IT was late, quite late, when Mr. Gus was “got to go away.” And it might have proved impossible altogether, but for some one who came for him and would not be denied. Mr. Scrivener was sitting alone with him in the library, from which all the others had gone, when this unknown summons arrived. The lawyer had done all he could to convince him that it was impossible he could remain; but Gus could not see the impossibility. He was hurt that they should wish him to go away, and still more hurt when the lawyer suggested that, in case of his claims being proved, Lady Markham would evacuate the house and leave it to him.
“What would she do that for?” Gus cried. “Did I come here to be left in a great desert all by myself? I won’t let them go away.”
Between these two determinations the lawyer did not know what to do. He was half-exasperated, half-amused, most reluctant to offend a personage who would have everything in his power as respected the little Markhams, and might make life so much happier, or more bitter, to all of them. He would not offend him for their sake, but neither could he let him take up his abode in the house and thus forestal all future settlement of the question. When the messenger came Mr. Scrivener was very grateful. It left him at liberty to speak with the others whose interests were much closer to his heart. To his surprise the person who came for Gus immediately addressed to him the most anxious questions about Lady Markham and Alice.
“I daren’t ask to see them,” this stranger said, who was half hidden in the obscurity of the night. “Will you tell them Edward Fairfax sends his—what do you call it?” said the young man—“duty, the poor people say: my most respectful duty. I stayed for to-day. I should have liked to help to carry him, but I did not feel I had any right.” His eyes glimmered in the twilight as eyes shine only through tears. “I helped to nurse him,” he said in explanation, “poor old gentleman.”
At this moment Gus, helped very obsequiously by Brown, who had got scent of something extraordinary in the air, as servants do, was getting himself into his overcoat.
“Have you anything to do with him?” the lawyer replied.
“No further than being in the inn with him. And I thought from what he said they might have a difficulty in getting him away. So I came to fetch him; but not entirely for that either,” Fairfax said.
“Then you never did them a better service,” said the lawyer, “than to-night.”
“I don’t think there is any harm in him,” Fairfax said.
The lawyer shook his head. There might be no harm in him; but what harm was coming because of him! He said nothing, and Gus came out, buttoned up to the throat.
“You’ll not go, I hope, till it is all settled,” he said.
“Settled—it may not be settled for years!” cried the lawyer, testily. And then he turned to the other, who might be a confederate for anything he knew, standing out in the darkness, “What name am I to tell Lady Markham—Fairfax? Keep him away as long as you can,” he whispered; “he will be the death of them.” He thought afterwards that he was in some degree committing himself as allowing that Gus possessed the power of doing harm, which it would have been better policy altogether to deny.
Thus it was not till nightfall that the lawyer was able to communicate to his clients his real opinion. All the exhaustion and desire of repose which generally follows such a period of domestic distress had been made an end of by this extraordinary new event. Lady Markham was sitting in her favourite room, wrapped in a shawl, talking low with her brother and Alice, when Mr. Scrivener came in. He told them how it was that he had got free, and gave them the message Fairfax had sent. But it is to be feared that the devotion and delicacy of it suffered in transmission. It was his regards or his respects, and not his duty, which the lawyer gave. What could the word matter? But he reported the rest more or less faithfully. “He thought there would be a difficulty in getting rid of our little friend,” Mr. Scrivener said, “and therefore he came. It was considerate.”
“Yes, it was very considerate,” Lady Markham said, but, unreasonably, the ladies were both disappointed and vexed, they could not tell why, that their friend should thus make himself appear the supporter of their enemy. Their hearts chilled to him in spite of themselves. Paul had gone out; he was not able to bear any more of it; he could not rest. “Forgive my boy, Mr. Scrivener,” his mother said; “he never was patient, and think of all he has lost.”
“Mr. Paul,” said the lawyer coldly, “might have endured the restraint for one evening, seeing I have waited on purpose to be of use to him.”
The hearts of all three sank to their shoes when Mr. Scrivener, who was his adviser, his supporter, the chief prop he had to trust to—who had called the young man Sir Paul all the morning—thus changed his title. Lady Markham put out her hand and grasped his arm.
“You have given it up, then!” she said. “You have given it up! There is no more hope!”
And though he would not allow this, all that Mr. Scrivener had to say was the reverse of hopeful. He was aware of Sir William’s residence in Barbadoes, which his wife had never heard of until the Lennys had betrayed it to her, and of many other little matters which sustained and gave consistence to the story of Gus. They sat together till late, going over everything, and before they separated it was tacitly concluded among them that all was over, that there was no more hope. The lawyer still spoke of inquiries, of sending a messenger to Barbadoes, and making various attempts to defend Paul’s position. After all, it resolved itself into a question of Paul. Lady Markham could not be touched one way or another, and the fortunes of the children were secured. But Paul—how was Paul to bear this alteration in everything, this ruin of his life?
“It is all over now,” Lady Markham said to her daughter, as after this long and terrible day they went up stairs together. “Whatever might have been, it is past hoping now. He will go with those people, and I shall never see my boy more.”
What could Alice say? She cried, which seemed the only thing possible. There was no use in tears, but there is sometimes relief when no other outlet is possible. They wept together, thankful that at least there were two of them to mingle their tears. And Paul had not come in. He was wandering about the woods in the moonlight, not caring for anything, his head light, and his feet heavy. He had fallen, fallen, he scarcely knew where or when. Instead of the subdued and sad happiness of the morning, a sense of wounding and bruising and miserable downfall was in him and about him. He did not know where he was going, though he was acquainted with every glade and tangled alley of those familiar woods. Once (it was now September) he was seized by the gamekeepers, who thought him a poacher, and whose alarmed apologies and excuses when they discovered that it was Sir Paul, gave him a momentary sensation of self-disgust as if it were he who was the impostor. “I am not Sir Paul,” was on his lips to say, but he did not seem to care enough for life to say it. One delusion more or less, what did it matter?
He walked and walked, till he was footsore with fatigue. He went past the Markham Arms in the dark, and saw his supplanter through the inn window talking—to whom?—to Fairfax. What had Fairfax to do with it? Was it a scheme invented by Fairfax to humble him? Then the unhappy young fellow strayed to his father’s grave, all heaped up and covered with the flowers that shone pale in the moonlight, quite detached from the surrounding graves and upturned earth. He sat down there, all alone in the silence of the world, and noticed, in spite of himself, how the night air moved the leaves and grasses, and how the moonlight slowly climbed the great slope of the skies. When the church tower came for a little while between him and the light, he shivered. He dropped his head into his hands and thought he slept. The night grew tedious to him, the darkness unendurable. He went away to the woods again, with a vague sense that to be taken for a poacher, or even shot by chance round the bole of a tree, would be the best thing that could happen. Neither Sir Paul nor any one—not even a poacher: what was he? A semblance, a shadow, a vain show—not the same as he who had walked with his face to heaven in the morning, and everything expanding, opening out around him. In a moment they had all collapsed like a house of cards. He did not want to go home; home! it was not home—nor to see his mother, nor to talk to any one. The hoot of the owl, the incomprehensible stirring of the woods were more congenial to him than human voices. What could they talk about? Nothing but this on which there was nothing to say. Supplanted! Yes, he was supplanted, turned out of his natural place by a stranger. And what could he do? He could not fight for his inheritance, which would have been a kind of consolation—unless indeed it were a law-fight in the courts, where there would be swearing and counter-swearing, and all the dead father’s life raked up, and perhaps shameful stories told of the old man who had to-day been laid in his grave with so much honour. This was the only way in which in these days a man could fight.
But it was only now and then, by intervals, that Paul’s thoughts took any form so definite. He did not want to think. There was in him a vague and general sense of destruction—ruin, downfall, and humiliation which he could not endure. But, strangely enough, in all this he never thought of the plans which so short a while ago he had considered as shaping his life. He did not think that now he could go back to them, and, free from all encumbrances of duty, pursue the way he had chosen. The truth was, he did not think of them at all. In the morning Spears and his colleagues had come to his mind as something from which he had escaped, but at night he did not think of them at all. They were altogether wiped out of his mind and obliterated by the loss of that which he had never possessed.
When he went home all the lights in the great house seemed extinguished save one candle which flickered in the hall window, and the light in his mother’s room, which shone out like a star into the summer darkness. It was Alice who came noiseless, before he could knock, and opened the great door.
“Mamma cannot sleep till she has seen you,” said the girl. “Oh, Paul, we must think of her now. I sent all the servants to bed. I have been watching for you at the window. I could not bear Brown and the rest to think that there was anything wrong.”
“But they must soon know that everything is wrong. It is not a thing that can be hid.”
“Perhaps it may be hid, Paul. It may turn out it is all a delusion—or an imposture.”
“Let us go to my mother’s room,” said Paul.
He said nothing as he went up the stairs, but when he got to the landing he turned round upon the pale girl beside him carrying the light, whose white face illuminated by her candle made a luminous point in the gloom. He turned round to her all at once in the blackness of the great vacant place.
“It is no imposture; it is true. Whether we can bear it or not, it is true!”
“God will help us to bear it, Paul; if you will not desert us—if you will stay by us——”
“Desert you—was there ever any question of deserting you?” he said. He looked at his sister with a half-complaining curiosity and surprise, and shrugged his shoulders, so foolish did it sound to him. Then he took the candle from her hand, almost rudely, and walked before her to their mother’s room. “You women never understand,” he said.