CHAPTER XXII.
As may be imagined, the ‘Churton Advertiser’ did not find its way to Murewell. It was certainly no pressure of social disapproval that made the Squire go down to Mile End in that winter’s dawn. The county might talk, or the local press might harangue, till Doomsday, and Mr. Wendover would either know nothing or care less.
Still his interview with Meyrick in the park after his return from a week in town, whither he had gone to see some old Berlin friends, had been a shock to him. A man may play the intelligent recluse, may refuse to fit his life to his neighbors’ notions as much as you please, and still find death, especially death for which he has some responsibility, as disturbing a fact as the rest of us.
He went home in much irritable discomfort. It seemed to him probably that fortune need not have been so eager to put him in the wrong. To relieve his mind he sent for Henslowe, and in an interview, the memory of which sent a shiver through the agent to the end of his days, he let it be seen that though it did not for the moment suit him to dismiss the man who had brought this upon him, that man’s reign in any true sense was over.
But afterward the Squire was still restless. What was astir in him was not so much pity or remorse as certain instincts of race which still survived under the strange super-structure of manners he had built upon them. It may be the part of a gentlemen and a scholar to let the agent whom you have interposed between yourself and a boorish peasantry have a free hand; but, after all, the estate is yours, and to expose the rector of the parish to all sorts of avoidable risks in the pursuit of his official duty by reason of the gratuitous filth of your property, is an act of doubtful breeding. The Squire in his most rough-and-tumble days at Berlin had always felt himself the grandee as well as the student. He abhorred sentimentalism, but neither did he choose to cut an unseemly figure in his own eyes.
After a night, therefore, less tranquil or less meditative than usual, he rose early and sallied forth at one of those unusual hours he generally chose for walking. The thing must be put right somehow, and at once, with as little waste of time and energy as possible, and Henslowe had shown himself not to be trusted; so telling a servant to follow him, the Squire had made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen for years.
Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition of the Rector. The Squire did not want to be impressed by the young man; did not want to make friends with him. No doubt his devotion had served his own purposes. Still Mr. Wendover was one of the subtlest living judges of character when he pleased, and his enforced progress through these hovels with Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him with a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment.
‘History would be inexplicable after all without the honest fanatic,’ he said to himself on the way home. ‘I suppose I had forgotten it. There is nothing like a dread of being bored for blunting your psychological instinct.’
In the course of the day he sent off a letter to the Rector intimating in the very briefest, dryest way that the cottages should be rebuilt on a different site as soon as possible, and enclosing a liberal contribution toward the expenses incurred in fighting the epidemic. When the letter was gone he drew his books toward him with a sound which was partly disgust, partly relief. This annoying business had wretchedly interrupted him, and his concessions left him mainly conscious of a strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh interview with young Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology; let him be content.
However, next morning after breakfast, Mr. Wendover once more saw his study door open to admit the tall figure of the Rector. The note and check had reached Robert late the night before, and, true to his new-born determination to make the best of the Squire, he had caught up his wideawake at the first opportunity and walked off to the Hall to acknowledge the gift in person. The interview opened as awkwardly as it was possible, and with their former conversation on the same spot fresh in their minds both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten minutes. The Squire was asking himself, indeed, impatiently, all the time, whether he could possibly be forced in the future to put up with such an experience again, and Robert found his host, if less sarcastic than before, certainly as impenetrable as ever.
At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and then Robert, as good luck would have it, turned his longing eyes on the Squire’s books, especially on the latest volumes of a magnificent German Weltgeschichte lying near his elbow, which he had coveted for months without being able to conquer his conscience sufficiently to become the possessor of it. He took it up with an exclamation of delight, and a quiet critical remark that exactly hit the value and scope of the book. The Squire’s eyebrows went up, and the corners of his mouth slackened visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to the amazement of Mrs. Darcy, who was watching them from the drawing-room window, walked back to the park gates together, and what Robert’s nobility and beauty of character would never have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the service of the poor and the tormented under the Squire’s eyes, a chance coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a moment.
The Squire walked back to the house under a threatening sky, his mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, his mind full of an unwonted excitement.
The sentiment of long-past days—days in Berlin, in Paris, where conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily relief and reward of labor, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had endeavored to import the materials for them from the Continent, from London. But as a matter of fact, it was years since he had had any such talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly realized that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his Fach.
‘Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?’ The Squire shrugged his shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality to combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought. Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall.
Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! ‘Why the deuce couldn’t he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!’ thought the Squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had wholly denied him the opportunity. ‘And then the sending back of those books: what a piece of idiocy!’
Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he should just have fallen on the period of the later Empire—of the passage from the old-world to the new, where the Squire was a master. The Squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library, ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made a youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he went back to his own work new names would occur to him, and full of the scholar’s avaricious sense of the shortness of time, he would shake his head and frown over the three months which young Elsmere had already passed, grappling with problems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of Monasticism in Gaul, and Heaven knows what besides, half a mile from the man and the library which could have supplied him with the best help to be got in England, unbenefited by either! Mile End was obliterated, and the annoyance, of the morning forgotten.
The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and sleety, the frost breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads with mire.
Robert, rising in his place to begin morning service, and wondering to see the congregation so good on such a day, was suddenly startled, as his eye travelled mechanically over to the Hall pew, usually tenanted by Mrs. Darcy in solitary state, to see the characteristic figure of the Squire. His amazement was so great that he almost stumbled in the exhortation, and his feeling was evidently shared by the congregation, which throughout the service showed a restlessness, an excited tendency to peer round corners and pillars, that was not favorable to devotion.
‘Has he come to spy out the land?’ the Rector thought to himself, and could not help a momentary tremor at the idea of preaching before so formidable an auditor. Then he pulled himself together by a great effort, and fixing his eyes on a shockheaded urchin half way down the church, read the service to him. Catherine meanwhile in her seat on the northern side of the nave, her soul lulled in Sunday peace, knew nothing of Mr. Wendover’s appearance.
Robert preached on the first sermon of Jesus, on the first appearance of the young Master in the synagogue at Nazareth:—
‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears!’
The sermon dwelt on the Messianic aspect of Christ’s mission, on the mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on the pathos of Jewish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of Christian insight as faith gradually transferred trait after trait of the Messiah of prophecy to the Christ of Nazareth. At first there was a certain amount of hesitation, a slight wavering hither and thither—a difficult choice of words—and then the soul freed itself from man, and the preacher forgot all but his Master and his people.’
At the door as he came out stood Mr. Wendover and Catherine, slightly flushed and much puzzled for conversation, beside him. The Hall carriage was drawn close up to the door, and Mrs. Darcy, evidently much excited, had her small head out of the window and was showering a number of flighty inquiries and suggestions on her brother, to which he paid no more heed than to the patter of the rain.
When Robert appeared the Squire addressed him ceremoniously,—
‘With your leave, Mr. Elsmere, I will walk with you to the rectory.’ Then, in another voice, ‘Go home, Lætitia, and don’t send anything or anybody.’
He made a signal to the coachman, and the carriage started, Mrs. Darcy’s protesting head remaining out of window as long as anything could be seen of the group at the church door. The odd little creature had paid one or two hurried and recent visits to Catherine during the quarrel, visits so filled, however, with vague railing against her brother and by a queer incoherent melancholy, that Catherine felt them extremely uncomfortable, and took care not to invite them. Clearly she was mortally afraid of ‘Roger,’ and yet ashamed of being afraid. Catherine could see that all the poor thing’s foolish whims and affectations were trampled on; that she suffered, rebelled, found herself no more able to affect Mr. Wendover than if she had been a fly buzzing round him, and became all the more foolish and whimsical in consequence.
The Squire and the Elsmeres crossed the common to the rectory, followed at a discreet interval by groups of villagers curious to get a look at the Squire. Robert was conscious of a good deal of embarrassment, but did his best to hide it. Catherine felt all through as if the skies had fallen. The Squire alone was at his ease, or as much at his ease as he ever was. He commented on the congregation, even condescended to say something of the singing, and passed over the staring of the choristers with a magnanimity of silence which did him credit.
They reached the rectory door, and it was evidently the Squire’s purpose to come in, so Robert invited him in. Catherine threw open her little drawing-room door, and then was seized with shyness as the Squire passed in, and she saw over his shoulder her baby, lying kicking and crowing on the hearthrug, in anticipation of her arrival, the nurse watching it. The Squire in his great cloak stopped, and looked down at the baby as if it had been some curious kind of reptile. The nurse blushed, courtesied, and caught up the gurgling creature in a twinkling.
Robert made a laughing remark on the tyranny and ubiquity of babies. The Squire smiled grimly. He supposed it was necessary that the human race should be carried on. Catherine meanwhile slipped out and ordered another place to be laid at the dinner-table, devoutly hoping that it might not be used.
It was used. The Squire stayed till it was necessary to invite him, then accepted the invitation, and Catherine found herself dispensing boiled mutton to him, while Robert supplied him with some very modest claret, the sort of wine which a man who drinks none thinks it necessary to have in the house, and watched the nervousness of their little parlor-maid with a fellow-feeling which made it difficult for him during the early part of the meal to keep a perfectly straight countenance. After a while, however, both he and Catherine were ready to admit that the Squire was making himself agreeable. He talked of Paris, of a conversation he had had with M. Renan, whose name luckily was quite unknown to Catherine, as to the state of things in the French Chamber.
‘A set of chemists and quill-drivers,’ he said contemptuously; ‘but as Renan remarked to me, there is one thing to be said for a government of that sort, “Ils ne font pas la guerre.” And so long as they don’t run France into adventures, and a man can keep a roof over his head and a son in his pocket, the men of letters at any rate can rub along. The really interesting thing in France just now is not French politics—Heaven save the mark!—but French scholarship. There never was so little original genius going in Paris, and there never was so much good work being done.’
Robert thought the point of view eminently characteristic.
‘Catholicism, I suppose,’ he said, ‘as a force to be reckoned with, is dwindling more and more?’
‘Absolutely dead,’ said the Squire emphatically, ‘as an intellectual force. They haven’t got a writer, scarcely a preacher. Not one decent book has been produced on that side for years.’
‘And the Protestants, too,’ said Robert, ‘have lost all their best men of late,’ and he mentioned one or two well-known French Protestant names.
‘Oh, as to French Protestantism ‘—and the Squire’s shrug was superb—‘Teutonic Protestantism is in the order of things, so to speak, but Latin Protestantism! There is no more sterile hybrid in the world!’.
Then, becoming suddenly aware that he might have said something inconsistent with his company, the Squire stopped abruptly. Robert, catching Catherine’s quick compression of the lips, was grateful to him, and the conversation moved on in another direction.
Yes, certainly, all things considered, Mr. Wendover made himself agreeable. He ate his boiled mutton and drank his ordinaire like a man, and when the meal was over, and he and Robert had withdrawn into the study, he gave an emphatic word of praise to the coffee which Catherine’s house-wifely care sent after them, and accepting a cigar, he sank into the arm-chair by the fire and spread a bony hand to the blaze, as if he had been at home in that particular corner for months. Robert, sitting opposite to him and watching his guest’s eyes travel round the room, with its medicine shelves, its rods and nets, and preparations of uncanny beasts, its parish litter, and its teeming bookcases, felt that the Mile End matter was turning out oddly indeed.
‘I have packed you a case of books, Mr. Elsmere,’ said the Squire, after a puff or two at his cigar. ‘How have you got on without that collection of Councils?’
He smiled a little awkwardly. It was one of the books Robert had sent back. Robert flushed. He did not want the Squire to regard him as wholly dependent on Murewell.
‘I bought it,’ he said, rather shortly. ‘I have ruined myself in books lately, and the London Library too supplies me really wonderfully well.’
‘Are these your books?’ The Squire got up to look at them. ‘Hum, not at all bad for a beginning. I have sent you so and so,’ and he named one or two costly folios that Robert had long pined for in vain.
The Rector’s eyes glistened.
‘That was very good of you,’ he said simply, ‘They will be most welcome.’
‘And now, how much time,’ said the other, settling himself again to his cigar, his thin legs crossed over each other, and his great head sunk into his shoulders, ‘how much time do you give to this work?’
‘Generally the mornings—not always. A man with twelve hundred souls to look after, you know, Mr. Wendover,’ said Elsmere, with a bright, half defiant accent, ‘can’t make grubbing among the Franks his main business.’
The Squire said nothing, and smoked on. Robert gathered that his companion thought his chances of doing anything worth mentioning very small.
‘Oh no,’ he said, following out his own, thought with a shake of his curly hair; ‘of course I shall never do very much. But if I don’t, it won’t be for want of knowing what the scholar’s ideal is.’ And he lifted his hand with a smile toward the Squire’s book on ‘English Culture,’ which stood in the book-case just above him. The Squire, following the gesture, smiled too. It was a faint, slight illumining, but it changed the face agreeably.
Robert began to ask questions about the book, about the pictures contained in it of foreign life and foreign universities. The Squire consented to be drawn out, and presently was talking at his very best.
Racy stories of Mommsen or Von Ranke were followed by a description of an evening of mad carouse with Heine—a talk at Nohant with George Sand—scenes in the Duchesse de Broglie’s salon—a contemptuous sketch of Guizot—a caustic sketch of Renan. Robert presently even laid aside his pipe, and stood in his favorite attitude, lounging against the mantel-piece, looking down, absorbed, on his visitor. All that intellectual passion which his struggle at Mile End had for the moment checked in him revived. Nay, after his weeks of exclusive contact with the most hideous forms of bodily ill, this interruption, these great names, this talk of great movements and great causes, had a special savour and relish. All the horizons of the mind expanded, the currents of the blood ran quicker.
Suddenly, however, he sprang up.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Wendover, it is too bad to interrupt you—I have enjoyed it immensely—but the fact is I have only two minutes to get to Sunday School in!’
Mr. Wendover rose also, and resumed his ordinary manner.
‘It is I who should apologize,’ he said with stiff politeness ‘for having encroached in this way on your busy day, Mr. Elsmere.’
Robert helped him on with his coat, and then suddenly the Squire turned to him.
‘You were preaching this morning on one of the Isaiah quotations in St. Matthew. It would interest you, I imagine, to see a recent Jewish book on the subject of the prophecies quoted in the Gospels which reached me yesterday. There is nothing particularly new in it, but it looked to me well done.’
‘Thank you,’ said Robert, not, however, with any great heartiness, and the Squire moved away. They parted at the gate, Robert running down the hill to the village as fast as his long legs could carry him.
Sunday School—pshaw!’ cried the Squire, as He tramped homeward in the opposite direction.
Next morning a huge packing-case arrived from the Hall, and Robert could not forbear a little gloating over the treasures in it before he tore himself away to pay his morning visit to Mile End. There everything was improving; the poor Sharland child indeed had slipped away on the night after the Squire’s visit, but the other bad cases in the diphtheria ward were mending fast. John Allwood was gaining strength daily, and poor Mary Sharland was feebly struggling back to a life which seemed hardly worth so much effort to keep. Robert felt, with a welcome sense of slackening strain, that the daily and hourly superintendence which he and Catherine had been giving to the place might lawfully be relaxed, that the nurses on the spot were now more than equal to their task, and after having made his round he raced home again in order to secure an hour with his books before luncheon.
The following day a note arrived, while they were at luncheon in the Squire’s angular precise handwriting. It contained a request that, unless otherwise engaged, the Rector would walk with Mr. Wendover that afternoon.
Robert flung it across to Catherine.
‘Let me see,’ he said, deliberating, ‘have I any engagement I must keep?’
There was a sort of jealousy for his work within him contending with this new fascination of the Squire’s company. But, honestly, there was nothing in the way, and he went.
That walk was the first of many. The Squire had no sooner convinced himself that young Elsmere’s society did in reality provide him with a stimulus and recreation he had been too long without, than in his imperious wilful way he began to possess himself of it as much as possible. He never alluded to the trivial matters which had first separated and then united them. He worked the better, he thought the more clearly, for these talks and walks with Elsmere, and therefore these talks and walks became an object with him. They supplied a long-stifled want, the scholar’s want of disciples, of some form of investment for all that heaped-up capital of thought he had been accumulating during a life-time.
As for Robert, he soon felt himself so much under the spell of the Squire’s strange and powerful personality that he was forced to make a fight for it, lest this new claim should encroach upon the old one. He would walk when the Squire liked, but three times out of four these walks must be parish rounds, interrupted by descents into cottages and chats in farmhouse parlors. The Squire submitted. The neighborhood began to wonder over the strange spectacle of Mr. Wendover waiting grimly in the winter dusk outside one of his own farmhouses while Elsmere was inside, or patrolling a bit of lane till Elsmere should have inquired after an invalid or beaten up a recruit for his confirmation class, dogged the while by stealthy children, with fingers in their mouths, who ran away in terror directly he turned.
Rumors of this new friendship spread. One day, on the bit of road between the Hall and the Rectory, Lady Helen behind her ponies whirled past the two men, and her arch look at Elsmere said as plain as words, ‘Oh, you young wonder! what hook has served you with this leviathan?
On another occasion, close to Churton, a man in a cassock and cloak came toward them. The Squire put up his eye-glass.
‘Humph!’ he remarked; ‘do you know this merryandrew, Elsmere?’
It was Newcome. As they passed, Robert with slightly, heightened color gave him an affectionate nod and smile. Newcome’s quick eye ran over the companions, he responded stiffly, and his step grew more rapid. A week or two later Robert noticed with a little prick of remorse that he had seen nothing of Newcome for an age. If Newcome would not come to him, he must go to Mottringham. He planned an expedition, but something happened to prevent it.
And Catherine? Naturally this new and most unexpected relation of Robert’s to the man who had begun by insulting him was of considerable importance to the wife. In the first place it broke up to some extent the exquisite tête-à-tête of their home life; it encroached often upon time that had always been hers; it filled Robert’s mind more and more with matters in which she had no concern. All these things many wives might have resented. Catherine Elsmere resented none of them. It is probable, of course, that she had her natural moments of regret and comparison when love said to itself a little sorely and hungrily, ‘It is hard to be even a fraction less to him then I once was?’ But if so, these moments never betrayed themselves in word or act. Her tender common sense, her sweet humility, made her recognize at once Robert’s need of intellectual comradeship, isolated as he was in this remote rural district. She knew perfectly that a clergyman’s life of perpetual giving forth becomes morbid and unhealthy if there is not some corresponding taking in.
If only it had not been Mr. Wendover! She marvelled over the fascination Robert found in his dry cynical talk. She wondered that a Christian pastor could ever forget Mr. Wendover’s antecedents; that the man who had nursed those sick children could forgive Mile End. All in all as they were to each other, she felt for the first time that she often understood her husband imperfectly. His mobility, his eagerness, were sometimes now a perplexity, even a pain to her.
It must not be imagined, however, that Robert let himself drift into this intellectual intimacy with one of the most distinguished of anti-Christian thinkers without reflecting on its possible consequences. The memory of that night of misery which “The Idols of the Market Place” had inflicted on him was enough. He was no match in controversy for Mr. Wendover, and he did not mean to attempt it.
One morning the Squire unexpectedly plunged into an account of a German monograph he had just received on the subject of the Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel. It was almost the first occasion on which he had touched what may strictly be called the matériel of orthodoxy in their discussions—at any rate directly. But the book was a striking one, and in the interest of it he had clearly forgotten his ground a little. Suddenly the man who was walking beside him interrupted him.
‘I think we ought to understand one another perhaps, Mr. Wendover,’ Robert said, speaking under a quick sense of oppression, but with his usual dignity and bright courtesy. ‘I know your opinions, of course, from your book; you know what mine, as an honest man, must be, from the position I hold. My conscience does not forbid me to discuss anything, only—I am no match for you on points of scholarship, and I should just like to say once for all, that to me, whatever else is true, the religion of Christ is true. I am a Christian and a Christian minister. Therefore, whenever we come to discuss what may be called Christian evidence, I do it with reserves, which you would not have. I believe in an Incarnation, a Resurrection, a Revelation. If there are literary difficulties, I must want to smooth them away—you may want to make much of them. We come to the matter from different points of view. You will not quarrel with me for wanting to make it clear. It isn’t as if we differed slightly. We differ fundamentally—is it not so?’
The Squire was walking beside him with bent shoulders, the lower lip pushed forward, as was usual with him when he was considering a matter with close attention, but did not mean to communicate his thoughts.
After a pause he said, with a faint, inscrutable smile,—
‘Your reminder is perfectly just. Naturally we all have our reserves. Neither of us can be expected to stultify his own.’
And the talk went forward again, Robert joining in more buoyantly than ever, perhaps because he had achieved a necessary but disagreeable thing and got done with it.
In reality he had but been doing as the child does when it sets up its sand-barrier against the tide.
CHAPTER XXIII.
It, was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending its golden empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel roots and beginning to gleam along the edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End the birches rose like green clouds against the browns and purples of the still leafless oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and building. Every day Robert was on the lookout for the swallows, or listening for the first notes of the nightingale amid the bare spring coverts.
But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it might have been, for Catherine was away. Mrs. Leyburn, who was to have come south to them in February, was attacked by bronchitis instead at Burwood and forbidden to move, even to a warmer climate. In March, Catherine, feeling restless and anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that Agnes should have all the nursing and responsibility tore herself from her man and her baby, and went north to Whindale for a fortnight, leaving Robert forlorn.
Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for a few days on her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. Robert’s opinion was that all women, even St. Elizabeths, have somewhere rooted in them an inordinate partiality for shopping; otherwise why should that operation take four or five mortal days? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up the whole of London in twelve hours! However, Catherine lingered, and as her purchases were made, Robert crossly supposed it must all be Rose’s fault. He believed that Rose spent a great deal too much on dress.
Catherine’s letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, she said, had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, and playing, she supposed magnificently. At any rate, the letters which followed her in shoals from Berlin flattered her to the skies, and during the three months preceding her return, Joachim himself had taken her as a pupil and given her unusual attention.
‘And now, of course,’ wrote Catherine, ‘she is desperately disappointed that mamma and Agnes cannot join her in town, as she had hoped. She does her best, I know, poor child, to conceal it and to feel as she ought about mamma, but I can see that the idea of an indefinite time at Burwood is intolerable to her. As to Berlin, I think she has enjoyed it, but she talks very scornfully of German Schwärmerei and German women, and she tells the oddest stories of her professors. With one or two of them she seems to have been in a state of war from the beginning; but some of them, my dear Robert, I am persuaded were just simply in love with her!
‘I don’t—no, I never shall believe, that independent, exciting student’s life is good for a girl. But I never say so to Rose. When she forgets to be irritable and to feel that the world is going against her, she is often very sweet to me, and I can’t bear there should be any conflict.’
His next day’s letter contained the following:—
‘Are you properly amused, sir, at your wife’s performances in town? Our three concerts you have heard all about. I still can’t get over them. I go about haunted by the seriousness, the life and death interest people throw into music. It is astonishing! And outside, as we got into our hansom, such sights and sounds!—such starved, fierce-looking men, such ghastly women!
‘But since then Rose has been taking me into society. Yesterday afternoon, after I wrote to you, we went to see Rose’s artistic friends—the Piersons—with whom she was staying last summer, and to-day we have even called on Lady Charlotte Wynnstay.
‘As to Mrs. Pierson, I never saw such an odd bundle of ribbons and rags and queer embroideries as she looked when we called. However, Rose says that, for “an æsthete”—she despises them now herself—Mrs. Pierson has wonderful taste, and that her wall-papers and her gowns, if I only understood them, are not the least like those of other æsthetic persons, but very recherché—which may be. She talked to Rose of nothing but acting, especially of Madame Desforêts. No one, according to her, has anything to do with an actress’ private life, or ought to take it into account. But, Robert dear, an actress is a woman, and has a soul!’
‘Then, Lady Charlotte:—you would have laughed at our entrée.’
‘We found she was in town, and went on her “day,” as she had asked Rose to do. The room was rather dark—none of these London rooms seem to me to have any light and air in them. The butler got our names wrong and I marched in first, more shy than I ever have been before in my life. Lady Charlotte had two gentlemen with her. She evidently did not know me in the least; she stood staring at me with her eyeglass on, and her cap so crooked I could think of nothing but a wish to put it straight. Then Rose followed, and in a few minutes it seemed to me as though it were Rose who were hostess, talking to the two gentlemen and being kind to Lady Charlotte. I am sure everybody in the room was amused by her self-possession, Lady Charlotte included. The gentlemen stared at her a great deal, and Lady Charlotte paid her one or two compliments on her looks, which I thought she would not have ventured to say to anyone in her own circle.’
‘We stayed about half an hour. One of the gentlemen was, I believe, a member of the Government, an under-secretary for something, but he and Rose and Lady Charlotte talked again of nothing but musicians and actors. It is strange that politicians should have time to know so much of these things. The other gentleman reminded me of Hotspur’s popinjay. I think now I made out that he wrote for the newspapers, but at the moment I should have felt it insulting to accuse him of anything so humdrum as an occupation in life. He discovered somehow that I had an interest in the Church, and he asked me, leaning back in his chair and lisping, whether I really thought “the Church could still totter on a while in the rural districts.” He was informed her condition was so “vewy dethperate.”
‘Then I laughed outright, and found my tongue. Perhaps his next article on the Church will have a few facts in it. I did my best to put some into him. Rose at last looked round at me, astonished. But he did not dislike me, I think. I was not impertinent to him, husband mine. If I might have described just one of your days to his high-and-mightiness! There is no need to tell you, I think, whether I did or not.’
‘Then when we got up to go, Lady Charlotte asked Rose to stay with her. Rose explained why she couldn’t, and Lady Charlotte pitied her dreadfully for having a family, and the under-secretary said that it was one’s first duty in life to trample on one’s relations, and that he hoped nothing would prevent his hearing her play sometime later in the year. Rose said very decidedly she should be in town for the winter. Lady Charlotte said she would have an evening specially for her, and as I said nothing, we got away at last.’
The letter of the following day recorded a little adventure:—
‘I was much startled this morning. I had got Rose to come with me to the National Gallery on our way to her dressmaker. We were standing before Raphael’s “Vigil of the Knight,” when suddenly I saw Rose, who was looking away toward the door into the long gallery, turn perfectly white. I followed her eyes, and there, in the doorway, disappearing—I am almost certain—was Mr. Langham! One cannot mistake his walk or his profile. Before I could say a word Rose had walked away to another wall of pictures, and when we joined again we did not speak of it. Did he see us, I wonder, and purposely avoid us? Something made me think so.’
‘Oh, I wish I could believe she had forgotten him! I am certain she would laugh me to angry scorn if I mentioned him; but there she sits by the fire now, while I am writing, quite drooping and pale, because she thinks I am not noticing. If she did but love me a little more! It must be my fault, I know.’
‘Yes, as you say, Burwood may as well be shut up or let. My dear, dear father!’
Robert could imagine the sigh with which Catherine had laid clown her pen. Dear tender soul, with all its old-world fidelities and pieties pure and unimpaired! He raised the signature to his lips.
Next day Catherine came back to him. Robert had no words too opprobrious for the widowed condition from which her return had rescued him. It seemed to Catherine, however, that life had been very full and keen with him since her departure! He lingered with her after supper, vowing that his club boys might make what hay in the study they pleased; he was going to tell her the news, whatever happened.
‘I told you of my two dinners at the Hall? The first was just tête-à-tête with the Squire; oh, and Mrs. Darcy, of course. I am always forgetting her, poor little thing, which is most ungrateful of me. A pathetic life that, Catherine. She seems to me, in her odd way, perpetually hungering for affections for praise. No doubt, if she got them she wouldn’t know what to do with them. She would just touch and leave them as she does everything. Her talk and she are both as light and wandering as thistledown. But still, meanwhile, she hungers, and is never satisfied. There seems to be something peculiarly antipathetic in her to the Squire. I can’t make it out. He is sometimes quite brutal to her when she is more inconsequent than usual. I often wonder she goes on living with him.’
Catherine made some indignant comment.
‘Yes,’ said Robert, musing. ‘Yes, it is bad.’
But Catherine thought his tone might have been more unqualified, and marvelled again at the curious lenity of judgment he had always shown of late toward Mr. Wendover. And all his judgments of himself and others were generally so quick, so uncompromising!
‘On the second occasion we had Freake and Dashwood,’ naming two well-known English antiquarians. ‘Very learned, very jealous, and very snuffy; altogether “too genuine,” as poor mother used to say of those old chairs we got for the dining-room. But afterward when we were all smoking in the library, the Squire came out of his shell and talked. I never heard him more brilliant!’
He paused a moment, his bright eyes looking far away from her, as though fixed on the scene he was describing.
‘Such a mind!’ he said at last with a long breath, ‘such a memory! Catherine, my book has been making great strides since you left. With Mr. Wendover to go to, all the problems are simplified. One is saved all false starts, all beating about the bush. What a piece of luck it was that put one down beside such a guide, such a living storehouse of knowledge!’
He spoke in a glow of energy and enthusiasm. Catherine sat looking at him wistfully, her gray eyes crossed by many varying shades of memory and feeling.
At last his look met hers, and the animation of it softened at once, grew gentle.
‘Do you think I am making knowledge too much of a god just now, Madonna mine?’ he said, throwing himself down beside her. ‘I have been full of qualms myself. The Squire excites one so, makes one feel as though intellect—accumulation—were the whole of life. But I struggle against it—I do. I go on, for instance, trying to make the Squire do his social duties—behave like “a human.”’
Catherine could not help smiling at his tone.
‘Well?’ she inquired.
He shook his head ruefully.
‘The Squire is a tough customer—most men of sixty-seven with strong wills are, I suppose. At any rate, he is like one of the Thurston trout—sees through all my manoeuvres. But one piece of news will astonish you, Catherine!’ And he sprang up to deliver it with effect. ‘Henslowe is dismissed.’
‘Henslowe dismissed!’ Catherine sat properly amazed, while Robert told the story.
The dismissal of Henslowe indeed represented the price which Mr. Wendover had been so far willing to pay for Elsmere’s society. Some quid pro quo there must be—that he was prepared to admit—considering their relative positions as Squire and parson. But, as Robert shrewdly suspected, not one of his wiles so far had imposed on the master of Murewell. He had his own sarcastic smiles over them, and over Elsmere’s pastoral naïveté in general. The evidences of the young Rector’s power and popularity were, however, on the whole, pleasant to Mr. Wendover. If Elsmere had his will with all the rest of the world, Mr. Wendover knew perfectly well who it was that at the present moment had his will with Elsmere. He had found a great piquancy in this shaping of a mind more intellectually eager and pliant than any he had yet come across among younger men; perpetual food too, for his sense of irony, in the intellectual contradictions, wherein Elsmere’s developing ideas and information were now, according to the Squire, involving him at every turn.
‘His religious foundations are gone already, if he did but know it,’ Mr. Wendover grimly remarked to himself one day about this time, ‘but he will take so long finding it out that the results are not worth speculating on.’
Cynically assured, therefore, at bottom, of his own power with this ebullient nature, the Squire was quite prepared to make external concessions, or, as we have said, to pay his price. It annoyed him that when Elsmere would press for allotment land, or a new institute, or a better supply of water for the village, it was not open to him merely to give carte blanche, and refer his petitioner to Henslowe. Robert’s opinion of Henslowe, and Henslowe’s now more cautious but still incessant hostility to the Rector, were patent at last even to the Squire. The situation was worrying and wasted time. It must be changed.
So one morning he met Elsmere with a bundle of letters in his hand, calmly informed him that Henslowe had been sent about his business, and that it would be a kindness if Mr. Elsmere would do him the favor of looking through some applications for the vacant post just received.
Elsmere, much taken by surprise, felt at first as it was natural for an over-sensitive, over-scrupulous man to feel. His enemy, had been given into his hand, and instead of victory he could only realize that he had brought a man to ruin.
‘He has a wife and children,’ he said quickly, looking at the Squire.
‘Of course I have pensioned him,’ replied the Squire impatiently; ‘otherwise I imagine he would be hanging round our necks to the end of the chapter.’
There was something in the careless indifference of the tone which sent a shiver through Elsmere. After all, this man had served the Squire for fifteen years, and it was not Mr. Wendover who had much to complain of.
No one with a conscience could have held out a finger to keep Henslowe in his post. But though Elsmere took the letters and promised to give them his best attention, as soon as he got home he made himself irrationally miserable over the matter. It was not his fault that, from the moment of his arrival in the parish, Henslowe had made him the target of a vulgar and embittered hostility, and so far as he had struck out in return it had been for the protection of persecuted and defenseless creatures. But all the same, he could not get the thought of the man’s collapse and humiliation out of his mind. How at his age was he to find other work, and how was he to endure life at Murewell without his comfortable house, his smart gig, his easy command of spirits, and the cringing of the farmers?
Tormented by the sordid misery of the situation almost as though it had been his own, Elsmere ran down impulsively in the evening to the agent’s house. Could nothing be done to assure the man that he was not really his enemy, and that anything the parson’s influence and the parson’s money could do to help him to a more decent life, and work which offered fewer temptations and less power over human beings, should be done?
It need hardly be said that the visit was a complete failure. Henslowe, who was drinking hard, no sooner heard Elsmere’s voice in the little hall than he dashed open the door which separated them, and, in a paroxysm of drunken rage, hurled at Elsmere all the venomous stuff he had been garnering up for months against some such occasion. The vilest abuse, the foulest charges—there was nothing that the maddened sot, now fairly unmasked, denied himself. Elsmere, pale and erect, tried to make himself heard. In vain. Henslowe was physically incapable of taking in a word.
At last the agent, beside himself, made a rush, his three untidy children, who had been hanging open-mouthed in the background, set up a howl of terror, and his Scotch wife, more pinched and sour than ever, who had been so far a gloomy spectator of the scene, interposed.
‘Have doon wi’ ye,’ she said sullenly, putting out a long bony arm in front of her husband, ‘or I’ll just lock oop that brandy where ye’ll naw find it if ye pull the house doon. Now, sir,’ turning to Elsmere, ‘would ye jest be going? Ye mean it weel, I daur say, but ye’ve doon yer wark, and ye maun leave it.’
And she motioned him out, not without a sombre dignity. Elsmere went home crestfallen. The enthusiast is a good deal too apt to under-estimate the stubbornness of moral fact, and these rebuffs have their stern uses for character.
‘They intend to go on living here, I am told,’ Elsmere said, as he wound up the story, ‘and as Henslowe is still churchwarden, he may do us a world of mischief yet. However, I think that wife will keep him in order. No doubt vengeance would be sweet to her as to him, but she has a shrewd eye, poor soul, to the Squire’s remittances. It is a wretched business, and I don’t take a man’s hate easily, Catherine!—though it may be a folly to say so.’
Catherine was irresponsive. The Old Testament element in her found a lawful satisfaction in Henslowe’s fall, and a wicked man’s hatred, according to her, mattered only to himself. The Squire’s conduct, on the other hand, made her uneasily proud. To her, naturally, it simply meant that he was falling under Robert’s spell. So much the better for him, but—