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 lifetime.

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 ones. 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 parlours. The squire submitted. The neighbourhood

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.

Rumours 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

towards them. The squire put up his eyeglass.

'Humph!' he remarked; 'do you know this merryandrew, Elsmere?'

It was Newcome. As they passed, Robert with slightly heightened colour

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 _tete-a-tete_ 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 than I once was!' But if so,

these moments never betrayed themselves in word or act. Her tender

common sense, her sweet humility, made her recognise 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 _materiel_ 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 books; 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 look-out 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 be all 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 _Schwaermerei_ 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 aesthete"--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 aesthetic persons,

but very _recherche_--which may be. She talked to Rose of nothing but

acting, especially of Madame Desforets. No one, according to her, has

anything to do with an actress's 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 _entree_.

'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 pay to any one

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 dithtricts." 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 some time 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 towards 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 down 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

_tete-a-tete_ 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 affection, 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 towards 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 afterwards 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 _naivete_ 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 favour 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 realise 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

defenceless 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----

CHAPTER XXIV

That same afternoon Robert started on a walk to a distant farm, where

one of his Sunday-school boys lay recovering from rheumatic fever. The

rector had his pocket full of articles--a story-book in one, a puzzle

map in the other--destined for Master Carter's amusement. On the way he

was to pick up Mr. Wendover at the park gates.

It was a delicious April morning. A soft west wind blew through leaf and

grass--

'Driving sweet buds, like flocks, to feed in air.'

The spring was stirring everywhere, and Robert raced along, feeling in

every vein a life, an ebullience akin to that of nature. As he neared

the place of meeting it occurred to him that the squire had been

unusually busy lately, unusually silent and absent too on their walks.

What _was_ he always at work on? Robert had often inquired of him as to

the nature of those piles of proof and manuscript with which his table

was littered. The squire had never given any but the most general

answer, and had always changed the subject. There was an invincible

_personal_ reserve about him which, through all his walks and talks with

Elsmere, had never as yet broken down. He would talk of other men and

other men's labours by the hour, but not of his own. Elsmere reflected

on the fact, mingling with the reflection a certain humorous scorn of

his own constant openness and readiness to take counsel with the world.

'However, _his_ book isn't a mere excuse, as Langham's is,' Elsmere

inwardly remarked. 'Langham, in a certain sense, plays even with

learning; Mr. Wendover plays at nothing.'

By the way, he had a letter from Langham in his pocket much more

cheerful and human than usual. Let him look through it again.

Not a word, of course, of that National Gallery experience!--a

circumstance, however, which threw no light on it either way.

'I find myself a good deal reconciled to life by this migration of

mine,' wrote Langham. 'Now that my enforced duties to them are all done

with, my fellow-creatures seem to me much more decent fellows than

before. The great stir of London, in which, unless I please, I have no

part whatever, attracts me more than I could have thought possible. No

one in these noisy streets has any rightful claim upon me. I have cut

away at one stroke lectures, and Boards of Studies, and tutors'

meetings, and all the rest of the wearisome Oxford make-believe, and the

creature left behind feels lighter and nimbler than he has felt for

years. I go to concerts and theatres; I look at the people in the

streets; I even begin to take an outsider's interest in social

questions, in the puny dykes which well-meaning people are trying to

raise all round us against the encroaching, devastating labour-troubles

of the future. By dint of running away from life, I may end by cutting a

much more passable figure in it than before. Be consoled, my dear

Elsmere; reconsider your remonstrances.'

* * * * *

There, under the great cedar by the gate, stood Mr. Wendover. Illumined

as he was by the spring sunshine, he struck Elsmere as looking unusually

shrunken and old. And yet under the look of physical exhaustion there

was a new serenity, almost a peacefulness of expression, which gave the

whole man a different aspect.

'Don't take me far,' he said abruptly, as they started. 'I have not got

the energy for it. I have been over-working, and must go away.'

'I have been sure of it for some time,' said Elsmere warmly. 'You ought

to have a long rest. But mayn't I know, Mr. Wendover, before you take

it, what this great task is you have been toiling at? Remember, you have

never told me a word of it.

And Elsmere's smile had in it a touch of most friendly reproach. Fatigue

had left the scholar relaxed, comparatively defenceless. His sunk and

wrinkled eyes lit up with a smile, faint indeed, but of unwonted

softness.

'A task indeed,' he said with a sigh, 'the task of a lifetime. To-day I

finished the second third of it. Probably before the last section is

begun some interloping German will have stepped down before me; it is

the way of the race! But for the moment there is the satisfaction of

having come to an end of some sort--a natural halt, at any rate.'

Elsmere's eyes were still interrogative. 'Oh, well,' said the squire

hastily, 'it is a book I planned just after I took my doctor's degree at

Berlin. It struck me then as the great want of modern scholarship. It is

a History of Evidence, or rather, more strictly, "A History of

_Testimony_."'

Robert started. The library flashed into his mind, and Langham's figure

in the long gray coat sitting on the stool.

'A great subject,' he said slowly, 'a magnificent subject. How have you

conceived it, I wonder?'

'Simply from the standpoint of evolution, of development. The

philosophical value of the subject is enormous. You must have considered

it, of course; every historian must. But few people have any idea in

detail of the amount of light which the history of human witness in the

world, systematically carried through, throws on the history of the

human mind; that is to say, on the history of ideas.'

The squire paused, his keen scrutinising look dwelling on the face

beside him, as though to judge whether he were understood.

'Oh, true!' cried Elsmere; 'most true. Now I know what vague want it is

that has been haunting me for months----'

He stopped short, his look, aglow with all the young thinker's ardour,

fixed on the squire.

The squire received the outburst in silence--a somewhat ambiguous

silence.

'But go on,' said Elsmere; 'please go on.'

'Well, you remember,' said the squire slowly, 'that when Tractarianism

began I was for a time one of Newman's victims. Then, when Newman

departed, I went over body and bones to the Liberal reaction which

followed his going. In the first ardour of what seemed to me a release

from slavery I migrated to Berlin, in search of knowledge which there

was no getting in England, and there, with the taste of a dozen aimless

theological controversies still in my mouth, this idea first took hold

of me. It was simply this:--Could one through an exhaustive examination

of human records, helped by modern physiological and mental science, get

at the conditions, physical and mental, which govern the greater or

lesser correspondence between human witness and the fact it reports?'

'A giant's task!' cried Robert: 'hardly conceivable!'

The squire smiled slightly--the smile of a man who looks back with

indulgent half-melancholy satire on the rash ambitions of his youth.

'Naturally,' he resumed, 'I soon saw I must restrict myself to European

testimony, and that only up to the Renaissance. To do that, of course, I

had to dig into the East, to learn several Oriental languages--Sanskrit

among them. Hebrew I already knew. Then, when I had got my languages, I

began to work steadily through the whole mass of existing records,

sifting and comparing. It is thirty years since I started. Fifteen years

ago I finished the section dealing with classical antiquity--with India,

Persia, Egypt, and Judaea. To-day I have put the last strokes to a

History of Testimony from the Christian era down to the sixth

century--from Livy to Gregory of Tours, from Augustus to Justinian.'

Elsmere turned to him with wonder, with a movement of irrepressible

homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitary labour for one end, one cause!

In our hurried fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity, this power

of realising itself, strikes the imagination.

'And your two books?'

'Were a mere interlude,' replied the squire briefly. 'After the

completion of the first part of my work, there were certain deposits

left in me which it was a relief to get rid of, especially in connection

with my renewed impressions of England,' he added drily.

Elsmere was silent, thinking this then was the explanation of the

squire's minute and exhaustive knowledge of the early Christian

centuries, a knowledge into which--apart from certain forbidden

topics--he had himself dipped so freely. Suddenly, as he mused, there

awoke in the young man a new hunger, a new unmanageable impulse towards

frankness of speech. All his nascent intellectual powers were alive and

clamorous. For the moment his past reticences and timidities looked to

him absurd. The mind rebelled against the barriers it had been rearing

against itself. It rushed on to sweep them away, crying out that all

this shrinking from free discussion had been at bottom 'a mere treason

to faith.'

'Naturally, Mr. Wendover,' he said at last, and his tone had a

half-defiant, half-nervous energy, 'you have given your best attention

all these years to the Christian problems.'

'Naturally,' said the squire drily. Then, as his companion still seemed

to wait, keenly expectant, he resumed, with something cynical in the

smile which accompanied the words,--

'But I have no wish to infringe our convention.'

'A convention was it?' replied Elsmere, flushing. 'I think I only wanted

to make my own position clear and prevent misunderstanding. But it is

impossible that I should be indifferent to the results of thirty years

such work as you can give to so great a subject.'

The squire drew himself up a little under his cloak and seemed to

consider. His tired eyes, fixed on the spring lane before them, saw in

reality only the long retrospects of the past. Then a light broke in

them, transformed them--a light of battle. He turned to the man beside

him, and his sharp look swept over him from head to foot. Well, if he

would have it, let him have it. He had been contemptuously content so

far to let the subject be. But Mr. Wendover, in spite of his philosophy,

had never been proof all his life against an anti-clerical instinct

worthy almost of a Paris municipal councillor. In spite of his fatigue

there woke in him a kind of cruel whimsical pleasure at the notion of

speaking, once for all, what he conceived to be the whole bare truth to

this clever attractive dreamer, to the young fellow who thought he could

condescend to science from the standpoint of the Christian miracles!

'Results?' he said interrogatively. 'Well, as you will understand, it is

tolerably difficult to summarise such a mass at a moment's notice. But I

can give you the lines of my last volumes, if it would interest you to

hear them.'

That walk prolonged itself far beyond Mr. Wendover's original intention.

There was something in the situation, in Elsmere's comments, or

arguments, or silences, which after a while banished the scholar's sense

of exhaustion and made him oblivious of the country distances. No man

feels another's soul quivering and struggling in his grasp without

excitement, let his nerve and his self-restraint be what they may.

As for Elsmere, that hour and a half, little as he realised it at the

time, represented the turning-point of life. He listened, he suggested,

he put in an acute remark here, an argument there, such as the squire

had often difficulty in meeting. Every now and then the inner protest of

an attacked faith would break through in words so full of poignancy, in

imagery so dramatic, that the squire's closely-knit sentences would be

for the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved himself no

mean guardian of all that was most sacred to himself and to Catherine,

and the squire's intellectual respect for him rose considerably.

All the same, by the end of their conversation that first period of

happy unclouded youth we have been considering was over for poor

Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable laws and instincts of the

mind, he had been for months tempting his fate, inviting catastrophe.

None the less did the first sure approaches of that catastrophe fill him

with a restless resistance which was in itself anguish.

As to the squire's talk, it was simply the outpouring of one of the

richest, most sceptical, and most highly-trained of minds on the subject

of Christian origins. At no previous period of his life would it have

greatly affected Elsmere. But now at every step the ideas, impressions,

arguments bred in him by his months of historical work and ordinary

converse with the squire rushed in, as they had done once before, to

cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr.

Wendover.

We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost at random from

the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake of indicating the main

lines of a bitter after-struggle.

'Testimony like every other human product has _developed_.

Man's power of apprehending and recording what he sees and

hears has grown from less to more, from weaker to stronger,

like any other of his faculties, just as the reasoning powers

of the cave-dweller have developed into the reasoning powers

of a Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this, and

it can be got from history and experience.'

* * * * *

'To plunge into the Christian period without having first

cleared the mind as to what is meant in history and

literature by "the critical method," which in history may be

defined as the "science of what is credible," and in

literature as "the science of what is rational," is to invite

fiasco. The theologian in such a state sees no obstacle to

accepting an arbitrary list of documents with all the strange

stuff they may contain, and declaring them to be sound

historical material, while he applies to all the strange

stuff of a similar kind surrounding them the most rigorous

principles of modern science. Or he has to make believe that

the reasoning processes exhibited in the speeches of the

Acts, in certain passages of St. Paul's Epistles, or in the

Old Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a validity for

the mind of the nineteenth century, when in truth they are

the imperfect, half-childish products of the mind of the

first century, of quite insignificant or indirect value to

the historian of fact, of enormous value to the historian of

_testimony_ and its varieties.'

* * * * *

'Suppose, for instance, before I begin to deal with the

Christian story, and the earliest Christian development, I

try to make out beforehand what are the moulds, the channels

into which the testimony of the time must run. I look for

these moulds, of course, in the dominant ideas, the

intellectual preconceptions and preoccupations existing when

the period begins.

'In the first place, I shall find present in the age which

saw the birth of Christianity, as in so many other ages, a

universal preconception in favour of miracle--that is to say,

of deviations from the common norm of experience, governing

the work of _all_ men of _all_ schools. Very well, allow for

it then. Read the testimony of the period in the light of it.

Be prepared for the inevitable differences between it and the

testimony of your own day. The witness of the time is not

true, nor, in the strict sense, false. It is merely

incompetent, half-trained, pre-scientific, but all through

perfectly natural. The wonder would have been to have had a

life of Christ without miracles. The air teems with them. The

East is full of Messiahs. Even a Tacitus is superstitious.

Even a Vespasian works miracles. Even a Nero cannot die, but

fifty years after his death is still looked for as the

inaugurator of a millennium of horror. The Resurrection is

partly invented, partly imagined, partly ideally true--in any

case wholly intelligible and natural, as a product of the

age, when once you have the key of that age.

'In the next place, look for the preconceptions that have a

definite historical origin; those, for instance, flowing from

the pre-Christian, apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking

the Maccabean legend of Daniel as the centre of

inquiry--those flowing from Alexandrian Judaism and the

school of Philo--those flowing from the Palestinian schools

of exegesis. Examine your synoptic gospels, your Gospel of

St. John, your Apocalypse, in the light of these. You have no

other chance of understanding them. But so examined, they

fall into place, become explicable and rational; such

material as science can make full use of. The doctrine of the

Divinity of Christ, Christian eschatology, and Christian

views of prophecy will also have found _their_ place in a

sound historical scheme!'

* * * * *

'It is discreditable now for the man of intelligence to

refuse to read his Livy in the light of his Mommsen. My

object has been to help in making it discreditable to him to

refuse to read his Christian documents in the light of a

trained scientific criticism. We shall have made some

positive advance in rationality when the man who is perfectly

capable of dealing sanely with legend in one connection, and,

in another, will insist on confounding it with history

proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without

falling _ipso facto_ out of court with men of education. It

is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so

little in the final staking out of the boundaries between

reason and unreason!'

And so on. These are mere ragged gleanings from an ample store. The

discussion in reality ranged over the whole field of history, plunged

into philosophy, and into the subtlest problems of mind. At the end of

it, after he had been conscious for many bitter moments of that same

constriction of heart which had overtaken him once before at Mr.

Wendover's hands, the religious passion in Elsmere once more rose with

sudden stubborn energy against the iron negations pressed upon it.

'I will not fight you any more, Mr. Wendover,' he said, with his moved

flashing look. 'I am perfectly conscious that my own mental experience

of the last two years has made it necessary to re-examine some of these

intellectual foundations of faith. But as to the faith itself, that is

its own witness. It does not depend, after all, upon anything external,

but upon the living voice of the Eternal in the soul of man!'

Involuntarily his pace quickened. The whole man was gathered into one

great, useless, pitiful defiance, and the outer world was forgotten. The

squire kept up with difficulty a while, a faint glimmer of sarcasm

playing now and then round the straight thin-lipped mouth. Then suddenly

he stopped.

'No, let it be. Forget me and my book, Elsmere. Everything can be got

out of in this world. By the way, we seem to have reached the ends of

the earth. Those are the new Mile End cottages, I believe. With your

leave, I'll sit down in one of them, and send to the Hall for the

carriage.'

Elsmere's repentant attention was drawn at once to his companion.

'I am a selfish idiot,' he said hotly, 'to have led you into

over-walking and over-talking like this.'

The squire made some short reply and instantly turned the matter off.

The momentary softness which had marked his meeting with Elsmere had

entirely vanished, leaving only the Mr. Wendover of every day, who was

merely made awkward and unapproachable by the slightest touch of

personal sympathy. No living being, certainly not his foolish little

sister, had any _right_ to take care of the squire. And as the signs of

age became more apparent, this one fact had often worked powerfully on

the sympathies of Elsmere's chivalrous youth, though as yet he had been

no more capable than any one else of breaking through the squire's

haughty reserve.

As they turned down the newly-worn track to the cottages, whereof the

weekly progress had been for some time the delight of Elsmere's heart,

they met old Meyrick in his pony-carriage. He stopped his shambling

steed at sight of the pair. The bleared spectacled eyes lit up, the prim

mouth broke into a smile which matched the April sun.

'Well, Squire; well, Mr. Elsmere, are you going to have a look at those

places? Never saw such palaces. I only hope I may end my days in

anything so good. Will you give me a lease, Squire?'

Mr. Wendover's deep eyes took a momentary survey, half indulgent, half

contemptuous, of the naive, awkward-looking old creature in the

pony-carriage. Then, without troubling to find an answer, he went his

way.

Robert stayed chatting a moment or two, knowing perfectly well what

Meyrick's gay garrulity meant. A sharp and bitter sense of the ironies

of life swept across him. The squire humanised, influenced by him--he

knew that was the image in Meyrick's mind; he remembered with a quiet

scorn its presence in his own. And never, never had he felt his own

weakness and the strength of that grim personality so much as at that

instant.

That evening Catherine noticed an unusual silence and depression in

Robert. She did her best to cheer it away, to get at the cause of it. In

vain. At last, with her usual wise tenderness, she left him alone,

conscious herself, as she closed the study door behind her, of a

momentary dreariness of soul, coming she knew not whence, and only

dispersed by the instinctive upward leap of prayer.

Robert was no sooner alone than he put down his pipe and sat brooding

over the fire. All the long debate of the afternoon began to fight

itself out again in the shrinking mind. Suddenly, in his restless pain,

a thought occurred to him. He had been much struck in the squire's

conversation by certain allusions to arguments drawn from the Book of

Daniel. It was not a subject with which Robert had any great

familiarity. He remembered his Pusey dimly, certain Divinity lectures,

an article of Westcott's.

He raised his hand quickly and took down the monograph on _The Use of

the Old Testament in the New_, which the squire had sent him in the

earliest days of their acquaintance. A secret dread and repugnance had

held him from it till now. Curiously enough it was not he but Catherine,

as we shall see, who had opened it first. Now, however, he got it down

and turned to the section on Daniel.

It was a change of conviction on the subject of the date and authorship

of this strange product of Jewish patriotism in the second century

before Christ that drove M. Renan out of the Church of Rome. 'For the

Catholic Church to confess,' he says in his _Souvenirs_, 'that Daniel is

an apocryphal book of the time of the Maccabees, would be to confess

that she had made a mistake; if she had made this mistake, she may have

made others; she is no longer divinely inspired.'

The Protestant, who is in truth more bound to the Book of Daniel than M.

Renan, has various ways of getting over the difficulties raised against

the supposed authorship of the book by modern criticism. Robert found

all these ways enumerated in the brilliant and vigorous pages of the

book before him.

In the first place, like the orthodox Saint-Sulpicien, the Protestant

meets the critic with a flat _non possumus_. 'Your arguments are useless

and irrelevant,' he says in effect. 'However plausible may be your

objections, the Book of Daniel is what it professes to be, _because_ our

Lord quoted it in such a manner as to distinctly recognise its

authority. The All-True and All-Knowing cannot have made a mistake, nor

can He have expressly led His disciples to regard as genuine and Divine,

prophecies which were in truth the inventions of an ingenious romancer.'

But the liberal Anglican--the man, that is to say, whose logical sense

is inferior to his sense of literary probabilities--proceeds quite

differently.

'Your arguments are perfectly just,' he says to the critic; 'the book is

a patriotic fraud, of no value except to the historian of literature.

But how do you know that our Lord quoted it as _true_ in the strict

sense? In fact He quoted it as _literature_, as a Greek might have

quoted Homer, as an Englishman might quote Shakespeare.'

And many a harassed Churchman takes refuge forthwith in the new

explanation. It is very difficult, no doubt, to make the passages in the

Gospels agree with it, but at the bottom of his mind there is a saving

silent scorn for the old theories of inspiration. He admits to himself

that probably Christ was not correctly reported in the matter.

Then appears the critic, having no interests to serve, no _parti pris_

to defend, and states the matter calmly, dispassionately, as it appears

to him. 'No reasonable man,' says the ablest German exponent of the Book

of Daniel, 'can doubt'--that this most interesting piece of writing

belongs to the year 169 or 170 B.C. It was written to stir up the

courage and patriotism of the Jews, weighed down by the persecutions of

Antiochus Epiphanes. It had enormous vogue. It inaugurated a new

Apocalyptic literature. And clearly the youth of Jesus of Nazareth was

vitally influenced by it. It entered into his thought, it helped to

shape his career.

But Elsmere did not trouble himself much with the critic, as at any rate

he was reported by the author of the book before him. Long before the

critical case was reached, he had flung the book heavily from him. The

mind accomplished its further task without help from outside. In the

stillness of the night there rose up weirdly before him a whole new

mental picture--effacing, pushing out, innumerable older images of

thought. It was the image of a purely human Christ--a purely human,

explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity. It broke his heart, but

the spell of it was like some dream-country wherein we see all the

familiar objects of life in new relations and perspectives. He gazed

upon it fascinated, the wailing underneath checked a while by the

strange beauty and order of the emerging spectacle. Only a little while!

Then with a groan Elsmere looked up, his eyes worn, his lips white and

set.

'I must face it--I must face it through! God help me!'

A slight sound overhead in Catherine's room sent a sudden spasm of

feeling through the young face. He threw himself down, hiding from his

own foresight of what was to be.

'My darling, my darling! But she shall know nothing of it--yet.'

CHAPTER XXV

And he did face it through.

The next three months were the bitterest months of Elsmere's life. They

were marked by anguished mental struggle, by a consciousness of painful

separation from the soul nearest to his own, and by a constantly

increasing sense of oppression, of closing avenues and narrowing

alternatives, which for weeks together seemed to hold the mind in a grip

whence there was no escape.

That struggle was not hurried and embittered by the bodily presence of

the squire. Mr. Wendover went off to Italy a few days after the

conversation we have described. But though he was not present in the

flesh the great book of his life was in Elsmere's hands, he had formally

invited Elsmere's remarks upon it; and the air of Murewell seemed still

echoing with his sentences, still astir with his thoughts. That curious

instinct of pursuit, that avid imperious wish to crush an irritating

resistance, which his last walk with Elsmere had first awakened in him

with any strength, persisted. He wrote to Robert from abroad, and the

proud fastidious scholar had never taken more pains with anything than

with those letters.

Robert might have stopped them, might have cast the whole matter from

him with one resolute effort. In other relations he had will enough and

to spare.

Was it an unexpected weakness of fibre that made it impossible?--that

had placed him in this way at the squire's disposal? Half the world

would answer yes. Might not the other half plead that in every

generation there is a minority of these mobile, impressionable,

defenceless natures, who are ultimately at the mercy of experience, at

the mercy of thought, at the mercy (shall we say?) of truth; and that,

in fact, it is from this minority that all human advance comes?

During these three miserable months it cannot be said--poor

Elsmere!--that he attempted any systematic study of Christian evidence.

His mind was too much torn, his heart too sore. He pounced feverishly on

one test point after another, on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the

relation of the New Testament to the thoughts and beliefs of its time,

the Gospel of St. John, the evidence as to the Resurrection, the

intellectual and moral conditions surrounding the formation of the

Canon. His mind swayed hither and thither, driven from each

resting-place in turn by the pressure of some new difficulty. And--let

it be said again--all through, the only constant element in the whole

dismal process was his trained historical sense. If he had gone through

this conflict at Oxford, for instance, he would have come out of it

unscathed: for he would simply have remained throughout it ignorant of

the true problems at issue. As it was, the keen instrument he had

sharpened so laboriously on indifferent material now ploughed its

agonising way, bit by bit, into the most intimate recesses of thought

and faith.

Much of the actual struggle he was able to keep from Catherine's view,

as he had vowed to himself to keep it. For after the squire's departure

Mrs. Darcy too went joyously up to London to flutter a while through the

golden alleys of Mayfair; and Elsmere was left once more in undisturbed

possession of the Murewell library. There for a while on every day--oh,

pitiful relief!--he could hide himself from the eyes he loved.

But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallowest

concealments. Catherine had already had one or two alarms. Once, in

Robert's study, among a tumbled mass of books he had pulled out in

search of something missing, and which she was putting in order, she had

come across that very book on the Prophecies which at a critical moment

had so deeply affected Elsmere. It lay open, and Catherine was caught by

the heading of a section: 'The Messianic Idea.'

She began to read, mechanically at first, and read about a page. That

page so shocked a mind accustomed to a purely traditional and mystical

interpretation of the Bible that the book dropped abruptly from her

hand, and she stood a moment by her husband's table, her fine face pale

and frowning.

She noticed, with bitterness, Mr. Wendover's name on the title-page. Was

it right for Robert to have such books? Was it wise, was it prudent, for

the Christian to measure himself against such antagonism as this? She

wrestled painfully with the question. 'Oh, but I can't understand,' she

said to herself with an almost agonised energy. 'It is I who am timid,

faithless! He _must_--he _must_--know what they say; he must have gone

through the dark places if he is to carry others through them.'

So she stilled and trampled on the inward protest. She yearned to speak

of it to Robert, but something withheld her. In her passionate wifely

trust she could not bear to seem to question the use he made of his time

and thought; and a delicate moral scruple warned her she might easily

allow her dislike of the Wendover friendship to lead her into

exaggeration and injustice.

But the stab of that moment recurred--dealt now by one slight incident,

now by another. And after the squire's departure Catherine suddenly

realised that the whole atmosphere of their home-life was changed.

Robert was giving himself to his people with a more scrupulous energy

than ever. Never had she seen him so pitiful, so full of heart for every

human creature. His sermons, with their constant imaginative dwelling on

the earthly life of Jesus, affected her now with a poignancy, a pathos,

which were almost unbearable. And his tenderness to _her_ was beyond

words. But with that tenderness there was constantly mixed a note of

remorse, a painful self-depreciation which she could hardly notice in

speech, but which every now and then wrung her heart. And in his parish

work he often showed a depression, an irritability, entirely new to her.

He who had always the happiest power of forgetting to-morrow all the

rubs of to-day, seemed now quite incapable of saving himself and his

cheerfulness in the old ways, nay, had developed a capacity for sheer

worry she had never seen in him before. And meanwhile all the old

gossips of the place spoke their mind freely to Catherine on the subject

of the rector's looks, coupling their remarks with a variety of

prescriptions, out of which Robert did sometimes manage to get one of

his old laughs. His sleeplessness, too, which had always been a

constitutional tendency, had become now so constant and wearing that

Catherine began to feel a nervous hatred of his book-work, and of those

long mornings at the Hall; a passionate wish to put an end to it, and

carry him away for a holiday.

But he would not hear of the holiday, and he could hardly bear any talk

of himself. And Catherine had been brought up in a school of feeling

which bade love be very scrupulous, very delicate, and which recognised

in the strongest way the right of every human soul to its own privacy,

its own reserves. That something definite troubled him she was certain.

What it was he clearly avoided telling her, and she could not hurt him

by impatience.

He would tell her soon--when it was right--she cried pitifully to

herself. Meantime both suffered, she not knowing why, clinging to each

other the while more passionately than ever.

One night, however, coming down in her dressing-gown into the study in

search of a _Christian Year_ she had left behind her, she found Robert

with papers strewn before him, his arms on the table and his head laid

down upon them. He looked up as she came in, and the expression of his

eyes drew her to him irresistibly.

'Were you asleep, Robert? Do come to bed!'

He sat up, and with a pathetic gesture held out his arms to her. She

came on to his knee, putting her white arms round his neck, while he

leant his head against her breast.

'Are you tired with all your walking to-day?' she said presently, a pang

at her heart.

'I am tired,' he said, 'but not with walking.'

'Does your book worry you? You shouldn't work so hard, Robert--you

shouldn't!'

He started.

'Don't talk of it. Don't let us talk or think at all, only feel!'

And he tightened his arms round her, happy once more for a moment in

this environment of a perfect love. There was silence for a few moments,

Catherine feeling more and more disturbed and anxious.

'Think of your mountains,' he said presently, his eyes still pressed

against her, 'of High Fell and the moonlight and the house where Mary

Backhouse died. Oh! Catherine, I see you still, and shall always see

you, as I saw you then, my angel of healing and of grace!'

'I too have been thinking of her to-night,' said Catherine softly, 'and

of the walk to Shanmoor. This evening in the garden it seemed to me as

though there were Westmoreland scents in the air! I was haunted by a

vision of bracken, and rocks, and sheep browsing up the fell slopes.'

'Oh for a breath of the wind on High Fell!' cried Robert,--it was so new

to her, the dear voice with this accent in it of yearning depression! 'I

want more of the spirit of the mountains, their serenity, their

strength. Say me that Duddon sonnet you used to say to me there, as you

said it to me that last Sunday before our wedding, when we walked up the

Shanmoor road to say good-bye to that blessed spot. Oh! how I sit and

think of it sometimes, when life seems to be going crookedly, that rock

on the fell-side where I found you, and caught you, and snared you, my

dove, for ever.'

And Catherine, whose mere voice was as balm to this man of many

impulses, repeated to him, softly in the midnight silence, those noble

lines in which Wordsworth has expressed, with the reserve and yet the

strength of the great poet, the loftiest yearning of the purest hearts--

'Enough, if something from our hand have power

To live and move, and serve the future hour,

And if, as towards the silent tomb we go,

Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,

We feel that we are greater than we know.'

'He has divined it all,' said Robert, drawing a long breath when she

stopped, which seemed to relax the fibres of the inner man, 'the fever

and the fret of human thought, the sense of littleness, of impotence, of

evanescence--and he has soothed it all!'

'Oh, not all, not all!' cried Catherine, her look kindling, and her rare

passion breaking through; 'how little in comparison!'

For her thoughts were with him of whom it was said, _'He needed not that

any one should bear witness concerning man, for he knew what was in

man_.' But Robert's only response was silence and a kind of quivering

sigh.

'Robert!' she cried, pressing her cheek against his temple, 'tell me, my

dear, dear husband, what it is troubles you. Something does--I am

certain--certain!'

'Catherine--wife--beloved!' he said to her, after another pause, in a

tone of strange tension she never forgot; 'generations of men and women

have known what it is to be led spiritually into the desert, into that

outer wilderness where even the Lord was "tempted." What am I that I

should claim to escape it? And you cannot come through it with me, my

darling--no, not even you! It is loneliness--it is solitariness

itself----' and he shuddered. 'But pray for me--pray that _He_ may be

with me, and that at the end there may be light!'

He pressed her to him convulsively, then gently released her. His solemn

eyes, fixed upon her as she stood there beside him, seemed to forbid

her to say a word more. She stooped; she laid her lips to his; it was a

meeting of soul with soul; then she went softly out, breaking the quiet

of the house by a stifled sob as she passed upstairs.

Oh! but at last she thought she understood him. She had not passed her

girlhood, side by side with a man of delicate fibre, of melancholy and

scrupulous temperament, and within hearing of all the natural interests

of a deeply religious mind, religious biography, religious psychology,

and--within certain sharply defined limits--religious speculation,

without being brought face to face with the black possibilities of

'doubts' and 'difficulties' as barriers in the Christian path. Has not

almost every Christian of illustrious excellence been tried and humbled

by them? Catherine, looking back upon her own youth, could remember

certain crises of religious melancholy, during which she had often

dropped off to sleep at night on a pillow wet with tears. They had

passed away quickly, and for ever. But she went back to them now,

straining her eyes through the darkness of her own past, recalling her

father's days of spiritual depression, and the few difficult words she

had sometimes heard from him as to those bitter times of religious

dryness and hopelessness, by which God chastens from time to time His

most faithful and heroic souls. A half-contempt awoke in her for the

unclouded serenity and confidence of her own inner life. If her own

spiritual experience had gone deeper, she told herself with the

strangest self-blame, she would have been able now to understand Robert

better--to help him more.

She thought as she lay awake after those painful moments in the study,

the tears welling up slowly in the darkness, of many things that had

puzzled her in the past. She remembered the book she had seen on his

table; her thoughts travelled over his months of intercourse with the

squire; and the memory of Mr. Newcome's attitude towards the man whom he

conceived to be his Lord's adversary, as contrasted with Robert's,

filled her with a shrinking pain she dared not analyse.

Still all through, her feeling towards her husband was in the main akin

to that of the English civilian at home towards English soldiers abroad,

suffering and dying that England may be great. _She_ had sheltered

herself all her life from those deadly forces of unbelief which exist in

English society, by a steady refusal to know what, however, any educated

university man must perforce know. But such a course of action was

impossible for Robert. He had been forced into the open, into the full

tide of the Lord's battle. The chances of that battle are many; and the

more courage the more risk of wounds and pain. But the great Captain

knows--the great Captain does not forget His own!

For never, never had she the smallest doubt as to the issue of this

sudden crisis in her husband's consciousness, even when she came nearest

to apprehending its nature. As well might she doubt the return of

daylight, as dream of any permanent eclipse descending upon the faith

which had shone through every detail of Robert's ardent impulsive life,

with all its struggles, all its failings, all its beauty, since she had

known him first. The dread did not even occur to her. In her agony of

pity and reverence she thought of him as passing through a trial, which

is specially the believer's trial--the chastening by which God proves

the soul He loves. Let her only love and trust in patience.

So that day by day as Robert's depression still continued, Catherine

surrounded him with the tenderest and wisest affection. Her quiet common

sense made itself heard, forbidding her to make too much of the change

in him, which might after all, she thought, be partly explained by the

mere physical results of his long strain of body and mind during the

Mile End epidemic. And for the rest she would not argue; she would not

inquire. She only prayed that she might so lead the Christian life

beside him, that the Lord's tenderness, the Lord's consolation, might

shine upon him through her. It had never been her wont to speak to him

much about his own influence, his own effect, in the parish. To the

austerer Christian considerations of this kind are forbidden: 'It is not

I, but Christ that worketh in me.' But now, whenever she came across any

striking trace of his power over the weak or the impure, the sick or the

sad, she would in some way make it known to him, offering it to him in

her delicate tenderness, as though it were a gift that the Father had

laid in her hand for him--a token that the Master was still indeed with

His servant, and that all was fundamentally well!

And so much, perhaps, the contact with his wife's faith, the power of

her love, wrought in Robert, that during these weeks and months he also

never lost his own certainty of emergence from the shadow which had

overtaken him. And, indeed, driven on from day to day as he was by an

imperious intellectual thirst which would be satisfied, the religion of

the heart, the imaginative emotional habit of years, that incessant

drama which the soul enacts with the Divine Powers to which it feels

itself committed, lived and persisted through it all. Feeling was

untouched. The heart was still passionately on the side of all its old

loves and adorations, still blindly trustful that in the end, by some

compromise as yet unseen, they would be restored to it intact.

Some time towards the end of July Robert was coming home from the Hall

before lunch, tired and worn, as the morning always left him, and

meditating some fresh sheets of the squire's proofs which had been in

his hands that morning. On the road crossing that to the rectory he

suddenly saw Reginald Newcome, thinner and whiter than ever, striding

along as fast as cassock and cloak would let him, his eyes on the

ground, and his wideawake drawn over them. He and Elsmere had scarcely

met for months, and Robert had lately made up his mind that Newcome was

distinctly less friendly, and wished to show it.

Elsmere had touched his arm before Newcome had perceived any one near

him. Then he drew back with a start.

'Elsmere, you here! I had an idea you were away for a holiday!'

'Oh dear, no!' said Robert, smiling. 'I may get away in September,

perhaps--not till then.'

'Mr. Wendover at home?' said the other, his eyes turning to the Hall, of

which the chimneys were just visible from where they stood.

'No, he is abroad.'

'You and he have made friends, I understand,' said the other abruptly,

his eagle look returning to Elsmere; 'I hear of you as always together.'

'We have made friends, and we walk a great deal when the squire is

here,' said Robert, meeting Newcome's harshness of tone with a bright

dignity 'Mr. Wendover has even been doing something for us in the

village. You should come and see the new Institute. The roof is on, and

we shall open it in August or September. The best building of the kind

in the country by far, and Mr. Wendover's gift.'

'I suppose you use the library a great deal?' said Newcome, paying no

attention to these remarks, and still eyeing his companion closely.

'A great deal.'

Robert had at that moment under his arm a German treatise on the history

of the Logos doctrine, which afterwards, looking back on the little

scene, he thought it probable Newcome recognised. They turned towards

the rectory together, Newcome still asking abrupt questions as to the

squire, the length of time he was to be away, Elsmere's work, parochial

and literary, during the past six months, the numbers of his Sunday

congregation, of his communicants, etc. Elsmere bore his catechism with

perfect temper, though Newcome's manner had in it a strange and almost

judicial imperativeness.

'Elsmere,' said his questioner presently, after a pause, 'I am going to

have a retreat for priests at the Clergy House next month. Father

H----,' mentioning a famous High Churchman, 'will conduct it. You would

do me a special favour'--and suddenly the face softened, and shone with

all its old magnetism on Elsmere--'if you would come. I believe you

would find nothing to dislike in it, or in our rule, which is a most

simple one.'

Robert smiled, and laid his hand on the other's arm.

'No, Newcome, no; I am in no mood for H----.'

The High Churchman looked at him with a quick and painful anxiety

visible in the stern eyes.

'Will you tell me what that means?'

'It means,' said Robert, clasping his hands tightly behind him, his pace

slackening a little to meet that of Newcome--'it means that if you will

give me your prayers, Newcome, your companionship sometimes, your pity

always, I will thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I am in a

state just now when I must fight my battles for myself, and in God's

sight only!'

It was the first burst of confidence which had passed his lips to any

one but Catherine.

Newcome stood still, a tremor of strong emotion running through the

emaciated face.

'You are in trouble, Elsmere; I felt it, I knew it, when I first saw

you!'

'Yes, I am in trouble,' said Robert quietly.

'Opinions?'

'Opinions, I suppose--or facts,' said Robert, his arms dropping wearily

beside him. 'Have you ever known what it is to be troubled in mind, I

wonder, Newcome?'

And he looked at his companion with a sudden pitiful curiosity.

A kind of flash passed over Mr. Newcome's face.

'_Have I ever known?_' he repeated vaguely, and then he drew his thin

hand, the hand of the ascetic and the mystic, hastily across his eyes,

and was silent--his lips moving, his gaze on the ground, his whole

aspect that of a man wrought out of himself by a sudden passion of

memory.

Robert watched him with surprise, and was just speaking, when Mr.

Newcome looked up, every drawn attenuated feature working painfully.

'Did you never ask yourself, Elsmere,' he said slowly, 'what it was

drove me from the bar and journalism to the East End? Do you think I

don't know,' and his voice rose, his eyes flamed, 'what black devil it

is that is gnawing at your heart now? Why, man, I have been through

darker gulfs of hell than you have ever sounded! Many a night I have

felt myself _mad--mad of doubt_--a castaway on a shoreless sea; doubting

not only God or Christ, but myself, the soul, the very existence of

good. I found only one way out of it, and _you_ will find only one way.'

The lithe hand caught Robert's arm impetuously--the voice with its

accent of fierce conviction was at his ear.

'Trample on yourself! Pray down the demon, fast, scourge, kill the body,

that the soul may live! What are we, miserable worms, that we should

defy the Most High, that we should set our wretched faculties against

His Omnipotence? Submit--submit--humble yourself, my brother! Fling away

the freedom which is your ruin. There is no freedom for man. Either a

slave to Christ, or a slave to his own lusts--there is no other choice.

Go away; exchange your work here for a time for work in London. You have

too much leisure here: Satan has too much opportunity. I foresaw it--I

foresaw it when you and I first met. I felt I had a message for you, and

here I deliver it. In the Lord's name, I bid you fly; I bid you yield in

time. Better to be the Lord's captive than _the Lord's betrayer_!'

The wasted form was drawn up to its full height, the arm was

outstretched, the long cloak fell back from it in long folds--voice and

eye were majesty itself. Robert had a tremor of responsive passion. How

easy it sounded, how tempting, to cut the knot, to mutilate and starve

the rebellious intellect which would assert itself against the soul's

purest instincts! Newcome had done it--why not he?

And then, suddenly, as he stood gazing at his companion, the spring sun,

and murmur all about them, another face, another life, another message,

flashed on his inmost sense--the face and life of Henry Grey. Words torn

from their context but full for him of intensest meaning, passed rapidly

through his mind: '_God is not wisely trusted when declared

unintelligible._' '_Such honour rooted in dishonour stands; such faith

unfaithful makes us falsely true._' '_God is for ever reason: and His

communication, His revelation, is reason._'

He turned away with a slight sad shake of the head. The spell was

broken. Mr. Newcome's arm dropped, and he moved sombrely on beside

Robert--the hand, which held a little book of Hours against his cloak,

trembling slightly.

At the rectory gate he stopped.

'Good-bye--I must go home.'

'You won't come in?--No, no, Newcome; believe me, I am no rash careless

egotist, risking wantonly the most precious things in life! But the call

is on me, and I must follow it. All life is God's, and all thought--not

only a fraction of it. He cannot let me wander very far!'

But the cold fingers he held so warmly dropped from his, and Newcome

turned away.

A week afterwards, or thereabouts, Robert had in some sense followed

Newcome's counsel. Admonished perhaps by sheer physical weakness, as

much as by anything else, he had for the moment laid down his arms; he

had yielded to an invading feebleness of the will, which refused, as it

were, to carry on the struggle any longer, at such a life-destroying

pitch of intensity. The intellectual oppression of itself brought about

wild reaction and recoil, and a passionate appeal to that inward witness

of the soul which holds its own long after the reason has practically

ceased to struggle.

It came about in this way. One morning he stood reading in the window of

the library the last of the squire's letters. It contained a short but

masterly analysis of the mental habits and idiosyncrasies of St. Paul,

_a propos_ of St. Paul's witness to the Resurrection. Every now and

then, as Elsmere turned the pages, the orthodox protest would assert

itself, the orthodox arguments make themselves felt as though in

mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality was gone.

Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery fallible man of

genius--so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral

passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate

criticism--the rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was

made. The one picture carried reason and imagination with it; the other

contented neither.

But as he put down the letter something seemed to snap within him. Some

chord of physical endurance gave way. For five months he had been living

intellectually at a speed no man maintains with impunity, and this

letter of the squire's, with its imperious demands upon the tired

irritable brain, was the last straw.

He sank down on the oriel seat, the letter dropping from his hands.

Outside, the little garden, now a mass of red and pink roses, the hill

and the distant stretches of park were wrapped in a thick sultry mist,

through which a dim far-off sunlight struggled on to the library floor,

and lay in ghostly patches on the polished boards and lower ranges of

books.

The simplest religious thoughts began to flow over him--the simplest

childish words of prayer were on his lips. He felt himself delivered, he

knew not how or why.

He rose deliberately, laid the squire's letter among his other papers,

and tied them up carefully; then he took up the books which lay piled on

the squire's writing-table: all those volumes of German, French, and

English criticism, liberal or apologetic, which he had been accumulating

round him day by day with a feverish toilsome impartiality, and began

rapidly and methodically to put them back in their places on the

shelves.

'I have done too much thinking, too much reading,' he was saying to

himself as he went through his task. 'Now let it be the turn of

something else!'

And still as he handled the books, it was as though Catherine's figure

glided backwards and forwards beside him, across the smooth floor, as

though her hand were on his arm, her eyes shining into his. Ah--he knew

well what it was had made the sharpest sting of this wrestle through

which he had been passing! It was not merely religious dread, religious

shame; that terror of disloyalty to the Divine Images which have filled

the soul's inmost shrine since its first entry into consciousness, such

as every good man feels in a like strait. This had been strong indeed;

but men are men, and love is love! Ay, it was to the dark certainty of

Catherine's misery that every advance in knowledge and intellectual

power had brought him nearer. It was from that certainty that he now,

and for the last time, recoiled. It was too much. It could not be borne.

He walked home, counting up the engagements of the next few weeks--the

school-treat, two club field-days, a sermon in the county town, the

probable opening of the new Workmen's Institute, and so on. Oh! to be

through them all and away, away amid Alpine scents and silences. He

stood a moment beside the gray slowly-moving river, half hidden beneath

the rank flower-growth, the tansy and willow-herb, the luxuriant elder

and trailing brambles of its August banks, and thought with hungry

passion of the clean-swept Alpine pasture, the fir-woods, and the

tameless mountain streams. In three weeks or less he and Catherine

should be climbing the Jaman or the Dent du Midi. And till then he would

want all his time for men and women. Books should hold him no more.

Catherine only put her arms round his neck in silence when he told her.

The relief was too great for words. He, too, held her close, saying

nothing. But that night, for the first time for weeks, Elsmere's wife

slept in peace and woke without dread of the day before her.

BOOK IV

CRISIS

CHAPTER XXVI

The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read nor

reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering

about the Mile End cottages, or the new Institute--sometimes fishing,

sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys,

hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into

the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the

gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of

enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and miry as his own, to

deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room. Once more the rector,

though physically perhaps less ardent than of yore, was the life of the

party, and a certain awe and strangeness which had developed in his

boys' minds towards him, during the last few weeks, passed away.

It was curious that in these days he would neither sit nor walk alone if

he could help it. Catherine or a stray parishioner was almost always

with him. All the while, vaguely, in the depths of consciousness, there

was the knowledge that behind this piece of quiet water on which his

life was now sailing, there lay storm and darkness, and that in front

loomed fresh possibilities of tempest. He knew, in a way, that it was a

treacherous peace which had overtaken him. And yet it was peace. The

pressure exerted by the will had temporarily given way, and the deepest

forces of the man's being had reasserted themselves. He could feel and

love and pray again; and Catherine, seeing the old glow in the eyes, the

old spring in the step, made the whole of life one thank-offering.

On the evening following that moment of reaction in the Murewell

library, Robert had written to the squire. His letter had been

practically a withdrawal from the correspondence.

'I find,' he wrote, 'that I have been spending too much time and energy

lately on these critical matters. It seems to me that my work as a

clergyman has suffered. Nor can I deny that your book and your letters

have been to me a source of great trouble of mind.

'My heart is where it was, but my head is often confused. Let

controversy rest a while. My wife says I want a holiday; I think so

myself, and we are off in three weeks; not, however, I hope, before we

have welcomed you home again, and got you to open the new Institute,

which is already dazzling the eyes of the village by its size and

splendour, and the white paint that Harris the builder has been

lavishing upon it.'

Ten days later, rather earlier than was expected, the squire and Mrs.

Darcy were at home again. Robert re-entered the great house the morning

after their arrival with a strange reluctance. Its glow and

magnificence, the warm perfumed air of the hall, brought back a sense of

old oppressions, and he walked down the passage to the library with a

sinking heart. There he found the squire busy as usual with one of those

fresh cargoes of books which always accompanied him on any homeward

journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more shrunken; more full of

force, of harsh epigram, of grim anecdote than ever. Robert sat on the

edge of the table laughing over his stories of French Orientalists, or

Roman cardinals, or modern Greek professors, enjoying the impartial

sarcasm which one of the greatest of _savants_ was always ready to pour

out upon his brethren of the craft.

The squire, however, was never genial for a moment during the interview.

He did not mention his book nor Elsmere's letter. But Elsmere suspected

in him a good deal of suppressed irritability; and, as after a while he

abruptly ceased to talk, the visit grew difficult.

The rector walked home feeling restless and depressed. The mind had

begun to work again. It was only by a great effort that he could turn

his thoughts from the squire, and all that the squire had meant to him

during the past year, and so woo back to himself 'the shy bird Peace.'

Mr. Wendover watched the door close behind him, and then went back to

his work with a gesture of impatience.

'Once a priest, always a priest. What a fool I was to forget it! You

think you make an impression on the mystic, and at the bottom there is

always something which defies you and common sense. "Two and two do not,

and shall not, make four,"' he said to himself, in a mincing voice of

angry sarcasm. '"It would give me too much pain that they should." Well,

and so I suppose what might have been a rational friendship will go by

the board like everything else. What can make the man shilly-shally in

this way? He is convinced already, as he knows--those later letters were

conclusive! His living, perhaps, and his work! Not for the money's

sake--there never was a more incredibly disinterested person born. But

his work? Well, who is to hinder his work? Will he be the first parson

in the Church of England who looks after the poor and holds his tongue?

If you can't speak your mind, it is something at any rate to possess

one--nine-tenths of the clergy being without the appendage. But

Elsmere--pshaw! he will go muddling on to the end of the chapter!'

The squire, indeed, was like a hunter whose prey escapes him at the very

moment of capture, and there grew on him a mocking aggressive mood which

Elsmere often found hard to bear.

One natural symptom of it was his renewed churlishness as to all local

matters. Elsmere one afternoon spent an hour in trying to persuade him

to open the new Institute.

'What on earth do you want me for?' inquired Mr. Wendover, standing

before the fire in the library, the Medusa head peering over his

shoulder. 'You know perfectly well that all the gentry about here--I

suppose you will have some of them--regard me as an old reprobate, and

the poor people, I imagine, as a kind of ogre. To me it doesn't matter a

twopenny damn--I apologise; it was the Duke of Wellington's favourite

standard of value--but I can't see what good it can do either you or the

village, under the circumstances, that I should stand on my head for the

popular edification.'

Elsmere, however, merely stood his ground, arguing and bantering, till

the squire grudgingly gave way. This time, after he departed, Mr.

Wendover, instead of going to his work, still stood gloomily ruminating

in front of the fire. His frowning eyes wandered round the great room

before him. For the first time he was conscious that now, as soon as the

charm of Elsmere's presence was withdrawn, his working hours were doubly

solitary; that his loneliness weighed upon him more; and that it

mattered to him appreciably whether that young man went or stayed. The

stirring of a new sensation, however,--unparalleled since the brief days

when even Roger Wendover had his friends and his attractions like other

men,--was soon lost in renewed chafing at Elsmere's absurdities. The

squire had been at first perfectly content--so he told himself--to limit

the field of their intercourse, and would have been content to go on

doing so. But Elsmere himself had invited freedom of speech between

them.

'I would have given him my best,' Mr. Wendover reflected impatiently. 'I

could have handed on to him all I shall never use, and he might use,

admirably. And now we might as well be on the terms we were to begin

with for all the good I get out of him, or he out of me. Clearly nothing

but cowardice! He cannot face the intellectual change, and he must, I

suppose, dread lest it should affect his work. Good God, what nonsense!

As if any one inquired what an English parson believed nowadays, so long

as he performs all the usual antics decently!'

And, meanwhile, it never occurred to the squire that Elsmere had a wife,

and a pious one. Catherine had been dropped out of his calculation as to

Elsmere's future, at a very early stage.

* * * * *

The following afternoon Robert, coming home from a round, found

Catherine out, and a note awaiting him from the Hall.

'Can you and Mrs. Elsmere come in to tea?' wrote the squire. 'Madame de

Netteville is here, and one or two others.'

Robert grumbled a good deal, looked for Catherine to devise an excuse

for him, could not find her, and at last reluctantly set out again

alone.

He was tired and his mood was heavy. As he trudged through the park he

never once noticed the soft sun-flooded distance, the shining loops of

the river, the feeding deer, or any of those natural witcheries to which

eye and sense were generally so responsive. The labourers going home,

the children--with aprons full of crab-apples, and lips dyed by the

first blackberries--who passed him, got but an absent smile or salute

from the rector. The interval of exaltation and recoil was over. The

ship of the mind was once more labouring in alien and dreary seas.

He roused himself to remember that he had been curious to see Madame de

Netteville. She was an old friend of the squire's, the holder of a

London salon, much more exquisite and select than anything Lady

Charlotte could show.

'She had the same thing in Paris before the war,' the squire explained.

'Renan gave me a card to her. An extraordinary woman. No particular

originality; but one of the best persons "to consult about ideas," like

Joubert's Madame de Beaumont, I ever saw. Receptiveness itself. A

beauty, too, or was one, and a bit of a sphinx, which adds to the

attraction. Mystery becomes a woman vastly. One suspects her of

adventures just enough to find her society doubly piquant.'

Vincent directed him to the upper terrace, whither tea had been taken.

This terrace, which was one of the features of Murewell, occupied the

top of the yew-clothed hill on which the library looked out. Evelyn

himself had planned it. Along its upper side ran one of the most

beautiful of old walls, broken by niches and statues, tapestried with

roses and honeysuckle, and opening in the centre to reveal Evelyn's

darling conceit of all--a semicircular space, holding a fountain, and

leading to a grotto. The grotto had been scooped out of the hill; it was

peopled with dim figures of fauns and nymphs who showed white amid its

moist greenery; and in front a marble Silence drooped over the fountain,

which held gold and silver fish in a singularly clear water. Outside ran

the long stretch of level turf, edged with a jewelled rim of flowers;

and as the hill fell steeply underneath, the terrace was like a high

green platform raised into air, in order that a Wendover might see his

domain, which from thence lay for miles spread out before him.

Here, beside the fountain, were gathered the squire, Mrs. Darcy, Madame

de Netteville, and two unknown men. One of them was introduced to

Elsmere as Mr. Spooner, and recognised by him as a Fellow of the Royal

Society, a famous mathematician, sceptic, _bon vivant_, and sayer of

good things. The other was a young Liberal Catholic, the author of a

remarkable collection of essays on mediaeval subjects in which the

squire, treating the man's opinions of course as of no account, had

instantly recognised the note of the true scholar. A pale, small, hectic

creature, possessed of that restless energy of mind which often goes

with the heightened temperature of consumption.

Robert took a seat by Madame de Netteville, whose appearance was

picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skilful mixture of black and creamy

yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly effective as her

manner. Her plumed hat shadowed a face which was no longer young in such

a way as to hide all the lines possible; while the half-light brought

admirably out the rich dark smoothness of the tints, the black lustre of

the eyes. A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert was

conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, which seemed

at first merely slow and languid, were in reality singularly full of

decision and purpose.

She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert felt that

she was studying him, and was not so much at his ease as usual, partly

owing to fatigue and mental worry.

She asked him little abrupt questions about the neighbourhood, his

parish, his work, in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct

aloofness, even _hauteur_. His answers, on the other hand, were often a

trifle reckless and offhand. He was in a mood to be impatient with a

_mondaine's_ languid inquiries into clerical work, and it seemed to him

the squire's description had been overdone.

'So you try to civilise your peasants,' she said at last. 'Does it

succeed--is it worth while?'

'That depends upon your general ideas of what is worth while,' he

answered smiling.

'Oh, everything is worth while that passes the time,' she said

hurriedly. 'The clergy of the old _regime_ went through life half

asleep. That was their way of passing it. Your way, being a modern, is

to bustle and try experiments.'

Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over Elsmere's

keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of intellectual and social

assumption enwrapped her, which annoyed Robert in much the same way as

Langham's philosophical airs were wont to do. He was drawn without

knowing it into a match of wits wherein his strokes, if they lacked the

finish and subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness or

mental resource. Madame de Netteville's tone insensibly changed, her

manner quickened, her great eyes gradually unclosed.

Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the reality of

influence, Madame de Netteville paradoxically maintaining that no human

being had ever really converted, transformed, or convinced another, the

voice of young Wishart, shrill and tremulous, rose above the general

level of talk.

'I am quite ready; I am not the least afraid of a definition. Theology

is organised knowledge in the field of religion, a science like any

other science!'

'Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,' said Mr. Spooner, leaning forward

with his hands round his knees, and speaking with the most elegant and

good-humoured _sangfroid_ imaginable, 'the science of the world's

ghosts! I cannot imagine any more fascinating.'

'Well,' said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a deep breath, '_that_

was a remark to have hurled at you all at once out of doors on a

summer's afternoon! Oh, Mr. Spooner!' she said, raising her voice,

'don't play the heretic here! There is no fun in it; there are too many

with you.'

'I did not begin it, my dear madam, and your reproach is unjust. On one

side of me Archbishop Manning's _fidus Achates_,' and the speaker took

off his large straw hat and gracefully waved it--first to the right,

then to the left. 'On the other, the rector of the parish. "Cannon to

right of me, cannon to left of me." I submit my courage is

unimpeachable!'

He spoke with a smiling courtesy as excessive as his silky moustache,

his long straw-coloured beard, and his Panama hat. Madame de Netteville

surveyed him with cool critical eyes. Robert smiled slightly,

acknowledged the bow, but did not speak.

Mr. Wishart evidently took no heed of anything but his own thoughts. He

sat bolt upright with shining excited eyes.

'Ah, I remember that article of yours in the _Fortnightly_! How you

sceptics miss the point!'

And out came a stream of argument and denunciation which had probably

lain lava-hot at the heart of the young convert for years, waiting for

such a moment as this, when he had before him at close quarters two of

the most famous antagonists of his faith. The outburst was striking, but

certainly unpardonably ill-timed. Madame de Netteville retreated into

herself with a shrug. Robert, in whom a sore nerve had been set jarring,

did his utmost to begin his talk with her again.

In vain!--for the squire struck in. He had been sitting huddled

together--his cynical eyes wandering from Wishart to Elsmere--when

suddenly some extravagant remark of the young Catholic, and Robert's

effort to edge away from the conversation, caught his attention at the

same moment. His face hardened, and in his nasal voice he dealt a swift

epigram at Mr. Wishart, which for the moment left the young disputant

floundering.

But only for the moment. In another minute or two the argument, begun so

casually, had developed into a serious trial of strength, in which the

squire and young Wishart took the chief parts, while Mr. Spooner threw

in a laugh and a sarcasm here and there.

And as long as Mr. Wendover talked, Madame de Netteville listened.

Robert's restless repulsion to the whole incident, his passionate wish

to escape from these phrases and illustrations and turns of argument

which were all so wearisomely stale and familiar to him, found no

support in her. Mrs. Darcy dared not second his attempts at chat, for

Mr. Wendover, on the rare occasions when he held forth, was accustomed

to be listened to; and Elsmere was of too sensitive a social fibre to

break up the party by an abrupt exit, which could only have been

interpreted in one way.

So he stayed, and perforce listened, but in complete silence. None of

Mr. Wendover's side-hits touched him. Only as the talk went on, the

rector in the background got paler and paler; his eyes, as they passed

from the mobile face of the Catholic convert, already, for those who

knew, marked with the signs of death, to the bronzed visage of the

squire, grew duller--more instinct with a slowly-dawning despair.

* * * * *

Half an hour later he was once more on the road leading to the park

gate. He had a vague memory that at parting the squire had shown him the

cordiality of one suddenly anxious to apologise by manner, if not by

word. Otherwise everything was forgotten. He was only anxious, half

dazed as he was, to make out wherein lay the vital difference between

his present self and the Elsmere who had passed along that road an hour

before.

He had heard a conversation on religious topics, wherein nothing was new

to him, nothing affected him intellectually at all. What was there in

that to break the spring of life like this? He stood still, heavily

trying to understand himself.

Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, every word of that

hectic young pleader for Christ and the Christian certainties would have

roused in him a leaping passionate sympathy--the heart's yearning

assent, even when the intellect was most perplexed. Now that inmost

strand had given way. Suddenly the disintegrating force he had been so

pitifully, so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into

the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure

of _feeling_, the first treachery of the _heart_. Wishart's hopes and

hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty faculties, had aroused in

him no echo, no response. His soul had been dead within him.

As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the gate it seemed to

Robert that he was going through, once more, that old fierce temptation

of Bunyan's,--

'For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously delivered me, and

had set me down so sweetly in the faith of His Holy Gospel, and had

given me such strong consolation and blessed evidence from heaven,

touching my interest in His love through Christ, the tempter came upon

me again, and that with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than

before. And that was, "To sell and part with this most blessed Christ;

to exchange Him for the things of life, for anything!" The temptation

lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so continually

that I was not rid of it one day in a month: no, not sometimes one hour

in many days together, for it did always, in almost whatever I thought,

intermix itself therewith, in such sort that I could neither eat my

food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look on this

or that, but still the temptation would come: "Sell Christ for this, or

sell Christ for that, sell Him, sell Him!"'

Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this _selva oscura_

of life? The selling of the Master, of 'the love so sweet, the unction

spiritual,' for an intellectual satisfaction, the ravaging of all the

fair places of the heart by an intellectual need!

And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, which

made the summer air a darkness, and closed every sense in him to the

evening beauty, he felt the irresistible march and pressure of the new

instincts, the new forces, which life and thought had been calling into

being. The words of St. Augustine which he had read to Catherine, taken

in a strange new sense, came back to him--'Commend to the keeping of the

Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose nothing!'

Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the whole nature in this

way?

Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, and his face

turned like the face of a blind man towards a world of which it saw

nothing, went through a desperate catechism of himself.

'_Do I believe in God?_ Surely, surely! "Though He slay me yet will I

trust in Him!" _Do I believe in Christ?_ Yes,--in the teacher, the

martyr, the symbol to us Westerns of all things heavenly and abiding,

the image and pledge of the invisible life of the spirit--with all my

soul and all my mind!

'_But in the Man-God_, the Word from Eternity,--in a wonder-working

Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living Intercessor and

Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren?'

He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there

rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words

of irrevocable meaning.

'Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt, enjoys,

equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and "_miracles do

not happen!_"'

It was done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after his lesser

defeat.

'Now was the battle won, and down fell I as a bird that is shot from the

top of a tree into great guilt and fearful despair. Thus getting out of

my bed I went moping in the field; but God knows with as heavy an heart

as mortal man I think could bear, where for the space of two hours I was

like a man bereft of life.'

All these years of happy spiritual certainty, of rejoicing oneness with

Christ, to end in this wreck and loss! Was not this indeed '_il gran

rifiuto_'--the greatest of which human daring is capable? The lane

darkened round him. Not a soul was in sight. The only sounds were the

sounds of a gently-breathing nature, sounds of birds and swaying

branches and intermittent gusts of air rustling through the gorse and

the drifts of last year's leaves in the wood beside him. He moved

mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of desolate

terror had passed away, with a new inrushing sense which seemed to him a

sense of liberty--of infinite expansion.

Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped away, and there

to the left on the westernmost edge of the hill lay the square stone

rectory, its windows open to the evening coolness, a white flutter of

pigeons round the dovecote on the side lawn, the gold of the August

wheat in the great cornfield showing against the heavy girdle of

oak-wood.

Robert stood gazing at it--the home consecrated by love, by effort, by

faith. The high alternations of intellectual and spiritual debate, the

strange emerging sense of deliverance, gave way to a most bitter human

pang of misery.

'_O God! My wife--my work!_'

... There was a sound of a voice calling--Catherine's voice calling for

him. He leant against the gate of the wood-path, struggling sternly with

himself. This was no simple matter of his own intellectual consistency

or happiness. Another's whole life was concerned. Any precipitate

speech, or hasty action, would be a crime. A man is bound above all

things to protect those who depend on him from his own immature or

revocable impulses. Not a word yet, till this sense of convulsion and

upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once more its own master.

He opened the gate and went towards her. She was strolling along the

path looking out for him, one delicate hand gathering up her long

evening dress--that very same black brocade she had worn in the old days

at Burwood--the other playing with their Dandie Dinmont puppy who was

leaping beside her. As she caught sight of him, there was the flashing

smile, the hurrying step. And he felt he could but just drag himself to

meet her.

'Robert, how long you have been! I thought you must have stayed to

dinner after all! And how tired you seem!'

'I had a long walk,' he said, catching her hand, as it slipped itself

under his arm, and clinging to it as though to a support. 'And I am

tired. There is no use whatever in denying it.'

His voice was light, but if it had not been so dark she must have been

startled by his face. As they went on towards the house, however, she

scolding him for over-walking, he won his battle with himself. He went

through the evening so that even Catherine's jealous eyes saw nothing

but extra fatigue. In the most desperate straits of life love is still

the fountain of all endurance, and if ever a man loved it was Robert

Elsmere.

But that night, as he lay sleepless in their quiet room, with the window

open to the stars and to the rising gusts of wind, which blew the petals

of the cluster-rose outside in drifts of 'fair weather snow' on to the

window-sill, he went through an agony which no words can adequately

describe.

He must, of course, give up his living and his orders. His standards and

judgments had always been simple and plain in these respects. In other

men it might be right and possible that they should live on in the

ministry of the Church, doing the humane and charitable work of the

Church, while refusing assent to the intellectual and dogmatic framework

on which the Church system rests; but for himself it would be neither

right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or reason about

it. There was a favourite axiom of Mr. Grey's which had become part of

his pupil's spiritual endowment, and which was perpetually present to

him at this crisis of his life, in the spirit, if not in the

letter--'_Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind._' And with this

intellectual conscience he was no more capable of trifling than with the

moral conscience.

The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds impressed

themselves upon him!--the stir of the child's waking soon after midnight

in the room overhead; the cry of the owls on the oak-wood; the purring

of the night-jars on the common; the morning chatter of the swallows

round the eaves.

With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself and looked at

Catherine. She was sleeping with that light sound sleep which belongs to

health of body and mind, one hand under her face, the other stretched

out in soft relaxation beside her. Her husband hung over her in a

bewilderment of feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent

pictures of the future; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous

details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How her sleep,

her ignorance, reproached him! He thought of the wreck of all her pure

ambitions--for him, for their common work, for the people she had come

to love; the ruin of her life of charity and tender usefulness, the

darkening of all her hopes, the shaking of all her trust. Two years of

devotion, of exquisite self-surrender, had brought her to this! It was

for this he had lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she

had opened to him all her sweet stores of faith, all the deepest springs

of her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer! The thought of it and his own

helplessness wrung his heart.

Oh, could he keep her love through it all? There was an unspeakable

dread mingled with his grief--his remorse. It had been there for months.

In her eyes would not only pain but sin divide them? Could he possibly

prevent her whole relation to him from altering and dwindling?

It was to be the problem of his remaining life. With a great cry of the

soul to that God it yearned and felt for through all the darkness and

ruin which encompassed it, he laid his hand on hers with the timidest

passing touch.

'Catherine, I will make amends! My wife, I will make amends!'

CHAPTER XXVII

The next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept on after

their usual waking time, and remembering his exhaustion of the night

before, left him softly, and kept the house quiet that he might not be

disturbed. She was in charge of the now toddling Mary in the dining-room

when the door opened and Robert appeared.

At sight of him she sprang up with a half-cry; the face seemed to have

lost all its fresh colour, its look of sun and air; the eyes were sunk;

the lips and chin lined and drawn. It was like a face from which the

youth had suddenly been struck out.

'Robert!---' but her question died on her lips.

'A bad night, darling, and a bad headache,' he said, groping his way, as

it seemed to her, to the table, his hand leaning on her arm. 'Give me

some breakfast.'

She restrained herself at once, put him into an armchair by the window,

and cared for him in her tender noiseless way. But she had grown almost

as pale as he, and her heart was like lead.

'Will you send me off for the day to Thurston ponds?' he said presently,

trying to smile with lips so stiff and nerveless that the will had small

control over them.

'Can you walk so far? You did overdo it yesterday, you know. You have

never got over Mile End, Robert.'

But her voice had a note in it which in his weakness he could hardly

bear. He thirsted to be alone again, to be able to think over quietly

what was best for her--for them both. There must be a next step, and in

her neighbourhood he was too feeble, too tortured, to decide upon it.

'No more, dear--no more,' he said impatiently, as she tried to feed him;

then he added as he rose: 'Don't make arrangements for our going next

week, Catherine; it can't be so soon.'

Catherine looked at him with eyes of utter dismay. The sustaining hope

of all these difficult weeks, which had slipped with such terrible

unexpectedness into their happy life, was swept away from her.

'Robert, you _ought_ to go.'

'I have too many things to arrange,' he said sharply, almost irritably.

Then his tone changed: 'Don't urge it, Catherine.'

His eyes in their weariness seemed to entreat her not to argue. She

stooped and kissed him, her lips trembling.

'When do you want to go to Thurston?'

'As soon as possible. Can you find me my fishing-basket and get me some

sandwiches? I shall only lounge there and take it easy.'

She did everything for him that wifely hands could do. Then when his

fishing-basket was strapped on, and his lunch was slipped into the

capacious pocket of the well-worn shooting coat, she threw her arms

round him.

'Robert, you will come away _soon_.'

He roused himself and kissed her.

'I will,' he said simply, withdrawing, however, from her grasp as though

he could not bear those close pleading eyes. 'Good-bye! I shall be back

some time in the afternoon.'

From her post beside the study window she watched him take the short cut

across the cornfield. She was miserable, and all at sea. A week ago he

had been so like himself again, and now----! Never had she seen him in

anything like this state of physical and mental collapse.

'Oh, Robert,' she cried under her breath, with an abandonment like a

child's, strong soul that she was, 'why _won't_ you tell me, dear? Why

won't you let me share? I might help you through--I might.'

She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A weaker woman would

have implored, tormented, till she knew all. Catherine's very strength

and delicacy of nature, and that respect which was inbred in her for the

_sacra_ of the inner life, stood in her way. She could not catechise

him, and force his confidence on this subject of all others. It must be

given freely. And oh! it was so long in coming!

Surely, surely, it must be mainly physical, the result of

over-strain--expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, just as

daily life reproduces itself in dreams. The worldly man suffers at such

times through worldly things, the religious man through his religion.

Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this kind, and with certain

more or less vague preparations for departure, Catherine got through the

morning as best she might.

Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under a sky which,

after a few threatening showers, promised once more to be a sky of

intense heat. He had with him all the tackle necessary for spooning

pike, a sport the novelty and success of which had hugely commended it

the year before to those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much

developed in him.

And now--oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the long stretches

of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but

instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque

group of old brick cottages brought a reminder of man and his works into

the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just

beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing

his way through the closely-set trees, he made some futile attempts at

fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was over and lay

it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for hours, vaguely watching

the reflection of the clouds, the gambols and quarrels of the waterfowl,

the ways of the birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the

softly-moving trees,--the real self of him passing all the while through

an interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching to the

future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret.

He thought of the feelings with which he had taken orders, of Oxford

scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of

his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He

felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of

prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and

worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned

aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes,

and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and

consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he

touched the depths of self-humiliation.

As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the

ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite

incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it

was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone.

The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh.

Only the _habit_ of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a

Power beyond sense--a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had been

stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was never a moment

when Elsmere felt himself _utterly_ forsaken.

But his people--his work! Every now and then into the fragmentary debate

still going on within him there would flash little pictures of Murewell.

The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning over the village

shop, the vane on the old 'Manor-house,' the familiar figures at the

doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear

to him as though he were that moment in the pulpit; the children he had

taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or

brutalised peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets he had

learnt,--all these memories and images clung about him as though with

ghostly hands, asking, 'Why will you desert us? You are ours--stay with

us!'