“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.”
CHAPTER III.
The Markhams of the Chase were one of the most important families in the county, as has been already intimated. They owned three parts at least of the parish (for my Lord Westland was a new man, who had bought, not inherited, that property, and all that the Trevors had was their house and park and a few fields that did not count), and a great deal more besides. It was generally said that they had risen into importance as a family only at the time of the Commonwealth, but their pedigree extended far beyond that. In the former generation the family had not been fortunate. Sir William Markham himself had been born the third son, and in his youth he had been absent from England, and had “knocked about the world,” as people say, in a way which had no doubt enlarged his experiences and made him perhaps more fit for the responsibilities of public life in which he had been so fortunate. He had succeeded, on the death of his second brother, when he was over thirty, and it was not till ten years later that he married.
It had occasioned some surprise in the neighbourhood when Isabel Fleetwood, who was a great beauty, and had made quite a sensation, it was said, in her first season, accepted the middle-aged and extremely sedate and serious little baronet. He was not handsome;—he had no sympathy with the gay life into which she had been plunged by her brother and aunt, who were her only guardians; and the world, always pleased to believe that interested motives are involved, and fond of prophesying badly of a marriage, concluded almost with one voice that it was the ambitious aunt and the extravagant brother who had made it up, and that the poor girl was sacrificed. But this was as great a mistake as the world ever made. Perhaps it would be wrong to assert that the marriage was a romantic one, and that the beautiful girl under twenty was passionately in love with her little statesman. Perhaps her modest, tranquil disposition, her dislike to the monotonous whirl of fashion, and her sense of the precarious tenure by which she held her position in her brother’s house, her only home (he married immediately after she did, as everybody knows, and did not conceal the fact that it was necessary to get rid of his sister before venturing upon a wife), had something to do with her decision. But she had never shown any signs of regretting it through all these years. Sir William was neither young nor handsome, but he was a man whose opinion was listened to wherever it was given, whose voice commanded the attention of the country, whose name was known over Europe. And this in some cases affects a young imagination as much as the finest moustache in the world, or the most distinguished stature. She was not clever, but she was a woman of that gracious nature, courteous, tolerant, and sympathetic, which is more perfect without the sharpness of intellect. Nothing that was unkind was possible to her. She had no particular imagination in the common sense of the word, but she had a higher gift, the moral imagination (so to speak) which gave her an exquisite understanding of other people’s feelings, and made her incapable of any injury to them. This made Lady Markham the very ideal of a great lady. As for Sir William, he held his place more firmly than ever with such a partner by his side. They were the happiest couple in the county, as well as the most important. Not only did you meet the best of company at their house, but the sight of a husband and wife so devoted to each other was good for you, everybody said. They were proud of each other, as they had good reason to be: she listened to him as to an oracle, and his tender consideration for her was an example to all. Everything had gone well with the Markhams. They were rich, and naturally inheritances and legacies and successions of all kinds fell to them, which made them richer. Their children were the healthiest and most thriving children that had ever been seen. Alice promised to be almost as pretty as her mother, and Paul was not short like Sir William. Thus fortune had favoured them on every side.
About a year before the date of this history, a cloud—like that famous cloud no bigger than a man’s hand—had floated up upon the clear sky, almost too clear in unshadowed well-being, over this prosperous house. It was nothing—a thing which most people would have laughed at, a mere reminder that even the Markhams were not to have everything their own way. It was that Paul, a model boy at school, had suddenly become—wild? Oh no! not wild, that was not the word: indeed it was difficult to know what word to use. He had begun as soon as he went to Oxford by having opinions. He had not been six months there before he was known at the Union and had plunged into all the politico-philosophical questions afloat in that atmosphere of the absolute. This was nothing but what ought to have been in the son of a statesman; but unfortunately to everything his father believed and trusted, Paul took the opposite side. He took up the highest republican principles, the most absolute views as to the equality of the human race. That, though it somewhat horrified his mother and sister, produced at first very little effect upon Sir William, who laughed and informed his family that Johnny Shotover had held precisely the same views when he was an undergraduate, though now he was Lord Rightabout’s secretary and as sound a politician as it was possible to desire. “It is the same as the measles,” Sir William said. Paul, however, had a theoretical mind and an obstinate temper: he was too logical for life. As soon as he had come to the conviction that all men are equal, he took the further step which costs a great deal more, and decided that there ought to be equality of property as well as of right. This made Sir William half angry, though it amused him. He bade his son not to be a fool.
“What would become of you,” he cried, “you young idiot!” using language not at all parliamentary, “if there was a re-distribution of property? How much do you think would fall to your share?”
“As much as I have any right to, sir,” the young revolutionary said.