Robert Elsmere
her as his nature was capable of, was certainly doing nothing to make
his walk with her otherwise than difficult. And every now and then some
languid epigram would bring Catherine's eyes on him with a fiery gleam
in their gray depths. Oh, fourteen more hours and she would have shut
the rectory gate on this most unwelcome of intruders! She had never
felt so vindictively anxious to see the last of any one in her life.
There was in her a vehemence of antagonism to the man's manner, his
pessimism, his infidelity, his very ways of speaking and looking, which
astonished even herself.
Robert's eager soul meanwhile, for once irresponsive to Catherine's, was
full of nothing but the squire. At last the moment was come, and that
dumb spiritual friendship he had formed through these long months with
the philosopher and the savant was to be tested by sight and speech of
the man. He bade himself a hundred times pitch his expectations low. But
curiosity and hope were keen, in spite of everything.
Ah, those parish worries! Robert caught the smoke of Mile End in the
distance, curling above the twilight woods, and laid about him
vigorously with his stick on the squire's shrubs, as he thought of those
poisonous hovels, those ruined lives! But, after all, it might be mere
ignorance, and that wretch Henslowe might have been merely trading on
his master's morbid love of solitude.
And then--all men have their natural conceits. Robert Elsmere would not
have been the very human creature he was if, half-consciously, he had
not counted a good deal on his own powers of influence. Life had been to
him so far one long social success of the best kind. Very likely as he
walked on to the great house over whose threshold lay the answer to the
enigma of months, his mind gradually filled with some naive young dream
of winning the squire, playing him with all sorts of honest arts,
beguiling him back to life--to his kind.
Those friendly messages of his through Mrs. Darcy had been very
pleasant.
'I wonder whether my Oxford friends have been doing me a good turn with
the squire,' he said to Rose, laughing. 'He knows the provost, of
course. If they talked me over it is to be hoped my scholarship didn't
come up. Precious little the provost used to think of my abilities for
Greek prose!'
Rose yawned a little behind her gloved hand. Robert had already talked a
good deal about the squire, and he was certainly the only person in the
group who was thinking of him. Even Catherine, absorbed in other
anxieties, had forgotten to feel any thrill at their approaching
introduction to the man who must of necessity mean so much to herself
and Robert.
* * * * *
'Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere,' said the butler, throwing open the carved
and gilded doors.
Catherine--following her husband, her fine grave head and beautiful neck
held a little more erect than usual--was at first conscious of nothing
but the dazzle of western light which flooded the room, striking the
stands of Japanese lilies, and the white figure of a clown in the famous
Watteau opposite the window.
Then she found herself greeted by Mrs. Darcy, whose odd habit of holding
her lace handkerchief in her right hand on festive occasions only left
her two fingers for her guests. The mistress of the Hall--as diminutive
and elf-like as ever in spite of the added dignity of her sweeping silk
and the draperies of black lace with which her tiny head was
adorned--kept tight hold of Catherine, and called a gentleman standing
in a group just behind her.
'Roger, here are Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere. Mr. Elsmere, the squire
remembers you in petticoats, and I'm not sure that I don't too.'
Robert, smiling, looked beyond her to the advancing figure of the
squire, but if Mr. Wendover heard his sister's remark he took no notice
of it. He held out his hand stiffly to Robert, bowed to Catherine and
Rose before extending to them the same formal greeting, and just
recognised Langham as having met him at Oxford.
Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with whom he had
been engaged on their entrance. His manner had been reserve itself. The
_hauteur_ of the grandee on his own ground was clearly marked in it, and
Robert could not help fancying that towards himself there had even been
something more. And not one of those phrases which, under the
circumstances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to Robert's
childish connection with the place, or as to the squire's remembrance of
his father, even though Mrs. Darcy had given him a special opening of
the kind.
The young rector instinctively drew himself together, like one who has
received a blow, as he moved across to the other side of the fireplace
to shake hands with the worthy family doctor, old Meyrick, who was
already well known to him. Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too
had felt their reception at the squire's hands to be a chilling one, sat
down to talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose
and Langham left to themselves were practically _tete-a-tete_, and that,
moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial screen between her
and them. She could see, however, the gleam of Rose's upstretched neck,
as Langham, who was leaning on the piano beside her, bent down to talk
to her; and when she looked next she caught a smiling motion of
Langham's head and eyes towards the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover's
grandmother, and was certain when he stooped afterwards to say something
to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness
there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture.
Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty.
The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the squire--a
tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her
relationships, her audacity, and the _salon_ which in one way or another
she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking
husband; two neighbouring clerics--the first, by name Longstaffe, a
somewhat inferior specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked;
and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men who
help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to reconcile
the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries of living.
Lady Charlotte was already known by name to the Elsmeres as the aunt of
one of their chief friends of the neighbourhood--the wife of a
neighbouring squire whose property joined that of Murewell Hall, one
Lady Helen Varley, of whom more presently. Lady Charlotte was the sister
of the Duke of Sedbergh, one of the greatest of dukes, and the sister
also of Lady Helen's mother, Lady Wanless. Lady Wanless had died
prematurely, and her two younger children, Helen and Hugh Flaxman,
creatures both of them of unusually fine and fiery quality, had owed a
good deal to their aunt. There were family alliances between the
Sedberghs and the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping
up with the squire. She adored cynics and people who said piquant
things, and it amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the
squire's timid, crack-brained, ridiculous little sister.
As to Dr. Meyrick, he was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. His gray hair
made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed head; he wore an
old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had a perpetual stoop, as though
of deference, and his spectacled look of mild attentiveness had nothing
in common with that medical self-assurance with which we are all
nowadays so familiar. Robert noticed presently that when he addressed
Mrs. Darcy he said 'Ma'am,' making no bones at all about it; and his
manner generally was the manner of one to whom class distinctions were
the profoundest reality, and no burden at all on a naturally humble
temper. Dr. Baker, of Whindale, accustomed to trouncing Mrs. Seaton,
would have thought him a poor creature.
When dinner was announced, Robert found himself assigned to Mrs. Darcy;
the squire took Lady Charlotte. Catherine fell to Mr. Bickerton, Rose to
Mr. Wynnstay, and the rest found their way in as best they could.
Catherine seeing the distribution was happy for a moment, till she found
that if Rose was covered on her right she was exposed to the full fire
of the enemy on her left, in other words that Langham was placed between
her and Dr. Meyrick.
'Are your spirits damped at all by this magnificence?' Langham said to
his neighbour as they sat down. The table was entirely covered with
Japanese lilies, save for the splendid silver candelabra from which the
light flashed, first on to the faces of the guests, and then on to those
of the family portraits, hung thickly round the room. A roof embossed
with gilded Tudor roses on a ground of black oak hung above them; a
rose-water dish in which the Merry Monarch had once dipped his hands,
and which bore a record of the fact in the inscription on its sides,
stood before them; and the servants were distributing to each guest
silver soup-plates which had been the gift of Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough, in some moment of generosity or calculation, to the
Wendover of her day.
'Oh dear, no!' said Rose carelessly. 'I don't know how it is, I think I
must have been born for a palace.'
Langham looked at her, at the daring harmony of colour made by the
reddish gold of her hair, the warm whiteness of her skin, and the
brown-pink tints of her dress, at the crystals playing the part of
diamonds on her beautiful neck, and remembered Robert's remarks to him.
The same irony mingled with the same bitterness returned to him, and the
elder brother's attitude became once more temporarily difficult. 'Who is
your neighbour?' he inquired of her presently.
'Lady Charlotte's husband,' she answered mischievously, under her
breath. 'One needn't know much more about him I imagine!'
'And that man opposite?'
'Robert's pet aversion,' she said calmly, without a change of
countenance, so that Mr. Longstaffe opposite, who was studying her as he
always studied pretty young women, stared at her through her remark in
sublime ignorance of its bearing.
'And your sister's neighbour?'
'I can't hit him off in a sentence, he's too good!' said Rose laughing;
'all I can say is that Mrs. Bickerton has too many children, and the
children have too many ailments for her ever to dine out.'
'That will do; I see the existence,' said Langham with a shrug. 'But he
has the look of an apostle, though a rather hunted one. Probably nobody
here, except Robert, is fit to tie his shoes.'
'The squire could hardly be called _empresse_,' said Rose, after a
second, with a curl of her red lips. Mr. Wynnstay was still safely
engaged with Mrs. Darcy, and there was a buzz of talk largely sustained
by Lady Charlotte.
'No,' Langham admitted; 'the manners I thought were not quite equal to
the house.'
'What possible reason could he have for treating Robert with those
airs?' said Rose indignantly, ready enough in girl fashion to defend her
belongings against the outer world. 'He ought to be only too glad to
have the opportunity of knowing him and making friends with him.'
'You are a sister worth having;' and Langham smiled at her as she leant
back in her chair, her white arms and wrists lying on her lap, and her
slightly flushed face turned towards him. They had been on these
pleasant terms of _camaraderie_ all day, and the intimacy between them
had been still making strides.
'Do you imagine I don't appreciate Robert because I make bad jokes
about the choir and the clothing club?' she asked him, with a little
quick repentance passing like a shadow through her eyes. 'I always feel
I play an odious part here. I can't like it--I can't--their life. I