Robert Elsmere
drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black--the sun
seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds of children's
voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart--or was it all sight and
sound alike, mirage and delirium?
With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man of
seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank down, still
gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars near the gate. After
a while the attack passed off and he found himself able to walk on. But
the joy, the leaping pulse of half an hour ago, were gone from his
veins. Was that the river--the house? He looked at them with dull eyes.
All the light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the
familiar things.
However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will and nature had
reasserted themselves, and he knew where he was and what he had to do.
Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.
'Why, sir! _Mr._ Elsmere!'
The butler's voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding at once
into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of the old rector.
Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the dining-room
and give him some wine before announcing him. Vincent ministered to him
with a long face, pressing all the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon
him in turn. The squire was much better, he declared, and had been
carried down to the library.
'But, lor, sir, there ain't much to be said for your looks
neither--seems as if London didn't suit you, sir.'
Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his throat, and
had overtired himself by walking over the common. Then, recognising from
a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror hanging by that
something of his natural colour had returned to him, he rose and bade
Vincent announce him.
'And Mrs. Darcy?' he asked, as they stepped out into the hall again.
'Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she's very well,' said the man, but, as it seemed
to Robert, with something of an embarrassed air.
He followed Vincent down the long passage--haunted by old memories, by
the old sickening sense of mental anguish--to the curtained door.
Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir of feet, and a voice, but at
first he saw nothing. The room was very much darkened. Then Meyrick
emerged into distinctness.
'Squire, here _is_ Mr. Elsmere! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I'm sure we're
very much obliged to you for meeting the squire's wishes so promptly.
You'll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but mending--oh yes, mending,
sir--no doubt of it.'
Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand was advanced
to him out of the gloom.
'That'll do, Meyrick. You won't be wanted till the evening.'
The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden sense of
relief. After all, the squire was still capable of trampling on Meyrick.
In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and the two men
were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to the dim light. Out of it
the squire's face gleamed almost as whitely as the tortured marble of
the Medusa just above their heads.
'It's some inflammation in the eyes,' the squire explained briefly,
'that's made Meyrick set up all this d--d business of blinds and
shutters. I don't mean to stand it much longer. The eyes are better, and
I prefer to see my way out of the world, if possible.'
'But you are recovering?' Robert said, laying his hand affectionately on
the old man's knee.
'I have added to my knowledge,' said the squire drily. 'Like Heine, I am
qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on
earth. And I am not in bed, which I was last week. For Heaven's sake
don't ask questions. If there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the
subject of the human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you
away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you so
hoarse for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of "the people,"
who wouldn't even subscribe to bury you? Have you been working up the
Apocrypha as I recommended you last time we met?'
Robert smiled.
'For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things with
neither of which had you much sympathy in old days--holiday-making and
"slumming."'
'Oh, I remember,' interrupted the squire hastily. 'I was low last week,
and read the Church papers by way of a counter-irritant. You have been
starting a new religion, I see. A new religion! _Humph!_'
The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the
sarcastic gleam of the eyes.
'You are hardly the man to deny,' he said, undisturbed, 'that the old
ones _laissent a desirer_.'
'Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you should go and
set up a brand-new one--an ugly anachronism besides,' retorted the
squire. 'However, you and I have no common ground--never had. I say
_know_, you say _feel_. Where is the difference, after all, between you
and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?'
'I have not seen her for six months,' Robert replied, with equal
abruptness.
The squire laughed a little under his breath.
'What did you think of her?'
'Very much what you told me to think--intellectually,' replied Robert,
facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.
'Well, I certainly never told you to think anything--_morally_,' said
the squire. 'The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see
there?'
The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere
went through with it, the squire watching him for a while with an
expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that
some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always
seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had
tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.
But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle
change in the squire's attitude--a relaxation of his own sense of
tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness.
The squire's head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the
breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had
dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and
defencelessness.
Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so
much to him.
Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the
Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk,
looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of
books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of
ken--they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so--a river
lost in the sands!
Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping squire.
'A bad sign! a bad sign!' he said, and shook his head mournfully.
After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon
him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical _malaise_ than had ever
yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw
Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up
to her with a warm greeting.
'Are you going in to the squire? Let us go together.'
She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day
before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into the room behind her, a
curious film, so it seemed to him, darkening her small gray eyes.
'The squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen my white mice?
Oh, they are such darlings! Only, one of them is ill, and they won't let
me have the doctor.'
Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She stood in the
middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger to a large cage of
white mice which stood in the window. The room seemed full besides of
other creatures. Robert stood rooted, looking at the tiny withered
figure in the black dress, its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in
lace, with a perplexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver.
Suddenly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent,
strong-looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their
eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head towards Mrs.
Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing the mice with the
weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, and went out sick at
heart. The careful exquisite beauty of the great hall struck him as
something mocking and anti-human.
No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. In the
evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in another key. He
insisted on a certain amount of light, and, leaning on Robert's arm,
went feebly round the bookshelves. He took out one of the volumes of the
Fathers that Newman had given him.
'When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rubbish,' he
said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, 'and of the
other hours I maundered away in services and self-examination! Thank
Heaven, however, the germ of revolt and sanity was always there. And
when once I got to it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick.'
Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the shrunken
squire.
'Oh, not one _you_ have any chance of learning, my good friend,' said
the other aggressively. 'And after all it's simple. _Go to your grave
with your eyes open_--that's all. But men don't learn it, somehow.
Newman was incapable--so are you. All the religions are nothing but so
many vulgar anaesthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse.'
'Do you want me to contradict you?' said Robert, smiling; 'I am quite
ready.'
The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his chair again, he
said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau in the window, 'The book is
all there--both parts, first and second. Publish it if you please. If
not, throw it into the fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has
done its work; it has helped me through half a century of living.'
'It shall be to me a sacred trust,' said Elsmere with emotion. 'Of
course if you don't publish it, I shall publish it.'
'As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more rational to tell me
about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood of yours.'
Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The words would
not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the middle that strange
creeping sleep overtook the squire again.
Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been coming in and
out through the evening, eyeing Elsmere, now that there was more light
on the scene, with almost as much anxiety and misgiving as the squire,
was summoned. The squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a
male attendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick
peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a finger to the
performance. They took him up the library stairs, through the empty
book-rooms and that dreary room which had been his father's, and so into
his own. By the time they set him down he was quite awake and conscious
again.
'It can't be said that I follow my own precepts,' he said to Robert
grimly as they put him down. 'Not much of the open eye about this. I
shall sleep myself into the unknown as sweetly as any saint in the
calendar.'
Robert was going when the squire called him back.
'You'll stay to-morrow, Elsmere?'
'Of course, if you wish it.'
The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently.
'Why did you ever go?'
'As I told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else for an
honest man to do.'
The squire turned round with a frown.
'What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get
me out of this.'