Robert Elsmere
sensation of the wild creature lassoed on the prairie, of the bird
exchanging in an instant its glorious freedom of flight for the pitiless
meshes of the net. It was stifling--her whole nature seemed to fight
with it.
Catherine rose and began to put away the books they had been covering.
She had said almost nothing in answer to Rose's tirade. When she was
ready she came and stood beside her sister a moment, her lips trembling.
At last she stooped and kissed the girl--the kiss of deep suppressed
feeling--and went away. Rose made no response.
Unmusical as she was, Catherine pined for her sister's music that
evening. Robert was busy in his study, and the hours seemed
interminable. After a little difficult talk Langham subsided into a book
and a corner. But the only words of which he was conscious for long were
the words of an inner dialogue. 'I promised to play for her.--Go and
offer then!--Madness! let me keep away from her. If she asks me, of
course I will go. She is much too proud, and already she thinks me
guilty of a rudeness.'
Then, with a shrug, he would fall to his book again, abominably
conscious, however, all the while of the white figure between the lamp
and the open window, and of the delicate head and cheek lit up against
the trees and the soft August dark.
When the time came to go to bed he got their candles for the two ladies.
Rose just touched his hand with cool fingers.
'Good-night, Mr. Langham. You are going in to smoke with Robert, I
suppose?'
Her bright eyes seemed to look him through. Their mocking hostility
seemed to say to him as plainly as possible: 'Your purgatory is
over--go, smoke and be happy!'
'I will go and help him wind up his sermon,' he said, with an attempt at
a laugh, and moved away.
Rose went upstairs, and it seemed to her that a Greek brow, and a pair
of wavering melancholy eyes, went before her in the darkness chased
along the passages by the light she held. She gained her room, and stood
by the window, seized again by that stifling sense of catastrophe, so
strange, so undefined. Then she shook it off with an angry laugh, and
went to work to see how far her stock of light dresses had suffered by
her London dissipations.
CHAPTER XVI
The next morning after breakfast the rectory party were in the
garden--the gentlemen smoking, Catherine and her sister strolling
arm-in-arm among the flowers. Catherine's vague terrors of the morning
before had all taken to themselves wings. It seemed to her that Rose and
Mr. Langham had hardly spoken to each other since she had seen them
walking about together. Robert had already made merry over his own
alarms, and hers, and she admitted he was in the right. As to her talk
with Rose her deep meditative nature was slowly working upon and
digesting it. Meanwhile, she was all tenderness to her sister, and there
was even a reaction of pity in her heart towards the lonely sceptic who
had once been so good to Robert.
Robert was just bethinking himself that it was time to go off to the
school, when they were all startled by an unexpected visitor--a short
old lady, in a rusty black dress and bonnet, who entered the drive and
stood staring at the rectory party, a tiny hand in a black thread glove
shading the sun from a pair of wrinkled eyes.
'Mrs. Darcy!' exclaimed Robert to his wife after a moment's perplexity,
and they walked quickly to meet her.
Rose and Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the others joined
them, and then for a while the attention of everybody in the group was
held by the squire's sister. She was very small, as thin and light as
thistle-down, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling child. The
face and all the features were extraordinarily minute, and moreover,
blanched and etherealised by age. She had the elfish look of a little
withered fairy godmother. And yet through it all it was clear that she
was a great lady. There were certain poses and gestures about her, which
made her thread gloves and rusty skirts seem a mere whim and masquerade,
adopted, perhaps deliberately, from a high-bred love of congruity, to
suit the country lanes.
She had come to ask them all to dinner at the Hall on the following
evening, and she either brought or devised on the spot the politest
messages from the squire to the new rector, which pleased the sensitive
Robert and silenced for the moment his various misgivings as to Mr.
Wendover's advent. Then she stayed chattering, studying Rose every now
and then out of her strange little eyes, restless and glancing as a
bird's, which took stock also of the garden, of the flower-beds, of
Elsmere's lanky frame, and of Elsmere's handsome friend in the
background. She was most odd when she was grateful, and she was grateful
for the most unexpected things. She thanked Elsmere effusively for
coming to live there, 'sacrificing yourself so nobly to us country
folk,' and she thanked him with an appreciative glance at Langham, for
having his clever friends to stay with him. 'The squire will be so
pleased. My brother, you know, is very clever; oh yes, frightfully
clever!'
And then there was a long sigh, at which Elsmere could hardly keep his
countenance.
She thought it particularly considerate of them to have been to see the
squire's books. It would make conversation so easy when they came to
dinner.
'Though I don't know anything about his books. He doesn't like women to
talk about books. He says they only pretend--even the clever ones.
Except, of course, Madame de Stael. He can only say she was ugly, and I
don't deny it. But I have about used up Madame de Stael,' she added,
dropping into another sigh as soft and light as a child's.
Robert was charmed with her, and even Langham smiled. And as Mrs. Darcy
adored 'clever men,' ranking them, as the London of her youth had ranked
them, only second to 'persons of birth,' she stood among them beaming,
becoming more and more whimsical and inconsequent, more and more
deliciously incalculable, as she expanded. At last she fluttered off,
only, however, to come hurrying back, with little, short, scudding
steps, to implore them all to come to tea with her as soon as possible
in the garden that was her special hobby, and in her last new
summer-house.
'I build two or three every summer,' she said. 'Now, there are
twenty-one! Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness in
the little eerie face, 'but how can one live without hobbies? That's
one--then I've two more. My album--oh, you _will_ all write in my album,
won't you? When I was young--when I was Maid of Honour'--and she drew
herself up slightly--'everybody had albums. Even the dear Queen herself!
I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it; something quite stupid,
after all. _Those_ hobbies--the garden and the album--are _quite_
harmless, aren't they? They hurt nobody, do they?' Her voice dropped a
little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in it, as of one
accustomed to be rebuked.
'Let me remind you of a saying of Bacon's,' said Langham, studying her,
and softened perforce into benevolence.
'Yes, yes,' said Mrs. Darcy in a flutter of curiosity.
'God Almighty first planted a garden,' he quoted; 'and indeed, it is the
purest of all human pleasures.'
'Oh, but how _delightful_!' cried Mrs. Darcy, clasping her diminutive
hands in their thread gloves. 'You must write that in my album, Mr.
Langham, that very sentence; oh, how _clever_ of you to remember it!
What it is to be clever and have a brain! But, then--I've another
hobby----'
Here, however, she stopped, hung her head and looked depressed. Robert,
with a little ripple of laughter, begged her to explain.
'No,' she said plaintively, giving a quick uneasy look at him, as though
it occurred to her that it might some day be his pastoral duty to
admonish her. 'No, it's wrong. I know it is--only I can't help it. Never
mind. You'll know soon.'
And again she turned away, when, suddenly, Rose attracted her attention,
and she stretched out a thin white bird-claw of a hand and caught the
girl's arm.
'There won't be much to amuse you to-morrow, my dear, and there ought
to be--you're so pretty!' Rose blushed furiously and tried to draw her
hand away. 'No, no! don't mind, don't mind. I didn't at your age. Well,
we'll do our best. But your own party is so _charming_!' and she looked
round the little circle, her gaze stopping specially at Langham before
it returned to Rose. 'After all, you will amuse each other.'
Was there any malice in the tiny withered creature? Rose, unsympathetic
and indifferent as youth commonly is when its own affairs absorb it, had
stood coldly outside the group which was making much of the squire's
sister. Was it so the strange little visitor revenged herself?
At any rate Rose was left feeling as if some one had pricked her. While
Catherine and Elsmere escorted Mrs. Darcy to the gate she turned to go
in, her head thrown back stag-like, her cheek still burning. Why should
it be always open to the old to annoy the young with impunity?
Langham watched her mount the first step or two; his eye travelled up
the slim figure so instinct with pride and will--and something in him
suddenly gave way. It was like a man who feels his grip relaxing on some
attacking thing he has been holding by the throat.
He followed her hastily.
'Must you go in? And none of us have paid our respects yet to those
phloxes in the back garden?'
Oh woman--flighty woman! An instant before, the girl, sore and bruised
in every fibre, she only half knew why, was thirsting that this man
might somehow offer her his neck that she might trample on it. He offers
it, and the angry instinct wavers, as a man wavers in a wrestling match
when his opponent unexpectedly gives ground. She paused, she turned her
white throat. His eyes upturned met hers.
'The phloxes did you say?' she asked, coolly redescending the steps.
'Then round here, please.'
She led the way, he followed, conscious of an utter relaxation of nerve
and will which for the moment had something intoxicating in it.
'There are your phloxes,' she said, stopping before a splendid line of
plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again; her spirits
rose at a bound. 'I don't know why you admire them so much. They have no
scent, and they are only pretty in the lump,' and she broke off a spike
of blossom, studied it a little disdainfully, and threw it away.
He stood beside her, the southern glow and life of which it was
intermittently capable once more lighting up the strange face.
'Give me leave to enjoy everything countrified more than usual,' he
said. 'After this morning it will be so long before I see the true
country again.'
He looked, smiling, round on the blue and white brilliance of the sky,
clear again after a night of rain; on the sloping garden, on the
village beyond, on the hedge of sweet peas close beside them, with its
blooms
'On tiptoe for a flight,
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white.'
'Oh! Oxford is countrified enough,' she said indifferently, moving down
the broad grass-path which divided the garden into two equal portions.
'But I am leaving Oxford, at any rate for a year,' he said quietly. 'I
am going to London.'
Her delicate eyebrows went up. 'To London?' Then, in a tone of mock
meekness and sympathy, 'How you will dislike it!'
'Dislike it--why?'
'Oh! because--' she hesitated, and then laughed her daring girlish
laugh--'because there are so many stupid people in London; the clever
people are not all picked out like prize apples, as I suppose they are
in Oxford.'
'At Oxford?' repeated Langham, with a kind of groan. 'At Oxford? You
imagine that Oxford is inhabited only by clever people?'