Robert Elsmere
saying of another Oxford scholar, _a propos_ of the death of a young man
of extraordinary promise, '_What learning has perished with him! How
vain seems all toil to acquire!_'--and the words, as they passed through
his mind, seemed to him to ring another death-knell.
But after the first painful impression he could not help losing himself
in the pleasure of the familiar face, the Murewell associations.
'How is the village, and the Institute? And what sort of man is my
successor--the man, I mean, who came after Armitstead?'
'I had him once to dinner,' said the squire briefly; 'he made a false
quantity, and asked me to subscribe to the Church Missionary Society. I
haven't seen him since. He and the village have been at loggerheads
about the Institute, I believe. He wanted to turn out the dissenters.
Bateson came to me, and we circumvented him, of course. But the man's an
ass. Don't talk of him!'
Robert sighed a long sigh. Was all his work undone? It wrung his heart
to remember the opening of the Institute, the ardour of his boys. He
asked a few questions about individuals, but soon gave it up as
hopeless. The squire neither knew nor cared.
'And Mrs. Darcy?'
'My sister had tea in her thirtieth summer-house last Sunday,' remarked
the squire grimly. 'She wished me to communicate the fact to you and
Mrs. Elsmere. Also, that the worst novel of the century will be out in a
fortnight, and she trusts to you to see it well reviewed in all the
leading journals.'
Robert laughed, but it was not very easy to laugh. There was a sort of
ghastly undercurrent in the squire's sarcasms that effectually deprived
them of anything mirthful.
'And your book?'
'Is in abeyance. I shall bequeath you the manuscript in my will, to do
what you like with.'
'Squire!'
'Quite true! If you had stayed, I should have finished it, I suppose.
But after a certain age the toil of spinning cobwebs entirely out of his
own brain becomes too much for a man.'
It was the first thing of the sort that iron mouth had ever said to him.
Elsmere was painfully touched.
'You must not--you shall not give it up,' he urged. 'Publish the first
part alone, and ask me for any help you please.'
The squire shook his head.
'Let it be. Your paper in the _Nineteenth Century_ showed me that the
best thing I can do is to hand on my materials to you. Though I am not
sure that when you have got them you will make the best use of them. You
and Grey between you call yourselves Liberals, and imagine yourselves
reformers, and all the while you are doing nothing but playing into the
hands of the Blacks. All this theistic philosophy of yours only means so
much grist to their mill in the end.'
'They don't see it in that light themselves,' said Robert, smiling.
'No,' returned the squire, 'because most men are puzzle-heads. Why,' he
added, looking darkly at Robert, while the great head fell forward on
his breast in the familiar Murewell attitude, 'why can't you do your
work and let the preaching alone?'
'Because,' said Robert, 'the preaching seems to me my work. There is the
great difference between us, Squire. You look upon knowledge as an end
in itself. It may be so. But to me knowledge has always been valuable
first and foremost for its bearing on life.'
'Fatal twist that,' returned the squire harshly. 'Yes, I know; it was
always in you. Well, are you happy? does this new crusade of yours give
you pleasure?'
'Happiness,' replied Robert, leaning against the chimneypiece and
speaking in a low voice, 'is always relative. No one knows it better
than you. Life is full of oppositions. But the work takes my whole heart
and all my energies.'
The squire looked at him in disapproving silence for a while.
'You will bury your life in it miserably,' he said at last; 'it will be
a toil of Sisyphus leaving no trace behind it; whereas such a book as
you might write, if you gave your life to it, might live and work, and
harry the enemy when you are gone.'
Robert forbore the natural retort.
The squire went round his library, making remarks, with all the caustic
shrewdness natural to him, on the new volumes that Robert had acquired
since their walks and talks together.
'The Germans,' he said at last, putting back a book into the shelves
with a new accent of distaste and weariness, 'are beginning to founder
in the sea of their own learning. Sometimes I think I will read no more
German. It is a nation of learned fools, none of whom ever sees an inch
beyond his own professorial nose.'
Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many
feelings--perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate sense of
wrong at this man's hands--was kind to him, and talked and smiled,
indeed, so much that the squire for the first time in his life took
individual notice of her, and as he parted with Elsmere in the hall made
the remark that Mrs. Elsmere seemed to like London, to which Robert,
busy in an opportune search for his guest's coat, made no reply.
'When are you coming to Murewell?' the squire said to him abruptly, as
he stood at the door muffled up as though it were December. 'There are a
good many points in that last article you want talking to about. Come
next month with Mrs. Elsmere.'
Robert drew a long breath, inspired by many feelings.
'I will come, but not yet. I must get broken in here more thoroughly
first. Murewell touches me too deeply, and my wife. You are going abroad
in the summer, you say. Let me come to you in the autumn.'
The squire said nothing, and went his way, leaning heavily on his stick,
across the square. Robert felt himself a brute to let him go, and almost
ran after him.
That evening Robert was disquieted by the receipt of a note from a young
fellow of St. Anselm's, an intimate friend and occasional secretary of
Grey. Grey, the writer said, had received Robert's last letter, was
deeply interested in his account of his work, and begged him to write
again. He would have written, but that he was himself in the doctor's
hands, suffering from various ills, probably connected with an attack of
malarial fever which had befallen him in Rome the year before.
Catherine found him poring over the letter, and, as it seemed to her,
oppressed by an anxiety out of all proportion to the news itself.
'They are not really troubled, I think,' she said, kneeling down beside
him, and laying her cheek against his. 'He will soon get over it,
Robert.'
But, alas! this mood, the tender characteristic mood of the old
Catherine, was becoming rarer and rarer with her. As the spring
expanded, as the sun and the leaves came back, poor Catherine's temper
had only grown more wintry and more rigid. Her life was full of moments
of acute suffering. Never, for instance, did she forget the evening of
Robert's lecture to the club. All the time he was away she had sat
brooding by herself in the drawing-room, divining with a bitter
clairvoyance all that scene in which he was taking part, her being
shaken with a tempest of misery and repulsion. And together with that
torturing image of a glaring room in which her husband, once Christ's
loyal minister, was employing all his powers of mind and speech to make
it easier for ignorant men to desert and fight against the Lord who
bought them, there mingled a hundred memories of her father which were
now her constant companions. In proportion as Robert and she became
more divided, her dead father resumed a ghostly hold upon her. There
were days when she went about rigid and silent, in reality living
altogether in the past, among the gray farms, the crags, and the stony
ways of the mountains.
At such times her mind would be full of pictures of her father's
ministrations--his talks with the shepherds on the hills, with the women
at their doors, his pale dreamer's face beside some wild deathbed,
shining with the Divine message, the 'visions' which to her awestruck
childish sense would often seem to hold him in their silent walks among
the misty hills.
Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognise these states
of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to shrink more and more
sensitively while they lasted from any collision with her. He kept his
work, his friends, his engagements to himself, talking resolutely of
other things, she trying to do the same, but with less success, as her
nature was less pliant than his.
Then there would come moments when the inward preoccupation would give
way, and that strong need of loving, which was, after all, the basis of
Catherine's character, would break hungrily through, and the wife of
their early married days would reappear, though still only with
limitations. A certain nervous physical dread of any approach to a
particular range of subjects with her husband was always present in her.
Nay, through all these months it gradually increased in morbid strength.
Shock had produced it; perhaps shock alone could loosen the stifling
pressure of it. But still every now and then her mood was brighter, more
caressing, and the area of common mundane interests seemed suddenly to
broaden for them.
Robert did not always make a wise use of these happier times; he was
incessantly possessed with his old idea that if she only _would_ allow
herself some very ordinary intercourse with his world, her mood would
become less strained, his occupations and his friends would cease to be
such bugbears to her, and, for his comfort and hers, she might
ultimately be able to sympathise with certain sides at any rate of his
work.
So again and again, when her manner no longer threw him back on himself,
he made efforts and experiments. But he managed them far less cleverly
than he would have managed anybody else's affairs, as generally happens.
For instance, at a period when he was feeling more enthusiasm than usual
for his colleague Wardlaw, and when Catherine was more accessible than
usual, it suddenly occurred to him to make an effort to bring them
together. Brought face to face, each _must_ recognise the nobleness of
the other. He felt boyishly confident of it. So he made it a point,
tenderly but insistently, that Catherine should ask Wardlaw and his wife
to come and see them. And Catherine, driven obscurely by a longing to
yield in something, which recurred, and often terrified herself, yielded
in this.
The Wardlaws, who in general never went into society, were asked to a
quiet dinner in Bedford Square, and came. Then, of course, it appeared
that Robert, with the idealist's blindness, had forgotten a hundred
small differences of temperament and training which must make it
impossible for Catherine, in a state of tension, to see the hero in
James Wardlaw. It was an unlucky dinner. James Wardlaw, with all his
heroisms and virtues, had long ago dropped most of those delicate
intuitions and divinations, which make the charm of life in society,
along the rough paths of a strenuous philanthropy. He had no tact, and,
like most saints, he drew a certain amount of inspiration from a
contented ignorance of his neighbour's point of view. Also, he was not a
man who made much of women, and he held strong views as to the
subordination of wives. It never occurred to him that Robert might have
a Dissenter in his own household, and as, in spite of their speculative
differences, he had always been accustomed to talk freely with Robert,
he now talked freely to Robert plus his wife, assuming, as every good
Comtist does, that the husband is the wife's pope.
Moreover, a solitary eccentric life, far from the society of his equals,
had developed in him a good many crude Jacobinisms. His experience of
London clergymen, for instance, had not been particularly favourable,
and he had a store of anecdotes on the subject which Robert had heard