Robert Elsmere
wistfulness which pained Catherine, she knew not why. But she answered
with tears and tender words, and at last the mother's face settled into
a peace which death did but confirm.
This great and unexpected loss, which had shaken to their depths all the
feelings and affections of his youth, had thrown Elsmere more than ever
on his wife. To him, made as it seemed for love and for enjoyment, grief
was a novel and difficult burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that
his wife helped him to bear it so that he came out from it not lessened
but ennobled, that she preserved him from many a lapse of nervous
weariness and irritation into which his temperament might easily have
been betrayed.
And how his very dependence had endeared him to Catherine! That
vibrating responsive quality in him, so easily mistaken for mere
weakness, which made her so necessary to him--there is nothing perhaps
which wins more deeply upon a woman. For all the while it was balanced
in a hundred ways by the illimitable respect which his character and his
doings compelled from those about him. To be the strength, the inmost
joy of a man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero
at every turn--there is no happiness more penetrating for a wife than
this.
* * * * *
On this August afternoon the Elsmeres were expecting visitors. Catherine
had sent the pony-carriage to the station to meet Rose and Langham, who
was to escort her from Waterloo. For various reasons, all
characteristic, it was Rose's first visit to Catherine's new home.
Now she had been for six weeks in London, and had been persuaded to come
on to her sister, at the end of her stay. Catherine was looking forward
to her coming with many tremors. The wild ambitious creature had been
not one atom appeased by Manchester and its opportunities. She had gone
back to Whindale in April only to fall into more hopeless discontent
than ever. 'She can hardly be civil to anybody,' Agnes wrote to
Catherine. 'The cry now is all "London" or at least "Berlin," and she
cannot imagine why papa should ever have wished to condemn us to such a
prison.'
Catherine grew pale with indignation as she read the words, and thought
of her father's short-lived joy in the old house and its few green
fields, or of the confidence which had soothed his last moments, that it
would be well there with his wife and children, far from the hubbub of
the world.
But Rose and her whims were not facts which could be put aside. They
would have to be grappled with, probably humoured. As Catherine
strolled out into the garden, listening alternately for Robert and for
the carriage, she told herself that it would be a difficult visit. And
the presence of Mr. Langham would certainly not diminish its difficulty.
The mere thought of him set the wife's young form stiffening. A cold
breath seemed to blow from Edward Langham, which chilled Catherine's
whole being. Why was Robert so fond of him?
But the more Langham cut himself off from the world, the more Robert
clung to him in his wistful affectionate way. The more difficult their
intercourse became, the more determined the younger man seemed to be to
maintain it. Catherine imagined that he often scourged himself in secret
for the fact that the gratitude which had once flowed so readily had now
become a matter of reflection and resolution.
'Why should we always expect to get pleasure from our friends?' he had
said to her once with vehemence. 'It should be pleasure enough to love
them.' And she knew very well of whom he was thinking.
How late he was this afternoon. He must have been a long round. She had
news for him of great interest. The lodge-keeper from the Hall had just
looked in to tell the rector that the squire and his widowed sister were
expected home in four days.
But, interesting as the news was, Catherine's looks as she pondered it
were certainly not looks of pleased expectation. Neither of them,
indeed, had much cause to rejoice in the squire's advent. Since their
arrival in the parish the splendid Jacobean Hall had been untenanted.
The squire, who was abroad with his sister at the time of their coming,
had sent a civil note to the new rector on his settlement in the parish,
naming some common Oxford acquaintances, and desiring him to make what
use of the famous Murewell Library he pleased. 'I hear of you as a
friend to letters,' he wrote; 'do my books a service by using them.' The
words were graceful enough. Robert had answered them warmly. He had also
availed himself largely of the permission they had conveyed. We shall
see presently that the squire, though absent, had already made a deep
impression on the young man's imagination.
But unfortunately he came across the squire in two capacities. Mr.
Wendover was not only the owner of Murewell, he was also the owner of
the whole land of the parish, where, however, by a curious accident of
inheritance, dating some generations back, and implying some very remote
connection between the Wendover and Elsmere families, he was not the
patron of the living. Now the more Elsmere studied him under this
aspect, the deeper became his dismay. The estate was entirely in the
hands of an agent who had managed it for some fifteen years, and of
whose character the rector, before he had been two months in the parish,
had formed the very poorest opinion. Robert, entering upon his duties
with the ardour of the modern reformer, armed not only with charity but
with science, found himself confronted by the opposition of a man who
combined the shrewdness of an attorney with the callousness of a
drunkard. It seemed incredible that a great landowner should commit his
interests and the interests of hundreds of human beings to the hands of
such a person.
By and by, however, as the rector penetrated more deeply into the
situation, he found his indignation transferring itself more and more
from the man to the master. It became clear to him that in some respects
Henslowe suited the squire admirably. It became also clear to him that
the squire had taken pains for years to let it be known that he cared
not one rap for any human being on his estate in any other capacity than
as a rent-payer or wage-receiver. What! Live for thirty years in that
great house, and never care whether your tenants and labourers lived
like pigs or like men, whether the old people died of damp, or the
children of diphtheria, which you might have prevented! Robert's brow
grew dark over it.
The click of an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreaminess at
once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. In another moment
Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a holly stick in his hand, his
face aglow with health and exercise and kindling at the sight of his
wife. She hung on his arm, and, with his hand laid tenderly on hers, he
asked her how she fared. She answered briefly, but with a little flush,
her eyes raised to his. She was within a few weeks of motherhood.
Then they strolled along talking. He gave her an account of his
afternoon, which, to judge from the worried expression which presently
effaced the joy of their meeting, had been spent in some unsuccessful
effort or other. They paused after a while, and stood looking over the
plain before them to a spot beyond the nearer belt of woodland, where
from a little hollow about three miles off there rose a cloud of bluish
smoke.
'He will do nothing!' cried Catherine, incredulous.
'Nothing! It is the policy of the estate, apparently, to let the old and
bad cottages fall to pieces. He sneers at one for supposing any
landowner has money for "philanthropy" just now. If the people don't
like the houses they can go. I told him I should appeal to the squire as
soon as he came home.'
'What did he say?'
'He smiled, as much as to say, "Do as you like, and be a fool for your
pains." How the squire can let that man tyrannise over the estate as he
does, I cannot conceive. Oh, Catherine, I am full of qualms about the
squire!'
'So am I,' she said, with a little darkening of her clear look. 'Old
Benham has just been in to say they are expected on Thursday.'
Robert started. 'Are these our last days of peace?' he said
wistfully--'the last days of our honeymoon, Catherine?'
She smiled at him with a little quiver of passionate feeling under the
smile.
'Can anything touch that?' she said under her breath.
'Do you know,' he said presently, his voice dropping, 'that it is only a
month to our wedding day? Oh, my wife, have I kept my promise--is the
new life as rich as the old?'
She made no answer, except the dumb sweet answer that love writes on
eyes and lips. Then a tremor passed over her.
'Are we too happy? Can it be well--be right?'
'Oh, let us take it like children!' he cried, with a shiver, almost
petulantly. 'There will be dark hours enough. It is so good to be
happy.'
She leant her cheek fondly against his shoulder. To her life always
meant self-restraint, self-repression, self-deadening, if need be. The
Puritan distrust of personal joy as something dangerous and ensnaring
was deep ingrained in her. It had no natural hold on him.
They stood a moment hand in hand fronting the cornfield and the
sun-filled west, while the afternoon breeze blew back the man's curly
reddish hair, long since restored to all its natural abundance.
Presently Robert broke into a broad smile.
'What do you suppose Langham has been entertaining Rose with on the way,
Catherine? I wouldn't miss her remarks to-night on the escort we
provided her for a good deal.'
Catherine said nothing, but her delicate eyebrows went up a little.
Robert stooped and lightly kissed her.
'You never performed a greater act of virtue even in _your_ life, Mrs.
Elsmere, than when you wrote Langham that nice letter of invitation.'
And then the young rector sighed, as many a boyish memory came crowding
upon him.
A sound of wheels! Robert's long legs took him to the gate in a
twinkling, and he flung it open just as Rose drove up in fine style, a
thin dark man beside her.
Rose lent her bright cheek to Catherine's kiss, and the two sisters
walked up to the door together, while Robert and Langham loitered after
them talking.
'Oh, Catherine!' said Rose under her breath, as they got into the
drawing-room, with a little theatrical gesture, 'why on earth did you
inflict that man and me on each other for two mortal hours?'
'Sh-sh!' said Catherine's lips, while her face gleamed with laughter.
Rose sank flushed upon a chair, her eyes glancing up with a little
furtive anger in them as the two gentlemen entered the room.
'You found each other easily at Waterloo?' asked Robert.
'Mr. Langham would never have found _me_,' said Rose drily; 'but I
pounced on him at last--just, I believe, as he was beginning to cherish
the hope of an empty carriage and the solitary enjoyment of his
_Saturday Review_.'
Langham smiled nervously. 'Miss Leyburn is too hard on a blind man,' he
said, holding up his eyeglass apologetically; 'it was my eyes, not my
will, that were at fault.'
Rose's lip curled a little. 'And Robert,' she cried, bending forward as
though something had just occurred to her, 'do tell me--I vowed I would
ask--_is_ Mr. Langham a Liberal or a Conservative? _He_ doesn't know!'
Robert laughed, so did Langham.
'Your sister,' he said, flushing, 'will have one so very precise in all
one says.'
He turned his handsome olive face towards her, an unwonted spark of
animation lighting up his black eyes. It was evident that he felt
himself persecuted, but it was not so evident whether he enjoyed the
process or disliked it.
'Oh dear, no!' said Rose nonchalantly. 'Only I have just come from a
house where everybody either loathes Mr. Gladstone or would die for him