Robert Elsmere

Catherine returned the letter to her husband with a look of dismay. He was standing with his back to the chimney-piece, his hands thrust far into his pockets, his upper lip quivering. In his happy, expansive life this was the sharpest personal rebuff that had ever happened to him. He could not but smart under it.

‘Not a word,’ he said, tossing his hair bank impetuously, as Catherine stood opposite watching him—‘not one single word about the miserable people themselves! What kind of stuff can the man be made of?’

‘Does he believe you?’ asked Catherine, bewildered.

‘If not, one must try and make him,’ he said energetically, after a moments pause. ‘To-morrow, Catherine, I go down to the Hall and see him.’

She quietly acquiesced, and the following afternoon, first thing after luncheon, she watched him go, her tender inspiring look dwelling with him as he crossed the park, which was lying delicately wrapped in one of the whitest of autumnal mists, the sun just playing through it with pale invading shafts.

The butler looked at him with some doubtfulness. It was never safe to admit visitors for the Squire without orders. But he and Robert had special relations. As the possessor of a bass voice worthy of his girth, Vincent, under Robert’s rule, had become the pillar of the choir, and it was not easy for him to refuse the Rector.

So Robert was led in, through the hall, and down the long passage to the curtained door, which he knew so well.

‘Mr. Elsmere, Sir!’

There was a sudden, hasty movement. Robert passed a magnificent lacquered screen newly placed round the door, and found himself in the Squire’s presence.

The Squire had half risen from his seat in a capacious chair, with a litter of books round it, and confronted his visitor with a look of surprised annoyance. The figure of the Rector, tall, thin, and youthful, stood out against the delicate browns and whites of the book-lined walls. The great room, so impressively bare when Robert and Langham had last seen it, was now full of the signs of a busy man’s constant habitation. An odor of smoke pervaded it; the table in the window was piled with books just unpacked, and the half-emptied case from which they had been taken lay on the ground beside the Squire’s chair.

‘I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, advancing hat in hand, while the Squire hastily put down the German professor’s pipe he had just been enjoying, and coldly accepted his proffered greeting. ‘I should have preferred not to disturb you without an appointment, but after your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal explanation was necessary.’

The Squire stiffly motioned toward a chair, which Robert took, and then slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes fixed on the intruder.

Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but maintaining in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, plunged at once into business. He took the letter he had just received from the Squire as a text, made a good-humored defence of his own proceedings, described his attempt to move Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man to the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about Henslowe were in perfect temper, though by no means without an edge.

Then having disposed of the more personal aspects of the matter, he paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite him, more like a bronzed mask at this moment than a human countenance. The Squire, however, gave him no help. He had received his remarks so far in perfect silence, and seeing that there were more to come, he waited for them with the same rigidity of look and attitude.

So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during the preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors, poisoned water—he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these woes but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labor of body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. But all that he could hurl against the Squire’s feeling, as it were, he gathered up, strangely conscious through it all of his own young persistent yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it lay chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so enriching.

But passion, and reticence, and bidden sympathy were alike lost upon the Squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had already risen restlessly from his chair, and from the rug was glowering down on his, unwelcome visitor.

Good heavens! had he come home to be lectured in his own library by this fanatical slip of a parson? As for his stories, the Squire barely took the trouble to listen to them.

Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his hand into other people’s pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but it was intolerable that his scholar’s privacy should be at the mercy of one of the tribe.

‘Mr. Elsmere,’ he broke out at last with contemptuous emphasis, ‘I imagine it would have been better—infinitely better—to have spared both yourself and me the disagreeables of this interview. However, I am not sorry we should understand each other. I have lived a life which is at least double the length of yours in very tolerable peace and comfort. The world has been good enough for me, and I for it, so far. I have been master in my own estate, and intend to remain so. As for the new-fangled ideas of a landowner’s duty, with which your mind seems to be full’—the scornful irritation of the tone was unmistakable—’ I have never dabbled in them, nor do I intend to begin now. I am like the rest of my kind; I have no money to chuck away in building schemes, in order that the Rector of the parish may pose as the apostle of the agricultural laborer. That, however, is neither here nor there. What is to the purpose is, that my business affairs are in the hands of a business man, deliberately chosen and approved by me, and that I have nothing to do with them. Nothing at all!’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘It may seem to you very shocking. You may reward it as the object in life of the English landowner to inspect the pigstyes and amend the habits of the English laborer. I don’t quarrel with the conception, I only ask you not to expect me to live up to it. I am a student first and foremost, and desire to be left to my books. Mr. Henslowe is there on purpose to protect my literary freedom. What he thinks desirable is good enough for me, as I have already informed you. I am sorry for it if his methods do not commend themselves to you. But I have yet to learn that the Rector of the parish has an ex-officio right to interfere between a landlord and his tenants.’

Robert kept his temper with some difficulty. After a pause he said, feeling desperately, however, that the suggestion was not likely to improve matters,—

‘If I were to take all the trouble and all the expense off your hands, Mr. Wendover would it be impossible for you to authorize me to make one or two alterations most urgently necessary for the improvement of the Mile End cottages?’

The Squire burst into an angry laugh.

‘I have never yet been in the habit, Mr. Elsmere, of doing my repairs by public subscription. You ask a little too much from an old man’s powers of adaptation.’

Robert rose from his seat, his hand trembling as it rested on his walking-stick.

‘Mr. Wendover,’ he said, speaking at last with a flash of answering scorn in his young vibrating voice, ‘what I think you cannot understand, is that at any moment a human creature may sicken and die, poisoned by the state of your property, for which you—and nobody else—are ultimately responsible.’

The Squire shrugged his shoulders.

So you say, Mr. Elsmere. If true, every person in such a condition has a remedy in his own hands. I force no one to remain on my property.’

‘The people who live there,’ exclaimed Robert, ‘have neither home nor subsistence if they are driven out. Murewell is full—times bad—most of the people old.’

‘And eviction “a sentence of death,” I suppose,’ interrupted the Squire, studying him with sarcastic eyes. ‘Well, I have no belief in a Gladstonian Ireland, still less in a Radical England. Supply and demand, cause and effect, are enough for me. The Mile End cottages are out of repair, Mr. Elsmere, so Mr. Henslowe tells me, because the site is unsuitable, the type of cottage out of date. People live in them at their peril; I don’t pull them down, or rather’—correcting himself with exasperating consistency—‘Mr. Henslowe doesn’t pull them down, because, like other men, I suppose, he dislikes an outcry. But if the population stays, it stays at its own risk. Now have I made myself plain?’

The two men eyed one another.

‘Perfectly plain,’ said Robert quietly. ‘Allow me to remind you, Mr. Wendover, that there are other matters than eviction capable of provoking an outcry.’

‘As you please,’ said the other indifferently. ‘I have no doubt I shall find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, I dare say I shall manage to put up with it. Society, is fanatics and the creatures they hunt. If I am to be hunted, I shall be in good company.’

Robert stood, hat in hand, tormented with a dozen cross-currents of feeling. He was forcibly struck with the blind and comparatively motiveless pugnacity of the Squire’s conduct. There was an extravagance in it which for the first time recalled to him old Meyrick’s lucubrations.

‘I have done no good, I see, Mr. Wendover,’ he said at last, slowly. ‘I wish I could have induced you to do an act of justice and mercy. I wish I could have made you think more kindly of myself. I have failed in both. It is useless to keep you any longer. Good morning.’

He bowed. The Squire also bent forward. At that moment Robert caught sight beside his shoulder of an antique, standing on the mantel piece, which was a new addition to the room. It was a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere’s ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man before him was not the first victim he had known.

Possessed with the fancy, the young man made his way into the hall. Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of passionate regret: ‘Shall I ever see this again?’ he asked himself. During the past twelve months his pleasure in the great house had been much more than sensuous. Within those walls his mind had grown, had reached to a fuller stature than before, and a man loves, or should love, all that is associated with the maturing of his best self.

He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadly. The magnificent pile, grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist which unwrapped it, seemed to look after him as he walked away, mutely wondering that he should have allowed anything so trivial as a peasant’s grievance to come between him and its perfections.

In the wooded lane outside the Rectory gate he overtook Catherine. He gave her his report, and they walked on together arm-in-arm, a very depressed pair.

‘What shall you do next?’ she asked him.

‘Make out the law of the matter,’ he said briefly.

‘If you get over the inspector,’ said Catherine anxiously, ‘I am tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.’

He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector’s attention.

Catherine’ did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm. But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have harassed him by over-advice.

So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him with a sigh.

‘Let it be awhile,’ he said with a shake of his long frame. ‘I shall get morbid over it if I don’t mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know you have worries of your own, wifie.’

And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a boyish tenderness.

‘Yes,’ said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. ‘Robert,’ she burst out again, ‘I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. He will never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my mind, is simply a changed creature.’

‘I don’t see it,’ said Robert doubtfully.

Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible!

‘You have been studying the Squire, sir—I have been studying Rose.’

Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose’s proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm’s length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had struck him first reappear.

‘Of course I feel myself to blame,’ he said when she stopped, ‘but how could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I owed him—I owe him—so much.’

‘I know,’ said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her that that old debt had been more than effaced.

‘You will have to send her to Berlin,’ said Elsmere after a pause. ‘You must play off her music against this unlucky feeling. If it exists it is your only chance.’

‘Yes, she must go to Berlin,’ said Catherine slowly.

Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling breaking up the delicate resolution of the face.

‘I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened my world for me!’

Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They were in the woodpath. She crept inside her husband’s arm and put up her face to him, swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love.

The next day Robert walked over to the little market town of Churton, saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of the place, and got from him a complete account of the present state of the rural sanitary law. The first step clearly was to move the sanitary inspector; if that failed for any reason, then any bonâ fide inhabitant had an appeal to the local sanitary authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked home pondering his information, and totally ignorant that Henslowe, who was always at Churton on market-days, had been in the market-place at the moment when the Rector’s tall figure had disappeared within Mr. Dunstan’s office-door. That door was unpleasantly known to the agent in connection with some energetic measures for raising money he had been lately under the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attracting his eyes by means of the fascination that often attaches to disagreeable objects.

In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing-room. Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap and her eyes were staring intently into a world whereof they only had the key. Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. The servant came, and there were several voices and a sound of much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading to the study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped with an exclamation.

His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old Milsom, more sallow and palsied than ever. As he stood bent almost double, his old knotted hand resting for support on the table beside him, everything in the little hall seemed to shake with him. The other was Sharland, the handsome father of the twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with every imaginable delicacy since Robert’s last visit to the hamlet. Even his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature decay. The rolling gypsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs dragged a little.

They had come to implore the Rector to let Mile End alone. Henslowe had been over there in the afternoon, and had given them all very plainly to understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled any more they would be all turned out at a week’s notice to shift as they could, ‘And if you don’t find Thurston Common nice lying this weather, with the winter coming on, you’ll know who to thank for it,’ the agent had flung behind him as he rode off.

Robert turned white. Rose, watching the little scene with listless eyes, saw him towering over the group like an embodiment of wrath and pity.

‘If they turn us out, sir,’ said old Milsom, wistfully looking up at Elsmere with blear eyes, ‘there’ll be nothing left but the House for us old ‘uns. Why, lor’ bless you, sir, it’s not so bad but we can make shift.’

‘You, Milsom!’ cried Robert; ‘and you’ve just all but lost your grandchild! And you know your wife’ll never be the same woman since that bout of fever in the spring. And——’

His quick eyes ran over the old man’s broken frame with a world of indignant meaning in them.

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Milsom, unmoved. ‘But if it isn’t fevers, it’s summat else. I can make a shilling or two where I be, speshally in the first part of the year, in the basket work, and my wife she goes charing up at Mr. Carter’s farm, and Mr. Dodson, him at the further farm, he do give us a bit sometimes. Ef you git us turned away it will be a bad day’s work for all on us, sir, you may take my word on it.’

‘And my wife so ill’ Mr. Elsmere,’ said Sharland, ‘and all those childer! I can’t walk three miles further to my work, Mr. Elsmere, I can’t nohow. I haven’t got the legs for it. Let un be, Sir. We’ll rub along.’

Robert tried to argue the matter.

If they would but stand by him he would fight the matter through, and they should not suffer, if he had to get up a public subscription, or support them out of his own pocket all the winter. A bold front, and Mr. Henslowe must give way. The law was on their side, and every laborer in Surrey would be the better off for their refusal to be housed like pigs and poisoned like vermin.

In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious endurance in the poor against which the keenest reformer constantly throws himself in vain. Elsmere was beaten. The two men got his word, and shuffled off back to their pestilential hovels, a pathetic content beaming on each face.

Catherine and Robert went back into the study. Rose heard her brother-in-law’s passionate sigh as the door swung behind them.

‘Defeated!’ she said to herself with a curious accent. ‘Well, everybody must have his turn. Robert has been too successful in his life, I think.—You wretch!’ she added, after a minute, laying her bright head down on the book before her.

Next morning his wife found Elsmere after breakfast busily packing a case of books in the study. They were books from the Hall library, which so far had been for months the inseparable companion of his historical work.

Catherine stood and watched him sadly.

‘Must You, Robert?’

‘I won’t be beholden to that man for anything an hour longer than I can help,’ he answered her.

When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where she stood in the open window.

‘Things won’t be as easy for us in the future, darling,’ he said to her. ‘A rector with both Squire and agent against him is rather heavily handicapped. We must make up our minds to that.’

‘I have no great fear,’ she said, looking at him proudly.

‘Oh, well—nor I—perhaps,’ he admitted, after a moment. We can hold our own. ‘But I wish—oh, I wish’—and he laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder—‘I could have made friends with the Squire.’

Catherine looked less responsive.

‘As Squire, Robert, or as Mr. Wendover?’

‘As both, of course, but specialty as Mr. Wendover.’

‘We can do without his friendship,’ she said with energy.

Robert gave a great stretch, as though to work off his regrets.

‘Ah, but—’ he said, half to himself, as his arms dropped, ‘if you are just filled with the hunger to know, the people who know as much as the Squire become very interesting to you!’

Catherine did not answer. But probably her heart went out once more in protest against a knowledge that was to her but a form of revolt against the awful powers of man’s destiny.

‘However, here go his books,’ said Robert.

Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appearance, Mrs. Leyburn all in a flutter concerning the event over which, in her own opinion, she had come to preside. In her gentle fluid mind all impressions were short-lived. She had forgotten how she had brought up her own babies, but Mrs. Thornburgh, who had never had any, had filled her full of nursery lore. She sat retailing a host of second-hand hints and instructions to Catherine, who would every now and then lay her hand smiling on her mother’s knee, well pleased to see the flush of pleasure on the pretty old face, and ready in her patient filial way, to let herself be experimented on to the utmost, if it did but make the poor, foolish thing happy.

Then came a night where every soul in the quiet Rectory, even hot, 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 as 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.