Robert Elsmere
passionate desire to rescue something more of human life from the
drowning, submerging past, to realise for himself and others the
solidarity and continuity of mankind's long struggle from the beginning
until now.
Langham had had much experience of Elsmere's versatility and pliancy,
but he had never realised it so much as now, while he sat listening to
the vivid, many-coloured speech getting quicker and quicker, and more
and more telling and original as Robert got more absorbed and excited by
what he had to say. He was endeavouring to describe to Langham the sort
of book he thought might be written on the rise of modern society in
Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the
blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory the
Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and its
saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the
fierce incoherence of the Empire's decay, the struggle of Roman order
and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of German hardness; above
all, the war of orthodoxy and heresy, with its strange political
complications. And then, discontented still, as though the heart of the
matter were still untouched, he went on, restlessly wandering the while,
with his long arms linked behind him, 'throwing out' words at an object
in his mind, trying to grasp and analyse that strange sense which haunts
the student of Rome's decline as it once overshadowed the infancy of
Europe, that sense of a slowly departing majesty, of a great presence
just withdrawn, and still incalculably potent, traceable throughout in
that humbling consciousness of Goth or Frank that they were but
'beggars hutting in a palace--the place had harboured greater men than
they!'
'There is one thing,' Langham said presently, in his slow nonchalant
voice, when the tide of Robert's ardour ebbed for a moment, 'that
doesn't seem to have touched you yet. But you will come to it. To my
mind, it makes almost the chief interest of history. It is just this.
History depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and the value of
testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third
century understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the
man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the
differences, and what are the deductions to be made from them, if any?'
He fixed his keen look on Robert, who was now lounging against the
books, as though his harangue had taken it out of him a little.
'Ah, well,' said the rector, smiling, 'I am only just coming to that. As
I told you, I am only now beginning to dig for myself. Till now it has
all been work at second hand. I have been getting a general survey of
the ground as quickly as I could with the help of other men's labours.
Now I must go to work inch by inch, and find out what the ground is made
of. I won't forget your point. It is enormously important, I
grant--enormously,' he repeated reflectively.
'I should think it is,' said Langham to himself as he rose; 'the whole
of orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance!'
There was not much more to be seen. A little wooden staircase led from
the second library to the upper rooms, curious old rooms, which had been
annexed one by one as the squire wanted them, and in which there was
nothing at all--neither chair, nor table, nor carpet--but books only.
All the doors leading from room to room had been taken off; the old
worm-eaten boards had been roughly stained; a few old French engravings
had been hung here and there where the encroaching books left an
opening; but otherwise all was bare. There was a curious charm in the
space and air of these empty rooms, with their latticed windows opening
on to the hill; and letting in day by day the summer sun-risings or the
winter dawns, which had shone upon them for more than three centuries.
'This is my last day of privilege,' said Robert. 'Everybody is shut out
when once he appears, from this wing, and this part of the grounds. This
was his father's room,' and the rector led the way into the last of the
series; 'and through there,' pointing to a door on the right, 'lies the
way to his own sleeping room, which is of course connected with the more
modern side of the house.'
'So this is where that old man ventured "what Cato did and Addison
approved,"' murmured Langham, standing in the middle of the room and
looking round him. This particular room was now used as a sort of lumber
place, a receptacle for the superfluous or useless books gradually
thrown off by the great collection all around. There were innumerable
volumes in frayed or broken bindings lying on the ground. A musty smell
hung over it all; the gray light from outside, which seemed to give only
an added subtlety and charm to the other portions of the ancient
building through which they had been moving, seemed here _triste_ and
dreary. Or Langham fancied it.
He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw suddenly
before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and framed in the doorways
facing him, an engraving of a Greuze picture--a girl's face turned over
her shoulder, the hair waving about her temples, the lips parted, the
teeth gleaming, mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line.
Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though
Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him.
CHAPTER XV
'Now, having seen our sight,' said Robert, as they left the great mass
of Murewell behind them, 'come and see our scandal. Both run by the same
proprietor, if you please. There is a hamlet down there in the
hollow'--and he pointed to a gray speck in the distance--'which deserves
a Royal Commission all to itself, which is a _disgrace_'--and his tone
warmed--'to any country, any owner, any agent! It is owned by Mr.
Wendover, and I see the pleasing prospect straight before me of
beginning my acquaintance with him by a fight over it. You will admit
that it is a little hard on a man who wants to live on good terms with
the possessor of the Murewell library to have to open relations with him
by a fierce attack on his drains and his pigsties.'
He turned to his companion with a half-rueful spark of laughter in his
gray eyes. Langham hardly caught what he said. He was far away in
meditations of his own.
'An attack,' he repeated vaguely; 'why an attack?'
Robert plunged again into the great topic of which his quick mind was
evidently full. Langham tried to listen, but was conscious that his
friend's social enthusiasms bored him a great deal. And side by side
with the consciousness there slid in a little stinging reflection that
four years ago no talk of Elsmere's could have bored him.
'What's the matter with this particular place?' he asked languidly, at
last, raising his eyes towards the group of houses now beginning to
emerge from the distance.
An angry red mounted in Robert's cheek.
'What isn't the matter with it? The houses, which were built on a swamp
originally, are falling into ruin; the roofs, the drains, the
accommodation per head, are all about equally scandalous. The place is
harried with illness; since I came there has been both fever and
diphtheria there. They are all crippled with rheumatism, but _that_ they
think nothing of; the English labourer takes rheumatism as quite in the
day's bargain! And as to _vice_--the vice that comes of mere endless
persecuting opportunity--I can tell you one's ideas of personal
responsibility get a good deal shaken up by a place like this! And I can
do nothing. I brought over Henslowe to see the place, and he behaved
like a brute. He scoffed at all my complaints, said that no landlord
would be such a fool as to build fresh cottages on such a site, that the
old ones must just be allowed to go to ruin; that the people might live
in them if they chose, or turn out of them if they chose. Nobody forced
them to do either; it was their own look-out.'
'That was true,' said Langham, 'wasn't it?'
Robert turned upon him fiercely.
'Ah! you think it so easy for those poor creatures to leave their homes,
their working places! Some of them have been there thirty years. They
are close to the two or three farms that employ them, close to the osier
beds which give them extra earnings in the spring. If they were turned
out there is nothing nearer than Murewell, and not a single cottage to
be found there. I don't say it is a landlord's duty to provide more
cottages than are wanted; but if the labour is wanted, the labourer
should be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, and woe to the man
who neglects or ill-treats him!'
Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence of the speech,
partly at the lack of adjustment between his friend's mood and his own.
He braced himself to take the matter more seriously, but meanwhile
Robert had caught the smile, and his angry eyes melted at once into
laughter.
'There I am, ranting as usual,' he said penitently. 'Took you for
Henslowe, I suppose! Ah, well, never mind. I hear the Provost has
another book on the stocks.'
So they diverged into other things, talking politics and new books,
public men and what not, till, at the end of a long and gradual descent
through wooded ground, some two miles to the north-west of the park,
they emerged from the trees beneath which they had been walking, and
found themselves on a bridge, a gray sluggish stream flowing beneath
them, and the hamlet they sought rising among the river flats on the
farther side.
'There,' said Robert, stopping, 'we are at our journey's end. Now then,
what sort of a place of human habitation do you call _that_?'
The bridge whereon they stood crossed the main channel of the river,
which just at that point, however, parted into several branches, and
came meandering slowly down through a little bottom or valley, filled
with osier beds, long since robbed of their year's growth of shoots. On
the other side of the river, on ground all but level with the osier beds
which interposed between them and the stream, rose a miserable group of
houses, huddled together as though their bulging walls and rotten roofs
could only maintain themselves at all by the help and support which each
wretched hovel gave to its neighbour. The mud walls were stained with
yellow patches of lichen, the palings round the little gardens were
broken and ruinous. Close beside them all was a sort of open drain or
water-course, stagnant and noisome, which dribbled into the river a
little above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by
firs, and a line of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the
shadow of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, the
dreariness, the gloom, the squalor of the place were indescribable.
'Well, that _is_ a God-forsaken hole!' said Langham, studying it, his
interest roused at last, rather, perhaps, by the Ruysdael-like
melancholy and picturesqueness of the scene than by its human
suggestiveness. 'I could hardly have imagined such a place existed in
southern England. It is more like a bit of Ireland.'
'If it were Ireland it might be to somebody's interest to ferret it
out,' said Robert bitterly. 'But these poor folks are out of the world.
They may be brutalised with impunity. Oh, such a case as I had here last
autumn! A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, who would have been
healthy and happy anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of
the place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the
world but preventable cruelty and neglect! It was a sight that burnt
into my mind, once for all, what is meant by a landlord's
responsibility. I tried, of course, to move her, but neither she nor her
parents--elderly folk--had energy enough for a change. They only prayed