Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of

change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose’s

proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm’s

length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of

Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those

stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married

life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that

there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had

struck him first reappear.

‘Of course I feel myself to blame,’ he said when she stopped, ‘but how

could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I

owed him--I owe him--so much.’

‘I know,’ said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her

that that old debt had been more than effaced.

‘You will have to send her to Berlin,’ said Elsmere after a pause. ‘You

must play off her music against this unlucky feeling. If it exists it is

your only chance.’

‘Yes, she must go to Berlin,’ said Catherine slowly.

Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling breaking up

the delicate resolution of the face.

‘I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened my world for

me!’

Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They were in the

woodpath. She crept inside her husband’s arm and put up her face to him,

swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love.

The next day Robert walked over to the little market town of Churton,

saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of the place, and got

from him a complete account of the present state of the rural sanitary

law. The first step clearly was to move the sanitary inspector; if that

failed for any reason, then any _bonâ fide_ inhabitant had an appeal to

the local sanitary authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked

home pondering his information, and totally ignorant that Henslowe, who

was always at Churton on market-days, had been in the market-place at

the moment when the Rector’s tall figure had disappeared within Mr.

Dunstan’s office-door. That door was unpleasantly known to the agent in

connection with some energetic measures for raising money he had been

lately under the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attracting

his eyes by means of the fascination that often attaches to disagreeable

objects.

In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing-room.

Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap and her eyes were

staring intently into a world whereof they only had the key. Suddenly

there was a ring at the bell. The servant came, and there were several

voices and a sound of much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading

to the study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped

with an exclamation.

His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old Milsom, more sallow

and palsied than ever. As he stood bent almost double, his old knotted

hand resting for support on the table beside him, everything in the

little hall seemed to shake with him. The other was Sharland, the

handsome father of the twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with

every imaginable delicacy since Robert’s last visit to the hamlet. Even

his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature decay. The rolling

gypsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs dragged a little.

They had come to implore the Rector to let Mile End alone. Henslowe had

been over there in the afternoon, and had given them all very plainly to

understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled any more they would be all turned

out at a week’s notice to shift as they could, ‘And if you don’t find

Thurston Common nice lying this weather, with the winter coming on,

you’ll know who to thank for it,’ the agent had flung behind him as he

rode off.

Robert turned white. Rose, watching the little scene with listless eyes,

saw him towering over the group like an embodiment of wrath and pity.

‘If they turn us out, sir,’ said old Milsom, wistfully looking up at

Elsmere with blear eyes, ‘there’ll be nothing left but the House for

us old ‘uns. Why, lor’ bless you, sir, it’s not so bad but we can make

shift.’

‘You, Milsom!’ cried Robert; ‘and you’ve just all but lost your

grandchild! And you know your wife’ll never be the same woman since that

bout of fever in the spring. And----’

His quick eyes ran over the old man’s broken frame with a world of

indignant meaning in them.

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Milsom, unmoved. ‘But if it isn’t fevers, it’s

summat else. I can make a shilling or two where I be, speshally in the

first part of the year, in the basket work, and my wife she goes charing

up at Mr. Carter’s farm, and Mr. Dodson, him at the further farm, he

do give us a bit sometimes. Ef you git us turned away it will be a bad

day’s work for all on us, sir, you may take my word on it.’

‘And my wife so ill’ Mr. Elsmere,’ said Sharland, ‘and all those

childer! I can’t walk three miles further to my work, Mr. Elsmere, I

can’t nohow. I haven’t got the legs for it. Let un be, Sir. We’ll rub

along.’

Robert tried to argue the matter.

If they would but stand by him he would fight the matter through, and

they should not suffer, if he had to get up a public subscription, or

support them out of his own pocket all the winter. A bold front, and Mr.

Henslowe must give way. The law was on their side, and every laborer in

Surrey would be the better off for their refusal to be housed like pigs

and poisoned like vermin.

In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious endurance in the

poor against which the keenest reformer constantly throws himself in

vain. Elsmere was beaten. The two men got his word, and shuffled off

back to their pestilential hovels, a pathetic content beaming on each

face.

Catherine and Robert went back into the study. Rose heard her

brother-in-law’s passionate sigh as the door swung behind them.

‘Defeated!’ she said to herself with a curious accent. ‘Well, everybody

must have his turn. Robert has been too successful in his life, I

think.--You wretch!’ she added, after a minute, laying her bright head

down on the book before her.

Next morning his wife found Elsmere after breakfast busily packing a

case of books in the study. They were books from the Hall library, which

so far had been for months the inseparable companion of his historical

work.

Catherine stood and watched him sadly.

‘Must You, Robert?’

‘I won’t be beholden to that man for anything an hour longer than I can

help,’ he answered her.

When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where she stood in

the open window.

‘Things won’t be as easy for us in the future, darling,’ he said to

her. ‘A rector with both Squire and agent against him is rather heavily

handicapped. We must make up our minds to that.’

‘I have no great fear,’ she said, looking at him proudly.

‘Oh, well--nor I--perhaps,’ he admitted, after a moment. We can hold

our own. ‘But I wish--oh, I wish’--and he laid his hand on his wife’s

shoulder--‘I could have made friends with the Squire.’

Catherine looked less responsive.

‘As Squire, Robert, or as Mr. Wendover?’

‘As both, of course, but specialty as Mr. Wendover.’

‘We can do without his friendship,’ she said with energy.

Robert gave a great stretch, as though to work off his regrets.

‘Ah, but--,’ he said, half to himself, as his arms dropped, ‘if you are

just filled with the hunger to _know_, the people who know as much as

the Squire become very interesting to you!’

Catherine did not answer. But probably her heart went out once more in

protest against a knowledge that was to her but a form of revolt against

the awful powers of man’s destiny.

‘However, here go his books,’ said Robert.

Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appearance, Mrs.

Leyburn all in a flutter concerning the event over which, in her

own opinion, she had come to preside. In her gentle fluid mind all

impressions were short-lived. She had forgotten how she had brought up

her own babies, but Mrs. Thornburgh, who had never had any, had filled

her full of nursery lore. She sat retailing a host of second-hand hints

and instructions to Catherine, who would every now and then lay her hand

smiling on her mother’s knee, well pleased to see the flush of pleasure

on the pretty old face, and ready in her patient filial way, to let

herself be experimented on to the utmost, if it did but make the poor,

foolish thing happy.

Then came a night where every soul in the quiet Rectory, even hot,

smarting Rose, was possessed by one thought though many terrible hours,

and one only--the thought of Catherine’s safety. It was strange and

unexpected, but Catherine, the most normal and healthy of women, had a

hard struggle for her own life and her child’s, and it was not till the

gray autumn morning, after a day and night which left a permanent

mark on Robert that he was summoned at last, and with the sense of one

emerging from black gulfs of terror, received from his wife’s languid

hand the tiny fingers of his firstborn.

The days that followed were full of emotion for these two people, who

were perhaps always ever-serious, oversensitive. They had no idea of

minimizing the great common experiences of life. Both of them were

really simple, brought up in old-fashioned simple ways, easily touched,

responsive to all that high spiritual education which flows from

the familiar incidents of the human story, approached poetically and

passionately. As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife’s room,

the occasional restless movements of the small brown head against her

breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country silence, he

felt all the deep familiar currents of human feeling sweeping through

him--love, reverence, thanksgiving--and all the walls of the soul, as it

were, expanding and enlarging as they passed.

Responsive creature that he was, the experience of these days was hardly

happiness. It went too deep; it brought him too poignantly near to all

that is most real and therefore most tragic in life.

Catherine’s recovery also was slower than might have been expected,

considering her constitutional soundness, and for the first week, after

that faint moment of joy when her child was laid upon her arm and

she saw her husband’s quivering face above her, there was a kind of

depression hovering over her. Robert felt it, and felt too that all his

devotion could not soothe it away. At last she said to him one evening,

in the encroaching September twilight, speaking with a sudden hurrying

vehemence, wholly unlike herself, as though a barrier of reserve had

given way,--

‘Robert, I cannot put it out of my head. I cannot forget it, _the pain

of the world!_’

He shut the book he was reading, her hand in his, and bent over her with

questioning eyes.

‘It seems’ she went on with that difficulty which a strong nature always

feels in self-revelation, ‘to take the joy even out of our love--and the

child. I feel ashamed almost that mere physical pain should have laid

such hold on me--and yet I can’t get away from it. It’s not for myself,’

and she smiled faintly at him. ‘Comparatively I had so little to bear!

But I know now for the first time what physical pain may mean--and

I never knew before! I lie thinking, Robert, about all creatures in

pain--workmen crushed by machinery, or soldiers--or poor things in

hospitals--above all of women! Oh, when I get well, how I will take care

of the women here! What women must suffer even here in out-of-the-way

cottages--no doctor, no kind nursing, all blind agony and struggle!

And women in London in dens like those Mr. Newcome got into, degraded,

forsaken, ill-treated, the thought of the child only an extra horror and

burden! And the pain all the time so merciless, so cruel--no escape! Oh,

to give all one is, or ever can be, to comforting! And yet the great

sea of it one can never touch! It is a nightmare--I am weak still, I

suppose; I don’t know myself; but I can see nothing but jarred, tortured

creatures everywhere. All my own joys and comforts seem to lift me

selfishly above the common lot.’

She stopped, her large gray-blue eyes dim with tears, trying once more

for that habitual self-restraint which physical weakness had shaken.

‘You _are_ weak,’ he said, caressing her, ‘and that destroys for a time

the normal balance of things. It is true, darling, but we are not meant

to see it always so clearly. God knows we could not bear it if we did.’

And to think,’ she said, shuddering a little, ‘that there are men and

women who in the face of it can still refuse Christ and the Cross, can

still say this life is all! How can they live--how dare they live?’

Then he saw that not only man’s pain but man’s defiance, had been

haunting her, and he guessed what persons and memories had been flitting

through her mind. But he dared not talk lest she should exhaust herself.

Presently, seeing a volume of Augustine’s ‘Confessions’, her favorite

book, lying beside her, he took it up, turning over the pages, and

weaving passages together as they caught his eye.

‘_Speak to me, for Thy compassion’s sake, O Lord my God, and tell me

what art Thou to me! Say unto my soul, “I am thy salvation.” Speak it

that I may hear. Behold the ears of my heart, O Lord; open them and say

into my soul, “I am thy salvation!” I will follow after this voice of

Thine, I will lay hold on Thee. The temple of my soul, wherein Thou

shouldest enter, is narrow, do Thou enlarge it. It falleth into

ruins--do Thou rebuild it!... Woe to that bold soul which hopeth, if

it do but let Thee go, to find something better than Thee! It turneth

hither and thither, on this side and on that, and all things are hard

and bitter unto it. For Thou only art rest!... Whithersoever the soul of

man turneth it findeth sorrow, except only in Thee. Fix there, then, thy

resting-place, mm soul! Lay up in Him whatever thou hast received from

Him. Commend to the keeping of the Truth whatever the Truth hath given

thee, and thou shalt lose nothing. And thy dead things shall revive and

thy weak things shall be made whole!_’

She listened, appropriating and clinging to every word, till the nervous

clasp of the long delicate fingers relaxed, her head dropped a little,

gently, against the head of the child, and tired with much feeling she

slept.

Robert slipped away and strolled out into the garden in the

fast-gathering darkness. His mind was full of that intense spiritual

life of Catherine’s which in its wonderful self-contentedness and

strength was always a marvel, sometimes a reproach to him. Beside her,

he seemed to himself a light creature, drawn hither and thither by this

interest and by that, tangled in the fleeting shows of things--the toy

and plaything of circumstance. He thought ruefully and humbly, as he

wondered on through the dusk, of his own lack of inwardness: ‘Everything

divides me from Thee!’ he could have cried in St. Augustine’s manner.

‘Books, and friends, and work--all seem to hide Thee from me. Why am I

so passionate for this and that, for all these sections and fragments of

Thee? Oh, for the One, the All! Fix, there thy resting-place, my soul!’

And presently, after this cry of self-reproach, he turned to muse on

that intuition of the world’s pain which had been troubling Catherine,

shrinking from it even more than she had shrunk from it, in proportion

as his nature was more imaginative than hers. And Christ the only clew,

the only remedy--no other anywhere in this vast Universe, where all

men are under sentences of death, where the whole creation groaneth and

travaileth in pain together until now!

And yet what countless generations of men had borne their pain, knowing

nothing of the one Healer. He thought of Buddhist patience and Buddhist

charity; of the long centuries during which Chaldean or Persian or

Egyptian lived, suffered, and died, trusting the gods they knew. And how

many other generations, nominally children of the Great Hope, had used

it as a mere instrument of passion or of hate, cursing in the name of

love, destroying in the name of pity! For how much of the world’s pain

was not Christianity itself responsible? His thoughts recurred with a

kind of anguished perplexity to some of the problems stirred in him of

late by his historical reading. The strifes and feuds and violences

of the early Church returned to weigh upon him--the hair-splitting

superstition, the selfish passion for power. He recalled Gibbon’s

lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen’s grave doubt

whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman Empire can

be said to be substantially happier now than in the days of Severus.

_O corruptio optimi!_ That men should have been so little affected by

that shining ideal of the New Jerusalem, ‘descended out of Heaven from

God,’ into their very midst--that the print of the ‘blessed feet’ along

the world’s highway should have been so often buried in the sands of

cruelty and fraud!

The September wind blew about him as he strolled through the darkening

common, set thick with great bushes of sombre juniper among the

yellowing fern, which stretched away on the left-hand side of the

road leading to the Hall. He stood and watched the masses of restless

discordant cloud which the sunset had left behind it, thinking the while

of Mr. Grey, of his assertions and his denials. Certain phrases of his

which Robert had heard drop from him on one or two rare occasions during

the later stages of his Oxford life ran through his head.

‘_The fairy-tale of Christianity_’--‘_The origins of Christian

Mythology_.’ He could recall, as the words rose in his memory, the

simplicity of the rugged face, and the melancholy mingled with fire

which had always marked the great tutor’s sayings about religion.

‘_Fairy Tale!_’ Could any reasonable man watch a life like Catherine’s

and believe that nothing but a delusion lay at the heart of it? And

as he asked the question, he seemed to hear Mr. Grey’s answer: ‘All

religions are true and all are false. In them all, more or less visibly,

man grasps at the one thing needful--self forsaken, God laid hold of.

The spirit in them all is the same, answers eternally to reality; it

is but the letter, the fashion, the imagery, that are relative and

changing.’

He turned and walked homeward, struggling with a host of tempestuous

ideas as swift and varying as the autumn clouds hurrying overhead. And

then, through a break in a line of trees, he caught sight of the tower

and chancel window of the little church. In an instant he had a vision

of early summer mornings--dewy, perfumed, silent, save for the birds and

all the soft stir of rural birth and growth, of a chancel fragrant

with many flowers, of a distant church with scattered figures, of the

kneeling form of his wife close beside him, himself bending over

her, the sacrament of the Lord’s death in his hand. The emotion, the

intensity, the absolute self-surrender of innumerable such moments

in the past--moments of a common faith, a common self-abasement--came

flooding back upon him. With a movement of joy and penitence he threw

himself at the feet of Catherine’s Master and his own: ‘_Fix there thy

resting-place, my soul!_’

CHAPTER XX.

Catherine’s later convalescence dwelt in her mind in after years as a

time of peculiar softness and peace. Her baby-girl throve; Robert had

driven the Squire and Henslowe out of his mind, and was all eagerness

as to certain negotiations with a famous naturalist for a lecture at

the village club. At Mile End, as though to put the Rector in the wrong,

serious illness had for the time disappeared; and Mrs. Leyburn’s mild

chatter, as she gently poked about the house and garden, went out in

Catherine’s pony-carriage, inspected Catherine’s stores, and hovered

over Catherine’s babe, had a constantly cheering effect on the still

languid mother. Like all theorists, especially those at secondhand, Mrs.

Leyburn’s maxims had been very much routed by the event. The babe had

ailments she did not understand, or it developed likes and dislikes she

had forgotten existed in babies, and Mrs. Leyburn was nonplussed. She

would sit with it on her lap, anxiously studying its peculiarities. She

was sure it squinted, that its back was weaker than other babies, that

it cried more than hers had ever done. She loved to be plaintive; it

would have seemed to her unladylike to be too cheerful, even over a

first grandchild.

Agnes meanwhile made herself practically useful, as was her way, and

she did almost more than anybody to beguile Catherine’s recovery by her

hours of Long Whindale chat. She had no passionate feeling about the

place and the people as Catherine had, but she was easily content, and

she had a good wholesome feminine curiosity as to the courtings and

weddings and buryings of the human beings about her. So she would sit

and chat, working the while with the quickest, neatest of fingers,

till Catherine knew as much about Jenny Tyson’s Whinborough lover, and

Farmer Tredall’s troubles with his son, and the way in which that odious

woman Molly Redgold bullied her little consumptive husband, as Agnes

knew, which was saying a good deal.

About themselves Agnes was frankness itself.

‘Since you went,’ she would say with a shrug, ‘I keep the coach steady,

perhaps, but Rose drives, and we shall have to go where she takes us. By

the way, Cathie, what have you been doing to her here? She is not a bit

like herself. I don’t generally mind being snubbed. It amuses her and

doesn’t hurt me; and, of course, I know I am meant to be her foil. But

really, sometimes she is too bad even for me.’

Catherine sighed, but held her peace. Like all strong persons, she kept

things very much to herself. It only made vexation more real to talk

about them. But she and Agnes discussed the winter and Berlin.

‘You had better let her go,’ said Agnes, significantly; ‘she will go

anyhow.’

A few days afterward Catherine, opening the drawing-room door

unexpectedly, came upon Rose sitting idly at the piano, her hands

resting on the keys, and her great gray eyes straining out of her white

face with an expression which sent the sister’s heart into her shoes.

‘How you steal about, Catherine!’ cried the player, getting up and

shutting the piano. ‘I declare you are just like Millais’s Gray Lady in

that ghostly gown.’

Catherine came swiftly across the floor. She had just left her child,

and the sweet dignity of motherhood was in her step, her look. She came

and threw her arms round the girl.

‘Rose dear, I have settled it all with mamma. The money can be managed,

and you shall go to Berlin for the winter when you like.’

She drew herself back a little, still with her arms round Rose’s waist,

and looked at her smiling, to see how she took it.

Rose had a strange movement of irritation. She drew herself out of

Catherine’s grasp.

‘I don’t know that I had settled on Berlin,’ she said coldly, ‘Very

possibly Leipsic would be better.’

Catherine’s face fell.

‘Whichever you like, dear. I have been thinking about it ever since that

day you spoke of it--you remember--and now I have talked it over with

mamma. If she can’t manage, all the expense we will help. Oh Rose,’ and

she came nearer again, timidly, her eyes melting, ‘I know we haven’t

understood each other. I have been ignorant, I think, and narrow. But I

meant it for the best, dear--I did--’

Her voice failed her, but in her look there seemed to be written the

history of all the prayers and yearnings of her youth over the pretty

wayward child who had been her joy and torment. Rose could not but meet

that look--its nobleness, its humble surrender.

Suddenly two large tears rolled down her cheeks. She dashed them away

impatiently.

‘I am not a bit well,’ she said, as though in irritable excuse both

to herself and Catherine. ‘I believe I have had a headache for a

fortnight.’

And then she put her arms down on a table near and hid her face upon

them. She was one bundle of jarring nerves; sore, poor passionate child,

that she was betraying herself; sorer still that, as she told herself,

Catherine was sending her to Berlin as a consolation. When girls

have love-troubles the first thing their elders do is to look for a

diversion. She felt sick and humiliated. Catherine had been talking her

over with the family, she supposed.

Meanwhile Catherine stood by her tenderly, stroking her hair and saying

soothing things.

‘I am sure you will be happy at Berlin, Rose. And you mustn’t leave me

out of your life, dear, though I am so stupid and unmusical. You must

write to me about all you do. We must be in a new time. Oh, I feel so

guilty sometimes,’ she went on, falling into a low intensity of voice

that startled Rose, and made her look hurriedly up. ‘I fought against

your music, I suppose, because I thought it was devouring you--leaving

no room for--for religion--for God. I was jealous of it for Christ’s

sake. And all the time I was blundering! Oh, Rose,’ and she sank on her

knees beside the chair, resting her head against the girl’s shoulder,

‘papa charged me to make you love God, and I torture myself with

thinking that, instead, it has been my doing, my foolish, clumsy doing,

that you have come to think religion dull and hard. Oh, my darling, if

I could make amends--if I could got you not to love your art less but

to love it in God! Christ is the first reality; all things else are

real and lovely in Him! Oh, I have been frightening you away from Him!

I ought to have drawn you near. I have been so--so silent, so shut up, I

have never tried to make you feel what it was kept _me_ at His feet! Oh,

Rose darling, you think the world real, and pleasure and enjoyment real.

But if I could have made you see and know the things I have seen up

in the mountains--among the poor, the dying--you would have _felt_

Him saving, redeeming, interceding, as I did. Oh, then you _must_, you

_would_ have known that Christ only is real, that our joys can only

truly exist in Him. I should have been more open--more faithful--more

humble.’

She paused with a long quivering sigh. Rose suddenly lifted herself, and

they fell into each others’ arms.

Rose, shaken and excited, thought, of course, of that night at Burwood,

when she had won leave to go to Manchester. This scene was the sequel to

that--the next stage in one and the same process. Her feeling was much

the same as that of the naturalist who comes close to any of the hidden

operations of life. She had come near to Catherine’s spirit in the

growing. Beside that sweet expansion, how poor and feverish and

earth-stained the poor child felt herself!

But there were many currents in Rose--many things striving for the

mastery. She kissed Catherine once or twice, then she drew herself back

suddenly, looking into the other’s face. A great wave of feeling rushed

up and broke.

‘Catherine, could you ever have married a man that did not believe in

Christ?’

She flung the question out--a kind of morbid curiosity, a wild wish to

find an outlet of some sort for things pent up in her, driving her on.

Catherine started. But she met Rose’s half-frowning eyes steadily.

‘Never, Rose! To me it would not be marriage.’ The child’s face lost its

softness. She drew one hand away.

‘What have we to do with it?’ She cried. ‘Each one for himself.’

‘But marriage makes two one,’ said Catherine, pale, but with a firm

clearness. ‘And if husband and wife are only one in body and estate, not

one in soul, why who that believes in the soul would accept such a bond,

endure such a miserable second best?’

She rose. But though her voice had recovered all its energy, her

attitude, her look was still tenderness, still yearning itself.

‘Religion does not fill up the soul,’ said Rose slowly. Then she added

carelessly, a passionate red flying into her cheek, against her will,

‘However, I cannot imagine any question that interests me personally

less. I was curious what you would say.’

And she too got up, drawing her hand lightly along the keyboard of the

piano. Her pose had a kind of defiance in it; her knit brows forbade

Catherine to ask questions. Catherine stood irresolute. Should she throw

herself on her sister, imploring her to speak, opening her own heart on

the subject of this wild, unhappy fancy for a man who would never think

again of the child he had played with?

But the North-country dread of words, of speech that only defines and

magnifies, prevailed. Let there be no words, but let her love and watch.

So, after a moment’s pause, she began in a different tone upon the

inquiries she had been making, the arrangements that would be wanted for

this musical winter. Rose was almost listless at first. A stranger would

have thought she was being persuaded into something against her will.

But she could not keep it up. The natural instinct reasserted itself,

and she was soon planning and deciding as sharply, and with as much

young omniscience, as usual.

By the evening it was settled. Mrs. Leyburn, much bewildered, asked

Catherine doubtfully, the last thing at night, whether she wanted Rose

to be a professional. Catherine exclaimed.

‘But, my dear,’ said the widow, staring pensively into her bedroom fire,

‘what’s she to do with all this music?’ Then after a second she added

half severely: ‘I don’t believe her father would have liked it; I don’t,

indeed, Catherine!’

Poor Catherine smiled and sighed in the background, but made no reply.

‘However, she never looks so pretty as when she’s playing the violin;

never!’ said Mrs. Leyburn presently in the distance, with a long breath

of satisfaction. ‘She’s got such a lovely hand and arm, Catherine!

They’re prettier than mine, and even your father used to notice mine.’

‘_Even_.’ The word had a little sound of bitterness. In spite of all

his love, had the gentle puzzle-headed woman found her unearthly husband

often very hard to live with?

Rose meanwhile was sitting up in bed, with her hands round her knees,

dreaming. So she had got her heart’s desire! There did not seem to be

much joy in the getting, but that was the way of things, one was

told. She knew she should hate the Germans--great, bouncing, over-fed,

sentimental creatures!

Then her thoughts ran into the future. After six months--yes, by

April--she would be home, and Agnes and her mother could meet her in

London.

_London_. Ah, it was London she was thinking of all the time, not

Berlin! She could not stay in the present; or rather the Rose of the

present went straining to the Rose of the future, asking to be righted,

to be avenged.

‘I will learn--I will learn fast, many things besides music!’ she said

to herself feverishly. ‘By April I shall be _much_ cleverer. Oh, _then_

I won’t be a fool so easily. We shall be sure to meet, of course. But

he shall find out that it was only a _child_, only a silly, softhearted

baby he played with down here. I shan’t care for him in the least, of

course not, not after six months. I don’t _mean_ to. And I will make him

know it--oh, I will, though he is so wise, and so much older, and mounts

on such stilts when he pleases!’

So once more Rose flung her defiance at fate. But when Catherine came

along the passage an hour later she heard low sounds from Rose’s room,

which ceased abruptly as her step drew near. The elder sister paused;

her eyes filled with tears; her hand closed indignantly. Then she came

closer, all but went in, thought better of it, and moved away. If there

is any truth in brain waves, Langham should have slept restlessly that

night.

Ten days later an escort had been found, all preparations had been made,

and Rose was gone.

Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes lingered a while, and then they too departed

under an engagement to come back after Christmas for a long stay, that

Mrs. Leyburn might cheat the Northern spring a little.

So husband and wife were alone again. How they relished their solitude!

Catherine took up many threads of work which her months of comparative

weakness had forced her to let drop. She taught vigorously in the

school; in the afternoons, so far as her child would let her, she

carried her tender presence and her practical knowledge of nursing to

the sick and feeble; and on two evenings in the week she and Robert

threw open a little room there was on the ground-floor between the study

and the dining-room to the women and girls of the village, as a sort of

drawing-room. Hard-worked mothers would come, who had put their fretful

babes to sleep, and given their lords to eat, and had just energy left,

while the eldest daughter watched, and the men were at the club or the

‘Blue Boar,’ to put on a clean apron and climb the short hill to the

rectory. Once there, there was nothing to think of for an hour but

the bright room, Catherine’s kind face, the Rector’s jokes, and the

illustrated papers or the photographs that were spread out for them

to look at if they would. The girls learned to come, because Catherine

could teach them a simple dressmaking, and was clever in catching stray

persons to set them singing; and because Mr. Elsmere read exciting

stories, and because nothing any one of them ever told Mrs. Elsmere was

forgotten by her, or failed to interest her. Any of her social equals of

the neighborhood would have hardly recognized the reserved and stately

Catherine on these occasions. Here she felt herself at home, at ease.

She would never, indeed, have Robert’s pliancy, his quick divination,

and for some time after her transplanting the North-country woman

had found it very difficult to suit herself to a new shade of local

character. But she was learning from Robert every day; she watched him

among the poor, recognizing all his gifts with a humble intensity of

admiring love, which said little but treasured everything, and for

herself her inward happiness and peace shone through her quiet ways,

making her the mother and the friend of all about her.

As for Robert, he, of course, was living at high pressure all round.

Outside his sermons and his school, his Natural History Club had perhaps

most of his heart, and the passion for science, little continuous work

as he was able to give it, grew on him more and more. He kept up as best

he could, working with one hand, so to speak, when he could not spare

two, and in his long rambles over moor and hill, gathering in with his

quick eye a harvest of local fact wherewith to feed their knowledge and

his own.

The mornings he always spent at work among his books, the afternoons

in endless tramps over the parish, sometimes alone, sometimes with

Catherine; and in the evenings, if Catherine was ‘at home’ twice a week

to womankind, he had his nights when his study became the haunt and prey

of half the boys in the place, who were free of everything, as soon as

he had taught them to respect his books, and not to taste his medicines;

other nights when he was lecturing or story-telling, in the club or in

some outlying hamlet; or others again, when with Catherine beside him he

would sit trying to think some of that religious passion which burned

in both their hearts, into clear words or striking illustrations for his

sermons.

Then his choir was much upon his mind. He knew nothing about music, nor

did Catherine; their efforts made Rose laugh irreverently when she got

their letters at Berlin. But Robert believed in a choir chiefly as an

excellent social and centralizing instrument. There had been none in

Mr. Preston’s day. He was determined to have one, and a good one, and

by sheer energy he succeeded, delighting in his boyish way over the

opposition some of his novelties excited among the older and more

stiff-backed inhabitants.

‘Let them talk,’ he would say brightly to Catherine. ‘They will come

round; and talk is good. Anything to make them think, to stir the pool!’

Of course that old problem of the agricultural laborer weighed upon

him--his grievances, his wants. He went about pondering the English land

system, more than half inclined one day to sink part of his capital in

a peasant-proprietor experiment, and engulfed the next in all the moral

and economical objections to the French system. Land for allotments,

at any rate, he had set his heart on. But in this direction, as in many

others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish was the Squire’s,

and not an inch of the Squire’s land would Henslowe let young Elsmere

have anything to do with if he knew it. He would neither repair, nor

enlarge the Workmen’s Institute; and he had a way of forgetting the

Squire’s customary subscriptions to parochial objects, always paid

through him, which gave him much food for chuckling whenever he passed

Elsmere in the country lanes. The man’s coarse insolence and mean hatred

made themselves felt at every turn, besmirching and embittering.

Still it was very true that neither Henslowe nor the Squire could do

Robert much harm. His hold on the parish was visibly strengthening; his

sermons were not only filling the church with his own parishioners, but

attracting hearers from the districts round Murewell, so that even on

these winter Sundays there was almost always a sprinkling of strange

faces among the congregation; and his position in the county and diocese

was becoming every month more honorable and important. The gentry about

showed them much kindness, and would have shown them much hospitality

if they had been allowed. But though Robert had nothing of the

ascetic about him, and liked the society of his equals as much as most

good-tempered and vivacious people do, he and Catherine decided that

for the present they had no time to spare for visits and county society.

Still, of course, there were many occasions on which the routine of

their life brought them across their neighbors, and it began to be

pretty widely recognized that Elsmere was a young fellow of unusual

promise and intelligence, that his wife too was remarkable, and that

between them they were likely to raise the standard of clerical effort

considerably in their part of Surrey.

All the factors of this life--his work, his influence, his recovered

health, the lavish beauty of the country, Elsmere enjoyed with all his

heart. But at the root of all there lay what gave value and savor to

everything else--that exquisite home-life of theirs, that tender, triple

bond of husband, wife, and child.

Catherine coming home tired from teaching or visiting, would find her

step quickening as she reached the gate of the rectory, and the sense of

delicious possession waking up in her, which is one of the first fruits

of motherhood. There, at the window, between the lamplight behind and

the winter dusk outside, would be the child in its nurse’s arms, little

wondering, motiveless smiles passing over the tiny puckered face

that was so oddly like Robert already. And afterward, in the fire-lit

nursery, with the bath in front of the high fender, and all the

necessaries of baby life beside it, she would go through those functions

which mothers love and linger over, let the kicking, dimpled creature

principally concerned protest as it may against the over-refinements of

civilization. Then, when the little restless voice was stilled, and

the cradle left silent in the darkened room, there would come the short

watching for Robert, his voice, his kiss, their simple meal together, a

moment of rest, of laughter and chat, before some fresh effort claimed

them. Every now and then--white-letter days--there would drop on them a

long evening together. Then out would come one of the few books--Dante

or Virgil or Milton--which had entered into the fibre of Catherine’s

strong nature. The two heads would draw close over them, or Robert would

take some thought of hers as a text, and spout away from the hearthrug,

watching all the while for her smile, her look of assent. Sometimes,

late at night, when there was a sermon on his mind, he would dive into

his pocket for his Greek Testament and make her read, partly for

the sake of teaching her--for she knew some Greek and longed to know

more--but mostly that he might get from her some of that garnered wealth

of spiritual experience which he adored in her. They would go from verse

to verse, from thought to thought, till suddenly perhaps the tide of

feeling would rise, and while the windswept round the house, and the

owls hooted in the elms, they would sit hand in hand, lost in love and

fait--Christ near them--Eternity, warm with God, enwrapping them.

So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthropist. In

reality, great as was the moral energy of this period of Elsmere’s life,

the dominant distinguishing note of it was not moral but intellectual.

In matters of conduct he was but developing habits and tendencies

already strongly present in him; in matters of his thinking, with every

month of this winter he was becoming conscious of fresh forces, fresh

hunger, fresh horizons.

‘_One half of your day be the king of your world_,’ Mr. Grey had said to

him; ‘_the other half be the slave of something which will take you out

of your world_, into the general life, the life of thought, of man as a

whole, of the universe.’

The counsel, as we have seen, had struck root and flowered into action.

So many men of Elsmere’s type give themselves up once and for all

as they become mature to the life of doing and feeling, practically

excluding the life of thought. It was Henry Grey’s influence in all

probability, perhaps, too, the training of an earlier Langham, that

saved for Elsmere the life of thought.

The form taken by this training of his own mind he had been thus

encouraged not to abandon, was, as we know, the study of history. He had

well mapped out before him that book on the origins of France which

he had described to Langham. It was to take him years, of course, and

meanwhile, in his first enthusiasm, he was like a child, revelling in

the treasure of work that lay before him. As he had told Langham, he had

just got below the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig

into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men

of his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions the

past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, coherence,

and, as it were, modernness, so that the main impression he produces on

us, so long as we look at that past through him only, is on the whole an

impression of continuity of _resemblance_.

Whereas, on the contrary, the first impression left on a man by the

attempt to plunge into the materials of history for himself is

almost always an extraordinarily sharp impression of _difference_, of

_contrast_. Ultimately, of course, he sees that those men and women

whose letters and biographies, whose creeds and general conceptions he

is investigating, are in truth his ancestors, bone of his bone, flesh of

his flesh. But at first the student who goes back, say, in the history

of Europe, behind the Renaissance or behind the Crusades into the actual

deposits of the past, is often struck with a kind of _vertige_. The men

and women whom he has dragged forth into the light of his own mind

are to him like some strange puppet-show. They are called by names he

knows--kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters--but what

a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic

processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance

and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or

falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and

tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the

grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed,

he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins who represent a forward

strain, who belong as it seems to a world of their own, a world ahead

of them. To them he stretches out his hand: ‘_You_,’ he says to them,

‘though your priests spoke to you not of Christ, but of Zeus and

Artemis, _you_ are really my kindred!’ But intellectually they stand

alone. Around them, after them, for long ages the world ‘spake as a

child, felt as a child, understood as a child.’

Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf.

‘_Science_,’ the mind cries, ‘_ordered knowledge_.’ And so for the first

time the modern recognizes what the accumulations of his forefathers

have done for him. He takes the torch which man has been so long and

patiently fashioning to his hand, and turns it on the past, and at every

step the sight grows stranger, and yet more moving, more pathetic.

The darkness into which he penetrates does but make him grasp his

own guiding light the more closely. And yet, bit by bit, it has been

prepared for him by these groping, half-conscious generations, and the

scrutiny which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a marvelling

gratitude.

But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during this winter of

work Elsmere felt them both very strongly. He would sit in the

morning buried among the records of decaying Rome and emerging France,

surrounded by Chronicles, by Church Councils, by lives of the Saints, by

primitive systems of law, pushing his imaginative, impetuous way through

them. Sometimes Catherine would be there, and he would pour out on her

something of what was in his own mind.

One day he was deep in the life of a certain saint. The saint had been

bishop of a diocese in Southern France. His biographer was his successor

in the see, a man of high political importance in the Burgundian state,

renowned besides for sanctity and learning. Only some twenty years

separated the biography, at the latest, from the death of its subject.

It contained some curious material for social history, and Robert was

reading it with avidity. But it was, of course, a tissue of marvels. The

young bishop had practised every virtue known to the time, and wrought

every conceivable miracle, and the miracles were better told than usual,

with more ingenuity, more imagination. Perhaps on that account they

struck the reader’s sense more sharply.

‘And the saint said to the sorcerers and to the practisers of unholy

arts, that they should do those evil things no more, for he had bound

the spirits of whom they were wont to inquire, and they would get no

further answers to their incantations. Then those stiff-necked sons of

the Devil fell upon the man of God, scourged him sore, and threatened

him with death, if he would not instantly loose those spirits he

had bound. And seeing he could prevail nothing, and being moreover,

admonished by God so to do, he permitted them to work their own

damnation. For he called for a parchment and wrote upon it, “_Ambrose

unto Satan--Enter!_” Then was the spell loosed, the spirits returned,

the sorcerers inquired as they were accustomed, and received answers.

But in a short space of time every one of them perished miserably and

was delivered unto his natural lord Satanas, whereunto he belonged.’

Robert made a hasty exclamation, and turning to Catherine, who was

working beside him, read the passage to her, with a few words as to the

book and its author.

Catherine’s work dropped a moment on to her knee.

‘What extraordinary superstition!’ she said, startled. ‘A bishop,

Robert, and an educated man?’

Robert nodded.

‘But it is the whole habit of mind,’ he said half to himself, staring

into the fire, ‘that is so astounding. No one escapes it. The whole age

really is non-sane.’

‘I suppose the devout Catholic would believe that?’

‘I am not sure,’ said Robert dreamily, and remained sunk in thought

for long after, while Catherine worked, and pondered a Christmas

entertainment for her girls.

Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was that was

really quickening and sharpening these historical impressions of his.

Evolution--once a mere germ in the mind--was beginning to press, to

encroach, to intermeddle with the mind’s other furniture.

And the comparative instinct--that tool, _par excellence_, of modern

science was at last fully awake, was growing fast, taking hold, now

here, now there.

‘It is tolerably clear to me,’ he said to himself suddenly one winter

afternoon, as he was trudging home alone from Mile End, ‘that some day

or other I must set to work to bring a little order into one’s notions

of the Old Testament. At present they are just a chaos!’

He walked on awhile, struggling with the rainstorm which had overtaken

him, till again the mind’s quick life took voice.

‘But what matter? God in the beginning--God in the prophets--in Israel’s

best life--God in Christ! How are any theories about the Pentateuch to

touch that?’

And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow with wind and rain, there

leapt a light, a softness indescribable.

But the vivider and the keener grew this new mental life of Elsmere’s,

the more constant became his sense of soreness as to that foolish and

motiveless quarrel which divided him from the Squire. Naturally he was

for ever being harassed and pulled up in his work by the mere loss of

the Murewell library. To have such a collection so close, and to be

cut off from it, was a state of things no student could help feeling

severely. But it was much more than that: it was the man he hankered

after; the man who was a master where he was a beginner; the man who had

given his life to learning, and was carrying all his vast accumulations

sombrely to the grave, unused, untransmitted.

‘He might have given me his knowledge,’ thought Elsmere sadly, ‘and

I--I--would have been a son to him. Why is life so perverse?’

Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and its master as

though both had been surrounded by the thorn hedge of fairy tale. The

Hall had its visitors during these winter months, but the Elsmeres saw

nothing of them. Robert gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday

evening, as he passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the

chief of English science side by side with the most accomplished of

English critics.

“‘There are good times in the world and I ain’t in ‘em!’” he said

to himself with a laugh and a shrug as he turned up the lane to

the rectory, and then, boylike, was ashamed of himself, and greeted

Catherine, with all the tenderer greeting.

Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure of having

seen the Squire. Both were in the twilight, when, as the neighborhood

declared, Mr. Wendover always walked, and both made a sharp impression

on the Rector’s nerves. In the heart of one of the loneliest commons

of the parish Robert, swinging along one November evening through the

scattered furze bushes growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly

conscious of a cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head bent

forward coming toward him. It passed without recognition of any kind,

and for an instant Robert caught the long, sharpened features and

haughty eyes of the Squire.

At another time Robert was walking, far from home, along a bit of level

road. The pools in the ruts were just filmed with frost, and gleamed

under the sunset; the winter dusk was clear and chill. A horseman turned

into the road from a side lane. It was the Squire again, alone. The

sharp sound of the approaching hoofs stirred Robert’s pulse, and as they

passed each other the Rector raised his hat. He thought his greeting was

acknowledged, but could not be quite sure. From the shelter of a group

of trees he stood a moment and looked after the retreating figure. It

and the horse showed dark against a wide sky barred by stormy reds and

purples. The wind whistled through the withered oaks; the long road

with its lines of glimmering pools seemed to stretch endlessly into the

sunset; and with every minute the night strode on. Age and loneliness

could have found no fitter setting. A shiver ran through Elsmere as he

stepped forward.

Undoubtedly the quarrel, helped by his work, and the perpetual presence

of that beautiful house commanding the whole country round it from its

plateau above the river, kept Elsmere specially in mind of the Squire.

As before their first meeting, and in spite of it, he became more and

more imaginatively preoccupied with him. One of the signs of it was a

strong desire to read the Squire’s two famous books: one, ‘The Idols of

the Market Place,’ an attack on English beliefs; the other, ‘Essays on

English Culture,’ an attack on English ideals of education. He had never

come across them as it happened, and perhaps Newcome’s denunciation had

some effect in inducing him for a time to refrain from reading them. But

in December he ordered them and waited their coming with impatience. He

said nothing of the order to Catherine; somehow there were by now two or

three portions of his work, two or three branches of his thought,

which had fallen out of their common discussion. After all she was

not literary and with all their oneness of soul there could not be an

_identity_ of interests or pursuits.

The books arrived in the morning. (Oh, how dismally well, with what a

tightening of the heart, did Robert always remember that day in after

years!) He was much too busy to look at them, and went off to a meeting.

In the evening, coming home late from his night-school, he found

Catherine tired, sent her to bed, and went himself into his study to put

together some notes for a cottage lecture he was to give the following

day. The packet of books, unopened, lay on his writing-table. He took

off the wrapper, and in his eager way fell to reading the first he

touched.

It was the first volume of the ‘Idols of the Market Place.’

Ten or twelve years before, Mr. Wendover had launched this book into

a startled and protesting England. It had been the fruit of his first

renewal of contact with English life and English ideas after his return

from Berlin. Fresh from the speculative ferment of Germany and the far

profaner scepticism of France, he had returned to a society where the

first chapter of Genesis and the theory of verbal inspiration were still

regarded as valid and important counters on the board of thought. The

result had been this book. In it each stronghold of English popular

religion had been assailed in turn, at a time when English orthodoxy was

a far more formidable thing than it is now.

The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, Tradition, the

Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, the Eighteenth

Century, the Broad Church Movement, Anglican Theology--the Squire had

his say about them all. And while the coolness and frankness of the

method sent a shook of indignation and horror through the religious

public, the subtle and caustic style, and the epigrams with which the

book was strewn, forced both the religious and irreligious public to

read, whether they would or no. A storm of controversy rose round the

volumes, and some of the keenest observers of English life had said at

the time, and maintained since, that the publication of the book had

made or marked an epoch.

Robert had lit on those pages in the Essay on the Gospels where the

Squire fell to analyzing the evidence for the Resurrection, following up

his analysis by an attempt at reconstructing the conditions out of which

the belief in ‘the legend’ arose. Robert began to read vaguely at first,

then to hurry on through page after page, still standing, seized at

once by the bizarre power of the style, the audacity and range of the

treatment.

Not a sound in the house. Outside, the tossing, moaning December night;

inside, the faintly crackling fire, the standing figure. Suddenly it

was to Robert as though a cruel torturing hand were laid upon his inmost

being. His breath failed him; the book slipped out of his grasp; he

sank down upon his chair, his head in his hands. Oh, what a desolate,

intolerable moment! Over the young idealist soul there swept a

dry destroying whirlwind of thought. Elements Gathered from all

sources--from his own historical work, from the Squire’s book, from the

secret, half-conscious recesses of the mind--entered into it, and as it

passed it seemed to scorch the heart.

He stayed bowed there a while, then he roused himself with a half-groan,

and hastily extinguishing his lamp; he groped his way upstairs to his

wife’s room. Catherine lay asleep. The child, lost among its white

coverings, slept too; there was a dim light over the bed, the books, the

pictures. Beside his wife’s pillow was a table on which there lay open

her little Testament and the ‘Imitation’ her father had given her.

Elsmere sank down beside her, appalled by the contrast between this soft

religious peace and that black agony of doubt which still overshadowed

him. He knelt there, restraining his breath lest it should wake her,

wrestling piteously with himself, crying for pardon, for faith, feeling

himself utterly unworthy to touch even the dear hand that lay so

near him. But gradually the traditional forces of his life reasserted

themselves. The horror lifted. Prayer brought comfort and a passionate,

healing self-abasement. ‘Master, forgive--defend--purify--’ cried the

aching heart. ‘_There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou,

O God!_’

He did not open the book again. Next morning he put it back into

his shelves. If there were any Christian who could affront such an

antagonist with a light heart, he felt with a shudder of memory it was

not he.

‘I have neither learning nor experience enough--yet,’ he said to himself

slowly as he moved away. ‘Of course it can be met, but I must grow, must

think--first.’

And of that night’s wrestle he said not a word to any living soul. He

did penance for it in the tenderest, most secret ways, but he shrank in

misery from the thought of revealing it even to Catherine.

CHAPTER XXI.

Meanwhile the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and apparently

throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. Robert, as soon as

he found that radical measures were for the time hopeless, had applied

himself with redoubled energy to making the people use such palliatives

as were within their reach, and had preached boiled water and the

removal of filth till, as he declared to Catherine, his dreams were one

long sanitary nightmare. But he was not confiding enough to believe that

the people paid much heed, and he hoped more from a dry hard winter than

from any exertion either of his or theirs.

But, alas! with the end of November a season of furious rain set in.

Then Robert began to watch Mile End with anxiety, for so far every

outbreak of illness there had followed upon unusual damp. But the rains

passed leaving behind them no worse result than the usual winter crop of

lung ailments and rheumatism, and he breathed again.

Christmas came and went, and with the end of December the wet weather

returned. Day after day rolling masses of southwest cloud came up from

the Atlantic and wrapped the whole country in rain, which reminded

Catherine of her Westmoreland rain more than any she had yet seen in the

South. Robert accused her of liking it for that reason, but she shook

her head with a sigh, declaring that it was ‘nothing without the peaks.’

One afternoon she was shutting the door of the school behind her,

and stepping out on the road skirting the green--the bedabbled wintry

green--when she saw Robert emerging from the Mile End lane. She crossed

over to him, wondering, as she neared him, that he seemed to take no

notice of her. He was striding along, his wideawake over his eyes, and

so absorbed that she had almost touched him before he saw her.

‘Darling, is that you? Don’t stop me, I am going to take the

pony-carriage in for Meyrick. I have just come back from that accursed

place; three cases of diphtheria in one house, Sharland’s wife--and two

others down with fever.’

She made a horrified exclamation.

‘It will spread,’ he said gloomily, ‘I know it will. I never saw the

children look such a ghastly crew before. Well, I must go for Meyrick

and a nurse, and we must isolate and make a fight for it.’

In a few days the diphtheria epidemic reached terrible proportion’s.

There had been one death, others were expected, and soon Robert in his

brief hours at home could find no relief in anything, so heavy was the

oppression of the day’s memories. At first Catherine for the child’s

sake kept away; but the little Mary was weaned, had a good Scotch nurse,

was in every way thriving, and after a day or two Catherine’s craving to

help, to be with Robert in his trouble was too strong to be withstood.

But she dared not go backward and forward between her baby and the

diphtheritic children. So she bethought herself of Mrs. Elsmere’s

servant, old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs. Elsmere’s cottage

till a tenant could be found for it, and doing good service meanwhile

as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse went over to the

cottage. Catherine carried the child there, wrapped close in maternal

arms, and leaving her on old Martha’s lap, went back to Robert.

Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight with the

epidemic. At the climax of it, there were about twenty children down

with it in different stages, and seven cases of fever. They had two

hospital nurses; one of the better cottages, turned into a sanatorium,

accommodated the worst cases under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine,

directed by them and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest,

he helping to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases

Sharland’s wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it seemed

almost impossible she could weather through. But day after day passed,

and by dint of incessant nursing she still lived. A youth of twenty,

the main support of a mother and five or six younger children, was also

desperately ill. Robert hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and

the boy’s doglike affection for the Rector, struggling with his

deathly weakness, was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and

Ormuzd--the power of life struggling with the power of death.

It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband and wife as

though the few daily hours spent at the rectory were mere halts between

successive acts of battle with the plague-fiend--a more real and grim

Grendel of the Marshes--for the lives of children. Catherine could

always sleep in these intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very

soon could only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick’s.

On all occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in him

of a certain lack of constitutional hardness which his mother knew very

well, but which his wife was only just beginning to recognize. However,

he laughed to scorn any attempt to restrain his constant goings and

comings, or those hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital

nurses were the first to admit, no one was so successful as the Rector.

And when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, the worn

and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge warm at each heart of

those before him of how the Rector not only talked but lived, carried

every word home.

This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, strangely

enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke through a tension

of brain which of late had become an oppression. And for both him and

Catherine these dark times had moments of intensest joy, points of white

light illuminating heaven and earth.

There were cloudy nights--wet, stormy January nights--when sometimes

it happened to them to come back both together from the hamlet, Robert

carrying a lantern, Catherine clothed in waterproof from head to foot,

walking beside him, the rays flashing now on her face, now on the wooded

sides of the lane, while the wind howled through the dark vault of

branches overhead. And then, as they talked or were silent, suddenly

a sense of the intense blessedness of this comradeship of theirs would

rise like a flood in the man’s heart, and he would fling his free arm

round her, forcing her to stand a moment in the January night and storm

while he said to her words of passionate gratitude, of faith in an

immortal union reaching beyond change or deaths lost in a kiss which was

a sacrament. Then there were the moments when they saw their child, held

high in Martha’s arms at the window, and leaping toward her mother; the

moments when one pallid, sickly being after another was pronounced out

of danger; and by the help of them the weeks passed away.

Nor were they left without help from outside. Lady Helen Varley no

sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Robert on his way one

morning from one cottage to another saw her pony-carriage in the lane.

He hastened up to her before she could dismount.

‘No, Lady Helen, you mustn’t come here,’ he said to her peremptorily, as

she held out her hand.

‘Oh, Mr. Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his grandmother. Let me

just go through, at any rate, and see what I can send you.’

Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs and hers had

once described this little lady to Elsmere by a French sentence which

originally applied to the Duchesse de Choiseul. ‘Une charmante petite

fée sortie d’un œuf enchanté!’--so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked

down upon her now, fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels behind

him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of life.

Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the production of

which even Worth had felt some pride; a little green velvet bonnet

perched on her fair hair; one tiny hand, ungloved, seemed ablaze

with diamonds; there were opals and diamonds somewhere at her throat,

gleaming among her sables. But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she

wore her high birth, her quaint, irregular prettiness, or the one or two

brilliant gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. She loved

her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased her to wear them

in the morning she wore them; and in five minutes she was capable of

making the sourest Puritan forget to frown on her and them. To Robert

she always seemed the quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their

best. All her freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful.

At her freest and gayest there were things in her--restraints,

reticences, perceptions--which implied behind her generations of rich,

happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate all the more

delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. Robert was often

struck by the curious differences between her and Rose. Rose was far

the handsome; she was at least as clever; and she had a strong

imperious will where Lady Helen had only impulses and sympathies and

_engouements_. But Rose belonged to the class which struggles, where

each individual depends on himself and knows it. Lady Helen had never

struggled for anything--all the best things of the world were hers so

easily that she hardly gave them a thought; or rather, what she had

gathered without pain she held so lightly, she dispensed so lavishly,

that men’s eyes followed her, fluttering through life, with much the

same feeling as was struck from Clough’s radical hero by the peerless

Lady Maria:--

Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness,

Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you;

Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous; only be lovely!

‘Uncaring,’ however, little Lady Helen never was. If she was a fairy,

she was a fairy all heart, all frank, foolish smiles and tears.

‘No, Lady Helen--no,’ Robert said again. ‘This is no place for you, and

we are getting on capitally.’

She pouted a little.

‘I believe you and Mrs. Elsmere are just killing yourselves all in a

corner, with no one to see,’ she said indignantly. ‘If you won’t let

me see, I shall send Sir Harry. But who’--and her brown fawn’s eyes

ran startled over the cottages before her--‘who, Mr. Elsmere, does this

_dreadful_ place belong to?’

‘Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert shortly.

‘Impossible!’ she cried incredulously. ‘Why, I wouldn’t ask one of my

dogs to sleep there,’ and she pointed to the nearest hovel, whereof the

walls were tottering outward, the thatch was falling to pieces, and the

windows were mended with anything that came handy--rags, paper, or the

crown of an old hat.

‘No, you would be ill-advised’ said Robert, looking with a bitter little

smile at the sleek dachshund that sat blinking beside its mistress.

‘But what is the agent about?’

Then Robert told her the story, not mincing his words. Since the

epidemic had begun, all that sense of imaginative attraction which had

been reviving in him toward the Squire had been simply blotted out by

a fierce heat of indignation. When he thought of Mr. Wendover now, he

thought of him as the man to whom in strict truth it was owing that

helpless children died in choking torture. All that agony, of wrath and

pity he had gone through in the last ten days sprang to his lips now as

he talked to Lady Helen, and poured itself into his words.

‘Old Meyrick and I have taken things into our own hands now,’ he said

at last briefly. ‘We have already made two cottages fairly habitable.

To-morrow the inspector comes. I told the people yesterday I wouldn’t be

bound by my promise a day longer. He must put the screw on Henslowe, and

if Henslowe dawdles, why we shall just drain and repair and sink for a

well, ourselves. I can find the money somehow. At present we get all our

water from one of the farms on the brow.’

‘Money!’ said Lady Helen impulsively, her looks warm with sympathy for

the pale, harassed young rector. ‘Sir Harry shall send you as much as

you want. And anything else--blankets--coals?’

Out came her notebooks and Robert was drawn into a list. Then, full

of joyfulness at being allowed to help, she gathered up her reins, she

nodded her pretty little head at him, and was just starting off her

ponies at full speed, equally eager ‘to tell Harry’ and to ransack

Churton for the stores required, when it occurred to her to pull up

again.

‘Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, does nothing but talk about

your sister-in-law. _Why_ did you keep her all to yourself? Is it kind,

is it neighborly, to have such a wonder to stay with you and let nobody

share?’

‘A wonder?’ said Robert, amused. ‘Rose plays the violin very well,

but--’

‘As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective!’ exclaimed Lady

Helen. ‘My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in town next season

if you will all let her. I think she would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte

knows all the world and his wife. And if I’m there, and Miss Leyburn

will let me make friends with her, why, you know, _I_ can just protect

her a little from Aunt Charlotte?’

The little laughing face bent forward again; Robert, smiling, raised his

hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else Elsmere would have

thought all this effusion insincere or patronizing. But Lady Helen was

the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only highborn woman he had ever

met who was really, and not only apparently, free from the ‘nonsense of

rank.’ Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte’s social tolerance to be

a mere varnish. But this little person, and her favorite brother Hugh,

to judge from the accounts of him, must always have found life too

romantic, too wildly and delightfully interesting from top to bottom, to

be measured by any but romantic standards.

Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who adored

his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and thanked God every

morning that he was an Englishman, rode over to Mile End. Robert, who

had just been round the place with the inspector and was dead tired,

had only energy to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry,

leaving a check behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong

language, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled.

A few days later Mr. Wendover’s crimes as a landowner, his agent’s

brutality, young Elsmere’s devotion, and the horrors of the Mile End

outbreak, were in everybody’s mouth. The county was roused. The Radical

newspaper came out on the Saturday with a flaming article; Robert, much

to his annoyance, found himself the local hero; and money began to come

in to him freely.

On the Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene with an army of

workmen. A racy communication from the inspector had reached him two

days before, so had a copy of the ‘Churton Advertiser.’ He had spent

Sunday in a drinking bout turning over all possible plans of vengeance

and evasion. Toward the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt clever

Scotchwoman, who saw ruin before them, and had on occasion an even

sharper tongue than her husband, managed to capture the supplies of

brandy in the house and effectually conceal them. Then she waited for

the moment of collapse which came on toward morning, and with her hands

on her hips she poured into him a volley of home-truths which not even

Sir Harry Varley could have bettered. Henslowe’s nerve gave way. He went

out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look for workmen.

Robert, standing on the step of a cottage, watched him give his orders,

and took vigilant note of their substance. They embodied the inspector’s

directions, and the Rector was satisfied. Henslowe was obliged to pass

him on his way to another group of houses. At first he affected not

to see the Rector, then suddenly Elsmere was conscious that the man’s

bloodshot eyes were on him. Such a look! If hate could have killed,

Elsmere would have fallen where he stood. Yet the man’s hand

mechanically moved to his hat, as though the spell of his wife’s

harangue were still potent over his shaking muscles.

Robert took no notice whatever of the salutation. He stood calmly

watching till Henslowe disappeared into the last house. Then he called

one of the agent’s train, heard what was to be done, gave a sharp nod

of assent, and turned on his heel. So far so good: the servant had been

made to feel, but he wished it had been the master. Oh, those three

little emaciated creatures whose eyes he had closed, whose clammy hands

he had held to the last!--what reckoning should be asked for their

undeserved torments when the Great Account came to be made up?

Meanwhile not a sound apparently of all this reached the Squire in the

sublime solitude of Murewell. A fortnight had passed. Henslowe had been

conquered, the county had rushed to Elsmere’s help, and neither he

nor Mrs. Darcy had made a sign. Their life was so abnormal that it was

perfectly possible they had heard nothing. Elsmere wondered when they

_would_ hear.

The Rector’s chief help and support all through had been old Meyrick.

The parish doctor had been in bed with rheumatism when the epidemic

broke out, and Robert, feeling it a comfort to be rid of him, had thrown

the whole business into the hands of Meyrick and his son. This son was

nominally his father’s junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young

and brilliant M.D. fresh from a great hospital, and his father was just

a poor old general practitioner, with the barest qualification and only

forty years’ experience to recommend him, it will easily be imagined

that the subordination was purely nominal. Indeed young Meyrick was fast

ousting his father in all directions, and the neighborhood, which had

so far found itself unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene

without old Meyrick’s assistance, was beginning to send notes to the

house in Charton High Street, whereon the superscription ‘Dr. _Edward_

Meyrick’ was underlined with ungrateful emphasis. The father took

his deposition very quietly. Only on Murewell Hall would he allow no

trespassing, and so long as his son left him undisturbed there, he took

his effacement in other quarters with perfect meekness.

Young Elsmere’s behavior to him, however, at a time when all the rest

of the Churton world was beginning to hold him cheap and let him see it,

had touched the old man’s heart, and he was the Rector’s slave in this

Mile End business. Edward Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the

hamlet once a day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him.

His attainments, of course, were useful, but his cocksureness was

irritating, and his manner to his father, abominable. The father, on the

other hand, came over in the shabby pony-cart he had driven for the last

forty years, and having himself no press of business, would spend hours

with the Rector over the cases, giving them an infinity of patient

watching, and amusing Robert by the cautious hostility he would allow

himself every now and then toward his souls newfangled devices.

At first Meyrick showed himself fidgety as to the Squire. Had he been

seen, been heard from? He received Robert’s sharp negatives with long

sighs, but Robert clearly saw that, like the rest of the world, he was

too much afraid of Mr. Wendover to go and beard him. Some months before,

as it happened, Elsmere had told him the story of his encounter with the

Squire, and had been a good deal moved and surprised by the old man’s

concern.

One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, when the

state of things in the hamlet was beginning decidedly to mend, Meyrick

arrived for his morning round, much preoccupied. He hurried his work a

little, and after it was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him.

‘I have seen the Squire, sir,’ he said, turning on his companion with a

certain excitement.

Robert flushed.

‘Have you?’ he replied with his hands behind him, and a world of

expression in his sarcastic voice.

‘You misjudge him! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere!’ the old man said

tremulously. ‘I told you he could know of this business--and he didn’t!

He has been in town part of the time, and down here, how is he to know

anything? He sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real _bad_

fellow.’

‘Don’t abuse the man,’ said Robert, looking up. ‘It’s not worth while,

when you can say your mind of the master.’

Old Meyrick sighed.

‘Well,’ said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and quivering, ‘you

told him the story, I suppose? Seven deaths, is it, by now? Well,

what sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents’--and he

smiled--‘produce?’

‘He talked of sending money,’ said Meyrick doubtfully; he said he would

have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr.

Elsmere, you think too hardly of the Squire, that you do!’

They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to discuss

the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be laboring under some suppressed

emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a doctor of

the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more or

less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve,

generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on

telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable

and ghastly story of the old Squire’s suicide. He described the heir’s

summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its

horrors, and that mysterious condition of the Squire for some months

afterward, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the

Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor,

had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover’s physical and mental

breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited

fatality which at that period of his life not even the Squire’s iron

will had been able wholly to conceal.

Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found

himself with some curiosity realizing the Squire from another man’s

totally different point of view. Evidently Meyrick had seen him at such

moments as wring from the harshest nature whatever grains of tenderness,

of pity, or of natural human weakness may be in it. And it was clear,

too, that the Squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling

a certain soothing influence in the _naïveté_ and simplicity of the old

man’s sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding

that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick’s presence, such

as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in him since his earliest

youth.

And yet how childish the old man’s whole mental image of the Squire was

after all! What small account it made of the subtleties, the gnarled

intricacies and contradictions of such a character! Horror at his

father’s end, and dread of a like fate for himself! Robert did not

know very much of the Squire, but he knew enough to feel sure that this

confiding, indulgent theory of Meyrick’s was ludicrously far from the

mark as an adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover’s later life.

Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resistance which

his companion’s mind was opposing to his own. He dropped the wandering

narrative he was busy upon with a sigh.

‘Ah well, I dare say it’s hard, it’s hard,’ he said with patient

acquiescence in his voice, ‘to believe a man can’t help himself. I dare

say we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But if ever there was a

man sick in mind--for all his book learning they talk about--and sick in

soul, that man is the Squire.’

Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was a new dignity

about the simple old man. The old-fashioned deference, which had never

let him forget in speaking to Robert that he was speaking to a man of

family, and which showed itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions

which were a torment to his son, had given way to something still more

deeply ingrained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the spectacles,

and the long straight hair--like the figure of a superannuated

schoolmaster--assumed, as he turned again to his younger companion,

something of authority, something almost of stateliness.

‘Ah, Mr. Elsmere,’ he said, laying his shrunk hand on the younger man’s

sleeve and speaking with emotion, ‘you’re very good to the poor. We’re

all proud of you--you and your good lady. But when you were coming, and

I heard tell all about you, I thought of my poor Squire, and I said

to myself, “That young man’ll be good to _him_. The Squire will make

friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good wife--and

there’ll be children born to him--and the Squire will take an

interest--and--and--maybe----”

The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently.

‘And there was something in the way between you,’ the speaker went on,

starting. ‘I dare say you were quite right--quite right. I can’t judge.

Only there are ways of doing a thing. And it was a last chance; and now

it’s missed--it’s missed. Ah! It’s no good talking; he has a heart--he

has! Many’s the kind thing he’s done in old days for me and mine--I’ll

never forget them! But all these last few years--oh, I know, I know. You

can’t go and shut your heart up, and fly in the face of all the duties

the Lord laid on you, without losing yourself and setting the Lord

against you. But it is pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it’s pitiful!’

It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine breath passing

through the wintry, lane and through the shaking voice of the old man.

Beside the spirit looking out of those wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth,

its justest resentments, its most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh,

inexcusable.

‘Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless you! Don’t imagine I will

forget a word you have said to me.’

The Rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a gentle smile

passed over Meyrick’s aging face, and they parted.

That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with John Allwood,

the youth of twenty whose case had been a severer tax on the powers of

the little nursing staff than perhaps any other. Mother and neighbors

were worn out, and it was difficult to spare a hospital nurse for long

together from the diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted

during the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the

nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept soundly on a

bed made up in the ground-floor room of the little sanatorium. Then at

twelve the nurse called him, and he went out, his eyes still heavy with

sleep, into a still, frosty winter’s night.

After so much rain, so much restlessness of wind and cloud, the silence

and the starry calm of it were infinitely welcome. The sharp cold air

cleared his brain and braced his nerves, and by the time he reached the

cottage whither he was bound, he was broad awake. He opened the door

softly, passed through the lower room, crowded with sleeping children,

climbed the narrow stairs as noiselessly as possible, and found himself

in a garret, faintly lit, a bed in one corner, and a woman sitting

beside it. The woman glided away, the Rector looked carefully at the

table of instructions hanging over the bed, assured himself that wine

and milk and beef essence and medicines were ready to his hand, put

out his watch on the wooden table near the bed, and sat him down to his

task. The boy was sleeping the sleep of weakness. Food was to be given

every half hour, and in this perpetual impulse to the system lay his

only chance.

The Rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could just read it by

the help of the dim light. But after a while, as the still hours passed

on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat thinking--endlessly thinking.

The young laborer lay motionless beside him, the lines of the long

emaciated frame showing through the bedclothes. The night-light

flickered on the broken, discolored ceiling; every now and then a mouse

scratched in the plaster; the mother’s heavy breathing came from the

next room; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried outside. Otherwise

deep silence, such silence as drives the soul back upon itself.

Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. The stern

judgments, the passionate condemnations which his nature housed so

painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul breathed an ‘ampler æther,

a diviner air.’ Oh! the mysteries of life and character, the subtle,

inexhaustible claims of pity! The problems which hang upon our being

here; its mixture of elements; the pressure of its inexorable physical

environment; the relations of mind to body, of man’s poor will to this

tangled tyrannous life--it was along these old, old lines his thought

went painfully groping and always at intervals it came back to the

Squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new soberness, a new

humility and patience entering in.

And yet it was not Meyrick’s facts exactly that had brought this about.

Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit

of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had

declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him.

Then these thoughts led him on further and further from man to God, from

human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours

did Elsmere’s hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint

sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and

strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its

source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt,

of bitter, brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the

eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling a while, and

then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering

faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine’s hand. It

was she who led him through the shades; it was her voice murmuring in

his ear.

When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible waves into

the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but fears of experience lay

between him and the beginnings of his watch.

‘It is by these moments we should date our lives’ he murmured to himself

as he rose: ‘they are the only real landmarks.’

It was eight o’clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him had come.

The results of the night for his charge were good: the strength had

been maintained, the pulse was firmer, the temperature lower. The boy,

throwing off his drowsiness, lay watching the Rector’s face as he talked

in an undertone to the nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb, friendly

wistfulness. When Robert bent over him to say good-by, this expression

brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, feeling at

last that there was a promise of life in his look and touch.

In, another moment he had stepped out into the January morning. It was

clear and still as the night had been. In the east there was a pale

promise of sun; the reddish-brown trunks of the fir woods had just

caught it and rose faintly in glowing in endless vistas and colonnades

one behind the other. The flooded river itself rushed through the bridge

as full and turbid as before, but all the other water surfaces had

gleaming films of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, almost a

festal air under the touch of the frost, while on the side of the hill

leading to Murewell, tree rose above tree, the delicate network of their

wintry twigs and branches set against stretches of frost-whitened grass,

till finally they climbed into the pale all-completing blue. In a copse

close at hand there were woodcutters at work, and piles of gleaming

laths shining through the underwood. Robins hopped along the frosty

road, and as he walked on through the houses toward the bridge, Robert’s

quick ear distinguished that most wintry of all sounds--the cry of a

flock of field-fares passing overhead.

As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure upon it,

the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, leaning against

the stone parapet. With a start he recognized the Squire.

He went up to him without an instant’s slackening of his steady step.

The Squire heard the sound of someone coming, turned, and saw the

Rector.

‘I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover,’ said Robert, stopping and

holding out his hand. ‘I meant to have come to talk to you about this

place this morning. I ought to have come before.’

He spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had parted the day

before. The Squire touched his hand for an instant.

‘You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,’ he said, endeavoring to

speak with all his old hauteur, while his heavy lips twitched nervously,

‘that, for one reason and another, I knew nothing of the epidemic here

till yesterday, when Meyrick told me.’

‘I heard from Mr. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here now, Mr.

Wendover, and I am in no great hurry to get home, may I take you through

and show you the people?’

The Squire at last looked at him straight--at the face worn and pale,

yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which something of the

solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed to be still lingering.

‘Are you just come?’ he said abruptly, ‘or are you going back?’

‘I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of the fever

cases. It’s hard work for the nurses and the relations sometimes,

without help.’

The Squire moved on mechanically toward the village, and Robert moved

beside him.

‘And Mrs. Elsmere?’

‘Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to stay the night

when the diphtheria was at its worst; but there are only four anxious

cases left, the rest all convalescent.’

The Squire said no more, and they turned into the lane, where the ice

lay thick in the deep ruts, and on either hand curls of smoke rose

into the clear cold sky. The Squire looked about him with eyes which

no detail escaped. Robert, without a word of comment, pointed out this

feature and that, showed where Henslowe had begun repairs, where the

new well was to be, what the water-supply had been till now, drew the

Squire’s attention to the roofs, the pigstyes, the drainage, or rather

complete absence of drainage, and all in the dry voice of someone going

through a catalogue. Word had already fled like wildfire through the

hamlet that the Squire was there. Children and adults, a pale emaciated

crew, poured out into the wintry air to look. The Squire knit his brows

with annoyance as the little crowd in the lane grew. Robert took no

notice.

Presently he pushed open the door of the house where he had spent the

night. In the kitchen a girl of sixteen was clearing away the various

nondescript heaps on which the family had slept, and was preparing

breakfast. The Squire looked at the floor,--

‘I thought I understood from Henslowe,’ he muttered, as though to

himself, ‘that there were no mud floors left on the estate--’

‘There are only three houses in Mile End without them; said Robert,

catching what he said.

They went upstairs, and the mother stood open-eyed while the Squire’s

restless look gathered in the details of the room, the youth’s face

as he lay back on his pillows, whiter than they, exhausted and yet

refreshed by the sponging with vinegar and water which the mother had

just been administering to him; the bed, the gaps in the worm-eaten

boards, the holes in the roof where the plaster bulged inward, as though

a shake would bring it down; the coarse china shepherdesses on the

mantelshelf, and the flowers which Catherine had put there the day

before. He asked a few questions, said an abrupt word or two to the

mother, and they tramped downstairs again and into the street. Then

Robert took him across to the little improvised hospital, saying to him

on the threshold, with a moment’s hesitation,--

‘As you know, for adults there is not much risk, but there is always

some risk--’

A peremptory movement of the Squire’s hand stopped him, and they went

in. In the downstairs room were half-a-dozen convalescents, pale,

shadowy creatures, four of them under ten, sitting up in their little

cots, each of them with a red flannel jacket drawn from Lady Helen’s

stores, and enjoying the breakfast which a nurse in white cap and apron

had just brought them. Upstairs in a room from which a lath-and-plaster

partition had been removed, and which had been adapted, warmed and

ventilated by various contrivances to which Robert and Meyrick had

devoted their practical minds, were the ‘four anxious cases.’ One of

them, a little creature of six, one of Sharland’s black-eyed children,

was sitting up, supported by the nurse, and coughing, its little life

away. As soon as he saw it, Robert’s step quickened. He forgot the

Squire altogether. He came and stood by the bedside, rigidly still,

for he could do nothing, but his whole soul absorbed in that horrible

struggle for air. How often he had seen it now, and never without the

same wild sense of revolt and protest! At last the hideous membrane was

loosened, the child got relief and lay back white and corpselike, but

with a pitiful momentary relaxation of the drawn lines on its little

brow. Robert stooped and kissed the damp tiny hand. The child’s eyes

remained shut, but the fingers made a feeble effort to close on his.

‘Mr. Elsmere,’ said the nurse, a motherly body, looking at him with

friendly admonition, ‘if you don’t go home and rest you’ll be ill too,

and I’d like to know who’ll be the better for that?’

‘How many deaths?’ asked the Squire abruptly, touching Elsmere’s arm,

and so reminding Robert of his existence. ‘Meyrick spoke of deaths.’

He stood near the door, but his eyes were fixed on the little bed, on

the half-swooning child.

‘Seven,’ said Robert, turning upon him. ‘Five of diphtheria, two of

fever. That little one will go, too.’

‘Horrible!’ said the Squire under his breath, and then moved to the

door.

The two men went downstairs in perfect silence. Below, in the

convalescent room, the children were capable of smiles, and of quick,

coquettish beckonings to the Rector to come and make game with them as

usual. But he could only kiss his hand to them and escape, for there was

more to do.

He took the Squire through all the remaining fever cases, and into

several of the worst cottages--Milsom’s among them--and when it was all

over they emerged into the lane again, near the bridge. There was still

a crowd of children and women hanging about, watching eagerly for the

Squire, whom many of them had never seen at all, and about whom various

myths had gradually formed themselves in the country-side. The Squire

walked away from them hurriedly, followed by Robert, and again they

halted on the centre of the bridge. A horse led by a groom was being

walked up and down on a flat piece of road just beyond.

It was an awkward moment. Robert never forgot the thrill of it, or the

association of wintry sunshine streaming down upon a sparkling world of

ice and delicate woodland and foam-flecked river.

The squire turned toward him irresolutely; his sharply-cut wrinkled lips

opening and closing again. Then he held out his hand: ‘Mr. Elsmere, I

did you a wrong--I did this place and its people a wrong. In my view,

regret for the past is useless. Much of what has occurred here is

plainly irreparable; I will think what can be done for the future.

As for my relation to you, it rests with you to say whether it can be

amended. I recognize that you have just cause of complaint.’

What invincible pride there was in the man’s very surrender! But Elsmere

was not repelled by it. He knew that in their hour together the Squire

had _felt_. His soul had lost its bitterness. The dead and their wrong

were with God.

He took the Squire’s outstretched hand, grasping it cordially, a pure,

unworldly dignity in his whole look and bearing.

‘Let us be friends, Mr. Wendover. It will be a great comfort to us--my

wife and me. Will you remember us both very kindly to Mrs. Darcy?’

Commonplace words, but words that made an epoch in the life of both. In

another minute the Squire, on horse-back, was trotting along the side

road leading to the Hall, and Robert was speeding home to Catherine as

fast as his long legs could carry him.

She was waiting for him on the steps, shading her eyes against the

unwonted sun. He kissed her with the spirits of a boy and told her all,

his news.

Catherine listened bewildered, not knowing what to say or how all

at once to forgive, to join Robert in forgetting. But that strange

spiritual glow about him was not to be withstood. She threw her arms

about him at last with a half sob,--

‘Oh, Robert--yes! Dear Robert--thank God!’

‘Never think any more,’ he said at last, leading her in from the little

hall, ‘of What has been, only of what shall be! Oh, Catherine, give me

some tea; and never did I see anything so tempting as that armchair.’

‘He sank down into it, and when she put his breakfast beside him she saw

with a start that he was fast asleep. The wife stood and watched him,

the signs of fatigue round eyes and mouth, the placid expression, and

her face was soft with tenderness and joy. Of course--of course, even

that hard man must love him. Who could help it? My Robert!’

And so now in this disguise, now in that, the supreme hour of

Catherine’s life stole on and on toward her.

CHAPTER XXII.

As may be imagined, the ‘Churton Advertiser’ did not find its way to

Murewell. It was certainly no pressure of social disapproval that made

the Squire go down to Mile End in that winter’s dawn. The county might

talk, or the local press might harangue, till Doomsday, and Mr. Wendover

would either know nothing or care less.

Still his interview with Meyrick in the park after his return from a

week in town, whither he had gone to see some old Berlin friends, had

been a shock to him. A man may play the intelligent recluse, may refuse

to fit his life to his neighbors’ notions as much as you please, and

still find death, especially death for which he has some responsibility,

as disturbing a fact as the rest of us.

He went home in much irritable discomfort. It seemed to him probably

that fortune need not have been so eager to put him in the wrong. To

relieve his mind he sent for Henslowe, and in an interview, the memory

of which sent a shiver through the agent to the end of his days, he let

it be seen that though it did not for the moment suit him to dismiss the

man who had brought this upon him, that man’s reign in any true sense

was over.

But afterward the Squire was still restless. What was astir in him was

not so much pity or remorse as certain instincts of race which still

survived under the strange super-structure of manners he had built upon

them. It may be the part of a gentlemen and a scholar to let the agent

whom you have interposed between yourself and a boorish peasantry have a

free hand; but, after all, the estate is yours, and to expose the rector

of the parish to all sorts of avoidable risks in the pursuit of his

official duty by reason of the gratuitous filth of your property, is an

act of doubtful breeding. The Squire in his most rough-and-tumble days

at Berlin had always felt himself the grandee as well as the student.

He abhorred sentimentalism, but neither did he choose to cut an unseemly

figure in his own eyes.

After a night, therefore, less tranquil or less meditative than usual,

he rose early and sallied forth at one of those unusual hours he

generally chose for walking. The thing must be put right somehow, and at

once, with as little waste of time and energy as possible, and Henslowe

had shown himself not to be trusted; so telling a servant to follow him,

the Squire had made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen

for years.

Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition of the Rector.

The Squire did not want to be impressed by the young man; did not want

to make friends with him. No doubt his devotion had served his own

purposes. Still Mr. Wendover was one of the subtlest living judges

of character when he pleased, and his enforced progress through these

hovels with Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him

with a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment.

‘History would be inexplicable after all without the honest fanatic,’ he

said to himself on the way home. ‘I suppose I had forgotten it. There

is nothing like a dread of being bored for blunting your psychological

instinct.’

In the course of the day he sent off a letter to the Rector intimating

in the very briefest, dryest way that the cottages should be rebuilt

on a different site as soon as possible, and enclosing a liberal

contribution toward the expenses incurred in fighting the epidemic. When

the letter was gone he drew his books toward him with a sound which was

partly disgust, partly relief. This annoying business had wretchedly

interrupted him, and his concessions left him mainly conscious of a

strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh interview with young

Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology; let him be content.

However, next morning after breakfast, Mr. Wendover once more saw his

study door open to admit the tall figure of the Rector. The note

and check had reached Robert late the night before, and, true to his

new-born determination to make the best of the Squire, he had caught

up his wideawake at the first opportunity and walked off to the Hall to

acknowledge the gift in person. The interview opened as awkwardly as it

was possible, and with their former conversation on the same spot fresh

in their minds both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten minutes. The

Squire was asking himself, indeed, impatiently, all the time, whether he

could possibly be forced in the future to put up with such an experience

again, and Robert found his host, if less sarcastic than before,

certainly as impenetrable as ever.

At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and then Robert, as

good luck would have it, turned his longing eyes on the Squire’s

books, especially on the latest volumes of a magnificent German

_Weltgeschichte_ lying near his elbow, which he had coveted for months

without being able to conquer his conscience sufficiently to become the

possessor of it. He took it up with an exclamation of delight, and a

quiet critical remark that exactly hit the value and scope of the book.

The Squire’s eyebrows went up, and the corners of his mouth slackened

visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to the amazement of Mrs. Darcy,

who was watching them from the drawing-room window, walked back to the

park gates together, and what Robert’s nobility and beauty of character

would never have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the

service of the poor and the tormented under the Squire’s eyes, a chance

coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a moment.

The Squire walked back to the house under a threatening sky, his

mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, his mind full of an

unwonted excitement.

The sentiment of long-past days--days in Berlin, in Paris, where

conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily

relief and reward of labor, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had

endeavored to import the materials for them from the Continent, from

London. But as a matter of fact, it was years since he had had any

such talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly

realized that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for

the scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional

interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his _Fach_.

‘Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes

of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?’ The Squire shrugged his

shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality

to combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought.

Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall.

Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and

this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! ‘Why the deuce

couldn’t he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!’

thought the Squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had

wholly denied him the opportunity. ‘And then the sending back of those

books: what a piece of idiocy!’

Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious

chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he

should just have fallen on the period of the later Empire--of the

passage from the old-world to the new, where the Squire was a master.

The Squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his

remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating

as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library,

ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an

unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made

a youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he

went back to his own work new names would occur to him, and full of the

scholar’s avaricious sense of the shortness of time, he would shake his

head and frown over the three months which young Elsmere had already

passed, grappling with problems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of

Monasticism in Gaul, and Heaven knows what besides, half a mile from the

man and the library which could have supplied him with the best help to

be got in England, unbenefited by either! Mile End was obliterated, and

the annoyance, of the morning forgotten.

The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and sleety, the frost

breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads with mire.

Robert, rising in his place to begin morning service, and wondering to

see the congregation so good on such a day, was suddenly startled, as

his eye travelled mechanically over to the Hall pew, usually tenanted

by Mrs. Darcy in solitary state, to see the characteristic figure of

the Squire. His amazement was so great that he almost stumbled in the

exhortation, and his feeling was evidently shared by the congregation,

which throughout the service showed a restlessness, an excited tendency

to peer round corners and pillars, that was not favorable to devotion.

‘Has he come to spy out the land?’ the Rector thought to himself, and

could not help a momentary tremor at the idea of preaching before

so formidable an auditor. Then he pulled himself together by a great

effort, and fixing his eyes on a shockheaded urchin half way down the

church, read the service to him. Catherine meanwhile in her seat on the

northern side of the nave, her soul lulled in Sunday peace, knew nothing

of Mr. Wendover’s appearance.

Robert preached on the first sermon of Jesus, on the first appearance of

the young Master in the synagogue at Nazareth:--

‘_This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears!_’

The sermon dwelt on the Messianic aspect of Christ’s mission, on the

mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on the pathos of

Jewish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of Christian insight as

faith gradually transferred trait after trait of the Messiah of prophecy

to the Christ of Nazareth. At first there was a certain amount of

hesitation, a slight wavering hither and thither--a difficult choice of

words--and then the soul freed itself from man, and the preacher forgot

all but his Master and his people.’

At the door as he came out stood Mr. Wendover and Catherine, slightly

flushed and much puzzled for conversation, beside him. The Hall carriage

was drawn close up to the door, and Mrs. Darcy, evidently much excited,

had her small head out of the window and was showering a number of

flighty inquiries and suggestions on her brother, to which he paid no

more heed than to the patter of the rain.

When Robert appeared the Squire addressed him ceremoniously,--

‘With your leave, Mr. Elsmere, I will walk with you to the rectory.’

Then, in another voice, ‘Go home, Lætitia, and don’t send anything or

anybody.’

He made a signal to the coachman, and the carriage started, Mrs. Darcy’s

protesting head remaining out of window as long as anything could be

seen of the group at the church door. The odd little creature had paid

one or two hurried and recent visits to Catherine during the quarrel,

visits so filled, however, with vague railing against her brother and

by a queer incoherent melancholy, that Catherine felt them extremely

uncomfortable, and took care not to invite them. Clearly she was

mortally afraid of ‘Roger,’ and yet ashamed of being afraid. Catherine

could see that all the poor thing’s foolish whims and affectations were

trampled on; that she suffered, rebelled, found herself no more able to

affect Mr. Wendover than if she had been a fly buzzing round him, and

became all the more foolish and whimsical in consequence.

The Squire and the Elsmeres crossed the common to the rectory, followed

at a discreet interval by groups of villagers curious to get a look at

the Squire. Robert was conscious of a good deal of embarrassment, but

did his best to hide it. Catherine felt all through as if the skies had

fallen. The Squire alone was at his ease, or as much at his ease as he

ever was. He commented on the congregation, even condescended to say

something of the singing, and passed over the staring of the choristers

with a magnanimity of silence which did him credit.

They reached the rectory door, and it was evidently the Squire’s purpose

to come in, so Robert invited him in. Catherine threw open her little

drawing-room door, and then was seized with shyness as the Squire passed

in, and she saw over his shoulder her baby, lying kicking and crowing

on the hearthrug, in anticipation of her arrival, the nurse watching it.

The Squire in his great cloak stopped, and looked down at the baby as if

it had been some curious kind of reptile. The nurse blushed, courtesied,

and caught up the gurgling creature in a twinkling.

Robert made a laughing remark on the tyranny and ubiquity of babies. The

Squire smiled grimly. He supposed it was necessary that the human

race should be carried on. Catherine meanwhile slipped out and ordered

another place to be laid at the dinner-table, devoutly hoping that it

might not be used.

It was used. The Squire stayed till it was necessary to invite him, then

accepted the invitation, and Catherine found herself dispensing boiled

mutton to him, while Robert supplied him with some very modest claret,

the sort of wine which a man who drinks none thinks it necessary to have

in the house, and watched the nervousness of their little parlor-maid

with a fellow-feeling which made it difficult for him during the early

part of the meal to keep a perfectly straight countenance. After a

while, however, both he and Catherine were ready to admit that

the Squire was making himself agreeable. He talked of Paris, of a

conversation he had had with M. Renan, whose name luckily was quite

unknown to Catherine, as to the state of things in the French Chamber.

‘A set of chemists and quill-drivers,’ he said contemptuously; ‘but as

Renan remarked to me, there is one thing to be said for a government of

that sort, “Ils ne font pas la guerre.” And so long as they don’t run

France into adventures, and a man can keep a roof over his head and a

son in his pocket, the men of letters at any rate can rub along.

The really interesting thing in France just now is not French

politics--Heaven save the mark!--but French scholarship. There never was

so little original genius going in Paris, and there never was so much

good work being done.’

Robert thought the point of view eminently characteristic.

‘Catholicism, I suppose,’ he said, ‘as a force to be reckoned with, is

dwindling more and more?’

‘Absolutely dead,’ said the Squire emphatically, ‘as an intellectual

force. They haven’t got a writer, scarcely a preacher. Not one decent

book has been produced on that side for years.’

‘And the Protestants, too,’ said Robert, ‘have lost all their best

men of late,’ and he mentioned one or two well-known French Protestant

names.

‘Oh, as to French Protestantism ‘--and the Squire’s shrug was

superb--‘Teutonic Protestantism is in the order of things, so to speak,

but _Latin_ Protestantism! There is no more sterile hybrid in the

world!’.

Then, becoming suddenly aware that he might have said something

inconsistent with his company, the Squire stopped abruptly. Robert,

catching Catherine’s quick compression of the lips, was grateful to him,

and the conversation moved on in another direction.

Yes, certainly, all things considered, Mr. Wendover made himself

agreeable. He ate his boiled mutton and drank his _ordinaire_ like a

man, and when the meal was over, and he and Robert had withdrawn into

the study, he gave an emphatic word of praise to the coffee which

Catherine’s house-wifely care sent after them, and accepting a cigar, he

sank into the arm-chair by the fire and spread a bony hand to the blaze,

as if he had been at home in that particular corner for months. Robert,

sitting opposite to him and watching his guest’s eyes travel round the

room, with its medicine shelves, its rods and nets, and preparations of

uncanny beasts, its parish litter, and its teeming bookcases, felt that

the Mile End matter was turning out oddly indeed.

‘I have packed you a case of books, Mr. Elsmere,’ said the Squire, after

a puff or two at his cigar. ‘How have you got on without that collection

of Councils?’

He smiled a little awkwardly. It was one of the books Robert had sent

back. Robert flushed. He did not want the Squire to regard him as wholly

dependent on Murewell.

‘I bought it,’ he said, rather shortly. ‘I have ruined myself in books

lately, and the London Library too supplies me really wonderfully well.’

‘Are these your books?’ The Squire got up to look at them. ‘Hum, not at

all bad for a beginning. I have sent you so and so,’ and he named one or

two costly folios that Robert had long pined for in vain.

The Rector’s eyes glistened.

‘That was very good of you,’ he said simply, ‘They will be most

welcome.’

‘And now, how much _time_,’ said the other, settling himself again to

his cigar, his thin legs crossed over each other, and his great head

sunk into his shoulders, ‘how much time do you give to this work?’

‘Generally the mornings--not always. A man with twelve hundred souls to

look after, you know, Mr. Wendover,’ said Elsmere, with a bright,

half defiant accent, ‘can’t make grubbing among the Franks his main

business.’

The Squire said nothing, and smoked on. Robert gathered that his

companion thought his chances of doing anything worth mentioning very

small.

‘Oh no,’ he said, following out his own, thought with a shake of his

curly hair; ‘of course I shall never do very much. But if I don’t, it

won’t be for want of knowing what the scholar’s ideal is.’ And he lifted

his hand with a smile toward the Squire’s book on ‘English Culture,’

which stood in the book-case just above him. The Squire, following the

gesture, smiled too. It was a faint, slight illumining, but it changed

the face agreeably.

Robert began to ask questions about the book, about the pictures

contained in it of foreign life and foreign universities. The Squire

consented to be drawn out, and presently was talking at his very best.

Racy stories of Mommsen or Von Ranke were followed by a description

of an evening of mad carouse with Heine--a talk at Nohant with George

Sand--scenes in the Duchesse de Broglie’s salon--a contemptuous sketch

of Guizot--a caustic sketch of Renan. Robert presently even laid aside

his pipe, and stood in his favorite attitude, lounging against

the mantel-piece, looking down, absorbed, on his visitor. All that

intellectual passion which his struggle at Mile End had for the moment

checked in him revived. Nay, after his weeks of exclusive contact with

the most hideous forms of bodily ill, this interruption, these great

names, this talk of great movements and great causes, had a special

savour and relish. All the horizons of the mind expanded, the currents

of the blood ran quicker.

Suddenly, however, he sprang up.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Wendover, it is too bad to interrupt you--I have

enjoyed it immensely--but the fact is I have only two minutes to get to

Sunday School in!’

Mr. Wendover rose also, and resumed his ordinary manner.

‘It is I who should apologize,’ he said with stiff politeness ‘for

having encroached in this way on your busy day, Mr. Elsmere.’