Robert Elsmere
the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red walls, and the
masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the
floweriness and the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow
and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village--roofs and
gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed
brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths
of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over
the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house,
now it was half ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the
squire of the day had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should
exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished
the rectory; so that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany
doors and carved cupboard fronts, in which Robert delighted, and in
which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure.
Altogether a quiet, rural, English spot. If the house had no beauty, it
commanded a world of loveliness. All around it--north, south, and
west--there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood
and grassy common, in which the few workaday patches of hedge and
ploughed land seemed ingulfed and lost. Close under the rectory windows,
however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the
largest and fruitfulest of the neighbourhood. At the present moment it
was just ready for the reaper--the golden ears had clearly but a few
more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was bounded by a dark
summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, over the distance, rose a blue
pointed hill, which seemed to be there only to attract and make a centre
for the sunsets.
As compared with her Westmoreland life, the first twelve months of
wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing
experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford.
It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the
senior members of the University were already in residence, and the
stagnation of the Long Vacation was over. Langham was up; so was Mr.
Grey, and many another old friend of Robert's. The bride and bridegroom
were much feted in a quiet way. They dined in many common rooms and
bursaries; they were invited to many luncheons, whereat the
superabundance of food and the length of time spent upon it made the
Puritan Catherine uncomfortable; and Langham devoted himself to taking
the wife through colleges and gardens, Schools and Bodleian, in most
orthodox fashion, indemnifying himself afterwards for the sense of
constraint her presence imposed upon him by a talk and a smoke with
Robert.
He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a creature so mobile,
so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere should have fallen in love with
this stately silent woman, with her very evident rigidities of thought
and training, was only another illustration of the mysteries of
matrimony. He could not get on with her, and after a while did not try
to do so.
There could be no doubt as to Elsmere's devotion. He was absorbed,
wrapped up in her.
'She has affected him,' thought the tutor, 'at a period of life when he
is more struck by the difficulty of being morally strong than by the
difficulty of being intellectually clear. The touch of religious genius
in her braces him like the breath of an Alpine wind. One can see him
expanding, glowing under it. _Bien!_ sooner he than I. To be fair,
however, let me remember that she decidedly does not like me--which may
cut me off from Elsmere. However'--and Langham sighed over his
fire--'what have he and I to do with one another in the future? By all
the laws of character something untoward might come out of this
marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, she will
have children--and that solves most things.'
Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected most people,
Robert, with that keen observation which lay hidden somewhere under his
careless boyish ways, noticed many points of change about his old
friend. Langham seemed to him less human, more strange, than ever; the
points of contact between him and active life were lessening in number
term by term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for
the retention of his post, and he spoke with wholesale distaste of his
pupils. He had set up a book on 'The Schools of Athens,' but when Robert
saw the piles of disconnected notes already accumulated, he perfectly
understood that the book was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a
difficult fastidious nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased.
Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been
intimate. Now, Langham's tone _a propos_ of Grey's politics and Grey's
dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard
to most of the strenuous things of life. 'Nothing particular is true,'
his manner said, 'and all action is a degrading _pis-aller_. Get through
the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as may
be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven's sake, don't cant
about it to other people!'
If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey
should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look of
Elsmere's wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he
tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both
of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldliness that
should have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm,
the spell of this born leader of men. But she watched him with a sort
of troubled admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity
surrounding him, which contended with something else in her mind
respecting him. Some words of Robert's, uttered very early in their
acquaintance, had set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Robert had
said, 'Grey is not one of us'; and Catherine, restrained by a hundred
ties of training and temperament, would not surrender herself, and could
not if she would.
Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and that first
institution of their common life, never to be forgotten for the
tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere had received them, and
had then retired to a little cottage of her own close by. She had of
course already made the acquaintance of her daughter-in-law, for she had
been the Thornburghs' guest for ten days before the marriage in
September, and Catherine, moreover, had paid her a short visit earlier
in the summer. But it was now that for the first time she realised to
the full the character of the woman Robert had married. Catherine's
manner to her was sweetness itself. Parted from her own mother as she
was, the younger woman's strong filial instincts spent themselves in
tending the mother who had been the guardian and life of Robert's youth.
And Mrs. Elsmere in return was awed by Catherine's moral force and
purity of nature, and proud of her personal beauty, which was so real,
in spite of the severity of the type, and to which marriage had given,
at any rate for the moment, a certain added softness and brilliancy.
But there were difficulties in the way. Catherine was a little too apt
to treat Mrs. Elsmere as she would have treated her own mother. But to
be nursed and protected, to be screened from draughts, and run after
with shawls and stools was something wholly new and intolerable to Mrs.
Elsmere. She could not away with it, and as soon as she had sufficiently
lost her first awe of her daughter-in-law she would revenge herself in
all sorts of droll ways, and with occasional flashes of petulant Irish
wit which would make Catherine colour and draw back. Then Mrs. Elsmere,
touched with remorse, would catch her by the neck and give her a
resounding kiss, which perhaps puzzled Catherine no less than her
sarcasm of a minute before.
Moreover Mrs. Elsmere felt ruefully from the first that her new daughter
was decidedly deficient in the sense of humour.
'I believe it's that father of hers,' she would say to herself crossly.
'By what Robert tells me of him he must have been one of the people who
get ill in their minds for want of a good mouth-filling laugh now and
then. The man who can't amuse himself a bit out of the world is sure to
get his head addled somehow, poor creature.'
Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able to take Mrs.
Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Catherine was more often
scandalised than impressed by her mother-in-law's charitable
performances.
Mrs. Elsmere's little cottage was filled with workhouse orphans sent to
her from different London districts. The training of these girls was the
chief business of her life, and a very odd training it was, conducted in
the noisiest way and on the most familiar terms. It was undeniable that
the girls generally did well, and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere,
but Catherine did not much like to think about them. Their household
teaching under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant Martha--as great an
original as herself--was so irregular, their religious training so
extraordinary, the clothes in which they were allowed to disport
themselves so scandalous to the sober taste of the rector's wife, that
Catherine involuntarily regarded the little cottage on the hill as a
spot of misrule in the general order of the parish. She would go in,
say, at eleven o'clock in the morning, find her mother-in-law in bed,
half-dressed, with all her handmaidens about her, giving her orders,
reading her letters and the newspaper, cutting out her girls' frocks,
instructing them in the fashions, or delivering little homilies on
questions suggested by the news of the day to the more intelligent of
them. The room, the whole house, would seem to Catherine in a detestable
litter. If so, Mrs. Elsmere never apologised for it. On the contrary, as
she saw Catherine sweep a mass of miscellaneous _debris_ off a chair in
search of a seat, the small bright eyes would twinkle with something
that was certainly nearer amusement than shame.
And in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere's relations with the poor of
the parish often made Catherine miserable. She herself had the most
angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows and sinners; but sin was sin to
her, and when she saw Mrs. Elsmere more than half attracted by the
stronger vices, and in many cases more inclined to laugh with what was
human in them than to weep over what was vile, Robert's wife would go
away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into nothing
harsh towards Robert's mother.
But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep or shallow,
no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the beginning of January
struck down Mrs. Elsmere, whose strange ways of living were more the
result of certain long-standing delicacies of health than she had ever
allowed any one to imagine. A few days of acute inflammation of the
lungs, borne with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish
character at its finest--a moment of agonised wrestling with that terror
of death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its earliest
consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory--and Robert found
himself motherless. He and Catherine had never left her since the
beginning of the illness. In one of the intervals towards the end, when
there was a faint power of speech, she drew Catherine's cheek down to
her and kissed her.
'God bless you!' the old woman's voice said, with a solemnity in it
which Robert knew well, but which Catherine had never heard before. 'Be
good to him, Catherine--be always good to him!'
And she lay looking from the husband to the wife with a certain