Robert Elsmere
marvel, there beat one of the warmest hearts that ever animated mortal
clay, and the prematurely wrinkled face, with its small quick eyes and
shrewd indulgent mouth, bespoke a nature as responsive as it was
vigorous.
Their owner was constantly in the public eye. Her house, during the
hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, was little else than a
halting-place between two journeys. Visits to the poor, long watches by
the sick; committees, in which her racy breadth of character gave her
always an important place; discussions with the vicar, arguments with
the curates, a chat with this person and a walk with that--these were
the incidents and occupations which filled her day. Life was delightful
to her; action, energy, influence, were delightful to her; she could
only breathe freely in the very thick of the stirring, many-coloured
tumult of existence. Whether it was a pauper in the workhouse, or boys
from the school, or a girl caught in the tangle of a love-affair, it was
all the same to Mrs. Elsmere. Everything moved her, everything appealed
to her. Her life was a perpetual giving forth, and such was the inherent
nobility and soundness of the nature, that in spite of her curious Irish
fondness for the vehement romantic sides of experience, she did little
harm, and much good. Her tongue might be over-ready and her
championships indiscreet, but her hands were helpful, and her heart was
true. There was something contagious in her enjoyment of life, and with
all her strong religious faith, the thought of death, of any final pause
and silence in the whirr of the great social machine, was to her a
thought of greater chill and horror than to many a less brave and
spiritual soul.
Till her boy was twelve years old, however, she had lived for him first
and foremost. She had taught him, played with him, learnt with him,
communicating to him through all his lessons her own fire and eagerness
to a degree which every now and then taxed the physical powers of the
child. Whenever the signs of strain appeared, however, the mother would
be overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together
Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, story-teller, and
romp, and forget all his precocious interest in history or vulgar
fractions. In after years when Robert looked back upon his childhood, he
was often reminded of the stories of Goethe's bringing-up. He could
recall exactly the same scenes as Goethe describes,--mother and child
sitting together in the gloaming, the mother's dark eyes dancing with
fun or kindling with dramatic fire, as she carried an imaginary hero or
heroine through a series of the raciest adventures; the child all
eagerness and sympathy, now clapping his little hands at the fall of the
giant, or the defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing and suggesting in
ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus to the mother's
inventiveness. He could see her dressing up with him on wet days,
reciting King Henry to his Prince Hal, or Prospero to his Ariel, or
simply giving free vent to her own exuberant Irish fun till both he and
she would sink exhausted into each other's arms, and end the evening
with a long croon, sitting curled up together in a big armchair in front
of the fire. He could see himself as a child of many crazes, eager for
poetry one week, for natural history the next, now spending all his
spare time in strumming, now in drawing, and now forgetting everything
but the delights of tree-climbing and bird-nesting.
And through it all he had the quick memory of his mother's
companionship, he could recall her rueful looks whenever the eager
inaccurate ways, in which he reflected certain ineradicable tendencies
of her own, had lost him a school advantage; he could remember her
exhortations, with the dash in them of humorous self-reproach which made
them so stirring to the child's affection; and he could realise their
old far-off life at Murewell, the joys and the worries of it, and see
her now gossiping with the village folk, now wearing herself impetuously
to death in their service, and now roaming with him over the Surrey
heaths in search of all the dirty delectable things in which a
boy-naturalist delights. And through it all he was conscious of the same
vivid energetic creature, disposing with some difficulty and _fracas_ of
its own excess of nervous life.
To return, however, to this same critical moment of Sir Mowbray's offer.
Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, doing very well at school, a
favourite both with boys and masters. But as to whether his development
would lead him in the direction of taking orders, his mother had not the
slightest idea. She was not herself very much tempted by the prospect.
There were recollections connected with Murewell, and with the long
death in life which her husband had passed through there, which were
deeply painful to her; and, moreover, her sympathy with the clergy as a
class was by no means strong. Her experience had not been large, but the
feeling based on it promised to have all the tenacity of a favourite
prejudice. Fortune had handed over the parish of Harden to a ritualist
vicar. Mrs. Elsmere's inherited Evangelicalism--she came from an Ulster
county--rebelled against his doctrine, but the man himself was too
lovable to be disliked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a hero when she saw him. And
in his own narrow way, the small-headed emaciated vicar was a hero, and
he and Mrs. Elsmere had soon tasted each other's quality, and formed a
curious alliance, founded on true similarity in difference.
But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself with all the
more force on his subordinates. The Harden curates were the chief crook
in Mrs. Elsmere's otherwise tolerable lot. Her parish activities brought
her across them perpetually, and she could not away with them. Their
cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the
Irish-woman's sense of humour at every turn. The individuals came and
went, but the type it seemed to her was always the same; and she made
their peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory as to the future of
the English Church, which was a source of constant amusement to the very
broad-minded young men who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in
general to see all the world's good points, was almost blind when it was
a curate's virtues which were in question. So that, in spite of all her
persistent church-going, and her love of church performances as an
essential part of the busy human spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere had no yearning
for a clerical son. The little accidents of a personal experience had
led to wide generalisations, as is the way with us mortals, and the
position of the young parson in these days of increased parsonic
pretensions was, to Mrs. Elsmere, a position in which there was an
inherent risk of absurdity. She wished her son to impose upon her when
it came to his taking any serious step in life. She asked for nothing
better, indeed, than to be able, when the time came, to bow the motherly
knee to him in homage, and she felt a little dread lest, in her flat
moments, a clerical son might sometimes rouse in her that sharp sense of
the ludicrous which is the enemy of all happy illusions.
Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously
considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only reflected that
it would certainly be better to say nothing of it to Robert until he
should be at college. His impressionable temperament, and the power he
had occasionally shown of absorbing himself in a subject till it
produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding, unfavourable to
health and nervous energy, all warned her not to supply him, at a period
of rapid mental and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense
of responsibility. As a boy, he had always shown himself religiously
susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother's religious likes and
dislikes had invariably found in him a blind and chivalrous support. He
was content to be with her, to worship with her, and to feel that no
reluctance or resistance divided his heart from hers. But there had been
nothing specially noteworthy or precocious about his religious
development, and at sixteen or seventeen, in spite of his affectionate
compliance, and his natural reverence for all persons and beliefs in
authority, his mother was perfectly aware that many other things in his
life were more real to him than religion. And on this point, at any
rate, she was certainly not the person to force him.
He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in--keen about
everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at games. He was in the
sixth, moreover, as soon as his age allowed: that is to say, as soon as
he was sixteen; and his pride in everything connected with the great
body in which he had already a marked and important place was unbounded.
Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had
always been present in him, and which his mother had largely helped to
develop by her own restless imaginative ways of approaching life and the
world, made themselves felt with considerable force. Some time before
his cousin's letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English
poetry, and, but for the corrective influence of a favourite tutor would
probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as
he had shown for subject after subject in his eager ebullient childhood.
His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject of
_The Faerie Queene_ to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which
made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked--
'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me
extraordinary pleasure.'
And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the boy's
prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a subject for
which he had always shown a special aptitude, asked him anxiously, after
an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the boy ran his hands
through his hair, and still keeping his finger between the leaves, shut
a book before him from which he had been learning by heart, and which
was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.
'I have just finished Belial!' he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
'and am beginning Beelzebub.'
A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period of
juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas from
the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral essays in
the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time with an energy
which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever she was called
upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the
same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast
developing power. Virgil and AEschylus appealed to the same fibres, the
same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakspeare, and the boy's quick
imaginative sense appropriated Greek and Latin life with the same ease
which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence
sprung the _Canterbury Tales_, or _As You Like It_. So that his tutor,
who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects in
life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiae_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very
smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college,
the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm's scholarship, and
so on.
Evidently such a youth was not likely to depend for the attainment of a
foothold in life on a piece of family privilege. The world was all
before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere thought proudly to herself, as
her mother's fancy wandered rashly through the coming years. And for