HE THAT WILL NOT
WHEN HE MAY
HE THAT WILL NOT
WHEN HE MAY
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOLUME III.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1880
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_
LONDON:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II. 12
CHAPTER III. 27
CHAPTER IV. 46
CHAPTER V. 70
CHAPTER VI. 88
CHAPTER VII. 108
CHAPTER VIII. 127
CHAPTER IX. 148
CHAPTER X. 166
CHAPTER XI. 190
CHAPTER XII. 211
CHAPTER XIII. 230
CHAPTER XIV. 255
HE THAT WILL NOT WHEN HE MAY.
CHAPTER I.
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.