Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (page 5)

there only to attract and make a centre for the sunsets.

As compared with her Westmoreland life, the first twelve months of wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford. It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the senior members of the University were already in residence, and the stagnation of the Long Vacation was over. Langham was up; so was Mr. Grey, and many another old friend of Robert’s. The bride and bridegroom were much feted in a quiet way. They dined in many common rooms and bursaries; they were invited to many luncheons, where at the superabundance of food and the length of time spent upon it made the Puritan Catherine uncomfortable; and Langham, devoted himself to taking the wife through colleges and gardens, schools and Bodleian, in most orthodox fashion, indemnifying himself afterward for the sense of constraint her presence imposed upon him by a talk and a smoke with Robert.

He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a creature so mobile, so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere should have fallen in love with this stately, silent woman, with her very evident rigidities of thought and training, was only another illustration of the mysteries of matrimony. He could not get on with her, and after a while did not try to do so.

There could be no doubt as to Elsmere’s devotion. He was absorbed, wrapped up in her.

‘She has affected him,’ thought the tutor, ‘at a period of life when he is more struck by the difficulty of being morally strong than by the difficulty of being intellectually clear. The touch of religious genius in her braces him like the breath of an Alpine wind. One can see him expanding, growing under it. _Bien!_ sooner he than! To be fair, however, let me remember that she decidedly does not like me–which may cut me off from Elsmere. However’–and Langham sighed over his fire–‘what have he and I to do with one another in the future? By all the laws of character something untoward might come out of this marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, she will have children–and that solves most things.’

Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected most people, Robert, with that keen observation which lay hidden somewhere under his careless boyish ways, noticed many points of change about his old friend. Langham seemed to him less human, more strange than ever; the points of contact between him and active life were lessening in number term by term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for the retention of his post, and he spoke with whole-sale distaste of his pupils. He had set up a book on ‘The Schools of Athens,’ but when Robert saw the piles of disconnected notes already accumulated, he perfectly understood that the book was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a difficult, fastidious nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased.

Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been intimate. Now, Laugham’s tone _a propos_ of Grey’s politics and Grey’s dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard to most of the strenuous things of life. ‘Nothing particular is true,’ his manner said, ‘and all action is a degrading _pis-aller_. Get through the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven’s sake, don’t cant about it to other people!’

If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look of Elsmere’s wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldiness that should have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm, the spell of this born leader of men. But she watched him with a sort of troubled admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity surrounding him, which contended with something else in her mind respecting him. Some words of Robert’s, uttered very early in their acquaintance, had set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Robert said, ‘Grey is not one of us;’ and Catherine, restrained by a hundred ties of training and temperament, would not surrender herself, and could not if she would.

Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and the first institution of their common life, never to be forgotten for the tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere had received them, and had then retired to a little cottage of her own close by. She had of course already made the acquaintance of her daughter-in-law, for she had been the Thornburghs’ guest for ten days before the marriage in September, and Catherine, moreover, had paid her a short visit in the summer. But it was now that for the first she realized to the full the character of the woman Robert had married. Catherine’s manner to her was sweetness itself. Parted from her own mother as she was, the younger wowan’s strong filial instincts spent themselves in tending the mother who had been the guardian and life of Robert’s youth. And, Mrs. Elsmere in return was awed by Catherine’s moral force and purity of nature, and proud of her personal beauty, which was so real, in spite of the severity of the type, and to which marriage had given, at any rate for the moment, a certain added softness and brilliancy.

But there were difficulties in the way. Catherine was a little too apt to treat Mrs. Elsmere as she would have treated her own mother. But to be nursed and protected, to be, screened from draughts, and run after with shawls and stools was something wholly new and intolerable to Mrs. Elsmere. She could not away with it, and as soon as she had sufficiently lost her first awe of her daughter-in-law she would revenge herself in all sorts of droll ways, and with occasional flashes of petulant Irish wit which would make Catherine color and drawback. Then Mrs. Elsmere, touched with remorse, would catch her by the neck and give her a resounding kiss, which perhaps puzzled Catherine no less than her sarcasm of a minute before.

Moreover Mrs. Elsmere felt ruefully from the first that her new daughter was decidedly deficient in the sense of humor.

‘I believe it’s that father of hers,’ she would say to herself crossly. ‘By what Robert tells me of him he must have been one of the people who get ill in their minds for want of a good mouth-filling laugh now and then. The man who can’t amuse himself a bit out of the world is sure to get his head addled somehow, poor creature.’

Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able to take Mrs. Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Catherine was more often scandalized than impressed by her mother-in-law’s charitable performances.

Mrs. Elsmere’s little cottage was filled with workhouse orphans sent to her from different London districts. The training of these girls was the chief business of her life, and a very odd training it was, conducted in the noisiest way and on the most familiar terms. It was undeniable that the girls generally did well and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere, but Catherine did not much like to think about them. Their household teaching under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant Martha–as great an original as herself, was so irregular, their religious training so extraordinary, the clothes in which they were allowed to disport themselves so scandalous to the sober taste of the rector’s wife, that Catherine involuntarily regarded the little cottage on the hill as a spot of misrule in the general order of the parish. She would go in, say, at eleven o’clock in the morning, find her mother-in-law in bed, half-dressed, with all her handmaidens about her, giving her orders, reading her letters and the newspaper, cutting out her girls’ frocks, instructing them in the fashions, or delivering little homilies on questions suggested by the news of the day to the more intelligent of them. The room, the whole house, would seem to Catherine in a detestable litter. If so, Mrs. Elsmere never apologized for it. On the contrary, as she saw Catherine sweep a mass of miscellaneous _debris_ off a chair in search of a seat, the small bright eyes would twinkle with something that was certainly nearer amusement than shame.

And in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere’s relations with the poor of the parish often made Catherine miserable. She herself had the most angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows and sinners; but sin was sin to her, and when she saw Mrs. Elsmere more than half attracted by the stronger vices, and in many cases more inclined to laugh with what was human in them, than to weep over what was vile, Robert’s wife would go away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into nothing harsh toward Robert’s mother.

But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep or shallow, no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the beginning of January struck down Mrs. Elsmere, whose strange ways of living were more the result of certain longstanding delicacies of health than she had ever allowed anyone to imagine. A few days of acute inflammation of the lungs, borne with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish character at its finest a moment of agonized wrestling with that terror of death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its earliest consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory–Robert found himself motherless. He and Catherine had never left her since the beginning of the illness. In one of the intervals toward the end, when there was a faint power of speech, she drew Catherine’s cheek down to her and kissed her.

‘God bless you!’ the old woman’s voice said, with a solemnity in it which Robert knew well, but which Catherine had never heard before. ‘Be good to him, Catherine–be always good to him!’

And she lay looking from the husband to the wife with a certain wistfulness which pained Catherine, she knew not why. But she answered with tears and tender words, and at last the mother’s face settled into a peace which death did but confirm.

This great and unexpected loss, which had shaken to their depths all the feelings and affections of his youth, had thrown Elsmere more than ever on his wife. To him, made as it seemed for love and for enjoyment, grief was a novel and difficult burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that his wife helped him to bear it so that he came out from it not lessened but ennobled, that she preserved him from many a lapse of nervous weariness and irritation into which his temperament might easily have been betrayed.

And how his very dependence had endeared him to Catherine! That vibrating responsive quality in him, so easily mistaken for mere weakness, which made her so necessary to him–there is nothing perhaps which wins more deeply upon a woman. For all the while it was balanced in a hundred ways by the illimitable respect which his character and his doings compelled from those about him. To be the strength, the inmost joy, of a man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero at every turn–there is no happiness more penetrating for a wife than this.

On this August afternoon the Elsmeres were expecting visitors. Catherine had sent the pony-carriage to the station to meet Rose and Langham, who was to escort her from Waterloo. For various reasons, all characteristic, it was Rose’s first visit to Catherine’s new home.

Now she had been for six weeks in London, and had been persuaded to come on to her sister, at the end of her stay. Catherine was looking forward to her coming with many tremors. The wild ambitious creature had been not one atom appeased by Manchester and its opportunities. She had gone back to Whindale in April only to fall into more hopeless discontent than ever. ‘She can hardly be civil to anybody,’ Agnes wrote to Catherine. ‘The cry now is all “London” or at least “Berlin,” and she cannot imagine why papa should ever have wished to condemn us to such a prison.’

Catherine grew pale with indignation as she read the words, and thought of her father’s short-lived joy in the old house and its few green fields, or of the confidence which had soothed his last moments, that it would be well there with his wife and children, far from the hubbub of the world.

But Rose and her whims were not facts which could be put aside. They would have to be grappled with, probably humored. As Catherine strolled out into the garden, listening alternately for Robert and for the carriage, she told herself that it would be a difficult visit. And the presence of Mr. Langham would certainly not diminish its difficulty. The mere thought of him set the wife’s young form stiffening. A cold breath seemed to blow from Edward Langham, which chilled Catherine’s whole being. Why was Robert so fond of him?

But the more Langham cut himself off from the world, the more Robert clung to him in his wistful affectionate way. The more difficult their intercourse became, the more determined the younger man seemed to be to maintain it. Catherine imagined that he often scourged himself in secret for the fact that the gratitude which had once flowed so readily had now become a matter of reflection and resolution.

‘Why should we always expect to get pleasure from our friends?’ he had said to her once with vehemence. ‘It should be pleasure enough to love them.’ And she knew very well of whom he was thinking.

How late he was this afternoon. He must have been a long round. She had news for him of great interest. The lodge-keeper from the Hall had just looked in to tell the rector that the Squire and his widowed sister were expected home in four days.

But, interesting as the news was, Catherine’s looks as she pondered it were certainly not looks of pleased expectation. Neither of them, indeed, had much cause to rejoice in the Squire’s advent. Since their arrival in the parish the splendid Jacobean Hall had been untenanted. The Squire, who was abroad to With his sister at the time of their coming, had sent a civil note to the new rector on his settlement in the parish, naming some common Oxford acquaintances, and desiring him to make what use of the famous Murewell Library he pleased. ‘I hear of you as a friend to letters,’ he wrote; ‘do my books a service by using them.’ The words were graceful enough. Robert had answered them warmly. He had also availed himself largely of the permission they had conveyed. We shall see presently that the Squire, though absent, had already made a deep impression on the young man’s imagination.

But unfortunately he came across the Squire in two capacities. Mr. Wendover was not only the owner of Murewell, he was also the owner of the whole land of the parish, where, however, by a curious accident of inheritance, dating some generations back, and implying some very remote connection between the Wendover and Elsmere families, he was not the patron of the living. Now the more Elsmere studied him under this aspect, the deeper became his dismay. The estate was entirely in the hands of an agent who had managed it for some fifteen years, and of whose character the Rector, before he had been two months in the parish, had formed the very poorest opinion. Robert, entering upon his duties with the Order of the modern reformer, armed not only with charity but with science, found himself confronted by the opposition of a man who combined the shrewdness of an attorney with the callousness of a drunkard. It seemed incredible that a great landowner should commit his interests and the interests of hundreds of human beings to the hands of such a person.

By-and-by, however, as the Rector penetrated more deeply into the situation, he found his indignation transferring itself more and more from the man to the master. It became clear to him that in some respects Henslowe suited the Squire admirably. It became also clear to him that the Squire had taken pains for years to let it be known that he cared not one rap for any human being on his estate in any other capacity than as a rent-payer or wage-receiver. What! Live for thirty years in that great house, and never care whether your tenants and laborers lived like pigs or like men, whether the old people died of damp, or the children of diphtheria, which you might have prevented! Robert’s brow grew dark over it.

The click of an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreaminess at once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. In another moment Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a holly stick in his hand, his face aglow with health and exercise and kindling at the sight of his wife. She hung on his arm, and, with his hand laid tenderly on hers, he asked her how she fared. She answered briefly, but with a little flush, her eyes raised to his. She was within a few weeks of motherhood.

Then they strolled along talking. He, gave her an account of his afternoon which, to judge from the worried expression which presently effaced the joy of their meeting, had been spent in some unsuccessful effort or other. They paused after awhile and stood looking over the plain before them to a spot beyond the nearer belt of woodland, where from a little hollow about three miles off there rose a cloud of bluish smoke.

‘He will do nothing!’ cried Catherine, incredulous.

‘Nothing! It is the policy of the estate, apparently, to let the old and bad cottages fall to pieces. He sneers at one for supposing any landowner has money for “philanthropy” just now. If the people don’t like the houses they can go. I told him I should appeal to the Squire as soon as he came home.’

‘What did he say?’

He smiled, as much as to say, “Do as you like and be a fool for your pains.” How the Squire can let that man tyrannize over the estate as he does, I cannot conceive. Oh, Catherine, I am full of qualms about the Squire!’

‘So am I,’ she said, with a little darkening of her clear look. ‘Old Benham has just been in to say they are expected on Thursday.’

Robert started. ‘Are these our last days of peace?’ he said wistfully–‘the last days of our honeymoon, Catherine?’

She smiled at him with a little quiver of passionate feeling under the smile.

‘Can anything touch that?’ she said under her breath.

‘Do you know,’ he said, presently, his voice dropping, ‘that it is only a month to our wedding day? Oh, my wife, have I kept my promise–is the new life as rich as the old?’

She made no answer, except the dumb sweet answer that love writes on eyes and lips. Then a tremor passed over her.

‘Are we too happy? Can it be well–be right?’

Oh, let us take it like children!’ he cried, with a shiver, almost petulantly. ‘There will be dark hours enough. It is so good to be happy.’

She leant her cheek fondly against his shoulder. To her, life always meant self-restraint, self-repression, self-deadening, if need be. The Puritan distrust of personal joy as something dangerous and ensnaring was deep ingrained in her. It had no natural hold on him.

They stood a moment hand in hand fronting the corn-field and the sun-filled West, while the afternoon breeze blew back the man’s curly reddish hair, long since restored to all its natural abundance.

Presently Robert broke into a broad smile.

‘What do you suppose Langham has been entertaining Rose with on the way, Catherine? I wouldn’t miss her remarks to-night on the escort we provided her for a good deal.’

Catherine said nothing, but her delicate eyebrows went up a little. Robert stooped and lightly kissed her.

‘You never performed a greater art of virtue even in _your_ life Mrs. Elsmere, than when you wrote Langham that nice letter of invitation.’

And then the young Rector sighed, as many a boyish memory came crowding upon him.

A sound of wheels! Robert’s long legs took him to the gate in a twinkling, and he flung it open just as Rose drove up in fine style, a thin dark man beside her.

Rose lent her bright cheek to Catherine’s kiss, and the two sisters walked up to the door together, while Robert and Langham loitered after them talking.

‘Oh, Catherine!’ said Rose under her breath, as they got into the drawing-room, with a little theatrical gesture, ‘why on earth did you inflict that man and me on each other for two mortal hours?’

‘Sh-sh!’ said Catherine’s lips, while her face gleamed with laughter.

Rose sank flushed upon a chair, her eyes glancing up with a little furtive anger in them as the two gentlemen entered the room.

‘You found each other easily at Waterloo?’ asked Robert.

‘Mr. Langham would never have found me,’ said Rose, dryly, ‘but I pounced on him at last, just, I believe, as he was beginning to cherish the hope of an empty carriage and the solitary enjoyment of his “Saturday Review.”‘

Langham smiled nervously. ‘Miss Leyburn is too hard on a blind man,’ he said, holding up his eye-glass apologetically; ‘it was my eyes, not my will, that were fault.’

Rose’s lip curled a little. ‘And Robert,’ she cried, bending forward as though something had just occurred to her, ‘do tell, me–I vowed I would ask–_is_ Mr. Langham a Liberal or a conservative? _He_ doesn’t know!’

Robert laughed, so did Langham.

‘Your sister,’ he said, flushing, ‘will have one so very precise in all one says.’

He turned his handsome olive face toward her, an unwonted spark of animation lighting up his black eyes. It was evident that he felt himself persecuted, but it was not so evident whether he enjoyed the process or disliked it.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said Rose nonchalantly. ‘Only I have just come from a house where everybody either loathes Mr. Gladstone or would die for him to-morrow. There was a girl of seven and a boy of nine who were always discussing “Coercion” in the corners of the schoolroom. So, of course, I have grown political too, and began to catechize Mr. Langham at once, and when he said “he didn’t know,” I felt I should like to set those children at him! They would soon put some principles into him!’

‘It is not generally lack of principle, Miss Rose,’ said her brother-in-law, ‘that turns a man a doubter in politics, but too much!’

And while he spoke, his eyes resting on Langham, his smile broadened as he recalled all those instances in their Oxford past, when he had taken a humble share in one of the Herculean efforts on the part of Langham’s friends, which were always necessary whenever it was a question of screwing a vote out of him on any debated University question.

‘How dull it must be to have too much principle!’ cried Rose. ‘Like a mill choked with corn. No bread because the machine can’t work!’

‘Defend me from my friends!’ cried Langham, roused. ‘Elsmere, when did I give you a right to caricature me in this way? If I were interested,’ he added, subsiding into his usual hesitating ineffectiveness, ‘I suppose I should know my own mind.’

And then seizing the muffins, he stood presenting them to Rose as though in deprecation of any further personalities. Inside him there was a hot protest against an unreasonable young beauty whom he had done his miserable best to entertain for two long hours, and who in return had made feel himself more of a fool than he had done for years. Since when had young women put on all these airs? In his young days they knew their place.

Catherine meanwhile sat watching her sister. The child was more beautiful than ever, but in other outer respects the Rose of Long Whindale had undergone much transformation. The puffed sleeves, the _aesthetic_ skirts, the naive adornments of bead and shell, the formless hat, which it pleased her to imagine ‘after Gainsborough,’ had all disappeared. She was clad in some soft fawn-colored garment, cut very much in the fashion; her hair was closely rolled and twisted about her lightly balanced head; everything about her was treat and fresh and tight-fitting. A year ago she had been a damsel from the ‘Earthly Paradise;’ now, so far as an English girl can achieve it she might have been a model for Tissot. In this phase, as in the other, there was a touch of extravagance. The girl was developing fast, but had clearly not yet developed. The restlessness, the self-consciousness of Long Whindale were still there; but they spoke to the spectator in different ways.

But in her anxious study of her sister Catherine did not forget her place of hostess. ‘Did our man bring you through the park, Mr. Langham?’ she asked him timidly.

‘Yes. What an exquisite old house!’ he said, turning to her, and feeling through all his critical sense the difference between the gentle matronly dignity of the one sister and the young self-assertion of the other.

‘Ah,’ said Robert, ‘I kept that as a surprise! Did you ever see a more perfect place?’

‘What date?’

‘Early Tudor–as to the oldest part. It was built by a relation of Bishop Fisher’s; then largely rebuilt under James I. Elizabeth stayed there twice. There is a trace of a visit of Sidney’s. Waller was there, and left a copy of verses in the library. Evelyn laid out a great deal of the garden. Lord Clarendon wrote part of his History in the garden, et cetera, et cetera. The place is steeped in associations, and as beautiful as a dream to begin with.’

‘And the owner of all this is the author of the “Idols of the Market Place”?’

Robert nodded.

‘Did you ever meet him at Oxford? I believe he was there once or twice during my time, but I never saw him.’

‘Yes,’ said Langham, thinking. ‘I met him at dinner at the Vice-Chancellor’s, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person–very difficult to talk to,’ he added reflectively.

Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose Leyburn’s lip and understood it in a moment. Incontinently he forgot the Squire and fell to asking himself what had possessed him on that luckless journey down. He had never seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable; and for once his philosophy did not enable him to swallow the certainty that this slim flashing creature must have thought him a morbid idiot with as much _sang-froid_ as usual.

Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, and presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On their way they passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitating, and then with a bright flush on the face, which had such maternal calm in it already, she threw her arm round Rose and drew her in. It was a white empty room, smelling of the roses outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for the life that was to be. Rose looked at it all–at the piles of tiny garments, the cradle, the pictures from Retsch’s ‘Song of the Bell,’ which had been the companions of their own childhood, on the walls–and something stirred in the girl’s breast.

‘Catherine, I believe you have everything you want, or you soon will have!’ she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, laying her hands on her sister’s shoulders.

‘Everything but worthiness!’ said Catherine softly, a mist rising in her calm gray eyes. ‘And you, ‘Roeschen,’ she added wistfully–‘have you been getting a little more what you want?’

‘What’s the good of asking?’ said the girl, with a little shrug of impatience. ‘As if creatures like we ever got what they want! London has been good fun certainly–if one could get enough, of it. Catherine, how long is that marvelous person going to stay?’ and she pointed in the direction of Langham’s room.

‘A week,’ said Catherine, smiling at the girl’s disdainful tone. ‘I was afraid you didn’t take to him.’

‘I never saw such a being before,’ declared Rose–‘never! I thought I should never get a plain answer from him about anything. He wasn’t even quite certain it was a fine day! I wonder if you set fire to him whether he would be sure it hurt! A week, you say? Heigho! what an age!’

‘Be kind to him,’ said Catherine, discreetly veiling her own feelings, and caressing the curly golden head as they moved toward the door. ‘He’s a poor lone don, and he was so good to Robert!’

‘Excellent reason for you, Mrs. Elsmere,’ said Rose pouting; ‘but—-‘

Her further remarks were cut short by the sound of the front-door bell.

‘Oh, I had forgotten Mr. Newcome!’ cried Catherine, starting. ‘Come down soon, Rose, and help us through.’

‘Who is he?’ inquired Rose, sharply.

‘A High Church clergyman near here, whom Robert asked to tea this afternoon,’ said Catherine, escaping.

Rose took her hat off very leisurely. The prospect down-stairs did not seem to justify despatch. She lingered and thought, of ‘Lohengrin’ and Albani, of the crowd of artistic friends that had escorted her to Waterloo, of the way in which she had been applauded the night before, of the joys of playing Brahms with a long-haired pupil of Rubinstein’s, who had dropped on one knee and kissed her hand at the end of it, etc. During the last six weeks the colors of ‘this thread-bare world’ had been freshening before her in marvellous fashion. And now, as she stood looking out, the quiet fields opposite, the sight of a cow pushing its head through the hedge, the infinite sunset sky, the quiet of the house, filled her with a sudden depression. How dull it all seemed–how wanting in the glow of life!

CHAPTER XII.

Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was passing, watched by Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had retreated into a corner of his own as soon as another visitor appeared. Beside Catherine sat a Ritualist clergyman in cassock and long cloak–a saint clearly, though perhaps, to judge from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed to quiver through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the saint’s wasted unearthly look, the ascetic brow, high and narrow, the veins showing through the skin, and a personality as magnetic as it was strong.

Catherine listened to the new-comer, and gave him his tea, with an aloofness of manner which was not lost on Langham. ‘She is the Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh!’ he said to himself. ‘For her there must neither be too much nor too little. How can Elsmere stand it?’

Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat balancing his long person over the arm of a chair listening to the recital of some of the High Churchman’s parish troubles with a slight half-embarrassed smile. The Vicar of Mottringham was always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring out took shape in Langham’s sarcastic sense as a sort of classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine’s fine face grew more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents. At a certain diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fibre in the young Rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperious, persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn by the same quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to the St. Anselm’s undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out with as much freedom as if all his companions had been as ready as he was to die for an alb, or to spend half their days in piously circumventing a bishop.

But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, from Mottringham and its intrigues to London and its teeming East. Robert was leading, his eye now on the apostalic-looking priest, now on his wife. Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had his way. Then it came out that behind these battles of kites and crows at Mottringhan, there lay an heroic period when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London Poverty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the meelee. Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian bishop–what Christian dare parade ten years of love to God and man? And presently round Elsmere’s lip there dawned a little smile of triumph. Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was bending forward eagerly–listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and facts were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in the sharp-featured priest sank out of sight; the face glowed with inward light; the stature of the man seemed to rise; the angel in him unsheathed its wings. Suddenly the story of the slums that Mr. Newcome was telling–a story of the purest Christian heroism told in the simplest way–came to an end, and Catherine leaned toward him with a long quivering breath.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you! That must have been a joy, a privilege!’

Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise.

‘Yes, it was a privilege,’ he said slowly–the story had been an account of the rescue of a young country lad from a London den of thieves and profligates–‘you are right; it was just that.’

And then some sensitive inner fibre of the man was set vibrating, and he would talk no more of himself or his past, do what they would.

So Robert had hastily to provide another subject, and he fell upon that of the Squire.

Mr. Newcome’s eyes flashed.

‘He is coming back? I am sorry for you, Elsmere. “Woo is me that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar!”‘

And he fell back in his chair, his lips tightening, his thin long hand lying along the arm of it, answering to that general impression of combat, of the spiritual athlete, that hung about him.

‘I don’t know,’ said Robert brightly, as he leant against the mantelpiece looking curiously at his visitor. ‘The Squire is a man of strong-character, of vast learning. His library is one of the finest in England, and it is at my service. I am not concerned with his opinions.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Newcome in his driest voice, but sadly. You are one of the people who believe in what you call tolerance–I remember.’

‘Yes, that is an impeachment to which I plead guilty,’ said Robert, perhaps with equal dryness; ‘and you–have your worries driven you to throw tolerance overboard?’

Newcome bent forward quickly. Strange glow and intensity of the fanatical eyes–strange beauty of the wasted, persecuting lips!

‘Tolerance!’ he said with irritable vehemence–‘tolerance! Simply another name for betrayal, cowardice, desertion–nothing else. God, Heaven, Salvation on the one side, the Devil and Hell on the other–and one miserable life, one wretched sin-stained will, to win the battle with; and in such a state of things _you_–‘ He dropped his voice, throwing out every word with a scornful, sibilant emphasis–

‘_You_ would have us believe as though our friends were our enemies and our enemies our friends, as though eternal misery were a bagatelle, and our faith a mere alternative. _I stand for Christ_, and His foes are mine.’

‘By which I suppose you mean,’ said Robert, quietly, that you would shut your door on the writer of “The Idols of the Market-place”?’

‘Certainly.’

And the priest rose, his whole attention concentrated on Robert, as though some deeper-lying motive were suddenly brought into play than any suggested by the conversation itself.

‘Certainly. _Judge not_–so long as a man has not judged himself,–only till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian’s path is clear. We are but soldiers under orders. What business have we to be truce-making on our own account? The war is not ours, but God’s!’

Robert’s eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself in such a quick passage of arms as all such natures as his delight in, when his look travelled past the gaunt figure of the Ritualist vicar to his wife. A sudden pang smote, silenced him. She was sitting with her face raised to Newcome; and her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion of sympathy. It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed, the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, and the color rushed over all his young boyish face.

‘To me,’ he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed rather on her than on Newcome, ‘a clergyman has enough to do with those foes of Christ he cannot choose but recognize. There is no making truce with vice or cruelty. Why should we complicate our task and spend in needless struggle the energies we might give to our brother?’

His wife turned to him. There was trouble in her look, then a swift lovely dawn of something indescribable. Newcome moved away, with a gesture that was half bitterness, half weariness.

‘Wait, my friend,’ he said slowly, ’till you have watched that man’s books eating the very heart out of a poor creature, as I have. When you have once seen Christ robbed of a soul that might have been His, by the infidel of genius, you will loathe all this Laodicean cant of tolerance as I do!’

There was, an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyeglass on, was carefully examining the make of a carved paper-knife lying near him. The strained, preoccupied mind of the High Churchman had never taken the smallest account of his presence, of which Robert had been keenly, not to say humorously, conscious throughout.

But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, and addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common interest. Newcome, in a kind of dream which seemed to have suddenly descended on him, stood near them, his priestly cloak falling in long folds about him, his ascetic face grave and rapt. Gradually, however, the talk of the two men dissipated the mystical cloud about him. He began to listen, to catch the savour of Langham’s modes of speech, and of his languid, indifferent personality.

‘I must go,’ he said abruptly, after a minute or two, breaking in upon the friends’ conversation. ‘I shall hardly get home before dark.’

He took a cold, punctilious leave of Catherine, and a still colder and lighter leave of Langham. Elsmere accompanied him to the gate.

On the way the older man suddenly caught him by the arm.

‘Elsmere, let me–I am the elder by so many years–let me speak to you. My heart goes out to you!’

And the eagle face softened; the harsh, commanding presence became enveloping, magnetic. Robert paused and looked down upon him, a quick light of foresight in his eye. He felt what was coming.

And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from Newcome’s inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered passion of years against certain ‘dangerous tendencies’ the elder priest discerned in the younger, against the worship of intellect and science as such which appeared in Elsmere’s talk, in Elsmere’s choice of friends. It was the eternal cry of the mystic of all ages.

‘Scholarship! Learning!’ Eyes and lips flashed into a vehement scorn. ‘You allow them a value in themselves, apart from the Christian’s test. It is the modern canker, the modern curse! Thank God, my years in London burnt it out of me! Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all these curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to worship? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal sympathy? Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression!–a time for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less than the lusts of the body, a time when it is better to believe than to know, to pray than to understand!’

Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together, Newcome’s gaze of fiery appeal fixed upon him.

‘We are differently made, you and I’ said the young Rector at last with difficulty. ‘Where you see temptation I see opportunity. I cannot conceive of God as the Arch-plotter against His own creation!’

Newcome dropped his hold abruptly.

‘A groundless optimism,’ he said with harshness. ‘On the track of the soul from birth to death there are two sleuth-hounds–Sin and Satan. Mankind forever flies them, is forever vanquished and devoured. I see life always as a thread-like path between abysses along which man _creeps_’–and his gesture illustrated the words–‘with bleeding hands and feet toward one-narrow-solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn to the right hand or the left–“I will repay, saith the Lord!”‘

Elsmere drew himself up suddenly; the words seemed to him a blasphemy. Then something stayed the vehement answer on his lips. It was a sense of profound, intolerable pity. What a maimed life! what an indomitable soul! Husbandhood, fatherhood, and all the sacred education that flows from human joy; for ever self-forbidden, and this grind creed for recompense!

He caught Newcome’s hand with a kind filial eagerness.

‘You are a perpetual lesson to me,’ he said, most gently. ‘When the world is too much with me, I think of you and am rebuked. God bless you! But I know myself. If I could see life and God as you see them for one hour, I should cease to be a Christian in the next!’

A flush of something like sombre resentment passed over Newcome’s face. There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment. He turned abruptly away, and Robert was left alone.

It was a still, clear evening, rich in the languid softness and balm which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere walked back to the house, his head uplifted to the sky which lay beyond the cornfield, his whole being wrought into a passionate protest–a passionate invocation of all things beautiful and strong and free, a clinging to life and nature as to something wronged and outraged.

Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down to warn him that it was late and that Langham had gone to dress; but she stood lingering by his side after her message was given, and he made no movement to go in. He turned to her, the exaltation gradually dying out of his face, and at last he stooped and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike him. She clasped both hands on his arm and stood pressing toward him as though to make amends–for she knew not what. Something–some sharp, momentary sense of difference, of antagonism, had hurt that inmost fibre which is the conscience of true passion. She did the most generous, the most ample penance for it as she stood there talking to him of half-indifferent things, but with a magic, a significance of eye and voice which seemed to take all the severity from her beauty and make her womanhood itself.

At the evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it seemed to Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of college-rooms in vacation, that everything looked flat and stale beside her, beside the flash of her white arms, the gleam of her hair, the confident grace of every movement. He thought her much too self-conscious and self-satisfied; and she certainly did not make herself agreeable to him; but for all that he could hardly take his eyes off her; and it occurred to him once or twice to envy Robert the easy childish friendliness she showed to him, and to him alone of the party. The lack of real sympathy between her and Catherine was evident to the stranger at once–what, indeed, could the two have in common? He saw that Catherine was constantly on the point of blaming, and Rose constantly on the point of rebelling. He caught the wrinkling of Catherine’s brow as Rose presently, in emulation apparently of some acquaintances she had been making in London, let slip the names of some of her male friends without the ‘Mr.,’ or launched into some bolder affectation than usual of a comprehensive knowledge of London society. The girl, in spite of all her beauty, and her fashion, and the little studied details of her dress, was in reality so crude, so much of a child under it all, that it made her audacities and assumptions the more absurd, and he could see that Robert was vastly amused by them.

But Langham was not merely amused by her. She was too beautiful and too full of character.

It astonished him to find himself afterward edging over to the corner where she sat with the Rectory cat on her knee–an inferior animal, but the best substitute for Chattie available. So it was, however; and once in her neighborhood he made another serious effort to get her to talk to him. The Elsmeres had never seen him so conversational. He dropped his paradoxical melancholy; he roared as gently as any sucking dove; and Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm’s, as the evening went on, some hesitating common-places worthy of a bashful undergraduate on the subject of the boats and Commemoration, had to beat a hasty retreat, so greatly did the situation tickle his sense of humor.

But the tutor made his various ventures under a discouraging sense of failure. What a capricious, ambiguous creature it was, how fearless, how disagreeably alive to all his own damaging peculiarities! Never had he been so piqued for years, and as he floundered about trying to find some common ground where he and she might be at ease, he was conscious throughout of her mocking indifferent eyes, which seemed to be saying to him all the time, ‘You are not interesting,–no, not a bit! You are tiresome, and I see through you, but I must talk to you, I suppose, _faute de mieux_.’

Long before the little party separated for the night, Langham had given it up, and had betaken himself to Catherine, reminding himself with some sharpness that he had come down to study his friend’s life, rather than the humors of a provoking girl. How still the summer night was round the isolated rectory; how fresh and spotless were all the appointments of the house; what a Quaker neatness and refinement everywhere! He drank in the scent of air and flowers with which the rooms were filled; for the first time his fastidious sense was pleasantly conscious of Catherine’s grave beauty; and even the mystic ceremonies of family prayer had a certain charm for him, pagan as he was. How much dignity and persuasiveness it has still he thought to himself, this commonplace country life of ours, on its best sides!

Half-past ten arrived. Rose just let him touch her hand; Catherine gave him a quiet good-night, with various hospitable wishes for his nocturnal comfort, and the ladies withdrew. He saw Robert open the door for his wife and catch her thin white fingers as she passed him with all the secrecy and passion of a lover.

Then they plunged into the study, he and Robert, and smoked their fill. The study was an astonishing medley. Books, natural history specimens, a half-written sermon, fishing rods, cricket bats, a huge medicine cupboard–all the main elements of Elsmere’s new existence were represented there. In the drawing-room with his wife and his sister-in-law he had been as much of a boy as ever; here clearly he was a man, very much in earnest. What about? What did it all come to? Can the English country clergyman do much with his life and his energies. Langham approached the subject with his usual skepticism.

Robert for awhile, however, did not help him to solve it. He fell at once to talking about the Squire, as though it cleared his mind to talk out his difficulties even to so ineffective a counsellor as Langham. Langham, indeed was but faintly interested in the Squire’s crimes as a landlord, but there was a certain interest to be got out of the struggle in Elsmere’s mind between the attractiveness of the Squire, as one of the most difficult and original personalties of English letters, and that moral condemnation of him as a man of possessions and ordinary human responsibilities with which the young reforming Rector was clearly penetrated. So that, as long as he could smoke under it, he was content to let his companion describe to him, Mr. Wendover’s connection with the property, his accession to it in middle life after a long residence in Germany, his ineffectual attempts to play the English country gentleman, and his subsequent complete withdrawal from the life about him.

‘You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives in that huge place,’ said Robert with energy. ‘He is not unpopular exactly with the poor down here. When they want to belabor anybody they lay on at the agent, Henslowe. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion the poor like a mystery. They never see him; when he is here the park is shut up; the common report is that he walks, at night; and he lives alone in that enormous house with his books. The country folk have all quarrelled with him, or nearly. It pleases him to get a few of the humbler people about, clergy, professional men, and so on, to dine with him sometimes. And be often fills the Hall, I am told, with London people for a day or two. But otherwise, he knows no one, and nobody knows him.’

‘But you say he has a widowed sister? How does she relish the kind of life?’

‘Oh, by all accounts,’ said the Rector with a shrug, ‘she is as little like other people as himself. A queer elfish little creature, they say, as fond of solitude down here as the Squire, and full of hobbies. In her youth she was about the Court. Then she married a Canon of Warham, one of the popular preachers, I believe, of the day. There is a bright little cousin of hers, a certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here, and tells one stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as hungry now, after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the purest parvenu. The Squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no influence with him. However, there is something naive in the stories they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But the Squire!’

And the Rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying his boots with a certain dolefulness.

Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of conversation presented to him as an epicure treats food, felt at this point that he had had enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.

‘So you physic bodies as well as Minds?’ he said, pointing to the medicine cupboard.

‘I should think so!’ cried Robert, brightening at once. Last winter I causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand. Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it’s a pleasure I may promise myself most years. But it shan’t remain what it is.’

And the Rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him in the depths of an armchair.

‘I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their drains!’

‘It seems to me,’ said Langham, musing, ‘that in my youth people talked about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.’

‘And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I have gone mad upon them. It’s all very well, but they are the foundations of a sound religion.’

‘Dirt, drains, and Darwin,’ said Langham meditatively, taking up Darwin’s ‘Earthworms,’ which lay on the study table beside him, side by side with a volume of Grant Allen’s ‘Sketches.’ ‘I didn’t know you cared for this sort of thing!’

Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole into his face.

‘Imagine, Langham!’ he said presently, ‘I had never read even the “Origin of Species” before I came here. We used to take the thing half for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense. But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force one’s self to understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is a very different matter. It is a revelation.’

‘Yes,’ said Langham; and could not forbear adding, ‘but it is a revelation, my friend, that has not always been held to square with other revelations.’

In general these two kept carefully off the religious ground. The man who is religious by nature tends to keep his treasure hid from the man who is critical by nature, and Langham was much more interested in other things. But still it had always been understood that each was free to say what he would.

‘There was a natural panic,’ said Robert, throwing back his head at the challenge. ‘Men shrank and will always shrink, say what you will, from what seems to touch things dearer to them than life. But the panic is passing. The smoke is clearing away, and we see that the battle-field is falling into new lines. But the old truth remains the same. Where and when and how you will, but somewhen and somehow, God created the heavens and the earth!’

Langham said nothing. It had seemed to him for long that the clergy were becoming dangerously ready to throw the Old Testament overboard, and all that it appeared to him to imply was that men’s logical sense is easily benumbed where their hearts are concerned.

‘Not that everyone need be troubled with the new facts,’ resumed Robert after a while, going back to his pipe. ‘Why should they? We are not saved by Darwinism. I should never press them on my wife, for instance, with all her clearness and courage of mind.’

His voice altered as he mentioned his wife–grew extraordinarily soft, even reverential.

‘It would distress her?’ said Langham interrogatively, and inwardly conscious of pursuing investigations begun a year before.

‘Yes, it would distress her. She holds the old ideas as she was taught them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem doubtful or grotesque to others. And why should I or anyone else trouble her? I above all, who am not fit to tie her shoe-strings.’

The young husband’s face seemed to gleam in the dim light which fell upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand in silence and touched his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet friendly look, and the two men instantly plunged into some quite trivial and commonplace subject.

Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense of pleasure in the country quiet, the peaceful flower-scented house. Catherine, who was an admirable housewife, had put out her best guest-sheets for his benefit, and the tutor, accustomed for long years to the second-best of college service, looked at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at the freshly matted floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at the spotlessness of everything in the room, with a distinct sense that matrimony had its advantages. He had come down to visit the Elsmeres, sustained by a considerable sense of virtue. He still loved Elsmere and cared to see him. It was a much colder love, no doubt, than that which he had given to the undergraduate. But the man altogether was a colder creature, who for years had been drawing in tentacle after tentacle, and becoming more and more content to live without his kind. Robert’s parsonage, however, and Robert’s wife had no attractions for him; and it was with an effort that he had made up his mind to accept the invitation which Catherine had made an effort to write.

And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His fastidious love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was touched by the Elsmere surroundings. And whatever Miss Leyburn might be, she was not commonplace. The demon of convention had no large part in _her!_ Langham lay awake for a time analyzing his impressions of her with some gusto, and meditating, with a whimsical candor which seldom failed him, on the manner in which she had trampled on him, and the reasons why.

He woke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. He was preeminently a person of moods, dependent, probably, as all moods are, on certain obscure physical variations. And his mental temperature had run down in the night. The house, the people who had been fresh and interesting to him twelve hours before, were now the burden he had more than half-expected them to be. He lay and thought of the unbroken solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour’s flight from human kind, of the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all effort, and could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a futile world, which had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage for the moment of being a new one.

Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann. That prototype of all the disillusioned had to cut himself adrift from the society of the eagles on the Dent du Midi, to go and hang, like any other ridiculous mortal, on the Paris law courts. Langham, whether he liked it or not, had to face the parsonic breakfast and the parsonic day.

He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl’s voice drew him to the window, which was open. In the garden stood Rose, on the edge of the sunk fence dividing the Rectory domain from the cornfield. She was stooping forward playing with Robert’s Dandie Dinmont. In one hand she held a mass of poppies, which showed a vivid scarlet against her blue dress; the other was stretched out seductively to the dog leaping round her. A crystal buckle flashed at her waist; the sunshine caught the curls of auburn hair, the pink cheek, the white moving hand, the lace ruffles at her throat and wrist. The lithe, glittering figure stood thrown out against the heavy woods behind, the gold of the cornfield, the blues of the distance. All the gayety and color which is as truly representative of autumn as the gray languor of a September mist had passed into it.

Langham stood and watched, hidden, as be thought, by the curtain, till a gust of wind shook the casement window beside him, and threatened to blow it in upon him. He put out his hand perforce to save it, and the slight noise caught Rose’s ear. She looked up; her smile vanished. ‘Go down, Dandie,’ she said severely, and walked quickly into the house with as much dignity as nineteen is capable of.

At breakfast the Elsmeres found their guest a difficulty. But they also, as we know, had expected it. He was languor itself; none of their conversational efforts succeeded; and Rose, studying him out the corners of her eyes, felt that it would be of no use even to torment so strange and impenetrable a being. Why on earth should people come and visit their friends, if they could not keep up even the ordinary decent pretences of society?

Robert had to go off to some clerical business afterward and Langham wandered out into the garden by himself. As he thought of his Greek texts and his untenanted Oxford rooms, he had the same sort of craving that an opium-eater has cut off from his drugs. How was he to get through?

Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful of volumes, and carried them out. True to himself in the smallest things, he could never in his life be content with the companionship of one book. To cut off the possibility of choice and change in anything whatever was repugnant to him.

He sat himself down in the shade of a great chestnut near the house, and an hour glided pleasantly away. As it happened, however, he did not open one of the books he had brought with him. A thought had struck him as he sat down, and he went groping in his pockets in search of a yellow-covered brochure, which, when found, proved to be a new play by Dumas, just about to be produced by a French company in London. Langham, whose passion for the French theatre supplied him, as we know, with a great deal of life, without the trouble of living, was going to see it, and always made a point of reading the piece beforehand.

The play turned upon a typical French situation, treated in a manner rather more French than usual. The reader shrugged his shoulders a good deal as he read on. ‘Strange nation!’ he muttered to himself after an act or two. ‘How they do revel in mud!’

Presently, just as the fifth act was beginning to get hold of him with that force which, after all, only a French playwright is master of, he looked up and saw the two sisters coming round the corner of the house from the great kitchen garden which stretched its grass paths and tangled flower-masses down the further slope of the hill. The transition was sharp from Dumas’ heated atmosphere of passion and crime to the quiet English rectory, its rural surroundings, and the figures of the two Englishwomen advancing toward him.

Catherine was in a loose white dress with a black lace scarf draped about her head and form. Her look hardly suggested youth, and there was certainly no touch of age in it. Ripeness, maturity, serenity–these were the chief ideas which seemed to rise in the mind at sight of her.

‘Are you amusing yourself, Mr. Langham?’ she said, stopping beside him and retaining with slight, imperceptible force Rose’s hand, which threatened to slip away.

‘Very much. I have been skimming through a play, which I hope to see next week, by way of preparation.’

Rose turned involuntarily. Not wishing to discuss ‘Marianne’ with either Catherine or her sister, Langham had just closed the book and was returning it to his pocket. But she had caught sight of it.

You are reading “Marianne,”‘ she exclaimed, the slightest possible touch of wonder in her tone.

‘Yes, it is “Marianne,”‘ said Langham, surprised in his turn. He had very old-fashioned notions about the limits of a girl’s acquaintance with the world, knowing nothing, therefore, as may be supposed, about the modern young woman, and he was a trifle scandalized by Rose’s accent of knowledge.

‘I read it last week,’ she said carelessly; ‘and the Piersons’–turning to her sister–‘have promised to take me to see it next winter if Desforets comes, again, as everyone expects.’

‘Who wrote it?’ asked Catherine innocently. The theatre not only gave her little pleasure, but wounded in her a hundred deep unconquerable instincts. But she had long ago given up in despair the hope of protecting against Rose’s dramatic instincts with success.

‘Dumas _fils_’ said Langham dryly. He was distinctly a good deal astonished.

Rose looked at him, and something brought a sudden flame into her cheek.

‘It is one of the best of his,’ she said defiantly. ‘I have read a good many others. Mr. Pierson lent me a volume. And when I was introduced to Madame Desforets last week, she agreed with me that “Marianne” is nearly the best of all.’

All this, of course, with the delicate nose well in air.

‘You were introduced to Madame Desforets?’ cried Langham, surprised this time quite out of discretion. Catherine looked at him with anxiety. The reputation of the black-eyed little French actress, who had been for a year or two the idol of the theatrical public of Paris and London, had reached even to her, and the tone of Langham’s exclamation struck her painfully.

‘I was,’ said Rose proudly. ‘Other people may think it a disgrace. _I_ thought it an honor!’

Langham could not help smiling, the girl’s naivete was so evident. It was clear that, if she had read “Marianne,” she had never understood it.

‘Rose, you don’t know!’ exclaimed Catherine, turning to her sister with a sudden trouble in her eyes. ‘I don’t think Mrs. Pierson ought to have done that, without consulting mamma especially.’

‘Why not?’ cried Rose vehemently. Her face was burning, and her heart was full of something like hatred of Langham but she tried hard to be calm.

‘I think,’ she said, with a desperate attempt at crushing dignity, ‘that the way in which all sorts of stories are believed against a woman, just because she is an actress, is _disgraceful!_ Just because a woman is on the stage, everybody thinks they may throw stones at her. I _know_, because–because she told me,’ cried the speaker, growing, however, half embarrassed as she spoke, ‘that she feels the things that are said of her deeply! She has been ill, very ill, and one of her friends said to me, “You know it isn’t her work, or a cold, or anything else that’s made her ill–it’s calumny!” And so it is.’

The speaker flashed an angry glance at Langham. She was sitting on the arm of the cane chair into which Catherine had fallen, one hand grasping the back of the chair for support, one pointed foot beating the ground restlessly in front of her, her small full mouth pursed indignantly, the greenish-gray eyes flashing and brilliant.

As for Langham, the cynic within him was on the point of uncontrollable laughter. Madame Desforets complaining of calumny to this little Westmoreland maiden! But his eyes involuntarily met Catherine’s, and the expression of both fused into a common wonderment–amused on his side, anxious on hers. ‘What a child, what an infant it is!’ they seemed, to confide to one another. Catherine laid her hand softly on Rose’s, and was about to say something soothing, which might secure her an opening for some sisterly advice later on, when there was a sound of calling from the gate. She looked up and saw Robert waving to her. Evidently, he had just run up from the school to deliver a message. She hurried across the drive to him and afterwards into the house, while he disappeared.

Rose got up from her perch on the armchair, and would have followed, but a movement of obstinacy or Quixotic wrath, or both, detained her.

‘At any rate, Mr. Langham,’ she said, drawing herself up, and speaking with the most lofty accent, ‘if you don’t know anything personally about Madame Desforets, I think it would be much fairer to say nothing–and not to assume at once that all you hear is true!’

Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, as he sat leaning forward under the tree, this slim, indignant creature standing over him, and his consciousness about equally divided between a sense of her absurdity and a sense of her prettiness.

‘You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn,’ he said at last, an enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth. ‘I could not argue with you; I had better not try.’

Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes which were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they could not help reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of Madame Desforets and her _causes celebres_ which were coursing through the brain behind them, and with a momentary impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary attraction, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him.

In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable to his own great chagrin, and Langham summoned up all his resignation and walked with the ladies. The general impression left upon his mind by the performance was, first that the dust of an English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that women’s society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from his with tolerable certainty.

But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done their duty by him, and he was again alone in the garden reading, he suddenly heard the sound of music.

Who was playing, and in that way? He got up and strolled past the drawing-room window to find out.

Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid, dowdy daughter of a local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, in her lavish, impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity of new music, the accumulations of her visit to London. She stood up beside the piano, her hair gleaming in the shadow of the drawing-room, her white brow hanging forward over her violin as she peered her way through the music, her whole soul absorbed in what she was doing, Langham passed unnoticed.

What astonishing playing! Why had no one warned him of the presence of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe creature? He sat down against the wall of the house, as close as possible, but out of sight, and listened. All the romance of his spoilt and solitary life had come to him so far through music, and through such music as this! For she was playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all those passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and exactly than through the voice of literature. Hans Sachs’ immortal song, echoes from the love duets in ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ fragments from a wild and alien dance-music, they rippled over him in a warm, intoxicating stream of sound, stirring association after association, and rousing from sleep a hundred bygone moods of feeling.

What magic and mastery in the girl’s touch! What power of divination, and of rendering! Ah! she too was floating in passion and romance, but of a different sort altogether from the conscious reflected product of the man’s nature. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future; she was weaving her story that was to be into the flying notes, playing to the unknown of her Whindale dreams, the strong, ardent unknown,–‘insufferable, if he pleases, to all the world besides, but to _me_ heaven!’ She had caught no breath yet of his coming, but her heart was ready for him.

Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window opened and Langham stood before her. She looked at him with a quick stiffening of the face which a minute before had been all quivering and relaxed, and his instant perception of it chilled the impulse which had brought him there.

He said something _banal_ about his enjoyment, something totally different from what he had meant to say. The moment presented itself, but he could not seize it or her.

‘I had no notion you cared for music,’ she said carelessly, as she shut the piano, and then she went away.

Langham felt a strange, fierce pang of disappointment. What had he meant to do or say? Idiot! What common ground was there between him and any such exquisite youth? What girl would ever see in him anything but the dull remains of what once had been a man!

CHAPTER XIII.

The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the subject of severe scientific investigation. He would ‘do it’ thoroughly.

So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. There, in spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Robert’s old tutor was a good deal more interested by Robert’s sermon than he had expected to be. It was on the character of David, and there was a note in it, a note of historical imagination, a power of sketching in a background of circumstance, and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were, by a detail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might watch a game of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and counting the good points, but by the end he was not a little carried away. The peroration was undoubtedly very moving, very intimate, very modern, and Langham up to a certain point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to music and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of him kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile out of the church,–‘This sort of thing will go down, will make a mark: Elsmere is at the beginning of a career!’

In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty towards his wife, in that he had been forced to leave so much of the entertainment of Langham to her, asked his old friend to come for him to the school at four o’clock and take him for a walk between two engagements. Langham was punctual, and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday cricket, which was in full swing. During the past year the young Rector had been developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations of country gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity before. He talked of fishing as Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant quotations from Kingsley; and his cricket, which had been good enough at Oxford to get him into his College eleven, had stood him in specially good stead with the Murewell villagers. That his play was not elegant they were not likely to find out; his bowling they set small store by; but his batting was of a fine, slashing, superior sort which soon carried the Murewell Club to a much higher position among the clubs of the neighborhood than it had ever yet aspired to occupy.

The Rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, after they had hung about the green a little while, he took his friend over to the Workmen’s Institute, which stood at the edge of it. He explained that the Institute had been the last achievement of the agent before Henslowe, a man who had done his duty to the estate according to his lights, and to whom it was owing that those parts of it, at any rate, which were most in the public eye, were still in fair condition.

The Institute was now in bad repair and too small for the place. ‘But catch that man doing anything for us!’ exclaimed Robert hotly. ‘He will hardly mend the roof now, merely, I believe, to spite me. But come and see my new Naturalists’ Club.’

And he opened the Institute door. Langham followed, in the temper of one getting up a subject for examination.

Poor Robert! His labor and his enthusiasm deserved a more appreciative eye. He was wrapped up in his Club, which had been the great success of his first year, and he dragged Langham through it all, not indeed, sympathetic creature that he was, without occasional qualms. ‘But after all,’ he would say to himself indignantly, ‘I must do something with him.’

Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at the collections for the year, and was quite ready to take it for granted that they were extremely creditable. Into the old-fashioned window-sills glazed compartments had been fitted, and these were now fairly filled with specimens, with eggs, butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and what not. A case of stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the centre of the room; another containing the birds of the district was close by. On a table further on stood two large opera books, which served as records of observations on the part of members of the Club. In one, which was scrawled over with mysterious hieroglyphs, anyone might write what he would. In the other, only such facts and remarks as had passed the gauntlet of a Club meeting were recorded in Robert’s neatest hand. On the same table stood jars full of strange creatures–tadpoles and water larvae of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed poking among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom only the generalizations of science were congenial, stood by and mildly scoffed.

As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently been hanging about waiting for the Rector, came up to him, boorishly touched his cap, and then, taking a cardboard box out of his pocket, opened it with infinite caution, something like a tremor of emotion passing over his gnarled countenance.

The Rector’s eyes glistened.

‘Hullo! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did you get that? You lucky fellow! Come in, and let’s look it out!’

And the two plunged back into the Club together, leaving Langham to the philosophic and patient contemplation of the village green, its geese, its donkeys, and its surrounding fringe of houses. He felt that quite indisputably life would have, been better worth living if, like Robert, he could have taken a passionate interest in rare moths or common plough-boys; but Nature having denied him the possibility, there was small use in grumbling.

Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy went off, bearing his treasure with him.

‘Lucky dog!’ said Robert, turning his friend into a country road leading out of the village, ‘he’s found one of the rarest moths of the district. Such a hero he’ll be in the Club to-morrow night. It’s extraordinary what a rational interest has done for that fellow! I nearly fought him in public last winter.’

And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a little quick look of feeling in the gray eyes.

‘”Magnificent, but not war,”‘ said Langham dryly. ‘I wouldn’t have given much for your chances against those shoulders.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I should have had a little science on my side, which counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the Club for brutality toward the old grandmother he lives with–turned him out in public. Such a scene! I shall never forget the boy’s face. It was like a corpse, and the eyes burning out of it. He made for me, but the others closed up round, and we got him put out.’

‘Hard lines on the grandmother,’ remarked Langham.

‘She thought so–poor old thing! She left her cottage that night, thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At the end of a week he came into the friend’s house, where she was alone in bed. She cowered under the bed-clothes, she told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead of which he threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to come home. “He wouldn’t do her no mischief.” Everybody dissuaded her, but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterward she sent for me and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody at his work. “Lord, sir!” she said, “it do remind me, when he sits glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the Devils inside ’em kep’ a-tearing ’em. But he’s like a new-born babe to me, sir–never does me no ‘arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do take his vittles!” So I made tracks for that lad,’ said Robert, his eyes kindling, his whole frame dilating. ‘I found him in the fields one morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right. And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow came trudging up every night after his work to ask for me–well, never mind! but it gives one a good glow at one’s heart to think about it.’

The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though defying his own feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The pastoral temper was a novelty to him, and the strong development of it in the undergraduate of his Oxford recollections had its interest.

A quarter to six,’ said Robert, as on their return from their walk they were descending a low wooded hill above the village, and the church clock rang out. ‘I must hurry, or I shall be late for my storytelling.’

‘Story-telling!’ said Langham, with a half-exasperated shrug. ‘What next? You clergy are too inventive by half!’

Robert laughed a trifle bitterly.

‘I can’t congratulate you on your epithets,’ he said, thrusting his hands far into his pockets. ‘Good Heavens, if we _were_–if we were inventive as a body, the Church wouldn’t be where she is in the rural districts! My story-telling is the simplest thing in the world. I began it in the winter with the object of somehow or other getting at the _imagination_ of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to live someone else’s life–it is the one thing worth doing with them. That’s what I have been aiming at. I _told_ my stories all the winter–Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas–Heaven knows what! And on the whole it answers best. But now we are reading “The Talisman.” Come and inspect us, unless you’re a purist about your Scott. None other of the immortals have such _longueurs_ as he, and we cut him freely.’

‘By all means,’ said Langham; lead on.’ And he followed his companion without repugnance. After all, there was something contagious in so much youth and hopefulness.

The story-telling was hold in the Institute.

A group of men and boys were hanging round the door when they reached it. The two friends made their way through, greeted in the dumb, friendly English fashion on all sides, and Langham found himself in a room half-filled with boys and youths, a few grown men, who had just put their pipes out, lounging at the back.

Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the hour that followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most enthusiastic, imaginative people are. He was a master of all those arts of look and gesture which make a spoken story telling and dramatic, and Langham marvelled with what energy, after his hard day’s work and with another service before him, he was able to throw himself into such a hors-d’oeuvre as this. He was reading to night one of the most perfect scenes that even the Wizard of the North has ever conjured: the scene in the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the life of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he read on, his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience, surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type and model of a man who had found his _metier_, found his niche in the world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to an ‘adequate and masterly expression of oneself’ be the aim of life, Robert was achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred souls gave him now all the scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his work to be rather above than below his deserts. He was content–more than content to spend ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or carried him far to the front in literature, on the civilizing a few hundred of England’s rural poor. The future might bring him worldly success–Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert’s stamp are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to no conscious effort of his. Here, in the country living he had so long dreaded and put from him, less it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was happy–deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.

_Happy!_ Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches, by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of thought by this realization, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another man’s happiness.

Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant children or animals passed in and out of the golden light spaces; the patches of heather left here and here glowed as the sunset touched them. Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled across the road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which generation after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! _Happy!_–in this world, ‘where men sit and hear each other groan.’ His friend’s confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.

What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity–‘on the passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,’ said the dreamy spectator to himself, ‘which at the first honest challenge of the critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him, between him and unpleasant facts!

In the evening, Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest of the household went to evening service.

After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham had shut himself up in Robert’s study he did what he had been admonished to do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself down into Robert’s chair, with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction. ‘Good! Now for something that takes the world less naively,’ he said to himself; ‘this house is too virtuous for anything.’

He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The house seemed entirely deserted.

‘All the servants gone too!’ he said presently, looking up and listening. ‘Anybody who wants the spoons needn’t trouble about me. I don’t leave this fire.’

And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of the swing door which separated Robert’s passage from the front hall, opening and shutting. Steps came quickly toward the study, the handle was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.

He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment. She also started as she saw him.

‘I did not know anyone was in,’ she said awkwardly, the color spreading over her face. ‘I came to look for a book.’

She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the darkness of the doorway, her long dress caught up round her in one hand, the other resting on the handle. A gust of some delicate perfume seemed to enter the room with her, and a thrill of pleasure passed through Langham’s senses.

Can I find anything for you?’ he said, springing up.

She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind that it would be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she said, with an accent as coldly polite as she could make it,–

‘Pray don’t disturb yourself. I know exactly where to find it.’

She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, and began running her fingers over the books, with slightly knitted brows and a mouth severely shut. Langham, still standing, watched her and presently stepped forward.

‘You can’t reach those upper shelves,’ he said; ‘please let me.’

He was already beside her, and she gave way.

‘I want “Charles Auchester,”‘ she said, still forbiddingly. It ought to be there.’

‘Oh, that queer musical novel–I know it quite well. No sign of it here,’ and he ran over the shelves with the practised eye of one accustomed to deal with books.

‘Robert must have lent it,’ said Rose, with a little sigh. ‘Never mind, please. It doesn’t matter,’ and she was already moving away.

‘Try some other, instead,’ he said, smiling, his arm still upstretched. ‘Robert has no lack of choice.’ His manner had an animation and ease usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a little.

‘He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced at last to stealing the servant’s “Family Herald” out of the kitchen cupboard,’ she said, a smile dawning.

Langham laughed.

‘Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact that when he and I begin to task novels I am always nowhere.’

‘I shouldn’t have supposed you ever read them,’ said Rose, obeying an irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterward.

‘Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to works on the “enclitic de**”?’ he asked, his fine eyes lit up with gayety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily so much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against the books behind him.

Natures like Langham’s, in which the nerves are never normal, have their moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of timidity and depression. After his melancholy of the last two days, the tide of reaction had been mounting within him, and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height.

She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What had happened to Robert’s silent and finicking friend?

‘I know nothing of Oxford,’ she said a little primly, in answer to his question. ‘I never was there–but I never was anywhere, I have seen nothing,’ she added hastily, and, as Langham thought, bitterly.

‘Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforets!’ he answered, laughing. ‘Is that so little?’

She flashed a quick, defiant look at him, as he mentioned Madame Desforets, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. She could not help softening toward him. What magic had passed over him?

‘Do you know,’ said Langham, moving, ‘that you are standing in a draught, and that it has turned extremely cold?’

For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and as the window was partially open the curtains were swaying hither and thither, and her muslin dress was being blown in coils round her feet.

‘So it has,’ said Rose, shivering. ‘I don’t envy the Church people. You haven’t found me a book, Mr. Langham!’

‘I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read it by the fire,’ he said, with his hand on the door.

She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath quickened. She too had passed into another phase. Was it the natural effect of night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she sank softly into the armchair opposite to that in which he had been sitting.

‘Find me an exciting one, please.’

Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the bookcase, his hand trembling a little as it passed along the books. He found ‘Villette’ and offered it to her. She took it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at once. He took the hint and went back to his Montaigne.

The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every now and then a sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying away again as abruptly as it had risen. Rose turned the pages of her book, sitting a little stiffly in her long chair, and Langham gradually began to find Montaigne impossible to read. He became instead more and more alive to every detail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and thrust the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose hastily withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up.

‘I am so sorry!’ he interjected. ‘Coals never do what you want them to do. Are you very much interested in “Villette”?’

‘Deeply,’ said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her lap. She laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did her best to check, half way through. What ailed her to-night? She seemed wearied; for the moment there was no fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty, her mutinous, mocking gayety–these things had all worked on the man beside her; but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was adorable.

‘Charlotte Bronte wrote it out of her Brussels experience, didn’t She?’ she resumed languidly. ‘How sorry she must have been to come back to that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!’

‘There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come back,’ said Langham, reflectively, ‘But how she pined for her wilds all through! I am afraid you don’t find your wilds as interesting as she found hers?’

His question and his smile startled her.

Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so personal, so manly. Instead, ‘Villette’ slid a little further from her hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back against the cushion.

‘No, I don’t find my wilds interesting at all,’ she said forlornly. ‘You are not fond of the people, as your sister is?’

‘Fond of them?’ cried Rose hastily. ‘I should think not; and what is more, they don’t like me. It is quite intolerable since Catherine left. I have so much more to do with them. My other sister and I have to do all her work. It is dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a genius for doing just what you do worst.’

The young girl’s hands fell across one another with a little impatient gesture. Langham had a movement of the most delightful compassion toward the petulant, childish creature. It was as though their relative positions had been in some mysterious way reversed. During their two days together she had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the mercy of her scornful, sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why, Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man’s natural advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to use it.

‘Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity?’ he said.

‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Rose irritably; ‘anything that has two legs and is ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.’

‘And _you_ want something quite different, something more exciting?’ he asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he dared something in thus pressing her, but dared it at least with his, wits about him. Rose met his look irresolutely, a little tremor of self-consciousness creeping over her.

‘Yes, I want something different,’ she said in a low voice and paused; then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her hands round her knees. ‘But it is not idleness I want. I want to work, but at things I was born for; I can’t have patience with old women, but I could slave all day and all night to play the violin.’

You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?’ he said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play with her rings.

That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine’s sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly gentleness.

‘But it is all so difficult, you see,’ she said despairingly. ‘Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to do.’

‘He would have changed with the times,’ said Langham.

‘I know he would,’ cried Rose. ‘I have told Catherine so a hundred times. People–good people–think quite differently about art now, don’t they, Mr. Langham?

She spoke with perfect _naivete_. He saw more and more of the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.

‘They call it the handmaid of religion,’ he answered, smiling.

Rose made a little face.

‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, with frank brevity. ‘But then there’s something else. You know where we live–at the very ends of the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What’s to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa died I’ve just been plotting and planning to get away. But there’s the difficulty,’–and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid out her case. ‘That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns ever since–the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can’t ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a dreadful, dreadful mistake!’ cried the child, letting her hands fall over her knee.

‘Had he been so happy there?’

‘Happy!–and Rose’s lip curled. ‘His brothers used to kick and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day’s peace till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_ have made him so fond of it?’

And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off perversity of her father’s.

‘Blood has strange magnetisms,’ said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, ‘and they show themselves in the oddest ways.’

‘Then I wish they wouldn’t,’ she said irritably. ‘But that isn’t all. He went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated other places. I think he must have thought’–and her voice dropped–‘he wasn’t going to live long–he wasn’t well when he gave up the school–and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of getting into mischief. Catherine says be thought the world was getting very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him to know that we should be out of it.’

Then she broke off suddenly.

‘Do you know,’ she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her companion, ‘after all, he gave me my first violin?’

Langham smiled.

‘I like that little inconsequence,’ he said.

‘Then of course I took to it, like a cluck to water, and it began to scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion, and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor, because I mightn’t have it. Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid around his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed again-on Sundays!’

Her companion’s eyes were not quite as clear as before.

‘Poor little naughty child,’ he said, bending over to her. ‘I think your father must have been a man to be loved.’

She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face working with a soft remorse.

‘Oh, so he was–so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why it would have been much easier for me, but he was so good! And there was Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see what a chain it’s been–what a weight! And as I must struggle–_must_, because I was I–to get back into the world on the other side of the mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why I have been a criminal all my life! And that isn’t exhilarating always.’

And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick, over-tragic emotion of nineteen.

‘I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play yesterday,’ he said gently.

She started.

‘_Did_ you hear me–that Wagner?’

He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.

‘Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.’

He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say ‘I am not quite the mummy you thought me, after all!’ And she colored slightly.

‘I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play often; and it seemed to me that with time–and work–you might play as well as any of them.’

The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.

‘And I can’t help thinking,’ he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own _role_ of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, ‘that if your father had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.’

‘Catherine hasn’t moved with the times,’ said Rose dolefully.

Langham was silent. _Gaucherie_ seized him again when it became a question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently emphatic.

‘And you think,’ she went on, ‘you _really_ think, without being too ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts’–and a little laugh danced through the vibrating voice–‘I might try and get them to give up Burwood–I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one can’t help having qualms, though one doesn’t tell them to one’s sisters and cousins and aunts. And sometimes’–she turned her chin round on her hand and looked at him with a delicious,