CHAPTER XXX.
But the problems of these two lives was not solved by a burst of feeling. Without that determining impulse of love and pity in Catherine’s heart the salvation of an exquisite bond might indeed have been impossible. But in spite of it the laws of character had still to work themselves inexorably out on either side.
The whole gist of the matter for Elsmere lay really in this question—Hidden in Catherine’s nature, was there, or was there not, the true stuff of fanaticism? Madame Guyon left her infant children to the mercies of chance, while she followed the voice of God to the holy war with heresy. Under similar conditions Catherine Elsmere might have planned the same. Could she ever have carried it out?
And yet the question is still ill-stated. For the influences of our modern time on religious action are so blunting and dulling, because in truth the religious motive itself is being constantly modified, whether the religious person knows it or not. Is it possible now for a good woman with a heart, in Catherine Elsmere’s position, to maintain herself against love, and all those subtle forces to which such a change as Elsmere’s opens the house doors, without either hardening, or greatly yielding? Let Catherine’s further story give some sort of an answer.
Poor soul! As they sat together in the study, after he had brought her home, Robert, with averted eyes, went through the plans he had already thought into shape. Catherine listened, saying almost nothing. But never, never had she loved this life of theirs so well as now that she was called on, at barely a week’s notice, to give it up for ever! For Robert’s scheme, in which her reason fully acquiesced, was to keep to their plan of going to Switzerland, he having first, of course, settled all things with the Bishop, and having placed his living in the hands of Mowbray Elsmere. When they left the rectory, in a week or ten days time, he proposed, in fact, his voice almost inaudible as he did so, that Catherine should leave it for good.
‘Everybody, had better suppose,’ he said choking, ‘that we are coming back. Of course we need say nothing. Armitstead will be here for next week certainly. Then afterward I can come down and manage everything. I shall get it over in a day if I can, and see nobody. I cannot say good-by, nor can you.’
‘And next Sunday, Robert?’ she asked him, after a pause.
‘I shall write to Armitstead this afternoon and ask him, if he possibly can, to come to-morrow afternoon, instead of Monday, and take the service.’
Catherine’s hands clasped each other still more closely. So then she had heard her husband’s voice for the last time in the public ministry of the Church, in prayer, in exhortation, in benediction! One of the most sacred traditions of her life was struck from her at a blow.
It was long before either of them spoke again. Then she ventured another question.
‘And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert—of—of our future?’
‘Shall we try London for a little?’ he answered in a queer, strained voice, leaning against the window, and looking out, that he might not see her. ‘I should find work among the poor—so would you—and I could go on with my book. And your mother and sister will probably be there part of the winter.’
She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future it seemed to them both, beside the wide and honorable range of his clergyman’s life as he and she had developed it. But she did not dwell long on that. Her thoughts were suddenly invaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in which she had recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of fifteen, from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago ruined, the victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his teeth in fierce and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a shelter, and was to see her through her ‘trouble;’ the girl, a frail, half-witted creature, who could find no words even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while with the dumbest, pitifulest tenacity.
How could she leave that girl? It was as if all the fibres of life were being violently wrenched from all their natural connections.
‘Robert!’ she cried at last with a start. ‘Had you forgotten the Institute to-morrow?’
‘No—no,’ he said with the saddest smile. ‘No, I had not forgotten it. Don’t go, Catherine—don’t go. I must. But why should you go through it?’
‘But there are all those flags and wreaths,’ she said, getting up in pained bewilderment. ‘I must go and look after them.’
He caught her in his arms.
‘Oh my wife, my wife, forgive me!’ It was a groan of misery. She put up her hands and pressed his hair back from his temples.
‘I love you, Robert,’ she said simply, her face colorless but perfectly calm.
Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, he went into the workroom and found her surrounded with flags, and a vast litter of paper roses and evergreens, which she and the new agent’s daughters who had come up to help her were putting together for the decorations of the morrow. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to smile and talk as usual, her lap full of ever-greens, and her politeness exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to Robert one of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He fled from it out into the village, driven by a restless longing for change and movement.
Here he found a large gathering round the new Institute. There were carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, and close by, an admiring circle of children and old men, huddling in the shade of a great chestnut.
Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending, stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting friendliness of those about him, or worried by their blunt comments on his looks. He could not bear more than a glance into the new rooms apportioned to the Naturalists’ Club. There against the wall stood the new glass cases he had wrung out of the Squire, with various new collections lying near, ready to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections stood out bravely in the added space and light; the walls were hung here and there with a wonderful set of geographical pictures he had carried off from a London exhibition, and fed his boys on for weeks; the floors were freshly matted; the new pine fittings gave out their pleasant cleanly scent; the white paint of doors and windows shone in the August sun. The building had been given by the Squire. The fittings and furniture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had planned for it all!—only to see the fruits of two years’ effort out of doors, and personal frugality at home, handed over to some possibly unsympathetic stranger. The heart beat painfully against the iron bars of fate, rebelling against the power of a mental process so to affect a man’s whole practical and social life!
He went out at last by the back of the Institute, where a little bit of garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to a lane.
At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge made by the builders’ carts, he saw a man standing, who turned away down the lane, however, as soon as the Rector’s figure emerged into view.
Robert had recognized the slouching gait and unwieldy form of Henslowe. There were at this moment all kinds of gruesome stories afloat in the village about the ex-agent. It was said that he was breaking up fast; it was known that he was extensively in debt; and the village shopkeepers had already held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best mode of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of cautious action toward his custom in future. The man, indeed, was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, maintaining all the while a snarling, exasperating front to the world, which was rapidly converting the careless half-malicious pity wherewith the village had till now surveyed his fall, into that more active species of baiting which the human animal is never very loath to try upon the limping specimens of his race.
Henslowe stopped and turned as he heard the steps behind him. Six months’ self-murdering had left ghastly traces. He was many degrees nearer the brute than he had been even when Robert made his ineffectual visit. But at this actual moment Roberts practised eye—for every English parish clergyman becomes dismally expert in the pathology of drunkenness—saw that there was no fight in him. He was in one of the drunkard’s periods of collapse—shivering, flabby, starting at every sound, a misery to himself and a spectacle to others.
‘Mr. Henslowe!’ cried Robert, still pursuing him, ‘may I speak to you a moment?’
The ex-agent turned, his prominent bloodshot eyes glowering at the speaker. But he had to catch at his stick for support, or at the nervous shock of Robert’s summons his legs would have given way under him.
Robert came up with him and stood a second, fronting the evil silence of the other, his boyish face deeply flushed. Perhaps the grotesqueness of that former scene was in his mind. Moreover the vestry meetings had furnished Henslowe with periodical opportunities for venting his gall on the Rector, and they had never been neglected. But he plunged on boldly.
‘I am going away next week, Mr. Henslowe; I shall be away some considerable time. Before I go I should like to ask you whether you do not think the feud between us had better cease. Why will you persist in making an enemy of me? If I did you an injury it was neither wittingly nor willingly. I know you have been ill, and I gather that—that—you are in trouble. If I could stand between you and further mischief I would—most gladly. If help—or—or money—’ He paused. He shrewdly suspected, indeed, from the reports that reached him, that Henslowe was on the brink of bankruptcy.
The Rector had spoken with the utmost diffidence and delicacy, but Henslowe found energy in return for an outburst of quavering animosity, from which, however, physical weakness had extracted all its sting.
‘I’ll thank you to make your canting offers to some one else, Mr. Elsmere. When I want your advice I’ll ask it. Good day to you.’ And he turned away with as much of an attempt at dignity as his shaking limbs would allow of.
‘Listen, Mr. Henslowe,’ said Robert firmly, walking beside him: ‘you know—I know—that if this goes on, in a year’s time you will be in your grave, and your poor wife and children struggling to keep themselves from the workhouse. You may think that I have no right to preach to you—that you are the older man—that it is an intrusion. But what is the good of blinking facts that you must know all the world knows? Come, now, Mr. Henslowe, let us behave for a moment as though this were our last meeting. Who knows? the chances of life are many. Lay down your grudge against me, and let me speak to you as one struggling human being to another. The fact that you have, as you say, become less prosperous, in some sort through me, seems to give me a right—to make it a duty forms, if you will—to help you if I can. Let me send a good doctor to see you. Let me implore you as a last chance to put yourself into his hands, and to obey him, and your wife; and let me—the Rector hesitated—‘let me make things pecuniarily easier for Mrs. Henslowe, till you have pulled yourself out of the bole in which, by common report at least, you are now.’
Henslowe stared at him, divided between anger caused by the sore stirring of his old self-importance, and a tumultuous flood of self-pity, roused irresistibly in him by Robert’s piercing frankness and aided by his own more or less maudlin condition. The latter sensation quickly undermined the former; he turned his back on the Rector and leant over the railings of the lane, shaken by something it is hardly worth while to dignify by the name of emotion. Robert stood by, a pale embodiment of mingled judgment and compassion. He gave the man a few moments to recover himself, and then, as Henslowe turned round again, he silently and appealingly held out his hand—the hand of the good man, which it was an honor for such as Henslowe to touch. Constrained by the moral force radiating from his look, the other took it with a kind of helpless sullenness.
Then, seizing at once on the slight concession, with that complete lack of inconvenient self-consciousness, or hindering indecision, which was one of the chief causes of his effect on men and women, Robert began to sound the broken repulsive creature as to his affairs. Bit by bit, compelled by a will and nervous strength far superior to his own, Henslowe was led into abrupt and blurted confidences which surprised no one so much as himself. Robert’s quick sense possessed itself of point after point, seeing presently ways of escape and relief which the besotted brain beside him had been quite incapable of devising for itself. They walked on into the open country, and what with the discipline of the Rector’s presence, the sobering effect wrought by the shock to pride and habit, and the unwonted brain exercise of the conversation, the demon in Henslowe had been for the moment most strangely tamed after half an hour’s talk. Actually some reminiscences of his old ways of speech and thoughts the ways of the once prosperous and self-reliant man of business had reappeared in him before the end of it, called out by the subtle influence of a manner which always attracted to the surface whatever decent element there might be left in a man, and then instantly gave it a recognition which was more redeeming than either counsel or denunciation.
By the time they parted Robert had arranged with his old enemy that he should become his surety with a rich cousin in Churton, who, always supposing there were no risk in the matter, and that benevolence ran on all-fours with security of investment, was prepared to shield the credit of the family by the advance of a sufficient sum of money to rescue the ex-agent from his most pressing difficulties. He had also wrung from him the promise to see a specialist in London—Robert writing that evening to make the appointment.
How had it been done? Neither Robert nor Henslowe ever quite knew. Henslowe walked home in a bewilderment which for once had nothing to do with brandy, but was simply the result of a moral shook acting on what was still human in the man’s debased consciousness, just as electricity acts on the bodily frame.
Robert, on the other hand, saw him depart with a singular lightening of mood. What he seemed to have achieved might turn out to be the merest moonshine. At any rate, the incident had appeased in him a kind of spiritual hunger—the hunger to escape a while from that incessant process of destructive analysis with which the mind was still beset, into some use of energy, more positive, human, and beneficent.
The following day was one long trial of endurance for Elsmere and for Catherine. She pleaded to go, promising quietly to keep out of his sight and they started together—a miserable pair.
Crowds, heat, decorations, the grandees on the platform, and conspicuous among them the Squire’s slouching frame and striking head, side by side with a white and radiant Lady Helen—the outer success, the inner revolt and pain—and the constant seeking of his truant eyes for a face that hid itself as much as possible in dark corners, but was in truth the one thing sharply present to him—these were the sort of impressions that remained with Elsmere afterward of this last meeting with his people.
He had made a speech, of which he never could remember a word. As he sat down, there had been a slight flutter of surprise in the sympathetic looks of those about him, as though the tone of it had been somewhat unexpected and disproportionate to the occasion. Had he betrayed himself in any way? He looked for Catherine, but she was nowhere to be seen. Only in his search he caught the Squire’s ironical glance, and wondered with quick shame what sort of nonsense he had been talking.
Then a neighboring clergyman, who had been his warm supporter and admirer from the beginning, sprang up and made a rambling panegyric on him and on his work, which Elsmere writhed under. His work! Absurdity! What could be done in two years? He saw it all as the merest nothing, a ragged beginning which might do more harm than good.
But the cheering was incessant, the popular feeling intense. There was old Milsom waving a feeble arm; John Allwood gaunt, but radiant; Mary Sharland, white still as the ribbons on her bonnet, egging on her flushed and cheering husband; and the club boys grinning and shouting, partly for love of Elsmere, mostly because to the young human animal mere noise is heaven. In front was an old hedger and ditcher, who came round the parish periodically, and never failed to take Elsmere’s opinion as to ‘a bit of prapperty’ he and two other brothers as ancient as himself had been quarrelling over for twenty years, and were likely to go on quarrelling over, till all three litigants had closed their eyes on a mortal scene which had afforded them on the whole vast entertainment, though little pelf. Next him was a bowed and twisted old tramp who had been shepherd in the district in his youth, had then gone through the Crimea and the Mutiny, and was now living about the commons, welcome to feed here and sleep there for the sake of his stories and his queer innocuous wit. Robert had had many a gay argumentative walk with him, and he and his companion had tramped miles to see the function, to rattle their sticks on the floor in Elsmere’s honor, and satiate their curious gaze on the Squire.
When all was over, Elsmere, with his wife on his arm, mounted the hill to the rectory, leaving the green behind them still crowded with folk. Once inside the shelter of their own trees, husband and wife turned instinctively and caught each other’s hands. A low groan broke from Elsmere’s lips; Catherine looked at him one moment, then fell weeping on his breast. The first chapter of their common life was closed.
One thing more, however, of a private nature, remained for Elsmere to do. Late in the afternoon he walked over to the Hall.
He found the Squire in the inner library, among his German books, his pipe in his mouth, his old smoking coat and slippers bearing witness to the rapidity and joy with which he had shut the world out again after the futilities of the morning. His mood was more accessible than Elsmere had yet found it since his return.
‘Well, have you done with all those tomfooleries, Elsmere? Precious eloquent speech you made! When I see you and people like you throwing yourselves at the heads of the people, I always think of Scaliger’s remark about the Basques: “They say they understand one another—I don’t believe a word of it!” All that the lower class wants to understand, at any rate, is the shortest way to the pockets of you and me; all that you and I need understand, according to me, is how to keep ‘em off! There you have the sum and substance of my political philosophy.’
‘You remind me,’ said Robert dryly, sitting down on one of the library stools, ‘of some of those sentiments you expressed so forcibly on the first evening of our acquaintance.’
The Squire received the shaft with equanimity.
‘I was not amiable, I remember, on that occasion,’ he said coolly, his thin, old man’s fingers moving the while among the shelves of books, ‘nor on several subsequent ones. I had been made a fool of, and you were not particularly adroit. But of course you won’t acknowledge it. Who ever yet got a parson to confess himself!’
‘Strangely enough, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, fixing him with a pair of deliberate feverish eyes, ‘I am here at this moment for that very purpose.’
‘Go on,’ said the Squire, turning, however, to meet the Rector’s look, his gold spectacles falling forward over his long hooked nose, his attitude one of sudden attention. ‘Go on.’
All his grievances against Elsmere returned to him. He stood aggressively waiting.
Robert paused a moment and then said abruptly:
‘Perhaps even you will agree, Mr. Wendover, that I had some reason for sentiment this morning. Unless I read the lessons to-morrow, which is possible, to-day has been my last public appearance as rector of this parish!’
The Squire looked at him dumfounded.
‘And your reasons?’ he said, with quick imperativeness.
Robert gave them. He admitted, as plainly and bluntly as he had done to Grey, the Squire’s own part in the matter; but here, a note of antagonism, almost of defiance, crept even into his confession of wide and illimitable defeat. He was there, so to speak, to hand over his sword. But to the Squire, his surrender had all the pride of victory.
‘Why should you give up your living?’ asked the Squire after several minutes’ complete silence.
He too had sat down, and was now bending forward, his sharp small eyes peering at his companion.
‘Simply because I prefer to feel myself an honest man. However, I have not acted without advice. Grey of St. Anselm’s—you know him of course—was a very close personal friend of mine at Oxford. I have been to see him, and we agreed it was the only thing to do.’
‘Oh, Grey,’ exclaimed the Squire, with a movement of impatience. ‘Grey of course wanted you to set up a church of your own, or to join his! He is like all idealists, he has the usual foolish contempt for the compromise of institutions.’
‘Not at all,’ said Robert calmly, ‘you are mistaken; he has the most sacred respect for institutions. He only thinks it well, and I agree with him, that with regard to a man’s public profession and practice he should recognize that two and two make four.’
It was clear to him from the Squire’s tone and manner that Mr. Wendover’s instincts on the point were very much what he had expected, the instincts of the philosophical man of the world, who scorns the notion of taking popular beliefs seriously, whether for protest or for sympathy. But he was too weary to argue. The Squire, however, rose hastily and began to walk up and down in a gathering storm of irritation. The triumph gained for his own side, the tribute to his life’s work, were at the moment absolutely indifferent to him. They were effaced by something else much harder to analyze. Whatever it was, it drove him to throw himself upon Robert’s position with a perverse bewildering bitterness.
‘Why should you break up your life in this wanton way? Who, in God’s name is injured if you keep your living? It is the business of the thinker and the scholar to clear his mind of cobwebs. Granted. You have done it. But it is also the business of the practical man to live! If I had your altruist, emotional temperament, I should not hesitate for a moment. I should regard the historical expressions of an eternal tendency in men as wholly indifferent to me. If I understand you aright, you have flung away the sanctions of orthodoxy. There is no other in the way. Treat words as they deserve. You’—and the speaker laid an emphasis on the pronoun which for the life of him he could not help making sarcastic—‘you will always have Gospel enough to preach.’
‘I cannot,’ Robert repeated quietly, unmoved by the taunt, if it was one. ‘I am in a different state, I imagine, from you. Words—that is to say, the specific Christian formulæ—may be indifferent to you, though a month or two ago I should hardly have guessed it; they are just now anything but indifferent to me.’
The Squire’s brow grew darker. He took up the argument again, more pugnaciously than ever. It was the strangest attempt ever made to gibe and flout a wandering sheep, back into the fold. Robert’s resentment was roused at last. The Squire’s temper seemed to him totally inexplicable, his arguments contradictory, the conversation useless and irritating. He got up to take his leave.
‘What you are about to do, Elsmere,’ the Squire wound up with saturnine emphasis, ‘is apiece of cowardice! You will live bitterly to regret the haste and the unreason of it.’
‘There has been no haste,’ exclaimed Robert in the low tone of passionate emotion; ‘I have not rooted up the most sacred growths of life as a careless child devastates its garden. There are some things which a man only does because he must.’
There was a pause. Robert held out his hand. The Squire could hardly touch it. Outwardly his mood was one of the strangest eccentricity and anger; and as to what was beneath it, Elsmere’s quick divination was dulled by worry and fatigue. It only served him so far that at the door he turned back, hat in hand, and said, looking lingeringly the while at the solitary sombre figure, at the great library, with all its suggestive and exquisite detail: ‘If Monday is fine, Squire, will you walk?’
The Squire made no reply except by another question,—
‘Do you still keep to your Swiss plans for next week?’ he asked sharply.
‘Certainly. The plan, as it happens, is a Godsend. But there,’ said Robert, with a sigh, ‘let me explain the details of this dismal business to you on Monday. I have hardly the courage for it now.’
The curtain dropped behind him. Mr. Wendover stood a minute looking after him; then, with some vehement expletive or other, walked up to his writing-table, drew some folios that were laying on it toward him, with hasty maladroit movements which sent his papers flying over the floor, and plunged doggedly into work.
He and Mrs. Darcy dined alone. After dinner the Squire leant against the mantelpiece, sipping his coffee, more gloomily silent than even his sister had seen him for weeks. And, as always happened when he became more difficult and morose, she became more childish. She was now wholly absorbed with a little electric toy she had just bought for Mary Elsmere, a number of infinitesimal little figures dancing fantastically under the stimulus of an electric current, generated by the simplest means. She hung over it absorbed, calling to her brother every now and then, as though by sheer perversity, to come and look whenever the pink or the blue danseuse executed a more surprising somersault than usual.
He took not the smallest spoken notice of her, though his eyes followed her contemptuously as she moved from window to window with her toy in pursuit of the fading light.
‘Oh, Roger,’ she called presently, still throwing herself to this side and that, to catch new views of her pith puppets, ‘I have got something to show you. You must admire them—you shall! I have been drawing them all day, and they are nearly done. You remember what I told you once about my “imps?” I have seen them all my life, since I was a child in France with papa, and I have never been able to draw them till the last few weeks. They are such dears—such darlings; every one will know them when he sees them! There is the Chinese imp, the low, smirking creature, you know, that sits on the edge of your cup of tea; there is the flipperty-flopperty creature that flies out at you when you open a drawer; there is the twisty-twirly person that sits jeering on the edge of your hat when it blows away from you; and’—her voice dropped—‘that ugly, ugly thing I always see waiting for me on the top of a gate. They have teased nee all my life, and now at last I have drawn them. If they were to take offence to-morrow I should have them—the beauties—all safe.’
She came toward him, her bizarre little figure swaying from side to side, her eyes glittering, her restless hands pulling at the lace round her blanched head and face. The Squire, his hands behind him, looked at her frowning, an involuntary horror dawning on his dark countenance, turned abruptly, and left the room.
Mr. Wendover worked till midnight; then, tired out, he turned to the bit of fire to which, in spite of the oppressiveness of the weather, the chilliness of age and nervous strain had led him to set a light. He sat there for long, sunk in the blackest reverie. He was the only living creature in the great library wing which spread around and above him—the only waking creature in the whole vast pile of Murewell. The silver lamps shone with a steady melancholy light on the chequered walls of books. The silence was a silence that could be felt; and the gleaming Artemis, the tortured frowning Medusa, were hardly stiller in their frozen calm than the crouching figure of the Squire.
So Elsmere was going! In a few weeks the rectory would be once more tenanted by one of those nonentities the Squire had either patronized or scorned all his life. The park, the lanes, the room in which he sits, will know that spare young figure, that animated voice, no more. The outlet which had brought so much relief and stimulus to his own mental powers is closed; the friendship on which he had unconsciously come to depend so much is broken before it had well begun.
All sorts of strange thwarted instincts make themselves felt in the Squire. The wife he had once thought to marry, the children he might have had, come to sit like ghosts with him beside the fire. He had never, like Augustine, ‘loved to love;’ he had only loved to know. But none of us escapes to the last the yearnings which make us men. The Squire becomes conscious that certain fibres he had thought long since dead in him had been all the while twining themselves silently round the disciple who had shown him in many respects such a filial consideration and confidence. That young man might have become to him the son of his old age, the one human being from whom, as weakness of mind and body break him down, even his indomitable spirit might have accepted the sweetness of human pity, the comfort of human help.
And it is his own hand which has done most to break the nascent, slowly forming tie. He has bereft himself.
With what incredible recklessness had he been acting all these months!
It was the levity of his own proceeding which stared him in the face. His rough hand had closed on the delicate wings of a soul as a boy crushes the butterfly he pursues. As Elsmere had stood looking back at him from the library door, the suffering which spoke in every line of that changed face had stirred a sudden troubled remorse in Roger Wendover. It was mere justice that one result of that suffering should be to leave himself forlorn.
He had been thinking and writing of religion, of the history of ideas, all his life. Had he ever yet grasped the meaning of religion to the religious man? God and faith—what have these venerable ideas ever mattered to him personally, except as the subjects of the most ingenious analysis, the most delicate historical inductions? Not only sceptical to the core, but constitutionally indifferent, the Squire had always found enough to make life amply worth living in the mere dissection of other men’s beliefs.
But to-night! The unexpected shock of feeling, mingled with the terrible sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems to have stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental habit. He sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father’s death, his own black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing horror of his sister’s increasing weakness of brain. Life has been on the whole a burden, though there has been a certain joy no doubt in the fierce intellectual struggle of it. And to-night it seems so nearly over! A cold prescience of death creeps over the Squire as he sits in the lamplit silence. His eye seems to be actually penetrating the eternal vastness which lies about our life. He feels himself old, feeble, alone. The awe, the terror which are at the root of all religions have fallen even upon him at last.
The fire burns lower, the night wears on; outside an airless, misty moonlight hangs over park and field. Hark! was that a sound upstairs, in one of those silent empty rooms?
The Squire half rises, one hand on his chair, his blanched face strained, listening. Again! Is it a footstep or simply a delusion of the ear? He rises, pushes aside the curtains into the inner library, where the lamps have almost burnt away, creeps up the wooden stair, and into the deserted upper story.
Why was that door into the end room—his father’s room—open? He had seen it closed that afternoon. No one had been there since. He stepped nearer. Was that simply a gleam of moonlight on the polished floor—confused lines of shadow thrown by the vine outside? And was that sound nothing but the stirring of the rising wind of dawn against the open casement window? Or—
‘My God!’
The Squire fled downstairs. He gained his chair again. He sat upright an instant, impressing on himself, with sardonic vindictive force, some of those truisms as to the action of mind on body, of brain-process on sensation, which it had been part of his life’s work to illustrate. The philosopher had time to realize a shuddering fellowship of weakness with his kind, to see himself as a helpless instance of an inexorable law, before he fell back in his chair; a swoon, born of pitiful human terror—terror of things unseen—creeping over heart and brain.
BOOK V. ROSE.
CHAPTER XXXI.
It was a November afternoon. London lay wrapped in rainy fog. The atmosphere was such as only a Londoner can breathe with equanimity, and the gloom was indescribable.
Meanwhile, in defiance of the Inferno outside, festal preparations were being made in a little house on Campden Hill. Lamps were lit; in the drawing-room chairs were pushed back; the piano was open, and a violin stand towered beside it; chrysanthemums were everywhere; an invalid lady in a ‘beat cap’ occupied the sofa; and two girls were flitting about, clearly making the last arrangements necessary for a ‘musical afternoon.’
The invalid was Mrs. Leyburn, the girls, of course, Rose and Agnes. Rose at last was safely settled in her longed-for London, and an artistic company, of the sort her soul loved, was coming to tea with her.
Of Rose’s summer at Burwood very little need be said. She was conscious that she had not borne it very well. She had been off-hand with Mrs. Thornburgh, and had enjoyed one or two open skirmishes with Mrs. Seaton. Her whole temper had been irritating and irritable—she was perfectly aware of it. Toward her sick mother, indeed, she had controlled herself; nor, for such a restless creature, had she made a bad nurse. But Agnes had endured much, and found it all the harder because she was so totally in the dark as to the whys and wherefores of her sister’s moods.
Rose herself would have scornfully denied that any ways and wherefores—beyond her rooted dislike of Whindale—existed. Since her return from Berlin, and especially since that moment when, as she was certain, Mr. Langham had avoided her and Catherine at the National Gallery, she had been calmly certain of her own heart-wholeness. Berlin had developed her precisely as she had desired that it might. The necessities of the Bohemian student’s life had trained her to a new independence and shrewdness, and in her own opinion she was now a woman of the world judging all things by pure reason.
Oh, of course, she understood him perfectly. In the first place, at the time of their first meeting she had been a mere bread-and-butter miss, the easiest of preys for anyone who might wish to get a few hours amusement and distraction out of her temper and caprices. In the next place, even supposing he had been ever inclined to fall in love with her, which her new sardonic fairness of mind obliged her to regard as entirely doubtful, he was a man to whom marriage was impossible. How could anyone expect such a superfine dreamer to turn bread-winner for a wife and household? Imagine Mr. Langham interviewed by a rate-collector or troubled about coals! As to her—simply—she had misunderstood the laws of the game. It was a little bitter to have to confess it; a little bitter that he should have seen it, and have felt reluctantly compelled to recall the facts to her. But, after all most girls have some young follies to blush over.
So far the little cynic would get, becoming rather more scarlet however, over the process of reflection than was quite compatible with the ostentatious worldly wisdom of it. Then a sudden inward restlessness would break through, and she would spend a passionate hour pacing up and down, and hungering for the moment when she might avenge upon herself and him the week of silly friendship he had found it necessary as her elder and monitor to out short!
In September came the news of Robert’s resignation of his living. Mother and daughters sat looking at each other over the letter, stupefied. That this calamity, of all others, should have fallen on Catherine, of all women! Rose said very little, and presently jumped up with shining, excited eyes, and ran out for a walk with Bob, leaving Agnes to console their tearful and agitated mother. When she came in she went singing about the house as usual. Agnes, who was moved by the news out of all her ordinary sang-froid, was outraged by what seemed to her Rose’s callousness. She wrote a letter to Catherine, which Catherine put among her treasures, so strangely unlike it was to the quiet indifferent Agnes of every day. Rose spent a morning over an attempt at a letter, which when it reached its destination only wounded Catherine by its constraint and convention.
And yet that same night when the child was alone, suddenly some phrase of Catherine’s letter recurred to her. She saw, as only imaginative people see, with every detail visualized, her sister’s suffering, her sister’s struggle that was to be. She jumped into bed, and, stifling all sounds under the clothes, cried herself to sleep, which did not prevent her next morning from harboring somewhere at the bottom of her, a wicked and furtive satisfaction that Catherine might now learn there were more opinions in the world than one.
As for the rest of the valley, Mrs. Leyburn soon passed from a bewailing to a plaintive indignation with Robert, which was a relief to her daughters. It seemed to her a reflection on ‘Richard’ that Robert should have behaved so. Church opinions had been good enough for ‘Richard.’ ‘The young men seem to think, my dears, their fathers were all fools!’
The Vicar, good man, was sincerely distressed, but sincerely confident, also, that in time Elsmere would find his way back into the fold. In Mrs. Thornburgh’s dismay there was a secret superstitious pang. Perhaps she had better not have meddled. Perhaps it was never well to meddle. One event bears many readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere’s life took shape in the uneasy consciousness of the Vicar’s spouse as a more or less sharp admonition against wilfulness in match-making.
Of course Rose had her way as to wintering in London. They came up in the middle of October while the Elsmeres were still abroad, and settled into a small house in Lerwick Gardens, Campden Hill, which Catherine had secured for them on her way through town to the Continent.
As soon as Mrs. Leyburn had been made comfortable, Rose set to work to look up her friends. She owed her acquaintance in London hitherto mainly to Mr. and Mrs. Pierson, the young barrister and his æsthetic wife whom she had originally met and made friends with in a railway-carriage. Mr. Pierson was bustling and shrewd; not made of the finest clay, yet not at all a bad fellow. His wife, the daughter of a famous Mrs. Leo Hunter of a bygone generation, was small, untidy, and in all matters of religious or political opinion ‘emancipated’ to an extreme. She had also a strong vein of inherited social ambition, and she and her husband welcomed Rose with greater effusion than ever, in proportion as she was more beautiful and more indisputably gifted than ever. They placed themselves and their house at the girl’s service, partly out of genuine admiration and good nature, partly also because they divined in her a profitable social appendage.
For the Piersons, socially, were still climbing, and had by no means attained. Their world, so far, consisted too much of the odds and ends of most other worlds. They were not satisfied with it, and the friendship of the girl-violinist, whose vivacious beauty and artistic gift made a stir wherever she went, was a very welcome addition to their resources. They fêted her in their own house; they took her to the houses of other people; society smiled on Miss Leyburn’s protectors more than it had ever smiled on Mr. and Mrs. Pierson taken alone; and meanwhile Rose, flushed, excited, and totally unsuspicious, thought the world a fairy-tale, and lived from morning till night in a perpetual din of music, compliments, and bravos, which seemed to her life indeed—life at last!
With the beginning of November the Elsmeres returned, and about the same time Rose began to project tea-parties of her own, to which Mrs. Leyburn gave a flurried assent. When the invitations were written, Rose sat staring at them a little, pen in hand.
‘I wonder what Catherine will say to some of these people!’ she remarked in a dubious voice to Agnes. ‘Some of them are queer, I admit; but, after all, those two superior persons will have to get used to my friends some time, and they may as well begin.’ ‘You cannot expect poor Cathie to come,’ said Agnes with sudden energy.
Rose’s eyebrows went up. Agnes resented her ironical expression, and with a word or two of quite unusual sharpness got up and went.
Rose, left alone, sprang up suddenly, and clasped her white fingers above her head, with a long breath.
‘Where my heart used to be, there is now just—a black—cold—cinder,’ she remarked with sarcastic emphasis. ‘I am sure I used to be a nice girl once, but it is so long ago I can’t remember it!’
She stayed so a minute or more; then two tears suddenly broke and fell. She dashed them angrily away, and sat down again to her note-writing.
Among the cards she had still to fill up, was one of which the envelope was addressed to the Hon. Hugh Flaxman, 90 St. Jame’s Place. Lady Charlotte, though she had afterward again left town, had been in Martin Street at the end of October. The Leyburns had lunched there, and had been introduced by her to her nephew, and Lady Helen’s brother, Mr. Flaxman. The girls had found him agreeable; he had called the week afterward when they were not at home; and Rose now carelessly sent him a card, with the inward reflection that he was much too great a man to come, and was probably enjoying himself at country houses, as every aristocrat should in November.
The following day the two girls made their way over to Bedford Square, where the Elsmeres had taken a house in order to be near the British Museum. They pushed their way upstairs through a medley of packing-cases and a sickening smell of paint. There was a sound of an opening door, and a gentleman stepped out of a back room, which was to be Elsmere’s study, on to the landing.
It was Edward Langham. He and Rose stood and stared at each other a moment. Then Rose in the coolest lightest voice introduced him to Agnes. Agnes, with one curious glance, took in her sister’s defiant, smiling ease and the stranger’s embarrassment; then she went on to find Catherine. The two left behind exchanged a few banal questions and answers, Langham had only allowed himself one look at the dazzling, face and eyes framed in fur cap and boa. Afterward he stood making a study of the ground, and answering her remarks in his usual stumbling fashion. What was it had gone out of her voice—simply the soft callow sounds of first youth? And what a personage she had grown in these twelve months—how formidably, consciously brilliant in look and dress and manner!
Yes, he was still in town—settled there, indeed, for some time. And she—was there any special day on which Mrs. Leyburn received visitors? He asked the question, of course, with various hesitations and circumlocutions.
‘Oh dear, yes! Will you come next Wednesday, for instance, and inspect a musical menagerie? The animals will go through their performances from four till seven. And I can answer for it that some of the specimens will be entirely new to you.’
The prospect offered could hardly have been more repellent to him, but he got out an acceptance somehow. She nodded lightly to him and passed on, and he went downstairs, his head in a whirl. Where had the crude pretty child of yesteryear departed to—impulsive, conceited, readily offended, easily touched, sensitive as to what all the world might think of her and her performances? The girl he had just left had counted all her resources, tried the edge of all her weapons, and knew her own place too well to ask for anybody else’s appraisement. What beauty—good heavens!—what aplomb! The rich husband Elsmere talked of would hardly take much waiting for.
So cogitating, Langham took his way westward to his Beaumont Street rooms. They were on the second floor, small, dingy, choked with books. Ordinarily he shut the door behind him with a sigh of content. This evening they seemed to him intolerably confined and stuffy. He thought of going out to his club and a concert, but did nothing, after all, but sit brooding over the fire till midnight, alternately hugging and hating his solitude.
And so we return to the Wednesday following this unexpected meeting.
The drawing-room at No. 27 was beginning to fill. Rose stood at the door receiving the guests as they flowed in, while Agnes in the background dispensed tea. She was discussing with herself the probability of Langham’s appearance. ‘Whom shall I introduce him to first?’ she pondered, while she shook hands. ‘The poet? I see Mamma is now struggling with him. The ‘cellist with the hair—or the lady in Greek dress—or the esoteric Buddhist? What a fascinating selection! I had really no notion we should be quite so curious!’
‘Mees Rose, they wait for you,’ said a charming golden-bearded young German, viola in hand, bowing before her. He and his kind were most of them in love with her already, and all the more so because she knew so well how to keep them at a distance.
She went off, beckoning to Agnes to take her place, and the quartet began. The young German aforesaid played the viola, while the ‘cello was divinely played by a Hungarian, of whose outer man it need only be said that in wild profusion of much-tortured hair, in Hebraism of feature, and swarthy smoothness of cheek, he belonged to that type which Nature would seem to have already used to excess in the production of the continental musician. Rose herself was violinist, and the instruments dashed into the opening allegro with a precision and an entrain that took the room by storm.
In the middle of it, Langham pushed his way into the crowd round the drawing-room door. Through the heads about him he could see her standing a little in advance of the others, her head turned to one side, really in the natural attitude of violin-playing, but, as it seemed to him, in a kind of ravishment of listening—cheeks flushed, eyes shining, and the right arm and high-curved wrist managing the bow with a grace born of knowledge and fine training.
‘Very much improved, eh?’ said an English professional to a German neighbor, lifting his eyebrows interrogatively.
The other nodded with the business-like air of one who knows. ‘Joachim, they say, war darüber entzückt, and did his best vid her, and now D—— has got her—‘naming a famous violinist—‘she vill make fast brogress. He vill schtamp upon her treecks!’
‘But will she ever be more than a very clever amateur? Too pretty, eh?’ And the questioner nudged his companion, dropping his voice.
Langham would have given worlds to get on into the room, over the prostrate body of the speaker by preference, but the laws of mass and weight had him at their mercy, and he was rooted to the spot.
The other shrugged his shoulders. ‘Vell, vid a bretty woman—überhaupt—it doesn’t mean business! It’s zoziety—the dukes and the duchesses—that ruins all the young talents!’
This whispered conversation went on during the andante. With the scherzo the two hirsute faces broke into broad smiles. The artist behind each woke up, and Langham heard no more, except guttural sounds of delight and quick notes of technical criticism.
How that Scherzo danced and coquetted, and how the Presto flew as though all the winds were behind it, chasing it, chasing its mad eddies of notes through listening space! At the end, amid a wild storm of applause, she laid down her violin, and, proudly smiling, her breast still heaving with excitement and exertion, received the praises of those crowding round her. The group round the door was precipitated forward, and Langham with it. She saw him in a moment. Her white brow contracted, and she gave him a quick but hardly smiling glance of recognition through the crowd. He thought there was no chance of getting at her, and moved aside amid the general hubbub to look at a picture.
‘Mr. Langham, how do you do?’
He turned sharply and found her beside him. She had come to him with malice in her heart—malice born of smart, and long smouldering pain; but as she caught his look, the look of the nervous, short-sighted scholar and recluse, as her glance swept over the delicate refinement of the face, a sudden softness quivered in her own. The game was so defenceless!
‘You will find nobody here you know,’ she said abruptly, a little under her breath. ‘I am morally certain you never saw a single person in the room before! Shall I introduce you?’
‘Delighted, of course. But don’t disturb yourself about me, Miss Leyburn. I come out of my hole so seldom, everything amuses me—but especially looking and listening.’
‘Which means,’ she said, with frank audacity, ‘that you dislike new people!’
His eye kindled at once. ‘Say rather that it means a preference for the people that are not new! There is such a thing as concentrating one’s attention. I came to hear you play, Miss Leyburn!’
‘Well?’
She glanced at him from under her long lashes, one hand playing with the rings on the other. He thought, suddenly, with a sting of regret, of the confiding child who had flushed under his praise that Sunday evening at Murewell.
‘Superb!’ he said, but half mechanically. ‘I had no notion a winter’s work would have done so much for you. Was Berlin as stimulating as you expected? When I heard you had gone, I said to myself—“Well, at least, now, there is one completely happy person in Europe!”’
‘Did you? How easily we all dogmatize about each other!’ she said scornfully. Her manner was by no means simple. He did not feel himself at all at ease with her. His very embarrassment, however, drove him into rashness, as often happens.
‘I thought I had enough to go upon!’ he said in another tone; and his black eyes, sparkling as though a film had dropped from then, supplied the reference his words forbore.
She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up of the whole figure.
‘Will you come and be introduced?’ she asked him coldly. He bowed as coldly and followed her. Wholesome resentment of her manner was denied him. He had asked for her friendship, and had then gone away and forgotten her. Clearly what she meant him to see now was that they were strangers again. Well, she was amply in her right. He suspected that his allusion to their first talk over the fire had not been unwelcome to her, as an opportunity.
And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest in spite of himself she might beguile him once more into those old lapses of will and common-sense! Coxcomb!
He made a few spasmodic efforts at conversation with the lady to whom she had introduced him, then awkwardly disengaged himself and went to stand in a corner and study his neighbors.
Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in the most correct professional costume—long hair, velvet coat, eye-glass and all. His extravagance, however, was of the most conventional type. Only his vanity had a touch of the sublime. Langham, who possessed a sort of fine-ear gift for catching conversation, heard him saying to an open-eyed ingénue beside him,—
‘Oh, my literary baggage is small as yet. I have only done, perhaps, three things that will live.’
‘Oh, Mr. Wood!’ said the maiden, mildly protesting against so much modesty.
He smiled, thrusting his hand into the breast of the velvet coat. ‘But then,’ he said in a tone of the purest candor, ‘at my age I don’t think Shelley had done more!’
Langham, who, like all shy men, was liable to occasional explosions, was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing and had to retire from the neighborhood of the bard, who looked round him, disturbed and slightly frowning.
At last he discovered a point of view in the back room whence he could watch the humors of the crowd without coming too closely in contact with them. What a miscellaneous collection it was! He began to be irritably jealous for Rose’s place in the world. She ought to be more adequately surrounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn—what were the Elsmeres about? He rebelled against the thought of her living perpetually among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, queen of the second-rate.
It provoked him that she should be amusing herself so well. Her laughter, every now and then, came ringing into the back room. And presently there was a general hubbub. Langham craned his neck forward, and saw a struggle going on over a roll of music, between Rose and the long-haired, long-nosed violoncellist. Evidently, she did not want to play some particular piece, and wished to put it out of sight. Whereupon the Hungarian, who had been clamoring for it, rushed to its rescue and there was a mock fight over it. At last, amid the applause of the room, Rose was beaten, and her conqueror, flourishing the music on high, executed a kind of pas seul of triumph.
‘Victoria!’ he cried. ‘Now denn for de conditions of peace. Mees Rose, vill you kindly tune up? You are as moch beaten as the French at Sedan.’
‘Not a stone of my fortresses, not an inch of my territory!’ said Rose, with fine emphasis, crossing her white wrists before her.
The Hungarian looked at her, the wild poetic strain in him, which was the strain of race, asserting itself.
‘But if de victor bows,’ he said, dropping on one knee before her. ‘If force lay down his spoils at de feet of beauty?’
The circle round them applauded hotly, the touch of theatricality finding immediate response. Langham was remorselessly conscious of the man’s absurd chevelure and ill-fitting clothes. But Rose herself had evidently nothing but relish for the score. Proudly smiling, she held out her hand for her property, and as soon as she had it safe, she whisked it into the open drawer of a cabinet standing near, and drawing out the key, held it up a moment in her taper fingers, and then, depositing it in a little velvet bag hanging at her girdle, she closed the snap upon it with a little vindictive wave of triumph. Every movement was graceful, rapid, effective.
Half a dozen German throats broke into guttural protest. Amid the storm of laughter and remonstrance, the door suddenly opened. The fluttered parlor-maid mumbled a long name, with a port of soldierly uprightness, there advanced behind her a large fair-haired woman, followed by a gentleman, and in the distance by another figure.
Rose drew back a moment astounded, one hand on the piano, her dress sweeping round her. An awkward silence fell on the chattering circle of musicians.
‘Good heavens!’ said Langham to himself, ‘Lady Charlotte Wynnstay!’
How do you do, Miss Leyburn?’ said one of the most piercing of voices. ‘Are you surprised to see me? You didn’t ask me—perhaps you don’t want me. But I have come, you see, partly because my nephew was coming,’ and she pointed to the gentleman behind her, ‘partly because I meant to punish you for not having come to see me last Thursday. Why didn’t you?’
‘Because we thought you were still away,’ said Rose, who had by this time recovered her self-possession. ‘But if you meant to punish me, Lady Charlotte, you have done it badly. I am delighted to see you. May I introduce my sister? Agnes, will you find Lady Charlotte Wynnstay a chair by mamma?’
‘Oh, you wish, I see, to dispose of me at once,’ said the other imperturbably. ‘What is happening? Is it music?’
‘Aunt Charlotte, that is most disingenuous on your part. I gave you ample warning.’
Rose, turned a smiling face toward the speaker. It was Mr. Flaxman, Lady Charlotte’s companion.
‘You need not have drawn the picture too black, Mr. Flaxman. There is an escape. If Lady Charlotte will only let my sister take her into the next room, she will find herself well out of the clutches of the music. Oh, Robert! Here you are at last! Lady Charlotte, you remember my brother-in-law? Robert, will you get Lady Charlotte some tea?’
‘I am not going to be banished,’ said Mr. Flaxman, looking down upon her, his well-bred, slightly worn face aglow with animation and pleasure.
‘Then you will be deafened,’ said Rose, laughing, as she escaped from him a moment, to arrange for a song from a tall formidable maiden, built after the fashion of Mr. Gilbert’s contralto heroines, with a voice which bore out the ample promise of her frame.
‘Your sister is a terribly self-possessed young person, Mr. Elsmere,’ said Lady Charlotte, as Robert piloted her across the room.
‘Does that imply praise or blame on your part, Lady Charlotte?’ asked Robert, smiling.
‘Neither at present. I don’t know Miss Leyburn well enough. I merely state a fact. No tea, Mr. Elsmere. I have had three teas already, and I am not like the American woman who could always worry down another cup.’
She was introduced to Mrs. Leyburn; but the plaintive invalid was immediately seized with terror of her voice and appearance, and was infinitely grateful to Robert for removing her as promptly as possible to a chair on the border of the two rooms where she could talk or listen as she pleased. For a few moments she listened to Fraülein Adelmann’s veiled unmanageable contralto; then she turned magisterially to Robert standing behind her—
‘The art of singing has gone out,’ she declared ‘since the Germans have been allowed to meddle in it. By the way, Mr. Elsmere how do you manage to be here? Are you taking a holiday?’
Robert looked at her with a start.
‘I have left Murewell, Lady Charlotte.’
‘Left Murewell!’ she said in astonishment, turning round to look at him, her eyeglass at her eye. ‘Why has Helen told me nothing about it? Have you got another living?’
‘No. My wife and I are settling in London. We only told Lady Helen of our intentions a few weeks ago.’
To which it may be added that Lady Helen, touched and dismayed by Elsmere’s letter to her, had not been very eager to hand over the woes of her friends to her aunt’s cool and irresponsible comments.
Lady Charlotte deliberately looked at him a minute longer through her glass. Then she let it fall.
‘You don’t mean to tell me any more, I can see, Mr. Elsmere. But you will allow me to be astonished?’
‘Certainly,’ he said, smiling sadly, and immediately afterward relapsing into silence.
‘Have you heard of the Squire, lately?’ he asked her after a pause.
‘Not from him. We are excellent friends when we meet, but he doesn’t consider me worth writing to. His sister—little idiot—writes to me every now and then. But she has not vouchsafed me a letter since the summer. I should say from the last accounts that he was breaking.’
‘He had a mysterious attack of illness just before I left’ said Robert gravely. ‘It made one anxious.’
‘Oh, it is the old story. All the Wendovers have died of weak hearts or queer brains—generally of both together. I imagine you had some experience of the Squire’s queerness at one time, Mr. Elsmere. I can’t say you and he seemed to be on particularly good terms on the only occasion I ever had the pleasure of meeting you at Murewell.’
She looked up at him, smiling grimly. She had a curiously exact memory for the unpleasant scenes of life.
‘Oh, you remember that unlucky evening!’ said Robert, reddening a little—‘We soon got over that. We became great friends.’
Again, however, Lady Charlotte was struck by the quiet melancholy of his tone. How strangely the look of youth—which had been so attractive in him the year before—had ebbed from the man’s face—from complexion, eyes, expression! She stared at him, full of a brusque, tormenting curiosity as to the how and why.
‘I hope there is some one among you strong enough to manage Miss Rose,’ she said presently, with an abrupt change of subject. ‘That little sister-in-law of yours is going to be the rage.’
‘Heaven forbid!’ cried Robert fervently.
‘Heaven will do nothing of the kind. She is twice as pretty as she was last year; I am told she plays twice as well. She had always the sort of manner that provoked people one moment and charmed them the next. And, to judge by my few words with her just now, I should say she had developed it finely. Well, now, Mr. Elsmere, who is going to take care of her?’
‘I suppose we shall all have a try at it, Lady Charlotte.’
‘Her mother doesn’t look to me a person of nerve enough,’ said Lady Charlotte coolly. ‘She is a girl certain—absolutely certain—to have adventures, and you may as well be prepared for them.’
‘I can only trust she will disappoint your expectations, Lady Charlotte,’ said Robert, with a slightly sarcastic emphasis.
‘Elsmere, who is that man talking to Miss Leyburn?’ asked Langham as the two friends stood side by side, a little later, watching the spectacle.
‘A certain Mr. Flaxman, brother to a pretty little neighbor of ours in Surrey—Lady Helen Varley—and nephew to Lady Charlotte. I have not seen him here before; but I think the girls like him.’
‘Is he the Flaxman who got the mathematical prize at Berlin last year?’
‘Yes, I believe so. A striking person altogether. He is enormously rich, Lady Helen tells me, in spite of an elder brother. All the money in his mother’s family has come to him, and he is the heir to Lord Daniel’s great Derbyshire property. Twelve years ago I used to hear him talked about incessantly by the Cambridge men one met. “Citizen Flaxman” they called him, for his opinion’s sake. He would ask his scout to dinner, and insist on dining with his own servants, and shaking hands with his friends’ butlers. The scouts and the butlers put an end to that, and altogether, I imagine, the world disappointed him. He has a story, poor fellow, too—a young wife who died with her first baby ten years ago. The world supposes him never to have got over it, which makes him all the more interesting. A distinguished face, don’t you think?—the good type of English aristocrat.’
Langham assented. But his attention was fixed on the group in which Rose’s bright hair was conspicuous; and when Robert left him and went to amuse Mrs. Leyburn, he still stood rooted to the same spot watching. Rose was leaning against the piano, one hand behind her, her whole attitude full of a young, easy, self-confident grace. Mr. Flaxman was standing beside her, and they were deep in talk—serious talk apparently, to judge by her quiet manner and the charmed, attentive interest of his look. Occasionally, however, there was a sally on her part, and an answering flash of laughter on his; but the stream of conversation closed immediately over the interruption, and flowed on as evenly as before.