“What is about him?”
Fairfax was determined to breathe no word of Paul’s altered circumstances to any one, sheltering himself under the fact that he himself knew nothing definite. The orator looked at him with a gaze which it was difficult to elude.
“I thought you had been with the family at that grand house of theirs? However! Paul was hot upon our emigration scheme, you know; he would hear no reason on that subject. I warned him that it was not a thing for men like him, with soft hands and muscles unstrung; but he paid me no attention. There was another thing, I believe, a secondary motive,” said Spears, with a wave of his hand, “a thing that never would have come into my head, which his mother found out—the kind of business that women do find out. Well! His father is dead, and I suppose he has come into the title and all that. But here’s the rub. We are within a fortnight of our start, and never another word from Paul. What does he mean by it? has he been persuaded by the women? has he thrown us overboard and gone in for the old business of landlord and aristocrat? I have told him many a time it was in his blood; but never was there one more hot for better principles. Now look here, Fairfax, you’re not the man to pretend ignorance. What do you know?”
“Nothing but that Sir William is dead.”
“Sir William is dead, that means, long live Sir Paul: lay roy est mortt, veeve lay roy,” said Spears, with honest English pronunciation. “Yes, the papers would tell you that. If he’s going to give it all up,” he went on, a deep colour coming over his face, “I sha’n’t be surprised. I don’t say that I’ll like it, but I sha’n’t be surprised. A large property—and a title—may be a temptation: but in that case it’s his duty to let us know. I suppose you and he see each other sometimes?”
“By chance we have met to-day.”
“By chance? I thought you were always meeting. Well, what does he mean? I acknowledge,” said Spears, with very conscious satire, “that a Sir Paul in our band will be an oddity. It wouldn’t be much more wonderful if it was St. Paul,” he added, with a laugh; “but one way or other I must know. And I don’t mind confessing to you,” he said, turning into the way by which Fairfax seemed to be walking, and suddenly striking him on the shoulder with an amicable but not slight blow, “that it will be a disappointment. I had rather committed the folly of setting my heart on that lad. He was the kind of thing, you know, that we mean in our class when we say a gentleman. There’s you, now, you’re a gentleman, too; but I make little account of you. You might just as well have been brought up in my shop or in trade. But there’s something about Paul, mind you—that’s where it is; he’s got that grand air, and that hot-headed way. I hate social distinctions, but he’s above them. The power of money is to me like a horrible monster, but he scorns it. Do you see what I mean? A man like me reasons it all out, and sees the harm of it, and the devilry of it, and it fires his blood. But Paul, he holds his head in the air, and treats it like the dirt below his feet. That’s fine, that takes hold of the imagination. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Fairfax,” said Spears, giving him another friendly tap on the shoulder, “but you’re just a careless fellow, one thing doesn’t matter more than another to you.”
“Quite true. I am not offended,” said Fairfax, laughing. “You discriminate very well, Spears, as you always do.”
“Yes, I suppose I have a knack that way,” said the demagogue, simply. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he added, “though it is not a subject that a man can question his daughter about, that it was just the same thing that attracted my girl.”
Fairfax turned round upon him with quick surprise; he had not heard anything about Janet. “What!” he said, “has Markham——” and then paused; for Spears, though indulgent to freedom of speech, was in this one point a dangerous person to meddle with. He turned round, with all the force of his rugged features and broad shoulders, and looked the questioner in the face.