Robert Elsmere
many reasons she secretly allowed herself to hope that he would find for
himself some other post of ministry in a very various world than the
vicarage of Murewell.
So she wrote a civil letter of acknowledgment to Sir Mowbray, informing
him that the intentions of his great-uncle should be communicated to the
boy when he should be of fit age to consider them, and that meanwhile
she was obliged to him for pointing out the procedure by which she might
lay hands on the legacy bequeathed to her in trust for her son, the
income of which would now be doubly welcome in view of his college
expenses. There the matter rested, and Mrs. Elsmere, during the two
years which followed, thought little more about it. She became more and
more absorbed in her boy's immediate prospects, in the care of his
health, which was uneven and tried somewhat by the strain of preparation
for an attempt on the St. Anselm's scholarship, and in the demands which
his ardent nature, oppressed with the weight of its own aspirations, was
constantly making upon her support and sympathy.
At last the moment so long expected arrived. Mrs. Elsmere and her son
left Harden amid a chorus of good wishes, and settled themselves early
in November in Oxford lodgings. Robert was to have a few days' complete
holiday before the examination, and he and his mother spent it in
exploring the beautiful old town, now shrouded in the 'pensive glooms'
of still, gray autumn weather. There was no sun to light up the misty
reaches of the river; the trees in the Broad Walk were almost bare; the
Virginian creeper no longer shone in patches of delicate crimson on the
college walls; the gardens were damp and forsaken. But to Mrs. Elsmere
and Robert the place needed neither sun nor summer 'for beauty's
heightening.' On both of them it laid its old irresistible spell; the
sentiment haunting its quadrangles, its libraries, and its dim melodious
chapels, stole into the lad's heart and alternately soothed and
stimulated that keen individual consciousness which naturally
accompanies the first entrance into manhood. Here, on this soil, steeped
in memories, _his_ problems, _his_ struggles were to be fought out in
their turn. 'Take up thy manhood,' said the inward voice, 'and show what
is in thee. The hour and the opportunity have come!'
And to this thrill of vague expectation, this young sense of an
expanding world, something of pathos and of sacredness was added by the
dumb influences of the old streets and weather-beaten stones. How
tenacious they were of the past! The dreaming city seemed to be still
brooding in the autumn calm over the long succession of her sons. The
continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort
of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were
the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary
shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother
from college to college.
Mrs. Elsmere, too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her eager
interest, the historic beauty of the place aroused in her an under-mood
of melancholy, just as it did in Robert. Both had the impressionable
Celtic temperament, and both felt that a critical moment was upon them,
and that the Oxford air was charged with fate for each of them. For the
first time in their lives they were to be parted. The mother's long
guardianship was coming to an end. Had she loved him enough? Had she so
far fulfilled the trust her dead husband had imposed upon her? Would her
boy love her in the new life as he had loved her in the old? And could
her poor craving heart bear to see him absorbed by fresh interests and
passions, in which her share could be only, at the best, secondary and
indirect?
One day--it was on the afternoon preceding the examination--she gave
hurried, half-laughing utterance to some of these misgivings of hers.
They were walking down the Lime-walk of Trinity Gardens; beneath their
feet a yellow fresh-strewn carpet of leaves, brown interlacing branches
overhead, and a red misty sun shining through the trunks. Robert
understood his mother perfectly, and the way she had of hiding a storm
of feeling under these tremulous comedy airs. So that, instead of
laughing too, he took her hand and, there being no spectators anywhere
to be seen in the damp November garden, he raised it to his lips with a
few broken words of affection and gratitude which very nearly overcame
the self-command of both of them. She dashed wildly into another
subject, and then suddenly it occurred to her impulsive mind that the
moment had come to make him acquainted with those dying intentions of
his great-uncle which we have already described. The diversion was a
welcome one, and the duty seemed clear. So, accordingly, she made him
give her all his attention while she told him the story and the terms of
Sir Mowbray's letter, forcing herself the while to keep her own opinions
and predilections as much as possible out of sight.
Robert listened with interest and astonishment, the sense of a new-found
manhood waxing once more strong within him, as his mind admitted the
strange picture of himself occupying the place which had been his
father's; master of the house and the parish he had wandered over with
childish steps, clinging to the finger or the coat of the tall stooping
figure which occupied the dim background of his recollections. 'Poor
mother,' he said thoughtfully, when she paused, 'it would be hard upon
_you_ to go back to Murewell!'
'Oh, you mustn't think of me when the time comes,' said Mrs. Elsmere,
sighing. 'I shall be a tiresome old woman, and you will be a young man
wanting a wife. There, put it out of your head, Robert. I thought I had
better tell you, for, after all, the fact may concern your Oxford life.
But you've got a long time yet before you need begin to worry about it.'
The boy drew himself up to his full height, and tossed his tumbling
reddish hair back from his eyes. He was nearly six feet already, with a
long thin body and head, which amply justified his school nickname of
'the darning-needle.'
'Don't you trouble either, mother,' he said, with a tone of decision: 'I
don't feel as if I should ever take orders.'
Mrs. Elsmere was old enough to know what importance to attach to the
trenchancy of eighteen, but still the words were pleasant to her.
The next day Robert went up for examination, and after three days of
hard work, and phases of alternate hope and depression, in which mother
and son excited one another to no useful purpose, there came the anxious
crowding round the college gate in the November twilight, and the sudden
flight of dispersing messengers bearing the news over Oxford. The
scholarship had been won by a precocious Etonian with an extraordinary
talent for 'stems,' and all that appertained thereto. But the exhibition
fell to Robert, and mother and son were well content.
The boy was eager to come into residence at once, though he would
matriculate too late to keep the term. The college authorities were
willing, and on the Saturday following the announcement of his success
he was matriculated, saw the Provost, and was informed that rooms would
be found for him without delay. His mother and he gaily climbed
innumerable stairs to inspect the garrets of which he was soon to take
proud possession, sallying forth from them only to enjoy an agitated
delightful afternoon among the shops. Expenditure, always charming,
becomes under these circumstances a sacred and pontifical act. Never had
Mrs. Elsmere bought a teapot for herself with half the fervour which she
now threw into the purchase of Robert's; and the young man, accustomed
to a rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the little elegancies of
life, was overwhelmed when his mother actually dragged him into a
printseller's, and added an engraving or two to the enticing
miscellaneous mass of which he was already master.
They only just left themselves time to rush back to their lodgings and
dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the Provost. The dinner,
however, was a great success. The short, shy manner of their
white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy,
unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had
more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab
poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the
Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she
must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like
the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could
not attain unto it. Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe
of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the
thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the
arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and
a centre of influence over thousands of English lives.
And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner's
gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday. The scores of young
faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost's sermon,
with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and
phrase--simplicities so suggestive, so full of a rich and yet
disciplined experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks
afterwards--completed the general impression made upon her by the Oxford
life. She came out, tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm. She,
too, like the generations before her, had launched her venture into the
deep. Her boy was putting out from her into the ocean; henceforth she
could but watch him from the shore. Brought into contact with this
imposing University organisation, with all its suggestions of virile
energies and functions, the mother suddenly felt herself insignificant
and forsaken. He had been her all, her own, and now on this
training-ground of English youth, it seemed to her that the great human
society had claimed him from her.
CHAPTER V
In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and most
stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at school. He
was a youth of many friends, by virtue of a natural gift of sympathy,
which was no doubt often abused, and by no means invariably profitable
to its owner, but wherein, at any rate, his power over his fellows, like
the power of half the potent men in the world's history, always lay
rooted. He had his mother's delight in living. He loved the
cricket-field, he loved the river; his athletic instincts and his
athletic friends were always fighting in him with his literary instincts
and the friends who appealed primarily to the intellectual and moral
side of him. He made many mistakes alike in friends and in pursuits; in
the freshness of a young and roving curiosity he had great difficulty in
submitting himself to the intellectual routine of the University, a
difficulty which ultimately cost him much; but at the bottom of the lad,
all the time, there was a strength of will, a force and even tyranny of
conscience, which kept his charm and pliancy from degenerating into
weakness, and made it not only delightful, but profitable to love him.
He knew that his mother was bound up in him, and his being was set to
satisfy, so far as he could, all her honourable ambitions.
His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence must have been
in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly concern us here. His
future life, so far as we can see, was most noticeably affected by two
men older than himself, and belonging to the dons--both of them fellows
and tutors of St. Anselm's, though on different planes of age.
The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert's tutor, and about seven years