Robert Elsmere
Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window opened, and
Langham stood before her. She looked at him with a quick stiffening of
the face which a minute before had been all quivering and relaxed, and
his instant perception of it chilled the impulse which had brought him
there.
He said something _banal_ about his enjoyment, something totally
different from what he had meant to say. The moment presented itself,
but he could not seize it or her.
'I had no notion you cared for music,' she said carelessly, as she shut
the piano, and then she went away.
Langham felt a strange fierce pang of disappointment. What had he meant
to do or say? Idiot! What common ground was there between him and any
such exquisite youth? What girl would ever see in him anything but the
dull remains of what once had been a man!
CHAPTER XIII
The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick as
ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether
intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the
prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the
subject of severe scientific investigation. He would 'do it' thoroughly.
So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. There, in
spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Robert's old tutor was a
good deal more interested by Robert's sermon than he had expected to be.
It was on the character of David, and there was a note in it, a note of
historical imagination, a power of sketching in a background of
circumstance, and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were,
by a detail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his
experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might watch a game
of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and counting the good
points, but by the end he was not a little carried away. The peroration
was undoubtedly very moving, very intimate, very modern, and Langham up
to a certain point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to
music and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of him
kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile out of the
church: 'This sort of thing will go down, will make a mark; Elsmere is
at the beginning of a career!'
In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty towards his wife,
in that he had been forced to leave so much of the entertainment of
Langham to her, asked his old friend to come for him to the school at
four o'clock and take him for a walk between two engagements. Langham
was punctual, and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday
cricket, which was in full swing. During the past year the young rector
had been developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably
always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations of country
gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity before. He talked of
fishing as Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant
quotations from Kingsley; and his cricket, which had been good enough at
Oxford to get him into his College eleven, had stood him in specially
good stead with the Murewell villagers. That his play was not elegant
they were not likely to find out; his bowling they set small store by;
but his batting was of a fine, slashing, superior sort which soon
carried the Murewell Club to a much higher position among the clubs of
the neighbourhood than it had ever yet aspired to occupy.
The rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, after they had
hung about the green a little while, he took his friend over to the
Workmen's Institute, which stood at the edge of it. He explained that
the Institute had been the last achievement of the agent before
Henslowe, a man who had done his duty to the estate according to his
lights, and to whom it was owing that those parts of it, at any rate,
which were most in the public eye, were still in fair condition.
The Institute was now in bad repair and too small for the place. 'But
catch that man doing anything for us!' exclaimed Robert hotly. 'He will
hardly mend the roof now, merely, I believe, to spite me. But come and
see my new Naturalists' Club.'
And he opened the Institute door. Langham followed in the temper of one
getting up a subject for examination.
Poor Robert! His labour and his enthusiasm deserved a more appreciative
eye. He was wrapped up in his Club, which had been the great success of
his first year, and he dragged Langham through it all, not indeed,
sympathetic creature that he was, without occasional qualms. 'But after
all,' he would say to himself indignantly, 'I must do _something_ with
him.'
Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at the collections
for the year, and was quite ready to take it for granted that they were
extremely creditable. Into the old-fashioned window-sills glazed
compartments had been fitted, and these were now fairly filled with
specimens, with eggs, butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and what
not. A case of stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the
centre of the room; another containing the birds of the district was
close by. On a table farther on stood two large open books, which served
as records of observations on the part of members of the Club. In one,
which was scrawled over with mysterious hieroglyphs, any one might write
what he would. In the other, only such facts and remarks as had passed
the gauntlet of a Club meeting were recorded in Robert's neatest hand.
On the same table stood jars full of strange creatures--tadpoles and
water larvae of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed, poking
among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom only the generalisations
of science were congenial, stood by and mildly scoffed.
As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently been hanging
about waiting for the rector, came up to him, boorishly touched his cap,
and then, taking a cardboard box out of his pocket, opened it with
infinite caution, something like a tremor of emotion passing over his
gnarled countenance.
The rector's eyes glistened.
'Hullo! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did you get that? You
lucky fellow! Come in, and let's look it out!'
And the two plunged back into the Club together, leaving Langham to the
philosophic and patient contemplation of the village green, its geese,
its donkeys, and its surrounding fringe of houses. He felt that quite
indisputably life would have been better worth living if, like Robert,
he could have taken a passionate interest in rare moths or common
ploughboys; but Nature having denied him the possibility, there was
small use in grumbling.
Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy went off,
bearing his treasure with him.
'Lucky dog!' said Robert, turning his friend into a country road leading
out of the village, 'he's found one of the rarest moths of the district.
Such a hero he'll be in the Club to-morrow night. It's extraordinary
what a rational interest has done for that fellow! I nearly fought him
in public last winter.'
And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a little quick
look of feeling in the gray eyes.
'Magnificent, but not war,' said Langham drily. 'I wouldn't have given
much for your chances against those shoulders.'
'Oh, I don't know. I should have had a little science on my side, which
counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the Club for brutality
towards the old grandmother he lives with--turned him out in public.
Such a scene! I shall never forget the boy's face. It was like a corpse,
and the eyes burning out of it. He made for me, but the others closed up
round, and we got him put out.'
'Hard lines on the grandmother,' remarked Langham.
'She thought so--poor old thing! She left her cottage that night,
thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At the end of a week
he came into the friend's house, where she was alone in bed. She cowered
under the bedclothes, she told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead
of which he threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to
come home. "He wouldn't do her no mischief." Everybody dissuaded her,
but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterwards she sent for me
and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody
at his work. "Lord, sir!" she said, "it do remind me, when he sits
glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the devils inside
'em kep' a-tearing 'em. But he's like a new-born babe to me, sir--never
does me no 'arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do
take his vittles!" So I made tracks for that lad,' said Robert, his eyes
kindling, his whole frame dilating. 'I found him in the fields one
morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the
evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since
then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there
is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right.
And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow
came trudging up every night after his work to ask for me--well, never
mind! but it gives one a good glow at one's heart to think about it.'
The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though defying his own
feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The pastoral temper was a
novelty to him, and the strong development of it in the undergraduate of
his Oxford recollections had its interest.
'A quarter to six,' said Robert, as on their return from their walk they
were descending a low-wooded hill above the village, and the church
clock rang out. 'I must hurry, or I shall be late for my story-telling.'
'Story-telling!' said Langham, with a half-exasperated shrug. 'What
next? You clergy are too inventive by half!'
Robert laughed a trifle bitterly.
'I can't congratulate you on your epithets,' he said, thrusting his
hands far into his pockets. 'Good heavens, if we _were_--if we were
inventive as a body, the Church wouldn't be where she is in the rural
districts! My story-telling is the simplest thing in the world. I began
it in the winter with the object of somehow or other getting at the
_imagination_ of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to
live some one else's life--it is the one thing worth doing with them.
That's what I have been aiming at. I _told_ my stories all the
winter--Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas--Heaven knows what! And on the
whole it answers best. But now we are reading _The Talisman_. Come and
inspect us, unless you're a purist about your Scott! None other of the
immortals have such _longueurs_ as he, and we cut him freely.'
'By all means,' said Langham; 'lead on.' And he followed his companion
without repugnance. After all, there was something contagious in so much
youth and hopefulness.
The story-telling was held in the Institute.
A group of men and boys were hanging round the door when they reached
it. The two friends made their way through, greeted in the dumb friendly
English fashion on all sides, and Langham found himself in a room
half-filled with boys and youths, a few grown men, who had just put
their pipes out, lounging at the back.
Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the hour that
followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most enthusiastic
imaginative people are. He was a master of all those arts of look and
gesture which make a spoken story telling and dramatic, and Langham
marvelled with what energy, after his hard day's work and with another
service before him, he was able to throw himself into such a _hors
d'oeuvre_ as this. He was reading to-night one of the most perfect
scenes that even the Wizard of the North has ever conjured; the scene in