But there was one of the party who was not at his ease. Fairfax, who had come away on the spur of the moment without any provision for a visit, and who felt his presence here to be mere accident, nothing more, scarcely knew what to do or say. After he had helped Sir William up stairs on their arrival, he came to Lady Markham, confused yet smiling, with his hat in his hand. “I must take my leave now. I hope Sir William will go on mending, and no longer have need of my arm as a walking-stick.”
“Your leave!” said Lady Markham, “what does that mean? Do you think after taking the use of you all the way here that I am going to let you go away without making acquaintance with Markham? No, no; you are going to stay.”
“I came as a walking-stick,” said the young man; “and I have brought nothing,” he added, laughing. “That is the disadvantage of a walking-stick which is human, which wants tooth-brushes and all kinds of things. Besides, I am of no further use. Sir William is better, and there are shoals of men here.”
“You make us out to be pleasant people,” said Lady Markham, “getting rid of our friends as soon as we have need of them no longer. That will never do. You must send for your things, and in the meantime there is Paul’s wardrobe to fall back upon. He always leaves a number of things here.”
“But——” said Fairfax, flushing very deeply. He was not handsome, like Paul. There was a look of easy good-humour, kindness, sympathy about him, a desire to please, a readiness to be serviceable. He had brown eyes, which were clear and kind; brown hair, crisp and curling; a pleasant mouth; but nothing in his features or his aspect that could be called distinguished. Pleasure, embarrassment, difficulty, a desire to say something, yet a reluctance to say it, were all mingled in his face; but the pleasure was the strongest. He gave an appealing look at Alice, as if entreating her to help him out.
“I want no buts,” said Lady Markham. “I want to go to Sir William, and you are detaining me with a foolish argument which you know you cannot convince me by. Send for your things, and Brown will show you your room: and we can talk it all over,” she said, smiling, “as soon as your portmanteau is here.”
Fairfax made her an obeisance as he might have done to a queen. He stood with his hat in his hand and his head bowed while she passed him going out of the room. Every young man, it is to be supposed, has some youthful feminine ideal in his mind, but to Fairfax Lady Markham was a new revelation. He knew, if not by experience, yet from all the poets, that there were creatures like her daughter in the world; that they were the flower and blossom of humanity, supposed to be the most beautiful things in life; but the next step from the Alices of creation was into a darkness he knew nothing of. Age, or a youth that was pretended, false, and disgusting, swallowed up all the rest. A mother (he had never known his own) was an old stager or an old campaigner, a dragon or a matchmaker, the gaoler or the executioner of her girls, the greatest danger to all men; scheming with deadly wiles to get rid of her daughters; then, in the terrible capacity of mother-in-law, using all these wiles to get the girls who had escaped from her, back, and make the lives of their husbands miserable. This is the conception which the common Englishman gets from his light literature of all women who are not young. Fairfax was no worse than his kind; he had never known his own mother, and the name was not sacred to him. But when Lady Markham came within his ken the young man was bewildered. He could understand Alice, but he could not understand the woman who was so beautiful and gracious, and yet Markham’s mother. She dazzled him, and filled him with shame and generous compunction. Her very smile was a fresh wonder. He was half afraid of her, yet to disobey or rebel against her seemed to him a thing impossible. The revelation of this mother even changed the character of his relations with Alice, for whom, on the first sight of her, the natural attraction of the natural mate, the wondering interest, admiration, and pleasure, which, if not love, is the first beginning of the state of love—had caught him all at once. The mother brought a softening as of domestic trust and affection into this nascent feeling. Alice was brought the nearer to him, by some in explainable magic, because of the dazzling superiority of this elder unknown princess, whose very existence was a miracle to him. When Lady Markham had gone out, with a smile and gracious bend of her head in answer to his reverential salutation, Fairfax came back to Alice with a certain awe in his look, which was half contradicted, half heightened, by the wavering of the smile upon his face, in which there mingled something like amusement at his own sense of awe.
“Miss Markham, may I ask your advice?” he said.
“You are frightened at mamma,” said Alice, with a soft laugh. “Oh, but you need not! She is as kind—as kind—as if she were only old nurse,” Alice said, in despair of finding a better illustration.
“Don’t be profane!” cried Fairfax, with uplifted hands. “Yes, I am frightened. I never knew that anybody’s mother could be like that. But, Miss Markham, will you give me your advice?”