‘When Elsmere was at college,’ he said, smiling, ‘I believe I wished

he should get a First, Class. This year I have certainly wished to say

good-by to St. Anselm’s, and to turn my back for good and all on my men.

I can’t remember that I have wished for anything else for six years.’

She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely languid, or was it

from him that the emotion she felt invading herself first started? She

tried to shake it off.

‘And _I_ am just a bundle of wants,’ she said, half-mockingly.

‘Generally speaking, I am in the condition of being ready to barter

all I have for some folly or other--one in the morning another in the

afternoon. What have you to say to such people, Mr. Langham?

Her eyes challenged him magnificently, mostly out of sheer nervousness.

But the face they rested on seemed suddenly to turn to stone before her.

The life died out of it. It grew still and rigid.

‘Nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘Between them and me there is a great

gulf fixed. I watch them pass, and I say to myself: “There are _the

living_--that is how they look, how they speak! Realize once for all

that you have nothing to do with them. Life is theirs--belongs to

_them_. You are already outside it. Go your way, and be a spectre among

the active and the happy no longer.”’

He leant his back against the gate. Did he see her? Was he conscious of

her at all in this rare impulse of speech which had suddenly overtaken

one of the most withdrawn and silent of human beings? All her airs

dropped off her; a kind of fright seized her; and involuntarily she laid

her hand on his arm.

‘Don’t--don’t--Mr. Langham! Oh, don’t say such things! Why should you be

so unhappy? Why should you talk so? Can no one do anything? Why do you

live so much alone? Is there no one you care about?’

He turned. What a vision! His artistic sense absorbed it in an

instant--the beautiful tremulous lip, the drawn white brow. For a moment

he drank in the pity, the emotion of those eyes. Then a movement of such

self-scorn as even he had never felt swept through him. He gently moved

away; her hand dropped.

‘Miss Leyburn,’ he said, gazing at her, his olive face singularly pale,

‘don’t waste your pity on me, for Heaven’s sake. Some madness made me

behave as I did just now. Years ago the same sort of idiocy betrayed me

to your brother; never before or since. I ask your pardon, humbly,’ and

his tone seemed to scorch her, ‘that this second fit of ranting should

have seized me in your presence.’

But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone too far. He

stopped and looked at her--piteously, the features quivering. It was

as though the man’s whole nature had for the moment broken up, become

disorganized. She could not bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to

have been laid bare to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he

caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary

scene--to both a kind of lifetime.

Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort.

‘That was _adorable_ of you,’ he said with a long breath. ‘But I stole

it--I despise myself. Why should you pity me? What is there to pity me

for? My troubles, such as I have, are my own making--every one.’

And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The tears of

excitement were in her eyes.

‘Won’t you let me be your friend?’ she said, trembling, with a kind of

reproach. ‘I thought--the other night--we were to be friends. Won’t you

tell me--’

‘--more of yourself?’ her eyes said, but her voice failed her. And

as for him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circumstance, of

individual character, seemed to drop from her. He forgot the difference

of years; he saw her no longer as she was--a girl hardly out of the

schoolroom, vain, ambitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude

romantic sense he was wantonly playing; she was to him pure beauty, pure

woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold, critical instinct which

had been for years draining his life of all its natural energies was

powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never been sweet

before.

So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, of his

cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of happiness and

success at college, of his first attempts to make himself a power among

younger men, of the gradual dismal failure of all his efforts, the dying

down of desire and ambition. From the general narrative there stood

out little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut

and masterly--of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his

Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a

special snare of Satan, and who since her husband’s death had refused to

see her son on the ground that his opinions ‘had vexed his father;’ of

his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate

it; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an

undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine

heights, of something cold, impotent, and baffling in himself, which

was to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human

affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the

axe to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after

friendship--which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a

skeleton at the feast; and the persistence through it all of a kind of

hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and

more powerless to satisfy: all those Langham put into words with an

extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was something in him

which found a kind of pleasure in the long analysis, which took pains

that it should be infinitely well done.

Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of literature she

would have realized that she was witnessing a masterly dissection of one

of those many morbid growths of which our nineteenth-century psychology

is full. But she was anything but literary, and she could not analyze

her excitement. The man’s physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity

of what he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect

her. And through it all there was the strange, girlish pride that this

should have befallen _her_; a first crude intoxicating sense of the

power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a desperate

anxiety to be equal to the occasion, to play her part well.

‘So you see,’ said Langham at last, with a great effort (to do him

justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of conversation; ‘all

these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the most unfit man in

the world for a college tutor. The undergraduates regard me as a

shilly-shallying pedant. On my part,’ he added dryly, ‘I am not slow

to retaliate. Every term I live I find the young man a less interesting

animal. I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham.

Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.’

And for one curious instant he looked out over the village, his

fastidious scholar’s soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of

which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent,

longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing what cue

to take.

‘And then--’ he went on presently (but was the strange being speaking to

her?)--‘so long as I stay there, worrying those about me, and eating my

own heart out, I am out off from the only life that might be mine, that

I might find the strength to live.’

The words were low and deliberate. After his moment of passionate

speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began to feel strangely

remote from him.

‘Do you mean the life of the student?’ she asked him after a pause,

timidly.

Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her.

‘Of the dreamer, rather.’

And as her eyes still questioned, as he was still moved by the spell

of her responsiveness, he let the new wave of feeling break in words.

Vaguely at first, and then with a growing flame and force he fell to

describing to her what the life of thought may be to the thinker, and

those marvellous moments which belong to that life when the mind which

has divorced itself from desire and sense sees spread out before it the

vast realms of knowledge, and feels itself close to the secret springs

and sources of being. And as he spoke, his language took an ampler turn,

the element of smallness which attaches to all more personal complaint

vanished, his words flowed, became eloquent, inspired--till the

bewildered child beside him, warm through and through as she was with

youth and passion, felt for an instant by sheer fascinated sympathy the

cold spell, the ineffable prestige, of the thinker’s voluntary death in

life.

But only, for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill smote her to

the heart.

‘You make me shiver,’ she cried, interrupting him. ‘Have those strange

things--I don’t understand them--made you happy? Can they make

anyone happy? Oh no, no! Happiness is to be got from living, seeing,

experiencing, making friends, enjoying nature! Look at the world,

Mr. Langham!’ she, said with bright cheeks, half smiling at her own

magniloquence, her hand waving over the view before them. ‘What has it

done that you should hate it so? If you can’t put up with people you

might love nature. I--I can’t be content with nature, because I want

some life first. Up in Whindale there is too much nature, not enough

life. But if I had got through life--if it had disappointed me--then I

should love nature. I keep saying to the mountains at home: “Not _now_,

not _now_; I want something else, but afterward if I can’t get it, or if

I get too much of it, why then I will love you, live with you. You are

my second string, my reserve. You--and art--and poetry.”’

‘But everything depends on feeling,’ he said softly, but lightly, as

though to keep the conversation from slipping back into those vague

depths it had emerged from; ‘and if one has forgotten how to feel--if

when one sees or bears something beautiful that used to stir one, one

can only say “I remember it moved me once!”--if feeling dies, like life,

like physical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man?’

She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism.

‘Oh, I cannot imagine it!’ she cried. ‘I shall feel to my last hour.’

Then after a pause, in another tone, ‘But, Mr. Langham, you say music

excites you, Wagner excites you?’

‘Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,’ he

admitted, smiling.

‘Well, then,’ and she looked at him persuasively, ‘why not give yourself

up to music? It is so easy--so little trouble to oneself--it just takes

you and carries you away.’

Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious--probably through

these admonitions of hers--that the situation had absurdity in it.

‘It is not my _métier_,’ he said hastily. ‘The self that enjoys music

is an outer self, and can only bear with it for a short time. No, Miss

Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the college will sing a _Te Deum_, I

shall settle down in London, I shall keep a bit book going, and cheat

the years after all, I suppose, as well as most people.’

‘And you will know, you will remember,’ she said faltering, reddening,

her womanliness forcing the words out of her, ‘that you have friends:

Robert--my sister--all of us?’

He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their eyes met each

was struck once more with the personal beauty of the other. His eyes

shone--their black depths seemed all tenderness.

‘I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,’ he said

slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself swept

off her feet into a world of tragic mysterious emotion. She all but put

her hand into his again, asking him childishly to hope, to be consoled.

But the maidenly impulse restrained her, and once more he leant on the

gate, burying his face in his hands.

Suddenly he felt himself utterly tired, relaxed. Strong nervous reaction

set in. What had all this scene, this tragedy been about? And then in

another instant was that sense of the ridiculous again clamoring to be

heard. He--the man of thirty-five--confessing himself, making a tragic

scene, playing Manfred or Cain to this adorable, half-fledged creature,

whom he had known five days! Supposing Elsmere had been there to

hear--Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh! As he leant over the gate,

he found himself quivering with impatience to be away--by himself--out

of reach--the critic in him making the most bitter, remorseless mock of

all these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But

for the life of him he could not find a word to say--a move to make. He

stood hesitating, _gauche_, as usual.

‘Do you know, Mr. Langham,’ said Rose lightly, by his side, ‘that there

is no time at all left for _you_ to give _me_ good advice in? That is an

obligation still hanging over you. I don’t mean to release you from

it, but if I don’t go in now, and finish the covering of those library

books, the youth of Murewell will be left without any literature till

Heaven knows when!’

He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into common

mundanity.

‘Hang literature--hang the parish library!’ he said with a laugh as he

moved after her. Yet his real inner feeling toward that parish library

was one of infinite friendliness.

‘Hear these men of letters!’ she said scornfully. But she was happy;

there was a glow on her cheek.

A bramble caught her dress; she stopped and laid her white hand to it,

but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and between them they wrenched it

away, but not till those soft slim fingers had several times felt the

neighborhood of his brown ones, and till there had flown through and

through him once more, as she stooped over him, the consciousness

that she was young, that she was beautiful, that she had pitied him so

sweetly, that they were alone.

‘Rose!’

It was Catherine calling--Catherine, who stood at the end of the

grass-path, with eyes all indignation and alarm.

Langham rose quickly from the ground.

He felt as though the gods had saved him--or damned him--which?

CHAPTER XVII.

Murewell Rectory during the next forty-eight hours was the scene of much

that might have been of interest to a psychologist gifted with the power

of divining his neighbors.

In the first place Catherine’s terrors were all alive again. Robert

had never seen her so moved since those days of storm and stress before

their engagement.

‘I cannot bear it!’ she said to Robert at night in their room. ‘I cannot

bear it! I hear it always in my ears: “What hast thou done with thy

sister?” Oh, Robert, don’t mind, dear, though he is your friend. My

father would have shrunk from him with horror--_An alien from the

household of faith! An enemy to the Cross of Christ!_’

She flung out the words with low intense emphasis and frowning brow,

standing rigid by the window, her hands locked behind her. Robert stood

by her much perplexed, feeling himself a good deal of a culprit, but

inwardly conscious that he knew a great deal more about Langham than she

did.

‘My dear wife,’ he said to her, ‘I am certain Langham has no intention

of marrying.’

‘Then more shame for him,’ cried Catherine flushing, ‘They could not

have looked more conscious, Robert, when I found them together, if he

had just proposed.’

‘What, in five days?’ said Robert, more than half inclined to banter

his wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine made no answer. ‘I

believe with men of that sort,’ he said at last, ‘relations to women

are never more than half-real--always more or less literature--acting.

Langham is tasting experience, to be bottled up for future use.’

It need hardly be said, however, that Catherine got small consolation

out of this point of view. It seemed to her Robert did not take the

matter quite rightly.

‘After all, darling,’ he said at last, kissing her, ‘you can act dragon

splendidly; you have already--so can I. And you really cannot make me

believe in anything very tragic in a week.’

But Catherine was conscious that she had already played the dragon hard,

to very little purpose. In the forty hours that intervened between the

scene in the garden and the Squire’s dinner party, Robert was always

wanting to carry off Langham, Catherine was always asking Rose’s help

in some household business or other. In vain. Langham said to himself

calmly, this time, that Elsmere and his wife were making a foolish

mistake in supposing that his friendship with Miss Leyburn was anything

to be alarmed about, that they would soon be amply convinced of it

themselves, and meanwhile he should take his own way. And as for Rose,

they had no sooner turned back all three from the house to the garden,

than she had divined everything in Catherine’s mind, and set herself

against her sister with a wilful force in which many a past irritation

found expression.

How Catherine hated the music of that week! It seemed to her she never

opened the drawing-room door but she saw Langham at the piano, his head

with its crown of glossy, curling black hair, and his eyes lit with

unwonted gleams of laughter and sympathy, turned toward Rose, who was

either chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional,

or taking off the ways of some famous teacher; or else, which was worse,

playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound--now as soft

and delicate as first love, now as full and grand as storm waves on an

angry coast. And the sister going with compressed lip to her work-table

would recognize sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and

never had the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her.

As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene in the

garden he had rated, satirized, examined himself in the most approved

introspective style. One half of him declared that scene to have been

the height of melodramatic absurdity; the other thought of it with a

thrill of tender gratitude toward the young pitiful creature who had

evoked it. After all, why, because he was alone in the world and must

remain so, should he feel bound to refuse this one gift of the gods, the

delicate, passing gift of a girl’s--a child’s friendship? As for her,

the man’s very real, though wholly morbid, modesty scouted the notion of

love on her side. _He_ was a likely person for a beauty on the threshold

of life and success to fall in love with; but she meant to be kind to

him, and he smiled a little inward indulgent smile over her very evident

compassion, her very evident intention of reforming him, reconciling him

to life. And, finally, he was incapable of any further resistance. He

had gone too far with her. Let her do what she would with him, dear

child, with the sharp tongue and the soft heart, and the touch of genius

and brilliancy which made her future so interesting! He called his age

and his disillusions to the rescue; he posed to himself as stooping to

her in some sort of elder-brotherly fashion: and if every now and then

some disturbing memory of that strange scene between them would come

to make his present _rôle_ less plausible, or some whim of hers made it

difficult to play, why then at bottom there was always the consciousness

that sixty hours, or thereabouts, would see him safely settled in that

morning train to London. Throughout it is probable that that morning

train occupied the saving background of his thoughts.

The two days passed by, and the Squire’s dinner-party arrived. About

seven on the Thursday evening a party of four might have been seen

hurrying across the park--Langham and Catherine in front, Elsmere and

Rose behind. Catherine had arranged it so, and Langham, who understood

perfectly that his friendship with her young sister was not at all to

Mrs. Elsmere’s taste, and who had by now taken as much of a dislike to

her as his nature was capable of, was certainly doing nothing to make

his walk with her otherwise than difficult. And every now and then some

languid epigram would bring Catherine’s eyes on him with a fiery gleam

in their gray depths. Oh, fourteen more hours and she would have shut

the Rectory gate on this most unwelcome of intruders! She had never,

felt so vindictively anxious to see the last of anyone in her life.

There was in her a vehemence of antagonism to the man’s manner, his

pessimism, his infidelity, his very ways of speaking and looking, which

astonished even herself.

Robert’s eager soul meanwhile, for once irresponsive to Catherine’s, was

full of nothing but the Squire. At last the moment was come, and that

dumb spiritual friendship he had formed through these long months with

the philosopher and the _savant_ was to be tested by sight and speech of

the man. He bade himself a hundred times pitch his expectations low. But

curiosity and hope were keen, in spite of everything.

Ah, those parish worries! Robert caught the smoke of Mile End in

the distance, curling above the twilight woods, and laid about him

vigorously with his stick on the Squire’s shrubs, as he thought of those

poisonous hovels, those ruined lives! But, after all, it might be mere

ignorance, and that wretch Henslowe might have been merely trading on

his master’s morbid love of solitude.

And then--all men have their natural conceits. Robert Elsmere would not

have been the very human creature he was if, half-consciously, he had

not counted a good deal on his own powers of influence. Life had been to

him so far one long social success of the best kind. Very likely, as he

walked on to the great house over whose threshold lay the answer to the

enigma of months, his mind gradually filled with some naïve young

dream of winning the Squire, playing him with all sorts of honest arts,

beguiling him back to life--to his kind.

Those friendly messages of his through Mrs. Darcy had been very

pleasant.

‘I wonder whether my Oxford friends have been doing me a good turn

with the Squire,’ he said to Rose, laughing. ‘He knows the Provost, of

course. If they talked me over it is to be hoped my scholarship didn’t

come up. Precious little the Provost used to think of my abilities for

Greek prose!’

Rose yawned a little behind her gloved hand. Robert had already talked a

good deal about the Squire, and he was certainly the only person in

the group who was thinking of him. Even Catherine, absorbed in other

anxieties, had forgotten to feel any thrill at their approaching

introduction to the man who must of necessity mean so much to herself

and Robert.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere,’ said the butler, throwing open the carved

and gilded doors.

Catherine following her husband, her fine grave head and beautiful neck

held a little more erect than usual--was at first conscious of nothing

but the dazzle of western light which flooded the room, striking the

stands of Japanese lilies, and the white figure of a clown in the famous

Watteau opposite the window.

Then she found herself greeted by Mrs. Darcy, whose odd habit of holding

her lace handkerchief in her right hand on festive occasions only left

her two fingers for her guests. The mistress of the Hall--as diminutive

and elf-like as ever in spite of the added dignity of her sweeping

silk and the draperies of black lace with which her tiny head was

adorned--kept tight hold of Catherine, and called a gentleman standing

in a group just behind her.

‘Roger, here are Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere. Mr. Elsmere, the Squire

remembers you in petticoats, and I’m not sure that I don’t, too.’

Robert, smiling, looked beyond her to the advancing figure of the

Squire, but if Mr. Wendover heard his sister’s remark he took no notice

of it. He held out his hand stiffly to Robert, bowed to Catherine

and Rose before extending to them the same formal greeting, and just

recognized Langham as having met him at Oxford.

Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with whom he had

been engaged on their entrance. His manner had been reserve itself. The

_hauteur_ of the grandee on his own ground was clearly marked in it, and

Robert could not help fancying that toward himself there had even

been something more. And not one of those phrases which, under the

circumstances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to Robert’s

childish connection with the place, or as to the Squire’s remembrance

of his father, even though Mrs. Darcy had given him a special opening of

the kind.

The young Rector instinctively drew himself together, like one who had

received a blow, as he moved across to the other side of the fireplace

to shake hands with the worthy family doctor, old Meyrick, who was

already well known to him. Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too

had felt their reception at the Squire’s hands to be a chilling one, sat

down to talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose

and Langham, left to themselves, were practically téte-à-téte, and that,

moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial screen between her

and them. She could see, however, the gleam of Rose’s upstretched neck,

as Langham, who was leaning on the piano beside her, bent down to

talk to her; and when she looked next she caught a smiling motion of

Langham’s head and eyes toward the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover’s

grandmother, and was certain when he stopped afterward to say something

to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness

there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture.

Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty.

The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the Squire--a

tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her

relationships, her audacity, and the salon which in one way or another

she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking

husband; two neighboring clerics--the first, by name Longstaffe, a

somewhat inferior specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked;

and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men who

help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to reconcile

the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries of living.

Lady Charlotte was already known by name to the Elsmeres as the aunt

of one of their chief friends of the neighborhood--the wife of a

neighboring squire whose property joined that of Murewell Hall, one Lady

Helen Varley, of whom more presently. Lady Charlotte was the sister of

the Duke of Sedbergh, one of the greatest of Dukes, and the sister also

of Lady Helen’s mother, lady Wanless. Lady Wanless had died prematurely,

and her two younger children, Helen and Hugh Flaxman, creatures both of

them of unusually fine and fiery quality, had owed a good deal to

their aunt. There were family alliances between the Sedberghs and

the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping up with the

Squire. She adored cynics and people who said piquant things, and it

amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the Squire’s timid,

crackbrained, ridiculous little sister.

As to Dr. Meyrick, he was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. His gray

hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed head; he wore an

old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had a perpetual stoop, as though

of deference, and his spectacled look of mild attentiveness had nothing

in common with that medical self-assurance with which we are all

nowadays so familiar. Robert noticed presently that when he addressed

Mrs. Darcy he said ‘Ma’am,’ making no bones at all about it; and his

manner generally was the manner of one to whom class distinctions were

the profoundest reality, and no burden at all on a naturally humble

temper. Dr. Baker, of Whindale, accustomed to trouncing Mrs. Seaton,

would have thought him a poor creature.

When dinner was announced, Robert found himself assigned to Mrs. Darcy;

the Squire took Lady Charlotte. Catherine fell to Mr. Bickerton, Rose

to Mr. Wynnstay, and the rest found their way in as best they could.

Catherine seeing the distribution was happy for a moment, till she found

that if Rose was covered on her right she was exposed to the full fire

of the enemy on her left, in other words that Langham was placed between

her and Dr. Meyrick.

‘Are your spirits damped at all by this magnificence?’ Langham said

to his neighbor as they sat down. The table was entirely covered with

Japanese lilies, save for the splendid silver candelabra from which the

light flashed, first on to the faces of the guests, and then on to those

of the family portraits hung thickly round the room. A roof embossed

with gilded Tudor roses on a ground of black oak hung above them; a

rose-water dish in which the Merry Monarch had once dipped his hands,

and which bore a record of the fact in the inscription on its sides,

stood before them; and the servants were distributing to each guest

silver soup-plates which had been the gift of Sarah Duchess of

Marlborough, in some moment of generosity or calculation, to the

Wendover of her day.

‘Oh dear no!’ said Rose carelessly. ‘I don’t know how it is, I think I

must have been born for a palace.’

Langham looked at her, at the daring harmony of color made by the

reddish gold of her hair, the warm whiteness of her skin, and the

brown-pink tints of her dress, at the crystals playing the part of

diamonds on her beautiful neck, and remembered Robert’s remarks to him.

The same irony mingled with the same bitterness returned to him, and the

elder brother’s attitude became once more temporarily difficult. ‘Who is

your neighbor?’ he inquired of her presently.

‘Lady Charlotte’s husband,’ she answered mischievously, under her

breath. ‘One needn’t know much more about him, I imagine!’

‘And that man opposite?’

‘Robert’s pet aversion,’ she said calmly, without a change of

countenance, so that Mr. Longstaffe opposite, who was studying her as he

always studied pretty young women, stared at her through her remark in

sublime ignorance of its bearing.

‘And your sister’s neighbor?’

‘I can’t hit him off in a sentence, he’s too good!’ said Rose laughing;

‘all I can say is that Mrs. Bickerton has too many children, and the

children have too many ailments for her ever to dine out.’

‘That will do; I see the existence,’ said Langham with a shrug. ‘But he

has the look of an apostle, though a rather hunted one. Probably nobody

here, except Robert, is fit to tie his shoes.’

The Squire could hardly be called _empressé_,’ said Rose, after a

second, with a curl of her red lips. Mr. Wynnstay was still safely

engaged with Mrs. Darcy, and there was a buzz of talk largely sustained

by Lady Charlotte.

‘No,’ Langham admitted; ‘the manners I thought were not quite equal to

the house.’

‘What possible reason could he have for treating Robert with those

airs?’ said Rose indignantly, ready enough, in girl fashion, to defend

her belongings against the outer world. ‘He ought to be only too glad to

have the opportunity of knowing him and making friends with him.’

‘You are a sister worth having;’ and Langham smiled at her as she leant

back in her chair, her white arms and wrists lying on her lap, and her

slightly flushed face turned toward him. They had been on these pleasant

terms of _camaraderie_ all day, and the intimacy between them had been

still making strides.

‘Do you imagine I don’t appreciate Robert because I make bad jokes about

the choir and the clothing club?’ she asked him, with a little quick

repentance passing like a shadow through her eyes. ‘I always feel I play

an odious part here. I can’t like it--I can’t--their life. I should hate

it! And yet--’

She sighed remorsefully and Langham, who five minutes before could have

wished her to be always smiling, could now have almost asked to fix

her as she was: the eyes veiled, the soft lips relaxed in this passing

instant of gravity.

‘Ah! I forgot--’ and she looked up again with light, bewitching

appeal--‘there is still that question, my poor little question of Sunday

night, when I was in that fine moral frame of mind and you were near

giving me, I believe, the only good advice you ever gave in your

life;--how shamefully you have treated it!’

One brilliant look, which Catherine for her torment caught from the

other side of the table, and then in an instant the quick face changed

and stiffened. Mr. Wynnstay was speaking to her, and Langham was left

to the intermittent mercies of Dr. Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was

also quite content, apparently, to judge from the radiant placidity of

his look, to examine his wine, study his _menu_, and enjoy the _entrées_

in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of conversation.

Robert, meanwhile, during the first few minutes, in which Mr. Wynnstay

had been engaged in some family talk with Mrs. Darcy, had been allowing

himself a little deliberate study of Mr. Wendover across what seemed

the safe distance of a long table. The Squire was talking shortly and

abruptly yet with occasional flashes of shrill, ungainly laughter, to

Lady Charlotte, who seemed to have no sort of fear of him and to

find him good company, and every now and then Robert saw him turn to

Catherine on the other side of him and with an obvious change of manner

address some formal and constrained remark to her.

Mr. Wendover was a man of middle height and loose, bony frame, of which,

as Robert had noticed in the drawing-room, all the lower half had a thin

and shrunken look. But the shoulders, which had the scholar’s stoop,

and the head were massive and squarely outlined. The head was specially

remarkable for its great breadth and comparative flatness above the

eyes, and for the way in which the head itself dwarfed the face, which,

as contrasted with the large angularity of the skull, had a pinched

and drawn look. The hair was reddish-gray, the eyes small, but deep-set

under fine brows, and the thin-lipped wrinkled mouth and long chin had a

look of hard, sarcastic strength.

Generally the countenance was that of an old man, the furrows were deep,

the skin brown and shrivelled. But the alertness and force of the man’s

whole expression showed that, if the body was beginning to fail, the

mind was as fresh and masterful as ever. His hair, worn rather longer

than usual, his loosely-fitting dress and slouching carriage gave him

an un-English look. In general he impressed Robert as a sort of curious

combination of the foreign _savant_ with the English grandee, for while

his manner showed a considerable consciousness of birth and social

importance, the gulf between him and the ordinary English country

gentleman could hardly have been greater, whether in points of

appearance or, as Robert very well knew, in points of social conduct.

And as Robert watched him, his thoughts flew back again to the library,

to this man’s past, to all that those eyes had seen and those hands

had touched. He felt already a mysterious, almost a yearning, sense

of acquaintance with the being who had just received him with such

chilling, such unexpected indifference.

The Squire’s manners; no doubt, were notorious, but even so, his

reception of the new Rector of the parish, the son of a man intimately

connected for years with the place, and with his father, and to whom he

had himself shown what was for him considerable civility by letter and

message, was sufficiently startling.

Robert, however, had no time to speculate on the causes of it, for Mrs.

Darcy, released from Mr. Wynnstay, threw herself with glee on to her

longed-for prey, the young and interesting-looking Rector. First of all

she cross-examined him as to his literary employments, and when by dint

of much questioning she had forced particulars from him, Robert’s mouth

twitched as he watched her scuttling away from the subject, seized

evidently with internal terrors lest she should have precipitated

herself beyond hope of rescue into the jaws of the sixth century. Then

with a view to regaining the lead and opening another and more promising

vein, she asked him his opinion of Lady Selden’s last novel, ‘Love in

a Marsh;’ and when he confessed ignorance she paused a moment, fork

in hand, her small wrinkled face looking almost as bewildered as when,

three minutes before, her rashness had well-nigh brought her face to

face with Gregory of Tours as a topic of conversation.

But she was not daunted long. With little air and bridlings infinitely

diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most beguiling confidence. She

could appreciate ‘clever men,’ she said, for she--she too--was literary.

Did Mr. Elsmere know--this in a hurried whisper, with sidelong glances

to see that Mr. Wynnstay was safely occupied with Rose, and the Squire

with Lady Charlotte--that she had once _written a novel_?

Robert, who had been posted up in many things concerning the

neighborhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most truly that he had.

Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over.

‘Ah! but you haven’t read it,’ she said regretfully. ‘It was when I

was Maid of Honor, you know. No Maid of Honor had ever written a novel

before. It was quite an event. Dear Prince Albert borrowed a copy of

me one night to read in bed--I have it still, with the page turned down

where he left-off.’ She hesitated. ‘It was only in the second chapter,’

she said at last with a fine truthfulness, ‘but you know he was so busy,

all the Queen’s work to do, of course, besides his own--poor man!’

Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, with blushes

which made her more weird than ever, consented.

Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between Lady

Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as grateful for his

attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white nobody, at a country

dinner-party ought to be, and was glad of the diversion afforded him by

some aggressive remark of his wife. He and she differed on three main

points: politics; the decoration of their London house, Sir. Wynnstay

being a lover of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris;

and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte in the

pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the domestic

hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a name for any sort

of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity; and the

company in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seriously

soured a small irritable Conservative with more family pride than either

nerves or digestion.

During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched Elsmere,

cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burning within her, and

as soon as there was once more a general burst of talk, she pounced upon

him afresh. Would he like to know that after thirty years she had just

finished her _second_ novel, unbeknown to her brother--as she mentioned

him the little face darkened, took a strange bitterness--and it was just

about to be entrusted to the post and a publisher?

Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. Mrs. Darcy

expanded still more--could, in fact, have hugged him. But, just as

she was launching into the plot a thought, apparently a scruple of

conscience, struck her.

‘Do you remember,’ she began, looking at him a little darkly, askance,

‘what I said about my hobbies the other day? Now, Mr. Elsmere, will you

tell me--don’t mind me--don’t be polite--have you ever heard people

tell stories of me? Have you ever, for instance, heard them call me

a--a--tuft-hunter?’

‘Never! ‘said Robert heartily.

‘They might,’ she said sighing. ‘I am a tuft-hunter. I can’t help it.

And yet we _are_ a good family, you know. I suppose it was that year

at Court, and that horrid Warham afterward. Twenty years in a cathedral

town--and a very _little_ cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham

Palace, and dear Lord Melbourne! Every year I came up to town to stay

with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn’t been for

that I should have died--my husband knew I should. It was the world, the

flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn’t be helped. But now,’

and she looked plaintively at her companion, as though challenging him

to a candid reply: ‘You _would_ be more interesting, wouldn’t you, to

tell the truth, if you had a handle to your name?’

‘Immeasurably,’ cried Robert, stifling his laughter with immense

difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh.

‘Well, yes, you know. But it isn’t right;’ and again she sighed. ‘And so

I have been writing this novel just for that. It is called--what do

you think?--“Mr. Jones.” Mr. Jones is my hero--it’s so good for me, you

know, to think about a Mr. Jones.’

She looked beamingly at him. ‘It must be indeed! Have you endowed him

with every virtue?’

‘Oh yes, and in the end, you know--’ and she bent forward eagerly--‘it

all comes right. His father didn’t die in Brazil without children after

all, and the title--’

‘What,’ cried Robert, ‘so he _wasn’t_ Mr. Jones?’

Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious.

‘Well, no,’ she said guiltily, ‘not just at the end. But it really

doesn’t matter--not to the story.’

Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory as he could

make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But

just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed

to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their

little private eddy was effaced. The Squire had been telling an

anecdote, and his clerical neighbors had been laughing at it.

‘Ah!’ cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a

chuckle, ‘that was an Archbishop worth having!’

‘A curious story,’ said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it,

however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed

to Robert that the Squire’s keen eye, as he sat looking down the table,

with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed

upon himself.

‘May we hear the story?’ he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly

smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and

moved out of her ordinary quiet.

‘It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,’ said Mr. Wendover, in

his dry, nasal voice. ‘You probably know it, Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop

Heber’s consecration to the see of Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop

to make a valedictory speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth

which followed the ceremony. “I have very little advice to give you

as to your future career,” he said to the young Bishop, “but all that

experience has given me I hand on to you. Place before your eyes

two precepts, and two only. One is--Preach the Gospel; and the other

is--_Put down enthusiasm!_“’

There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the Squire’s look as he

told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Robert. Robert divined

in a moment that the story had been retold for his special benefit, and

that in some unexplained way, the relations between him and the Squire

were already biased. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and

falling back into his place made no comment on the Squire’s anecdote.

Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the

distant figure of the Rector, with regard to whom she had been asking

Dr. Meyrick for particulars quite unmindful of Catherine’s neighborhood,

turned back again toward the Squire.

‘An unblushing old worldling, I should call your Archbishop,’ she said

briskly, ‘and a very good thing for him that he lived when he did. Our

modern good people would have dusted his apron for him.’

Lady Charlotte prided herself on these vigorous forms of speech, and the

Squire’s neighborhood generally called out an unusual crop of them. The

Squire was still sitting with his hands on the table, his great brows

bent, surveying his guests.

‘Oh, of course all the sensible men are dead!’ he said indifferently.

‘But that is a pet saying of mine--the Church of England in a nutshell.’

Robert flushed, and after a moment’s hesitation bent forward.

‘What do you suppose,’ he asked quietly, your Archbishop meant, Mr.

Wendover, by enthusiasm? Nonconformity, I imagine.’

‘Oh, very possibly!’ and again Robert found the hawk-like glance

concentrated on himself. ‘But I like to give his remark a much wider

extension. One may make it a maxim of general experience, and take it as

fitting all the fools with a mission who have teased our generation--all

your Kingsleys, and Maurices, and Ruskins--everyone bent on making any

sort of aimless commotion, which may serve him both as an investment for

the next world and an advertisement for this.’

‘Upon my word, Squire,’ said Lady Charlotte, ‘I hope you don’t expect

Mr. Elsmere to agree with you?’

Mr. Wendover made her a little bow.

‘I have very little sanguineness of any sort in my composition,’ he said

dryly.

‘I should like to know,’ said Robert, taking no notice of this by-play;

‘I should like to know, Mr. Wendover, leaving the Archbishop out of

count, what _you_ understand by this word enthusiasm in this maxim of

yours?’

‘An excellent manner,’ thought Lady Charlotte, who with all her

noisiness, was an extremely shrewd woman, ‘an excellent manner and an

unprovoked attack.’

Catherine’s trained eye, however, had detected signs in Robert’s look

and bearing which were lost on Lady Charlotte, and which made her

look nervously on. As to the rest of the table, they had all fallen to

watching the ‘break’ between the new Rector and their host with a good

deal of curiosity.

The Squire paused a moment before replying.

‘It is not easy to put it tersely,’ he said at last; ‘but I may define

it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of your right-hand

neighbor with straw torn off the roof of your left-hand neighbor; the

custom, in short, of robbing Peter to propitiate Paul.’

‘Precisely,’ said Mr. Wynnstay, warmly; ‘all the ridiculous Radical

nostrums of the last fifty years--you have hit them off exactly.

Sometimes you rob more and propitiate less; sometimes you rob less and

propitiate more. But the principle is always the same.’ And mindful of

all those intolerable evenings, when these same Radical nostrums had

been forced down his throat at his own table he threw a pugnacious look

at his wife, who smiled back serenely in reply. There is small redress

indeed for these things, when out of the common household stock the wife

possesses most of the money, and a vast proportion of the brains.

‘And the cynic takes pleasure in observing,’ interrupted the Squire,

‘that the man who effects the change of balance does it in the loftiest

manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. Other trades may fail. The

agitator is always sure of his market.’

He spoke with a harsh contemptuous insistence which was gradually

setting every nerve in Robert’s body tingling. He bent forward again,

his long, thin frame and boyish, bright complexioned face making an

effective contrast to the Squire’s bronzed and wrinkled squareness.

‘Oh, if you and Mr. Wynnstay are prepared to draw an indictment against

your generation and all its works I have no more to say,’ he said,

smiling still, though his voice had risen a little in spite of himself.

‘I should be content to withdraw with my Burke into the majority. I

imagined your attack on enthusiasm had a narrower scope, but if it is

to be made synonymous with social progress I give up. The subject is too

big. Only----’

He hesitated. Mr. Wynnstay was studying him with somewhat insolent

coolness; Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass never wavered from his face, and

he felt through every fibre the tender, timid admonitions of his wife’s

eyes.

‘However,’ he went on after an instant, ‘I imagine that we should

find it difficult anyhow to discover common ground. I regard your

Archbishop’s maxim, Mr. Wendover,’ and his tone quickened and grew

louder, ‘as first of all a contradiction in terms; and in the next

place, to me, almost all enthusiasms are respectable!’

‘You are one of those people, I see,’ returned Mr. Wendover, after a

pause, with the same nasal emphasis and the same hauteur, ‘who

imagine we owe civilization to the heart; that mankind has _felt_ its

way--literally. The school of the majority, of course--I admit it amply.

I, on the other hand, am with the benighted minority who believe that

the world, so far as it has lived to any purpose, has lived by the

head,’ and he flung, the noun at Robert scornfully. ‘But I am quite

aware that in a world of claptrap the philosopher gets all the

kicks, and the philanthropists, to give them their own label, all the

halfpence.’

The impassive tone had gradually warmed to a heat which was

unmistakable. Lady Charlotte looked on with interesting relish. To her

all society was a comedy played for her entertainment, and she detected

something more dramatic than usual in the juxtaposition of these two

men. That young Rector might be worth looking after. The dinners in

Martin Street were alarming in want of fresh blood. As for poor Mr.

Bickerton, he had begun to talk hastily to Catherine, with a sense of

something tumbling about his ears, while Mr. Longstaffe, eyeglass

in hand, surveyed the table with a distinct sense of pleasurable

entertainment. He had not seen much of Elsmere yet, but it was as clear

as daylight that the man was a firebrand, and should be kept in order.

Meanwhile there was a pause between the two main disputants; the

storm-clouds were deepening outside, and rain had begun to patter on the

windows. Mrs. Darcy was just calling attention to the weather, when the

Squire unexpectedly returned to the charge.

‘The one necessary thing in life,’ he said, turning to Lady Charlotte,

a slight irritating smile playing round his strong mouth, ‘is--not to be

duped. Put too much faith in these things the altruists talk of, and

you arrive one day at the condition of Louis XIV. after the battle of

Ramillies: “Dieu a donc oublié tout ce que j’ai fait pour lui?” Read

your Renan; remind yourself at every turn that it is quite possible

after all the egotist may turn out to be in the right of it, and you

will find at any rate that the world gets on excellently well without

your blundering efforts to set it straight. And so we get back to the

Archbishop’s maxim--adapted, no doubt, to English requirements,’ and

he shrugged his great shoulders expressively: ‘_Pace_ Mr. Elsmere, of

course, and the rest of our clerical friends!’

Again he looked down the table, and the strident voice sounded harsher

than ever as it rose above the sudden noise of the storm outside.

Robert’s bright eyes were fixed on the Squire, and before Mr. Wendover

stopped, Catherine could see the words of reply trembling on his lips.

‘I am well content,’ he said, with a curious dry intensity of tone. ‘I

give you your Renan. Only leave us poor dupes our illusions. We will not

quarrel with the division. With you all the cynics of History; with us

all the “scorners of the ground” from the world’s beginning until now!’

The Squire made a quick, impatient movement. Mr. Wynnstay looked

significantly at his wife, who dropped her eyeglass with a little

irrepressible smile.

As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it seemed to him

that his eyes and the Squire’s crossed like swords. In Robert’s mind

there had arisen a sudden passion of antagonism. Before his eyes there

was a vision of a child in a stifling room, struggling with mortal

disease, imposed upon her, as he hotly reminded himself, by this man’s

culpable neglect. The dinner-party, the splendor of the room, the

conversation, excited a kind of disgust in him. If it were not for

Catherine’s pale face opposite, he could hardly have maintained his

self-control.

Mrs. Darcy, a little bewildered, and feeling that things were not going

particularly well, thought it best to interfere.

‘Roger,’ she said, plaintively, ‘you must not be so philosophical. It’s

too hot! He used to talk like that,’ she went on, bending over to Mr.

Wynnstay, ‘to the French priests who came to see us last winter in

Paris. They never minded a bit--they used to laugh: “Monsieur votre

frère, madame, c’est un homme qui a trop lu,” they would say to me when

I gave them their coffee. Oh, they were such dears, those old priests!

Roger said they had great hopes of me.’

The chatter was welcome, the conversation broke up. The Squire turned to

Lady Charlotte, and Rose to Langham.

‘Why didn’t you support Robert?’ she said to him, impulsively, with a

dissatisfied face. ‘He was alone, against the table!’

‘What good should I have done him?’ he asked, with a shrug. ‘And pray,

my lady confessor, what enthusiasms do you suspect me of?’

He looked at her intently. It seemed to her they were by the gate

again--the touch of his lips on her hand. She turned from him hastily to

stoop for her fan which had slipped away. It was only Catherine who, for

her annoyance, saw the scarlet flush leap into the fair face. An instant

later Mrs. Darcy had given the signal.

CHAPTER XVIII.

After dinner, Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Catherine,

whose quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal of the dinner had

impressed her, but a few minutes’ talk produced in her the conviction

that without a good deal of pains--and why should a Londoner, accustomed

to the cream of things, take pains with a country clergyman’s wife?--she

was not likely to get much out of her. Her appearance, promised more,

Lady Charlotte thought, than her conversation justified, and she looked

about for easier game.

‘Are you. Mr. Elsmere’s sister?’ said a loud voice over Rose’s head; and

Rose, who had been turning over an illustrated book, with a mind

wholly detached from it, looked up to see Lady Charlotte’s massive form

standing over her.

‘No, his sister-in-law,’ said Rose, flushing in spite of herself, for

Lady Charlotte was distinctly formidable.

‘Hum,’ said her questioner, depositing herself beside her. ‘I never

saw two sisters more unlike. You have got a very argumentative

brother-in-law.’

Rose said nothing, partly from awkwardness, partly from rising

antagonism.

‘Did you agree with him?’ asked Lady Charlotte, putting up her glass and

remorselessly studying every detail of the pink dress, its ornaments,

and the slippered feet peeping out beneath it.

‘Entirely,’ said Rose fearlessly, looking her full in the face.

‘And what can you know about it, I wonder? However, you are on the right

side’. It is the fashion nowadays to have enthusiasms. I suppose you

muddle about among the poor like other people?’

‘I know nothing about the poor,’ said Rose.

‘Oh, then, I suppose you feel yourself effective enough in some other

line?’ said the other, coolly. ‘What is it--lawn tennis, or private

theatricals, or--h’em--prettiness?’ And again the eyeglass went up.

‘Whichever you like,’ said Rose, calmly, the scarlet on her cheek

deepening, while she resolutely reopened her book. The manner of the

other had quite effaced in her all that sense of obligation, as from the

young to the old, which she had been very carefully brought up in. Never

had she beheld such an extraordinary woman.

‘Don’t read,’ said Lady Charlotte complacently. ‘Look at me. It’s

your duty to talk to me, you know; and I won’t make myself any more

disagreeable than I can help. I generally make myself disagreeable, and

yet, after all, there are a great many people who like me.’

Rose turned a countenance rippling with suppressed laughter on her

companion. Lady Charlotte had a large fair face, with a great deal of

nose and chin, and an erection of lace and feathers on her head that

seemed in excellent keeping with the masterful emphasis of those

features. Her eyes stared frankly and unblushingly at the world, only

softened at intervals by the glasses which were so used as to make

them a most effective adjunct to her conversation. Socially she was

absolutely devoid of weakness or of shame. She found society extremely

interesting, and she always struck straight for the desirable thing

in it, making short work of all those delicate tentative processes of

acquaintanceship by which men and women ordinarily sort themselves.

Roses brilliant, vivacious beauty had caught her eye at dinner; she

adored beauty as she adored anything effective, and she always took a

queer pleasure in bullying her way into a girl’s liking. It is a

great thing to be persuaded that at bottom you have a good heart.

Lady Charlotte was so persuaded, and allowed herself many things in

consequence.

‘What shall we talk about?’ said Rose demurely. ‘What a magnificent old

house this is!’

‘Stuff and nonsense! I don’t want to talk about the house. I am sick

to death of it. And if your people live in the parish you are, too. I

return to my question. Come, tell me, what is your particular line in

life? I am sure you have one, by your face. You had better tell me; it

will do you no harm.’

Lady Charlotte settled herself comfortably on the sofa, and Rose, seeing

that there was no chance of escaping her tormentor, felt her spirits

rise to an encounter.

‘Really--Lady Charlotte--’ and she looked down, and then up, with a

feigned bashfulness--‘I--I--play a little.’

‘Humph!’ said her questioner again, rather disconcerted by the obvious

missishness of the answer. ‘You do, do you? More’s the pity. No woman

who respects herself ought to play the piano nowadays. A professional

told me the other day that until nineteen-twentieths of the profession

were strung up, there would be no chance for the rest, and, as for

amateurs, there is simply _no_ room for them whatever. I don’t conceive

anything more passé than amateur pianoforte playing!’

‘I don’t play the piano,’ said Rose, meekly.

‘What--the fashionable instrument, the banjo?’ laughed Lady Charlotte.

‘That would be really striking.’

Rose was silent again, the corners of her month twitching.

‘Mrs. Darcy,’ said her neighbor raising her voice. ‘This young lady

tells me she plays something; what is it?’

Mrs. Darcy looked in a rather helpless way at Catherine. She was

dreadfully afraid of Lady Charlotte.

Catherine, with a curious reluctance, gave the required information, and

then Lady Charlotte insisted that the violin should be sent for, as it

had not been brought.

‘Who accompanies you?’ she inquired of Rose.

‘Mr. Langham plays very well,’ said Rose, indifferently.

Lady Charlotte raised her eyebrows. ‘That dark, Byronic-looking creature

who came with you? I should not have imagined him capable of anything

sociable. Letitia, shall I send my maid to the Rectory, or can you spare

a man?’

Mrs. Darcy hurriedly gave orders, and Rose, inwardly furious, was

obliged to submit. Then Lady Charlotte, having gained her point, and

secured a certain amount of diversion for the evening, lay back on the

sofa, used her fan, and yawned till the gentlemen appeared.

When they came in, the precious violin which Rose never trusted to any

other hands but her own without trepidation had just arrived, and its

owner, more erect than usual, because more nervous, was trying to prop

up a dilapidated music-stand which Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As

Langham came in, she looked up and beckoned to him.

‘Do you see?’ she said to him impatiently, ‘They have made me play. Will

you accompany me? I am very sorry, but there is no one else.’

If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, it was

any sort of performance in public. But the half-plaintive look which

accompanied her last words showed that she knew it, and he did his best

to be amiable.

‘I am altogether at your service,’ he said, sitting down with

resignation.

‘It is all that tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,’ she whispered

to him behind the music-stand. I never saw such a person in my life.’

‘Macaulay’s Lady, Holland without the brains,’ suggested Langham with

languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note.

Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the Squire sauntered in together.

‘A village Norman-Néruda?’ whispered the guest to the host. The Squire

shrugged his shoulders.

‘Hush!’ said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. Mr.

Wynnstay’s smile instantly disappeared; he leant against the doorway

and stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musicians began, on some

Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had

not played twenty bars before the attention of everyone in the room was

more or less seized--unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children,

good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who

was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when

it would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him

back to his pale overweighted spouse.

First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage,

non-European; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken

here and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive

and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern

feeling.

‘Ah, but _excellent!_’ said Lady Charlotte once, under her breath, at a

pause; ‘and what _entrain_--what beauty!’

For Rose’s figure was standing thrown out against the dusky blue of

the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every curve, every

grace, each tint--hair and cheek and gleaming arm gained an enchanting

picturelike distinctness. There was jessamine at her waist and among

the gold of her hair; the crystals on her neck, and on the little shoe

thrown forward beyond her dress, caught the lamplight.

‘How can that man play with her and not fall in love with her?’ thought

Lady Charlotte to herself, with a sigh perhaps for her own youth. ‘He

looks cool enough, however; the typical don with his nose in the Air!’

Then the slow, passionate sweetness of the music swept her away with it,

she being in her way a connoisseur, and she ceased to speculate. When

the sounds ceased there was silence for a moment. Mrs. Darcy, who had

a piano in her sitting-room whereon she strummed every morning with her

tiny rheumatic fingers, and who had, as we know, strange little veins of

sentiment running all about her, stared at Rose with open mouth. So did

Catherine. Perhaps it was then for the first time that, touched by this

publicity this contagion of other people’s feelings, Catherine realized

fully against what a depth of stream she had been building her useless

barriers.

‘More! More!’ cried Lady Charlotte.

The whole room seconded the demand save the Squire and Mr. Bickerton.

They withdrew together into a distant oriel. Robert, who was delighted

with his little sister-in-law’s success, went smiling to talk of it

to Mrs. Darcy, while Catherine with a gentle coldness answered Mr.

Longstaffe’s questions on the same theme.

‘Shall we?’ said Rose, panting a little, but radiant--looking down on

her companion.

‘Command me!’ he said, his grave lips slightly smiling, his eyes taking

in the same vision that had charmed Lady Charlotte’s. What a ‘child of

grace and genius!’

‘But do you like it?’ she persisted.

‘Like it--like accompanying your playing?’

‘Oh no,’--impatiently; ‘showing off, I mean. I am quite ready to stop.’

‘Go on; go on!’ he said, laying his finger on the A. ‘You have driven

all my _mauvaise honte_ away. I have not heard you play so splendidly

yet.’

She flushed all over. ‘Then we will go on,’ she said briefly.

So they plunged again into an Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven. How the

girl threw herself into it, bringing out the wailing love-song of the

Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which

set every nerve in Langham vibrating! Yet the art of it was wholly

unconscious. The music was the mere natural voice of her inmost self.

A comparison full of excitement was going on in that self between her

first impressions of the man beside her, and her consciousness of him,

as he seemed to-night human, sympathetic, kind. A blissful sense of a

mission filled the young silly soul. Like David, she was pitting herself

and her gift against those dark powers which may invade and paralyze a

life.

After the shouts of applause at the end had yielded to a burst of talk,

in the midst of which Lady Charlotte, with exquisite infelicity, might

have been heard laying down the law to Catherine as to how her sister’s

remarkable musical powers might be best perfected, Langham turned to his

companion,--

‘Do you know that for years I have enjoyed nothing so much as the music

of the last two days?’

His black eyes shone upon her, transfused with something infinitely soft

and friendly. She smiled. ‘How little I imagined that first evening that

you cared for music!’

‘Or about anything else worth caring for?’ he asked her, laughing, but

with always that little melancholy note in the laugh.

‘Oh, if you like,’ she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. ‘I

believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, when

you weren’t reading “Hamlet” in the corner, about the arrangements for

women’s education at Oxford.’

‘Could I have found a more respectable subject?’ he inquired of her.

‘The adjective is excellent,’ she said with a little face, as she put

her violin into its case. ‘If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it

personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing,

English history, the Catechism, and “Paradise Lost.”--I taught myself

French at seventeen, because one Molière wrote plays in it, and German

because of Wagner. But they are _my_ French and _my_ German. I wouldn’t

advise anybody else to steal them!’

Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl’s agile fingers.

‘I wonder,’ he said at last, slowly, ‘when I shall play that Beethoven

again?’

‘To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,’ she said dryly; ‘we

murdered one or two passages in fine style.’

He looked at her, startled. ‘But I go by the morning train!’ There was

an instant silence. Then the violin case shut with a snap.

‘I thought it was to be Saturday,’ she said abruptly.

‘No,’ he answered with a sigh, ‘it was always Friday. There is a meeting

in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.’

‘Then we shan’t finish these Hungarian duets,’ she said slowly, turning

away from him to collect some music on the piano.

Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind him, with all

its ups and downs, its quarrels, its _ennuis_, its moments of delightful

intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare,

monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in

him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity.

‘No, we shall finish nothing,’ he said in a voice which only she could

hear, his hands lying on the keys; ‘there are some whose destiny it is

never to finish--never to have enough--to leave the feast on the tables

and all the edges of life ragged!’

Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, from the group

Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves were all unsteady with music

and feeling, and the face looking down on him had grown pale.

‘We make our own destiny,’ she said impatiently. ‘_We_ choose. It is all

our own doing. Perhaps destiny begins things--friendship, for instance;

but afterward it is absurd to talk of anything but ourselves. We keep

our friends, our chances, our--our joys,’ she went on hurriedly, trying

desperately to generalize, ‘or we throw them away wilfully, because we

choose.’

Their eyes were riveted on each other.

‘Not wilfully,’ he said under his breath. ‘But--no matter. May I take

you at your word, Miss Leyburn? Wretched shirker that I am, whom even

Robert’s charity despairs of: have I made a friend? Can I keep her?’

Extraordinary spell of the dark effeminate face--of its rare smile! The

girl forgot all pride, all discretion. ‘Try,’ she whispered, and as his

hand, stretching along the keyboard, instinctively felt for hers, for

one instant--and another, and another--she gave it to him.

‘Albert, come here!’ exclaimed Lady Charlotte, beckoning to her husband;

and Albert, though with a bad grace, ‘obeyed. ‘Just go and ask that girl

to come and talk with me, will you? Why on earth didn’t you make friends

with her at dinner?’

The husband made some irritable answer, and the wife laughed.

‘Just like you!’ she said, with a good humor which seemed to him solely

caused by the fact of his non-success with the beauty at table. ‘You

always expect to kill at the first stroke. I mean to take her in tow. Go

and bring her here.’

Mr. Wynnstay sauntered off with as much dignity as his stature was

capable of. He found Rose tying up her music at one end of the piano,

while Langham was preparing to shut up the keyboard.

There was something appeasing in the girl’s handsomeness. Mr. Wynnstay

laid down his airs, paid her various compliments, and led her off to

Lady Charlotte.

Langham stood by the piano, lost in a kind of miserable dream. Mrs.

Darcy fluttered up to him.

‘Oh, Mr. Langham, you play so _beautifully!_ Do Play a solo!’

He subsided onto the music-bench obediently. On any ordinary occasion

tortures could not have induced him to perform in a room full of

strangers. He had far too lively and fastidious a sense of the futility

of the amateur.

But he played-what, he knew not. Nobody listened but Mrs. Darcy, who sat

lost in an armchair a little way off, her tiny foot beating time. Rose

stopped talking, started, tried to listen. But Lady Charlotte had had

enough music, and so had Mr. Longstaffe, who was endeavoring to joke

himself into the good graces of the Duke of Sedbergh’s sister. The din

of conversation rose at the challenge of the piano, and Langham was soon

overcrowded.

Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player’s inward tumult was so

great, that what his hands did he hardly knew or cared. He felt himself

the greatest criminal unhung. Saddenly, through all that wilful mist of

epicurean feeling, which had been enwrapping him, there had pierced a

sharp illumining beam from a girl’s eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with

tenderness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing degeneracy of

every moral muscle led him to now? What! smile and talk, and smile--and

be a villain all the time? What! encroach on a young life, like

some creeping parasitic growth, taking all, able to give nothing in

return--not even one genuine spark of genuine passion? Go philandering

on till a child of nineteen shows you her warm impulsive heart, play on

her imagination, on her pity, safe all the while in the reflection that

by the next day you will be far away, and her task and yours will be

alike to forget! He shrinks from himself as one shrinks from a man

capable of injuring anything weak and helpless. To despise the world’s

social code, and then to fall conspicuously below its simplest articles;

to aim at being pure intelligence, pure open-eyed rationality, and not

even to succeed in being a gentleman, as the poor commonplace world

understands it! Oh, to fall at her pardon before parting for ever!

But no--no more posing; no more dramatizing. How can he get away most

quietly--make least sign? The thought of that walk home in the darkness

fills him with a passion of irritable impatience.

‘Look at that Romney, Mr. Elsmere; just look at it!’ cried Dr. Meyrick

excitedly; ‘did you ever see anything finer? There was one of those

London dealer fellows down here last summer offered the Squire four

thousand pounds down on the nail for it.’

In this way Meyrick had been taking Robert round the drawing-room, doing

the honors of every stick and stone in it, his eyeglass in his eye, his

thin old face shining with pride over the Wendover possessions. And so

the two gradually neared the oriel where the Squire and Mr. Bickerton

were standing.

Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation with the

Squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve in him was still

tingling with anger, he had done his best to keep up indifferent talk on

local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly he was asking himself whether

he could ever sit at the Squire’s table and eat his bread again. It

seemed to him that they had had a brush which would be difficult to

forget. And as he sat there before the Squire’s wine, hot with righteous

heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord crowded

upon him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his

inferiors and bully his equals!

But as the minutes passed on, the Rector had cooled down. The sweet,

placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. ‘What, play your

cards so badly, give up the game so rashly, the very first round?

Nonsense! Patience and try again. There must be some cause in the

background. No need to be white-livered, but every need, in the case of

such a man as the Squire, to take no hasty, needless offence.’

So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick and he close to

the Squire and his companion. The two men, as the Rector approached,

were discussing some cases of common enclosure that had just taken

place in the neighborhood. Robert listened a moment, then struck in.

Presently, when the chat dropped, he began to express to the Squire his

pleasure in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, courtesy

itself, but without any trace of effusion.

‘I believe,’ he said at last, smiling, ‘my father used to be allowed the

same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the way in which he clung

to Murewell.’

‘I had never the honor of Mr. Edward Elsmere’s acquaintance,’ said the

Squire frigidly. ‘During the time of his occupation of the Rectory I was

not in England.’

‘I know. Do you still go much to Germany? Do you keep up your relations

with Berlin?’

‘I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,’ said the Squire briefly, his

eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on the man who ventured to

question him about himself, uninvited. There was an awkward pause. Then

the Squire turned again to Mr. Bickerton.

‘Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm of last February

has brought down at the northeast corner of the park?’

Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the words

themselves. The Squire had not yet addressed a single remark of any

kind about Murewell to him. There was a deliberate intention to exclude

implied in this appeal to the man who was not the man of the place, on

such a local point, which struck Robert very forcibly.

He walked away to where his wife was sitting.

‘What time is it?’ whispered Catherine, looking up at him.

‘Time to go,’ he returned, smiling, but she caught the discomposure in

his tone and look at once, and her wifely heart rose against the Squire.

She got up, drawing herself together with a gesture that became her.

Then let us go at once,’ said she. ‘Where is Rose?’

A minute later there was a general leave-taking. Oddly enough it found

the Squire in the midst of a conversation with Langham. As though to

show more clearly that it was the Rector personally who was in his black

books, Mr. Wendover had already devoted some cold attention to Catherine

both at and after dinner, and he had no sooner routed Robert than he

moved in his slouching way across from Mr. Bickerton to Langham. And

now, another man altogether, he was talking and laughing--describing

apparently a reception at the French Academy--the epigrams flying, the

harsh face all lit up, the thin bony fingers gesticulating freely.

The husband and wife exchanged glances as they stood waiting, while lady

Charlotte, in her loudest voice, was commanding Rose to come and see

her in London any Thursday after the first of November. Robert was very

sore. Catherine passionately felt it, and forgetting everything but him,

longed to be out with him in the park comforting him.

‘What an absurd fuss you have been making about that girl,’ Wynnstay

exclaimed to his wife as the Elsmere party left the room, the Squire

conducting Catherine with a chill politeness. ‘And now, I suppose, you

will be having her up in town, and making some young fellow who ought

to know better fall in love with her. I am told the father was a

grammar-school headmaster. Why can’t you leave people where they

belong?’

‘I have already pointed out to you,’ Lady Charlotte observed calmly,

‘that the world has moved on since you were launched into it. I can’t

keep up class-distinctions to please you; otherwise, no doubt, being

the devoted wife I am, I might try. However, my dear, we both have our

fancies. You collect Sèvres china with or without a pedigree,’ and she

coughed dryly; ‘I collect promising young women. On the whole, I think

my hobby is more beneficial to you than yours is profitable to me.’

Mr. Wynnstay was furious. Only a week before he had been childishly,

shamefully taken in by a Jew curiosity dealer from Vienna, to his wife’s

huge amusement. If looks could have crushed her, Lady Charlotte would

have been crushed. But she was far too substantial as she lay back in

her chair, one large foot crossed over the other, and, as her husband

very well knew, the better man of the two. He walked away, murmuring

under his mustache words that would hardly have borne publicity, while

Lady Charlotte, through her glasses, made a minute study of a little

French portrait hanging some two yards from her.

Meanwhile the Elsmere party were stepping out into the warm damp of the

night. The storm had died away, but a soft Scotch mist of rain filled

the air. Everything was dark, save for a few ghostly glimmerings through

the trees of the avenue; and there was a strong sweet smell of wet earth

and grass. Rose had drawn the hood of her waterproof over her head,

and her face gleamed an indistinct whiteness from its shelter. Oh this

leaping pulse--this bright glow of expectation! How had she made that

stupid blunder about his going? Oh, it was Catherine’s mistake, of

course, at the beginning. But what matter? Here, they were in the dark,

side by side, friends now, friends always. Catherine should not spoil

their last walk together. She felt a passionate trust that he would not

allow it.

‘Wifie!’ exclaimed Robert, drawing her a little apart, ‘do you know

it has just occurred to me that, as I was going through the park this

afternoon by the lower footpath, I crossed Henslowe coming away from

the house. Of course this is what has happened! _He_ has told his story

first. No doubt just before I met him he had been giving the Squire a

full and particular account--_à la_ Henslowe--of my proceedings since I

came. Henslowe lays it on thick--paints with a will. The Squire receives

me afterward as the meddlesome, pragmatical priest he understands me to

be; puts his foot down to begin with; and, _hinc illæ lacrymæ_. It’s as

clear as daylight! I thought that man had an odd twist of the lip as he

passed me.’

‘Then a disagreeable evening will be the worst of it,’ said Catherine

proudly. ‘I imagine, Robert, you can defend yourself against that bad

man?’

‘He has got the start; he has no scruples; and it remains to be seen

whether the Squire has a heart to appeal to,’ replied the young Rector

with sore reflectiveness. ‘Oh, Catherine, have you ever thought, wifie,

what a business it will be for us if I can’t make friends with that man?

Here we are at his gates--all our people in his power; the comfort,

at any rate, of our social life depending on him. And what a strange,

unmanageable, inexplicable being!’

Elsmere sighed aloud. Like all quick imaginative natures he was easily

depressed, and the Squire’s sombre figure had for the moment darkened

his whole horizon. Catherine laid her check against his arm in the

darkness, consoling, remonstrating, every other thought lost in her

sympathy with Robert’s worries. Langham and Rose slipped out of her

head; Elsmere’s step had quickened as it always did when he was excited,

and she kept up without thinking.

When Langham found the others had shot ahead in the darkness, and he

and his neighbor were _tête-à-tête_, despair seized him. But for once

he showed a sort of dreary presence of mind. Suddenly, while the girl

beside him was floating in a golden dream of feeling he plunged with a

stiff deliberation born of his inner conflict into a discussion of the

German system of musical training. Rose, startled, made some vague and

flippant reply. Langham pursued the matter. He had some information

about it, it appeared, garnered up in his mind, which might perhaps some

day prove useful to her. A St. Anselm’s undergraduate, one Dashwood, an

old pupil of his, had been lately at Berlin for six months, studying

at the Conservatorium. Not long ago, being anxious to become a

schoolmaster, he had written to Langham for a testimonial. His letter

had contained a full account of his musical life. Langham proceeded to

recapitulate it.

His careful and precise report of hours, fees, masters, and methods

lasted till they reached the park gate. He had the smallest powers of

social acting, and his _rôle_ was dismally overdone. The girl beside him

could not know that he was really defending her from himself. His cold

altered manner merely seemed to her a sudden and marked withdrawal of

his petition for her friendship. No doubt she had received that petition

too effusively--and he wished there should be no mistake.

What a young smarting soul went through in that half mile of listening

is better guessed than analyzed. There are certain moments of shame,

which only women know, and which seem to sting and burn out of youth all

its natural sweet self-love. A woman may outlive them, but never forget

them. If she pass through one at nineteen her cheek will grow hot over

it at seventy. Her companion’s measured tone, the flow of deliberate

speech which came from him, the nervous aloofness of his attitude--every

detail in that walk seemed to Rose’s excited sense an insult.

As the park gate swung behind them she felt a sick longing for

Catherine’s shelter. Then all the pride in her rushed to the rescue and

held that swooning dismay at the heart of her in check. And forthwith

she capped Langham’s minute account of the scale-method of a famous

Berlin pianist by some witty stories of the latest London prodigy, a

child-violinist, incredibly gifted, dirty, and greedy, whom she had made

friends with in town. The girl’s voice ran out sharp and hard under the

trees. Where, in fortune’s name, were the lights of the Rectory? Would

this nightmare never come to an end?

At the Rectory gate was Catherine waiting for them, her whole soul one

repentant alarm.

‘Mr. Langham, Robert has gone to the study; will you go and smoke with

him?’

‘By all means. Good-night, then, Mrs. Elsmere.’

Catherine gave him her hand. Rose was trying hard to fit the lock of the

gate into the hasp, and had no hand free. Besides, he did not approach

her.

‘Good-night!’ she said to him over her shoulder.

‘Oh, and Mr. Langham!’ Catherine called after him as he strode away,

‘will you settle with Robert about the carriage?’

He turned, made a sound of assent, and went on.

‘When?’ asked Rose lightly.

‘For the nine-o’clock train.’

‘There should be a law against interfering with people’s breakfast

hour,’ said Rose; ‘though, to, be sure, a guest may as well get himself

gone early and be done with it. How you and Robert raced, Cathie! We did

our best to catch you up, but the pace was too good.’

Was there a wild taunt, a spice of malice in the girl’s reckless voice?

Catherine could not see her in the darkness, but the sister felt a

sudden trouble invade her.

‘Rose darling, you are not tired?’

‘Oh dear no! Good-night, sleep well. What a goose Mrs. Darcy is!’

And, barely submitting to be kissed, Rose ran up the steps and upstairs.

Langham and Robert smoked till midnight. Langham for the first time gave

Elsmere an outline of his plans for the future, and Robert, filled with

dismay at this final breach with Oxford and human society, and the

only form of practical life possible to such a man, threw himself into

protests more and more vigorous and affectionate. Langham listened

to them at first with sombre silence, then with an impatience which

gradually reduced Robert to a sore puffing at his pipe. There was a

long space during which they sat together, the ashes of the little fire

Robert had made dropping on the hearth, and not a word on either side.

At last Elsmere could not bear it, and when midnight struck he sprang

up with an impatient shake of his long body, and Langham took the hint,

gave him a cold good-night, and went.

As the door shut upon him, Robert dropped back into his chair, and sat

on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the fire. It seemed to

him the world was going crookedly. A day on which a man of singularly

open and responsive temper makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than

ever before to losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the

calendar, and by way of aggravation, a Robert Elsmere says to himself

at once, that somehow or other there must be fault of his own in the

matter.

Rose!--pshaw! Catherine little knows what stuff that cold, intangible

soul is made of.

Meanwhile, Langham was standing heavily, looking out into the night. The

different elements in the mountain of discomfort that weighed upon him

were so many that the weary mind made no attempt to analyze them. He had

a sense of disgrace, of having stabbed something gentle that had leant

upon him, mingled with a strong intermittent feeling of unutterable

relief. Perhaps his keenest regret was that, after all it had not been

love! He had offered himself up to a girl’s just contempt, but he had no

recompense in the shape of a great addition to knowledge, to experience.

Save for a few doubtful moments at the beginning, when he had all but

surprised himself in something more poignant, what he had been conscious

of had been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of sentiment, a

subtle surrender to one exquisite æsthetic impression after another. And

these things in other relations, the world had yielded him before.

‘Am I sane?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Have I ever been sane? Probably

not. The disproportion between my motives and other men’s is too great

to be normal. Well at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long

after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still

be doing penance in the desert.’

He threw himself down beside the open window with a groan. An hour later

he lifted a face blanched and lined, and stretched out his band with

avidity toward a book on the table. It was an obscure and difficult

Greek text, and he spent the greater part of the night over it,

rekindling in himself with feverish haste the embers of his one lasting

passion.

Meanwhile, in a room overhead, another last scene in this most futile

of dramas was passing. Rose, when she came in, had locked the door, torn

off her dress and her ornaments, and flung herself on the edge of her

bed, her hands on her knees, her shoulders drooping, a fierce red spot

on either cheek. There for an indefinite time she went through a torture

of self-scorn. The incidents of the week passed before her one by one;

her sallies, her defiances, her impulsive friendliness, the élan, the

happiness of the last two days, the self-abandonment of this evening.

Oh, intolerable--intolerable!

And all to end with the intimation that she had been behaving like a

forward child--had gone too far and must be admonished--made to feel

accordingly! The poisoned arrow pierced deeper and deeper into the

girl’s shrinking pride. The very foundations of self-respect seemed

overthrown.

Suddenly her eye caught a dim and ghostly reflection of her own figure,

as she sat with locked hands on the edge of the bed, in a long glass

near, the only one of the kind which the Rectory household possessed.

Rose sprang up, snatched at the candle, which was flickering in the air

of the open window, and stood erect before the glass, holding the candle

above her heart.

What the light showed her was a slim form in a white dressing-gown, that

fell loosely about it; a rounded arm up-stretched; a head, still crowned

with its jessamine wreath, from which the bright hair fell heavily

over shoulders and bosom; eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud

challenge at what they saw; two lips, ‘indifferent red’ just open to let

the quick breath come through--all thrown into the wildest chiaroscuro

by the wavering candle flame.

Her challenge was answered. The fault was not there. Her arm dropped.

She put down the light.

‘I _am_ handsome,’ she said to herself, her mouth quivering childishly.

‘I am. I may say it to myself.’

Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. Her room,

on the opposite side of the house from Langham’s, looked over the

cornfields and the distance. The stubbles gleamed faintly; the dark

woods, the clouds teased by the rising wind, sent a moaning voice to

greet her.

‘I hate him! I hate him!’ she cried to the darkness, clenching her cold

little hand.

Then presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her head in

the bed-clothes. She was crying--angry stifled tears which had the hot

impatience of youth in them. It all seemed to her so untoward. This was

not the man she had dreamed of--the unknown of her inmost heart. _He_

had been young, ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye

flashing into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside

the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden mysteries behind it.

She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid this

paralyzing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to peace--to

indifference. The poor child flies from her own half-understood trouble;

will none of it; murmurs again wildly,--

‘I hate him! I hate him! Cold-blooded--ungrateful--unkind!’

In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, inthrall her inmost soul. The

charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, womanlike.

That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed,

struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing, there, trying

to recall what she had been a week before; the whirl of her London

visit, the ambitions with which it had filled her; the bewildering,

many-colored lights it had thrown upon life, the intoxicating sense of

artistic power. In vain.

The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise;

And the colors have all passed away from her eyes.

She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as she lay

weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory sense of growth,

of enrichment. In such moments of pain does a woman first begin to live?

Ah! why should it hurt so--this long-awaited birth of the soul?

BOOK III. THE SQUIRE.

CHAPTER XIX.

The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a date of

some importance in the lives of two or three persons. Rose was not

likely to forget it; Langham carried about with him the picture of

the great drawing-room, its stately light and shade, and its scattered

figures, through many a dismal subsequent hour: and to Robert it was the

beginning of a period of practical difficulties such as his fortunate

youth had never yet encountered.

His conjecture had hit the mark. The Squire’s sentiments toward him,

which had been on the whole friendly enough, with the exception of a

slight nuance of contempt provoked in Mr. Wendover’s mind by all forms

of the clerical calling, had been completely transformed in the course

of the afternoon before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report

of his agent. Henslowe who knew certain sides of the Squire’s character

by heart, had taken Time by the forelock. For fourteen years before

Robert entered the parish he had been king of it. Mr. Preston, Robert’s

predecessor, had never given him a moment’s trouble. The agent had

developed a habit of drinking, had favored his friends and spited his

enemies, and he allowed certain distant portions of the estate to go

finely to ruin, quite undisturbed by any sentimental meddling of the

priestly sort. Then the old Rector had been gathered to the majority,

and this long-legged busybody had taken his place, a man, according to

the agent, as full of communistical notions as an egg is full of meat,

and always ready to poke his nose into other people’s business. And as

all men like mastery, but especially Scotchmen, and as during even

the first few months of the new Rector’s tenure of office it became

tolerably evident to Henslowe that young Elsmere would soon become the

ruling force of the neighborhood unless measures were taken to prevent

it, the agent, over his nocturnal drams, had taken sharp and cunning

counsel with himself concerning the young man.

The state of Mile End had been originally the result of indolence and

caprice on his part rather than of any set purpose of neglect. As soon,

however, as it was brought to his notice by Elsmere, who did it to begin

with, in the friendliest way, it became a point of honor with the agent

to let the place go to the devil, nay, to hurry it there. For some

time notwithstanding, he avoided an open breach with the Rector. He met

Elsmere’s remonstrances by a more or less civil show of argument, belied

every now and then by the sarcasm of his coarse blue eye, and so far the

two men had kept outwardly on terms. Elsmere had reason to know that on

one or two occasions of difficulty in the parish Henslowe had tried to

do him a mischief. The attempts, however, had not greatly succeeded,

and their ill-success had probably excited in Elsmere a confidence of

ultimate victory which had tended to keep him cool in the presence of

Henslowe’s hostility. But Henslowe had been all along merely waiting for

the Squire. He had served the owner of the Murewell estate for fourteen

years, and if he did not know that owner’s peculiarities by this time,

might he obtain certain warm corners in the next life to which he was

fond of consigning other people! It was not easy to cheat the Squire

out of money, but it was quite easy to play upon him ignorance of the

details of English land management--ignorance guaranteed by the learned

habits of a lifetime--on his complete lack of popular sympathy, and on

the contempt felt by the disciple of Bismarck and Mommsen for all

forms of altruistic sentiment. The Squire despised priests. He hated

philanthropic cants. Above all things be respected his own leisure, and

was abnormally, irritably sensitive as to any possible inroads upon it.

All these things Henslowe knew, and all these things be utilized. He

saw the Squire within forty-eight hours of his arrival at Murewell. His

fancy picture of Robert and his doings was introduced with adroitness,

and colored with great skill, and he left the Squire walking up and down

his library, chafing alternately at the monstrous fate which had planted

this sentimental agitator at his gates, and at the memory of his

own misplaced civilities toward the intruder. In the evening those

civilities were abundantly avenged, as we have seen.

Robert was much perplexed as to his next step. His heart was very sore.

The condition of Mile End--those gaunt-eyed women and wasted children,

all the sordid details of their unjust, avoidable suffering weighed upon

his nerves perpetually. But he was conscious that this state of

feeling was one of tension, perhaps of exaggeration, and though it was

impossible he should let the matter alone, he was anxious to do nothing

rashly.

However, two days after the dinner-party he met Henslowe on the hill

leading up to the Rectory. Robert would have passed the man with a

stiffening of his tall figure and the slightest possible salutation. But

the agent just returned from a round wherein the bars of various local

inns had played a conspicuous part, was in a truculent mood and stopped

to speak. He took up the line of insolent condolence with the Rector on

the impossibility of carrying his wishes with regard to Mile End into

effect. They had been laid before the Squire of course, but the Squire

had his own ideas and wasn’t just easy to manage.

‘Seen him yet, sir?’ Henslowe wound up jauntily, every line of his

flushed countenance, the full lips under the fair beard, and the light

prominent eyes, expressing a triumph he hardly cared to conceal.

‘I have seen him, but I have not talked to him on this particular

matter,’ said the Rector quietly, though the red mounted in his cheek.

‘You may, however, be very sure, Mr. Henslowe, that everything I know

about Mile End, the Squire shall know before long.’

‘Oh, lor’ bless me, air!’ cried Henslowe with a guffaw, ‘it’s all one to

me. And if the Squire ain’t satisfied with the way his work’s done now,

why he can take you on as a second string you know. You’d show us all,

I’ll be bound, how to make the money fly.’

Then Robert’s temper gave way, and he turned upon the half-drunken brute

before him with a few home truths delivered with a rapier-like force

which for the moment staggered Henslowe, who turned from red to purple.

The Rector, with some of those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which

we had glimpses in his talk with Langham, burning at his heart felt the

man no better than a murderer, and as good as told him so. Then, without

giving him time to reply, Robert strode off, leaving Henslowe planted

in the pathway. But he was hardly up the hill before the agent, having

recovered himself by dint of copious expletives, was looking after him

with a grim chuckle. He knew his master, and he knew himself, and he

thought between them they would about manage to keep that young spark in

order.

Robert meanwhile went straight home into his study, and there fell upon

ink and paper. What was the good of protracting the matter any longer?

Something must and should be done for these people, if not one way, then

another.

So he wrote to the Squire, showing the letter to Catherine when it was

done, lest there should be anything over-fierce in it. It was the

simple record of twelve months’ experience told with dignity and strong

feeling. Henslowe was barely mentioned in it, and the chief burden

of the letter was to implore the Squire to come and inspect certain

portions of his property with his own eyes. The Rector would be at his

service any day or hour.

Husband and wife went anxiously through the document, softening here,

improving there, and then it was sent to the Hall. Robert waited

nervously through the day for an answer. In the evening, while he and

Catherine were in the footpath after dinner, watching a chilly autumnal

moonrise over the stubble of the cornfield, the answer came.

‘Hm,’ said Robert dubiously as he opened it, holding it up to the

moonlight: ‘can’t be said to be lengthy.’

He and Catherine hurried into the house. Robert read the letter, and

handed it to her without a word.

After some curt references to one or two miscellaneous points raised

in the latter part of the Rector’s letter, the Squire wound up as

follows:--

“As for the bulk of your communication, I am at a loss to understand

the vehemence of your remarks on the subject of my Mile End property.

My agent informed me shortly after my return home that you had been

concerning yourself greatly, and, as he conceived, unnecessarily, about

the matter. Allow me to assure you that I have full confidence in Mr.

Henslowe, who has been in the district for as many years as you have

spent months in it, and whose authority on points connected with the

business management of my estate naturally carries more weight with me,

if you will permit me to say so, than your own.

“I am, sir, your obedient servant,

“ROGER WENDOVER”

Catherine returned the letter to her husband with a look of dismay. He

was standing with his back to the chimney-piece, his hands thrust far

into his pockets, his upper lip quivering. In his happy, expansive life

this was the sharpest personal rebuff that had ever happened to him. He

could not but smart under it.

‘Not a word,’ he said, tossing his hair bank impetuously, as Catherine

stood opposite watching him--‘not one single word about the miserable

people themselves! What kind of stuff can the man be made of?’

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

‘If not, one must try and make him,’ he said energetically, after a

moments pause. ‘To-morrow, Catherine, I go down to the Hall and see

him.’

She quietly acquiesced, and the following afternoon, first thing after

luncheon, she watched him go, her tender inspiring look dwelling with

him as he crossed the park, which was lying delicately wrapped in one of

the whitest of autumnal mists, the sun just playing through it with pale

invading shafts.

The butler looked at him with some doubtfulness. It was never safe to

admit visitors for the Squire without orders. But he and Robert had

special relations. As the possessor of a bass voice worthy of his girth,

Vincent, under Robert’s rule, had become the pillar of the choir, and it

was not easy for him to refuse the Rector.

So Robert was led in, through the hall, and down the long passage to the

curtained door, which he knew so well.

‘Mr. Elsmere, Sir!’

There was a sudden, hasty movement. Robert passed a magnificent

lacquered screen newly placed round the door, and found himself in the

Squire’s presence.

The Squire had half risen from his seat in a capacious chair, with a

litter of books round it, and confronted his visitor with a look of

surprised annoyance. The figure of the Rector, tall, thin, and youthful,

stood out against the delicate browns and whites of the book-lined

walls. The great room, so impressively bare when Robert and Langham

had last seen it, was now full of the signs of a busy man’s constant

habitation. An odor of smoke pervaded it; the table in the window was

piled with books just unpacked, and the half-emptied case from which

they had been taken lay on the ground beside the Squire’s chair.

‘I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, advancing

hat in hand, while the Squire hastily put down the German professor’s

pipe he had just been enjoying, and coldly accepted his proffered

greeting. ‘I should have preferred not to disturb you without an

appointment, but after your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal

explanation was necessary.’

The Squire stiffly motioned toward a chair, which Robert took, and then

slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes fixed on the intruder.

Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but maintaining

in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, plunged at once into

business. He took the letter he had just received from the Squire as a

text, made a good-humored defence of his own proceedings, described his

attempt to move Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man

to the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about Henslowe

were in perfect temper, though by no means without an edge.

Then having disposed of the more personal aspects of the matter, he

paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite him, more like

a bronzed mask at this moment than a human countenance. The Squire,

however, gave him no help. He had received his remarks so far in perfect

silence, and seeing that there were more to come, he waited for them

with the same rigidity of look and attitude.

So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of

those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during

the preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary

condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors,

poisoned water--he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his

stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have

burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these

woes but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labor of

body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. But all

that he could hurl against the Squire’s feeling, as it were, he gathered

up, strangely conscious through it all of his own young persistent

yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it lay

chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of intellectual

hunger, so stimulating, so enriching.

But passion, and reticence, and bidden sympathy were alike lost upon the

Squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had already risen restlessly

from his chair, and from the rug was glowering down on his, unwelcome

visitor.

Good heavens! had he come home to be lectured in his own library by this

fanatical slip of a parson? As for his stories, the Squire barely took

the trouble to listen to them.

Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his hand

into other people’s pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but it was

intolerable that his scholar’s privacy should be at the mercy of one of

the tribe.

‘Mr. Elsmere,’ he broke out at last with contemptuous emphasis, ‘I

imagine it would have been better--infinitely better--to have spared

both yourself and me the disagreeables of this interview. However, I am

not sorry we should understand each other. I have lived a life which is

at least double the length of yours in very tolerable peace and comfort.

The world has been good enough for me, and I for it, so far. I have been

master in my own estate, and intend to remain so. As for the new-fangled

ideas of a landowner’s duty, with which your mind seems to be full’--the

scornful irritation of the tone was unmistakable--’ I have never dabbled

in them, nor do I intend to begin now. I am like the rest of my kind;

I have no money to chuck away in building schemes, in order that

the Rector of the parish may pose as the apostle of the agricultural

laborer. That, however, is neither here nor there. What is to the

purpose is, that my business affairs are in the hands of a business man,

deliberately chosen and approved by me, and that I have nothing to do

with them. Nothing at all!’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘It may seem

to you very shocking. You may reward it as the object in life of the

English landowner to inspect the pigstyes and amend the habits of the

English laborer. I don’t quarrel with the conception, I only ask you not

to expect me to live up to it. I am a student first and foremost, and

desire to be left to my books. Mr. Henslowe is there on purpose to

protect my literary freedom. What he thinks desirable is good enough for

me, as I have already informed you. I am sorry for it if his methods do

not commend themselves to you. But I have yet to learn that the Rector

of the parish has an ex-officio right to interfere between a landlord

and his tenants.’

Robert kept his temper with some difficulty. After a pause he said,

feeling desperately, however, that the suggestion was not likely to

improve matters,--

‘If I were to take all the trouble and all the expense off your hands,

Mr. Wendover would it be impossible for you to authorize me to make one

or two alterations most urgently necessary for the improvement of the

Mile End cottages?’

The Squire burst into an angry laugh.

‘I have never yet been in the habit, Mr. Elsmere, of doing my repairs by

public subscription. You ask a little too much from an old man’s powers

of adaptation.’

Robert rose from his seat, his hand trembling as it rested on his

walking-stick.

‘Mr. Wendover,’ he said, speaking at last with a flash of answering

scorn in his young vibrating voice, ‘what I think you cannot understand,

is that at any moment a human creature may sicken and die, poisoned

by the state of your property, for which you--and nobody else--are

ultimately responsible.’

The Squire shrugged his shoulders.

So you say, Mr. Elsmere. If true, every person in such a condition has a

remedy in his own hands. I force no one to remain on my property.’

‘The people who live there,’ exclaimed Robert, ‘have neither home nor

subsistence if they are driven out. Murewell is full--times bad--most of

the people old.’

‘And eviction “a sentence of death,” I suppose,’ interrupted the

Squire, studying him with sarcastic eyes. ‘Well, I have no belief in a

Gladstonian Ireland, still less in a Radical England. Supply and demand,

cause and effect, are enough for me. The Mile End cottages are out

of repair, Mr. Elsmere, so Mr. Henslowe tells me, because the site is

unsuitable, the type of cottage out of date. People live in them at

their peril; I don’t pull them down, or rather’--correcting himself with

exasperating consistency--‘Mr. Henslowe doesn’t pull them down, because,

like other men, I suppose, he dislikes an outcry. But if the population

stays, it stays at its own risk. Now have I made myself plain?’

The two men eyed one another.

‘Perfectly plain,’ said Robert quietly. ‘Allow me to remind you,

Mr. Wendover, that there are other matters than eviction capable of

provoking an outcry.’

‘As you please,’ said the other indifferently. ‘I have no doubt I shall

find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, I dare say I shall

manage to put up with it. Society, is fanatics and the creatures they

hunt. If I am to be hunted, I shall be in good company.’

Robert stood, hat in hand, tormented with a dozen cross-currents

of feeling. He was forcibly struck with the blind and comparatively

motiveless pugnacity of the Squire’s conduct. There was an extravagance

in it which for the first time recalled to him old Meyrick’s

lucubrations.

‘I have done no good, I see, Mr. Wendover,’ he said at last, slowly. ‘I

wish I could have induced you to do an act of justice and mercy. I wish

I could have made you think more kindly of myself. I have failed in

both. It is useless to keep you any longer. Good morning.’

He bowed. The Squire also bent forward. At that moment Robert caught

sight beside his shoulder of an antique, standing on the mantel piece,

which was a new addition to the room. It was a head of Medusa, and

the frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere’s ruffled nerves with

extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol

of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights

the heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man

before him was not the first victim he had known.

Possessed with the fancy, the young man made his way into the hall.

Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of passionate regret: ‘Shall

I ever see this again?’ he asked himself. During the past twelve months

his pleasure in the great house had been much more than sensuous. Within

those walls his mind had grown, had reached to a fuller stature than

before, and a man loves, or should love, all that is associated with the

maturing of his best self.

He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadly. The magnificent pile,

grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist which unwrapped it, seemed

to look after him as he walked away, mutely wondering that he should

have allowed anything so trivial as a peasant’s grievance to come

between him and its perfections.

In the wooded lane outside the Rectory gate he overtook Catherine. He

gave her his report, and they walked on together arm-in-arm, a very

depressed pair.

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

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

‘If you get over the inspector,’ said Catherine anxiously, ‘I am

tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.’

He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such

cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector’s attention.

Catherine’ did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm.

But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first

serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself

distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have

harassed him by over-advice.

So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him

with a sigh.

‘Let it be awhile,’ he said with a shake of his long frame. ‘I shall get

morbid over it if I don’t mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know you

have worries of your own, wifie.’

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

tenderness.

‘Yes,’ said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. ‘Robert,’ she burst

out again, ‘I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_

will never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my

mind, is simply a changed creature.’

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

Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That

men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible!

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