CHAPTER XIII.
The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the subject of severe scientific investigation. He would ‘do it’ thoroughly.
So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. There, in spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Robert’s old tutor was a good deal more interested by Robert’s sermon than he had expected to be. It was on the character of David, and there was a note in it, a note of historical imagination, a power of sketching in a background of circumstance, and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were, by a detail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might watch a game of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and counting the good points, but by the end he was not a little carried away. The peroration was undoubtedly very moving, very intimate, very modern, and Langham up to a certain point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to music and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of him kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile out of the church,—‘This sort of thing will go down, will make a mark: Elsmere is at the beginning of a career!’
In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty towards his wife, in that he had been forced to leave so much of the entertainment of Langham to her, asked his old friend to come for him to the school at four o’clock and take him for a walk between two engagements. Langham was punctual, and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday cricket, which was in full swing. During the past year the young Rector had been developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations of country gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity before. He talked of fishing as Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant quotations from Kingsley; and his cricket, which had been good enough at Oxford to get him into his College eleven, had stood him in specially good stead with the Murewell villagers. That his play was not elegant they were not likely to find out; his bowling they set small store by; but his batting was of a fine, slashing, superior sort which soon carried the Murewell Club to a much higher position among the clubs of the neighborhood than it had ever yet aspired to occupy.
The Rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, after they had hung about the green a little while, he took his friend over to the Workmen’s Institute, which stood at the edge of it. He explained that the Institute had been the last achievement of the agent before Henslowe, a man who had done his duty to the estate according to his lights, and to whom it was owing that those parts of it, at any rate, which were most in the public eye, were still in fair condition.
The Institute was now in bad repair and too small for the place. ‘But catch that man doing anything for us!’ exclaimed Robert hotly. ‘He will hardly mend the roof now, merely, I believe, to spite me. But come and see my new Naturalists’ Club.’
And he opened the Institute door. Langham followed, in the temper of one getting up a subject for examination.
Poor Robert! His labor and his enthusiasm deserved a more appreciative eye. He was wrapped up in his Club, which had been the great success of his first year, and he dragged Langham through it all, not indeed, sympathetic creature that he was, without occasional qualms. ‘But after all,’ he would say to himself indignantly, ‘I must do something with him.’
Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at the collections for the year, and was quite ready to take it for granted that they were extremely creditable. Into the old-fashioned window-sills glazed compartments had been fitted, and these were now fairly filled with specimens, with eggs, butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and what not. A case of stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the centre of the room; another containing the birds of the district was close by. On a table further on stood two large opera books, which served as records of observations on the part of members of the Club. In one, which was scrawled over with mysterious hieroglyphs, anyone might write what he would. In the other, only such facts and remarks as had passed the gauntlet of a Club meeting were recorded in Robert’s neatest hand. On the same table stood jars full of strange creatures—tadpoles and water larvae of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed poking among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom only the generalizations of science were congenial, stood by and mildly scoffed.
As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently been hanging about waiting for the Rector, came up to him, boorishly touched his cap, and then, taking a cardboard box out of his pocket, opened it with infinite caution, something like a tremor of emotion passing over his gnarled countenance.
The Rector’s eyes glistened.
‘Hullo! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did you get that? You lucky fellow! Come in, and let’s look it out!’
And the two plunged back into the Club together, leaving Langham to the philosophic and patient contemplation of the village green, its geese, its donkeys, and its surrounding fringe of houses. He felt that quite indisputably life would have, been better worth living if, like Robert, he could have taken a passionate interest in rare moths or common plough-boys; but Nature having denied him the possibility, there was small use in grumbling.
Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy went off, bearing his treasure with him.
‘Lucky dog!’ said Robert, turning his friend into a country road leading out of the village, ‘he’s found one of the rarest moths of the district. Such a hero he’ll be in the Club to-morrow night. It’s extraordinary what a rational interest has done for that fellow! I nearly fought him in public last winter.’
And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a little quick look of feeling in the gray eyes.
‘“Magnificent, but not war,”’ said Langham dryly. ‘I wouldn’t have given much for your chances against those shoulders.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I should have had a little science on my side, which counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the Club for brutality toward the old grandmother he lives with—turned him out in public. Such a scene! I shall never forget the boy’s face. It was like a corpse, and the eyes burning out of it. He made for me, but the others closed up round, and we got him put out.’
‘Hard lines on the grandmother,’ remarked Langham.
‘She thought so—poor old thing! She left her cottage that night, thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At the end of a week he came into the friend’s house, where she was alone in bed. She cowered under the bed-clothes, she told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead of which he threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to come home. “He wouldn’t do her no mischief.” Everybody dissuaded her, but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterward she sent for me and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody at his work. “Lord, sir!” she said, “it do remind me, when he sits glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the Devils inside ‘em kep’ a-tearing ‘em. But he’s like a new-born babe to me, sir—never does me no ‘arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do take his vittles!” So I made tracks for that lad,’ said Robert, his eyes kindling, his whole frame dilating. ‘I found him in the fields one morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right. And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow came trudging up every night after his work to ask for me—well, never mind! but it gives one a good glow at one’s heart to think about it.’
The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though defying his own feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The pastoral temper was a novelty to him, and the strong development of it in the undergraduate of his Oxford recollections had its interest.
A quarter to six,’ said Robert, as on their return from their walk they were descending a low wooded hill above the village, and the church clock rang out. ‘I must hurry, or I shall be late for my storytelling.’
‘Story-telling!’ said Langham, with a half-exasperated shrug. ‘What next? You clergy are too inventive by half!’
Robert laughed a trifle bitterly.
‘I can’t congratulate you on your epithets,’ he said, thrusting his hands far into his pockets. ‘Good Heavens, if we were—if we were inventive as a body, the Church wouldn’t be where she is in the rural districts! My story-telling is the simplest thing in the world. I began it in the winter with the object of somehow or other getting at the imagination of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to live someone else’s life—it is the one thing worth doing with them. That’s what I have been aiming at. I told my stories all the winter—Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas—Heaven knows what! And on the whole it answers best. But now we are reading “The Talisman.” Come and inspect us, unless you’re a purist about your Scott. None other of the immortals have such longueurs as he, and we cut him freely.’
‘By all means,’ said Langham; lead on.’ And he followed his companion without repugnance. After all, there was something contagious in so much youth and hopefulness.
The story-telling was hold in the Institute.
A group of men and boys were hanging round the door when they reached it. The two friends made their way through, greeted in the dumb, friendly English fashion on all sides, and Langham found himself in a room half-filled with boys and youths, a few grown men, who had just put their pipes out, lounging at the back.
Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the hour that followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most enthusiastic, imaginative people are. He was a master of all those arts of look and gesture which make a spoken story telling and dramatic, and Langham marvelled with what energy, after his hard day’s work and with another service before him, he was able to throw himself into such a hors-d’oeuvre as this. He was reading to night one of the most perfect scenes that even the Wizard of the North has ever conjured: the scene in the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the life of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he read on, his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience, surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type and model of a man who had found his métier, found his niche in the world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to an ‘adequate and masterly expression of oneself’ be the aim of life, Robert was achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred souls gave him now all the scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his work to be rather above than below his deserts. He was content—more than content to spend ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or carried him far to the front in literature, on the civilizing a few hundred of England’s rural poor. The future might bring him worldly success—Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert’s stamp are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to no conscious effort of his. Here, in the country living he had so long dreaded and put from him, less it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was happy—deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.
Happy! Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches, by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of thought by this realization, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another man’s happiness.
Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant children or animals passed in and out of the golden light spaces; the patches of heather left here and here glowed as the sunset touched them. Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled across the road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which generation after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! Happy!—in this world, ‘where men sit and hear each other groan.’ His friend’s confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.
What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity—‘on the passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,’ said the dreamy spectator to himself, ‘which at the first honest challenge of the critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him, between him and unpleasant facts!
In the evening, Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest of the household went to evening service.
After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham had shut himself up in Robert’s study he did what he had been admonished to do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself down into Robert’s chair, with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction. ‘Good! Now for something that takes the world less naïvely,’ he said to himself; ‘this house is too virtuous for anything.’
He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The house seemed entirely deserted.
‘All the servants gone too!’ he said presently, looking up and listening. ‘Anybody who wants the spoons needn’t trouble about me. I don’t leave this fire.’
And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of the swing door which separated Robert’s passage from the front hall, opening and shutting. Steps came quickly toward the study, the handle was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.
He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment. She also started as she saw him.
‘I did not know anyone was in,’ she said awkwardly, the color spreading over her face. ‘I came to look for a book.’
She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the darkness of the doorway, her long dress caught up round her in one hand, the other resting on the handle. A gust of some delicate perfume seemed to enter the room with her, and a thrill of pleasure passed through Langham’s senses.
Can I find anything for you?’ he said, springing up.
She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind that it would be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she said, with an accent as coldly polite as she could make it,—
‘Pray don’t disturb yourself. I know exactly where to find it.’
She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, and began running her fingers over the books, with slightly knitted brows and a mouth severely shut. Langham, still standing, watched her and presently stepped forward.
‘You can’t reach those upper shelves,’ he said; ‘please let me.’
He was already beside her, and she gave way.
‘I want “Charles Auchester,”’ she said, still forbiddingly. It ought to be there.’
‘Oh, that queer musical novel—I know it quite well. No sign of it here,’ and he ran over the shelves with the practised eye of one accustomed to deal with books.
‘Robert must have lent it,’ said Rose, with a little sigh. ‘Never mind, please. It doesn’t matter,’ and she was already moving away.
‘Try some other, instead,’ he said, smiling, his arm still upstretched. ‘Robert has no lack of choice.’ His manner had an animation and ease usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a little.
‘He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced at last to stealing the servant’s “Family Herald” out of the kitchen cupboard,’ she said, a smile dawning.
Langham laughed.
‘Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact that when he and I begin to task novels I am always nowhere.’
‘I shouldn’t have supposed you ever read them,’ said Rose, obeying an irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterward.
‘Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to works on the “enclitic de**”?’ he asked, his fine eyes lit up with gayety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily so much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against the books behind him.
Natures like Langham’s, in which the nerves are never normal, have their moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of timidity and depression. After his melancholy of the last two days, the tide of reaction had been mounting within him, and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height.
She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What had happened to Robert’s silent and finicking friend?
‘I know nothing of Oxford,’ she said a little primly, in answer to his question. ‘I never was there—but I never was anywhere, I have seen nothing,’ she added hastily, and, as Langham thought, bitterly.
‘Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforêts!’ he answered, laughing. ‘Is that so little?’
She flashed a quick, defiant look at him, as he mentioned Madame Desforêts, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. She could not help softening toward him. What magic had passed over him?
‘Do you know,’ said Langham, moving, ‘that you are standing in a draught, and that it has turned extremely cold?’
For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and as the window was partially open the curtains were swaying hither and thither, and her muslin dress was being blown in coils round her feet.
‘So it has,’ said Rose, shivering. ‘I don’t envy the Church people. You haven’t found me a book, Mr. Langham!’
‘I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read it by the fire,’ he said, with his hand on the door.
She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath quickened. She too had passed into another phase. Was it the natural effect of night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she sank softly into the armchair opposite to that in which he had been sitting.
‘Find me an exciting one, please.’
Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the bookcase, his hand trembling a little as it passed along the books. He found ‘Villette’ and offered it to her. She took it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at once. He took the hint and went back to his Montaigne.
The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every now and then a sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying away again as abruptly as it had risen. Rose turned the pages of her book, sitting a little stiffly in her long chair, and Langham gradually began to find Montaigne impossible to read. He became instead more and more alive to every detail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and thrust the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose hastily withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up.
‘I am so sorry!’ he interjected. ‘Coals never do what you want them to do. Are you very much interested in “Villette”?’
‘Deeply,’ said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her lap. She laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did her best to check, half way through. What ailed her to-night? She seemed wearied; for the moment there was no fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty, her mutinous, mocking gayety—these things had all worked on the man beside her; but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was adorable.
‘Charlotte Bronté wrote it out of her Brussels experience, didn’t She?’ she resumed languidly. ‘How sorry she must have been to come back to that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!’
‘There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come back,’ said Langham, reflectively, ‘But how she pined for her wilds all through! I am afraid you don’t find your wilds as interesting as she found hers?’
His question and his smile startled her.
Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so personal, so manly. Instead, ‘Villette’ slid a little further from her hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back against the cushion.
‘No, I don’t find my wilds interesting at all,’ she said forlornly. ‘You are not fond of the people, as your sister is?’
‘Fond of them?’ cried Rose hastily. ‘I should think not; and what is more, they don’t like me. It is quite intolerable since Catherine left. I have so much more to do with them. My other sister and I have to do all her work. It is dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a genius for doing just what you do worst.’
The young girl’s hands fell across one another with a little impatient gesture. Langham had a movement of the most delightful compassion toward the petulant, childish creature. It was as though their relative positions had been in some mysterious way reversed. During their two days together she had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the mercy of her scornful, sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why, Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man’s natural advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to use it.
‘Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity?’ he said.
‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Rose irritably; ‘anything that has two legs and is ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.’
‘And you want something quite different, something more exciting?’ he asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he dared something in thus pressing her, but dared it at least with his, wits about him. Rose met his look irresolutely, a little tremor of self-consciousness creeping over her.
‘Yes, I want something different,’ she said in a low voice and paused; then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her hands round her knees. ‘But it is not idleness I want. I want to work, but at things I was born for; I can’t have patience with old women, but I could slave all day and all night to play the violin.’
You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?’ he said quietly.
She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play with her rings.
That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine’s sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly gentleness.
‘But it is all so difficult, you see,’ she said despairingly. ‘Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to do.’
‘He would have changed with the times,’ said Langham.
‘I know he would,’ cried Rose. ‘I have told Catherine so a hundred times. People—good people—think quite differently about art now, don’t they, Mr. Langham?
She spoke with perfect naïveté. He saw more and more of the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.
‘They call it the handmaid of religion,’ he answered, smiling.
Rose made a little face.
‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, with frank brevity. ‘But then there’s something else. You know where we live—at the very ends of the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What’s to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa died I’ve just been plotting and planning to get away. But there’s the difficulty,’—and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid out her case. ‘That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns ever since—the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can’t ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a dreadful, dreadful mistake!’ cried the child, letting her hands fall over her knee.
‘Had he been so happy there?’
‘Happy!—and Rose’s lip curled. ‘His brothers used to kick and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day’s peace till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What could have made him so fond of it?’
And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off perversity of her father’s.
‘Blood has strange magnetisms,’ said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, ‘and they show themselves in the oddest ways.’
‘Then I wish they wouldn’t,’ she said irritably. ‘But that isn’t all. He went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated other places. I think he must have thought’—and her voice dropped—‘he wasn’t going to live long—he wasn’t well when he gave up the school—and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him to know that we should be out of it.’
Then she broke off suddenly.
‘Do you know,’ she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her companion, ‘after all, he gave me my first violin?’
Langham smiled.
‘I like that little inconsequence,’ he said.
‘Then of course I took to it, like a cluck to water, and it began to scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion, and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor, because I mightn’t have it. Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid around his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed again-on Sundays!’
Her companion’s eyes were not quite as clear as before.
‘Poor little naughty child,’ he said, bending over to her. ‘I think your father must have been a man to be loved.’
She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face working with a soft remorse.
‘Oh, so he was—so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why it would have been much easier for me, but he was so good! And there was Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see what a chain it’s been—what a weight! And as I must struggle—must, because I was I—to get back into the world on the other side of the mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why I have been a criminal all my life! And that isn’t exhilarating always.’
And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick, over-tragic emotion of nineteen.
‘I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play yesterday,’ he said gently.
She started.
‘Did you hear me—that Wagner?’
He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.
‘Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.’
He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say ‘I am not quite the mummy you thought me, after all!’ And she colored slightly.
‘I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play often; and it seemed to me that with time—and work—you might play as well as any of them.’
The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.
‘And I can’t help thinking,’ he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own rôle of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, ‘that if your father had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.’
‘Catherine hasn’t moved with the times,’ said Rose dolefully.
Langham was silent. Gaucherie seized him again when it became a question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently emphatic.
‘And you think,’ she went on, ‘you really think, without being too ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts’—and a little laugh danced through the vibrating voice—‘I might try and get them to give up Burwood—I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one can’t help having qualms, though one doesn’t tell them to one’s sisters and cousins and aunts. And sometimes’—she turned her chin round on her hand and looked at him with a delicious, shy impulsiveness—‘sometimes a stranger sees clearer. Do you think me a monster, as Catherine does?’
Even as she spoke her own words startled her—the confidence, the abandonment of them. But she held to them bravely; only her eyelids quivered. She had absurdly misjudged this man, and there was a warm penitence in her heart. How kind he had been, how sympathetic!
He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her gravely, with the air, as it seemed to her, of her friend, her confessor. Her white childish brow, the little curls of bright hair upon her temples, her parted lips, the pretty folds of the muslin dress the little foot on the fender—every detail of the picture impressed itself once for all. Langham will carry it with him to his grave.
‘Tell me,’ she said again, smiling divinely, as though to encourage him—‘tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, what you think?’
The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a gust of wind sweeping through the house—voices and steps approaching. Rose sprang up, and for the first time during all the latter part of their conversation felt a sharp sense of embarrassment.
‘How early you are, Robert!’ she exclaimed, as the study door opened and Robert’s wind-blown head and tall form wrapped in an Inverness cape appeared on the threshold. ‘Is Catherine tired?’
‘Rather,’ said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise betraying itself on his face. ‘She has gone to bed, and told me to ask you to come and say good-night to her.’
‘You got my message about not coming from old Martha?’ asked Rose. ‘I met her on the common.’
‘Yes, she gave it us at the church door.’ He went out again into the passage to hang up his greatcoat. She followed, longing to tell him that it was pure accident that took her to the study, but she could not find words in which to do it, and could only say good-night a little abruptly.
‘How tempting, that fire looks!’ said Robert, re-entering the study. ‘Were you very cold, Langham, before you lit it?
‘Very,’ said Langham smiling, his arm behind his head, his eyes fixed on the blaze; ‘but I have been delightfully warm and happy since.’
CHAPTER XIV.
Catherine stopped beside the drawing-room window with a start, caught by something she saw outside.
It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Langham strolling round the garden. A bystander would have been puzzled by the sudden knitting of Catherine’s brows over it.
Rose held a red parasol, which gleamed against the trees; Dandie leapt about her, but she was too busy talking to take much notice of him. Talking, chattering, to that cold cynic of a man, for whom only yesterday she had scarcely had a civil word! Catherine felt herself a prey to all sorts of vague, unreasonable alarms.
Robert had said to her the night before, with an odd look: ‘Wifie, when I came in I found Langham and Rose had been spending the evening together in the study. And I don’t, know when I have seen Langham so brilliant or so alive as in our smoking talk just now!’
Catherine had laughed him to scorn; but, all the same, she had been a little longer going to sleep than usual. She felt herself almost as much as ever the guardian of her sisters, and the old sensitive nerve was set quivering. And now there could be no question about it—Rose had changed her ground toward Mr. Langham altogether. Her manner at breakfast was evidence enough of it.
Catherine’s self-torturing mind leapt on for an instant to all sorts of horrors. That man!—and she and Robert responsible to her mother and her dead father! Never! Then she scolded herself back to common-sense. Rose and he had discovered a common subject in music and musicians. That would be quite enough to account for the new-born friendship on Rose’s part. And in five more days, the limit of Langham’s stay, nothing very dreadful could happen, argued the reserved Catherine.
But she was uneasy, and after a bit, as that tête-à-tête in the garden still went on, she could not, for the life of her, help interfering. She strolled out to meet them with some woollen stuff hanging over her arm, and made a plaintive and smiling appeal to Rose to come and help her with some preparations for a mothers’ meeting to be held that afternoon. Rose, who was supposed by the family to be ‘taking care’ of her sister at a critical time, had a moment’s prick of conscience, and went off with a good grace. Langham felt vaguely that he owed Mrs. Elsmere another grudge, but he resigned himself and took out a cigarette, wherewith to console himself for the loss of his companion.
Presently, as he stood for a moment turning over some new books on the drawing-room table, Rose came in. She held an armful of blue serge, and, going up to a table in the window, she took from it a little work-ease, and was about to vanish again when Langham went up to her.
‘You look intolerably busy,’ he said to her, discontentedly.
‘Six dresses, ten cloaks, eight petticoats to cut out by luncheon time,’ she answered demurely, with a countenance of most Dorcas-like seriousness—‘and if I spoil them I shall have to pay for the stuff!’
He shrugged his shoulders, and looked at her smiling, still master of himself and of his words.
‘And no music—none at all? Perhaps you don’t know that I too can accompany?’
‘You play!’ she exclaimed, incredulous.
‘Try me.’
The light of his fine black eyes seemed to encompass her. She moved backward a little, shaking her head. ‘Not this morning,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, no, not this morning! I am afraid you don’t know anything about tacking or fixing, or the abominable time they take. Well, it could hardly be expected. There is nothing in the world’—and she shook her serge vindictively—‘that I hate so much!’
‘And not this afternoon, for Robert and I go fishing. But this evening?’ he said, detaining her.
She nodded lightly, dropped her lovely eyes with a sudden embarrassment, and went away with lightning quickness.
A minute or two later Elsmere laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Come and see the Hall, old fellow. It will be our last chance, for the Squire and his sister come back this afternoon. I must parochialize a bit afterward, but you shan’t be much victimized.’
Langham submitted, and they sallied forth. It was a soft rainy morning, one of the first heralds of autumn. Gray mists were drifting silently across the woods and the wide stubbles of the now shaven cornfield, where white lines of reapers were at work, as the morning cleared, making and stacking the sheaves. After a stormy night the garden was strewn with débris, and here and there noiseless prophetic showers of leaves were dropping on the lawn.
Elsmere took his guest along a bit of common, where great black junipers stood up like magnates in council above the motley undergrowth of fern and heather, and then they turned into the park. A great stretch of dimpled land it was, falling softly toward the south and west, bounded by a shining twisted river, and commanding from all its highest points a heathery world of distance, now turned a stormy purple under the drooping fringes of the rain clouds. They walked downward from the moment of entering it, till at last, when they reached a wooded plateau about a hundred feet above the river, the house itself came suddenly into view.
That was a house of houses! The large main building, as distinguished from the lower stone portions to the north which represented a fragment of the older Elizabethan house, had been in its day the crown and boast of Jacobean house-architecture. It was fretted and jewelled with Renaissance terra-cotta work from end to end; each gable had its lace work, each window its carved setting. And yet the lines of the whole were so noble, genius had hit the general proportions so finely, that no effect of stateliness or grandeur had been missed through all the accumulation of ornament. Majestic relic of a vanished England, the house rose amid the August woods rich in every beauty that site, and wealth, and centuries could give to it. The river ran about it as though it loved it. The cedars which had kept it company for well nigh two centuries gathered proudly round it; the deer grouped themselves in the park beneath it, as though they were conscious elements in a great whole of loveliness.
The two friends were admitted by a housemaid who happened to be busy in the hall, and whose red cheeks and general breathlessness bore witness to the energy of the storm of preparation now sweeping through the house.
The famous hall to which Elsmere at once drew Langham’s attention was, however, in no way remarkable for size or height. It told comparatively little of seignorial dignity, but it was as though generation after generation had employed upon its perfecting the craft of its most delicate fingers, the love of its most fanciful and ingenious spirits. Over-head, the stucco-work ceiling, covered with stags and birds and strange heraldic creatures unknown to science, had the deep creamy tint, the consistency and surface of antique ivory. From the white and gilt frieze beneath, untouched, so Robert explained, since the Jacobean days when it was first executed, hung Renaissance tapestries which would have made the heart’s delight of any romantic child, so rich they were in groves of marvellous trees hung with red and golden fruits, in far reaching palaces and rock-built citadels, in flying shepherdesses and pursuing shepherds. Between the tapestries again, there were breadths of carved panelling, crowded with all things round and sweet, with fruits and flowers and strange musical instruments, with flying cherubs, and fair faces in laurel-wreathed medallions; while in the middle of the Hall a great oriel window broke the dim, venerable surfaces of wood and tapestry with stretches of jewelled light. Tables crowded with antiques, with Tanagra figures or Greek verses, with Florentine bronzes or specimens of the wilful, vivacious wood-carving of seventeenth century Spain, stood scattered on the Persian carpets. And, to complete the whole, the gardeners had just been at work on the corners of the hall and of the great window, so that the hard-won subtleties of man’s bygone handiwork, with which the splendid room was incrusted from top to bottom, were masked and renewed here and there by the careless, easy splendor of flowers, which had but to bloom in order to eclipse them all.
Robert was at home in the great pile, where for many months he had gone freely in and out on his way to the library, and the housekeeper only met him to make an apology for her working dress, and to hand over to him the keys of the library bookcases, with the fretful comment that seemed to have in it the ghostly voice of generations of housemaids, Oh lor’, sir, they are a trouble, them books!’
From the drawing-rooms, full of a more modern and less poetical magnificence, where Langham turned restless and refractory, Elsmere with a smile took his guest silently back into the hall, and opened a carved door behind a curtain. Passing through, they found themselves in a long passage lighted by small windows on the left-hand side.
‘This passage, please notice,’ said Robert, ‘leads to nothing but the wing containing the library, or rather libraries, which is the oldest part of the house. I always enter it with a kind of pleasing awe! Consider these carpets, which keep out every sound, and look how everything gets older as we go on.’
For half-way down the passage the ceiling seemed to descend upon their heads, the flooring became uneven, and woodwork and walls showed that they had passed from the Jacobean house into the much older Tudor building. Presently Robert led the way up a few shallow steps, pushed open a heavy door, also covered by curtains, and bade his companion enter.
They found themselves in a low, immense room, running at right angles to the passage they had just quitted. The long diamond-paned window, filling almost half of the opposite wall, faced the door by which they had come in; the heavy, carved mantelpiece was to their right; an open doorway on their left, closed at present by tapestry hangings, seemed to lead into yet other rooms.
The walls of this one were completely covered from floor to ceiling with latticed bookcases, enclosed throughout in a frame of oak carved in light classical relief by what appeared to be a French hand of the sixteenth century. The checkered bindings of the books, in which the creamy tints of vellum predominated, lined the whole surface of the wall with a delicate sobriety of color; over the mantelpiece, the picture of the founder of the house—a Holbein portrait, glorious in red robes and fur and golden necklace—seemed to gather up and give voice to all the dignity and impressiveness of the room beneath him; while on the window side the book-lined wall was, as it were, replaced by the wooded face of a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly, about a hundred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library wing. Between the window and the hill, however, was a small old English garden, closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with every flower that an English August knows—with sunflowers, tiger lilies, and dahlias, white and red. The window was low, so that the flowers seemed to be actually in the room, challenging the pale tints of the books, the tawny browns and blues of the Persian carpet and the scarlet splendors of the courtier over the mantelpiece. The room was lit up besides by a few gleaming casts from the antique, by the ‘Diane Chasseresse’ of the Louvre, by the Hermes of Praxiteles smiling with immortal kindness on the child enthroned upon his arm, and by a Donatello figure of a woman in marble, its subtle, sweet austerity contrasting with the Greek frankness and blitheness of its companions.
Langham was penetrated at once by the spell of this strange and beautiful place. The fastidious instincts which had been half revolted by the costly accumulations, the over-blown splendors of the drawing-room, were abundantly satisfied here.
‘So it was here,’ he said, looking round him, ‘that that man wrote the “Idols of the Market Place”?’
‘I imagine so,’ said Robert; ‘if so, he might well have felt a little more charity toward the human race in writing it. The race cannot be said to have treated him badly on the whole. But now look, Langham, look at these books—the most precious things are here.’
And he turned the key of a particular section of the wall, which was not only latticed but glazed.
‘Here is “A Mirror for Magistrates.” Look at the title-page; you will find Gabriel Harvey’s name on it. Here is a first edition of “Astrophol and Stella,” another of the Arcadia. They may very well be presentation copies, for the Wendover of that day is known to have been a wit and a writer. Imagine finding them in situ like this in the same room, perhaps on the same shelves, as at the beginning! The other rooms on this floor have been annexed since, but this room was always a library.’
Langham took the volumes reverently from Robert’s hands into his own, the scholar’s passion hot within him. That glazed case was indeed a storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson’s ‘Underwoods’ with his own corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell’s ‘Poems,’ with autograph notes; manuscript volumes of letters, containing almost every famous name known to English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the quartos—everything that the heart of the English collector could most desire was there. And the charm of it was that only a small proportion of these precious things represented conscious and deliberate acquisition. The great majority of them had, as it were, drifted thither one by one, carried there by the tide of English letters as to a warm and natural resting-place.
But Robert grew impatient, and hurried on his guest to other things—to the shelves of French rarities, ranging from Du Bellay’s ‘Visions,’ with his autograph, down to the copy of ‘Les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe’ presented by Chateaubriand to Madame Récamier, or to a dainty manuscript volume in the fine writing of Lamartine.
‘These,’ Robert explained, ‘were collected, I believe, by the Squire’s father. He was not in the least literary, so they say, but it had always been a point of honor to carry on the library, and as he had learnt French well in his youth he bought French things, taking advice, but without knowing much about them, I imagine. It was in the room overhead,’ said Robert, laying down the book he held, and speaking in a lower key, ‘so the old doctor of the house told me a few weeks ago, that the same poor soul put an end to himself twenty years ago.’
‘What in the name of fortune did he do that for?’
‘Mania,’ said Robert quietly.
‘Whew!’ said the other, lifting his eyebrows. ‘Is that the skeleton in this very magnificent cupboard?’
‘It has been the Wendover scourge from the beginning, so I hear. Everyone about here of course explains this man’s eccentricities by the family history. But I don’t know,’ said Robert, his lip hardening, ‘it may be extremely convenient sometimes to have a tradition of the kind. A man who knew how to work it might very well enjoy all the advantages of sanity and the privileges of insanity at the same time. The poor old doctor I was telling you of—old Meyrick—who has known the Squire since his boyhood, and has a dog-like attachment to him, is always hinting at mysterious excuses. Whenever I let out to him, as I do sometimes, as to the state of the property, he talks of “inherited melancholy,” “rash judgments,” and so forth. I like the good old soul, but I don’t believe much of it. A man who is sane enough to make a great name for himself in letters is sane enough to provide his estate with a decent agent.’
‘It doesn’t follow,’ said Langham, who was, however, so deep in a collection of Spanish romances and chronicles, that the Squire’s mental history did not seem to make much impression upon him. ‘Most men of letters are mad, and I should be inclined,’ he added, with a sudden and fretful emphasis, ‘to argue much worse things for the sanity of your Squire, Elsmere, from the fact that this room is undoubtedly allowed to get damp sometimes, than from any of those absurd parochial tests of yours.’
And he held up a couple of priceless books, of which the Spanish sheepskin bindings showed traces here and there of moisture.
‘It is no use, I know, expecting you to preserve a moral sense when you get among books,’ said Robert with a shrug. ‘I will reserve my remarks on that subject. But you must really tear yourself away from this room, Langham, if you want to see the rest of the Squire’s quarters. Here you have what we may call the ornamental, sensational part of the library, that part of it which would make a stir at Sotheby’s; the working parts are all to come.’
Langham reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged away. Robert held back the hangings over the doorway leading into the rest of the wing, and, passing through, they found themselves in a continuation of the library totally different in character from the magnificent room they had just left. The walls were no longer latticed and carved; they were closely packed, in the most business-like way, with books which represented the Squire’s own collection, and were in fact a chart of his own intellectual history.
‘This is how I interpret this room,’ said Robert, looking round it. ‘Here are the books he collected at Oxford in the Tractarian movement and afterward. Look here,’ and he pulled out a volume of St. Basil.
Langham looked, and saw on the title-page a note in faded characters: ‘Given to me by Newman at Oxford, in 1845.’
‘Ah, of course, he was one of them in ‘45; he must have left them very soon after,’ said Langham reflectively.
Robert nodded. ‘But look at them! There are the Tracts, all the Fathers, all the Councils, and masses, as you see, of Anglican theology. Now look at the next case, nothing but eighteenth century!’
‘I see,—from the Fathers to the Philosophers, from Hooker to Hume. How history repeats itself in the individual!’
‘And there again,’ said Robert, pointing to the other side of the room, ‘are the results of his life as a German student.’
‘Germany—ah, I remember! How long was he there?’
‘Ten years, at Berlin and Heidelberg. According to old Meyrick, he buried his last chance of living like other men at Berlin. His years of extravagant labor there have left marks upon him physically that can never be effaced. But that bookcase fascinates me. Half the great names of modern thought are in those books.’
And so they were. The first Langham opened had a Latin dedication in a quavering old man’s hand, ‘Amico et discipulo meo,’ signed ‘Fredericus Gulielmus Schelling.’ The next bore the autograph of Alexander von Humboldt, the next that of Boeckh, the famous classic, and so on. Close by was Niebuhr’s History, in the title-page of which a few lines in the historian’s handwriting bore witness to much ‘pleasant discourse between the writer and Roger Wendover, at Bonn, in the summer of 1847.’ Judging from other shelves further down, he must also have spent some time, perhaps an academic year, at Tubïngen, for here were most of the early editions of the ‘Leben Jesu,’ with some corrections from Strauss’s hand, and similar records of Baur, Ewald, and other members or opponents of the Tubïngen school. And so on, through the whole bookcase. Something of everything was there—Philosophy, Theology, History, Philology. The collection was a medley, and made almost a spot of disorder in the exquisite neatness and system of the vast gathering of which it formed part. Its bond of union was simply that it represented the forces of an epoch, the thoughts, the men, the occupations which had absorbed the energies of ten golden years. Every bock seemed to be full of paper marks; almost every title-page was covered with minute writing, which, when examined, proved to contain a record of lectures, or conversations with the author of the volume, sometimes a string of anecdotes or a short biography, rapidly sketched out of the fulness of personal knowledge, and often seasoned with a subtle causticity and wit. A history of modern thinking Germany, of that ‘unextinguished hearth’ whence the mind of Europe has been kindled for three generations, might almost have been evolved from that bookcase and its contents alone.
Langham, as he stood peering among the ugly, vilely-printed German volumes, felt suddenly a kind of magnetic influence creeping over him. The room seemed instinct with a harsh, commanding presence. The history of a mind and soul was written upon the face of it; every shelf, as it were, was an autobiographical fragment, an ‘Apologia pro Vita Mea.’ He drew away from the books at last with the uneasy feeling of one who surprises a confidence, and looked for Robert. Robert was at the end of the room, a couple of volumes under his arm, another, which he was reading, in his hand.
‘This is my corner,’ he said, smiling and flushing a little, as his friend moved up to him. ‘Perhaps you don’t know that I too am engaged upon a great work.’
‘A great work—you?’
Langham looked at his companion as though to find out whether his remark was meant seriously, or whether he might venture to be cynical. Elsmere writing! Why should everybody write books? It was absurd! The scholar who knows what toll scholarship takes of life is always apt to resent the intrusion of the man of action into his domains. It looks to him like a kind of ridiculous assumption that anyone d’un coeur léger can do what has cost him his heart’s blood.
Robert understood something of the meaning of his tone, and replied almost apologetically; he was always singularly modest about himself on the intellectual side.
‘Well, Grey is responsible. He gave me such a homily before I left Oxford on the absolute necessity of keeping up with books, that I could do nothing less than set up a “subject” at once. “Half the day,” he used to say to me, “you will be king of your world: the other half be the slave of something which will take you out of your world into the general world;” and then he would quote to me that saying he was always bringing into lectures—I forget whose it is—“The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect. It is the mission of books that they help one to remember it.” Altogether it was striking, coming from one who has always had such a tremendous respect for practical life and work, and I was much impressed by it. So blame him!’
Langham was silent. Elsmere had noticed that any allusion to Grey found Langham less and less responsive.
‘Well what is the “great work”?’ he said at last, abruptly.
‘Historical. Oh, I should have written something without Grey; I have always had a turn for it since I was a child. But he was clear that history was especially valuable—especially necessary to a clergyman. I felt he was right, entirely right. So I took my Final Schools’ history for a basis, and started on the Empire, especially the decay of the Empire. Some day I mean to take up one of the episodes in the great birth of Europe-the makings of France, I think, most likely. It seems to lead farthest and tell most. I have been at work now nine months.’
‘And are just getting into it?’
‘Just about. I have got down below the surface, and am beginning to feel the joys of digging;’ and Robert threw back his head with one of his most brilliant, enthusiastic smiles. ‘I have been shy about boring you with the thing, but the fact is, I am very keen indeed; and this library has been a godsend!’
‘So I should think.’ Langham sat down on one of the carved wooden stools placed at intervals along the bookcases and looked at his friend, his psychological curiosity rising a little.
‘Tell me,’ he said presently—‘tell me what interests you specially—what seizes you—in a subject like the making of France, for instance?’
‘Do you really want to know?’ said Robert, incredulously.
The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk up and down, trying to answer Langham’s questions, and at the same time to fix in speech a number of sentiments and impressions bred in him by the work of the past few months. After a while Langham began to see his way. Evidently the forces at the bottom of this new historical interest were precisely the same forces at work in Elsmere’s parish plans, in his sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young forces of imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study was not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumulation which is the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, of science. It was simply a passionate sense of the human problems which underlie all the dry and dusty detail of history and give it tone and color, a passionate desire to rescue something more of human life from the drowning, submerging past, to realize for himself and others the solidarity and continuity of mankind’s long struggle from the beginning until now.
Langham had had much experience of Elsmere’s versatility and pliancy, but he had never realized it so much as now, while he sat listening to the vivid, many-colored speech getting quicker and quicker, and more and more telling and original as Robert got more absorbed and excited by what he had to say. He was endeavoring to describe to Langham the sort of book be thought might be written on the rise of modern society in Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and its saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the fierce incoherence of the Empire’s decay, the struggle of Roman order and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of German hardness; above all, the war of orthodoxy and heresy, with its strange political complications. And then, discontented still, as though the heart of the matter was still untouched, he went on, restlessly wandering the while, with his long arms linked behind him, throwing out words at an object in his mind, trying to grasp and analyze that strange sense which haunts the student of Rome’s decline as it once overshadowed the infancy of Europe, that sense of a slowly departing majesty, of a great presence just withdrawn, and still incalculably potent, traceable throughout in that humbling consciousness of Goth or Frank that they were but ‘beggars hutting in a palace—the place had harbored greater men than they!’
‘There is one thing,’ Langham said presently, in his slow, nonchalant voice, when the tide of Robert’s ardor ebbed for a moment, ‘that doesn’t seem to have touched you yet. But you will come to it. To my mind, it makes almost the chief interest of history. It is just this. History depends on testimony. What is the nature and the value of testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences, and what are the deductions to be made from them, if any?’ He fixed his keen look on Robert, who was now lounging against the books, as though his harangue had taken it out of him a little.
‘Ah, well,’ said the Rector smiling, ‘I am only just coming to that. As I told you, I am only now beginning to dig for myself. Till now it has all been work at second hand. I have been getting a general survey of the ground as quickly as I could with the help of other men’s labors. Now I must go to work inch by inch, and find out what the ground is made of. I won’t forget your point. It is enormously important, I grant—enormously,’ he repeated reflectively.
‘I should think it is’ said Langham to himself as he rose; ‘the whole of orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance!’
There was not much more to be seen. A little wooden stair-case led from the second library to the upper rooms, curious old rooms, which had been annexed one by one as the Squire wanted them, and in which there was nothing at all—neither chair, nor table, nor carpet—but books only. All the doors leading from room to room had been taken off; the old worm-eaten boards had been roughly stained; a few old French engravings had been hung here and there where the encroaching books left an opening; but otherwise all was bare. There was a curious charm in the space and air of these empty rooms, with their latticed windows opening on to the hill, and letting in day by day the summer sun-risings or the winter dawns, which had shone upon them for more than three centuries.
‘This is my last day of privilege,’ said Robert. ‘Everybody is shut out when once he appears, from this wing, and this part of the grounds. This was his father’s room,’ and the Rector led the way into the last of the series; ‘and through there,’ pointing to a door on the right, ‘lies the way to his own sleeping-room, which is of course connected with the more modern side of the house.’
‘So this is where that old man ventured “what Cato did and Addison approved,” murmured Langham, standing in the middle of the room and looking around him. This particular room was now used as a sort of lumber place, a receptacle for the superfluous or useless books, gradually thrown off by the great collection all around. There were innumerable volumes in frayed or broken bindings lying on the ground. A musty smell hung over it all; the gray light from outside, which seemed to give only an added subtlety and charm, to the other portions of the ancient building through which they had been moving, seemed here triste and dreary. Or Langham fancied it.
He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw suddenly before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and framed in the doorways facing him, an engraving of a Greuze picture—a girl’s face turned over her shoulder, the hair waving about her temples, the lips parted, the teeth gleaming mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line. Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him.