Fairfax calculated justly. Paul, who had resisted his mother’s appeals and his sister’s entreaties, obeyed at once the imperative message of the man who threw the light of outside opinion and common necessity upon the situation. He arrived that night, just after the great London physician, who had come down to pronounce upon Sir William’s condition, had been driven to the railway. Paul had no carriage sent for him, and had said to himself that it was all an exaggeration and piece of folly, since some one from Markham was evidently dining out. There were, however, all the signs of melancholy excitement which usually follow such a visit visible in the hall and about the house when he reached it. Brown and one of his subordinates were standing talking in low tones on the great steps, shaking their heads as they conversed. Mr. Brown himself had managed to change his usually cheerful countenance into the semblance of that which is characteristic of an undertaker’s mute.
“I knew how it would be the moment I set eyes upon him,” Mr. Brown was saying. “Death was in his face, if it ever was in a man’s.”
Paul sprang from the lumbering old fly which he had found at the station with a mixture of eagerness and incredulity.
“How is my father?” he said.
“Oh, sir, you’re come none too soon,” said Brown, “Sir William is as bad as bad can be.” And then Alice, hearing something, she did not know what, rushed out. Every sound was full of terror in the oppressed house. She flung herself upon her brother and wept. There was no need to say anything; and Paul who had been lingering, thinking they did not mean what they said, believing it to be a device to get him seduced into that dangerous stronghold of his enemy’s house, was overcome too.
“Why did not I hear before?” he said. But nobody bid him remember that he had been told a dozen times before.
Sir William was very ill that night. He began to wander, and said things in his confused and broken utterance which were very mysterious to the listeners. But as none of them had any clue to what these wanderings meant, they did not add, as they might have done, to the misery of the night. There was no rest for any one during those tedious hours. The children and the inferior servants went to bed as usual, but the elder ones, and those domestics who had been long in the family, could not rest any more than could those individually concerned; the excitement of that gloomy expectation got into their veins. Mrs. Fry was up and down all night, and Brown lay on a sofa in the housekeeper’s room, from which he appeared at intervals looking very wretched and troubled, with that air of half-fearing half hoping the worst, which gets into the faces of those who stand about the outer chamber where death has shown his face. Nothing however “happened” that night. The day began again, and life, galvanised into a haggard copy of itself, with all the meals put upon the table as usual. The chief figure in this new day, in this renewed vigil, was Paul, who, always important in the house, was now doubly important as so soon to be master of all. The servants were all very careful of him that he should not be troubled; messages and commissions which the day before would have been handed unceremoniously to Fairfax, were now managed by Brown himself as best he could rather than trouble Mr. Paul; and even Mrs. Fry was more anxious that he should lie down and rest, than even that Alice, her favourite, should be spared.
“It will all come upon him after,” the housekeeper said.
As for Paul himself, the effect upon him was very great. Perhaps it was because of the profound dissatisfaction in his mind with all his own plans, that he had so long resisted the call to come home. Since his father had left Oxford, Paul had gone through many chapters of experience. Every day had made him more discontented with his future associates, more secretly appalled by the idea that the rest of his life was to be spent entirely among them. He had left his rooms in college, and gone into some very homely ones not far from Spears’s, by way of accustoming himself to his new life. This was a thing he had long intended to do, and he had been angry with himself for his weak-minded regard for personal comfort, but unfortunately his enthusiasm had begun to sink into disgust before he took this step, and his loathing for the little mean rooms, the narrow street full of crowding children and evil odours was intense. That he had forced himself to remain, notwithstanding this loathing, was perhaps all the worse for his plans. He would not yield to his own disgust, but it inspired him with a secret horror and opposition far more important than this mere dislike of his surroundings. He saw that none of the others minded those things, which made his existence miserable. Even Spears, whose perceptions in some respects were delicate, did not smell the smell, nor perceive the squalor. He thought Paul’s new lodgings very handsome; he called him Paul, without any longer even the apologetic smile which at first accompanied that familiarity, as a matter of course. And Janet gave him no peace. She called him out with little beckonings and signs. She was always in the way when he came or went. She took the charge of him, telling him what he ought to do and what not to do, with an attempt at that petty tyranny which a woman who is loved may exercise with impunity, but which becomes intolerable in any other.
It was thus with a kind of fierce determination to remain faithful to his convictions that Paul had set himself like a rock against all the appeals from home. His convictions! These convictions gradually resolved themselves into a conviction of the utter unendurableness of life, under the conditions which he had chosen, as day by day went on. Nothing, he had resolved, should make him yield, or own himself mistaken—nothing would induce him to give up the cause to which he had pledged himself. But now that at last he had been driven out of that stronghold, and forced to leave the surroundings he hated, and come back to those that were natural to him, Paul’s mind was in a chaos indescribable. After the first burst of penitence and remorse, there had stolen on him a sense of well-being, a charm of association which he strove to struggle against, but in vain. He was grieved, deeply grieved for his father; but is it possible that in the mind of a young heir, aware of all the incalculable differences in his own life which the end of his father’s must make, there should not be a quivering excitement of the future mingling with the sorrow of the present, however sincere? When he went out in the morning, after the feverishness of that agitated night, to feel the fresh air in his face, and saw around him all the spreading woods, all the wealthy and noble grace of the old house which an hour or moment, might make his own, a strange convulsion shook his being. Was not he pledged to give all up, to relinquish everything—to share whatever he had with his brother, and, leave all belonging to him? The question brought a deadly faintness over him. While he stood under the trees looking at his home, he seemed to see the keen eyes of the Scotsman, Fraser, inspecting the place, and Short jotting down calculations on a bit of paper as to what would be the value of the materials, and how many villas semi-detached might be built on the site—while Spears, perhaps, patted him on the shoulder, and bid him remember that even if he had not given it up, this could not have lasted,—“the country would not stand it long.” He seemed to see and hear them discussing his fate; and Janet, standing at the door, making signs to him with her hand. What had he to do here? It was to that society he belonged. Nevertheless, Paul’s heart quivered with a strange excitement when he thought that to-morrow—perhaps this very night!—And then he bethought himself of the darkened room upstairs, and his mother’s lingering watch; and his heart contracted with a sudden pang.