Robert Elsmere
sharpness that he had come down to study his friend's life, rather than
the humours of a provoking girl. How still the summer night was round
the isolated rectory; how fresh and spotless were all the appointments
of the house; what a Quaker neatness and refinement everywhere! He drank
in the scent of air and flowers with which the rooms were filled; for
the first time his fastidious sense was pleasantly conscious of
Catherine's grave beauty; and even the mystic ceremonies of family
prayer had a certain charm for him, pagan as he was. How much dignity
and persuasiveness it has still, he thought to himself, this commonplace
country life of ours, on its best sides!
Half-past ten arrived. Rose just let him touch her hand; Catherine gave
him a quiet good-night, with various hospitable wishes for his nocturnal
comfort, and the ladies withdrew. He saw Robert open the door for his
wife, and catch her thin white fingers as she passed him with all the
secrecy and passion of a lover.
Then they plunged into the study, he and Robert, and smoked their fill.
The study was an astonishing medley. Books, natural history specimens, a
half-written sermon, fishing-rods, cricket-bats, a huge medicine
cupboard--all the main elements of Elsmere's new existence were
represented there. In the drawing-room with his wife and his
sister-in-law he had been as much of a boy as ever; here clearly he was
a man, very much in earnest. What about? What did it all come to? Can
the English country clergyman do much with his life and his energies?
Langham approached the subject with his usual scepticism.
Robert for a while, however, did not help him to solve it. He fell at
once to talking about the squire, as though it cleared his mind to talk
out his difficulties even to so ineffective a counsellor as Langham.
Langham, indeed, was but faintly interested in the squire's crimes as a
landlord, but there was a certain interest to be got out of the struggle
in Elsmere's mind between the attractiveness of the squire, as one of
the most difficult and original personalities of English letters, and
that moral condemnation of him as a man of possessions and ordinary
human responsibilities with which the young reforming rector was clearly
penetrated. So that, as long as he could smoke under it, he was content
to let his companion describe to him Mr. Wendover's connection with the
property, his accession to it in middle life after a long residence in
Germany, his ineffectual attempts to play the English country gentleman,
and his subsequent complete withdrawal from the life about him.
'You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives in that huge
place,' said Robert with energy. 'He is not unpopular exactly with the
poor down here. When they want to belabour anybody they lay on at the
agent, Henslowe. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion the poor
like a mystery. They never see him; when he is here the park is shut up;
the common report is that he walks at night; and he lives alone in that
enormous house with his books. The county folk have all quarrelled with
him, or nearly. It pleases him to get a few of the humbler people about,
clergy, professional men, and so on, to dine with him sometimes. And he
often fills the Hall, I am told, with London people for a day or two.
But otherwise he knows no one, and nobody knows him.'
'But you say he has a widowed sister? How does she relish the kind of
life?'
'Oh; by all accounts,' said the rector with a shrug, 'she is as little
like other people as himself. A queer elfish little creature, they say,
as fond of solitude down here as the squire, and full of hobbies. In her
youth she was about the court. Then she married a canon of Warham, one
of the popular preachers, I believe, of the day. There is a bright
little cousin of hers, a certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here,
and tells me stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little
aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never
got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as hungry now,
after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the
purest parvenu. The squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no
influence with him. However, there is something naive in the stories
they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with _her_. But the
squire!'
And the rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying his boots
with a certain dolefulness.
Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of conversation
presented to him as an epicure treats foods, felt at this point that he
had had enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.
'So you physic bodies as well as minds?' he said, pointing to the
medicine cupboard.
'I should think so!' cried Robert, brightening at once. 'Last winter I
causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand.
Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And
if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it's a pleasure I
may promise myself most years. But it shan't remain what it is.'
And the rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or
two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him
in the depths of an armchair.
'I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their
drains!'
'It seems to me,' said Langham, musing, 'that in my youth people talked
about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.'
'And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I have gone mad
upon them. It's all very well, but they are the foundations of a sound
religion.'
'Dirt, drains, and Darwin,' said Langham meditatively, taking up
Darwin's _Earthworms_, which lay on the study table beside him, side by
side with a volume of Grant Allen's _Sketches_. 'I didn't know you cared
for this sort of thing!'
Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole into his
face.
'Imagine, Langham!' he said presently, 'I had never read even _The
Origin of Species_ before I came here. We used to take the thing half
for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense.
But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force
one's self to understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is
a very different matter. It is a revelation.'
'Yes,' said Langham; and could not forbear adding, 'but it is a
revelation, my friend, that has not always been held to square with
other revelations.'
In general these two kept carefully off the religious ground. The man
who is religious by nature tends to keep his treasure hid from the man
who is critical by nature, and Langham was much more interested in other
things. But still it had always been understood that each was free to
say what he would.
'There was a natural panic,' said Robert, throwing back his head at the
challenge. 'Men shrank and will always shrink, say what you will, from
what seems to touch things dearer to them than life. But the panic is
passing. The smoke is clearing away, and we see that the battle-field is
falling into new lines. But the old truth remains the same. Where and
when and how you will, but somewhen and somehow, God created the heavens
and the earth!'
Langham said nothing. It had seemed to him for long that the clergy were
becoming dangerously ready to throw the Old Testament overboard, and all
that it appeared to him to imply was that men's logical sense is easily
benumbed where their hearts are concerned.
'Not that every one need be troubled with the new facts,' resumed Robert
after a while, going back to his pipe. 'Why should they? We are not
saved by Darwinism. I should never press them on my wife, for instance,
with all her clearness and courage of mind.'
His voice altered as he mentioned his wife--grew extraordinarily soft,
even reverential.
'It would distress her?' said Langham interrogatively, and inwardly
conscious of pursuing investigations begun a year before.
'Yes, it would distress her. She holds the old ideas as she was taught
them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem doubtful or grotesque to
others. And why should I or any one else trouble her? I above all, who
am not fit to tie her shoe-strings.'
The young husband's face seemed to gleam in the dim light which fell
upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand in silence and touched
his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet friendly look, and the two men
instantly plunged into some quite trivial and commonplace subject.
Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense of pleasure in
the country quiet, the peaceful flower-scented house. Catherine, who was
an admirable housewife, had put out her best guest-sheets for his
benefit, and the tutor, accustomed for long years to the second-best of
college service, looked at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at
the freshly matted floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at the
spotlessness of everything in the room, with a distinct sense that
matrimony had its advantages. He had come down to visit the Elsmeres,
sustained by a considerable sense of virtue. He still loved Elsmere and
cared to see him. It was a much colder love, no doubt, than that which
he had given to the undergraduate. But the man altogether was a colder
creature, who for years had been drawing in tentacle after tentacle, and
becoming more and more content to live without his kind. Robert's
parsonage, however, and Robert's wife had no attractions for him; and it
was with an effort that he had made up his mind to accept the invitation
which Catherine had made an effort to write.
And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His fastidious
love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was touched by the Elsmere
surroundings. And whatever Miss Leyburn might be, she was not
commonplace. The demon of convention had no large part in _her_! Langham
lay awake for a time analysing his impressions of her with some gusto,
and meditating, with a whimsical candour which seldom tailed him, on the
manner in which she had trampled on him, and the reasons why.
He woke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. He was
pre-eminently a person of moods, dependent, probably, as all moods are,
on certain obscure physical variations. And his mental temperature had
run down in the night. The house, the people who had been fresh and
interesting to him twelve hours before, were now the burden he had more
than half expected them to be. He lay and thought of the unbroken
solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour's flight from human kind, of
the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all effort, and
could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a futile world, which
had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage for the moment of being a new
one.
Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann. That prototype of
all the disillusioned had to cut himself adrift from the society of the
eagles on the Dent du Midi, to go and hang like any other ridiculous
mortal on the Paris law-courts. Langham, whether he liked it or no, had
to face the parsonic breakfast and the parsonic day.
He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl's voice drew him
to the window, which was open. In the garden stood Rose, on the edge of
the sunk fence dividing the rectory domain from the cornfield. She was
stooping forward playing with Robert's Dandie Dinmont. In one hand she
held a mass of poppies, which showed a vivid scarlet against her blue
dress; the other was stretched out seductively to the dog leaping round
her. A crystal buckle flashed at her waist; the sunshine caught the
curls of auburn hair, the pink cheek, the white moving hand, the lace
ruffles at her throat and wrist. The lithe glittering figure stood