only left her two fingers for her guests. The mistress of the Hall–as diminutive and elf-like as ever in spite of the added dignity of her sweeping silk and the draperies of black lace with which her tiny head was adorned–kept tight hold of Catherine, and called a gentleman standing in a group just behind her.
‘Roger, here are Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere. Mr. Elsmere, the Squire remembers you in petticoats, and I’m not sure that I don’t, too.’
Robert, smiling, looked beyond her to the advancing figure of the Squire, but if Mr. Wendover heard his sister’s remark he took no notice of it. He held out his hand stiffly to Robert, bowed to Catherine and Rose before extending to them the same formal greeting, and just recognized Langham as having met him at Oxford.
Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with whom he had been engaged on their entrance. His manner had been reserve itself. The _hauteur_ of the grandee on his own ground was clearly marked in it, and Robert could not help fancying that toward himself there had even been something more. And not one of those phrases which, under the circumstances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to Robert’s childish connection with the place, or as to the Squire’s remembrance of his father, even though Mrs. Darcy had given him a special opening of the kind.
The young Rector instinctively drew himself together, like one who had received a blow, as he moved across to the other side of the fireplace to shake hands with the worthy family doctor, old Meyrick, who was already well known to him. Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too had felt their reception at the Squire’s hands to be a chilling one, sat down to talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose and Langham, left to themselves, were practically tete-a-tete, and that, moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial screen between her and them. She could see, however, the gleam of Rose’s upstretched neck, as Langham, who was leaning on the piano beside her, bent down to talk to her; and when she looked next she caught a smiling motion of Langham’s head and eyes toward the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover’s grandmother, and was certain when he stopped afterward to say something to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture. Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty.
The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the Squire–a tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her relationships, her audacity, and the salon which in one way or another she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking husband; two neighboring clerics–the first, by name Longstaffe, a somewhat inferior specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked; and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men who help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to reconcile the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries of living.
Lady Charlotte was already known by name to the Elsmeres as the aunt of one of their chief friends of the neighborhood–the wife of a neighboring squire whose property joined that of Murewell Hall, one Lady Helen Varley, of whom more presently. Lady Charlotte was the sister of the Duke of Sedbergh, one of the greatest of Dukes, and the sister also of Lady Helen’s mother, lady Wanless. Lady Wanless had died prematurely, and her two younger children, Helen and Hugh Flaxman, creatures both of them of unusually fine and fiery quality, had owed a good deal to their aunt. There were family alliances between the Sedberghs and the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping up with the Squire. She adored cynics and people who said piquant things, and it amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the Squire’s timid, crackbrained, ridiculous little sister.
As to Dr. Meyrick, he was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. His gray hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed head; he wore an old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had a perpetual stoop, as though of deference, and his spectacled look of mild attentiveness had nothing in common with that medical self-assurance with which we are all nowadays so familiar. Robert noticed presently that when he addressed Mrs. Darcy he said ‘Ma’am,’ making no bones at all about it; and his manner generally was the manner of one to whom class distinctions were the profoundest reality, and no burden at all on a naturally humble temper. Dr. Baker, of Whindale, accustomed to trouncing Mrs. Seaton, would have thought him a poor creature.
When dinner was announced, Robert found himself assigned to Mrs. Darcy; the Squire took Lady Charlotte. Catherine fell to Mr. Bickerton, Rose to Mr. Wynnstay, and the rest found their way in as best they could. Catherine seeing the distribution was happy for a moment, till she found that if Rose was covered on her right she was exposed to the full fire of the enemy on her left, in other words that Langham was placed between her and Dr. Meyrick.
‘Are your spirits damped at all by this magnificence?’ Langham said to his neighbor as they sat down. The table was entirely covered with Japanese lilies, save for the splendid silver candelabra from which the light flashed, first on to the faces of the guests, and then on to those of the family portraits hung thickly round the room. A roof embossed with gilded Tudor roses on a ground of black oak hung above them; a rose-water dish in which the Merry Monarch had once dipped his hands, and which bore a record of the fact in the inscription on its sides, stood before them; and the servants were distributing to each guest silver soup-plates which had been the gift of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, in some moment of generosity or calculation, to the Wendover of her day.
‘Oh dear no!’ said Rose carelessly. ‘I don’t know how it is, I think I must have been born for a palace.’
Langham looked at her, at the daring harmony of color made by the reddish gold of her hair, the warm whiteness of her skin, and the brown-pink tints of her dress, at the crystals playing the part of diamonds on her beautiful neck, and remembered Robert’s remarks to him. The same irony mingled with the same bitterness returned to him, and the elder brother’s attitude became once more temporarily difficult. ‘Who is your neighbor?’ he inquired of her presently.
‘Lady Charlotte’s husband,’ she answered mischievously, under her breath. ‘One needn’t know much more about him, I imagine!’
‘And that man opposite?’
‘Robert’s pet aversion,’ she said calmly, without a change of countenance, so that Mr. Longstaffe opposite, who was studying her as he always studied pretty young women, stared at her through her remark in sublime ignorance of its bearing.
‘And your sister’s neighbor?’
‘I can’t hit him off in a sentence, he’s too good!’ said Rose laughing; ‘all I can say is that Mrs. Bickerton has too many children, and the children have too many ailments for her ever to dine out.’
‘That will do; I see the existence,’ said Langham with a shrug. ‘But he has the look of an apostle, though a rather hunted one. Probably nobody here, except Robert, is fit to tie his shoes.’
The Squire could hardly be called _empresse_,’ said Rose, after a second, with a curl of her red lips. Mr. Wynnstay was still safely engaged with Mrs. Darcy, and there was a buzz of talk largely sustained by Lady Charlotte.
‘No,’ Langham admitted; ‘the manners I thought were not quite equal to the house.’
‘What possible reason could he have for treating Robert with those airs?’ said Rose indignantly, ready enough, in girl fashion, to defend her belongings against the outer world. ‘He ought to be only too glad to have the opportunity of knowing him and making friends with him.’
‘You are a sister worth having;’ and Langham smiled at her as she leant back in her chair, her white arms and wrists lying on her lap, and her slightly flushed face turned toward him. They had been on these pleasant terms of _camaraderie_ all day, and the intimacy between them had been still making strides.
‘Do you imagine I don’t appreciate Robert because I make bad jokes about the choir and the clothing club?’ she asked him, with a little quick repentance passing like a shadow through her eyes. ‘I always feel I play an odious part here. I can’t like it–I can’t–their life. I should hate it! And yet–‘
She sighed remorsefully and Langham, who five minutes before could have wished her to be always smiling, could now have almost asked to fix her as she was: the eyes veiled, the soft lips relaxed in this passing instant of gravity.
‘Ah! I forgot–‘ and she looked up again with light, bewitching appeal–‘there is still that question, my poor little question of Sunday night, when I was in that fine moral frame of mind and you were near giving me, I believe, the only good advice you ever gave in your life;–how shamefully you have treated it!’
One brilliant look, which Catherine for her torment caught from the other side of the table, and then in an instant the quick face changed and stiffened. Mr. Wynnstay was speaking to her, and Langham was left to the intermittent mercies of Dr. Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was also quite content, apparently, to judge from the radiant placidity of his look, to examine his wine, study his _menu_, and enjoy the _entrees_ in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of conversation.
Robert, meanwhile, during the first few minutes, in which Mr. Wynnstay had been engaged in some family talk with Mrs. Darcy, had been allowing himself a little deliberate study of Mr. Wendover across what seemed the safe distance of a long table. The Squire was talking shortly and abruptly yet with occasional flashes of shrill, ungainly laughter, to Lady Charlotte, who seemed to have no sort of fear of him and to find him good company, and every now and then Robert saw him turn to Catherine on the other side of him and with an obvious change of manner address some formal and constrained remark to her.
Mr. Wendover was a man of middle height and loose, bony frame, of which, as Robert had noticed in the drawing-room, all the lower half had a thin and shrunken look. But the shoulders, which had the scholar’s stoop, and the head were massive and squarely outlined. The head was specially remarkable for its great breadth and comparative flatness above the eyes, and for the way in which the head itself dwarfed the face, which, as contrasted with the large angularity of the skull, had a pinched and drawn look. The hair was reddish-gray, the eyes small, but deep-set under fine brows, and the thin-lipped wrinkled mouth and long chin had a look of hard, sarcastic strength.
Generally the countenance was that of an old man, the furrows were deep, the skin brown and shrivelled. But the alertness and force of the man’s whole expression showed that, if the body was beginning to fail, the mind was as fresh and masterful as ever. His hair, worn rather longer than usual, his loosely-fitting dress and slouching carriage gave him an un-English look. In general he impressed Robert as a sort of curious combination of the foreign _savant_ with the English grandee, for while his manner showed a considerable consciousness of birth and social importance, the gulf between him and the ordinary English country gentleman could hardly have been greater, whether in points of appearance or, as Robert very well knew, in points of social conduct. And as Robert watched him, his thoughts flew back again to the library, to this man’s past, to all that those eyes had seen and those hands had touched. He felt already a mysterious, almost a yearning, sense of acquaintance with the being who had just received him with such chilling, such unexpected indifference.
The Squire’s manners; no doubt, were notorious, but even so, his reception of the new Rector of the parish, the son of a man intimately connected for years with the place, and with his father, and to whom he had himself shown what was for him considerable civility by letter and message, was sufficiently startling.
Robert, however, had no time to speculate on the causes of it, for Mrs. Darcy, released from Mr. Wynnstay, threw herself with glee on to her longed-for prey, the young and interesting-looking Rector. First of all she cross-examined him as to his literary employments, and when by dint of much questioning she had forced particulars from him, Robert’s mouth twitched as he watched her scuttling away from the subject, seized evidently with internal terrors lest she should have precipitated herself beyond hope of rescue into the jaws of the sixth century. Then with a view to regaining the lead and opening another and more promising vein, she asked him his opinion of Lady Selden’s last novel, ‘Love in a Marsh;’ and when he confessed ignorance she paused a moment, fork in hand, her small wrinkled face looking almost as bewildered as when, three minutes before, her rashness had well-nigh brought her face to face with Gregory of Tours as a topic of conversation.
But she was not daunted long. With little air and bridlings infinitely diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most beguiling confidence. She could appreciate ‘clever men,’ she said, for she–she too–was literary. Did Mr. Elsmere know–this in a hurried whisper, with sidelong glances to see that Mr. Wynnstay was safely occupied with Rose, and the Squire with Lady Charlotte–that she had once _written a novel_?
Robert, who had been posted up in many things concerning the neighborhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most truly that he had. Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over.
‘Ah! but you haven’t read it,’ she said regretfully. ‘It was when I was Maid of Honor, you know. No Maid of Honor had ever written a novel before. It was quite an event. Dear Prince Albert borrowed a copy of me one night to read in bed–I have it still, with the page turned down where he left-off.’ She hesitated. ‘It was only in the second chapter,’ she said at last with a fine truthfulness, ‘but you know he was so busy, all the Queen’s work to do, of course, besides his own–poor man!’
Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, with blushes which made her more weird than ever, consented.
Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between Lady Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as grateful for his attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white nobody, at a country dinner-party ought to be, and was glad of the diversion afforded him by some aggressive remark of his wife. He and she differed on three main points: politics; the decoration of their London house, Sir. Wynnstay being a lover of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris; and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte in the pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the domestic hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a name for any sort of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity; and the company in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seriously soured a small irritable Conservative with more family pride than either nerves or digestion.
During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched Elsmere, cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burning within her, and as soon as there was once more a general burst of talk, she pounced upon him afresh. Would he like to know that after thirty years she had just finished her _second_ novel, unbeknown to her brother–as she mentioned him the little face darkened, took a strange bitterness–and it was just about to be entrusted to the post and a publisher?
Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. Mrs. Darcy expanded still more–could, in fact, have hugged him. But, just as she was launching into the plot a thought, apparently a scruple of conscience, struck her.
‘Do you remember,’ she began, looking at him a little darkly, askance, ‘what I said about my hobbies the other day? Now, Mr. Elsmere, will you tell me–don’t mind me–don’t be polite–have you ever heard people tell stories of me? Have you ever, for instance, heard them call me a–a–tuft-hunter?’
‘Never! ‘said Robert heartily.
‘They might,’ she said sighing. ‘I am a tuft-hunter. I can’t help it. And yet we _are_ a good family, you know. I suppose it was that year at Court, and that horrid Warham afterward. Twenty years in a cathedral town–and a very _little_ cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, and dear Lord Melbourne! Every year I came up to town to stay with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn’t been for that I should have died–my husband knew I should. It was the world, the flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn’t be helped. But now,’ and she looked plaintively at her companion, as though challenging him to a candid reply: ‘You _would_ be more interesting, wouldn’t you, to tell the truth, if you had a handle to your name?’
‘Immeasurably,’ cried Robert, stifling his laughter with immense difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh.
‘Well, yes, you know. But it isn’t right;’ and again she sighed. ‘And so I have been writing this novel just for that. It is called–what do you think?–“Mr. Jones.” Mr. Jones is my hero–it’s so good for me, you know, to think about a Mr. Jones.’
She looked beamingly at him. ‘It must be indeed! Have you endowed him with every virtue?’
‘Oh yes, and in the end, you know–‘ and she bent forward eagerly–‘it all comes right. His father didn’t die in Brazil without children after all, and the title–‘
‘What,’ cried Robert, ‘so he _wasn’t_ Mr. Jones?’
Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious.
‘Well, no,’ she said guiltily, ‘not just at the end. But it really doesn’t matter–not to the story.’
Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory as he could make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their little private eddy was effaced. The Squire had been telling an anecdote, and his clerical neighbors had been laughing at it.
‘Ah!’ cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a chuckle, ‘that was an Archbishop worth having!’
‘A curious story,’ said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it, however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed to Robert that the Squire’s keen eye, as he sat looking down the table, with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed upon himself.
‘May we hear the story?’ he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and moved out of her ordinary quiet.
‘It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,’ said Mr. Wendover, in his dry, nasal voice. ‘You probably know it, Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop Heber’s consecration to the see of Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop to make a valedictory speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth which followed the ceremony. “I have very little advice to give you as to your future career,” he said to the young Bishop, “but all that experience has given me I hand on to you. Place before your eyes two precepts, and two only. One is–Preach the Gospel; and the other is–_Put down enthusiasm!_”‘
There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the Squire’s look as he told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Robert. Robert divined in a moment that the story had been retold for his special benefit, and that in some unexplained way, the relations between him and the Squire were already biased. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and falling back into his place made no comment on the Squire’s anecdote. Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the distant figure of the Rector, with regard to whom she had been asking Dr. Meyrick for particulars quite unmindful of Catherine’s neighborhood, turned back again toward the Squire.
‘An unblushing old worldling, I should call your Archbishop,’ she said briskly, ‘and a very good thing for him that he lived when he did. Our modern good people would have dusted his apron for him.’
Lady Charlotte prided herself on these vigorous forms of speech, and the Squire’s neighborhood generally called out an unusual crop of them. The Squire was still sitting with his hands on the table, his great brows bent, surveying his guests.
‘Oh, of course all the sensible men are dead!’ he said indifferently. ‘But that is a pet saying of mine–the Church of England in a nutshell.’
Robert flushed, and after a moment’s hesitation bent forward.
‘What do you suppose,’ he asked quietly, your Archbishop meant, Mr. Wendover, by enthusiasm? Nonconformity, I imagine.’
‘Oh, very possibly!’ and again Robert found the hawk-like glance concentrated on himself. ‘But I like to give his remark a much wider extension. One may make it a maxim of general experience, and take it as fitting all the fools with a mission who have teased our generation–all your Kingsleys, and Maurices, and Ruskins–everyone bent on making any sort of aimless commotion, which may serve him both as an investment for the next world and an advertisement for this.’
‘Upon my word, Squire,’ said Lady Charlotte, ‘I hope you don’t expect Mr. Elsmere to agree with you?’
Mr. Wendover made her a little bow.
‘I have very little sanguineness of any sort in my composition,’ he said dryly.
‘I should like to know,’ said Robert, taking no notice of this by-play; ‘I should like to know, Mr. Wendover, leaving the Archbishop out of count, what _you_ understand by this word enthusiasm in this maxim of yours?’
‘An excellent manner,’ thought Lady Charlotte, who with all her noisiness, was an extremely shrewd woman, ‘an excellent manner and an unprovoked attack.’
Catherine’s trained eye, however, had detected signs in Robert’s look and bearing which were lost on Lady Charlotte, and which made her look nervously on. As to the rest of the table, they had all fallen to watching the ‘break’ between the new Rector and their host with a good deal of curiosity.
The Squire paused a moment before replying.
‘It is not easy to put it tersely,’ he said at last; ‘but I may define it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of your right-hand neighbor with straw torn off the roof of your left-hand neighbor; the custom, in short, of robbing Peter to propitiate Paul.’
‘Precisely,’ said Mr. Wynnstay, warmly; ‘all the ridiculous Radical nostrums of the last fifty years–you have hit them off exactly. Sometimes you rob more and propitiate less; sometimes you rob less and propitiate more. But the principle is always the same.’ And mindful of all those intolerable evenings, when these same Radical nostrums had been forced down his throat at his own table he threw a pugnacious look at his wife, who smiled back serenely in reply. There is small redress indeed for these things, when out of the common household stock the wife possesses most of the money, and a vast proportion of the brains.
‘And the cynic takes pleasure in observing,’ interrupted the Squire, ‘that the man who effects the change of balance does it in the loftiest manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.’
He spoke with a harsh contemptuous insistence which was gradually setting every nerve in Robert’s body tingling. He bent forward again, his long, thin frame and boyish, bright complexioned face making an effective contrast to the Squire’s bronzed and wrinkled squareness.
‘Oh, if you and Mr. Wynnstay are prepared to draw an indictment against your generation and all its works I have no more to say,’ he said, smiling still, though his voice had risen a little in spite of himself. ‘I should be content to withdraw with my Burke into the majority. I imagined your attack on enthusiasm had a narrower scope, but if it is to be made synonymous with social progress I give up. The subject is too big. Only—-‘
He hesitated. Mr. Wynnstay was studying him with somewhat insolent coolness; Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass never wavered from his face, and he felt through every fibre the tender, timid admonitions of his wife’s eyes.
‘However,’ he went on after an instant, ‘I imagine that we should find it difficult anyhow to discover common ground. I regard your Archbishop’s maxim, Mr. Wendover,’ and his tone quickened and grew louder, ‘as first of all a contradiction in terms; and in the next place, to me, almost all enthusiasms are respectable!’
‘You are one of those people, I see,’ returned Mr. Wendover, after a pause, with the same nasal emphasis and the same hauteur, ‘who imagine we owe civilization to the heart; that mankind has _felt_ its way–literally. The school of the majority, of course–I admit it amply. I, on the other hand, am with the benighted minority who believe that the world, so far as it has lived to any purpose, has lived by the head,’ and he flung, the noun at Robert scornfully. ‘But I am quite aware that in a world of claptrap the philosopher gets all the kicks, and the philanthropists, to give them their own label, all the halfpence.’
The impassive tone had gradually warmed to a heat which was unmistakable. Lady Charlotte looked on with interesting relish. To her all society was a comedy played for her entertainment, and she detected something more dramatic than usual in the juxtaposition of these two men. That young Rector might be worth looking after. The dinners in Martin Street were alarming in want of fresh blood. As for poor Mr. Bickerton, he had begun to talk hastily to Catherine, with a sense of something tumbling about his ears, while Mr. Longstaffe, eyeglass in hand, surveyed the table with a distinct sense of pleasurable entertainment. He had not seen much of Elsmere yet, but it was as clear as daylight that the man was a firebrand, and should be kept in order.
Meanwhile there was a pause between the two main disputants; the storm-clouds were deepening outside, and rain had begun to patter on the windows. Mrs. Darcy was just calling attention to the weather, when the Squire unexpectedly returned to the charge.
‘The one necessary thing in life,’ he said, turning to Lady Charlotte, a slight irritating smile playing round his strong mouth, ‘is–not to be duped. Put too much faith in these things the altruists talk of, and you arrive one day at the condition of Louis XIV. after the battle of Ramillies: “Dieu a donc oublie tout ce que j’ai fait pour lui?” Read your Renan; remind yourself at every turn that it is quite possible after all the egotist may turn out to be in the right of it, and you will find at any rate that the world gets on excellently well without your blundering efforts to set it straight. And so we get back to the Archbishop’s maxim–adapted, no doubt, to English requirements,’ and he shrugged his great shoulders expressively: ‘_Pace_ Mr. Elsmere, of course, and the rest of our clerical friends!’
Again he looked down the table, and the strident voice sounded harsher than ever as it rose above the sudden noise of the storm outside. Robert’s bright eyes were fixed on the Squire, and before Mr. Wendover stopped, Catherine could see the words of reply trembling on his lips.
‘I am well content,’ he said, with a curious dry intensity of tone. ‘I give you your Renan. Only leave us poor dupes our illusions. We will not quarrel with the division. With you all the cynics of History; with us all the “scorners of the ground” from the world’s beginning until now!’
The Squire made a quick, impatient movement. Mr. Wynnstay looked significantly at his wife, who dropped her eyeglass with a little irrepressible smile.
As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it seemed to him that his eyes and the Squire’s crossed like swords. In Robert’s mind there had arisen a sudden passion of antagonism. Before his eyes there was a vision of a child in a stifling room, struggling with mortal disease, imposed upon her, as he hotly reminded himself, by this man’s culpable neglect. The dinner-party, the splendor of the room, the conversation, excited a kind of disgust in him. If it were not for Catherine’s pale face opposite, he could hardly have maintained his self-control.
Mrs. Darcy, a little bewildered, and feeling that things were not going particularly well, thought it best to interfere.
‘Roger,’ she said, plaintively, ‘you must not be so philosophical. It’s too hot! He used to talk like that,’ she went on, bending over to Mr. Wynnstay, ‘to the French priests who came to see us last winter in Paris. They never minded a bit–they used to laugh: “Monsieur votre frere, madame, c’est un homme qui a trop lu,” they would say to me when I gave them their coffee. Oh, they were such dears, those old priests! Roger said they had great hopes of me.’
The chatter was welcome, the conversation broke up. The Squire turned to Lady Charlotte, and Rose to Langham.
‘Why didn’t you support Robert?’ she said to him, impulsively, with a dissatisfied face. ‘He was alone, against the table!’
‘What good should I have done him?’ he asked, with a shrug. ‘And pray, my lady confessor, what enthusiasms do you suspect me of?’
He looked at her intently. It seemed to her they were by the gate again–the touch of his lips on her hand. She turned from him hastily to stoop for her fan which had slipped away. It was only Catherine who, for her annoyance, saw the scarlet flush leap into the fair face. An instant later Mrs. Darcy had given the signal.
CHAPTER XVIII.
After dinner, Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Catherine, whose quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal of the dinner had impressed her, but a few minutes’ talk produced in her the conviction that without a good deal of pains–and why should a Londoner, accustomed to the cream of things, take pains with a country clergyman’s wife?–she was not likely to get much out of her. Her appearance, promised more, Lady Charlotte thought, than her conversation justified, and she looked about for easier game.
‘Are you. Mr. Elsmere’s sister?’ said a loud voice over Rose’s head; and Rose, who had been turning over an illustrated book, with a mind wholly detached from it, looked up to see Lady Charlotte’s massive form standing over her.
‘No, his sister-in-law,’ said Rose, flushing in spite of herself, for Lady Charlotte was distinctly formidable.
‘Hum,’ said her questioner, depositing herself beside her. ‘I never saw two sisters more unlike. You have got a very argumentative brother-in-law.’
Rose said nothing, partly from awkwardness, partly from rising antagonism.
‘Did you agree with him?’ asked Lady Charlotte, putting up her glass and remorselessly studying every detail of the pink dress, its ornaments, and the slippered feet peeping out beneath it.
‘Entirely,’ said Rose fearlessly, looking her full in the face.
‘And what can you know about it, I wonder? However, you are on the right side’. It is the fashion nowadays to have enthusiasms. I suppose you muddle about among the poor like other people?’
‘I know nothing about the poor,’ said Rose.
‘Oh, then, I suppose you feel yourself effective enough in some other line?’ said the other, coolly. ‘What is it–lawn tennis, or private theatricals, or–h’em–prettiness?’ And again the eyeglass went up.
‘Whichever you like,’ said Rose, calmly, the scarlet on her cheek deepening, while she resolutely reopened her book. The manner of the other had quite effaced in her all that sense of obligation, as from the young to the old, which she had been very carefully brought up in. Never had she beheld such an extraordinary woman.
‘Don’t read,’ said Lady Charlotte complacently. ‘Look at me. It’s your duty to talk to me, you know; and I won’t make myself any more disagreeable than I can help. I generally make myself disagreeable, and yet, after all, there are a great many people who like me.’
Rose turned a countenance rippling with suppressed laughter on her companion. Lady Charlotte had a large fair face, with a great deal of nose and chin, and an erection of lace and feathers on her head that seemed in excellent keeping with the masterful emphasis of those features. Her eyes stared frankly and unblushingly at the world, only softened at intervals by the glasses which were so used as to make them a most effective adjunct to her conversation. Socially she was absolutely devoid of weakness or of shame. She found society extremely interesting, and she always struck straight for the desirable thing in it, making short work of all those delicate tentative processes of acquaintanceship by which men and women ordinarily sort themselves. Roses brilliant, vivacious beauty had caught her eye at dinner; she adored beauty as she adored anything effective, and she always took a queer pleasure in bullying her way into a girl’s liking. It is a great thing to be persuaded that at bottom you have a good heart. Lady Charlotte was so persuaded, and allowed herself many things in consequence.
‘What shall we talk about?’ said Rose demurely. ‘What a magnificent old house this is!’
‘Stuff and nonsense! I don’t want to talk about the house. I am sick to death of it. And if your people live in the parish you are, too. I return to my question. Come, tell me, what is your particular line in life? I am sure you have one, by your face. You had better tell me; it will do you no harm.’
Lady Charlotte settled herself comfortably on the sofa, and Rose, seeing that there was no chance of escaping her tormentor, felt her spirits rise to an encounter.
‘Really–Lady Charlotte–‘ and she looked down, and then up, with a feigned bashfulness–‘I–I–play a little.’
‘Humph!’ said her questioner again, rather disconcerted by the obvious missishness of the answer. ‘You do, do you? More’s the pity. No woman who respects herself ought to play the piano nowadays. A professional told me the other day that until nineteen-twentieths of the profession were strung up, there would be no chance for the rest, and, as for amateurs, there is simply _no_ room for them whatever. I don’t conceive anything more passe than amateur pianoforte playing!’
‘I don’t play the piano,’ said Rose, meekly.
‘What–the fashionable instrument, the banjo?’ laughed Lady Charlotte. ‘That would be really striking.’
Rose was silent again, the corners of her month twitching.
‘Mrs. Darcy,’ said her neighbor raising her voice. ‘This young lady tells me she plays something; what is it?’
Mrs. Darcy looked in a rather helpless way at Catherine. She was dreadfully afraid of Lady Charlotte.
Catherine, with a curious reluctance, gave the required information, and then Lady Charlotte insisted that the violin should be sent for, as it had not been brought.
‘Who accompanies you?’ she inquired of Rose.
‘Mr. Langham plays very well,’ said Rose, indifferently.
Lady Charlotte raised her eyebrows. ‘That dark, Byronic-looking creature who came with you? I should not have imagined him capable of anything sociable. Letitia, shall I send my maid to the Rectory, or can you spare a man?’
Mrs. Darcy hurriedly gave orders, and Rose, inwardly furious, was obliged to submit. Then Lady Charlotte, having gained her point, and secured a certain amount of diversion for the evening, lay back on the sofa, used her fan, and yawned till the gentlemen appeared.
When they came in, the precious violin which Rose never trusted to any other hands but her own without trepidation had just arrived, and its owner, more erect than usual, because more nervous, was trying to prop up a dilapidated music-stand which Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As Langham came in, she looked up and beckoned to him.
‘Do you see?’ she said to him impatiently, ‘They have made me play. Will you accompany me? I am very sorry, but there is no one else.’
If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, it was any sort of performance in public. But the half-plaintive look which accompanied her last words showed that she knew it, and he did his best to be amiable.
‘I am altogether at your service,’ he said, sitting down with resignation.
‘It is all that tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,’ she whispered to him behind the music-stand. I never saw such a person in my life.’
‘Macaulay’s Lady, Holland without the brains,’ suggested Langham with languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note.
Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the Squire sauntered in together.
‘A village Norman-Neruda?’ whispered the guest to the host. The Squire shrugged his shoulders.
‘Hush!’ said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. Mr. Wynnstay’s smile instantly disappeared; he leant against the doorway and stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musicians began, on some Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had not played twenty bars before the attention of everyone in the room was more or less seized–unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children, good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when it would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him back to his pale overweighted spouse.
First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage, non-European; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern feeling.
‘Ah, but _excellent!_’ said Lady Charlotte once, under her breath, at a pause; ‘and what _entrain_–what beauty!’
For Rose’s figure was standing thrown out against the dusky blue of the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every curve, every grace, each tint–hair and cheek and gleaming arm gained an enchanting picturelike distinctness. There was jessamine at her waist and among the gold of her hair; the crystals on her neck, and on the little shoe thrown forward beyond her dress, caught the lamplight.
‘How can that man play with her and not fall in love with her?’ thought Lady Charlotte to herself, with a sigh perhaps for her own youth. ‘He looks cool enough, however; the typical don with his nose in the Air!’
Then the slow, passionate sweetness of the music swept her away with it, she being in her way a connoisseur, and she ceased to speculate. When the sounds ceased there was silence for a moment. Mrs. Darcy, who had a piano in her sitting-room whereon she strummed every morning with her tiny rheumatic fingers, and who had, as we know, strange little veins of sentiment running all about her, stared at Rose with open mouth. So did Catherine. Perhaps it was then for the first time that, touched by this publicity this contagion of other people’s feelings, Catherine realized fully against what a depth of stream she had been building her useless barriers.
‘More! More!’ cried Lady Charlotte.
The whole room seconded the demand save the Squire and Mr. Bickerton. They withdrew together into a distant oriel. Robert, who was delighted with his little sister-in-law’s success, went smiling to talk of it to Mrs. Darcy, while Catherine with a gentle coldness answered Mr. Longstaffe’s questions on the same theme.
‘Shall we?’ said Rose, panting a little, but radiant–looking down on her companion.
‘Command me!’ he said, his grave lips slightly smiling, his eyes taking in the same vision that had charmed Lady Charlotte’s. What a ‘child of grace and genius!’
‘But do you like it?’ she persisted.
‘Like it–like accompanying your playing?’
‘Oh no,’–impatiently; ‘showing off, I mean. I am quite ready to stop.’
‘Go on; go on!’ he said, laying his finger on the A. ‘You have driven all my _mauvaise honte_ away. I have not heard you play so splendidly yet.’
She flushed all over. ‘Then we will go on,’ she said briefly.
So they plunged again into an Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven. How the girl threw herself into it, bringing out the wailing love-song of the Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which set every nerve in Langham vibrating! Yet the art of it was wholly unconscious. The music was the mere natural voice of her inmost self. A comparison full of excitement was going on in that self between her first impressions of the man beside her, and her consciousness of him, as he seemed to-night human, sympathetic, kind. A blissful sense of a mission filled the young silly soul. Like David, she was pitting herself and her gift against those dark powers which may invade and paralyze a life.
After the shouts of applause at the end had yielded to a burst of talk, in the midst of which Lady Charlotte, with exquisite infelicity, might have been heard laying down the law to Catherine as to how her sister’s remarkable musical powers might be best perfected, Langham turned to his companion,–
‘Do you know that for years I have enjoyed nothing so much as the music of the last two days?’
His black eyes shone upon her, transfused with something infinitely soft and friendly. She smiled. ‘How little I imagined that first evening that you cared for music!’
‘Or about anything else worth caring for?’ he asked her, laughing, but with always that little melancholy note in the laugh.
‘Oh, if you like,’ she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. ‘I believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, when you weren’t reading “Hamlet” in the corner, about the arrangements for women’s education at Oxford.’
‘Could I have found a more respectable subject?’ he inquired of her.
‘The adjective is excellent,’ she said with a little face, as she put her violin into its case. ‘If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing, English history, the Catechism, and “Paradise Lost.”–I taught myself French at seventeen, because one Moliere wrote plays in it, and German because of Wagner. But they are _my_ French and _my_ German. I wouldn’t advise anybody else to steal them!’
Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl’s agile fingers.
‘I wonder,’ he said at last, slowly, ‘when I shall play that Beethoven again?’
‘To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,’ she said dryly; ‘we murdered one or two passages in fine style.’
He looked at her, startled. ‘But I go by the morning train!’ There was an instant silence. Then the violin case shut with a snap.
‘I thought it was to be Saturday,’ she said abruptly.
‘No,’ he answered with a sigh, ‘it was always Friday. There is a meeting in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.’
‘Then we shan’t finish these Hungarian duets,’ she said slowly, turning away from him to collect some music on the piano.
Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its _ennuis_, its moments of delightful intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare, monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity.
‘No, we shall finish nothing,’ he said in a voice which only she could hear, his hands lying on the keys; ‘there are some whose destiny it is never to finish–never to have enough–to leave the feast on the tables and all the edges of life ragged!’
Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, from the group Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves were all unsteady with music and feeling, and the face looking down on him had grown pale.
‘We make our own destiny,’ she said impatiently. ‘_We_ choose. It is all our own doing. Perhaps destiny begins things–friendship, for instance; but afterward it is absurd to talk of anything but ourselves. We keep our friends, our chances, our–our joys,’ she went on hurriedly, trying desperately to generalize, ‘or we throw them away wilfully, because we choose.’
Their eyes were riveted on each other.
‘Not wilfully,’ he said under his breath. ‘But–no matter. May I take you at your word, Miss Leyburn? Wretched shirker that I am, whom even Robert’s charity despairs of: have I made a friend? Can I keep her?’
Extraordinary spell of the dark effeminate face–of its rare smile! The girl forgot all pride, all discretion. ‘Try,’ she whispered, and as his hand, stretching along the keyboard, instinctively felt for hers, for one instant–and another, and another–she gave it to him.
‘Albert, come here!’ exclaimed Lady Charlotte, beckoning to her husband; and Albert, though with a bad grace, ‘obeyed. ‘Just go and ask that girl to come and talk with me, will you? Why on earth didn’t you make friends with her at dinner?’
The husband made some irritable answer, and the wife laughed.
‘Just like you!’ she said, with a good humor which seemed to him solely caused by the fact of his non-success with the beauty at table. ‘You always expect to kill at the first stroke. I mean to take her in tow. Go and bring her here.’
Mr. Wynnstay sauntered off with as much dignity as his stature was capable of. He found Rose tying up her music at one end of the piano, while Langham was preparing to shut up the keyboard.
There was something appeasing in the girl’s handsomeness. Mr. Wynnstay laid down his airs, paid her various compliments, and led her off to Lady Charlotte.
Langham stood by the piano, lost in a kind of miserable dream. Mrs. Darcy fluttered up to him.
‘Oh, Mr. Langham, you play so _beautifully!_ Do Play a solo!’
He subsided onto the music-bench obediently. On any ordinary occasion tortures could not have induced him to perform in a room full of strangers. He had far too lively and fastidious a sense of the futility of the amateur.
But he played-what, he knew not. Nobody listened but Mrs. Darcy, who sat lost in an armchair a little way off, her tiny foot beating time. Rose stopped talking, started, tried to listen. But Lady Charlotte had had enough music, and so had Mr. Longstaffe, who was endeavoring to joke himself into the good graces of the Duke of Sedbergh’s sister. The din of conversation rose at the challenge of the piano, and Langham was soon overcrowded.
Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player’s inward tumult was so great, that what his hands did he hardly knew or cared. He felt himself the greatest criminal unhung. Saddenly, through all that wilful mist of epicurean feeling, which had been enwrapping him, there had pierced a sharp illumining beam from a girl’s eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with tenderness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing degeneracy of every moral muscle led him to now? What! smile and talk, and smile–and be a villain all the time? What! encroach on a young life, like some creeping parasitic growth, taking all, able to give nothing in return–not even one genuine spark of genuine passion? Go philandering on till a child of nineteen shows you her warm impulsive heart, play on her imagination, on her pity, safe all the while in the reflection that by the next day you will be far away, and her task and yours will be alike to forget! He shrinks from himself as one shrinks from a man capable of injuring anything weak and helpless. To despise the world’s social code, and then to fall conspicuously below its simplest articles; to aim at being pure intelligence, pure open-eyed rationality, and not even to succeed in being a gentleman, as the poor commonplace world understands it! Oh, to fall at her pardon before parting for ever! But no–no more posing; no more dramatizing. How can he get away most quietly–make least sign? The thought of that walk home in the darkness fills him with a passion of irritable impatience.
‘Look at that Romney, Mr. Elsmere; just look at it!’ cried Dr. Meyrick excitedly; ‘did you ever see anything finer? There was one of those London dealer fellows down here last summer offered the Squire four thousand pounds down on the nail for it.’
In this way Meyrick had been taking Robert round the drawing-room, doing the honors of every stick and stone in it, his eyeglass in his eye, his thin old face shining with pride over the Wendover possessions. And so the two gradually neared the oriel where the Squire and Mr. Bickerton were standing.
Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation with the Squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve in him was still tingling with anger, he had done his best to keep up indifferent talk on local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly he was asking himself whether he could ever sit at the Squire’s table and eat his bread again. It seemed to him that they had had a brush which would be difficult to forget. And as he sat there before the Squire’s wine, hot with righteous heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord crowded upon him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his inferiors and bully his equals!
But as the minutes passed on, the Rector had cooled down. The sweet, placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. ‘What, play your cards so badly, give up the game so rashly, the very first round? Nonsense! Patience and try again. There must be some cause in the background. No need to be white-livered, but every need, in the case of such a man as the Squire, to take no hasty, needless offence.’
So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick and he close to the Squire and his companion. The two men, as the Rector approached, were discussing some cases of common enclosure that had just taken place in the neighborhood. Robert listened a moment, then struck in. Presently, when the chat dropped, he began to express to the Squire his pleasure in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, courtesy itself, but without any trace of effusion.
‘I believe,’ he said at last, smiling, ‘my father used to be allowed the same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the way in which he clung to Murewell.’
‘I had never the honor of Mr. Edward Elsmere’s acquaintance,’ said the Squire frigidly. ‘During the time of his occupation of the Rectory I was not in England.’
‘I know. Do you still go much to Germany? Do you keep up your relations with Berlin?’
‘I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,’ said the Squire briefly, his eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on the man who ventured to question him about himself, uninvited. There was an awkward pause. Then the Squire turned again to Mr. Bickerton.
‘Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm of last February has brought down at the northeast corner of the park?’
Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the words themselves. The Squire had not yet addressed a single remark of any kind about Murewell to him. There was a deliberate intention to exclude implied in this appeal to the man who was not the man of the place, on such a local point, which struck Robert very forcibly.
He walked away to where his wife was sitting.
‘What time is it?’ whispered Catherine, looking up at him.
‘Time to go,’ he returned, smiling, but she caught the discomposure in his tone and look at once, and her wifely heart rose against the Squire. She got up, drawing herself together with a gesture that became her.
Then let us go at once,’ said she. ‘Where is Rose?’
A minute later there was a general leave-taking. Oddly enough it found the Squire in the midst of a conversation with Langham. As though to show more clearly that it was the Rector personally who was in his black books, Mr. Wendover had already devoted some cold attention to Catherine both at and after dinner, and he had no sooner routed Robert than he moved in his slouching way across from Mr. Bickerton to Langham. And now, another man altogether, he was talking and laughing–describing apparently a reception at the French Academy–the epigrams flying, the harsh face all lit up, the thin bony fingers gesticulating freely.
The husband and wife exchanged glances as they stood waiting, while lady Charlotte, in her loudest voice, was commanding Rose to come and see her in London any Thursday after the first of November. Robert was very sore. Catherine passionately felt it, and forgetting everything but him, longed to be out with him in the park comforting him.
‘What an absurd fuss you have been making about that girl,’ Wynnstay exclaimed to his wife as the Elsmere party left the room, the Squire conducting Catherine with a chill politeness. ‘And now, I suppose, you will be having her up in town, and making some young fellow who ought to know better fall in love with her. I am told the father was a grammar-school headmaster. Why can’t you leave people where they belong?’
‘I have already pointed out to you,’ Lady Charlotte observed calmly, ‘that the world has moved on since you were launched into it. I can’t keep up class-distinctions to please you; otherwise, no doubt, being the devoted wife I am, I might try. However, my dear, we both have our fancies. You collect Sevres china with or without a pedigree,’ and she coughed dryly; ‘I collect promising young women. On the whole, I think my hobby is more beneficial to you than yours is profitable to me.’
Mr. Wynnstay was furious. Only a week before he had been childishly, shamefully taken in by a Jew curiosity dealer from Vienna, to his wife’s huge amusement. If looks could have crushed her, Lady Charlotte would have been crushed. But she was far too substantial as she lay back in her chair, one large foot crossed over the other, and, as her husband very well knew, the better man of the two. He walked away, murmuring under his mustache words that would hardly have borne publicity, while Lady Charlotte, through her glasses, made a minute study of a little French portrait hanging some two yards from her.
Meanwhile the Elsmere party were stepping out into the warm damp of the night. The storm had died away, but a soft Scotch mist of rain filled the air. Everything was dark, save for a few ghostly glimmerings through the trees of the avenue; and there was a strong sweet smell of wet earth and grass. Rose had drawn the hood of her waterproof over her head, and her face gleamed an indistinct whiteness from its shelter. Oh this leaping pulse–this bright glow of expectation! How had she made that stupid blunder about his going? Oh, it was Catherine’s mistake, of course, at the beginning. But what matter? Here, they were in the dark, side by side, friends now, friends always. Catherine should not spoil their last walk together. She felt a passionate trust that he would not allow it.
‘Wifie!’ exclaimed Robert, drawing her a little apart, ‘do you know it has just occurred to me that, as I was going through the park this afternoon by the lower footpath, I crossed Henslowe coming away from the house. Of course this is what has happened! _He_ has told his story first. No doubt just before I met him he had been giving the Squire a full and particular account–_a la_ Henslowe–of my proceedings since I came. Henslowe lays it on thick–paints with a will. The Squire receives me afterward as the meddlesome, pragmatical priest he understands me to be; puts his foot down to begin with; and, _hinc illae lacrymae_. It’s as clear as daylight! I thought that man had an odd twist of the lip as he passed me.’
‘Then a disagreeable evening will be the worst of it,’ said Catherine proudly. ‘I imagine, Robert, you can defend yourself against that bad man?’
‘He has got the start; he has no scruples; and it remains to be seen whether the Squire has a heart to appeal to,’ replied the young Rector with sore reflectiveness. ‘Oh, Catherine, have you ever thought, wifie, what a business it will be for us if I can’t make friends with that man? Here we are at his gates–all our people in his power; the comfort, at any rate, of our social life depending on him. And what a strange, unmanageable, inexplicable being!’
Elsmere sighed aloud. Like all quick imaginative natures he was easily depressed, and the Squire’s sombre figure had for the moment darkened his whole horizon. Catherine laid her check against his arm in the darkness, consoling, remonstrating, every other thought lost in her sympathy with Robert’s worries. Langham and Rose slipped out of her head; Elsmere’s step had quickened as it always did when he was excited, and she kept up without thinking.
When Langham found the others had shot ahead in the darkness, and he and his neighbor were _tete-a-tete_, despair seized him. But for once he showed a sort of dreary presence of mind. Suddenly, while the girl beside him was floating in a golden dream of feeling he plunged with a stiff deliberation born of his inner conflict into a discussion of the German system of musical training. Rose, startled, made some vague and flippant reply. Langham pursued the matter. He had some information about it, it appeared, garnered up in his mind, which might perhaps some day prove useful to her. A St. Anselm’s undergraduate, one Dashwood, an old pupil of his, had been lately at Berlin for six months, studying at the Conservatorium. Not long ago, being anxious to become a schoolmaster, he had written to Langham for a testimonial. His letter had contained a full account of his musical life. Langham proceeded to recapitulate it.
His careful and precise report of hours, fees, masters, and methods lasted till they reached the park gate. He had the smallest powers of social acting, and his _role_ was dismally overdone. The girl beside him could not know that he was really defending her from himself. His cold altered manner merely seemed to her a sudden and marked withdrawal of his petition for her friendship. No doubt she had received that petition too effusively–and he wished there should be no mistake.
What a young smarting soul went through in that half mile of listening is better guessed than analyzed. There are certain moments of shame, which only women know, and which seem to sting and burn out of youth all its natural sweet self-love. A woman may outlive them, but never forget them. If she pass through one at nineteen her cheek will grow hot over it at seventy. Her companion’s measured tone, the flow of deliberate speech which came from him, the nervous aloofness of his attitude–every detail in that walk seemed to Rose’s excited sense an insult.
As the park gate swung behind them she felt a sick longing for Catherine’s shelter. Then all the pride in her rushed to the rescue and held that swooning dismay at the heart of her in check. And forthwith she capped Langham’s minute account of the scale-method of a famous Berlin pianist by some witty stories of the latest London prodigy, a child-violinist, incredibly gifted, dirty, and greedy, whom she had made friends with in town. The girl’s voice ran out sharp and hard under the trees. Where, in fortune’s name, were the lights of the Rectory? Would this nightmare never come to an end?
At the Rectory gate was Catherine waiting for them, her whole soul one repentant alarm.
‘Mr. Langham, Robert has gone to the study; will you go and smoke with him?’
‘By all means. Good-night, then, Mrs. Elsmere.’
Catherine gave him her hand. Rose was trying hard to fit the lock of the gate into the hasp, and had no hand free. Besides, he did not approach her.
‘Good-night!’ she said to him over her shoulder.
‘Oh, and Mr. Langham!’ Catherine called after him as he strode away, ‘will you settle with Robert about the carriage?’
He turned, made a sound of assent, and went on.
‘When?’ asked Rose lightly.
‘For the nine-o’clock train.’
‘There should be a law against interfering with people’s breakfast hour,’ said Rose; ‘though, to, be sure, a guest may as well get himself gone early and be done with it. How you and Robert raced, Cathie! We did our best to catch you up, but the pace was too good.’
Was there a wild taunt, a spice of malice in the girl’s reckless voice? Catherine could not see her in the darkness, but the sister felt a sudden trouble invade her.
‘Rose darling, you are not tired?’
‘Oh dear no! Good-night, sleep well. What a goose Mrs. Darcy is!’
And, barely submitting to be kissed, Rose ran up the steps and upstairs.
Langham and Robert smoked till midnight. Langham for the first time gave Elsmere an outline of his plans for the future, and Robert, filled with dismay at this final breach with Oxford and human society, and the only form of practical life possible to such a man, threw himself into protests more and more vigorous and affectionate. Langham listened to them at first with sombre silence, then with an impatience which gradually reduced Robert to a sore puffing at his pipe. There was a long space during which they sat together, the ashes of the little fire Robert had made dropping on the hearth, and not a word on either side.
At last Elsmere could not bear it, and when midnight struck he sprang up with an impatient shake of his long body, and Langham took the hint, gave him a cold good-night, and went.
As the door shut upon him, Robert dropped back into his chair, and sat on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the fire. It seemed to him the world was going crookedly. A day on which a man of singularly open and responsive temper makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than ever before to losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the calendar, and by way of aggravation, a Robert Elsmere says to himself at once, that somehow or other there must be fault of his own in the matter.
Rose!–pshaw! Catherine little knows what stuff that cold, intangible soul is made of.
Meanwhile, Langham was standing heavily, looking out into the night. The different elements in the mountain of discomfort that weighed upon him were so many that the weary mind made no attempt to analyze them. He had a sense of disgrace, of having stabbed something gentle that had leant upon him, mingled with a strong intermittent feeling of unutterable relief. Perhaps his keenest regret was that, after all it had not been love! He had offered himself up to a girl’s just contempt, but he had no recompense in the shape of a great addition to knowledge, to experience. Save for a few doubtful moments at the beginning, when he had all but surprised himself in something more poignant, what he had been conscious of had been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of sentiment, a subtle surrender to one exquisite aesthetic impression after another. And these things in other relations, the world had yielded him before.
‘Am I sane?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Have I ever been sane? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives and other men’s is too great to be normal. Well at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing penance in the desert.’
He threw himself down beside the open window with a groan. An hour later he lifted a face blanched and lined, and stretched out his band with avidity toward a book on the table. It was an obscure and difficult Greek text, and he spent the greater part of the night over it, rekindling in himself with feverish haste the embers of his one lasting passion.
Meanwhile, in a room overhead, another last scene in this most futile of dramas was passing. Rose, when she came in, had locked the door, torn off her dress and her ornaments, and flung herself on the edge of her bed, her hands on her knees, her shoulders drooping, a fierce red spot on either cheek. There for an indefinite time she went through a torture of self-scorn. The incidents of the week passed before her one by one; her sallies, her defiances, her impulsive friendliness, the elan, the happiness of the last two days, the self-abandonment of this evening. Oh, intolerable–intolerable!
And all to end with the intimation that she had been behaving like a forward child–had gone too far and must be admonished–made to feel accordingly! The poisoned arrow pierced deeper and deeper into the girl’s shrinking pride. The very foundations of self-respect seemed overthrown.
Suddenly her eye caught a dim and ghostly reflection of her own figure, as she sat with locked hands on the edge of the bed, in a long glass near, the only one of the kind which the Rectory household possessed. Rose sprang up, snatched at the candle, which was flickering in the air of the open window, and stood erect before the glass, holding the candle above her heart.
What the light showed her was a slim form in a white dressing-gown, that fell loosely about it; a rounded arm up-stretched; a head, still crowned with its jessamine wreath, from which the bright hair fell heavily over shoulders and bosom; eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud challenge at what they saw; two lips, ‘indifferent red’ just open to let the quick breath come through–all thrown into the wildest chiaroscuro by the wavering candle flame.
Her challenge was answered. The fault was not there. Her arm dropped. She put down the light.
‘I _am_ handsome,’ she said to herself, her mouth quivering childishly. ‘I am. I may say it to myself.’
Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. Her room, on the opposite side of the house from Langham’s, looked over the cornfields and the distance. The stubbles gleamed faintly; the dark woods, the clouds teased by the rising wind, sent a moaning voice to greet her.
‘I hate him! I hate him!’ she cried to the darkness, clenching her cold little hand.
Then presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her head in the bed-clothes. She was crying–angry stifled tears which had the hot impatience of youth in them. It all seemed to her so untoward. This was not the man she had dreamed of–the unknown of her inmost heart. _He_ had been young, ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye flashing into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden mysteries behind it.
She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid this paralyzing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to peace–to indifference. The poor child flies from her own half-understood trouble; will none of it; murmurs again wildly,–
‘I hate him! I hate him! Cold-blooded–ungrateful–unkind!’
In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, inthrall her inmost soul. The charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, womanlike.
That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed, struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing, there, trying to recall what she had been a week before; the whirl of her London visit, the ambitions with which it had filled her; the bewildering, many-colored lights it had thrown upon life, the intoxicating sense of artistic power. In vain.
The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise; And the colors have all passed away from her eyes.
She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as she lay weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory sense of growth, of enrichment. In such moments of pain does a woman first begin to live? Ah! why should it hurt so–this long-awaited birth of the soul?
BOOK III.
THE SQUIRE.
CHAPTER XIX.
The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a date of some importance in the lives of two or three persons. Rose was not likely to forget it; Langham carried about with him the picture of the great drawing-room, its stately light and shade, and its scattered figures, through many a dismal subsequent hour: and to Robert it was the beginning of a period of practical difficulties such as his fortunate youth had never yet encountered.
His conjecture had hit the mark. The Squire’s sentiments toward him, which had been on the whole friendly enough, with the exception of a slight nuance of contempt provoked in Mr. Wendover’s mind by all forms of the clerical calling, had been completely transformed in the course of the afternoon before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report of his agent. Henslowe who knew certain sides of the Squire’s character by heart, had taken Time by the forelock. For fourteen years before Robert entered the parish he had been king of it. Mr. Preston, Robert’s predecessor, had never given him a moment’s trouble. The agent had developed a habit of drinking, had favored his friends and spited his enemies, and he allowed certain distant portions of the estate to go finely to ruin, quite undisturbed by any sentimental meddling of the priestly sort. Then the old Rector had been gathered to the majority, and this long-legged busybody had taken his place, a man, according to the agent, as full of communistical notions as an egg is full of meat, and always ready to poke his nose into other people’s business. And as all men like mastery, but especially Scotchmen, and as during even the first few months of the new Rector’s tenure of office it became tolerably evident to Henslowe that young Elsmere would soon become the ruling force of the neighborhood unless measures were taken to prevent it, the agent, over his nocturnal drams, had taken sharp and cunning counsel with himself concerning the young man.
The state of Mile End had been originally the result of indolence and caprice on his part rather than of any set purpose of neglect. As soon, however, as it was brought to his notice by Elsmere, who did it to begin with, in the friendliest way, it became a point of honor with the agent to let the place go to the devil, nay, to hurry it there. For some time notwithstanding, he avoided an open breach with the Rector. He met Elsmere’s remonstrances by a more or less civil show of argument, belied every now and then by the sarcasm of his coarse blue eye, and so far the two men had kept outwardly on terms. Elsmere had reason to know that on one or two occasions of difficulty in the parish Henslowe had tried to do him a mischief. The attempts, however, had not greatly succeeded, and their ill-success had probably excited in Elsmere a confidence of ultimate victory which had tended to keep him cool in the presence of Henslowe’s hostility. But Henslowe had been all along merely waiting for the Squire. He had served the owner of the Murewell estate for fourteen years, and if he did not know that owner’s peculiarities by this time, might he obtain certain warm corners in the next life to which he was fond of consigning other people! It was not easy to cheat the Squire out of money, but it was quite easy to play upon him ignorance of the details of English land management–ignorance guaranteed by the learned habits of a lifetime–on his complete lack of popular sympathy, and on the contempt felt by the disciple of Bismarck and Mommsen for all forms of altruistic sentiment. The Squire despised priests. He hated philanthropic cants. Above all things be respected his own leisure, and was abnormally, irritably sensitive as to any possible inroads upon it.
All these things Henslowe knew, and all these things be utilized. He saw the Squire within forty-eight hours of his arrival at Murewell. His fancy picture of Robert and his doings was introduced with adroitness, and colored with great skill, and he left the Squire walking up and down his library, chafing alternately at the monstrous fate which had planted this sentimental agitator at his gates, and at the memory of his own misplaced civilities toward the intruder. In the evening those civilities were abundantly avenged, as we have seen.
Robert was much perplexed as to his next step. His heart was very sore. The condition of Mile End–those gaunt-eyed women and wasted children, all the sordid details of their unjust, avoidable suffering weighed upon his nerves perpetually. But he was conscious that this state of feeling was one of tension, perhaps of exaggeration, and though it was impossible he should let the matter alone, he was anxious to do nothing rashly.
However, two days after the dinner-party he met Henslowe on the hill leading up to the Rectory. Robert would have passed the man with a stiffening of his tall figure and the slightest possible salutation. But the agent just returned from a round wherein the bars of various local inns had played a conspicuous part, was in a truculent mood and stopped to speak. He took up the line of insolent condolence with the Rector on the impossibility of carrying his wishes with regard to Mile End into effect. They had been laid before the Squire of course, but the Squire had his own ideas and wasn’t just easy to manage.
‘Seen him yet, sir?’ Henslowe wound up jauntily, every line of his flushed countenance, the full lips under the fair beard, and the light prominent eyes, expressing a triumph he hardly cared to conceal.
‘I have seen him, but I have not talked to him on this particular matter,’ said the Rector quietly, though the red mounted in his cheek. ‘You may, however, be very sure, Mr. Henslowe, that everything I know about Mile End, the Squire shall know before long.’
‘Oh, lor’ bless me, air!’ cried Henslowe with a guffaw, ‘it’s all one to me. And if the Squire ain’t satisfied with the way his work’s done now, why he can take you on as a second string you know. You’d show us all, I’ll be bound, how to make the money fly.’
Then Robert’s temper gave way, and he turned upon the half-drunken brute before him with a few home truths delivered with a rapier-like force which for the moment staggered Henslowe, who turned from red to purple. The Rector, with some of those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which we had glimpses in his talk with Langham, burning at his heart felt the man no better than a murderer, and as good as told him so. Then, without giving him time to reply, Robert strode off, leaving Henslowe planted in the pathway. But he was hardly up the hill before the agent, having recovered himself by dint of copious expletives, was looking after him with a grim chuckle. He knew his master, and he knew himself, and he thought between them they would about manage to keep that young spark in order.
Robert meanwhile went straight home into his study, and there fell upon ink and paper. What was the good of protracting the matter any longer? Something must and should be done for these people, if not one way, then another.
So he wrote to the Squire, showing the letter to Catherine when it was done, lest there should be anything over-fierce in it. It was the simple record of twelve months’ experience told with dignity and strong feeling. Henslowe was barely mentioned in it, and the chief burden of the letter was to implore the Squire to come and inspect certain portions of his property with his own eyes. The Rector would be at his service any day or hour.
Husband and wife went anxiously through the document, softening here, improving there, and then it was sent to the Hall. Robert waited nervously through the day for an answer. In the evening, while he and Catherine were in the footpath after dinner, watching a chilly autumnal moonrise over the stubble of the cornfield, the answer came.
‘Hm,’ said Robert dubiously as he opened it, holding it up to the moonlight: ‘can’t be said to be lengthy.’
He and Catherine hurried into the house. Robert read the letter, and handed it to her without a word.
After some curt references to one or two miscellaneous points raised in the latter part of the Rector’s letter, the Squire wound up as follows:–
“As for the bulk of your communication, I am at a loss to understand the vehemence of your remarks on the subject of my Mile End property. My agent informed me shortly after my return home that you had been concerning yourself greatly, and, as he conceived, unnecessarily, about the matter. Allow me to assure you that I have full confidence in Mr. Henslowe, who has been in the district for as many years as you have spent months in it, and whose authority on points connected with the business management of my estate naturally carries more weight with me, if you will permit me to say so, than your own.
“I am, sir, your obedient servant,
“ROGER WENDOVER”
Catherine returned the letter to her husband with a look of dismay. He was standing with his back to the chimney-piece, his hands thrust far into his pockets, his upper lip quivering. In his happy, expansive life this was the sharpest personal rebuff that had ever happened to him. He could not but smart under it.
‘Not a word,’ he said, tossing his hair bank impetuously, as Catherine stood opposite watching him–‘not one single word about the miserable people themselves! What kind of stuff can the man be made of?’
‘Does he believe you?’ asked Catherine, bewildered.
‘If not, one must try and make him,’ he said energetically, after a moments pause. ‘To-morrow, Catherine, I go down to the Hall and see him.’
She quietly acquiesced, and the following afternoon, first thing after luncheon, she watched him go, her tender inspiring look dwelling with him as he crossed the park, which was lying delicately wrapped in one of the whitest of autumnal mists, the sun just playing through it with pale invading shafts.
The butler looked at him with some doubtfulness. It was never safe to admit visitors for the Squire without orders. But he and Robert had special relations. As the possessor of a bass voice worthy of his girth, Vincent, under Robert’s rule, had become the pillar of the choir, and it was not easy for him to refuse the Rector.
So Robert was led in, through the hall, and down the long passage to the curtained door, which he knew so well.
‘Mr. Elsmere, Sir!’
There was a sudden, hasty movement. Robert passed a magnificent lacquered screen newly placed round the door, and found himself in the Squire’s presence.
The Squire had half risen from his seat in a capacious chair, with a litter of books round it, and confronted his visitor with a look of surprised annoyance. The figure of the Rector, tall, thin, and youthful, stood out against the delicate browns and whites of the book-lined walls. The great room, so impressively bare when Robert and Langham had last seen it, was now full of the signs of a busy man’s constant habitation. An odor of smoke pervaded it; the table in the window was piled with books just unpacked, and the half-emptied case from which they had been taken lay on the ground beside the Squire’s chair.
‘I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, advancing hat in hand, while the Squire hastily put down the German professor’s pipe he had just been enjoying, and coldly accepted his proffered greeting. ‘I should have preferred not to disturb you without an appointment, but after your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal explanation was necessary.’
The Squire stiffly motioned toward a chair, which Robert took, and then slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes fixed on the intruder.
Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but maintaining in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, plunged at once into business. He took the letter he had just received from the Squire as a text, made a good-humored defence of his own proceedings, described his attempt to move Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man to the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about Henslowe were in perfect temper, though by no means without an edge.
Then having disposed of the more personal aspects of the matter, he paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite him, more like a bronzed mask at this moment than a human countenance. The Squire, however, gave him no help. He had received his remarks so far in perfect silence, and seeing that there were more to come, he waited for them with the same rigidity of look and attitude.
So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during the preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors, poisoned water–he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these woes but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labor of body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. But all that he could hurl against the Squire’s feeling, as it were, he gathered up, strangely conscious through it all of his own young persistent yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it lay chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so enriching.
But passion, and reticence, and bidden sympathy were alike lost upon the Squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had already risen restlessly from his chair, and from the rug was glowering down on his, unwelcome visitor.
Good heavens! had he come home to be lectured in his own library by this fanatical slip of a parson? As for his stories, the Squire barely took the trouble to listen to them.
Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his hand into other people’s pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but it was intolerable that his scholar’s privacy should be at the mercy of one of the tribe.
‘Mr. Elsmere,’ he broke out at last with contemptuous emphasis, ‘I imagine it would have been better–infinitely better–to have spared both yourself and me the disagreeables of this interview. However, I am not sorry we should understand each other. I have lived a life which is at least double the length of yours in very tolerable peace and comfort. The world has been good enough for me, and I for it, so far. I have been master in my own estate, and intend to remain so. As for the new-fangled ideas of a landowner’s duty, with which your mind seems to be full’–the scornful irritation of the tone was unmistakable–‘ I have never dabbled in them, nor do I intend to begin now. I am like the rest of my kind; I have no money to chuck away in building schemes, in order that the Rector of the parish may pose as the apostle of the agricultural laborer. That, however, is neither here nor there. What is to the purpose is, that my business affairs are in the hands of a business man, deliberately chosen and approved by me, and that I have nothing to do with them. Nothing at all!’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘It may seem to you very shocking. You may reward it as the object in life of the English landowner to inspect the pigstyes and amend the habits of the English laborer. I don’t quarrel with the conception, I only ask you not to expect me to live up to it. I am a student first and foremost, and desire to be left to my books. Mr. Henslowe is there on purpose to protect my literary freedom. What he thinks desirable is good enough for me, as I have already informed you. I am sorry for it if his methods do not commend themselves to you. But I have yet to learn that the Rector of the parish has an ex-officio right to interfere between a landlord and his tenants.’
Robert kept his temper with some difficulty. After a pause he said, feeling desperately, however, that the suggestion was not likely to improve matters,–
‘If I were to take all the trouble and all the expense off your hands, Mr. Wendover would it be impossible for you to authorize me to make one or two alterations most urgently necessary for the improvement of the Mile End cottages?’
The Squire burst into an angry laugh.
‘I have never yet been in the habit, Mr. Elsmere, of doing my repairs by public subscription. You ask a little too much from an old man’s powers of adaptation.’
Robert rose from his seat, his hand trembling as it rested on his walking-stick.
‘Mr. Wendover,’ he said, speaking at last with a flash of answering scorn in his young vibrating voice, ‘what I think you cannot understand, is that at any moment a human creature may sicken and die, poisoned by the state of your property, for which you–and nobody else–are ultimately responsible.’
The Squire shrugged his shoulders.
So you say, Mr. Elsmere. If true, every person in such a condition has a remedy in his own hands. I force no one to remain on my property.’
‘The people who live there,’ exclaimed Robert, ‘have neither home nor subsistence if they are driven out. Murewell is full–times bad–most of the people old.’
‘And eviction “a sentence of death,” I suppose,’ interrupted the Squire, studying him with sarcastic eyes. ‘Well, I have no belief in a Gladstonian Ireland, still less in a Radical England. Supply and demand, cause and effect, are enough for me. The Mile End cottages are out of repair, Mr. Elsmere, so Mr. Henslowe tells me, because the site is unsuitable, the type of cottage out of date. People live in them at their peril; I don’t pull them down, or rather’–correcting himself with exasperating consistency–‘Mr. Henslowe doesn’t pull them down, because, like other men, I suppose, he dislikes an outcry. But if the population stays, it stays at its own risk. Now have I made myself plain?’
The two men eyed one another.
‘Perfectly plain,’ said Robert quietly. ‘Allow me to remind you, Mr. Wendover, that there are other matters than eviction capable of provoking an outcry.’
‘As you please,’ said the other indifferently. ‘I have no doubt I shall find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, I dare say I shall manage to put up with it. Society, is fanatics and the creatures they hunt. If I am to be hunted, I shall be in good company.’
Robert stood, hat in hand, tormented with a dozen cross-currents of feeling. He was forcibly struck with the blind and comparatively motiveless pugnacity of the Squire’s conduct. There was an extravagance in it which for the first time recalled to him old Meyrick’s lucubrations.
‘I have done no good, I see, Mr. Wendover,’ he said at last, slowly. ‘I wish I could have induced you to do an act of justice and mercy. I wish I could have made you think more kindly of myself. I have failed in both. It is useless to keep you any longer. Good morning.’
He bowed. The Squire also bent forward. At that moment Robert caught sight beside his shoulder of an antique, standing on the mantel piece, which was a new addition to the room. It was a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere’s ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man before him was not the first victim he had known.
Possessed with the fancy, the young man made his way into the hall. Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of passionate regret: ‘Shall I ever see this again?’ he asked himself. During the past twelve months his pleasure in the great house had been much more than sensuous. Within those walls his mind had grown, had reached to a fuller stature than before, and a man loves, or should love, all that is associated with the maturing of his best self.
He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadly. The magnificent pile, grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist which unwrapped it, seemed to look after him as he walked away, mutely wondering that he should have allowed anything so trivial as a peasant’s grievance to come between him and its perfections.
In the wooded lane outside the Rectory gate he overtook Catherine. He gave her his report, and they walked on together arm-in-arm, a very depressed pair.
‘What shall you do next?’ she asked him.
‘Make out the law of the matter,’ he said briefly.
‘If you get over the inspector,’ said Catherine anxiously, ‘I am tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.’
He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector’s attention.
Catherine’ did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm. But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have harassed him by over-advice.
So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him with a sigh.
‘Let it be awhile,’ he said with a shake of his long frame. ‘I shall get morbid over it if I don’t mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know you have worries of your own, wifie.’
And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a boyish tenderness.
‘Yes,’ said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. ‘Robert,’ she burst out again, ‘I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_ will never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my mind, is simply a changed creature.’
‘_I_ don’t see it,’ said Robert doubtfully.
Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible!
‘You have been studying the Squire, sir–I have been studying Rose.’
Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose’s proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm’s length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had struck him first reappear.
‘Of course I feel myself to blame,’ he said when she stopped, ‘but how could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I owed him–I owe him–so much.’
‘I know,’ said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her that that old debt had been more than effaced.
‘You will have to send her to Berlin,’ said Elsmere after a pause. ‘You must play off her music against this unlucky feeling. If it exists it is your only chance.’
‘Yes, she must go to Berlin,’ said Catherine slowly.
Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling breaking up the delicate resolution of the face.
‘I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened my world for me!’
Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They were in the woodpath. She crept inside her husband’s arm and put up her face to him, swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love.
The next day Robert walked over to the little market town of Churton, saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of the place, and got from him a complete account of the present state of the rural sanitary law. The first step clearly was to move the sanitary inspector; if that failed for any reason, then any _bona fide_ inhabitant had an appeal to the local sanitary authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked home pondering his information, and totally ignorant that Henslowe, who was always at Churton on market-days, had been in the market-place at the moment when the Rector’s tall figure had disappeared within Mr. Dunstan’s office-door. That door was unpleasantly known to the agent in connection with some energetic measures for raising money he had been lately under the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attracting his eyes by means of the fascination that often attaches to disagreeable objects.
In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing-room. Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap and her eyes were staring intently into a world whereof they only had the key. Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. The servant came, and there were several voices and a sound of much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading to the study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped with an exclamation.
His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old Milsom, more sallow and palsied than ever. As he stood bent almost double, his old knotted hand resting for support on the table beside him, everything in the little hall seemed to shake with him. The other was Sharland, the handsome father of the twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with every imaginable delicacy since Robert’s last visit to the hamlet. Even his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature decay. The rolling gypsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs dragged a little.
They had come to implore the Rector to let Mile End alone. Henslowe had been over there in the afternoon, and had given them all very plainly to understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled any more they would be all turned out at a week’s notice to shift as they could, ‘And if you don’t find Thurston Common nice lying this weather, with the winter coming on, you’ll know who to thank for it,’ the agent had flung behind him as be rode off.
Robert turned white. Rose, watching the little scene with listless eyes, saw him towering over the group like an embodiment of wrath and pity.
‘If they turn us out, sir,’ said old Milsom, wistfully looking up at Elsmere with blear eyes, ‘there’ll be nothing left but the House for us old ‘uns. Why, lor’ bless you, sir, it’s not so bad but we can make shift,’
‘You, Milsom!’ cried Robert; ‘and you’ve just all but lost your grandchild! And you know your wife’ll never be the same woman since that bout of fever in the spring. And—-‘
His quick eyes ran over the old man’s broken frame with a world of indignant meaning in them.
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Milsom, unmoved. ‘But if it isn’t fevers, it’s summat else. I can make a shilling or two where I be, speshally in the first part of the year, in the basket work, and my wife she goes charing up at Mr. Carter’s farm, and Mr. Dodson, him at the further farm, he do give us a bit sometimes. Ef you git us turned away it will be a bad day’s work for all on us, sir, you may take my word on it.’
‘And my wife so ill’ Mr. Elsmere,’ said Sharland, ‘and all those childer! I can’t walk three miles further to my work, Mr. Elsmere, I can’t nohow. I haven’t got the legs for it. Let un be, Sir. We’ll rub along.’
Robert tried to argue the matter.
If they would but stand by him he would fight the matter through, and they should not suffer, if he had to get up a public subscription, or support them out of his own pocket all the winter. A bold front, and Mr. Henslowe must give way. The law was on their side, and every laborer in Surrey would be the better off for their refusal to be housed like pigs and poisoned like vermin.
In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious endurance in the poor against which the keenest reformer constantly throws himself in vain. Elsmere was beaten. The two men got his word, and shuffled off back to their pestilential hovels, a pathetic content beaming on each face.
Catherine and Robert went back into the study. Rose heard her brother-in-law’s passionate sigh as the door swung behind them.
‘Defeated!’ she said to herself with a curious accent. ‘Well, everybody must have his turn. Robert has been too successful in his life, I think.–You wretch!’ she added, after a minute, laying her bright head down on the book before her.
Next morning his wife found Elsmere after breakfast busily packing a case of books in the study. They were books from the Hall library, which so far had been for months the inseparable companion of his historical work.
Catherine stood and watched him sadly.
‘Must You, Robert?’
‘I won’t be beholden to that man for anything an hour longer than I can help,’ he answered her.
When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where she stood in the open window.
‘Things won’t be as easy for us in the future, darling,’ he said to her. ‘A rector with both Squire and agent against him is rather heavily handicapped. We must make up our minds to that.’
‘I have no great fear,’ she said, looking at him proudly.
‘Oh, well–nor I–perhaps,’ he admitted, after a moment. We can hold our own. ‘But I wish–oh, I wish’–and he laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder–‘I could have made friends with the Squire.’
Catherine looked less responsive.
‘As Squire, Robert, or as Mr. Wendover?’
‘As both, of course, but specialty as Mr. Wendover.’
‘We can do without his friendship,’ she said with energy.
Robert gave a great stretch, as though to work off his regrets.
‘Ah, but–,’he said, half to himself, as his arms dropped, ‘if you are just filled with the hunger to _know_, the people who know as much as the Squire become very interesting to you!’
Catherine did not answer. But probably her heart went out once more in protest against a knowledge that was to her but a form of revolt against the awful powers of man’s destiny.
‘However, here go his books,’ said Robert.
Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appearance, Mrs. Leyburn all in a flutter concerning the event over which, in her own opinion, she had come to preside. In her gentle fluid mind all impressions were short-lived. She had forgotten how she had brought up her own babies, but Mrs. Thornburgh, who had never had any, had filled her full of nursery lore. She sat retailing a host of second-hand hints and instructions to Catherine, who would every now and then lay her hand smiling on her mother’s knee, well pleased to see the flush of pleasure on the pretty old face, and ready in her patient filial way, to let herself be experimented on to the utmost, if it did but make the poor, foolish thing happy.
Then came a night where every soul in the quiet Rectory, even hot,