Robert Elsmere
temperament, prevented him from becoming a High Churchman. The
sacramental, ceremonial view of the Church never took hold upon him. But
to the English Church as a great national institution for the promotion
of God's work on earth no one could have been more deeply loyal, and
none coming close to him could mistake the fervour and passion of his
Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancour or
bitterness meant, so that men of all shades of Christian belief reckoned
a friend in him, and he went through life surrounded by an unusual,
perhaps a dangerous amount of liking and affection. He threw himself
ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church
vicar, and now toiling with Grey and one or two other Liberal fellows,
at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room just started by
them in one of the suburbs; while in the second year of his lectureship
the success of some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of
the religious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his mark.
So the three years passed--years not, perhaps, of great intellectual
advance, for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly
to the fore, but years certainly of continuous growth in character and
moral experience. And at the end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer,
and it was accepted.
The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from the little
house in Merton Street, where she had established herself, had watched
her boy's meteoric career through these crowded months with very
frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was
constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realised long before
he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end for
him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her
remonstrances, nor Mr. Grey's common-sense, nor Langham's fidgety
protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter
came so easy. During the latter half of his third year of teaching he
was continually being sent away by the doctors, and coming back only to
break down again. At last, in the January of his fourth year, the
collapse became so decided that he consented, bribed by the prospect of
the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East,
accompanied by his mother and a college friend.
Just before their departure news reached him of the death of the rector
of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living from Sir Mowbray.
At the moment when the letter arrived he was feeling desperately tired
and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill
and deep sense of depression with which he received it. For within him
was a slowly-emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still
more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labour and the worst
forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the Murewell
incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.
But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and Grey
strongly advised him to accept.
'You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Liberal tutor with
emphasis. 'No one can say a living with 1200 souls, and no curate, is a
sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd--you couldn't stand it.
And after all, I imagine, there are some souls worth saving out of the
towns.'
Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a corrupt and
indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied calmly that they probably
were, but that the fact did not affect, so far as he could see,
Elsmere's competence to fulfil all the duties of rector of Murewell.
'After all, my dear fellow,' he said, a smile breaking over his strong
expressive face, 'it is well even for reformers to be sane.'
Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had foreseen it all
along. She was miserable about his health, but she too had a moment of
superstition, and would not urge him. Murewell was no name of happy omen
to her--she had passed the darkest hours of her life there.
In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly granted him.
Then he and his mother and friend fled over seas: he feverishly
determined to get well and cheat the fates. But, after a halcyon time in
Palestine and Constantinople, a whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on
their way home, acting on a low constitutional state, settled matters.
Robert was laid up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled
out again into the hot Riviera sunshine it was clear to himself and
everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he would, in
the Christian vineyard.
'Mother,' he said one day, suddenly looking up at her as she sat near
him working, 'can _you_ be happy at Murewell?'
There was a wistfulness in the long thin face, and a pathetic accent of
surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother's heart.
'I can be happy wherever you are,' she said, laying her brown nervous
hand on his blanched one.
'Then give me pen and paper and let me write to Mowbray. I wonder
whether the place has changed at all. Heigh ho! How is one to preach to
people who have stuffed you up with gooseberries, or swung you on gates,
or lifted you over puddles to save your petticoats? I wonder what has
become of that boy whom I hit in the eye with my bow and arrow, or of
that other lout who pummelled me into the middle of next week for
disturbing his bird-trap? By the way, is the Squire--is Roger
Wendover--living at the Hall now?'
He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest.
'So I hear,' said Mrs. Elsmere drily. '_He_ won't be much good to you.'
He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. He had forgotten
the Squire of Murewell. But Roger Wendover, the famous and eccentric
owner of Murewell Hall, hermit and scholar, possessed of one of the most
magnificent libraries in England, and author of books which had carried
a revolutionary shock into the heart of English society, was not a
figure to be overlooked by any rector of Murewell, least of all by one
possessed of Robert's culture and imagination.
The young man ransacked his memory on the subject with a sudden access
of interest in his new home that was to be.
Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now convalescent, had
accepted an invitation to spend a month in Long Whindale with his
mother's cousins, the Thornburghs, who offered him quiet, and bracing
air. He was to enter on his duties at Murewell in July, the bishop, who
had been made aware of his Oxford reputation, welcoming the new recruit
to the diocese with marked warmth of manner.
CHAPTER VI
'Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,' cried Rose, calling from
outside through the dining-room window; 'and tell mamma.'
It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert
Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An intelligent
foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley might have believed
that, after all, England, and even Northern England, had a summer. Early
in the season as it was, the sun was already drawing the colour out of
the hills; the young green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening.
Except the oaks. They were brilliance itself against the luminous
gray-blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just
unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches and the
birches and the hawthorns were already sobered by a longer acquaintance
with life and Phoebus.
Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when in its proper
place served her, apparently, both as hat and as parasol. She seemed to
have been running races with a fine collie, who lay at her feet panting,
but studying her with his bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off
again at the first indication that his playmate had recovered her wind.
Chattie was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her
as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a model of
treacherous beauty.
'Chattie, you fiend, come here!' cried Rose, holding out a hand to her;
'if Miss Barks were ever pretty she must have looked like you at this
moment.'
'I won't have Chattie put upon,' said Agnes, establishing herself at the
other side of the little tea-table; 'she has done you no harm. Come to
me, beastie. _I_ won't compare you to disagreeable old maids.'
The cat looked from one sister to the other, blinking; then with a
sudden magnificent spring leaped on to Agnes's lap and curled herself up
there.
'Nothing but cupboard love,' said Rose scornfully, in answer to Agnes's
laugh; 'she knows you will give her bread and butter and I won't, out of
a double regard for my skirts and her morals. Oh, dear me! Miss Barks
was quite seraphic last night; she never made a single remark about my
clothes, and she didn't even say to me as she generally does, with an
air of compassion, that she "_quite_ understands how hard it must be to
keep in tune."'
'The amusing thing was Mrs. Seaton and Mr. Elsmere,' said Agnes. 'I just
love, as Mrs. Thornburgh says, to hear her instructing other people in
their own particular trades. She didn't get much change out of him.'
Rose gave Agnes her tea, and then, bending forward, with one hand on her
heart, said in a stage whisper, with a dramatic glance round the garden,
'My heart is whole. How is yours?'
'_Intact_,' said Agnes calmly, 'as that French bric-a-brac man in the
Brompton Road used to say of his pots. But he is very nice.'
'Oh, charming! But when my destiny arrives'--and Rose, returning to her
tea, swept her little hand with a teaspoon in it eloquently round--'he
won't have his hair cut close. I must have luxuriant locks, and I will
take _no_ excuse! _Une chevelure de poete_, the eye of an eagle, the
moustache of a hero, the hand of a Rubinstein, and, if it pleases him,
the temper of a fiend. He will be odious, insufferable for all the world
besides, except for me; and for me he will be heaven.'
She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a little flush
of something half real on her cheek.
'No doubt,' said Agnes drily. 'But you can't wonder if under the
circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law. To return to the
subject, however, Catherine liked him. She said so.'
'Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose discontentedly; 'Catherine likes
everybody--of a certain sort--and everybody likes Catherine.'
'Does that mean, Miss Hasty,' said her sister, 'that you have made up
your mind Catherine will never marry?'
'Marry!' cried Rose. 'You might as well talk of marrying Westminster
Abbey.'
Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose's fun had a decided lack of
sweetness. 'After all,' she said demurely, 'St. Elizabeth married.'
'Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If Catherine were
"her Royal Highness" it would be her duty to marry, which would just
make _all_ the difference. Duty! I hate the word.'
And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the nose of the
collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an attitude of blinking
and dignified protest against his mistress's follies.
Agnes again studied her sister. 'What's the matter with you, Rose?'
'The usual thing, my dear,' replied Rose curtly, 'only more so. I had a
letter this morning from Carry Ford--the daughter, you know, of those
nice people I stayed in Manchester with last year. Well, she wants me to
go and stay the winter with them and study under a first-rate man,
Franzen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the winter. I
haven't said a word about it--what's the use? I know all Catherine's
arguments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished us to