenance also fell, in reflection of hers. However deep may be one’s private consciousness of one’s own deficiencies, there is always a little expectation in one’s mind that other people will make light of them; but when you see your own dismay, and more than your own dismay, in the eyes of your counsellor, then is the moment when you sink into the abyss. His lip quivered for a moment, and though it eventually succeeded in forming into a smile, the smile was very tremulous and uncertain.
“I see,” he said; “no need for another word. Good-bye. I have had a glimpse into—the garden of Eden, though I must not stay.”
“Mr. Fairfax!” cried Alice, as he turned away. “Come back—come back this moment! How dare you take me up so? Do you want to get me into trouble,” she cried, half crying, half laughing, “with mamma? Would you like to have her—beat me?”
“She does so sometimes?”
“To be sure,” cried Alice, with an unsteady laugh. “Oh, Mr. Fairfax, what a fright you have given me! You have made my heart beat!”
“Not so much as mine,” he said. They had their laugh, and then they stood once more looking at each other. “It is all very well,” said the young man; “you want to spare my feelings; you would not hurt any one. But beyond that, you know as well as I do that Lady Markham, knowing who I am, would not like to have me here.”
“Who are you?” said Alice, with a little renewed alarm; and in her mind she tried to remember whether there had been any trials in the papers, any criminals who bore this name.
“I am nobody at all,” said Fairfax. “I haven’t even the distinction of being improper, or belonging to people who have made themselves notable either for evil or good. I am nobody. That is precisely what I want Lady Markham to understand.”
“I think, Mr. Fairfax,” said Alice, “you had better go and send for your things, as mamma said.”
“You think I may?”
He looked at her with eyes full of pleasure and gratitude, putting more meaning into her words than they would bear, and getting a thrill of conscious happiness out of the little arbitrary tone which, half in jest and half to hide her real doubts, Alice put on. He was so glad to obey, to say to himself that it was their own doing and that they could not blame him for it, so happy to be made to remain as he persuaded himself. The children rushed in as he went away to obey what he called to himself the order he had received, eager to know who he was, and making a hundred inquiries about all kinds of things—about papa’s illness, why he looked so grey, and what was the matter with him; about Paul, why he did not come home; about Mr. Fairfax, who he was, what he was, what he was doing there, whether he was going to stay. There was scarcely a question that could be put on these subjects which the ingenious children did not ask; and Alice was glad finally to suggest that they should walk to the village with Mr. Fairfax and show him where the post-office was, that he might telegraph for his portmanteau. They were quite willing to take this on themselves. “We shall be sure to see the little gentleman,” Bell said. “Who is the little gentleman?” asked Alice; but she had so many things to think of that she did not pay any attention to the reply, which was made by all the four voices at once. What did it matter? She had a hundred things so much more important to think of.
And when the children had been sent off, forming a guard of honour about Fairfax, cross-examining him to their heart’s content, and in their turn communicating much information which was quite novel to him, Alice thought she was very glad of the quiet and the interval of rest. Sir William was resting, declaring himself much better; and Lady Markham, in the relief of this fact, was lying down on the sofa, getting half an hour’s doze after her sleepless night. Alice had not slept much more than her mother, but she could not doze. After a while a sensation of regret stole into her mind that she had not accompanied the others. There was a soft breeze blowing among the trees which freshened the aspect of nature, and the sky was blue and tender, doubly blue after the smoky half-colour of a town. Alice sat by the window and watched the flickering of the leaves, and wished she had gone with them. Something seemed wanting to her. To be alone and free to rest, did not seem the privilege she had thought it. She wanted—what? Some one to speak to, some one’s eyes to meet hers. The leaves ruffled and seemed to call her; the little breeze came and whispered at the edge of the window, blowing the lace curtains about. All the world invited her, wooed her, to go out into the fresh air, into the green avenue, into the joyful yet silent world. “The air would have done me good,” Alice said to herself; and her voice came back to her out of the silence as if it had been somebody else’s voice. Then by degrees it came into her head that the air would still do her good if she went out now, which somehow did not exactly hit her wishes. After this, however, it occurred to her that to stroll down the avenue and meet them as they came back would not be amiss, and much comforted by this suggestion she ran to get her hat. Would they be glad to see her, or would they ask her loudly why she came out now, when nobody wanted her. Brothers and sisters under fourteen are apt to express opinions of this sort very plainly. Alice felt angry at the idea, but afterwards melted, and represented to herself that to meet them in the avenue was of all the courses open to her the best.
Sir William was able to come down stairs to dinner, which was more than any one had hoped, and after dinner he came into the dining-room with the ladies, and saw the children, as he had always been in the habit of doing, while he took his coffee. A recovery of this kind from a sudden fit of illness has often the most softening and happy effect. He had a great deal of care on his mind, but the sensation of getting better seemed to chase it all away. He seemed to be getting better of that too, to be getting over it, before it ever came to anything. Had he been in his usual condition he would have known very well that he had got over nothing, that it was all waiting for him round the corner of the very next day, or even hour; but Sir William convalescent was not in his usual state of mind. He felt as if he had got over it, as if it all lay behind him—the perplexity, and the trouble, and alarm. He sat in his great chair, with cushions placed about him, looking so much older, and so much softer, more indulgent and more talkative. A kind of garrulousness had come upon him. He told his children stories of his own childhood. He was not put out by their restlessness, by their interruptions, as he generally was. Never had he been so gentle, so amiable. He told them all about an adventure of his in the woods with his brothers, when he had been about Roland’s age. It was like the story of old Grouse in the gun-room to the little Markhams; they knew exactly where to laugh, and what questions to ask to show their interest, and they conducted themselves with the greatest propriety, not even putting him right when he deviated from the correct routine of the story, which they remembered better than he did. It was only after this wonderful tale was over that Bell made the unfortunate remark which brought a new transformation. How should the child know there was any harm in it? “Oh,” she cried suddenly, “look, Harry! look, Marie! As papa sits there, now! Did you ever see anything so like the little gentleman?” and Bell clasped her hands together in admiring contemplation of this strange fact.
There was a pause. Had it not been for the entire ignorance of the easy household, calm, and fearing no evil, it might have been thought that a shiver ran through the air, as this crisis suddenly developed itself out of the quiet: every one was quite still. They all looked at the child with amused curiosity—all but one. And though there was nothing meant by it the effect was strange. It was left to Sir William to speak, which he did in a clear, thin voice, suddenly becoming judicial and solemn.
“Whom do you mean by the little gentleman, Bell?”
“Oh, he is a relation—he told us so,” said the little girl.
“And he has brought me some sweetmeats from abroad—me!—though he didn’t know my name. What sort of things would you call sweetmeats, mamma?”
“And he is living down at the Markham Arms. We saw him to-day. He jumped into the railway carriage with Dolly Stainforth.”
“Oh, but I saw him come back—following the carriage,” cried Roland. “He stood at the station-gate to see you pass, papa, and looked so sorry. That was him, Alice, that stopped us when we went to the village with Mr. Fairfax. You saw him. He wanted to shake hands all round.”
The pause now, after this clamour of voices, was more curious than ever. Lady Markham began to wonder a little.
“A relation!—who could it be? Do you know of any relation who would not have come to us straight? I do not think it could be a relation. You must have made a mistake.”
“Oh, no; we have not made any mistake,” cried the children with one voice. “Besides, he was such friends with us. He promised to give us quantities of things; and then he is like papa.”
“I don’t think Sir William is well,” said Fairfax, hurriedly. He rose up with an exclamation of terror, and Lady Markham sprang to her feet and rushed to her husband’s side.
“I am feeling—a little faint,” he said, in a half-whisper, with a tremendous attempt to regain command of himself; but it failed. His head drooped, his eyelids quivered, and then lay half-closed upon the dim langour underneath that had lost all power of seeing; his breath laboured, and came in gasps from his pale lips. All the sudden recovery in which they had been so happy was over. Alice put the children hastily out of the room, like a flock frightened, as she ran to call Jarvis, to get what was necessary, to send for the village doctor. The boys and girls got together into a corner of the hall and cried silently, clinging together in fright and sorrow; or at least the girls cried, wondering—
“Was it anything we said?”
“Oh, I wish—I wish!” cried Bell, but in a whisper, “that I had not said anything about the little gentleman!”
But of all the family she was the only one that thought of this. The others though they were much alarmed were not surprised. There was nothing, alas! more natural than that these fits should come on again. The doctor had expected it. They said to each other that he had been more tired with the journey than they supposed—that indeed it was certain in his state of health that he must be worn out by the journey: the wonder only was that he had revived at all. He was carried to his room after a while, the children looking on drearily from their corner, full of dismay. To them nothing seemed to be too dreadful to be expected.
“Oh, why does papa look so pale?” Marie sobbed, with that blighting terror which seizes a child at the first sight of such signs of mortality. Even the boys had much to do to rub away out of the corners of their eyes the sudden burst of tears.
“I am better—much better,” the sick man said, when he came to himself, “but very weak. You won’t allow me to be disturbed? I cannot see any one—it is impossible for me to see any one, Isabel.”
“Do you think I will let you be disturbed?” said Lady Markham. “And who would disturb you? Do you forget, William, that we are at home?”
But that word, so full of consolation, fell upon him with no healing in it. Yes, he knew very well that he was at home, and that his enemy who had been waiting for him all these years—his enemy who meant him no harm, who meant no one any harm—the deadliest foe of the children and their mother, his own reproach and shame—that innocent yet mortal enemy was close to him, lurking among the trees, behind the peaceful houses in the village, to disturb him as no one else could. His wife put back the curtain so as to shield his feeble eyes from the lamp, and sat down—anxious, yet serene—wondering at his strange fancy. Disturb him! Who could disturb him here?