Robert Elsmere
to-morrow. There was a girl of seven and a boy of nine who were always
discussing "Coercion" in the corners of the schoolroom. So, of course, I
have grown political too, and began to catechise Mr. Langham at once,
and when he said "he didn't know," I felt I should like to set those
children at him! They would soon put some principles into him!'
'It is not generally lack of principle, Miss Rose,' said her
brother-in-law, 'that turns a man a doubter in politics, but too much!'
And while he spoke, his eyes resting on Langham, his smile broadened as
he recalled all those instances in their Oxford past, when he had taken
a humble share in one of the herculean efforts on the part of Langham's
friends, which were always necessary whenever it was a question of
screwing a vote out of him on any debated University question.
'How dull it must be to have too much principle!' cried Rose. 'Like a
mill choked with corn. No bread because the machine can't work!'
'Defend me from my friends!' cried Langham, roused. 'Elsmere, when did I
give you a right to caricature me in this way? If I were interested,' he
added, subsiding into his usual hesitating ineffectiveness, 'I suppose I
should know my own mind.'
And then seizing the muffins, he stood presenting them to Rose as though
in deprecation of any further personalities. Inside him there was a hot
protest against an unreasonable young beauty whom he had done his
miserable best to entertain for two long hours, and who in return had
made him feel himself more of a fool than he had done for years. Since
when had young women put on all these airs? In his young days they knew
their place.
Catherine meanwhile sat watching her sister. The child was more
beautiful than ever, but in other outer respects the Rose of Long
Whindale had undergone much transformation. The puffed sleeves, the
aesthetic skirts, the naive adornments of bead and shell, the formless
hat, which it pleased her to imagine 'after Gainsborough,' had all
disappeared. She was clad in some soft fawn-coloured garment, cut very
much in the fashion; her hair was closely rolled and twisted about her
lightly-balanced head; everything about her was neat and fresh and
tight-fitting. A year ago she had been a damsel from the 'Earthly
Paradise'; now, so far as an English girl can achieve it, she might have
been a model for Tissot. In this phase, as in the other, there was a
touch of extravagance. The girl was developing fast, but had clearly not
yet developed. The restlessness, the self-consciousness of Long Whindale
were still there; out they spoke to the spectator in different ways.
But in her anxious study of her sister Catherine did not forget her
place of hostess. 'Did our man bring you through the park, Mr. Langham?'
she asked him timidly.
'Yes. What an exquisite old house!' he said, turning to her, and feeling
through all his critical sense the difference between the gentle
matronly dignity of the one sister and the young self-assertion of the
other.
'Ah,' said Robert, 'I kept that as a surprise! Did you ever see a more
perfect place?'
'What date?'
'Early Tudor--as to the oldest part. It was built by a relation of
Bishop Fisher's; then largely rebuilt under James I. Elizabeth stayed
there twice. There is a trace of a visit of Sidney's. Waller was there,
and left a copy of verses in the library. Evelyn laid out a great deal
of the garden. Lord Clarendon wrote part of his History in the garden,
et cetera, et cetera. The place is steeped in associations, and as
beautiful as a dream to begin with.'
'And the owner of all this is the author of _The Idols of the
Market-place_?'
Robert nodded.
'Did you ever meet him at Oxford? I believe he was there once or twice
during my time, but I never saw him.'
'Yes,' said Langham, thinking. 'I met him at dinner at the
Vice-Chancellor's, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person--very
difficult to talk to,' he added reflectively.
Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose Leyburn's lip
and understood it in a moment. Incontinently he forgot the squire and
fell to asking himself what had possessed him on that luckless journey
down. He had never seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable;
and for once his philosophy did not enable him to swallow the certainty
that this slim flashing creature must have thought him a morbid idiot
with as much _sangfroid_ as usual.
Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, and
presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On their way they
passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitating, and then with a
bright flush on the face, which had such maternal calm in it already,
she threw her arm round Rose and drew her in. It was a white empty room,
smelling of the roses outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for
the life that was to be. Rose looked at it all--at the piles of tiny
garments, the cradle, the pictures from Retsch's 'Song of the Bell,'
which had been the companion of their own childhood, on the walls--and
something stirred in the girl's breast.
'Catherine, I believe you have everything you want, or you soon will
have!' she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, laying her hands on
her sister's shoulders.
'Everything but worthiness!' said Catherine softly, a mist rising in her
calm gray eyes. 'And you, Roeschen,' she added wistfully, 'have you been
getting a little more what you want?'
'What's the good of asking?' said the girl, with a little shrug of
impatience. 'As if creatures like me ever got what they want! London has
been good fun certainly--if one could get enough of it. Catherine, how
long is that marvellous person going to stay?' and she pointed in the
direction of Langham's room.
'A week,' said Catherine, smiling at the girl's disdainful tone. 'I was
afraid you didn't take to him.'
'I never saw such a being before,' declared Rose--'never! I thought I
should never get a plain answer from him about anything. He wasn't even
quite certain it was a fine day! I wonder if you set fire to him whether
he would be sure it hurt! A week, you say? Heigh ho! what an age!'
'Be kind to him,' said Catherine, discreetly veiling her own feelings,
and caressing the curly golden head as they moved towards the door.
'He's a poor lone don, and he was so good to Robert!'
'Excellent reason for you, Mrs. Elsmere,' said Rose, pouting; 'but----'
Her further remarks were cut short by the sound of the front-door bell.
'Oh, I had forgotten Mr. Newcome!' cried Catherine, starting. 'Come down
soon, Rose, and help us through.'
'Who is he?' inquired Rose sharply.
'A High Church clergyman near here, whom Robert asked to tea this
afternoon,' said Catherine, escaping.
Rose took her hat off very leisurely. The prospect downstairs did not
seem to justify despatch. She lingered and thought of 'Lohengrin' and
Albani, of the crowd of artistic friends that had escorted her to
Waterloo, of the way in which she had been applauded the night before,
of the joys of playing Brahms with a long-haired pupil of Rubinstein's,
who had dropped on one knee and kissed her hand at the end of it, etc.
During the last six weeks the colours of 'this threadbare world' had
been freshening before her in marvellous fashion. And now, as she stood
looking out, the quiet fields opposite, the sight of a cow pushing its
head through the hedge, the infinite sunset sky, the quiet of the house,
filled her with a sudden depression. How dull it all seemed--how wanting
in the glow of life!
CHAPTER XII
Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was passing, watched by
Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had retreated into a corner
of his own as soon as another visitor appeared. Beside Catherine sat a
Ritualist clergyman in cassock and long cloak--a saint clearly, though
perhaps, to judge from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed
to quiver through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the
saint's wasted unearthly look, the ascetic brow high and narrow, the
veins showing through the skin, and a personality as magnetic as it was
strong.
Catherine listened to the new-comer, and gave him his tea, with an
aloofness of manner which was not lost on Langham. 'She is the
Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh!' he said to himself. 'For her there
must neither be too much nor too little. How can Elsmere stand it?'
Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat balancing his long
person over the arm of a chair listening to the recital of some of the
High Churchman's parish troubles with a slight half-embarrassed smile.
The vicar of Nottingham was always in trouble. The narrative he was
pouring out took shape in Langham's sarcastic sense as a sort of
classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of
Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass
churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine's fine face grew more
and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women
never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents.
At a certain diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fibre
in the young rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperious
persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn
by the same quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to
the St. Anselm's undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out with as
much freedom as if all his companions had been as ready as he was to die
for an alb, or to spend half their days in piously circumventing a
bishop.
But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, from
Nottingham and its intrigues to London and its teeming East. Robert was
leading, his eye now on the apostolic-looking priest, now on his wife.
Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had his way. Then it came out that
behind these battles of kites and crows at Mottringham, there lay an
heroic period, when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London
poverty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the _melee_.
Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with
difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian
bishop--what Christian dare parade ten years of love to God and man? And
presently round Elsmere's lip there dawned a little smile of triumph.
Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was
bending forward eagerly--listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and
facts were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in the
sharp-featured priest sank out of sight; the face glowed with inward
light; the stature of the man seemed to rise; the angel in him
unsheathed its wings. Suddenly a story of the slums that Mr. Newcome was
telling--a story of the purest Christian heroism told in the simplest
way--came to an end, and Catherine leaned towards him with a long
quivering breath.
'Oh, thank you, thank you! That must have been a joy, a privilege!'
Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise.
'Yes, it was a privilege,' he said slowly--the story had been an account
of the rescue of a young country lad from a London den of thieves and
profligates--'you are right; it was just that.'
And then some sensitive inner fibre of the man was set vibrating, and he
would talk no more of himself or his past, do what they would.
So Robert had hastily to provide another subject, and he fell upon that
of the squire.
Mr. Newcome's eyes flashed.
'He is coming back? I am sorry for you, Elsmere. "Woe is me that I am
constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have my habitation among the
tents of Kedar!"'
And he fell back in his chair, his lips tightening, his thin long hand
lying along the arm of it, answering to that general impression of