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.
LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.