“No, my lady; if I’m not good enough to take my meals with you, I’ll have nothing in this house,” she cried, and flounced indignant out of the room. This was the summary end of the first visit paid to Markham by Janet Spears.
CHAPTER III.
The day after Paul’s departure for London with his lawyer and his uncle, Mr. Gus left the Markham Arms. By a fatality Fairfax thought, he too was going away at the same time. He had gone up to Markham in the morning early for no particular reason. He said to himself that he wanted to see the house of which he had so strangely become an inmate for a little while and then had been swept out of, most probably for ever. To think that he knew all those rooms as familiarly as if they belonged to him, and could wander about them in his imagination, and remember whereabouts the pictures hung on the walls, and how the patterns went in the carpet, and yet never had seen them a month ago, and never might see them again! It is a strange experience in a life when this happens, but not a very rare one. Sometimes the passer-by is made for a single evening, for an hour or two, the sharer of an existence which drops entirely into the darkness afterwards, and is never visible to him again. Fairfax asked himself somewhat sadly if this was how it was to be. He thought that he would never in his life forget one detail of those rooms, the very way the curtains hung, the covers on the tables: and yet they could never be anything to him except a picture in his memory, hanging suspended between the known and the unknown. The great door was open as he had known it (“It is always open,” he said to himself), and all the windows of the sitting-rooms, receiving the full air and sunshine into them. But up stairs the house was not yet open. Over some of the windows the curtains were drawn. Where they still sleeping, the two women who were in his thoughts? He cared much less in comparison for the rest of the family. Paul, indeed, being in trouble, had been much in his mind as he came up the avenue; but Paul had not been here when Fairfax had lived in the house, and did not enter into his recollections; and Paul he knew was away now. But the two ladies—Alice, whom he had been allowed to spend so many lingering hours with, whom he had told so much about himself—and Lady Markham, whom he had never ceased to wonder at; they had taken him into the very closest circle of their friendship; they had said “Go,” and he had gone; or “Come,” and he had always been ready to obey. And now was he to see no more of them for ever? Fairfax could not but feel very melancholy when this thought came into his mind. He came slowly up the avenue, looking at the old house. The old house he called it to himself, as people speak of the home they have loved for years. He would never forget it though already perhaps they had forgotten him. His foot upon the gravel caught the ear of Mr. Brown, who came to the door and looked out curiously. When things of a mysterious character are happening in a house the servants are always vigilant. Brown came down stairs early; he suffered no sound to pass unnoticed. And now he came out into the early sunshine, and looked about like a man determined to let nothing escape him. And the sight of Fairfax was a welcome sight, for was not he “mixed up” with the whole matter, and probably able to throw light upon some part of it, could he be got to speak.
“I hope I see you well, sir,” said Mr. Brown. “This is a sad house, sir—not like what it was a little time ago. We have suffered a great affliction, sir, in the loss of Sir William.”
“I am going away, Brown,” said Fairfax. “I came up to ask for the ladies. Tell me what you can about them. How is Lady Markham? She must have felt it terribly, I fear.”
“Yes, sir, and all that’s happened since,” said Brown. “A death, sir, is a thing we must all look forward to. That will happen from time to time, and nobody can say a word; but there’s a deal happened since, Mr. Fairfax—and that do try my lady the worst of all.”
Fairfax did not ask what had happened, which Mr. Brown very shrewdly took as conclusive that he knew all about it. He said half to himself, “I will leave a card, though that means nothing;” and then he mused long over the card, trying to put more than a message ever contained into the little space at his disposal. This was at last what he produced—
When he had written this—and only when he had written it—it occurred to him how much better it would have been to have written a note, and then he hesitated whether to tear his card in pieces; but on reflection, decided to let it go. He thought the crowded lines would discourage Brown from the attempt to decipher it.
“You will give them that, and tell them—but there is no need for telling them anything,” Fairfax said with a sigh.