Robert Elsmere
the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the life
of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he read on, his
arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full of
infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience,
surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives
he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type
and model of a man who had found his _metier_, found his niche in the
world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to an 'adequate
and masterly expression of one's self' be the aim of life, Robert was
fast achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred souls gave him now all
the scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his work to be rather
above than below his deserts. He was content--more than content--to
spend ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or
carried him far to the front in literature, on the civilising of a few
hundred of England's rural poor. The future might bring him worldly
success--Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert's stamp
are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to no conscious
effort of his. Here, in the country living he had so long dreaded and
put from him, lest it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was
happy--deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.
_Happy!_ Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches, by
the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of
thought by this realisation, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another
man's happiness.
Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant
children or animals passed in and out of the golden light-spaces; the
patches of heather left here and there glowed as the sunset touched
them. Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage
garden, gay with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool
browns and bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled
across the road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and
scene seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic
expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation
after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life
after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again.
And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a
universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose!
_Happy!_--in this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His
friend's confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.
What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity--'on the
passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said the dreaming
spectator to himself, 'which at the first honest challenge of the
critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never
given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the
straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him,
between him and unpleasant facts!'
* * * * *
In the evening Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self
against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him to
Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he
stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest
of the household went to evening service.
After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was
streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the
trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham
shut himself up in Robert's study he did what he had been admonished to
do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily
into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself
down into Robert's chair with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction. 'Good!
Now for something that takes the world less naively,' he said to
himself; 'this house is too virtuous for anything.'
He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The
house seemed entirely deserted.
'All the servants gone too!' he said presently, looking up and
listening. 'Anybody who wants the spoons needn't trouble about me. I
don't leave this fire.'
And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of
the swing door which separated Robert's passage from the front hall
opening and shutting. Steps came quickly towards the study, the handle
was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.
He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment. She
also started as she saw him.
'I did not know any one was in,' she said awkwardly, the colour
spreading over her face. 'I came to look for a book.'
She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the darkness of the
doorway; her long dress caught up round her in one hand, the other
resting on the handle. A gust of some delicate perfume seemed to enter
the room with her, and a thrill of pleasure passed through Langham's
senses.
'Can I find anything for you?' he said, springing up.
She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind that it would
be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she said, with an accent as
coldly polite as she could make it,--
'Pray don't disturb yourself. I know exactly where to find it.'
She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, and began
running her fingers over the books, with slightly knitted brows and a
mouth severely shut. Langham, still standing, watched her and presently
stepped forward.
'You can't reach those upper shelves,' he said; 'please let me.'
He was already beside her, and she gave way.
'I want _Charles Auchester_,' she said, still forbiddingly. 'It ought to
be there.'
'Oh, that queer musical novel--I know it quite well. No sign of it
here,' and he ran over the shelves with the practised eye of one
accustomed to deal with books.
'Robert must have lent it,' said Rose, with a little sigh. 'Never mind,
please. It doesn't matter,' and she was already moving away.
'Try some other instead,' he said, smiling, his arm still upstretched.
'Robert has no lack of choice.' His manner had an animation and ease
usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a
little.
'He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced
at last to stealing the servant's _Family Herald_ out of the kitchen
cupboard,' she said, a smile dawning.
Langham laughed.
'Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact
that when he and I begin to talk novels I am always nowhere.'
'I shouldn't have supposed you ever read them,' said Rose, obeying an
irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterwards.
'Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to
works on the "enclitic [Greek: de]"?' he asked, his fine eyes lit up
with gaiety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily
so much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against
the books behind him.
Natures like Langham's, in which the nerves are never normal, have their
moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of timidity and depression.
After his melancholy of the last two days the tide of reaction had been
mounting within him, and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height.
She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What had happened
to Robert's silent and finicking friend?
'I know nothing of Oxford,' she said a little primly, in answer to his
question. 'I never was there--but I never was anywhere, I have seen
nothing,' she added hastily, and, as Langham thought, bitterly.
'Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforets!' he answered,
laughing. 'Is that so little?'
She flashed a quick defiant look at him, as he mentioned Madame
Desforets, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. She could not
help softening towards him. What magic had passed over him?
'Do you know,' said Langham, moving, 'that you are standing in a
draught, and that it has turned extremely cold?'
For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and as the
window was partially open the curtains were swaying hither and thither,
and her muslin dress was being blown in coils round her feet.
'So it has,' said Rose, shivering. 'I don't envy the Church people. You
haven't found me a book, Mr. Langham?'
'I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read it by the
fire,' he said, with his hand on the door.
She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath quickened.
She too had passed into another phase. Was it the natural effect of
night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she sank softly into the
armchair opposite to that in which he had been sitting.
'Find me an exciting one, please.'
Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the bookcase, his hand
trembling a little as it passed along the books. He found _Villette_ and
offered it to her. She took it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at
once. He took the hint and went back to his Montaigne.
The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every now and then a
sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying away again as abruptly as
it had risen. Rose turned the pages of her book, sitting a little
stiffly in her long chair, and Langham gradually began to find Montaigne
impossible to read. He became instead more and more alive to every
detail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or
imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and
thrust the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose
hastily withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up.
'I am so sorry!' he interjected. 'Coals never do what you want them to
do. Are you very much interested in _Villette_?'
'Deeply,' said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her lap. She
laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did her best to check,
half way through. What ailed her to-night? She seemed wearied; for the
moment there was no fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty,
her mutinous mocking gaiety--these things had all worked on the man
beside her; but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was
adorable.
'Charlotte Bronte wrote it out of her Brussels experience, didn't she?'
she resumed languidly. 'How sorry she must have been to come back to
that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!'
'There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come
back,' said Langham reflectively. 'But how she pined for her wilds all
through! I am afraid you don't find your wilds as interesting as she
found hers?'
His question and his smile startled her.
Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that
her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably
the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so
personal, so manly. Instead. _Villette_ slid a little farther from her
hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back against the cushion.
'No, I don't find my wilds interesting at all,' she said forlornly.
'You are not fond of the people as your sister is?'
'Fond of them?' cried Rose hastily. 'I should think not; and what is
more, they don't like me. It is quite intolerable since Catherine left.
I have so much more to do with them. My other sister and I have to do
all her work. It is dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a
genius for doing just what you do worst.'
The young girl's hands fell across one another with a little impatient
gesture. Langham had a movement of the most delightful compassion