Robert Elsmere
to be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life to give her
the communion. "Ah, sir!" said the mother to me--not bitterly--that is
the strange thing, they have so little bitterness--"if Mister 'Enslowe
would jest 'a mended that bit 'o roof of ours last winter, Bessie
needn't have laid in the wet so many nights as she did, and she coughin'
fit to break your heart, for all the things yer could put over 'er."'
Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a few minutes
before, tremulous with feeling. 'Ah, well,' he said at last with a long
breath, moving away from the parapet of the bridge on which he had been
leaning, 'better be oppressed than oppressor, any day! Now, then, I must
deliver my stores. There's a child here Catherine and I have been doing
our best to pull through typhoid.'
They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading to the hamlet.
Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the
community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the
filth surrounding one of the nearest cottages.
A feeble elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow bloodless skin
make him look much older than he actually was, opened the door and
invited them to come in. Robert passed on into an inner room, conducted
thither by a woman who had been sitting working over the fire. Langham
stood irresolute; but the old man's quavering 'kindly take a chair, sir;
you've come a long way,' decided him, and he stepped in.
Inside the hovel was miserable indeed. It belonged to that old and evil
type which the efforts of the last twenty years have done so much all
over England to sweep away: four mud walls, enclosing an oblong space
about eight yards long, divided into two unequal portions by a lath and
plaster partition, with no upper storey, a thatched roof, now entirely
out of repair, and letting in the rain in several places, and a paved
floor little better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous were
the gaps between the stones. The dismal place had no small
adornings--none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and
trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing
the existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation of
the sheerest physical need; and Langham, as he sat down, caught the
sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odours of
damp meadows in times of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so well.
As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak tremulous voice, the
visitor's attention was irresistibly held by the details about him.
Fresh as he was from all the delicate sights, the harmonious colours and
delightful forms of the squire's house, they made an unusually sharp
impression on his fastidious senses. What does human life become lived
on reeking floors and under stifling roofs like these? What strange
abnormal deteriorations, physical and spiritual, must it not inevitably
undergo? Langham felt a sudden inward movement of disgust and repulsion.
'For heaven's sake, keep your superstitions!' he could have cried to the
whole human race, 'or any other narcotic that a grinding fate has left
you. What does _anything_ matter to the mass of mankind but a little
ease, a little lightening of pressure on this side or on that?'
Meanwhile the old man went maundering on, talking of the weather, and of
his sick child, and 'Mr. Elsmere,' with a kind of listless incoherence
which hardly demanded an answer, though Langham threw in a word or two
here and there.
Among other things, he began to ask a question or two about Robert's
predecessor, a certain Mr. Preston, who had left behind him a memory of
amiable evangelical indolence.
'Did you see much of him?' he asked.
'Oh law, no, sir!' replied the man, surprised into something like
energy. 'Never seed 'im more 'n once a year, and sometimes not that!'
'Was he liked here?'
'Well, sir, it was like this, you see. My wife, she's north-country, she
is, comes from Yorkshire; sometimes she'd used to say to me, "Passon
'ee ain't much good, and passon 'ee ain't much harm. 'Ee's no more good
nor more 'arm, so fer as _I_ can see, nor a chip in a basin o'
parritch." And that was just about it; sir,' said the old man, pleased
for the hundredth time with his wife's bygone flight of metaphor and his
own exact memory of it.
As to the rector's tendance of his child, his tone was very cool and
guarded.
'It do seem strange, sir, as nor he nor Doctor Grimes 'ull let her have
anything to put a bit of flesh on her, nothin' but them messy things as
he brings--milk an' that. An' the beef jelly--lor, such a trouble!
Missis Elsmere, he tells my wife, strains all the stuff through a cloth,
she do; never seed anythin' like it, nor my wife neither. People is
clever nowadays,' said the speaker dubiously. Langham realised that, in
this quarter of his parish at any rate, his friend's pastoral vanity, if
he had any, would not find much to feed on. Nothing, to judge from this
specimen at least, greatly affected an inhabitant of Mile End.
Gratitude, responsiveness, imply health and energy, past or present. The
only constant defence which the poor have against such physical
conditions as those which prevailed at Mile End is apathy.
As they came down the dilapidated steps at the cottage door, Robert drew
in with avidity a long draught of the outer air.
'Ugh!' he said with a sort of groan, 'that bedroom! Nothing gives one
such a sense of the toughness of human life as to see a child
recovering, actually recovering, in such a pestilential den! Father,
mother, grown-up son, girl of thirteen, and grandchild, all huddled in a
space just fourteen feet square. Langham!' and he turned passionately on
his companion, 'what defence can be found for a man who lives in a place
like Murewell Hall, and can take money from human beings for the use of
a sty like that?'
'Gently, my friend. Probably the squire, being the sort of recluse he
is, has never seen the place, or, at any rate, not for years, and knows
nothing about it!'
'More shame for him!'
'True in a sense,' said Langham, a little drily; 'but as you _may_ want
hereafter to make excuses for your man, and he _may_ give you occasion,
I wouldn't begin by painting him to yourself any blacker than need be.'
Robert laughed, sighed and acquiesced. 'I am a hot-headed, impatient
kind of creature at the best of times,' he confessed. 'They tell me that
great things have been done for the poor round here in the last twenty
years. Something has been done, certainly. But why are the old ways, the
old evil neglect and apathy, so long, so terribly long in dying? This
social progress of ours we are so proud of is a clumsy limping jade at
best!'
They prowled a little more about the hamlet, every step almost revealing
some new source of poison and disease. Of their various visits,
however, Langham remembered nothing afterwards but a little scene in a
miserable cottage, where they found a whole family party gathered round
the mid-day meal. A band of puny, black, black-eyed children were
standing or sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three
weeks before, sat by the fire, deathly pale, a 'bad leg' stretched out
before her on some improvised support, one baby on her lap and another
dark-haired bundle asleep in a cradle beside her. There was a pathetic
pinched beauty about the whole family. Even the tiny twins were
comparatively shapely; all the other children had delicate transparent
skins, large eyes, and small colourless mouths. The father, a
picturesque handsome fellow, looking as though he had gipsy blood in his
veins, had opened the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal,
would have retreated at once, in spite of the children's shy inviting
looks, but a glance past them at the mother's face checked the word of
refusal and apology on his lips, and he stepped in.
In after years Langham was always apt to see him in imagination as he
saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of the mother, his quick
pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and exhaustion of face and frame, his
hand resting instinctively on the head of a small creature that had
crept up beside him, his look all attention and softness as the woman
feebly told him some of the main facts of her state. The young rector at
the moment might have stood for the modern 'Man of Feeling,' as
sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of self, as
his eighteenth-century prototype.
On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his companion, 'Have you
heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham? What did you think of it?'
'Extraordinary!' said Langham briefly. 'The most considerable gift I
ever came across in an amateur.'
His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw a quick
observant look at him.
'The difficulty,' he exclaimed, 'is to know what to do with it!'
'Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to study abroad.
What is there to prevent it?'
Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. He could not
stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife
of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed,
cabined, and confined in this way?
'I grant you,' said Robert, with a look of perplexity, 'there is not
much to prevent it.'
And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very tenderly of all
the antecedents and explanations of that old-world distrust of art and
the artistic life so deeply rooted in his wife, even though in practice
and under his influence she had made concession after concession.
'The great solution of all,' he said presently, brightening, 'would be
to get her married. I don't wonder her belongings dislike the notion of
anything so pretty and so flighty going off to live by itself. And to
break up the home in Whindale would be to undo everything their father
did for them, to defy his most solemn last wishes.'
'To talk of a father's wishes, in a case of this kind, ten years after
his death, is surely excessive?' said Langham with dry interrogation;
then, suddenly recollecting himself, 'I beg your pardon, Elsmere. I am
interfering.'
'Nonsense,' said Robert brightly, 'I don't wonder, it seems like a
difficulty of our own making. Like so many difficulties, it depends on
character, present character, bygone character----' And again he fell
musing on his Westmoreland experiences, and on the intensity of that
Puritan type it had revealed to him. 'However, as I said, marriage would
be the natural way out of it.'
'An easy way, I should think,' said Langham, after a pause.
'It won't be so easy to find the right man. She is a young person with a
future, is Miss Rose. She wants somebody in the stream; somebody with a
strong hand who will keep her in order and yet give her a wide range; a
rich man, I think--she hasn't the ways of a poor man's wife; but, at any
rate, some one who will be proud of her, and yet have a full life of his
own in which she may share.'
'Your views are extremely clear,' said Langham, and his smile had a
touch of bitterness in it. 'If hers agree, I prophesy you won't have
long to wait. She has beauty, talent, charm--everything that rich and
important men like.'
There was the slightest sarcastic note in the voice. Robert winced. It
was borne in upon one of the least worldly of mortals that he had been
talking like the veriest schemer. What vague quick impulse had driven
him on?
By the time they emerged again upon the Murewell Green the rain had
cleared altogether away, and the autumnal morning had broken into
sunshine, which played mistily on the sleeping woods, on the white
fronts of the cottages, and the wide green where the rain-pools