“Ah, if I could have had patience! Do you know what anxiety means?” said Lady Markham. “It is a determination not to be unhappy. What does it matter whether I am happy or not—I have been very happy all my life. I ought to bear it, and wait till God sends a cure; but we would not, Alice—we would rush into it, knowing nothing, meddling. Oh, why should women interfere!”
This strained Alice’s sense of natural justice.
“Have not women as much to do with it as men?” she said.
“I have made things worse—I have made everything worse. Mr. Fairfax, will you go and tell Paul that his father is ill? Oh no, I have no right to ask you to take so much trouble; but you are kind, I know. You have a mother who would go out of her senses too, if anything was amiss. When you tell her she will explain it all to you; how foolish, how foolish a woman can be. Go and tell him that his father is ill. His father is not a man to be ill for nothing. He will see it is no light matter when he knows that his father is ill. There is something—a little—the matter with Sir William’s heart—not much, thank God; but we ought to spare him. Will you tell Paul?—but Alice, Alice, how could you be so careless, Mr. Fairfax has had no breakfast!”
Lady Markham rose hastily, and drew a chair to the table, and turned to him, pointing to it, with a tremulous smile about her mouth, though the tears were standing in her eyes.
Was it possible that it was only yesterday he had come to know them? He hurried out with his message, quite agitated by the sight of this family trouble. It was no affair of his, and he had no mother as Lady Markham suggested, to make him understand; but his heart seemed to be suddenly filled up like an empty vessel with these new people’s affairs. He tried to laugh at himself, but stopped in the midst of the effort, growing portentously grave. Why should he laugh? If Sir William was ill, and Paul on the point of abandoning his natural position and his native country on a wildgoose chase, with which in all probability he would soon be utterly disgusted, circumstances were very grave for the Markham family. Perhaps Fairfax felt it all the more strongly that he in his own person had no family to abandon. He felt the want so much that he wondered all the more at one who, with all these pleasant things belonging to him, should be willing to throw up everything, and go off into the wilds with Spears—with Spears! he repeated to himself with indignant, yet half-amused surprise. He did not know anything about Janet, for the very good reason that till this morning there had been nothing to know.
Fairfax walked very rapidly to Paul’s college, but did not find him. As he however came slowly back again across the deserted quadrangle, he met young Markham coming gloomily along, his head down, and his countenance obscured. There was a sort of dull decision in Paul’s aspect, as if all his affairs had been settled at a stroke, as if the hopes and uncertainties of ordinary life were over for him. He who held his head so high, whose step was so light and elastic with all the rapidity of a visionary, came along now crushing the grass with a heavy foot, all the lightness and youthfulness gone out of him. Fairfax looked at him with an impulse of wonder. This favourite of fortune, so much beloved, important to so many, with the world at his feet, what could have put so much perverseness into his mind that he, of all men in the world, should be discontented with his lot! How wonderful it was! Paul did not want to be accosted, to be disturbed in his gloomy thoughts by any frivolous interruption. He was about to pass with a sullen nod when Fairfax stopped him against his will.
“Markham, I am sent to tell you that your father is ill.”
Paul stopped, and regarded him with sudden anger.