Robert Elsmere
part. And in five more days, the limit of Langham's stay, nothing very
dreadful _could_ happen, argued the reserved Catherine.
But she was uneasy, and after a bit, as that _tete-a-tete_ in the garden
still went on, she could not, for the life of her, help interfering. She
strolled out to meet them with some woollen stuff hanging over her arm,
and made a plaintive and smiling appeal to Rose to come and help her
with some preparations for a mothers' meeting to be held that afternoon.
Rose, who was supposed by the family to be 'taking care' of her sister
at a critical time, had a moment's prick of conscience, and went off
with a good grace. Langham felt vaguely that he owed Mrs. Elsmere
another grudge, but he resigned himself and took out a cigarette,
wherewith to console himself for the loss of his companion.
Presently, as he stood for a moment turning over some new books on the
drawing-room table, Rose came in. She held an armful of blue serge, and,
going up to a table in the window, she took from it a little work-case,
and was about to vanish again when Langham went up to her.
'You look intolerably busy,' he said to her, discontentedly.
'Six dresses, ten cloaks, eight petticoats to cut out by luncheon time,'
she answered demurely, with a countenance of most Dorcas-like
seriousness, 'and if I spoil them I shall have to pay for the stuff!'
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her, smiling, still master of
himself and of his words.
'And no music--none at all? Perhaps you don't know that I too can
accompany?'
'You play!' she exclaimed, incredulous.
'Try me.'
The light of his fine black eyes seemed to encompass her. She moved
backward a little, shaking her head. 'Not this morning,' she said. 'Oh
dear, no, not this morning! I am afraid you don't know anything about
tacking or fixing, or the abominable time they take. Well, it could
hardly be expected. There is nothing in the world'--and she shook her
serge vindictively--'that I hate so much!'
'And not this afternoon, for Robert and I go fishing. But this evening?'
he said, detaining her.
She nodded lightly, dropped her lovely eyes with a sudden embarrassment,
and went away with lightning quickness.
A minute or two later Elsmere laid a hand on his friend's shoulder.
'Come and see the Hall, old fellow. It will be our last chance, for the
squire and his sister come back this afternoon. I must parochialise a
bit afterwards, but you shan't be much victimised.'
Langham submitted, and they sallied forth. It was a soft rainy morning,
one of the first heralds of autumn. Gray mists were drifting silently
across the woods and the wide stubbles of the now shaven cornfield,
where white lines of reapers were at work, as the morning cleared,
making and stacking the sheaves. After a stormy night the garden was
strewn with _debris_, and here and there noiseless prophetic showers of
leaves were dropping on the lawn.
Elsmere took his guest along a bit of common, where great black junipers
stood up like magnates in council above the motley undergrowth of fern
and heather, and then they turned into the park. A great stretch of
dimpled land it was, falling softly towards the south and west, bounded
by a shining twisted river, and commanding from all its highest points a
heathery world of distance, now turned a stormy purple under the
drooping fringes of the rain clouds. They walked downwards from the
moment of entering it, till at last, when they reached a wooded plateau
about a hundred feet above the river, the house itself came suddenly
into view.
That was a house of houses! The large main building, as distinguished
from the lower stone portions to the north which represented a fragment
of the older Elizabethan house, had been in its day the crown and boast
of Jacobean house-architecture. It was fretted and jewelled with
Renaissance terra-cotta work from end to end; each gable had its lace
work, each window its carved setting. And yet the lines of the whole
were so noble, genius had hit the general proportions so finely, that no
effect of stateliness or grandeur had been missed through all the
accumulation of ornament. Majestic relic of a vanished England, the
house rose amid the August woods rich in every beauty that site, and
wealth, and centuries could give to it. The river ran about it as though
it loved it. The cedars which had kept it company for well-nigh two
centuries gathered proudly round it; the deer grouped themselves in the
park beneath it, as though they were conscious elements in a great whole
of loveliness.
The two friends were admitted by a housemaid who happened to be busy in
the hall, and whose red cheeks and general breathlessness bore witness
to the energy of the storm of preparation now sweeping through the
house.
The famous hall to which Elsmere at once drew Langham's attention was,
however, in no way remarkable for size or height. It told comparatively
little of seignorial dignity, but it was as though generation after
generation had employed upon its perfecting the craft of its most
delicate fingers, the love of its most fanciful and ingenious spirits.
Overhead, the stucco-work ceiling, covered with stags and birds and
strange heraldic creatures unknown to science, had the deep creamy tint,
the consistency and surface of antique ivory. From the white and gilt
frieze beneath, untouched, so Robert explained, since the Jacobean days
when it was first executed, hung Renaissance tapestries which would have
made the heart's delight of any romantic child, so rich they were in
groves of marvellous trees hung with red and golden fruits, in
far-reaching palaces and rock-built citadels, in flying shepherdesses
and pursuing shepherds. Between the tapestries, again, there were
breadths of carved panelling, crowded with all things round and sweet,
with fruits and flowers and strange musical instruments, with flying
cherubs, and fair faces in laurel-wreathed medallions; while in the
middle of the wall a great oriel window broke the dim venerable surfaces
of wood and tapestry with stretches of jewelled light. Tables crowded
with antiques, with Tanagra figures or Greek vases, with Florentine
bronzes or specimens of the wilful vivacious wood-carving of
seventeenth-century Spain, stood scattered on the Persian carpets. And,
to complete the whole, the gardeners had just been at work on the
corners of the hall, and of the great window, so that the hard-won
subtleties of man's bygone handiwork, with which the splendid room was
encrusted from top to bottom, were masked and relieved here and there by
the careless easy splendour of flowers, which had but to bloom in order
to eclipse them all.
Robert was at home in the great pile, where for many months he had gone
freely in and out on his way to the library, and the housekeeper only
met him to make an apology for her working dress, and to hand over to
him the keys of the library bookcases, with the fretful comment that
seemed to have in it the ghostly voice of generations of housemaids, 'Oh
lor', sir, they are a trouble, them books!'
From the drawing-rooms, full of a more modern and less poetical
magnificence, where Langham turned restless and refractory, Elsmere with
a smile took his guest silently back into the hall, and opened a carved
door behind a curtain. Passing through, they found themselves in a long
passage lighted by small windows on the left-hand side.
'This passage, please notice,' said Robert, 'leads to nothing but the
wing containing the library, or rather libraries, which is the oldest
part of the house. I always enter it with a kind of pleasing awe!
Consider these carpets, which keep out every sound, and look how
everything gets older as we go on.'
For half-way down the passage the ceiling seemed to descend upon their
heads, the flooring became uneven and woodwork and walls showed that
they had passed from the Jacobean house into the much older Tudor
building. Presently Robert led the way up a few shallow steps, pushed
open a heavy door, also covered by curtains, and bade his companion
enter.
They found themselves in a low immense room, running at right angles to
the passage they had just quitted. The long diamond-paned window,
filling almost half of the opposite wall, faced the door by which they
had come in; the heavy carved mantelpiece was to their right; an open
doorway on their left, closed at present by tapestry hangings, seemed to
lead into yet other rooms.
The walls of this one were completely covered from floor to ceiling with
latticed bookcases, enclosed throughout in a frame of oak carved in
light classical relief by what appeared to be a French hand of the
sixteenth century. The chequered bindings of the books, in which the
creamy tints of vellum predominated, lined the whole surface of the wall
with a delicate sobriety of colour; over the mantelpiece, the picture of
the founder of the house--a Holbein portrait, glorious in red robes and
fur and golden necklace--seemed to gather up and give voice to all the
dignity and impressiveness of the room beneath him; while on the window
side the book-lined wall was, as it were, replaced by the wooded face of
a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly about
a hundred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library wing.
Between the window and the hill, however, was a small old English
garden, closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with every
flower that an English August knows--with sun-flowers, tiger-lilies, and
dahlias white and red. The window was low, so that the flowers seemed to
be actually in the room, challenging the pale tints of the books, the
tawny browns and blues of the Persian carpet, and the scarlet splendours
of the courtier over the mantelpiece. The room was lit up besides by a
few gleaming casts from the antique, by the 'Diane Chasseresse' of the
Louvre, by the Hermes of Praxiteles smiling with immortal kindness on
the child enthroned upon his arm, and by a Donatello figure of a woman
in marble, its subtle sweet austerity contrasting with the Greek
frankness and blitheness of its companions.
Langham was penetrated at once by the spell of this strange and
beautiful place. The fastidious instincts which had been half revolted
by the costly accumulations, the overblown splendours of the
drawing-room, were abundantly satisfied here.
'So it was here,' he said, looking round him, 'that that man wrote _The
Idols of the Market-place_?'
'I imagine so,' said Robert; 'if so, he might well have felt a little
more charity towards the human race in writing it. The race cannot be
said to have treated him badly on the whole. But now look, Langham, look
at these books--the most precious things are here.'
And he turned the key of a particular section of the wall, which was
not only latticed but glazed.
'Here is _A Mirror for Magistrates_. Look at the title-page; you will
find Gabriel Harvey's name on it. Here is a first edition of _Astrophel
and Stella_, another of the Arcadia. They may very well be presentation
copies, for the Wendover of that day is known to have been a wit and a
writer. Imagine finding them _in situ_ like this in the same room,
perhaps on the same shelves, as at the beginning! The other rooms on
this floor have been annexed since, but this room was always a library.'
Langham took the volumes reverently from Robert's hands into his own,
the scholar's passion hot within him. That glazed case was indeed a
storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson's _Underwoods_ with his own
corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell's _Poems_, with
autograph notes; manuscript volumes of letters, containing almost every
famous name known to English literature in the seventeenth and