‘You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn,’ he said at last, an

enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth. ‘I

could not argue with you; I had better not try.’

Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes which

were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they could not help

reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of Madame Desforêts and

her _causes célèbres_ which were coursing through the brain behind them,

and with a momentary impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary

attraction, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him.

In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable to his own great chagrin,

and Langham summoned up all his resignation and walked with the ladies.

The general impression left upon his mind by the performance was, first

that the dust of an English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that

women’s society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made

for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from his with

tolerable certainty.

But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done their duty by

him, and he was again alone in the garden reading, he suddenly heard the

sound of music.

Who was playing, and in that way? He got up and strolled past the

drawing-room window to find out.

Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid, dowdy daughter of a

local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, in her

lavish, impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity of new music, the

accumulations of her visit to London. She stood up beside the piano, her

hair gleaming in the shadow of the drawing-room, her white brow hanging

forward over her violin as she peered her way through the music, her

whole soul absorbed in what she was doing, Langham passed unnoticed.

What astonishing playing! Why had no one warned him of the presence

of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe creature? He sat down

against the wall of the house, as close as possible, but out of sight,

and listened. All the romance of his spoilt and solitary life had come

to him so far through music, and through such music as this! For she

was playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all those

passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart

of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and exactly than

through the voice of literature. Hans Sachs’ immortal song, echoes from

the love duets in ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ fragments from a wild and alien

dance-music, they rippled over him in a warm, intoxicating stream of

sound, stirring association after association, and rousing from sleep a

hundred bygone moods of feeling.

What magic and mastery in the girl’s touch! What power of divination,

and of rendering! Ah! she too was floating in passion and romance, but

of a different sort altogether from the conscious reflected product of

the man’s nature. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future;

she was weaving her story that was to be into the flying notes,

playing to the unknown of her Whindale dreams, the strong, ardent

unknown,--‘insufferable, if he pleases, to all the world besides, but to

_me_ heaven!’ She had caught no breath yet of his coming, but her heart

was ready for him.

Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window opened and

Langham stood before her. She looked at him with a quick stiffening of

the face which a minute before had been all quivering and relaxed, and

his instant perception of it chilled the impulse which had brought him

there.

He said something _banal_ about his enjoyment, something totally

different from what he had meant to say. The moment presented itself,

but he could not seize it or her.

‘I had no notion you cared for music,’ she said carelessly, as she shut

the piano, and then she went away.

Langham felt a strange, fierce pang of disappointment. What had he meant

to do or say? Idiot! What common ground was there between him and any

such exquisite youth? What girl would ever see in him anything but the

dull remains of what once had been a man!

CHAPTER XIII.

The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick

as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether

intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the

prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the

subject of severe scientific investigation. He would ‘do it’ thoroughly.

So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. There, in

spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Robert’s old tutor was a

good deal more interested by Robert’s sermon than he had expected to be.

It was on the character of David, and there was a note in it, a note

of historical imagination, a power of sketching in a background of

circumstance, and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were,

by a detail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his

experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might watch a game

of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and counting the good

points, but by the end he was not a little carried away. The peroration

was undoubtedly very moving, very intimate, very modern, and Langham up

to a certain point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to

music and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of him

kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile out of the

church,--‘This sort of thing will go down, will make a mark: Elsmere is

at the beginning of a career!’

In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty towards his wife,

in that he had been forced to leave so much of the entertainment of

Langham to her, asked his old friend to come for him to the school at

four o’clock and take him for a walk between two engagements. Langham

was punctual, and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday

cricket, which was in full swing. During the past year the young Rector

had been developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably

always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations of country

gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity before. He talked of

fishing as Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant

quotations from Kingsley; and his cricket, which had been good enough

at Oxford to get him into his College eleven, had stood him in specially

good stead with the Murewell villagers. That his play was not elegant

they were not likely to find out; his bowling they set small store

by; but his batting was of a fine, slashing, superior sort which soon

carried the Murewell Club to a much higher position among the clubs of

the neighborhood than it had ever yet aspired to occupy.

The Rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, after they

had hung about the green a little while, he took his friend over to the

Workmen’s Institute, which stood at the edge of it. He explained

that the Institute had been the last achievement of the agent before

Henslowe, a man who had done his duty to the estate according to his

lights, and to whom it was owing that those parts of it, at any rate,

which were most in the public eye, were still in fair condition.

The Institute was now in bad repair and too small for the place. ‘But

catch that man doing anything for us!’ exclaimed Robert hotly. ‘He will

hardly mend the roof now, merely, I believe, to spite me. But come and

see my new Naturalists’ Club.’

And he opened the Institute door. Langham followed, in the temper of one

getting up a subject for examination.

Poor Robert! His labor and his enthusiasm deserved a more appreciative

eye. He was wrapped up in his Club, which had been the great success

of his first year, and he dragged Langham through it all, not indeed,

sympathetic creature that he was, without occasional qualms. ‘But after

all,’ he would say to himself indignantly, ‘I must do something with

him.’

Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at the collections

for the year, and was quite ready to take it for granted that they

were extremely creditable. Into the old-fashioned window-sills glazed

compartments had been fitted, and these were now fairly filled with

specimens, with eggs, butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and what

not. A case of stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the

centre of the room; another containing the birds of the district was

close by. On a table further on stood two large opera books, which

served as records of observations on the part of members of the Club. In

one, which was scrawled over with mysterious hieroglyphs, anyone might

write what he would. In the other, only such facts and remarks as had

passed the gauntlet of a Club meeting were recorded in Robert’s neatest

hand. On the same table stood jars full of strange creatures--tadpoles

and water larvae of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed

poking among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom only the

generalizations of science were congenial, stood by and mildly scoffed.

As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently been hanging

about waiting for the Rector, came up to him, boorishly touched his

cap, and then, taking a cardboard box out of his pocket, opened it with

infinite caution, something like a tremor of emotion passing over his

gnarled countenance.

The Rector’s eyes glistened.

‘Hullo! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did you get that? You

lucky fellow! Come in, and let’s look it out!’

And the two plunged back into the Club together, leaving Langham to the

philosophic and patient contemplation of the village green, its geese,

its donkeys, and its surrounding fringe of houses. He felt that quite

indisputably life would have, been better worth living if, like Robert,

he could have taken a passionate interest in rare moths or common

plough-boys; but Nature having denied him the possibility, there was

small use in grumbling.

Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy went off,

bearing his treasure with him.

‘Lucky dog!’ said Robert, turning his friend into a country road leading

out of the village, ‘he’s found one of the rarest moths of the district.

Such a hero he’ll be in the Club to-morrow night. It’s extraordinary

what a rational interest has done for that fellow! I nearly fought him

in public last winter.’

And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a little quick

look of feeling in the gray eyes.

‘“Magnificent, but not war,”’ said Langham dryly. ‘I wouldn’t have given

much for your chances against those shoulders.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I should have had a little science on my side, which

counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the Club for brutality

toward the old grandmother he lives with--turned him out in public. Such

a scene! I shall never forget the boy’s face. It was like a corpse, and

the eyes burning out of it. He made for me, but the others closed up

round, and we got him put out.’

‘Hard lines on the grandmother,’ remarked Langham.

‘She thought so--poor old thing! She left her cottage that night,

thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At the end of a week

he came into the friend’s house, where she was alone in bed. She cowered

under the bed-clothes, she told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead

of which he threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to

come home. “He wouldn’t do her no mischief.” Everybody dissuaded her,

but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterward she sent for me

and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody

at his work. “Lord, sir!” she said, “it do remind me, when he sits

glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the Devils inside

‘em kep’ a-tearing ‘em. But he’s like a new-born babe to me, sir--never

does me no ‘arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do

take his vittles!” So I made tracks for that lad,’ said Robert, his

eyes kindling, his whole frame dilating. ‘I found him in the fields one

morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the

evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since

then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there

is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right.

And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow

came trudging up every night after his work to ask for me--well, never

mind! but it gives one a good glow at one’s heart to think about it.’

The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though defying his own

feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The pastoral temper was a

novelty to him, and the strong development of it in the undergraduate of

his Oxford recollections had its interest.

A quarter to six,’ said Robert, as on their return from their walk they

were descending a low wooded hill above the village, and the church

clock rang out. ‘I must hurry, or I shall be late for my storytelling.’

‘Story-telling!’ said Langham, with a half-exasperated shrug. ‘What

next? You clergy are too inventive by half!’

Robert laughed a trifle bitterly.

‘I can’t congratulate you on your epithets,’ he said, thrusting his

hands far into his pockets. ‘Good Heavens, if we _were_--if we were

inventive as a body, the Church wouldn’t be where she is in the rural

districts! My story-telling is the simplest thing in the world. I began

it in the winter with the object of somehow or other getting at the

_imagination_ of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to live

someone else’s life--it is the one thing worth doing with them.

That’s what I have been aiming at. I _told_ my stories all the

winter--Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas--Heaven knows what! And on the

whole it answers best. But now we are reading “The Talisman.” Come and

inspect us, unless you’re a purist about your Scott. None other of the

immortals have such _longueurs_ as he, and we cut him freely.’

‘By all means,’ said Langham; lead on.’ And he followed his companion

without repugnance. After all, there was something contagious in so much

youth and hopefulness.

The story-telling was hold in the Institute.

A group of men and boys were hanging round the door when they reached

it. The two friends made their way through, greeted in the dumb,

friendly English fashion on all sides, and Langham found himself in a

room half-filled with boys and youths, a few grown men, who had just put

their pipes out, lounging at the back.

Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the hour

that followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most enthusiastic,

imaginative people are. He was a master of all those arts of look and

gesture which make a spoken story telling and dramatic, and Langham

marvelled with what energy, after his hard day’s work and with

another service before him, he was able to throw himself into such a

hors-d’œuvre as this. He was reading to night one of the most perfect

scenes that even the Wizard of the North has ever conjured: the scene in

the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the life

of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he read on,

his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full

of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience,

surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives

he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type

and model of a man who had found his _métier_, found his niche in the

world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to an ‘adequate

and masterly expression of oneself’ be the aim of life, Robert was

achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred souls gave him now all the

scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his work to be rather above

than below his deserts. He was content--more than content to spend

ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or carried

him far to the front in literature, on the civilizing a few hundred

of England’s rural poor. The future might bring him worldly

success--Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert’s stamp

are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to no conscious

effort of his. Here, in the country living he had so long dreaded and

put from him, less it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was

happy--deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.

_Happy!_ Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches,

by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of

thought by this realization, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another

man’s happiness.

Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant

children or animals passed in and out of the golden light spaces; the

patches of heather left here and here glowed as the sunset touched them.

Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay

with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and

bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled across the

road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene

seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and

helplessness of human existence, which generation after generation, is

still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out

from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what

agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may

know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! _Happy!_--in

this world, ‘where men sit and hear each other groan.’ His friend’s

confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.

What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity--‘on the

passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,’ said the dreamy

spectator to himself, ‘which at the first honest challenge of the

critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never

given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the

straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him,

between him and unpleasant facts!

In the evening, Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self

against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him

to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he

stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest

of the household went to evening service.

After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was

streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the

trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham

had shut himself up in Robert’s study he did what he had been admonished

to do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily

into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself

down into Robert’s chair, with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction.

‘Good! Now for something that takes the world less naïvely,’ he said to

himself; ‘this house is too virtuous for anything.’

He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The

house seemed entirely deserted.

‘All the servants gone too!’ he said presently, looking up and

listening. ‘Anybody who wants the spoons needn’t trouble about me. I

don’t leave this fire.’

And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of

the swing door which separated Robert’s passage from the front hall,

opening and shutting. Steps came quickly toward the study, the handle

was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.

He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment. She

also started as she saw him.

‘I did not know anyone was in,’ she said awkwardly, the color spreading

over her face. ‘I came to look for a book.’

She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the darkness of

the doorway, her long dress caught up round her in one hand, the other

resting on the handle. A gust of some delicate perfume seemed to enter

the room with her, and a thrill of pleasure passed through Langham’s

senses.

Can I find anything for you?’ he said, springing up.

She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind that it would

be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she said, with an accent as

coldly polite as she could make it,--

‘Pray don’t disturb yourself. I know exactly where to find it.’

She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, and began

running her fingers over the books, with slightly knitted brows and a

mouth severely shut. Langham, still standing, watched her and presently

stepped forward.

‘You can’t reach those upper shelves,’ he said; ‘please let me.’

He was already beside her, and she gave way.

‘I want “Charles Auchester,”’ she said, still forbiddingly. It ought to

be there.’

‘Oh, that queer musical novel--I know it quite well. No sign of it

here,’ and he ran over the shelves with the practised eye of one

accustomed to deal with books.

‘Robert must have lent it,’ said Rose, with a little sigh. ‘Never mind,

please. It doesn’t matter,’ and she was already moving away.

‘Try some other, instead,’ he said, smiling, his arm still upstretched.

‘Robert has no lack of choice.’ His manner had an animation and ease

usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a

little.

‘He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced

at last to stealing the servant’s “Family Herald” out of the kitchen

cupboard,’ she said, a smile dawning.

Langham laughed.

‘Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact

that when he and I begin to task novels I am always nowhere.’

‘I shouldn’t have supposed you ever read them,’ said Rose, obeying an

irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterward.

‘Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to

works on the “enclitic de**”?’ he asked, his fine eyes lit up with

gayety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily so

much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against the

books behind him.

Natures like Langham’s, in which the nerves are never normal, have their

moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of timidity and depression.

After his melancholy of the last two days, the tide of reaction had been

mounting within him, and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height.

She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What had happened

to Robert’s silent and finicking friend?

‘I know nothing of Oxford,’ she said a little primly, in answer to his

question. ‘I never was there--but I never was anywhere, I have seen

nothing,’ she added hastily, and, as Langham thought, bitterly.

‘Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforêts!’ he answered,

laughing. ‘Is that so little?’

She flashed a quick, defiant look at him, as he mentioned Madame

Desforêts, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. She could not

help softening toward him. What magic had passed over him?

‘Do you know,’ said Langham, moving, ‘that you are standing in a

draught, and that it has turned extremely cold?’

For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and as the

window was partially open the curtains were swaying hither and thither,

and her muslin dress was being blown in coils round her feet.

‘So it has,’ said Rose, shivering. ‘I don’t envy the Church people. You

haven’t found me a book, Mr. Langham!’

‘I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read it by the

fire,’ he said, with his hand on the door.

She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath quickened.

She too had passed into another phase. Was it the natural effect of

night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she sank softly into the

armchair opposite to that in which he had been sitting.

‘Find me an exciting one, please.’

Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the bookcase, his hand

trembling a little as it passed along the books. He found ‘Villette’ and

offered it to her. She took it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at

once. He took the hint and went back to his Montaigne.

The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every now and then a

sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying away again as abruptly

as it had risen. Rose turned the pages of her book, sitting a little

stiffly in her long chair, and Langham gradually began to find Montaigne

impossible to read. He became instead more and more alive to every

detail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or

imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and thrust

the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose hastily

withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up.

‘I am so sorry!’ he interjected. ‘Coals never do what you want them to

do. Are you very much interested in “Villette”?’

‘Deeply,’ said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her lap. She

laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did her best to check,

half way through. What ailed her to-night? She seemed wearied; for the

moment there was no fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty,

her mutinous, mocking gayety--these things had all worked on the man

beside her; but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was

adorable.

‘Charlotte Bronté wrote it out of her Brussels experience, didn’t She?’

she resumed languidly. ‘How sorry she must have been to come back to

that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!’

‘There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come

back,’ said Langham, reflectively, ‘But how she pined for her wilds all

through! I am afraid you don’t find your wilds as interesting as she

found hers?’

His question and his smile startled her.

Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that

her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably

the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so

personal, so manly. Instead, ‘Villette’ slid a little further from her

hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back against the cushion.

‘No, I don’t find my wilds interesting at all,’ she said forlornly. ‘You

are not fond of the people, as your sister is?’

‘Fond of them?’ cried Rose hastily. ‘I should think not; and what is

more, they don’t like me. It is quite intolerable since Catherine left.

I have so much more to do with them. My other sister and I have to do

all her work. It is dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a

genius for doing just what you do worst.’

The young girl’s hands fell across one another with a little impatient

gesture. Langham had a movement of the most delightful compassion

toward the petulant, childish creature. It was as though their relative

positions had been in some mysterious way reversed. During their two

days together she had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the

mercy of her scornful, sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why,

Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man’s natural

advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to use it.

‘Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity?’ he said.

‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Rose irritably; ‘anything that has two legs and is

ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.’

‘And _you_ want something quite different, something more exciting?’ he

asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he dared something in

thus pressing her, but dared it at least with his, wits about him.

Rose met his look irresolutely, a little tremor of self-consciousness

creeping over her.

‘Yes, I want something different,’ she said in a low voice and paused;

then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her hands round her

knees. ‘But it is not idleness I want. I want to work, but at things I

was born for; I can’t have patience with old women, but I could slave

all day and all night to play the violin.’

You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?’ he

said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play

with her rings.

That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in

her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other

self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine’s

sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly

gentleness.

‘But it is all so difficult, you see,’ she said despairingly. ‘Papa

thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had

lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has

been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to

do.’

‘He would have changed with the times,’ said Langham.

‘I know he would,’ cried Rose. ‘I have told Catherine so a hundred

times. People--good people--think quite differently about art now, don’t

they, Mr. Langham?

She spoke with perfect _naïveté_. He saw more and more of the child in

her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.

‘They call it the handmaid of religion,’ he answered, smiling.

Rose made a little face.

‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, with frank brevity. ‘But then there’s something

else. You know where we live--at the very ends of the earth, seven miles

from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What’s

to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa

died I’ve just been plotting and planning to get away. But there’s the

difficulty,’--and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid

out her case. ‘That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns

ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can’t

ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa

retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such

a dreadful, dreadful mistake!’ cried the child, letting her hands fall

over her knee.

‘Had he been so happy there?’

‘Happy!--and Rose’s lip curled. ‘His brothers used to kick and cuff him,

his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day’s peace till he

went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years

and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_ have made

him so fond of it?’

And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off

perversity of her father’s.

‘Blood has strange magnetisms,’ said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the

pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, ‘and they show themselves

in the oddest ways.’

‘Then I wish they wouldn’t,’ she said irritably. ‘But that isn’t all. He

went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated

other places. I think he must have thought’--and her voice dropped--‘he

wasn’t going to live long--he wasn’t well when he gave up the

school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of

getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting

very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him

to know that we should be out of it.’

Then she broke off suddenly.

‘Do you know,’ she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her

companion, ‘after all, he gave me my first violin?’

Langham smiled.

‘I like that little inconsequence,’ he said.

‘Then of course I took to it, like a cluck to water, and it began to

scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion,

and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated

Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself

nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor, because I mightn’t have it.

Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid around

his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the

hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him

sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed

again-on Sundays!’

Her companion’s eyes were not quite as clear as before.

‘Poor little naughty child,’ he said, bending over to her. ‘I think your

father must have been a man to be loved.’

She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face working with a soft

remorse.

‘Oh, so he was--so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why it

would have been much easier for me, but he was so good! And there was

Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see

what a chain it’s been--what a weight! And as I must struggle--_must_,

because I was I--to get back into the world on the other side of the

mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why

I have been a criminal all my life! And that isn’t exhilarating always.’

And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick,

over-tragic emotion of nineteen.

‘I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play

yesterday,’ he said gently.

She started.

‘_Did_ you hear me--that Wagner?’

He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.

‘Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.’

He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say ‘I am not quite the mummy

you thought me, after all!’ And she colored slightly.

‘I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play

often; and it seemed to me that with time--and work--you might play as

well as any of them.’

The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she

gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.

‘And I can’t help thinking,’ he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own

_rôle_ of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, ‘that if your father

had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must

have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and

to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.’

‘Catherine hasn’t moved with the times,’ said Rose dolefully.

Langham was silent. _Gaucherie_ seized him again when it became a

question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently

emphatic.

‘And you think,’ she went on, ‘you _really_ think, without being too

ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts’--and a

little laugh danced through the vibrating voice--‘I might try and get

them to give up Burwood--I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of

course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one

can’t help having qualms, though one doesn’t tell them to one’s sisters

and cousins and aunts. And sometimes’--she turned her chin round on her

hand and looked at him with a delicious, shy impulsiveness--‘sometimes a

stranger sees clearer. Do _you_ think me a monster, as Catherine does?’

Even as she spoke her own words startled her--the confidence, the

abandonment of them. But she held to them bravely; only her eyelids

quivered. She had absurdly misjudged this man, and there was a warm

penitence in her heart. How kind he had been, how sympathetic!

He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece,

looking down upon her gravely, with the air, as it seemed to her, of

her friend, her confessor. Her white childish brow, the little curls of

bright hair upon her temples, her parted lips, the pretty folds of the

muslin dress the little foot on the fender--every detail of the picture

impressed itself once for all. Langham will carry it with him to his

grave.

‘Tell me,’ she said again, smiling divinely, as though to encourage

him--‘tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, what you think?’

The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a gust of wind

sweeping through the house--voices and steps approaching. Rose

sprang up, and for the first time during all the latter part of their

conversation felt a sharp sense of embarrassment.

‘How early you are, Robert!’ she exclaimed, as the study door opened

and Robert’s wind-blown head and tall form wrapped in an Inverness cape

appeared on the threshold. ‘Is Catherine tired?’

‘Rather,’ said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise betraying itself

on his face. ‘She has gone to bed, and told me to ask you to come and

say good-night to her.’

‘You got my message about not coming from old Martha?’ asked Rose. ‘I

met her on the common.’

‘Yes, she gave it us at the church door.’ He went out again into the

passage to hang up his greatcoat. She followed, longing to tell him that

it was pure accident that took her to the study, but she could not

find words in which to do it, and could only say good-night a little

abruptly.

‘How tempting, that fire looks!’ said Robert, re-entering the study.

‘Were you very cold, Langham, before you lit it?

‘Very,’ said Langham smiling, his arm behind his head, his eyes fixed on

the blaze; ‘but I have been delightfully warm and happy since.’

CHAPTER XIV.

Catherine stopped beside the drawing-room window with a start, caught by

something she saw outside.

It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Langham strolling

round the garden. A bystander would have been puzzled by the sudden

knitting of Catherine’s brows over it.

Rose held a red parasol, which gleamed against the trees; Dandie leapt

about her, but she was too busy talking to take much notice of him.

Talking, chattering, to that cold cynic of a man, for whom only

yesterday she had scarcely had a civil word! Catherine felt herself a

prey to all sorts of vague, unreasonable alarms.

Robert had said to her the night before, with an odd look: ‘Wifie,

when I came in I found Langham and Rose had been spending the evening

together in the study. And I don’t, know when I have seen Langham so

brilliant or so alive as in our smoking talk just now!’

Catherine had laughed him to scorn; but, all the same, she had been a

little longer going to sleep than usual. She felt herself almost as much

as ever the guardian of her sisters, and the old sensitive nerve was set

quivering. And now there could be no question about it--Rose had changed

her ground toward Mr. Langham altogether. Her manner at breakfast was

evidence enough of it.

Catherine’s self-torturing mind leapt on for an instant to all sorts of

horrors. _That_ man!--and she and Robert responsible to her mother and

her dead father! Never! Then she scolded herself back to common-sense.

Rose and he had discovered a common subject in music and musicians. That

would be quite enough to account for the new-born friendship on Rose’s

part. And in five more days, the limit of Langham’s stay, nothing very

dreadful _could_ happen, argued the reserved Catherine.

But she was uneasy, and after a bit, as that _tête-à-tête_ in the garden

still went on, she could not, for the life of her, help interfering. She

strolled out to meet them with some woollen stuff hanging over her arm,

and made a plaintive and smiling appeal to Rose to come and help her

with some preparations for a mothers’ meeting to be held that afternoon.

Rose, who was supposed by the family to be ‘taking care’ of her sister

at a critical time, had a moment’s prick of conscience, and went off

with a good grace. Langham felt vaguely that he owed Mrs. Elsmere

another grudge, but he resigned himself and took out a cigarette,

wherewith to console himself for the loss of his companion.

Presently, as he stood for a moment turning over some new books on the

drawing-room table, Rose came in. She held an armful of blue serge, and,

going up to a table in the window, she took from it a little work-ease,

and was about to vanish again when Langham went up to her.

‘You look intolerably busy,’ he said to her, discontentedly.

‘Six dresses, ten cloaks, eight petticoats to cut out by luncheon

time,’ she answered demurely, with a countenance of most Dorcas-like

seriousness--‘and if I spoil them I shall have to pay for the stuff!’

He shrugged his shoulders, and looked at her smiling, still master of

himself and of his words.

‘And no music--none at all? Perhaps you don’t know that I too can

accompany?’

‘You play!’ she exclaimed, incredulous.

‘Try me.’

The light of his fine black eyes seemed to encompass her. She moved

backward a little, shaking her head. ‘Not this morning,’ she said. ‘Oh

dear, no, not this morning! I am afraid you don’t know anything about

tacking or fixing, or the abominable time they take. Well, it could

hardly be expected. There is nothing in the world’--and she shook her

serge vindictively--‘that I hate so much!’

‘And not this afternoon, for Robert and I go fishing. But this evening?’

he said, detaining her.

She nodded lightly, dropped her lovely eyes with a sudden embarrassment,

and went away with lightning quickness.

A minute or two later Elsmere laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

‘Come and see the Hall, old fellow. It will be our last chance, for the

Squire and his sister come back this afternoon. I must parochialize a

bit afterward, but you shan’t be much victimized.’

Langham submitted, and they sallied forth. It was a soft rainy morning,

one of the first heralds of autumn. Gray mists were drifting silently

across the woods and the wide stubbles of the now shaven cornfield,

where white lines of reapers were at work, as the morning cleared,

making and stacking the sheaves. After a stormy night the garden was

strewn with _débris_, and here and there noiseless prophetic showers of

leaves were dropping on the lawn.

Elsmere took his guest along a bit of common, where great black junipers

stood up like magnates in council above the motley undergrowth of fern

and heather, and then they turned into the park. A great stretch of

dimpled land it was, falling softly toward the south and west, bounded

by a shining twisted river, and commanding from all its highest points

a heathery world of distance, now turned a stormy purple under the

drooping fringes of the rain clouds. They walked downward from the

moment of entering it, till at last, when they reached a wooded plateau

about a hundred feet above the river, the house itself came suddenly

into view.

That was a house of houses! The large main building, as distinguished

from the lower stone portions to the north which represented a fragment

of the older Elizabethan house, had been in its day the crown and

boast of Jacobean house-architecture. It was fretted and jewelled with

Renaissance terra-cotta work from end to end; each gable had its lace

work, each window its carved setting. And yet the lines of the whole

were so noble, genius had hit the general proportions so finely, that

no effect of stateliness or grandeur had been missed through all the

accumulation of ornament. Majestic relic of a vanished England, the

house rose amid the August woods rich in every beauty that site, and

wealth, and centuries could give to it. The river ran about it as though

it loved it. The cedars which had kept it company for well nigh two

centuries gathered proudly round it; the deer grouped themselves in the

park beneath it, as though they were conscious elements in a great whole

of loveliness.

The two friends were admitted by a housemaid who happened to be busy in

the hall, and whose red cheeks and general breathlessness bore witness

to the energy of the storm of preparation now sweeping through the

house.

The famous hall to which Elsmere at once drew Langham’s attention was,

however, in no way remarkable for size or height. It told comparatively

little of seignorial dignity, but it was as though generation after

generation had employed upon its perfecting the craft of its most

delicate fingers, the love of its most fanciful and ingenious spirits.

Over-head, the stucco-work ceiling, covered with stags and birds and

strange heraldic creatures unknown to science, had the deep creamy tint,

the consistency and surface of antique ivory. From the white and gilt

frieze beneath, untouched, so Robert explained, since the Jacobean days

when it was first executed, hung Renaissance tapestries which would have

made the heart’s delight of any romantic child, so rich they were in

groves of marvellous trees hung with red and golden fruits, in far

reaching palaces and rock-built citadels, in flying shepherdesses and

pursuing shepherds. Between the tapestries again, there were breadths of

carved panelling, crowded with all things round and sweet, with fruits

and flowers and strange musical instruments, with flying cherubs, and

fair faces in laurel-wreathed medallions; while in the middle of the

Hall a great oriel window broke the dim, venerable surfaces of wood and

tapestry with stretches of jewelled light. Tables crowded with antiques,

with Tanagra figures or Greek verses, with Florentine bronzes or

specimens of the wilful, vivacious wood-carving of seventeenth century

Spain, stood scattered on the Persian carpets. And, to complete the

whole, the gardeners had just been at work on the corners of the hall

and of the great window, so that the hard-won subtleties of man’s

bygone handiwork, with which the splendid room was incrusted from top

to bottom, were masked and renewed here and there by the careless, easy

splendor of flowers, which had but to bloom in order to eclipse them

all.

Robert was at home in the great pile, where for many months he had gone

freely in and out on his way to the library, and the housekeeper only

met him to make an apology for her working dress, and to hand over to

him the keys of the library bookcases, with the fretful comment that

seemed to have in it the ghostly voice of generations of housemaids, Oh

lor’, sir, they are a trouble, them books!’

From the drawing-rooms, full of a more modern and less poetical

magnificence, where Langham turned restless and refractory, Elsmere with

a smile took his guest silently back into the hall, and opened a carved

door behind a curtain. Passing through, they found themselves in a long

passage lighted by small windows on the left-hand side.

‘This passage, please notice,’ said Robert, ‘leads to nothing but the

wing containing the library, or rather libraries, which is the oldest

part of the house. I always enter it with a kind of pleasing awe!

Consider these carpets, which keep out every sound, and look how

everything gets older as we go on.’

For half-way down the passage the ceiling seemed to descend upon their

heads, the flooring became uneven, and woodwork and walls showed that

they had passed from the Jacobean house into the much older Tudor

building. Presently Robert led the way up a few shallow steps, pushed

open a heavy door, also covered by curtains, and bade his companion

enter.

They found themselves in a low, immense room, running at right angles

to the passage they had just quitted. The long diamond-paned window,

filling almost half of the opposite wall, faced the door by which they

had come in; the heavy, carved mantelpiece was to their right; an open

doorway on their left, closed at present by tapestry hangings, seemed to

lead into yet other rooms.

The walls of this one were completely covered from floor to ceiling

with latticed bookcases, enclosed throughout in a frame of oak carved

in light classical relief by what appeared to be a French hand of the

sixteenth century. The checkered bindings of the books, in which the

creamy tints of vellum predominated, lined the whole surface of the wall

with a delicate sobriety of color; over the mantelpiece, the picture of

the founder of the house--a Holbein portrait, glorious in red robes and

fur and golden necklace--seemed to gather up and give voice to all the

dignity and impressiveness of the room beneath him; while on the window

side the book-lined wall was, as it were, replaced by the wooded face

of a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly,

about a hundred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library

wing. Between the window and the hill, however, was a small old English

garden, closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with every

flower that an English August knows--with sunflowers, tiger lilies, and

dahlias, white and red. The window was low, so that the flowers seemed

to be actually in the room, challenging the pale tints of the books, the

tawny browns and blues of the Persian carpet and the scarlet splendors

of the courtier over the mantelpiece. The room was lit up besides by a

few gleaming casts from the antique, by the ‘Diane Chasseresse’ of the

Louvre, by the Hermes of Praxiteles smiling with immortal kindness on

the child enthroned upon his arm, and by a Donatello figure of a woman

in marble, its subtle, sweet austerity contrasting with the Greek

frankness and blitheness of its companions.

Langham was penetrated at once by the spell of this strange and

beautiful place. The fastidious instincts which had been half

revolted by the costly accumulations, the over-blown splendors of the

drawing-room, were abundantly satisfied here.

‘So it was here,’ he said, looking round him, ‘that that man wrote the

“Idols of the Market Place”?’

‘I imagine so,’ said Robert; ‘if so, he might well have felt a little

more charity toward the human race in writing it. The race cannot be

said to have treated him badly on the whole. But now look, Langham, look

at these books--the most precious things are here.’

And he turned the key of a particular section of the wall, which was not

only latticed but glazed.

‘Here is “A Mirror for Magistrates.” Look at the title-page; you will

find Gabriel Harvey’s name on it. Here is a first edition of “Astrophol

and Stella,” another of the Arcadia. They may very well be presentation

copies, for the Wendover of that day is known to have been a wit and

a writer. Imagine finding them _in situ_ like this in the same room,

perhaps on the same shelves, as at the beginning! The other rooms on

this floor have been annexed since, but this room was always a library.’

Langham took the volumes reverently from Robert’s hands into his own,

the scholar’s passion hot within him. That glazed case was indeed

a storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson’s ‘Underwoods’ with his own

corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell’s ‘Poems,’ with

autograph notes; manuscript volumes of letters, containing almost

every famous name known to English literature in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast

collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had

belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole;

the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the

quartos--everything that the heart of the English collector could most

desire was there. And the charm of it was that only a small proportion

of these precious things represented conscious and deliberate

acquisition. The great majority of them had, as it were, drifted thither

one by one, carried there by the tide of English letters as to a warm

and natural resting-place.

But Robert grew impatient, and hurried on his guest to other things--to

the shelves of French rarities, ranging from Du Bellay’s ‘Visions,’

with his autograph, down to the copy of ‘Les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe’

presented by Chateaubriand to Madame Récamier, or to a dainty manuscript

volume in the fine writing of Lamartine.

‘These,’ Robert explained, ‘were collected, I believe, by the Squire’s

father. He was not in the least literary, so they say, but it had always

been a point of honor to carry on the library, and as he had learnt

French well in his youth he bought French things, taking advice,

but without knowing much about them, I imagine. It was in the room

overhead,’ said Robert, laying down the book he held, and speaking in a

lower key, ‘so the old doctor of the house told me a few weeks ago, that

the same poor soul put an end to himself twenty years ago.’

‘What in the name of fortune did he do that for?’

‘Mania,’ said Robert quietly.

‘Whew!’ said the other, lifting his eyebrows. ‘Is that the skeleton in

this very magnificent cupboard?’

‘It has been the Wendover scourge from the beginning, so I hear.

Everyone about here of course explains this man’s eccentricities by the

family history. But I don’t know,’ said Robert, his lip hardening, ‘it

may be extremely convenient sometimes to have a tradition of the kind. A

man who knew how to work it might very well enjoy all the advantages

of sanity and the privileges of insanity at the same time. The poor old

doctor I was telling you of--old Meyrick--who has known the Squire since

his boyhood, and has a dog-like attachment to him, is always hinting at

mysterious excuses. Whenever I let out to him, as I do sometimes, as

to the state of the property, he talks of “inherited melancholy,” “rash

judgments,” and so forth. I like the good old soul, but I don’t believe

much of it. A man who is sane enough to make a great name for himself in

letters is sane enough to provide his estate with a decent agent.’

‘It doesn’t follow,’ said Langham, who was, however, so deep in a

collection of Spanish romances and chronicles, that the Squire’s mental

history did not seem to make much impression upon him. ‘Most men of

letters are mad, and I should be inclined,’ he added, with a sudden and

fretful emphasis, ‘to argue much worse things for the sanity of your

Squire, Elsmere, from the fact that this room is undoubtedly allowed

to get damp sometimes, than from any of those absurd parochial tests of

yours.’

And he held up a couple of priceless books, of which the Spanish

sheepskin bindings showed traces here and there of moisture.

‘It is no use, I know, expecting you to preserve a moral sense when you

get among books,’ said Robert with a shrug. ‘I will reserve my remarks

on that subject. But you must really tear yourself away from this room,

Langham, if you want to see the rest of the Squire’s quarters. Here you

have what we may call the ornamental, sensational part of the library,

that part of it which would make a stir at Sotheby’s; the working parts

are all to come.’

Langham reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged away. Robert held back

the hangings over the doorway leading into the rest of the wing, and,

passing through, they found themselves in a continuation of the library

totally different in character from the magnificent room they had just

left. The walls were no longer latticed and carved; they were closely

packed, in the most business-like way, with books which represented

the Squire’s own collection, and were in fact a chart of his own

intellectual history.

‘This is how I interpret this room,’ said Robert, looking round it.

‘Here are the books he collected at Oxford in the Tractarian movement

and afterward. Look here,’ and he pulled out a volume of St. Basil.

Langham looked, and saw on the title-page a note in faded characters:

‘_Given to me by Newman at Oxford, in 1845._’

‘Ah, of course, he was one of them in ‘45; he must have left them very

soon after,’ said Langham reflectively.

Robert nodded. ‘But look at them! There are the Tracts, all the Fathers,

all the Councils, and masses, as you see, of Anglican theology. Now look

at the next case, nothing but eighteenth century!’

‘I see,--from the Fathers to the Philosophers, from Hooker to Hume. How

history repeats itself in the individual!’

‘And there again,’ said Robert, pointing to the other side of the room,

‘are the results of his life as a German student.’

‘Germany--ah, I remember! How long was he there?’

‘Ten years, at Berlin and Heidelberg. According to old Meyrick, he

buried his last chance of living like other men at Berlin. His years

of extravagant labor there have left marks upon him physically that can

never be effaced. But that bookcase fascinates me. Half the great names

of modern thought are in those books.’

And so they were. The first Langham opened had a Latin dedication in a

quavering old man’s hand, ‘Amico et discipulo meo,’ signed ‘Fredericus

Gulielmus Schelling.’ The next bore the autograph of Alexander von

Humboldt, the next that of Boeckh, the famous classic, and so on. Close

by was Niebuhr’s History, in the title-page of which a few lines in the

historian’s handwriting bore witness to much ‘pleasant discourse between

the writer and Roger Wendover, at Bonn, in the summer of 1847.’ Judging

from other shelves further down, he must also have spent some time,

perhaps an academic year, at Tubïngen, for here were most of the early

editions of the ‘Leben Jesu,’ with some corrections from Strauss’s hand,

and similar records of Baur, Ewald, and other members or opponents of

the Tubïngen school. And so on, through the whole bookcase. Something

of everything was there--Philosophy, Theology, History, Philology.

The collection was a medley, and made almost a spot of disorder in the

exquisite neatness and system of the vast gathering of which it formed

part. Its bond of union was simply that it represented the forces of

an epoch, the thoughts, the men, the occupations which had absorbed

the energies of ten golden years. Every bock seemed to be full of paper

marks; almost every title-page was covered with minute writing, which,

when examined, proved to contain a record of lectures, or conversations

with the author of the volume, sometimes a string of anecdotes or

a short biography, rapidly sketched out of the fulness of personal

knowledge, and often seasoned with a subtle causticity and wit. A

history of modern thinking Germany, of that ‘unextinguished hearth’

whence the mind of Europe has been kindled for three generations, might

almost have been evolved from that bookcase and its contents alone.

Langham, as he stood peering among the ugly, vilely-printed German

volumes, felt suddenly a kind of magnetic influence creeping over him.

The room seemed instinct with a harsh, commanding presence. The history

of a mind and soul was written upon the face of it; every shelf, as it

were, was an autobiographical fragment, an ‘Apologia pro Vita Mea.’

He drew away from the books at last with the uneasy feeling of one who

surprises a confidence, and looked for Robert. Robert was at the end

of the room, a couple of volumes under his arm, another, which he was

reading, in his hand.

‘This is _my_ corner,’ he said, smiling and flushing a little, as his

friend moved up to him. ‘Perhaps you don’t know that I too am engaged

upon a great work.’

‘A great work--you?’

Langham looked at his companion as though to find out whether his remark

was meant seriously, or whether he might venture to be cynical. Elsmere

writing! Why should everybody write books? It was absurd! The scholar

who knows what toll scholarship takes of life is always apt to resent

the intrusion of the man of action into his domains. It looks to him

like a kind of ridiculous assumption that anyone _d’un cœur léger_ can

do what has cost him his heart’s blood.

Robert understood something of the meaning of his tone, and replied

almost apologetically; he was always singularly modest about himself on

the intellectual side.

‘Well, Grey is responsible. He gave me such a homily before I left

Oxford on the absolute necessity of keeping up with books, that I could

do nothing less than set up a “subject” at once. “Half the day,” he used

to say to me, “you will be king of your world: the other half be the

slave of something which will take you out of your world into the

general world;” and then he would quote to me that saying he was always

bringing into lectures--I forget whose it is--“_The decisive events of

the world take place in the intellect_. It is the mission of books that

they help one to remember it.” Altogether it was striking, coming from

one who has always had such a tremendous respect for practical life and

work, and I was much impressed by it. So blame him!’

Langham was silent. Elsmere had noticed that any allusion to Grey found

Langham less and less responsive.

‘Well what is the “great work”?’ he said at last, abruptly.

‘Historical. Oh, I should have written something without Grey; I have

always had a turn for it since I was a child. But he was clear that

history was especially valuable--especially necessary to a clergyman. I

felt he was right, entirely right. So I took my Final Schools’ history

for a basis, and started on the Empire, especially the decay of the

Empire. Some day I mean to take up one of the episodes in the great

birth of Europe-the makings of France, I think, most likely. It seems to

lead farthest and tell most. I have been at work now nine months.’

‘And are just getting into it?’

‘Just about. I have got down below the surface, and am beginning to feel

the joys of digging;’ and Robert threw back his head with one of his

most brilliant, enthusiastic smiles. ‘I have been shy about boring you

with the thing, but the fact is, I am very keen indeed; and this library

has been a godsend!’

‘So I should think.’ Langham sat down on one of the carved wooden stools

placed at intervals along the bookcases and looked at his friend, his

psychological curiosity rising a little.

‘Tell me,’ he said presently--‘tell me what interests you

specially--what seizes you--in a subject like the making of France, for

instance?’

‘Do you really want to know?’ said Robert, incredulously.

The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk up and down,

trying to answer Langham’s questions, and at the same time to fix in

speech a number of sentiments and impressions bred in him by the work

of the past few months. After a while Langham began to see his way.

Evidently the forces at the bottom of this new historical interest were

precisely the same forces at work in Elsmere’s parish plans, in

his sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young forces of

imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study was

not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumulation which

is the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, of science. It was

simply a passionate sense of the human problems which underlie all the

dry and dusty detail of history and give it tone and color, a passionate

desire to rescue something more of human life from the drowning,

submerging past, to realize for himself and others the solidarity and

continuity of mankind’s long struggle from the beginning until now.

Langham had had much experience of Elsmere’s versatility and pliancy,

but he had never realized it so much as now, while he sat listening to

the vivid, many-colored speech getting quicker and quicker, and more

and more telling and original as Robert got more absorbed and excited by

what he had to say. He was endeavoring to describe to Langham the sort

of book be thought might be written on the rise of modern society

in Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the

blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory

the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and

its saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the

fierce incoherence of the Empire’s decay, the struggle of Roman order

and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of German hardness; above

all, the war of orthodoxy and heresy, with its strange political

complications. And then, discontented still, as though the heart of the

matter was still untouched, he went on, restlessly wandering the while,

with his long arms linked behind him, throwing out words at an object

in his mind, trying to grasp and analyze that strange sense which haunts

the student of Rome’s decline as it once overshadowed the infancy of

Europe, that sense of a slowly departing majesty, of a great presence

just withdrawn, and still incalculably potent, traceable throughout in

that humbling consciousness of Goth or Frank that they were but ‘beggars

hutting in a palace--the place had harbored greater men than they!’

‘There is one thing,’ Langham said presently, in his slow, nonchalant

voice, when the tide of Robert’s ardor ebbed for a moment, ‘that doesn’t

seem to have touched you yet. But you will come to it. To my mind, it

makes almost the chief interest of history. It is just this. History

depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and the value of testimony at

given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand

or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the

sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences, and

what are the deductions to be made from them, if any?’ He fixed his keen

look on Robert, who was now lounging against the books, as though his

harangue had taken it out of him a little.

‘Ah, well,’ said the Rector smiling, ‘I am only just coming to that. As

I told you, I am only now beginning to dig for myself. Till now it has

all been work at second hand. I have been getting a general survey of

the ground as quickly as I could with the help of other men’s labors.

Now I must go to work inch by inch, and find out what the ground is

made of. I won’t forget your point. It is enormously important, I

grant--enormously,’ he repeated reflectively.

‘I should think it is’ said Langham to himself as he rose; ‘the whole of

orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance!’

There was not much more to be seen. A little wooden stair-case led from

the second library to the upper rooms, curious old rooms, which had been

annexed one by one as the Squire wanted them, and in which there was

nothing at all--neither chair, nor table, nor carpet--but books only.

All the doors leading from room to room had been taken off; the old

worm-eaten boards had been roughly stained; a few old French engravings

had been hung here and there where the encroaching books left an

opening; but otherwise all was bare. There was a curious charm in the

space and air of these empty rooms, with their latticed windows opening

on to the hill, and letting in day by day the summer sun-risings or the

winter dawns, which had shone upon them for more than three centuries.

‘This is my last day of privilege,’ said Robert. ‘Everybody is shut out

when once he appears, from this wing, and this part of the grounds. This

was his father’s room,’ and the Rector led the way into the last of the

series; ‘and through there,’ pointing to a door on the right, ‘lies the

way to his own sleeping-room, which is of course connected with the more

modern side of the house.’

‘So this is where that old man ventured “what Cato did and Addison

approved,” murmured Langham, standing in the middle of the room and

looking around him. This particular room was now used as a sort of

lumber place, a receptacle for the superfluous or useless books,

gradually thrown off by the great collection all around. There were

innumerable volumes in frayed or broken bindings lying on the ground. A

musty smell hung over it all; the gray light from outside, which seemed

to give only an added subtlety and charm, to the other portions of

the ancient building through which they had been moving, seemed here

_triste_ and dreary. Or Langham fancied it.

He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw suddenly

before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and framed in the doorways

facing him, an engraving of a Greuze picture--a girl’s face turned over

her shoulder, the hair waving about her temples, the lips parted, the

teeth gleaming mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line.

Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though

Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him.

CHAPTER XV.

‘Now, having seen our sight,’ said Robert, as they left the great mass

of Murewell behind them, ‘come and see our scandal. Both run by the

same proprietor, if you please. There is a hamlet down there in the

hollow’--and he pointed to a gray speck in the distance--‘I which

deserves a Royal Commission all to itself, which is a _disgrace_’--and

his tone warmed--‘to any country, any owner, any agent! It is owned

by Mr. Wendover, and I see the pleasing prospect straight before me of

beginning my acquaintance with him by a fight over it. You will admit

that it is a little hard on a man who wants to live on good terms with

the possessor of the Murewell library to have to open relations with him

by a fierce attack on his drains and his pigsties.’

He turned to his companion with a half-rueful spark of laughter in

his gray, eyes. Langham hardly caught what he said. He was far away in

meditations of his own.

‘An attack,’ he repeated vaguely; ‘why an attack?’

Robert plunged again into the great topic of which his quick mind was

evidently full. Langham tried to listen, but was conscious that his

friend’s social enthusiasms bored him a great deal. And side by side

with the consciousness there slid in a little stinging reflection that

four years ago no talk of Elsmere’s could have bored him.

‘What’s the matter with this particular place?’ he asked languidly,

at last, raising his eyes toward the group of houses now beginning to

emerge from the distance.

An angry, red mounted in Robert’s cheek.

‘What isn’t the matter with it? The houses which were built on a

swamp originally, are falling into ruin; the roofs, the drains, the

accommodation per head, are all about equally scandalous. The place

is harried with illness; since I came there has been both fever and

diphtheria there. They are all crippled with rheumatism, but _that_ they

think nothing of; the English laborer takes rheumatism as quite in the

day’s bargain! And as to _vice_--the vice that comes of mere endless

persecuting opportunity--I can tell you one’s ideas of personal

responsibility get a good deal shaken up by a place like this! And I

can do nothing. I brought over Henslowe to see the place, and he behaved

like a brute. He scoffed at all my complaints, said that no landlord

would be such a fool as to build fresh cottages on such a site, that the

old ones must just be allowed to go to ruin; that the people might live

in them if they chose, or turn out of them if they chose. Nobody forced

them to do either; it was their own look-out.’

‘That was true,’ said Langham, ‘wasn’t it?’

Robert turned upon him fiercely.

‘Ah! you think it so easy for these poor creatures to leave their homes

their working places! Some of them have been there thirty years. They

are close to the two or three farms that employ them, close to the osier

beds which give them extra earnings in the spring. If they were turned

out, there is nothing nearer than Murewell, and not a single cottage

to be found there. I don’t say it is a landlord’s duty to provide more

cottages than are wanted; but if the labor is wanted, the laborer should

be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, and woe to the man who

neglects or ill-treats him!’

Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence of the speech,

partly at the lack of adjustment between his friend’s mood and his

own. He braced himself to take the matter more seriously, but meanwhile

Robert had caught the smile, and his angry eyes melted at once into

laughter.

‘There I am, ranting as usual,’ he said penitently, ‘Took you for

Henslowe, I suppose! Ah, well, never mind. I hear the Provost has

another book on the stocks?’

So they diverged into other things, talking politics and new books,

public men and what not, till at the end of a long and gradual descent

through wooded ground, some two miles to the northwest of the park, they

emerged from the trees beneath which they had been walking, and found

themselves on a bridge, a gray sluggish stream flowing beneath them, and

the hamlet they sought rising among the river flats on the farther side.

‘There,’ said Robert, stopping, ‘we are at our journey’s end. Now,

then--what sort of a place of human habitation do you call _that_?’

The bridge whereon they stood crossed the main channel of the river,

which just at that point, however, parted into several branches, and

came meandering slowly down through a little bottom or valley, filled

with osier beds, long since robbed of their year’s growth of shoots. On

the other side of the river, on ground all but level with the osier beds

which interposed between them and the stream, rose a miserable group of

houses, huddled together as though their bulging walls and rotten roofs

could only maintain themselves at all by the help and support which each

wretched hovel gave to its neighbor. The mud walls were stained with

yellow patches of lichen, the palings round the little gardens were

broken and ruinous. Close beside them all was a sort of open drain or

water-course, stagnant and noisome, which dribbled into the river a

little above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by

firs, and a line of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the

shadow of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, the

dreariness, the gloom, the squalor of the place were indescribable.

‘Well, that is a God-forsaken hole!’ said Langham, studying it, his

interest roused at last, rather perhaps by the Ruysdael-like melancholy

and picturesqueness of the scene than by its human suggestiveness. ‘I

could hardly have imagined such a place existed in southern England. It

is more like a bit of Ireland.’

‘If it were Ireland it might be to somebody’s interest to ferret it

out,’ said Robert bitterly. ‘But these poor folks are out of the world.

They may be brutalized with impunity. Oh, such a case as I had here

last autumn! A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, who would have been

healthy and happy anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of

the place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the

world but preventable cruelty and neglect? It was a sight that

burnt into my mind, once for all, what is meant by a landlord’s

responsibility. I tried, of course, to move her, but neither she nor her

parents--elderly folk--had energy enough for a change. They only prayed

to be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life to give her

the communion. “Ah, sir!” said the mother to me--not bitterly--that

is the strange thing, they have so little bitterness! “If Mr. ‘Enslowe

would just ‘a mended that bit o’ roof of ours last winter, Bessie

needn’t have laid in the wet so many nights as she did, and she coughin’

fit to break your heart, for all the things yer could put over’er.”’

Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a few minutes

before, tremulous with feeling, ‘Ah, well,’ he said at last with a long

breath, moving away from the parapet of the bridge on which he had been

leaning, ‘better be oppressed than oppressor any day! Now, then, I must

deliver my stores. There’s a child here Catherine and I have been doing

our best to pull through typhoid.’

They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading to the

hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the

community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the

filth surrounding one of the nearest cottages.

A feeble, elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow, bloodless skin

made him look much older than he actually was, opened the door and

invited them to come in. Robert passed on into an inner room, conducted

thither by a woman who had been sitting working over the fire. Langham

stood irresolute, but the old man’s quavering ‘Kindly take a chair Sir;

you’ve come a long way,’ decided him, and he stepped in.

Inside, the hovel was miserable indeed. It belonged to that old and evil

type which the efforts of the last twenty years have done so much all

over England to sweep away: four mud walls, enclosing an oblong space

about eight yards long, divided into two unequal portions by a lath and

plaster partition, with no upper story, a thatched roof, now entirely

out of repair, and letting in the rain in several places, and a paved

floor little better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous

were the gaps between the stones. The dismal place had no small

adornings--none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and

trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing

the existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation

of the sheerest physical need; and Langham, as he sat down, caught the

sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odors of

damp meadows in times of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so well.

As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak, tremulous voice, the

visitor’s attention was irresistibly held by the details about him.

Fresh as he was from all the delicate sights, the harmonious colors and

delightful forms of the Squire’s house, they made an unusually sharp

impression on his fastidious senses. What does human life become lived

on reeking floors and under stifling roofs like these? What strange,

abnormal deteriorations, physical and spiritual, must it not inevitably

undergo? Langham felt a sudden inward movement of disgust and repulsion.

‘For Heaven’s sake, keep your superstitions!’ he could have cried to the

whole human race, ‘or any other narcotic that a grinding fate has left

you. What does _anything_ matter to the mass of mankind but a little

ease, a little lightening of pressure on this side or on that?’

Meanwhile the old man went maundering on, talking of the weather, and of

his sick child, and ‘Mr. Elsmere,’ with a kind of listless incoherence

which hardly demanded an answer, though Langham threw in a word or two

here and there.

Among other things, he began to ask a question or two about Robert’s

predecessor, a certain Mr. Preston, who had left behind him a memory of

amiable evangelical indolence.

‘Did you see much of him?’ he asked.

‘Oh law, no, sir!’ replied the man, surprised into something like

energy. I Never seed ‘im more’n once a year, and sometimes not that!’

‘Was he liked here?’

‘Well, sir, it was like this, you see. My wife, she’s north-country, she

is, comes from Yorkshire; sometimes she’d used to say to me, “Passon ‘ee

ain’t much good, and passon ‘ee ain’t much harm. ‘Ee’s no more good nor

more ‘arm, so fer as _I_ can see, nor a chip in a basin o’ parritch.”

And that was just about it, sir,’ said the old man, pleased for the

hundredth time with his wife’s bygone flight of metaphor and his own

exact memory of it.

As to the Rector’s tendance of his child his tone was very cool and

guarded.

‘It do seem strange, sir, as nor he nor Doctor Grimes ‘ull let her have

anything to put a bit of flesh on her, nothin’ but them messy things

as he brings--milk an’ that. An’ the beef jelly--lor! such a trouble!

Missis Elsmere, he tells my wife, strains all the stuff through a cloth,

she do; never seed anythin’ like it, nor my wife neither. People is

clever nowadays,’ said the speaker dubiously. Langham realized, that in

this quarter of his parish at any rate, his friend’s pastoral vanity, if

he had any, would not find much to feed on. Nothing, to judge from

this specimen at least, greatly affected an inhabitant of Mile End.

Gratitude, responsiveness, imply health and energy, past or present.

The only constant defence which the poor have against such physical

conditions as those which prevailed at Mile End is apathy.

As they came down the dilapidated steps at the cottage door, Robert drew

in with avidity a long draught of the outer air.

‘Ugh!’ he said, with a sort of groan, ‘that bedroom! Nothing gives

one such a sense of the toughness of human life as to see a child

recovering, actually recovering, in such a pestilential den! Father,

mother, grown up son, girl of thirteen, and grandchild--all huddled in a

space just fourteen feet square. Langham!’ and he turned passionately on

his companion, ‘what defence can be found for a man who lives in a place

like Murewell Hall, and can take money from human beings for the use of

a sty like that?’

‘Gently, my friend. Probably the Squire, being the sort of recluse he

is, has never seen the place, or at any rate not for-years, and knows

nothing about it!’

‘More shame for him!’

‘True in a sense,’ said Langham, a little dryly; ‘but as you may want

hereafter to make excuses for your man, and he may give you occasion, I

wouldn’t begin by painting him to yourself any blacker than need be.’

Robert laughed, sighed, and acquiesced. ‘I am a hot-headed, impatient

kind of creature at the best of times,’ he confessed. ‘They tell me that

great things have been done for the poor round here in the last twenty

years. Something has been done, certainly. But why are the old ways, the

old evil neglect and apathy, so long, so terribly long in dying! This

social progress of ours we are so proud of is a clumsy limping jade at

best!’

They prowled a little more about the hamlet, every step almost revealing

some new source of poison and disease. Of their various visits, however,

Langham remembered nothing afterward but a little scene in a miserable

cottage, where they found a whole family partly gathered round the

mid-day meal. A band of puny black-eyed children were standing or

sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three weeks before,

sat by the fire, deathly pale, a ‘bad leg’ stretched out before her on

some improvised support, one baby on her lap and another dark-haired

bundle asleep in a cradle beside her. There was a pathetic, pinched

beauty about the whole family. Even the tiny twins were comparatively

shapely; all the other children had delicate, transparent skins, large

eyes, and small colorless mouths. The father, a picturesque, handsome

fellow, looking as though he had gypsy blood in his veins, had opened

the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal, would have retreated

at once, in spite of the children’s shy inviting looks, but a glance

past them at the mother’s face checked the word of refusal and apology

on his lips, and he stepped in.

In after years Langham was always apt to see him in imagination as he

saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of the mother, his quick,

pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and exhaustion of face and frame,

his hand resting instinctively on the head of a small creature that had

crept up beside him, his look all attention and softness as the woman

feebly told him some of the main facts of her state. The young Rector

at the moment might have stood for the modern ‘Man of Feeling,’ as

sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of self, as

his eighteenth-century prototype.

On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his companion, ‘Have you

heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham? What did you think of it?’

‘Extraordinary!’ said Langham briefly. ‘The most considerable gift I

ever came across in an amateur.’

His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw a quick

observant look at him.

‘The difficulty,’ he exclaimed, ‘is to know what to do with it!’

‘Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to study abroad.

What is there to prevent it?’

Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. He could not

stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife

of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed,

cabined, and confined in this way?

‘I grant you,’ said Robert with a look of perplexity, ‘there is not much

to prevent it.’

And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very tenderly of all

the antecedents and explanations of that old-world distrust of art and

the artistic life so deeply rooted in his wife, even though in practice

and under his influence she had made concession after concession.

‘The great solution of all,’ he said presently, brightening, would be

to get her married. I don’t wonder her belongings dislike the notion of

anything so pretty and so flighty, going off to live by itself. And to

break up the home in Whindale would be to undo everything their father

did for them, to defy his most solemn last wishes.’

‘To talk of a father’s wishes, in a case of this kind, ten years after

his death, is surely excessive,’ said Langham with dry interrogation;

then, suddenly recollecting himself, ‘I beg your pardon, Elsmere. I am

interfering.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Robert brightly, ‘I don’t wonder, it seems like a

difficulty of our own making. Like so many difficulties, it depends

on character, present character, bygone character--’ And again he fell

musing on his Westmoreland experiences, and on the intensity of that

Puritan type it had revealed to him. ‘However, as I said, marriage would

be the natural way out of it.’

‘An easy way, I should think,’ said Langham, after a pause.

‘It won’t be so easy to find the right man. She is a young person with a

future, is Miss Rose. She wants somebody in the stream; somebody with a

strong hand who will keep her in order and yet give her a wide range; a

rich man, I think--she hasn’t the ways of a poor man’s wife; but, at any

rate, someone who will be proud of her, and yet have a full life of his

own in which she may share.’

‘Your views are extremely clear,’ said Langham, and his smile had a

touch of bitterness in it. ‘If hers agree, I prophesy you won’t have

long to wait. She has beauty, talent, charm--everything that rich and

important men like.’

There was the slightest sarcastic note in the voice. Robert winced. It

was borne in upon one of the least worldly of mortals that he had been

talking like the veriest schemer. What vague, quick impulse had driven

him on?

By the time they emerged again upon the Murewell Green the rain had

cleared altogether away, and the autumnal morning had broken into

sunshine which played mistily on the sleeping woods, on the white fronts

of the cottages, and the wide green where the rain-pools glistened.

On the hill leading to the Rectory there was the flutter of a woman’s

dress. As they hurried on, afraid of being late for luncheon, they saw

that it was Rose in front of them.

Langham started as the slander figure suddenly refined itself against

the road. A tumult within, half rage, half feeling, showed itself only

in an added rigidity of the finely-cut features.

Rose turned directly she heard the steps and voices, and over the

dreaminess of her face there flashed a sudden brightness.

‘You _have_ been along time!’ she exclaimed, saying the first thing that

came into her head, joyously, rashly, like the child she in reality was.

‘How many halt and maimed has Robert taken you to see, Mr. Langham?’

‘We went to Murewell first. The library was well worth seeing. Since

then we have been a parish round, distributing stores.’

Rose’s look changed in an instant. The words were spoken by the Langham

of her earliest acquaintance. The man who that morning had asked her to

play to him had gone--vanished away.

‘How exhilarating!’ she said scornfully. ‘Don’t you wonder how anyone

can ever tear themselves away from the country?’

‘Rose, don’t be abusive,’ said Robert, opening his eyes at her tone.

Then, passing his arm through hers he looked banteringly down upon

her. ‘For the first time since you left the metropolis you have walked

yourself into a color. It’s becoming--and it’s Murewell--so be civil!’

‘Oh, nobody denies you a high place in milkmaids!’ she said, with her

head in air--and they went off into a minute’s sparring.

Meanwhile, Langham, on the other side of the road, walked up slowly,

his eyes on the ground. Once, when Rose’s eye caught him, a shock

ran through her. There was already a look of slovenly age, about his

stooping bookworm’s gait. Her companion of the night before--handsome,

animated, human--where was he? The girl’s heart felt a singular

contraction. Then she turned and rent herself, and Robert found her more

mocking and sprightly than ever.

At the Rectory gate Robert ran on to overtake a farmer on the road. Rose

stooped to open the latch; Langham mechanically made a quick movement

forward to anticipate her. Their fingers touched; she drew hers hastily

away and passed in, an erect and dignified figure, in her curving garden

hat.

Langham went straight up to his room, shut the door and stood before

the open window, deaf and blind to everything save an inward storm of

sensation.

‘Fool! Idiot!’ he said to himself at last, with fierce stifled emphasis,

while a kind of dumb fury with himself and circumstance swept through

him.

That he, the poor and solitary student whose only sources of

self-respect lay in the deliberate limitations, the reasoned and

reasonable renunciations he had imposed upon his life, should have

needed the reminder of his old pupil not to fall in love with his

brilliant, ambitious sister! His irritable self-consciousness enormously

magnified Elsmere’s motive and Elsmere’s words. That golden vagueness

and softness of temper which had possessed him since his last sight of

her gave place to one of bitter tension.

With sardonic scorn he pointed out to himself that his imagination was

still held by, his nerves were still thrilling under, the mental

image of a girl looking up to him as no woman had ever looked--a girl,

white-armed, white-necked--with softened eyes of appeal and confidence.

He bade himself mark that during the whole of his morning walk with

Robert down to its last stage, his mind had been really absorbed in some

preposterous dream he was now too self-contemptuous to analyze. Pretty

well for a philosopher, in four days! What a ridiculous business is

life--what a contemptible creature is man, how incapable of dignity, of

consistency!

At luncheon he talked rather more than usual, especially on literary

matters with Robert. Rose, too, was fully occupied in giving Catherine a

sarcastic account of a singing lesson she had been administering in the

school that morning. Catherine winced sometimes at the tone of it.

That afternoon Robert, in high spirits, his rod over his shoulder, his

basket at his back, carried off his guest for a lounging afternoon along

the river. Elsmere enjoyed these fishing expeditions like a boy. They

were his holidays, relished all the more because he kept a jealous

account of them with his conscience. He sauntered along, now throwing a

cunning and effectual fly, now resting, smoking, and chattering, as the

fancy took him. He found a great deal of the old stimulus and piquancy

in Langham’s society, but there was an occasional irritability in his

companion, especially toward himself personally, which puzzled him.

After a while, indeed, he began to feel himself the unreasonably

cheerful person which he evidently appeared to his companion. A mere

ignorant enthusiast, banished for ever from the realm of pure knowledge

by certain original and incorrigible defects--after a few hours’ talk

with Langham Robert’s quick insight always showed him some image of

himself resembling this in his friend’s mind.

At last he turned restive. He had been describing to Langham his

acquaintance with the Dissenting minister of the place--a strong,

coarse-grained fellow of sensuous, excitable temperament, famous for

his noisy ‘conversion meetings,’ and for a gymnastic dexterity in the

quoting and combining of texts, unrivalled in Robert’s experience. Some

remark on the Dissenter’s logic, made, perhaps, a little too much in

the tone of the Churchman conscious of University advantages, seemed to

irritate Langham.

‘You think your Anglican logic in dealing with the Bible so superior! On

the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant.

Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you

are, because English-men, as a whole, like attempting the

contradictory--like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The

nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. But that is

another matter.’

Robert smoked on a moment in silence. Then he flushed and laid down his

pipe.

‘We are all fools in your eyes, I know! _À la bonne heure!_ I have

been to the University, and talk what he is pleased to call

“philosophy”--therefore Mr. Colson denies me faith. You have always, in

your heart of hearts, denied me knowledge. But I cling to both in spite

of you.’

There was a ray of defiance, of emotion, in his look. Langham met it in

silence.

‘I deny you nothing,’ he said at last, slowly. ‘On the contrary, I

believe you to be the possessor of all that is best worth having in life

and mind.’

His irritation had all died away. His tone was one of indescribable

depression, and his great black eyes were fixed on Robert with a

melancholy which startled his companion by a subtle transition Elsmere

felt himself touched with a pang of profound pity for the man who an

instant before had seemed to pose as his scornful superior. He stretched

out his hand, and laid it on his friend’s shoulder.

Rose spent the afternoon in helping Catherine with various parochial

occupations. In the course of them Catherine asked many questions about

Long Whindale. Her thoughts clung to the hills, to the gray farmhouses,

the rough men and women inside them. But Rose gave her small

satisfaction.

‘Poor old Jim Backhouse!’ said Catherine, sighing; Agnes tells me he is

quite bedridden now.’

‘Well, and a good thing for John, don’t you think--’ said Rose briskly,

covering a parish library book the while in a way which made Catherine’s

fingers itch to take it from her--‘and for us? It’s some use having a

carrier now.’

Catherine made no reply. She thought of the ‘noodle’, fading out of life

in the room where Mary Backhouse died; she actually saw the white hair,

the blurred eyes, the palsied hands, the poor emaciated limbs stretched

along the settle. Her heart rose, but she said nothing.

‘And has Mrs. Thornburgh been enjoying her summer?’

‘Oh! I suppose so,’ said Rose, her tone indicating a quite measureless

indifference. ‘She had another young Oxford man staying with her in

June--a missionary--and it annoyed her very much that neither Agnes nor

I would intervene to prevent his resuming his profession. She seemed to

think it was a question of saving him from being eaten, and apparently

he would have proposed to either of us.’

Catherine could not help laughing. ‘I suppose she still thinks she

married Robert and me.’

‘Of course. So she did.’

Catherine colored a little, but Rose’s hard lightness of tone was

unconquerable.

‘Or if she didn’t,’ Rose resumed, ‘nobody could have the heart to rob

her of the illusion. Oh, by the way, Sarah has been under warning since

June! Mrs. Thornburgh told her desperately that she must either throw

over her young man, who was picked up drunk at the Vicarage gate one

night, or vacate the Vicarage kitchen. Sarah cheerfully accepted her

month’s notice, and is still making the Vicarage jams and walking

out with the young man every Sunday. Mr. Thornburgh sees that it will

require a convulsion of nature to get rid either of Sarah or the young

man, and has succumbed.’

‘And the Tysons? And that poor Walker girl?’

‘Oh, dear me, Catherine!’ said Rose, a strange disproportionate flash of

impatience breaking through. ‘Everyone in Long Whindale is always just

where and what they were last year. I admit they are born and die, but

they do nothing else of a decisive kind.’

Catherine’s hands worked away for a while, then she laid down her book

and said, lifting her clear, large eyes on her sister,--

‘Was there never a time when you loved the valley, Rose?’

‘Never!’ cried Rose.

Then she pushed away her work, and leaning her elbows on the table

turned her brilliant face to Catherine. There was frank mutiny in it.

‘By the way, Catherine, are you going to prevent mamma from letting me

go to Berlin for the winter?’

‘And after Berlin, Rose?’ said Catherine, presently, her gaze bent upon

her work.

‘After Berlin? What next?’ said Rose recklessly. ‘Well, after Berlin I

shall try to persuade mamma and Agnes, I suppose, to come and back me up

in London. We could still be some months of the year at Burwood.’

Now she had said it out. But there was something else surely goading the

girl than mere intolerance of the family tradition. The hesitancy, the

moral doubt of her conversation with Langham, seemed to have vanished

wholly in a kind of acrid self-assertion.

Catherine felt a shock sweep through her, It was as though all the

pieties of life, all the sacred assumptions and self-surrenders at the

root of it, were shaken, outraged by the girl’s tone.

‘Do you ever remember,’ she said, looking up, while her voice trembled,

‘what papa wished when he was dying?’

It was her last argument. To Rose she had very seldom used it in so many

words. Probably, it seemed to her too strong, too sacred, to be often

handled.

But Rose sprang up, and pacing the little work-room with her

white wrists locked behind her, she met that argument with all the

concentrated passion which her youth had for years been storing up

against it. Catherine sat presently overwhelmed, bewildered. This

language of a proud and tameless individuality, this modern gospel of

the divine right of self-development--her soul loathed it! And yet,

since that night in Marrisdale, there had been a new yearning in her to

understand.

Suddenly, however, Rose stopped, lost her thread. Two figures were

crossing the lawn, and their shadows were thrown far beyond them by the

fast disappearing sun.

She threw herself down on her chair again with an abrupt--‘Do you see

they have come back? We must go and dress.’

And as she spoke she was conscious of a new sensation altogether--the

sensation of the wild creature lassoed on the prairie, of the bird

exchanging in an instant its glorious freedom of flight for the pitiless

meshes of the net. It was stifling--her whole nature seemed to fight

with it.

Catherine rose and began to put away the books they had been covering.

She had said almost nothing in answer to Rose’s tirade. When she was

ready she came and stood beside her sister a moment, her lips trembling.

At last she stooped and kissed the girl--the kiss of deep, suppressed

feeling--and went away. Rose made no response.

Unmusical as she was, Catherine pined for her sister’s music

that evening. Robert was busy in his study, and the hours seemed

interminable. After a little difficult talk Langham subsided into a book

and a corner. But the only words of which he was conscious for long were

the words of an inner dialogue. ‘I promised to play for her.--Go and

offer then!--Madness! let me keep away from her. If she asks me, of

course I will go.--She is much too proud, and already she thinks me

guilty of a rudeness.’

Then, with a shrug, he would fall to his book again, abominably

conscious, however, all the while of the white figure between the lamp

and the open window, and of the delicate head and cheek lit up against

the trees and the soft August dark.

When the time came to go to bed he got their candles for the two ladies.

Rose just touched his hand with cool fingers.

‘Good night, Mr. Langham. You are going in to smoke with Robert, I

suppose?’

Her bright eyes seemed to look him through. Their mocking hostility

seemed to say to him, as plainly as possible: ‘Your purgatory is

over--go, smoke and be happy!’

‘I will go and help him wind up his sermon,’ he said, with an attempt at

a laugh, and moved away.

Rose went upstairs, and it seemed to her that a Greek brow, and a pair

of wavering, melancholy eyes went before her in the darkness chased

along the passages by the light she held. She gained her room, and stood

by the window, seized again by that stifling sense of catastrophe, so

strange, so undefined. Then she shook it off with an angry laugh, and

went to work to see how far her stock of light dresses had suffered by

her London dissipations.

CHAPTER XVI.

The next morning after breakfast the Rectory party were in the garden;

the gentlemen smoking, Catherine and her sister scrolling arm in arm

among the flowers. Catherine’s vague terrors of the morning before

had all taken to themselves wings. It seemed to her that Rose and Mr.

Langham had hardly spoken to each other since she had seen them walking

about together. Robert had already made merry over his own alarms, and

hers, and she admitted he was in the right. As to her talk with Rose,

her deep meditative nature was slowly working upon and digesting it.

Meanwhile, she was all tenderness to her sister, and there was even a

reaction of pity in her heart toward the lonely sceptic who had once

been so good to Robert.

Robert was just bethinking himself that it was time to go off to the

school, when they were all startled by an unexpected visitor--a short

old lady, in a rusty black dress and bonnet, who entered the drive and

stood staring at the Rectory party, a tiny hand in a black thread glove

shading the sun from a pair of wrinkled eyes.

‘Mrs. Darcy!’ exclaimed Robert to his Wife after a moment’s perplexity,

and they walked quickly to meet her.

Rose and Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the others joined

them, and then for a while the attention of everybody in the group was

held by the Squire’s sister. She was very small, as thin and light as

thistledown, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling child. The

face and all the features were extraordinarily minute, and moreover,

blanched and etherealized by age. She had the elfish look of a little

withered fairy godmother. And yet through it all it was clear that she

was a great lady. There were certain poses and gestures about her, which

made her thread gloves and rusty skirts seem a mere whim and masquerade,

adopted, perhaps deliberately, from a high-bred love of congruity, to

suit the country lanes.

She had come to ask them all to dinner at the Hall on the following

evening, and she either brought or devised on the spot the politest

messages from the Squire to the new Rector, which pleased the sensitive

Robert and silenced for the moment his various misgivings as to Mr.

Wendover’s advent. Then she stayed chattering, studying Rose every now

and then out of her strange little eyes, restless and glancing as a

bird’s, which took stock also of the garden, of the flower-beds,

of Elsmere’s lanky frame, and of Elsmere’s handsome friend in the

background. She was most odd when she was grateful, and she was grateful

for the most unexpected things. She thanked Elsmere effusively for

coming to live there, ‘sacrificing yourself so nobly to us country

folk,’ and she thanked him with an appreciative glance at Langham,

for having his clever friends to stay with him. ‘The Squire will be

so pleased. My brother, you know, is very clever; oh yes, frightfully

clever!’

And then there was a long sigh, at which Elsmere cold hardly keep his

countenance.

She thought it particularly considerate of them to have been to see the

Squire’s books. It would make conversation so easy when they came to

dinner.

‘Though I don’t know anything about his books. He doesn’t like women

to talk about books. He says they only pretend--even the clever ones.

Except, of course, Madame de Staël. He can only say she was ugly, and

I don’t deny it. But I have about used up Madame de Staël,’ she added,

dropping into another sigh as soft and light as a child’s.

Robert was charmed with her, and even Langham smiled. And as Mrs. Darcy

adored ‘clever men,’ ranking them, as the London of her youth had ranked

them, only second to ‘persons of birth,’ she stood among them beaming,

becoming more and more whimsical and inconsequent, more and more

deliciously incalculable, as she expanded. At last she fluttered off,

only, however, to come hurrying back with little, short, scudding steps,

to implore them all to come to tea with her as soon as possible in the

garden that was her special hobby, and in her last new summerhouse.

‘I build two or three every summer,’ she said. ‘Now, there are

twenty-one! Roger laughs at me,’ and there was a momentary bitterness

in the little eerie face, ‘but how can one live without hobbies? That’s

one--then I’ve two more. My album--oh, you _will_ all write in my album,

won’t you? When I was young--when I was Maid of Honor’--and she drew

herself up slightly--‘everybody had albums. Even the dear Queen herself!

I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it; something quite stupid,

after all. _Those_ hobbies--the garden and the album--are _quite_

harmless, aren’t they? They hurt nobody, do they?’ Her voice dropped,

a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in it, as of one

accustomed to be rebuked.

‘Let me remind you of a saying of Bacon’s,’ said Langham, studying her,

and softened perforce into benevolence.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs. Darcy in a flutter of curiosity.

‘God Almighty first planted a garden,’ he quoted; ‘and, indeed, it is

the purest of all human pleasures.’

‘Oh, but how _delightful!_’ cried Mrs. Darcy, clasping her diminutive

hands in their thread gloves. ‘You must write that in my album, Mr.

Langham, that very sentence; oh, how _clever_ of you to remember it!

What it is to be clever and have a brain! But, then--I’ve another

hobby--’

Here, however, she stopped, hung her head and looked depressed. Robert,

with a little ripple of laughter, begged her to explain.

‘No,’ she said plaintively, giving a quick uneasy look at him, as

though it occurred to her that it might some day be his pastoral duty to

admonish her. ‘No, it’s wrong. I know it is--only I can’t help it. Never

mind. You’ll know soon.’

And again she turned away, when, suddenly, Rose attracted her attention,

and she stretched out a thin, white, bird-claw of a hand and caught the

girl’s arm.

‘There won’t be much to amuse you to-morrow, my dear--and there ought to

be--you’re so pretty!’ Rose blushed furiously and tried to draw her hand

away. ‘No, no! don’t mind, don’t mind. I didn’t at your age. Well, we’ll

do our best. But your own party is so _charming!_’ and she looked round

the little circle, her gaze stopping specially at Langham before it

returned to Rose. ‘After all, you will amuse each other.’

Was there any malice in the tiny withered creature? Rose, unsympathetic

and indifferent as youth commonly is when its own affairs absorb it,

had stood coldly outside the group which was making much of the Squire’s

sister. Was it so the strange little visitor revenged herself?

At any rate Rose was left feeling as if someone had pricked her. While

Catherine and Elsmere escorted Mrs. Darcy to the gate she turned to go

in, her head thrown back staglike, her cheek still burning. Why should

it be always open to the old to annoy the young with impunity?

Langham watched her mount the first step or two; his eye travelled up

the slim figure so instinct with pride and will--and something in him

suddenly gave way. It was like a man who feels his grip relaxing on some

attacking thing he has been heading by the throat.

He followed her hastily.

‘Must you go in? And none of us have paid our respects yet to those

phloxes in the back garden?’

Oh woman--flighty woman! An instant before, the girl, sore and bruised

in every fibre, she only half knew why, was thirsting that this man

might somehow offer her his neck that she might trample on it. He offers

it and the angry instinct wavers, as a man wavers in a wrestling match

when his opponent unexpectedly gives ground. She paused, she turned her

white throat. His eyes upturned met hers.

‘The phloxes did you say?’ she asked, coolly redescending the steps.

‘Then round here, please.’

She led the way, he followed, conscious of an utter relaxation of nerve

and will which for the moment had something intoxicating in it.

‘There are your phloxes,’ she said, stopping before a splendid line of

plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again; her spirits

rose at a bound. ‘I don’t know why you admire them so much. They have no

scent and they are only pretty in the lump’--and she broke off a spike

of blossom, studied it a little disdainfully, and threw it away.

He stood beside her, the southern glow and life of which it was

intermittently capable once more lighting up the strange face.

‘Give me leave to enjoy everything countrified more than usual,’ he

said. ‘After this morning it will be so long before I see the true

country again.’

He looked, smiling, round on the blue and white brilliance of the sky,

clear again after a night of rain; on the sloping garden, on the village

beyond, on the hedge of sweet peas close beside them, with its blooms.

on tiptoe for a flight,

With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white.

‘Oh! Oxford is countrified enough,’ she said, indifferently, moving down

the broad grass-path which divided the garden into two equal portions.

‘But I am leaving Oxford, at any rate for a year,’ he said quietly. ‘I

am going to London.’

Her delicate eyebrows went up. ‘To London?’ Then, in a tone of mock

meekness and sympathy: ‘How you will dislike it!’

‘Dislike It-why?’

‘Oh! Because--’ she hesitated, and then laughed her daring girlish

laugh, ‘because there are so many stupid people in London; the clever

people are not all picked out like prize apples, as I suppose they are

in Oxford.’

‘At Oxford?’ repeated Langham, with a kind of groan. At Oxford? You

imagine that Oxford is inhabited only by clever people?’

‘I can only judge by what I see,’ she said demurely. ‘Every Oxford man

always behaves as if he were the cream of the universe. Oh! I don’t mean

to be rude,’ she cried, losing for a moment her defiant control over

herself, as though afraid of having gone too far. ‘I am not the least

disrespectful, really. When you and Robert talk, Catherine and I feel

quite as humble as we ought.’

The words wore hardly out before she could have bitten the tongue that

spoke them. He had made her feel her indiscretions of Sunday night as

she deserved to feel them, and now after three minutes’ conversation she

was on the verge of fresh ones. Would she never grow up, never behave

like other girls? That word _humble!_ It seemed to burn her memory.

Before he could possibly answer she barred the way by a question as

short and dry as possible,--

What are you going to London for?’

‘For many reasons,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I have told no

one yet--not even Elsmere. And indeed I go back to my rooms for a while

from here. But as soon as Term begins, I become a Londoner.’

They had reached the gate at the bottom of the garden, and were leaning

against it. She was disturbed, conscious, lightly flushed. It struck her

as another _gaucherie_ on her part that she should have questioned him

as to his plans. What did his life matter to her?

He was looking away from her, studying the half-ruined, degraded Manor

House spread out below them. Then suddenly he turned,--

If I could imagine for a moment it would interest you to hear my reasons

for leaving Oxford, I could not flatter myself you would see any sense

in them. I _know_ that Robert will think them moonshine; nay, more, that

they will give him pain.’

He smiled sadly. The tone of gentleness, the sudden breach in the man’s

melancholy reserve affected the girl beside him for the second time,

precisely as they had affected her the first time. The result of

twenty-four hours’ resentful meditation turned out to be precisely

_nil_. Her breath came fast, her proud look melted, and his quick sense

caught the change in an instant.

‘Are you tired of Oxford?’ the poor child asked him, almost shyly.

‘Mortally!’ he said, still smiling. ‘And what is more important still,

Oxford is tired of me. I have been lecturing there for ten years. They

have had more than enough of me.’

‘Oh! but Robert said’--began Rose impetuously, then stopped, crimson,

remembering many things Robert had said.

‘That I helped him over a few stiles?’ returned Langham calmly. ‘Yes,

there was a time when I was capable of that--there was a time when

I could teach, and teach with pleasure.’ He paused. Rose could have

scourged herself for the tremor she felt creeping over her. Why should

it be to her so new and strange a thing that a _man_, especially a man

of these years and this calibre, should confide in her, should speak to

her intimately of himself? After all she said to herself angrily, with

a terrified sense of importance, she was a child no longer, though her

mother and sisters would treat her as one. ‘When we were chatting the

other night,’ he went on, turning to her again as he stood leaning on

the gate, ‘do you know what it was struck me most?’

His tone had in it the most delicate, the most friendly deference. But

Rose flushed furiously.

‘That girls are very ready to talk about themselves, I imagine,’ she

said scornfully.

‘Not at all! Not for a moment! No, but it seemed to me so pathetic, so

strange that anybody should wish for anything so much as you wished for

the musician’s life.’

‘And you never wish for anything?’ she cried.