smarting Rose, was possessed by one thought though many terrible hours, and one only–the thought of Catherine’s safety. It was strange and unexpected, but Catherine, the most normal and healthy of women, had a hard struggle for her own life and her child’s, and it was not till the gray autumn morning, after a day and night which left a permanent mark on Robert that he was summoned at last, and with the sense of one emerging from black gulfs of terror, received from his wife’s languid hand the tiny fingers of his firstborn.
The days that followed were full of emotion for these two people, who were perhaps always ever-serious, oversensitive. They had no idea of minimizing the great common experiences of life. Both of them were really simple, brought up in old-fashioned simple ways, easily touched, responsive to all that high spiritual education which flows from the familiar incidents of the human story, approached poetically and passionately. As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife’s room, the occasional restless movements of the small brown head against her breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country silence, he felt all the deep familiar currents of human feeling sweeping through him–love, reverence, thanksgiving–and all the walls of the soul, as it were, expanding and enlarging as they passed.
Responsive creature that he was, the experience of these days was hardly happiness. It went too deep; it brought him too poignantly near to all that is most real and therefore most tragic in life.
Catherine’s recovery also was slower than might have been expected, considering her constitutional soundness, and for the first week, after that faint moment of joy when her child was laid upon her arm and she saw her husband’s quivering face above her, there was a kind of depression hovering over her. Robert felt it, and felt too that all his devotion could not soothe it away. At last she said to him one evening, in the encroaching September twilight, speaking with a sudden hurrying vehemence, wholly unlike herself, as though a barrier of reserve had given way,–
‘Robert, I cannot put it out of my head. I cannot forget it, _the pain of the world!_’
He shut the book he was reading, her hand in his, and bent over her with questioning eyes.
‘It seems’ she went on with that difficulty which a strong nature always feels in self-revelation, ‘to take the joy even out of our love–and the child. I feel ashamed almost that mere physical pain should have laid such hold on me–and yet I can’t get away from it. It’s not for myself,’ and she smiled faintly at him. ‘Comparatively I had so little to bear! But I know now for the first time what physical pain may mean–and I never knew before! I lie thinking, Robert, about all creatures in pain–workmen crushed by machinery, or soldiers–or poor things in hospitals–above all of women! Oh, when I get well, how I will take care of the women here! What women must suffer even here in out-of-the-way cottages–no doctor, no kind nursing, all blind agony and struggle! And women in London in dens like those Mr. Newcome got into, degraded, forsaken, ill-treated, the thought of the child only an extra horror and burden! And the pain all the time so merciless, so cruel–no escape! Oh, to give all one is, or ever can be, to comforting! And yet the great sea of it one can never touch! It is a nightmare–I am weak still, I suppose; I don’t know myself; but I can see nothing but jarred, tortured creatures everywhere. All my own joys and comforts seem to lift me selfishly above the common lot.’
She stopped, her large gray-blue eyes dim with tears, trying once more for that habitual self-restraint which physical weakness had shaken.
‘You _are_ weak,’ he said, caressing her, ‘and that destroys for a time the normal balance of things. It is true, darling, but we are not meant to see it always so clearly. God knows we could not bear it if we did.’
And to think,’ she said, shuddering a little, ‘that there are men and women who in the face of it can still refuse Christ and the Cross, can still say this life is all! How can they live–how dare they live?’
Then he saw that not only man’s pain but man’s defiance, had been haunting her, and he guessed what persons and memories had been flitting through her mind. But he dared not talk lest she should exhaust herself. Presently, seeing a volume of Augustine’s ‘Confessions’, her favorite book, lying beside her, he took it up, turning over the pages, and weaving passages together as they caught his eye.
‘_Speak to me, for Thy compassion’s sake, O Lord my God, and tell me what art Thou to me! Say unto my soul, “I am thy salvation.” Speak it that I may hear. Behold the ears of my heart, O Lord; open them and say into my soul, “I am thy salvation!” I will follow after this voice of Thine, I will lay hold on Thee. The temple of my soul, wherein Thou shouldest enter, is narrow, do Thou enlarge it. It falleth into ruins–do Thou rebuild it! . . . Woe to that bold soul which hopeth, if it do but let Thee go, to find something better than Thee! It turneth hither and thither, on this side and on that, and all things are hard and bitter unto it. For Thou only art rest! . . . Whithersoever the soul of man turneth it findeth sorrow, except only in Thee. Fix there, then, thy resting-place, mm soul! Lay up in Him whatever thou hast received from Him. Commend to the keeping of the Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose nothing. And thy dead things shall revive and thy weak things shall be made whole!_’
She listened, appropriating and clinging to every word, till the nervous clasp of the long delicate fingers relaxed, her head dropped a little, gently, against the head of the child, and tired with much feeling she slept.
Robert slipped away and strolled out into the garden in the fast-gathering darkness. His mind was full of that intense spiritual life of Catherine’s which in its wonderful self-contentedness and strength was always a marvel, sometimes a reproach to him. Beside her, he seemed to himself a light creature, drawn hither and thither by this interest and by that, tangled in the fleeting shows of things–the toy and plaything of circumstance. He thought ruefully and humbly, as he wondered on through the dusk, of his own lack of inwardness: ‘Everything divides me from Thee!’ he could have cried in St. Augustine’s manner. ‘Books, and friends, and work–all seem to hide Thee from me. Why am I so passionate for this and that, for all these sections and fragments of Thee? Oh, for the One, the All! Fix, there thy resting-place, my soul!’
And presently, after this cry of self-reproach, he turned to muse on that intuition of the world’s pain which had been troubling Catherine, shrinking from it even more than she had shrunk from it, in proportion as his nature was more imaginative than hers. And Christ the only clew, the only remedy–no other anywhere in this vast Universe, where all men are under sentences of death, where the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now!
And yet what countless generations of men had borne their pain, knowing nothing of the one Healer. He thought of Buddhist patience and Buddhist charity; of the long centuries during which Chaldean or Persian or Egyptian lived, suffered, and died, trusting the gods they knew. And how many other generations, nominally children of the Great Hope, had used it as a mere instrument of passion or of hate, cursing in the name of love, destroying in the name of pity! For how much of the world’s pain was not Christianity itself responsible? His thoughts recurred with a kind of anguished perplexity to some of the problems stirred in him of late by his historical reading. The strifes and feuds and violences of the early Church returned to weigh upon him–the hair-splitting superstition, the selfish passion for power. He recalled Gibbon’s lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen’s grave doubt whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman Empire can be said to be substantially happier now than in the days of Severus.
_O corruptio optimi!_ That men should have been so little affected by that shining ideal of the New Jerusalem, ‘descended out of Heaven from God,’ into their very midst–that the print of the ‘blessed feet’ along the world’s highway should have been so often buried in the sands of cruelty and fraud!
The September wind blew about him as he strolled through the darkening common, set thick with great bushes of sombre juniper among the yellowing fern, which stretched away on the left-hand side of the road leading to the Hall. He stood and watched the masses of restless discordant cloud which the sunset had left behind it, thinking the while of Mr. Grey, of his assertions and his denials. Certain phrases of his which Robert had heard drop from him on one or two rare occasions during the later stages of his Oxford life ran through his head.
‘_The fairy-tale of Christianity_’–‘_The origins of Christian Mythology_.’ He could recall, as the words rose in his memory, the simplicity of the rugged face, and the melancholy mingled with fire which had always marked the great tutor’s sayings about religion.
‘_Fairy Tale!_’ Could any reasonable man watch a life like Catherine’s and believe that nothing but a delusion lay at the heart of it? And as he asked the question, he seemed to hear Mr. Grey’s answer: ‘All religions are true and all are false. In them all, more or less visibly, man grasps at the one thing needful–self forsaken, God laid hold of. The spirit in them all is the same, answers eternally to reality; it is but the letter, the fashion, the imagery, that are relative and changing.’
He turned and walked homeward, struggling with a host of tempestuous ideas as swift and varying as the autumn clouds hurrying overhead. And then, through a break in a line of trees, he caught sight of the tower and chancel window of the little church. In an instant he had a vision of early summer mornings–dewy, perfumed, silent, save for the birds and all the soft stir of rural birth and growth, of a chancel fragrant with many flowers, of a distant church with scattered figures, of the kneeling form of his wife close beside him, himself bending over her, the sacrament of the Lord’s death in his hand. The emotion, the intensity, the absolute self-surrender of innumerable such moments in the past–moments of a common faith, a common self-abasement–came flooding back upon him. With a movement of joy and penitence he threw himself at the feet of Catherine’s Master and his own: ‘_Fix there thy resting-place, my soul!_’
CHAPTER XX.
Catherine’s later convalescence dwelt in her mind in after years as a time of peculiar softness and peace. Her baby-girl throve; Robert had driven the Squire and Henslowe out of his mind, and was all eagerness as to certain negotiations with a famous naturalist for a lecture at the village club. At Mile End, as though to put the Rector in the wrong, serious illness had for the time disappeared; and Mrs. Leyburn’s mild chatter, as she gently poked about the house and garden, went out in Catherine’s pony-carriage, inspected Catherine’s stores, and hovered over Catherine’s babe, had a constantly cheering effect on the still languid mother. Like all theorists, especially those at secondhand, Mrs. Leyburn’s maxims had been very much routed by the event. The babe had ailments she did not understand, or it developed likes and dislikes she had forgotten existed in babies, and Mrs. Leyburn was nonplussed. She would sit with it on her lap, anxiously studying its peculiarities. She was sure it squinted, that its back was weaker than other babies, that it cried more than hers had ever done. She loved to be plaintive; it would have seemed to her unladylike to be too cheerful, even over a first grandchild.
Agnes meanwhile made herself practically useful, as was her way, and she did almost more than anybody to beguile Catherine’s recovery by her hours of Long Whindale chat. She had no passionate feeling about the place and the people as Catherine had, but she was easily content, and she had a good wholesome feminine curiosity as to the courtings and weddings and buryings of the human beings about her. So she would sit and chat, working the while with the quickest, neatest of fingers, till Catherine knew 6as much about Jenny Tyson’s Whinborough lover, and Farmer Tredall’s troubles with his son, and the way in which that odious woman Molly Redgold bullied her little consumptive husband, as Agnes knew, which was saying a good deal.
About themselves Agnes was frankness itself.
‘Since you went,’ she would say with a shrug, ‘I keep the coach steady, perhaps, but Rose drives, and we shall have to go where she takes us. By the way, Cathie, what have you been doing to her here? She is not a bit like herself. I don’t generally mind being snubbed. It amuses her and doesn’t hurt me; and, of course, I know I am meant to be her foil. But really, sometimes she is too bad even for me.’
Catherine sighed, but held her peace. Like all strong persons, she kept things very much to herself. It only made vexation more real to talk about them. But she and Agnes discussed the winter and Berlin.
‘You had better let her go,’ said Agnes, significantly; ‘she will go anyhow.’
A few days afterward Catherine, opening the drawing-room door unexpectedly, came upon Rose sitting idly at the piano, her hands resting on the keys, and her great gray eyes straining out of her white face with an expression which sent the sister’s heart into her shoes.
‘How you steal about, Catherine!’ cried the player, getting up and shutting the piano. ‘I declare you are just like Millais’s Gray Lady in that ghostly gown.’
Catherine came swiftly across the floor. She had just left her child, and the sweet dignity of motherhood was in her step, her look. She came and threw her arms round the girl.
‘Rose dear, I have settled it all with mamma. The money can be managed, and you shall go to Berlin for the winter when you like.’
She drew herself back a little, still with her arms round Rose’s waist, and looked at her smiling, to see how she took it.
Rose had a strange movement of irritation. She drew herself out of Catherine’s grasp.
‘I don’t know that I had settled on Berlin,’ she said coldly, ‘Very possibly Leipsic would be better.’
Catherine’s face fell.
‘Whichever you like, dear. I have been thinking about it ever since that day you spoke of it–you remember–and now I have talked it over with mamma. If she can’t manage, all the expense we will help. Oh Rose,’ and she came nearer again, timidly, her eyes melting, ‘I know we haven’t understood each other. I have been ignorant, I think, and narrow. But I meant it for the best, dear–I did–‘
Her voice failed her, but in her look there seemed to be written the history of all the prayers and yearnings of her youth over the pretty wayward child who had been her joy and torment. Rose could not but meet that look–its nobleness, its humble surrender.
Suddenly two large tears rolled down her cheeks. She dashed them away impatiently.
‘I am not a bit well,’ she said, as though in irritable excuse both to herself and Catherine. ‘I believe I have had a headache for a fortnight.’
And then she put her arms down on a table near and hid her face upon them. She was one bundle of jarring nerves; sore, poor passionate child, that she was betraying herself; sorer still that, as she told herself, Catherine was sending her to Berlin as a consolation. When girls have love-troubles the first thing their elders do is to look for a diversion. She felt sick and humiliated. Catherine had been talking her over with the family, she supposed.
Meanwhile Catherine stood by her tenderly, stroking her hair and saying soothing things.
‘I am sure you will be happy at Berlin, Rose. And you mustn’t leave me out of your life, dear, though I am so stupid and unmusical. You must write to me about all you do. We must be in a new time. Oh, I feel so guilty sometimes,’ she went on, falling into a low intensity of voice that startled Rose, and made her look hurriedly up. ‘I fought against your music, I suppose, because I thought it was devouring you–leaving no room for–for religion–for God. I was jealous of it for Christ’s sake. And all the time I was blundering! Oh, Rose,’ and she sank on her knees beside the chair, resting her head against the girl’s shoulder, ‘papa charged me to make you love God, and I torture myself with thinking that, instead, it has been my doing, my foolish, clumsy doing, that you have come to think religion dull and hard. Oh, my darling, if I could make amends–if I could got you not to love your art less but to love it in God! Christ is the first reality; all things else are real and lovely in Him! Oh, I have been frightening you away from Him! I ought to have drawn you near. I have been so–so silent, so shut up, I have never tried to make you feel what it was kept _me_ at His feet! Oh, Rose darling, you think the world real, and pleasure and enjoyment real. But if I could have made you see and know the things I have seen up in the mountains–among the poor, the dying–you would have _felt_ Him saving, redeeming, interceding, as I did. Oh, then you _must_, you _would_ have known that Christ only is real, that our joys can only truly exist in Him. I should have been more open–more faithful–more humble.’
She paused with a long quivering sigh. Rose suddenly lifted herself, and they fell into each others’ arms.
Rose, shaken and excited, thought, of course, of that night at Burwood, when she had won leave to go to Manchester. This scene was the sequel to that–the next stage in one and the same process. Her feeling was much the same as that of the naturalist who comes close to any of the hidden operations of life. She had come near to Catherine’s spirit in the growing. Beside that sweet expansion, how poor and feverish and earth-stained the poor child felt herself!
But there were many currents in Rose–many things striving for the mastery. She kissed Catherine once or twice, then she drew herself back suddenly, looking into the other’s face. A great wave of feeling rushed up and broke.
‘Catherine, could you ever have married a man that did not believe in Christ?’
She flung the question out–a kind of morbid curiosity, a wild wish to find an outlet of some sort for things pent up in her, driving her on.
Catherine started. But she met Rose’s half-frowning eyes steadily.
‘Never, Rose! To me it would not be marriage.’ The child’s face lost its softness. She drew one hand away.
‘What have we to do with it?’ She cried. ‘Each one for himself.’
‘But marriage makes two one,’ said Catherine, pale, but with a firm clearness. ‘And if husband and wife are only one in body and estate, not one in soul, why who that believes in the soul would accept such a bond, endure such a miserable second best?’
She rose. But though her voice had recovered all its energy, her attitude, her look was still tenderness, still yearning itself.
‘Religion does not fill up the soul,’ said Rose slowly. Then she added carelessly, a passionate red flying into her cheek, against her will, ‘However, I cannot imagine any question that interests me personally less. I was curious what you would say.’
And she too got up, drawing her hand lightly along the keyboard of the piano. Her pose had a kind of defiance in it; her knit brows forbade Catherine to ask questions. Catherine stood irresolute. Should she throw herself on her sister, imploring her to speak, opening her own heart on the subject of this wild, unhappy fancy for a man who would never think again of the child he had played with?
But the North-country dread of words, of speech that only defines and magnifies, prevailed. Let there be no words, but let her love and watch.
So, after a moment’s pause, she began in a different tone upon the inquiries she had been making, the arrangements that would be wanted for this musical winter. Rose was almost listless at first. A stranger would have thought she was being persuaded into something against her will. But she could not keep it up. The natural instinct reasserted itself, and she was soon planning and deciding as sharply, and with as much young omniscience, as usual.
By the evening it was settled. Mrs. Leyburn, much bewildered, asked Catherine doubtfully, the last thing at night, whether she wanted Rose to be a professional. Catherine exclaimed.
‘But, my dear,’ said the widow, staring pensively into her bedroom fire, ‘what’s she to do with all this music?’ Then after a second she added half severely: ‘I don’t believe her father would have liked it; I don’t, indeed, Catherine!’
Poor Catherine smiled and sighed in the background, but made no reply.
‘However, she never looks so pretty as when she’s playing the violin; never!’ said Mrs. Leyburn presently in the distance, with a long breath of satisfaction. ‘She’s got such a lovely hand and arm, Catherine! They’re prettier than mine, and even your father used to notice mine.’
‘_Even_.’ The word had a little sound of bitterness. In spite of all his love, had the gentle puzzle-headed woman found her unearthly husband often very hard to live with?
Rose meanwhile was sitting up in bed, with her hands round her knees, dreaming. So she had got her heart’s desire! There did not seem to be much joy in the getting, but that was the way of things, one was told. She knew she should hate the Germans–great, bouncing, over-fed, sentimental creatures!
Then her thoughts ran into the future. After six months–yes, by April–she would be home, and Agnes and her mother could meet her in London.
_London_. Ah, it was London she was thinking of all the time, not Berlin! She could not stay in the present; or rather the Rose of the present went straining to the Rose of the future, asking to be righted, to be avenged.
‘I will learn–I will learn fast, many things besides music!’ she said to herself feverishly. ‘By April I shall be _much_ cleverer. Oh, _then_ I won’t be a fool so easily. We shall be sure to meet, of course. But he shall find out that it was only a _child_, only a silly, softhearted baby he played with down here. I shan’t care for him in the least, of course not, not after six months. I don’t _mean_ to. And I will make him know it–oh, I will, though he is so wise, and so much older, and mounts on such stilts when he pleases!’
So once more Rose flung her defiance at fate. But when Catherine came along the passage an hour later she heard low sounds from Rose’s room, which ceased abruptly as her step drew near. The elder sister paused; her eyes filled with tears; her hand closed indignantly. Then she came closer, all but went in, thought better of it, and moved away. If there is any truth in brain waves, Langham should have slept restlessly that night.
Ten days later an escort had been found, all preparations had been made, and Rose was gone.
Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes lingered a while, and then they too departed under an engagement to come back after Christmas for a long stay, that Mrs. Leyburn might cheat the Northern spring a little.
So husband and wife were alone again. How they relished their solitude! Catherine took up many threads of work which her months of comparative weakness had forced her to let drop. She taught vigorously in the school; in the afternoons, so far as her child would let her, she carried her tender presence and her practical knowledge of nursing to the sick and feeble; and on two evenings in the week she and Robert threw open a little room there was on the ground-floor between the study and the dining-room to the women and girls of the village, as a sort of drawing-room. Hard-worked mothers would come, who had put their fretful babes to sleep, and given their lords to eat, and had just energy left, while the eldest daughter watched, and the men were at the club or the ‘Blue Boar,’ to put on a clean apron and climb the short hill to the rectory. Once there, there was nothing to think of for an hour but the bright room, Catherine’s kind face, the Rector’s jokes, and the illustrated papers or the photographs that were spread out for them to look at if they would. The girls learned to come, because Catherine could teach them a simple dressmaking, and was clever in catching stray persons to set them singing; and because Mr. Elsmere read exciting stories, and because nothing any one of them ever told Mrs. Elsmere was forgotten by her, or failed to interest her. Any of her social equals of the neighborhood would have hardly recognized the reserved and stately Catherine on these occasions. Here she felt herself at home, at ease. She would never, indeed, have Robert’s pliancy, his quick divination, and for some time after her transplanting the North-country woman had found it very difficult to suit herself to a new shade of local character. But she was learning from Robert every day; she watched him among the poor, recognizing all his gifts with a humble intensity of admiring love, which said little but treasured everything, and for herself her inward happiness and peace shone through her quiet ways, making her the mother and the friend of all about her.
As for Robert, he, of course, was living at high pressure all round. Outside his sermons and his school, his Natural History Club had perhaps most of his heart, and the passion for science, little continuous work as he was able to give it, grew on him more and more. He kept up as best he could, working with one hand, so to speak, when he could not spare two, and in his long rambles over moor and hill, gathering in with his quick eye a harvest of local fact wherewith to feed their knowledge and his own.
The mornings he always spent at work among his books, the afternoons in endless tramps over the parish, sometimes alone, sometimes with Catherine; and in the evenings, if Catherine was ‘at home’ twice a week to womankind, he had his nights when his study became the haunt and prey of half the boys in the place, who were free of everything, as soon as he had taught them to respect his books, and not to taste his medicines; other nights when he was lecturing or story-telling, in the club or in some outlying hamlet; or others again, when with Catherine beside him he would sit trying to think some of that religious passion which burned in both their hearts, into clear words or striking illustrations for his sermons.
Then his choir was much upon his mind. He knew nothing about music, nor did Catherine; their efforts made Rose laugh irreverently when she got their letters at Berlin. But Robert believed in a choir chiefly as an excellent social and centralizing instrument. There had been none in Mr. Preston’s day. He was determined to have one, and a good one, and by sheer energy he succeeded, delighting in his boyish way over the opposition some of his novelties excited among the older and more stiff-backed inhabitants.
‘Let them talk,’ he would say brightly to Catherine. ‘They will come round; and talk is good. Anything to make them think, to stir the pool!’
Of course that old problem of the agricultural laborer weighed upon him–his grievances, his wants. He went about pondering the English land system, more than half inclined one day to sink part of his capital in a peasant-proprietor experiment, and engulfed the next in all the moral and economical objections to the French system. Land for allotments, at any rate, he had set his heart on. But in this direction, as in many others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish was the Squire’s, and not an inch of the Squire’s land would Henslowe let young Elsmere have anything to do with if he knew it. He would neither repair, nor enlarge the Workmen’s Institute; and he had a way of forgetting the Squire’s customary subscriptions to parochial objects, always paid through him, which gave him much food for chuckling whenever he passed Elsmere in the country lanes. The man’s coarse insolence and mean hatred made themselves felt at every turn, besmirching and embittering.
Still it was very true that neither Henslowe nor the Squire could do Robert much harm. His hold on the parish was visibly strengthening; his sermons were not only filling the church with his own parishioners, but attracting hearers from the districts round Murewell, so that even on these winter Sundays there was almost always a sprinkling of strange faces among the congregation; and his position in the county and diocese was becoming every month more honorable and important. The gentry about showed them much kindness, and would have shown them much hospitality if they had been allowed. But though Robert had nothing of the ascetic about him, and liked the society of his equals as much as most good-tempered and vivacious people do, he and Catherine decided that for the present they had no time to spare for visits and county society. Still, of course, there were many occasions on which the routine of their life brought them across their neighbors, and it began to be pretty widely recognized that Elsmere was a young fellow of unusual promise and intelligence, that his wife too was remarkable, and that between them they were likely to raise the standard of clerical effort considerably in their part of Surrey.
All the factors of this life–his work, his influence, his recovered health, the lavish beauty of the country, Elsmere enjoyed with all his heart. But at the root of all there lay what gave value and savor to everything else–that exquisite home-life of theirs, that tender, triple bond of husband, wife, and child.
Catherine coming home tired from teaching or visiting, would find her step quickening as she reached the gate of the rectory, and the sense of delicious possession waking up in her, which is one of the first fruits of motherhood. There, at the window, between the lamplight behind and the winter dusk outside, would be the child in its nurse’s arms, little wondering, motiveless smiles passing over the tiny puckered face that was so oddly like Robert already. And afterward, in the fire-lit nursery, with the bath in front of the high fender, and all the necessaries of baby life beside it, she would go through those functions which mothers love and linger over, let the kicking, dimpled creature principally concerned protest as it may against the over-refinements of civilization. Then, when the little restless voice was stilled, and the cradle left silent in the darkened room, there would come the short watching for Robert, his voice, his kiss, their simple meal together, a moment of rest, of laughter and chat, before some fresh effort claimed them. Every now and then–white-letter days–there would drop on them a long evening together. Then out would come one of the few books–Dante or Virgil or Milton–which had entered into the fibre of Catherine’s strong nature. The two heads would draw close over them, or Robert would take some thought of hers as a text, and spout away from the hearthrug, watching all the while for her smile, her look of assent. Sometimes, late at night, when there was a sermon on his mind, he would dive into his pocket for his Greek Testament and make her read, partly for the sake of teaching her–for she knew some Greek and longed to know more–but mostly that he might get from her some of that garnered wealth of spiritual experience which he adored in her. They would go from verse to verse, from thought to thought, till suddenly perhaps the tide of feeling would rise, and while the windswept round the house, and the owls hooted in the elms, they would sit hand in hand, lost in love and fait–Christ near them–Eternity, warm with God, enwrapping them.
So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthropist. In reality, great as was the moral energy of this period of Elsmere’s life, the dominant distinguishing note of it was not moral but intellectual.
In matters of conduct he was but developing habits and tendencies already strongly present in him; in matters of his thinking, with every month of this winter he was becoming conscious of fresh forces, fresh hunger, fresh horizons.
‘_One half of your day be the king of your world_,’ Mr. Grey had said to him; ‘_the other half be the slave of something which will take you out of your world_, into the general life, the life of thought, of man as a whole, of the universe.’
The counsel, as we have seen, had struck root and flowered into action. So many men of Elsmere’s type give themselves up once and for all as they become mature to the life of doing and feeling, practically excluding the life of thought. It was Henry Grey’s influence in all probability, perhaps, too, the training of an earlier Langham, that saved for Elsmere the life of thought.
The form taken by this training of his own mind he had been thus encouraged not to abandon, was, as we know, the study of history. He had well mapped out before him that book on the origins of France which he had described to Langham. It was to take him years, of course, and meanwhile, in his first enthusiasm, he was like a child, revelling in the treasure of work that lay before him. As he had told Langham, he had just got below the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men of his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions the past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, coherence, and, as it were, modernness, so that the main impression he produces on us, so long as we look at that past through him only, is on the whole an impression of continuity of _resemblance_.
Whereas, on the contrary, the, first impression left on a man by the attempt to plunge into the materials of history for himself is almost always an extraordinarily sharp impression of _difference_, of _contrast_. Ultimately, of course, he sees that those men and women whose letters and biographies, whose creeds and general conceptions he is investigating, are in truth his ancestors, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. But at first the student who goes back, say, in the history of Europe, behind the Renaissance or behind the Crusades into the actual deposits of the past, is often struck with a kind of _vertige_. The men and women whom he has dragged forth into the light of his own mind are to him like some strange puppet-show. They are called by names he knows–kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters–but what a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed, he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins who represent a forward strain, who belong as it seems to a world of their own, a world ahead of them. To them he stretches out his hand: ‘_You_,’ he says to them, ‘though your priests spoke to you not of Christ, but of Zeus and Artemis, _you_ are really my kindred!’ But intellectually they stand alone. Around them, after them, for long ages the world ‘spake as a child, felt as a child, understood as a child.’
Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf. ‘_Science_,’ the mind cries, ‘_ordered knowledge_.’ And so for the first time the modern recognizes what the accumulations of his forefathers have done for him. He takes the torch which man has been so long and patiently fashioning to his hand, and turns it on the past, and at every step the sight grows stranger, and yet more moving, more pathetic. The darkness into which he penetrates does but make him grasp his own guiding light the more closely. And yet, bit by bit, it has been prepared for him by these groping, half-conscious generations, and the scrutiny which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a marvelling gratitude.
But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during this winter of work Elsmere felt them both very strongly. He would sit in the morning buried among the records of decaying Rome and emerging France, surrounded by Chronicles, by Church Councils, by lives of the Saints, by primitive systems of law, pushing his imaginative, impetuous way through them. Sometimes Catherine would be there, and he would pour out on her something of what was in his own mind.
One day he was deep in the life of a certain saint. The saint had been bishop of a diocese in Southern France. His biographer was his successor in the see, a man of high political importance in the Burgundian state, renowned besides for sanctity and learning. Only some twenty years separated the biography, at the latest, from the death of its subject. It contained some curious material for social history, and Robert was reading it with avidity. But it was, of course, a tissue of marvels. The young bishop had practised every virtue known to the time, and wrought every conceivable miracle, and the miracles were better told than usual, with more ingenuity, more imagination. Perhaps on that account they struck the reader’s sense more sharply.
‘And the saint said to the sorcerers and to the practisers of unholy arts, that they should do those evil things no more, for he had bound the spirits of whom they were wont to inquire, and they would get no further answers to their incantations. Then those stiff-necked sons of the Devil fell upon the man of God, scourged him sore, and threatened him with death, if he would not instantly loose those spirits he had bound. And seeing he could prevail nothing, and being moreover, admonished by God so to do, he permitted them to work their own damnation. For he called for a parchment and wrote upon it, “_Ambrose unto Satan–Enter!_” Then was the spell loosed, the spirits returned, the sorcerers inquired as they were accustomed, and received answers. But in a short space of time every one of them perished miserably and was delivered unto his natural lord Satanas, whereunto he belonged.’
Robert made a hasty exclamation, and turning to Catherine, who was working beside him, read the passage to her, with a few words as to the book and its author.
Catherine’s work dropped a moment on to her knee.
‘What extraordinary superstition!’ she said, startled. ‘A bishop, Robert, and an educated man?’
Robert nodded.
‘But it is the whole habit of mind,’ he said half to himself, staring into the fire, ‘that is so astounding. No one escapes it. The whole age really is non-sane.’
‘I suppose the devout Catholic would believe that?’
‘I am not sure,’ said Robert dreamily, and remained sunk in thought for long after, while Catherine worked, and pondered a Christmas entertainment for her girls.
Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was that was really quickening and sharpening these historical impressions of his. Evolution–once a mere germ in the mind–was beginning to press, to encroach, to intermeddle with the mind’s other furniture.
And the comparative instinct–that tool, _par excellence_, of modern science was at last fully awake, was growing fast, taking hold, now here, now there.
‘It is tolerably clear to me,’ he said to himself suddenly one winter afternoon, as he was trudging home alone from Mile End, ‘that some day or other I must set to work to bring a little order into one’s notions of the Old Testament. At present they are just a chaos!’
He walked on awhile, struggling with the rainstorm which had overtaken him, till again the mind’s quick life took voice.
‘But what matter? God in the beginning–God in the prophets–in Israel’s best life–God in Christ! How are any theories about the Pentateuch to touch that?’
And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow with wind and rain, there leapt a light, a softness indescribable.
But the vivider and the keener grew this new mental life of Elsmere’s, the more constant became his sense of soreness as to that foolish and motiveless quarrel which divided him from the Squire. Naturally he was for ever being harassed and pulled up in his work by the mere loss of the Murewell library. To have such a collection so close, and to be cut off from it, was a state of things no student could help feeling severely. But it was much more than that: it was the man he hankered after; the man who was a master where he was a beginner; the man who had given his life to learning, and was carrying all his vast accumulations sombrely to the grave, unused, untransmitted.
‘He might have given me his knowledge,’ thought Elsmere sadly, ‘and I–I–would have been a son to him. Why is life so perverse?’
Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and its master as though both had been surrounded by the thorn hedge of fairy tale. The Hall had its visitors during these winter months, but the Elsmeres saw nothing of them. Robert gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday evening, as he passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the chief of English science side by side with the most accomplished of English critics.
“‘There are good times in the world and I ain’t in ’em!'” he said to himself with a laugh and a shrug as he turned up the lane to the rectory, and then, boylike, was ashamed of himself, and greeted Catherine, with all the tenderer greeting.
Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure of having seen the Squire. Both were in the twilight, when, as the neighborhood declared, Mr. Wendover always walked, and both made a sharp impression on the Rector’s nerves. In the heart of one of the loneliest commons of the parish Robert, swinging along one November evening through the scattered furze bushes growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly conscious of a cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head bent forward coming toward him. It passed without recognition of any kind, and for an instant Robert caught the long, sharpened features and haughty eyes of the Squire.
At another time Robert was walking, far from home, along a bit of level road. The pools in the ruts were just filmed with frost, and gleamed under the sunset; the winter dusk was clear and chill. A horseman turned into the road from a side lane. It was the Squire again, alone. The sharp sound of the approaching hoofs stirred Robert’s pulse, and as they passed each other the Rector raised his hat. He thought his greeting was acknowledged, but could not be quite sure. From the shelter of a group of trees he stood a moment and looked after the retreating figure. It and the horse showed dark against a wide sky barred by stormy reds and purples. The wind whistled through the withered oaks; the long road with its lines of glimmering pools seemed to stretch endlessly into the sunset; and with every minute the night strode on. Age and loneliness could have found no fitter setting. A shiver ran through Elsmere as he stepped forward.
Undoubtedly the quarrel, helped by his work, and the perpetual presence of that beautiful house commanding the whole country round it from its plateau above the river, kept Elsmere specially in mind of the Squire. As before their first meeting, and in spite of it, he became more and more imaginatively preoccupied with him. One of the signs of it was a strong desire to read the Squire’s two famous books: one, ‘The Idols of the Market Place,’ an attack on English beliefs; the other, ‘Essays on English Culture,’ an attack on English ideals of education. He had never come across them as it happened, and perhaps Newcome’s denunciation had some effect in inducing him for a time to refrain from reading them. But in December he ordered them and waited their coming with impatience. He said nothing of the order to Catherine; somehow there were by now two or three portions of his work, two or three branches of his thought, which had fallen out of their common discussion. After all she was not literary and with all their oneness of soul there could not be an _identity_ of interests or pursuits.
The books arrived in the morning. (Oh, how dismally well, with what a tightening of the heart, did Robert always remember that day in after years!) He was much too busy to look at them, and went off to a meeting. In the evening, coming home late from his night-school, he found Catherine tired, sent her to bed, and went himself into his study to put together some notes for a cottage lecture he was to give the following day. The packet of books, unopened, lay on his writing-table. He took off the wrapper, and in his eager way fell to reading the first he touched.
It was the first volume of the ‘Idols of the Market Place.’
Ten or twelve years before, Mr. Wendover had launched this book into a startled and protesting England. It had been the fruit of his first renewal of contact with English life and English ideas after his return from Berlin. Fresh from the speculative ferment of Germany and the far profaner scepticism of France, he had returned to a society where the first chapter of Genesis and the theory of verbal inspiration were still regarded as valid and important counters on the board of thought. The result had been this book. In it each stronghold of English popular religion had been assailed in turn, at a time when English orthodoxy was a far more formidable thing than it is now.
The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, Tradition, the Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, the Eighteenth Century, the Broad Church Movement, Anglican Theology–the Squire had his say about them all. And while the coolness and frankness of the method sent a shook of indignation and horror through the religious public, the subtle and caustic style, and the epigrams with which the book was strewn, forced both the religious and irreligious public to read, whether they would or no. A storm of controversy rose round the volumes, and some of the keenest observers of English life had said at the time, and maintained since, that the publication of the book had made or marked an epoch.
Robert had lit on those pages in the Essay on the Gospels where the Squire fell to analyzing the evidence for the Resurrection, following up his analysis by an attempt at reconstructing the conditions out of which the belief in ‘the legend’ arose. Robert began to read vaguely at first, then to hurry on through page after page, still standing, seized at once by the bizarre power of the style, the audacity and range of the treatment.
Not a sound in the house. Outside, the tossing, moaning December night; inside, the faintly crackling fire, the standing figure. Suddenly it was to Robert as though a cruel torturing hand were laid upon his inmost being. His breath failed him; the book slipped out of his grasp; he sank down upon his chair, his head in his hands. Oh, what a desolate, intolerable moment! Over the young idealist soul there swept a dry destroying whirlwind of thought. Elements Gathered from all sources–from his own historical work, from the Squire’s book, from the secret, half-conscious recesses of the mind- -entered into it, and as it passed it seemed to scorch the heart.
He stayed bowed there a while, then he roused himself with a half-groan, and hastily extinguishing his lamp; he groped his way upstairs to his wife’s room. Catherine lay asleep. The child, lost among its white coverings, slept too; there was a dim light over the bed, the books, the pictures. Beside his wife’s pillow was a table on which there lay open her little Testament and the ‘Imitation’ her father had given her. Elsmere sank down beside her, appalled by the contrast between this soft religious peace and that black agony of doubt which still overshadowed him. He knelt there, restraining his breath lest it should wake her, wrestling piteously with himself, crying for pardon, for faith, feeling himself utterly unworthy to touch even the dear hand that lay so near him. But gradually the traditional forces of his life reasserted themselves. The horror lifted. Prayer brought comfort and a passionate, healing self-abasement. ‘Master, forgive–defend–purify–‘ cried the aching heart. ‘_There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God!_’
He did not open the book again. Next morning he put it back into his shelves. If there were any Christian who could affront such an antagonist with a light heart, he felt with a shudder of memory it was not he.
‘I have neither learning nor experience enough–yet,’ he said to himself slowly as he moved away. ‘Of course it can be met, but I must grow, must think–first.’
And of that night’s wrestle he said not a word to any living soul. He did penance for it in the tenderest, most secret ways, but he shrank in misery from the thought of revealing it even to Catherine.
CHAPTER XXI.
Meanwhile the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and apparently throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. Robert, as soon as he found that radical measures were for the time hopeless, had applied himself with redoubled energy to making the people use such palliatives as were within their reach, and had preached boiled water and the removal of filth till, as he declared to Catherine, his dreams were one long sanitary nightmare. But he was not confiding enough to believe that the people paid much heed, and he hoped more from a dry hard winter than from any exertion either of his or theirs.
But, alas! with the end of November a season of furious rain set in.
Then Robert began to watch Mile End with anxiety, for so far every outbreak of illness there had followed upon unusual damp. But the rains passed leaving behind them no worse result than the usual winter crop of lung ailments and rheumatism, and he breathed again.
Christmas came and went, and with the end of December the wet weather returned. Day after day rolling masses of southwest cloud came up from the Atlantic and wrapped the whole country in rain, which reminded Catherine of her Westmoreland rain more than any she had yet seen in the South. Robert accused her of liking it for that reason, but she shook her head with a sigh, declaring that it was ‘nothing without the peaks.’
One afternoon she was shutting the door of the school behind her, and stepping out on the road skirting the green–the bedabbled wintry green–when she saw Robert emerging from the Mile End lane. She crossed over to him, wondering, as she neared him, that he seemed to take no notice of her. He was striding along, his wideawake over his eyes, and so absorbed that she had almost touched him before he saw her.
‘Darling, is that you? Don’t stop me, I am going to take the pony-carriage in for Meyrick. I have just come back from that accursed place; three cases of diphtheria in one house, Sharland’s wife–and two others down with fever.’
She made a horrified exclamation.
‘It will spread,’ he said gloomily, ‘I know it will. I never saw the children look such a ghastly crew before. Well, I must go for Meyrick and a nurse, and we must isolate and make a fight for it.’
In a few days the diphtheria epidemic reached terrible proportion’s. There had been one death, others were expected, and soon Robert in his brief hours at home could find no relief in anything, so heavy was the oppression of the day’s memories. At first Catherine for the child’s sake kept away; but the little Mary was weaned, had a good Scotch nurse, was in every way thriving, and after a day or two Catherine’s craving to help, to be with Robert in his trouble was too strong to be withstood. But she dared not go backward and forward between her baby and the diphtheritic children. So she bethought herself of Mrs. Elsmere’s servant, old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs. Elsmere’s cottage till a tenant could be found for it, and doing good service meanwhile as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse went over to the cottage. Catherine carried the child there, wrapped close in maternal arms, and leaving her on old Martha’s lap, went back to Robert.
Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight with the epidemic. At the climax of it, there were about twenty children down with it in different stages, and seven cases of fever. They had two hospital nurses; one of the better cottages, turned into a sanatorium, accommodated the worst cases under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine, directed by them and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest, he helping to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases Sharland’s wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it seemed almost impossible she could weather through. But day after day passed, and by dint of incessant nursing she still lived. A youth of twenty, the main support of a mother and five or six younger children, was also desperately ill. Robert hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and the boy’s doglike affection for the Rector, struggling with his deathly weakness, was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and Ormuzd–the power of life struggling with the power of death.
It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband and wife as though the few daily hours spent at the rectory were mere halts between successive acts of battle with the plague-fiend–a more real and grim Grendel of the Marshes–for the lives of children. Catherine could always sleep in these intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very soon could only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick’s. On all occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in him of a certain lack of constitutional hardness which his mother knew very well, but which his wife was only just beginning to recognize. However, he laughed to scorn any attempt to restrain his constant goings and comings, or those hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital nurses were the first to admit, no one was so successful as the Rector. And when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, the worn and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge warm at each heart of those before him of how the Rector not only talked but lived, carried every word home.
This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, strangely enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke through a tension of brain which of late had become an oppression. And for both him and Catherine these dark times had moments of intensest joy, points of white light illuminating heaven and earth.
There were cloudy nights–wet, stormy January nights–when sometimes it happened to them to come back both together from the hamlet, Robert carrying a lantern, Catherine clothed in waterproof from head to foot, walking beside him, the rays flashing now on her face, now on the wooded sides of the lane, while the wind howled through the dark vault of branches overhead. And then, as they talked or were silent, suddenly a sense of the intense blessedness of this comradeship of theirs would rise like a flood in the man’s heart, and he would fling his free arm round her, forcing her to stand a moment in the January night and storm while he said to her words of passionate gratitude, of faith in an immortal union reaching beyond change or deaths lost in a kiss which was a sacrament. Then there were the moments when they saw their child, held high in Martha’s arms at the window, and leaping toward her mother; the moments when one pallid, sickly being after another was pronounced out of danger; and by the help of them the weeks passed away.
Nor were they left without help from outside. Lady Helen Varley no sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Robert on his way one morning from one cottage to another saw her pony-carriage in the lane. He hastened up to her before she could dismount.
‘No, Lady Helen, you mustn’t come here,’ he said to her peremptorily, as she held out her hand.
‘Oh, Mr. Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his grandmother. Let me just go through, at any rate, and see what I can send you.’
Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs and hers had once described this little lady to Elsmere by a French sentence which originally applied to the Duchesse de Choiseul. ‘Une charmante petite fee sortie d’un oeuf enchante!’–so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked down upon her now, fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels behind him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of life. Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the production of which even Worth had felt some pride; a little green velvet bonnet perched on her fair hair; one tiny hand, ungloved, seemed ablaze with diamonds; there were opals and diamonds somewhere at her throat, gleaming among her sables. But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she wore her high birth, her quaint, irregular prettiness, or the one or two brilliant gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. She loved her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased her to wear them in the morning she wore them; and in five minutes she was capable of making the sourest Puritan forget to frown on her and them. To Robert she always seemed the quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their best. All her freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful. At her freest and gayest there were things in her–restraints, reticences, perceptions–which implied behind her generations of rich, happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate all the more delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. Robert was often struck by the curious differences between her and Rose. Rose was far the handsome; she was at least as clever; and she had a strong imperious will where Lady Helen had only impulses and sympathies and _engouements_. But Rose belonged to the class which struggles, where each individual depends on himself and knows it. Lady Helen had never struggled for anything–all the best things of the world were hers so easily that she hardly gave them a thought; or rather, what she had gathered without pain she held so lightly, she dispensed so lavishly, that men’s eyes followed her, fluttering through life, with much the same feeling as was struck from Clough’s radical hero by the peerless Lady Maria:–
Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness, Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you; Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous; only be lovely!
‘Uncaring,’ however, little Lady Helen never was. If she was a fairy, she was a fairy all heart, all frank, foolish smiles and tears.
‘No, Lady Helen–no,’ Robert said again. ‘This is no place for you, and we are getting on capitally.’
She pouted a little.
‘I believe you and Mrs. Elsmere are just killing yourselves all in a corner, with no one to see,’ she said indignantly. ‘If you won’t let me see, I shall send Sir Harry. But who’–and her brown fawn’s eyes ran startled over the cottages before her–‘who, Mr. Elsmere, does this _dreadful_ place belong to?’
‘Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert shortly.
‘Impossible!’ she cried incredulously. ‘Why, I wouldn’t ask one of my dogs to sleep there,’ and she pointed to the nearest hovel, whereof the walls were tottering outward, the thatch was falling to pieces, and the windows were mended with anything that came handy–rags, paper, or the crown of an old hat.
‘No, you would be ill-advised’ said Robert, looking with a bitter little smile at the sleek dachshund that sat blinking beside its mistress.
‘But what is the agent about?’
Then Robert told her the story, not mincing his words. Since the epidemic had begun, all that sense of imaginative attraction which had been reviving in him toward the Squire had been simply blotted out by a fierce heat of indignation. When he thought of Mr. Wendover now, he thought of him as the man to whom in strict truth it was owing that helpless children died in choking torture. All that agony, of wrath and pity he had gone through in the last ten days sprang to his lips now as he talked to Lady Helen, and poured itself into his words.
‘Old Meyrick and I have taken things into our own hands now,’ he said at last briefly. ‘We have already made two cottages fairly habitable. To-morrow the inspector comes. I told the people yesterday I wouldn’t be bound by my promise a day longer. He must put the screw on Henslowe, and if Henslowe dawdles, why we shall just drain and repair and sink for a well, ourselves. I can find the money somehow. At present we get all our water from one of the farms on the brow.’
‘Money!’ said Lady Helen impulsively, her looks warm with sympathy for the pale, harassed young rector. ‘Sir Harry shall send you as much as you want. And anything else–blankets–coals?’
Out came her notebooks and Robert was drawn into a list. Then, full of joyfulness at being allowed to help, she gathered up her reins, she nodded her pretty little head at him, and was just starting off her ponies at full speed, equally eager ‘to tell Harry’ and to ransack Churton for the stores required, when it occurred to her to pull up again.
‘Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, does nothing but talk about your sister-in-law. _Why_ did you keep her all to yourself? Is it kind, is it neighborly, to have such a wonder to stay with you and let nobody share?’
‘A wonder?’ said Robert, amused. ‘Rose plays the violin very well, but–‘
‘As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective!’ exclaimed Lady Helen. ‘My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in town next season if you will all let her. I think she would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte knows all the world and his wife. And if I’m there, and Miss Leyburn will let me make friends with her, why, you know, _I_ can just protect her a little from Aunt Charlotte?’
The little laughing face bent forward again; Robert, smiling, raised his hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else Elsmere would have thought all this effusion insincere or patronizing. But Lady Helen was the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only highborn woman he had ever met who was really, and not only apparently, free from the ‘nonsense of rank.’ Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte’s social tolerance to be a mere varnish. But this little person, and her favorite brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts of him, must always have found life too romantic, too wildly and delightfully interesting from top to bottom, to be measured by any but romantic standards.
Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who adored his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and thanked God every morning that he was an Englishman, rode over to Mile End. Robert, who had just been round the place with the inspector and was dead tired, had only energy to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry, leaving a check behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong language, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled.
A few days later Mr. Wendover’s crimes as a landowner, his agent’s brutality, young Elsmere’s devotion, and the horrors of the Mile End outbreak, were in everybody’s mouth. The county was roused. The Radical newspaper came out on the Saturday with a flaming article; Robert, much to his annoyance, found himself the local hero; and money began to come in to him freely.
On the Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene with an army of workmen. A racy communication from the inspector had reached him two days before, so had a copy of the ‘Churton Advertiser.’ He had spent Sunday in a drinking bout turning over all possible plans of vengeance and evasion. Toward the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt clever Scotchwoman, who saw ruin before them, and had on occasion an even sharper tongue than her husband, managed to capture the supplies of brandy in the house and effectually conceal them. Then she waited for the moment of collapse which came on toward morning, and with her hands on her hips she poured into him a volley of home-truths which not even Sir Harry Varley could have bettered. Henslowe’s nerve gave way. He went out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look for workmen.
Robert, standing on the step of a cottage, watched him give his orders, and took vigilant note of their substance. They embodied the inspector’s directions, and the Rector was satisfied. Henslowe was obliged to pass him on his way to another group of houses. At first he affected not to see the Rector, then suddenly Elsmere was conscious that the man’s bloodshot eyes were on him. Such a look! If hate could have killed, Elsmere would have fallen where he stood. Yet the man’s hand mechanically moved to his hat, as though the spell of his wife’s harangue were still potent over his shaking muscles.
Robert took no notice whatever of the salutation. He stood calmly watching till Henslowe disappeared into the last house. Then he called one of the agent’s train, heard what was to be done, gave a sharp nod of assent, and turned on his heel. So far so good: the servant had been made to feel, but he wished it had been the master. Oh, those three little emaciated creatures whose eyes he had closed, whose clammy hands he had held to the last!–what reckoning should be asked for their undeserved torments when the Great Account came to be made up?
Meanwhile not a sound apparently of all this reached the Squire in the sublime solitude of Murewell. A fortnight had passed. Henslowe had been conquered, the county had rushed to Elsmere’s help, and neither he nor Mrs. Darcy had made a sign. Their life was so abnormal that it was perfectly possible they had heard nothing. Elsmere wondered when they _would_ hear.
The Rector’s chief help and support all through had been old Meyrick. The parish doctor had been in bed with rheumatism when the epidemic broke out, and Robert, feeling it a comfort to be rid of him, had thrown the whole business into the hands of Meyrick and his son. This son was nominally his father’s junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young and brilliant M.D. fresh from a great hospital, and his father was just a poor old general practitioner, with the barest qualification and only forty years’ experience to recommend him, it will easily be imagined that the subordination was purely nominal. Indeed young Meyrick was fast ousting his father in all directions, and the neighborhood, which had so far found itself unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene without old Meyrick’s assistance, was beginning to send notes to the house in Charton High Street, whereon the superscription ‘Dr. _Edward_ Meyrick’ was underlined with ungrateful emphasis. The father took his deposition very quietly. Only on Murewell Hall would he allow no trespassing, and so long as his son left him undisturbed there, he took his effacement in other quarters with perfect meekness.
Young Elsmere’s behavior to him, however, at a time when all the rest of the Churton world was beginning to hold him cheap and let him see it, had touched the old man’s heart, and he was the Rector’s slave in this Mile End business. Edward Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the hamlet once a day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him. His attainments, of course, were useful, but his cocksureness was irritating, and his manner to his father, abominable. The father, on the other hand, came over in the shabby pony-cart he had driven for the last forty years, and having himself no press of business, would spend hours with the Rector over the cases, giving them an infinity of patient watching, and amusing Robert by the cautious hostility he would allow himself every now and then toward his souls newfangled devices.
At first Meyrick showed himself fidgety as to the Squire. Had he been seen, been heard from? He received Robert’s sharp negatives with long sighs, but Robert clearly saw that, like the rest of the world, he was too much afraid of Mr. Wendover to go and beard him. Some months before, as it happened, Elsmere had told him the story of his encounter with the Squire, and had been a good deal moved and surprised by the old man’s concern.
One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, when the state of things in the hamlet was beginning decidedly to mend, Meyrick arrived for his morning round, much preoccupied. He hurried his work a little, and after it was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him.
‘I have seen the Squire, sir,’ he said, turning on his companion with a certain excitement.
Robert flushed.
‘Have you?’ he replied with his hands behind him, and a world of expression in his sarcastic voice.
‘You misjudge him! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere!’ the old man said tremulously. ‘I told you he could know of this business–and he didn’t! He has been in town part of the time, and down here, how is he to know anything? He sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real _bad_ fellow.’
‘Don’t abuse the man,’ said Robert, looking up. ‘It’s not worth while, when you can say your mind of the master.’
Old Meyrick sighed.
‘Well,’ said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and quivering, ‘you told him the story, I suppose? Seven deaths, is it, by now? Well, what sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents’–and he smiled–‘produce?’
‘He talked of sending money,’ said Meyrick doubtfully; he said he would have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr. Elsmere, you think too hardly of the Squire, that you do!’
They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be laboring under some suppressed emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a doctor of the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more or less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve, generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable and ghastly story of the old Squire’s suicide. He described the heir’s summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its horrors, and that mysterious condition of the Squire for some months afterward, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor, had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover’s physical and mental breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited fatality which at that period of his life not even the Squire’s iron will had been able wholly to conceal.
Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found himself with some curiosity realizing the Squire from another man’s totally different point of view. Evidently Meyrick had seen him at such moments as wring from the harshest nature whatever grains of tenderness, of pity, or of natural human weakness may be in it. And it was clear, too, that the Squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling a certain soothing influence in the _naivete_ and simplicity of the old man’s sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick’s presence, such as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in him since his earliest youth.
And yet how childish the old man’s whole mental image of the Squire was after all! What small account it made of the subtleties, the gnarled intricacies and contradictions of such a character! Horror at his father’s end, and dread of a like fate for himself! Robert did not know very much of the Squire, but he knew enough to feel sure that this confiding, indulgent theory of Meyrick’s was ludicrously far from the mark as an adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover’s later life.
Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resistance which his companion’s mind was opposing to his own. He dropped the wandering narrative he was busy upon with a sigh.
‘Ah well, I dare say it’s hard, it’s hard,’ he said with patient acquiescence in his voice, ‘to believe a man can’t help himself. I dare say we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But if ever there was a man sick in mind–for all his book learning they talk about–and sick in soul, that man is the Squire.’
Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was a new dignity about the simple old man. The old-fashioned deference, which had never let him forget in speaking to Robert that he was speaking to a man of family, and which showed itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions which were a torment to his son, had given way to something still more deeply ingrained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the spectacles, and the long straight hair–like the figure of a superannuated schoolmaster–assumed, as he turned again to his younger companion, something of authority, something almost of stateliness.
‘Ah, Mr. Elsmere,’ he said, laying his shrunk hand on the younger man’s sleeve and speaking with emotion, ‘you’re very good to the poor. We’re all proud of you–you and your good lady. But when you were coming, and I heard tell all about you, I thought of my poor Squire, and I said to myself, “That young man’ll be good to _him_. The Squire will make friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good wife–and there’ll be children born to him–and the Squire will take an interest–and–and–maybe—-“
The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently.
‘And there was something in the way between you,’ the speaker went on, starting. ‘I dare say you were quite right–quite right. I can’t judge. Only there are ways of doing a thing. And it was a last chance; and now it’s missed–it’s missed. Ah! It’s no good talking; he has a heart–he has! Many’s the kind thing he’s done in old days for me and mine–I’ll never forget them! But all these last few years–oh, I know, I know. Yon can’t go and shut your heart up, and fly in the face of all the duties the Lord laid on you, without losing yourself and setting the Lord against you. But it is pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it’s pitiful!’
It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine breath passing through the wintry, lane and through the shaking voice of the old man. Beside the spirit looking out of those wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth, its justest resentments, its most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh, inexcusable.
‘Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless you! Don’t imagine I will forget a word you have said to me.’
The Rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a gentle smile passed over Meyrick’s aging face, and they parted.
That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with John Allwood, the youth of twenty whose case had been a severer tax on the powers of the little nursing staff than perhaps any other. Mother and neighbors were worn out, and it was difficult to spare a hospital nurse for long together from the diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted during the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept soundly on a bed made up in the ground-floor room of the little sanatorium. Then at twelve the nurse called him, and he went out, his eyes still heavy with sleep, into a still, frosty winter’s night.
After so much rain, so much restlessness of wind and cloud, the silence and the starry calm of it were infinitely welcome. The sharp cold air cleared his brain and braced his nerves, and by the time he reached the cottage whither he was bound, he was broad awake. He opened the door softly, passed through the lower room, crowded with sleeping children, climbed the narrow stairs as noiselessly as possible, and found himself in a garret, faintly lit, a bed in one corner, and a woman sitting beside it. The woman glided away, the Rector looked carefully at the table of instructions hanging over the bed, assured himself that wine and milk and beef essence and medicines were ready to his hand, put out his watch on the wooden table near the bed, and sat him down to his task. The boy was sleeping the sleep of weakness. Food was to be given every half hour, and in this perpetual impulse to the system lay his only chance.
The Rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could just read it by the help of the dim light. But after a while, as the still hours passed on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat thinking–endlessly thinking. The young laborer lay motionless beside him, the lines of the long emaciated frame showing through the bedclothes. The night-light flickered on the broken, discolored ceiling; every now and then a mouse scratched in the plaster; the mother’s heavy breathing came from the next room; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried outside. Otherwise deep silence, such silence as drives the soul back upon itself.
Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. The stern judgments, the passionate condemnations which his nature housed so painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul breathed an ‘ampler aether, a diviner air.’ Oh! the mysteries of life and character, the subtle, inexhaustible claims of pity! The problems which hang upon our being here; its mixture of elements; the pressure of its inexorable physical environment; the relations of mind to body, of man’s poor will to this tangled tyrannous life–it was along these old, old lines his thought went painfully groping and always at intervals it came back to the Squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new soberness, a new humility and patience entering in.
And yet it was not Meyrick’s facts exactly that had brought this about. Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him.
Then these thoughts led him on further and further from man to God, from human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours did Elsmere’s hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt, of bitter, brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling a while, and then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine’s hand. It was she who led him through the shades; it was her voice murmuring in his ear.
When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible waves into the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but fears of experience lay between him and the beginnings of his watch.
‘It is by these moments we should date our lives’ he murmured to himself as he rose: ‘they are the only real landmarks.’
It was eight o’clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him had come. The results of the night for his charge were good: the strength had been maintained, the pulse was firmer, the temperature lower. The boy, throwing off his drowsiness, lay watching the Rector’s face as he talked in an undertone to the nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb, friendly wistfulness. When Robert bent over him to say good-by, this expression brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, feeling at last that there was a promise of life in his look and touch.
In, another moment he had stepped out into the January morning. It was clear and still as the night had been. In the east there was a pale promise of sun; the reddish-brown trunks of the fir woods had just caught it and rose faintly in glowing in endless vistas and colonnades one behind the other. The flooded river itself rushed through the bridge as full and turbid as before, but all the other water surfaces had gleaming films of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, almost a festal air under the touch of the frost, while on the side of the hill leading to Murewell, tree rose above tree, the delicate network of their wintry twigs and branches set against stretches of frost-whitened grass, till finally they climbed into the pale all-completing blue. In a copse close at hand there were woodcutters at work, and piles of gleaming laths shining through the underwood. Robins hopped along the frosty road, and as he walked on through the houses toward the bridge, Robert’s quick ear distinguished that most wintry of all sounds–the cry of a flock of field-fares passing overhead.
As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure upon it, the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, leaning against the stone parapet. With a start he recognized the Squire.
He went up to him without an instant’s slackening of his steady step. The Squire heard the sound of someone coming, turned, and saw the Rector.
‘I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, stopping and holding out his hand. ‘I meant to have come to talk to you about this place this morning. I ought to have come before.’
He spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had parted the day before. The Squire touched his hand for an instant.
‘You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,’ he said, endeavoring to speak with all his old hauteur, while his heavy lips twitched nervously, ‘that, for one reason and another, I knew nothing of the epidemic here till yesterday, when Meyrick told me.’
‘I heard from Mr. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here now, Mr. Wendover, and I am in no great hurry to get home, may I take you through and show you the people?’
The Squire at last looked at him straight–at the face worn and pale, yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which something of the solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed to be still lingering.
‘Are you just come?’ he said abruptly, ‘or are you going back?’
‘I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of the fever cases. It’s hard work for the nurses and the relations sometimes, without help.’
The Squire moved on mechanically toward the village, and Robert moved beside him.
‘And Mrs. Elsmere?’
‘Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to stay the night when the diphtheria was at its worst; but there are only four anxious cases left, the rest all convalescent.’
The Squire said no more, and they turned into the lane, where the ice lay thick in the deep ruts, and on either hand curls of smoke rose into the clear cold sky. The Squire looked about him with eyes which no detail escaped. Robert, without a word of comment, pointed out this feature and that, showed where Henslowe had begun repairs, where the new well was to be, what the water-supply had been till now, drew the Squire’s attention to the roofs, the pigstyes, the drainage, or rather complete absence of drainage, and all in the dry voice of someone going through a catalogue. Word had already fled like wildfire through the hamlet that the Squire was there. Children and adults, a pale emaciated crew, poured out into the wintry air to look. The Squire knit his brows with annoyance as the little crowd in the lane grew. Robert took no notice.
Presently he pushed open the door of the house where he had spent the night. In the kitchen a girl of sixteen was clearing away the various nondescript heaps on which the family had slept, and was preparing breakfast. The Squire looked at the floor,–
‘I thought I understood from Henslowe,’ he muttered, as though to himself, ‘that there were no mud floors left on the estate–‘
‘There are only three houses in Mile End without them; said Robert, catching what he said.
They went upstairs, and the mother stood open-eyed while the Squire’s restless look gathered in the details of the room, the youth’s face as he lay back on his pillows, whiter than they, exhausted and yet refreshed by the sponging with vinegar and water which the mother had just been administering to him; the bed, the gaps in the worm-eaten boards, the holes in the roof where the plaster bulged inward, as though a shake would bring it down; the coarse china shepherdesses on the mantelshelf, and the flowers which Catherine had put there the day before. He asked a few questions, said an abrupt word or two to the mother, and they tramped downstairs again and into the street. Then Robert took him across to the little improvised hospital, saying to him on the threshold, with a moment’s hesitation,–
‘As you know, for adults there is not much risk, but there is always some risk–‘
A peremptory movement of the Squire’s hand stopped him, and they went in. In the downstairs room were half-a-dozen convalescents, pale, shadowy creatures, four of them under ten, sitting up in their little cots, each of them with a red flannel jacket drawn from Lady Helen’s stores, and enjoying the breakfast which a nurse in white cap and apron had just brought them. Upstairs in a room from which a lath-and-plaster partition had been removed, and which had been adapted, warmed and ventilated by various contrivances to which Robert and Meyrick had devoted their practical minds, were the ‘four anxious cases.’ One of them, a little creature of six, one of Sharland’s black-eyed children, was sitting up, supported by the nurse, and coughing, its little life away. As soon as he saw it, Robert’s step quickened. He forgot the Squire altogether. He came and stood by the bedside, rigidly still, for he could do nothing, but his whole soul absorbed in that horrible struggle for air. How often he had seen it now, and never without the same wild sense of revolt and protest! At last the hideous membrane was loosened, the child got relief and lay back white and corpselike, but with a pitiful momentary relaxation of the drawn lines on its little brow. Robert stooped and kissed the damp tiny hand. The child’s eyes remained shut, but the fingers made a feeble effort to close on his.
‘Mr. Elsmere,’ said the nurse, a motherly body, looking at him with friendly admonition, ‘if you don’t go home and rest you’ll be ill too, and I’d like to know who’ll be the better for that?’
‘How many deaths?’ asked the Squire abruptly, touching Elsmere’s arm, and so reminding Robert of his existence. ‘Meyrick spoke of deaths.’
He stood near the door, but his eyes were fixed on the little bed, on the half-swooning child.
‘Seven,’ said Robert, turning upon him. ‘Five of diphtheria, two of fever. That little one will go, too.’
‘Horrible!’ said the Squire under his breath, and then moved to the door.
The two men went downstairs in perfect silence. Below, in the convalescent room, the children were capable of smiles, and of quick, coquettish beckonings to the Rector to come and make game with them as usual. But he could only kiss his hand to them and escape, for there was more to do.
He took the Squire through all the remaining fever cases, and into several of the worst cottages–Milsom’s among them–and when it was all over they emerged into the lane again, near the bridge. There was still a crowd of children and women hanging about, watching eagerly for the Squire, whom many of them had never seen at all, and about whom various myths had gradually formed themselves in the country-side. The Squire walked away from them hurriedly, followed by Robert, and again they halted on the centre of the bridge. A horse led by a groom was being walked up and down on a flat piece of road just beyond.
It was an awkward moment. Robert never forgot the thrill of it, or the association of wintry sunshine streaming down upon a sparkling world of ice and delicate woodland and foam-flecked river.
The squire turned toward him irresolutely; his sharply-cut wrinkled lips opening and closing again. Then he held out his hand: ‘Mr. Elsmere, I did you a wrong–I did this place and its people a wrong. In my view, regret for the past is useless. Much of what has occurred here is plainly irreparable; I will think what can be done for the future. As for my relation to you, it rests with you to say whether it can be amended. I recognize that you have just cause of complaint.’
What invincible pride there was in the man’s very surrender! But Elsmere was not repelled by it. He knew that in their hour together the Squire had _felt_. His soul had lost its bitterness. The dead and their wrong were with God.
He took the Squire’s outstretched hand, grasping it cordially, a pure, unworldly dignity in his whole look and bearing.
‘Let us be friends, Mr. Wendover. It will be a great comfort to us–my wife and me. Will you remember us both very kindly to Mrs. Darcy?’
Commonplace words, but words that made an epoch in the life of both. In another minute the Squire, on horse-back, was trotting along the side road leading to the Hall, and Robert was speeding home to Catherine as fast as his long legs could carry him.
She was waiting for him on the steps, shading her eyes against the unwonted sun. He kissed her with the spirits of a boy and told her all, his news.
Catherine listened bewildered, not knowing what to say or how all at once to forgive, to join Robert in forgetting. But that strange spiritual glow about him was not to be withstood. She threw her arms about him at last with a half sob,–
‘Oh, Robert–yes! Dear Robert–thank God!’
‘Never think any more,’ he said at last, leading her in from the little hall, ‘of What has been, only of what shall be! Oh, Catherine, give me some tea; and never did I see anything so tempting as that armchair.’
‘He sank down into it, and when she put his breakfast beside him she saw with a start that he was fast asleep. The wife stood and watched him, the signs of fatigue round eyes and mouth, the placid expression, and her face was soft with tenderness and joy. Of course–of course, even that hard man must love him. Who could help it? My Robert!’
And so now in this disguise, now in that, the supreme hour of Catherine’s life stole on and on toward her.
CHAPTER XXII.
As may be imagined, the ‘Churton Advertiser’ did not find its way to Murewell. It was certainly no pressure of social disapproval that made the Squire go down to Mile End in that winter’s dawn. The county might talk, or the local press might harangue, till Doomsday, and Mr. Wendover would either know nothing or care less.
Still his interview with Meyrick in the park after his return from a week in town, whither he had gone to see some old Berlin friends, had been a shock to him. A man may play the intelligent recluse, may refuse to fit his life to his neighbors’ notions as much as you please, and still find death, especially death for which he has some responsibility, as disturbing a fact as the rest of us.
He went home in much irritable discomfort. It seemed to him probably that fortune need not have been so eager to put him in the wrong. To relieve his mind he sent for Henslowe, and in an interview, the memory of which sent a shiver through the agent to the end of his days, he let it be seen that though it did not for the moment suit him to dismiss the man who had brought this upon him, that man’s reign in any true sense was over.
But afterward the Squire was still restless. What was astir in him was not so much pity or remorse as certain instincts of race which still survived under the strange super-structure of manners he had built upon them. It may be the part of a gentlemen and a scholar to let the agent whom you have interposed between yourself and a boorish peasantry have a free hand; but, after all, the estate is yours, and to expose the rector of the parish to all sorts of avoidable risks in the pursuit of his official duty by reason of the gratuitous filth of your property, is an act of doubtful breeding. The Squire in his most rough-and-tumble days at Berlin had always felt himself the grandee as well as the student. He abhorred sentimentalism, but neither did he choose to cut an unseemly figure in his own eyes.
After a night, therefore, less tranquil or less meditative than usual, he rose early and sallied forth at one of those unusual hours he generally chose for walking. The thing must be put right somehow, and at once, with as little waste of time and energy as possible, and Henslowe had shown himself not to be trusted; so telling a servant to follow him, the Squire had made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen for years.
Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition of the Rector. The Squire did not want to be impressed by the young man; did not want to make friends with him. No doubt his devotion had served his own purposes. Still Mr. Wendover was one of the subtlest living judges of character when he pleased, and his enforced progress through these hovels with Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him with a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment.
‘History would be inexplicable after all without the honest fanatic,’ he said to himself on the way home. ‘I suppose I had forgotten it. There is nothing like a dread of being bored for blunting your psychological instinct.’
In the course of the day he sent off a letter to the Rector intimating in the very briefest, dryest way that the cottages should be rebuilt on a different site as soon as possible, and enclosing a liberal contribution toward the expenses incurred in fighting the epidemic. When the letter was gone he drew his books toward him with a sound which was partly disgust, partly relief. This annoying business had wretchedly interrupted him, and his concessions left him mainly conscious of a strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh interview with young Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology; let him be content.
However, next morning after breakfast, Mr. Wendover once more saw his study door open to admit the tall figure of the Rector. The note and check had reached Robert late the night before, and, true to his new-born determination to make the best of the Squire, he had caught up his wideawake at the first opportunity and walked off to the Hall to acknowledge the gift in person. The interview opened as awkwardly as it was possible, and with their former conversation on the same spot fresh in their minds both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten minutes. The Squire was asking himself, indeed, impatiently, all the time, whether he could possibly be forced in the future to put up with such an experience again, and Robert found his host, if less sarcastic than before, certainly as impenetrable as ever.
At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and then Robert, as good luck would have it, turned his longing eyes on the Squire’s books, especially on the latest volumes of a magnificent German _Weltgeschichte_ lying near his elbow, which he had coveted for months without being able to conquer his conscience sufficiently to become the possessor of it. He took it up with an exclamation of delight, and a quiet critical remark that exactly hit the value and scope of the book. The Squire’s eyebrows went up, and the corners of his mouth slackened visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to the amazement of Mrs. Darcy, who was watching them from the drawing-room window, walked back to the park gates together, and what Robert’s nobility and beauty of character would never have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the service of the poor and the tormented under the Squire’s eyes, a chance coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a moment.
The Squire walked back to the house under a threatening sky, his mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, his mind full of an unwonted excitement.
The sentiment of long-past days–days in Berlin, in Paris, where conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily relief and reward of labor, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had endeavored to import the materials for them from the Continent, from London. But as a matter of fact, it was years since he had had any such talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly realized that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his _Fach_.
‘Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?’ The Squire shrugged his shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality to combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought. Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall.
Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! ‘Why the deuce couldn’t he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!’ thought the Squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had wholly denied him the opportunity. ‘And then the sending back of those books: what a piece of idiocy!’
Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he should just have fallen on the period of the later Empire–of the passage from the old-world to the new, where the Squire was a master. The Squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library, ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made a youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he went back to his own work new names would occur to him, and full of the scholar’s avaricious sense of the shortness of time, he would shake his head and frown over the three months which young Elsmere had already passed, grappling with problems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of Monasticism in Gaul, and Heaven knows what besides, half a mile from the man and the library which could have supplied him with the best help to be got in England, unbenefited by either! Mile End was obliterated, and the annoyance, of the morning forgotten.
The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and sleety, the frost breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads with mire.
Robert, rising in his place to begin morning service, and wondering to see the congregation so good on such a day, was suddenly startled, as his eye travelled mechanically over to the Hall pew, usually tenanted by Mrs. Darcy in solitary state, to see the characteristic figure of the Squire. His amazement was so great that he almost stumbled in the exhortation, and his feeling was evidently shared by the congregation, which throughout the service showed a restlessness, an excited tendency to peer round corners and pillars, that was not favorable to devotion.
‘Has he come to spy out the land?’ the Rector thought to himself, and could not help a momentary tremor at the idea of preaching before so formidable an auditor. Then he pulled himself together by a great effort, and fixing his eyes on a shockheaded urchin half way down the church, read the service to him. Catherine meanwhile in her seat on the northern side of the nave, her soul lulled in Sunday peace, knew nothing of Mr. Wendover’s appearance.
Robert preached on the first sermon of Jesus, on the first appearance of the young Master in the synagogue at Nazareth:–
‘_This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears!_’
The sermon dwelt on the Messianic aspect of Christ’s mission, on the mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on the pathos of Jewish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of Christian insight as faith gradually transferred trait after trait of the Messiah of prophecy to the Christ of Nazareth. At first there was a certain amount of hesitation, a slight wavering hither and thither–a difficult choice of words–and then the soul freed itself from man, and the preacher forgot all but his Master and his people.’
At the door as he came out stood Mr. Wendover and Catherine, slightly flushed and much puzzled for conversation, beside him. The Hall carriage was drawn close up to the door, and Mrs. Darcy, evidently much excited, had her small head out of the window and was showering a number of flighty inquiries and suggestions on her brother, to which he paid no more heed than to the patter of the rain.
When Robert appeared the Squire addressed him ceremoniously,–
‘With your leave, Mr. Elsmere, I will walk with you to the rectory.’ Then, in another voice, ‘Go home, Laetitia, and don’t send anything or anybody.’
He made a signal to the coachman, and the carriage started, Mrs. Darcy’s protesting head remaining out of window as long as anything could be seen of the group at the church door. The odd little creature had paid one or two hurried and recent visits to Catherine during the quarrel, visits so filled, however, with vague railing against her brother and by a queer incoherent melancholy, that Catherine felt them extremely uncomfortable, and took care not to invite them. Clearly she was mortally afraid of ‘Roger,’ and yet ashamed of being afraid. Catherine could see that all the poor thing’s foolish whims and affectations were trampled on; that she suffered, rebelled, found herself no more able to affect Mr. Wendover than if she had been a fly buzzing round him, and became all the more foolish and whimsical in consequence.
The Squire and the Elsmeres crossed the common to the rectory, followed at a discreet interval by groups of villagers curious to get a look at the Squire. Robert was conscious of a good deal of embarrassment, but did his best to hide it. Catherine felt all through as if the skies had fallen. The Squire alone was at his ease, or as much at his ease as he ever was. He commented on the congregation, even condescended to say something of the singing, and passed over the staring of the choristers with a magnanimity of silence which did him credit.
They reached the rectory door, and it was evidently the Squire’s purpose to come in, so Robert invited him in. Catherine threw open her little drawing-room door, and then was seized with shyness as the Squire passed in, and she saw over his shoulder her baby, lying kicking and crowing on the hearthrug, in anticipation of her arrival, the nurse watching it. The Squire in his great cloak stopped, and looked down at the baby as if it had been some curious kind of reptile. The nurse blushed, courtesied, and caught up the gurgling creature in a twinkling.
Robert made a laughing remark on the tyranny and ubiquity of babies. The Squire smiled grimly. He supposed it was necessary that the human race should be carried on. Catherine meanwhile slipped out and ordered another place to be laid at the dinner-table, devoutly hoping that it might not be used.
It was used. The Squire stayed till it was necessary to invite him, then accepted the invitation, and Catherine found herself dispensing boiled mutton to him, while Robert supplied him with some very modest claret, the sort of wine which a man who drinks none thinks it necessary to have in the house, and watched the nervousness of their little parlor-maid with a fellow-feeling which made it difficult for him during the early part of the meal to keep a perfectly straight countenance. After a while, however, both he and Catherine were ready to admit that the Squire was making himself agreeable. He talked of Paris, of a conversation he had had with M. Renan, whose name luckily was quite unknown to Catherine, as to the state of things in the French Chamber.
‘A set of chemists and quill-drivers,’ he said contemptuously; ‘but as Renan remarked to me, there is one thing to be said for a government of that sort, “Ils ne font pas la guerre.” And so long as they don’t run France into adventures, and a man can keep a roof over his head and a son in his pocket, the men of letters at any rate can rub along. The really interesting thing in France just now is not French politics–Heaven save the mark!–but French scholarship. There never was so little original genius going in Paris, and there never was so much good work being done.’
Robert thought the point of view eminently characteristic.
‘Catholicism, I suppose,’ he said, ‘as a force to be reckoned with, is dwindling more and more?’
‘Absolutely dead,’ said the Squire emphatically, ‘as an intellectual force. They haven’t got a writer, scarcely a preacher. Not one decent book has been produced on that side for years.’
‘And the Protestants, too,’ said Robert, ‘have lost all their best men of late,’ and he mentioned one or two well-known French Protestant names.
‘Oh, as to French Protestantism ‘–and the Squire’s shrug was superb–‘Teutonic Protestantism is in the order of things, so to speak, but _Latin_ Protestantism! There is no more sterile hybrid in the world!’.
Then, becoming suddenly aware that he might have said something inconsistent with his company, the Squire stopped abruptly. Robert, catching Catherine’s quick compression of the lips, was grateful to him, and the conversation moved on in another direction.
Yes, certainly, all things considered, Mr. Wendover made himself agreeable. He ate his boiled mutton and drank his _ordinaire_ like a man, and when the meal was over, and he and Robert had withdrawn