Robert Elsmere
should hate it! And yet----'
She sighed remorsefully, and Langham, who five minutes before could have
wished her to be always smiling, could now have almost asked to fix her
as she was: the eyes veiled, the soft lips relaxed in this passing
instant of gravity.
'Ah! I forgot--' and she looked up again with light bewitching
appeal--'there is still that question, my poor little question of Sunday
night, when I was in that fine moral frame of mind and you were near
giving me, I believe, the only good advice you ever gave in your
life,--how shamefully you have treated it!'
One brilliant look, which Catherine for her torment caught from the
other side of the table, and then in an instant the quick face changed
and stiffened. Mr. Wynnstay was speaking to her, and Langham was left to
the intermittent mercies of Dr. Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was
also quite content, apparently, to judge from the radiant placidity of
his look, to examine his wine, study his _menu_, and enjoy his
_entrees_ in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of
conversation.
Robert, meanwhile, during the first few minutes, in which Mr. Wynnstay
had been engaged in some family talk with Mrs. Darcy, had been allowing
himself a little deliberate study of Mr. Wendover across what seemed the
safe distance of a long table. The squire was talking shortly and
abruptly, yet with occasional flashes of shrill ungainly laughter, to
Lady Charlotte, who seemed to have no sort of fear of him and to find
him good company, and every now and then Robert saw him turn to
Catherine on the other side of him, and with an obvious change of manner
address some formal and constrained remark to her.
Mr. Wendover was a man of middle height and loose bony frame, of which,
as Robert had noticed in the drawing-room, all the lower half had a thin
and shrunken look. But the shoulders, which had the scholar's stoop, and
the head were massive and squarely outlined. The head was specially
remarkable for its great breadth and comparative flatness above the
eyes, and for the way in which the head itself dwarfed the face, which,
as contrasted with the large angularity of the skull, had a pinched and
drawn look. The hair was reddish-gray, the eyes small, but deep-set
under fine brows, and the thin-lipped wrinkled mouth and long chin had a
look of hard sarcastic strength.
Generally the countenance was that of an old man, the furrows were deep,
the skin brown and shrivelled. But the alertness and force of the man's
whole expression showed that, if the body was beginning to fail, the
mind was as fresh and masterful as ever. His hair, worn rather longer
than usual, his loosely-fitting dress and slouching carriage gave him an
un-English look. In general he impressed Robert as a sort of curious
combination of the foreign _savant_ with the English grandee, for while
his manner showed a considerable consciousness of birth and social
importance, the gulf between him and the ordinary English country
gentleman could hardly have been greater, whether in points of
appearance or, as Robert very well knew, in points of social conduct.
And as Robert watched him, his thoughts flew back again to the library,
to this man's past, to all that those eyes had seen and those hands had
touched. He felt already a mysterious, almost a yearning, sense of
acquaintance with the being who had just received him with such
chilling, such unexpected, indifference.
The squire's manners, no doubt, were notorious, but even so, his
reception of the new rector of the parish, the son of a man intimately
connected for years with the place, and with his father, and to whom he
had himself shown what was for him considerable civility by letter and
message, was sufficiently startling.
Robert, however, had no time to speculate on the causes of it, for Mrs.
Darcy, released from Mr. Wynnstay, threw herself with glee on to her
longed-for prey, the young and interesting-looking rector. First of all
she cross-examined him as to his literary employments, and when by dint
of much questioning she had forced particulars from him, Robert's mouth
twitched as he watched her scuttling away from the subject, seized
evidently with internal terrors lest she should have precipitated
herself beyond hope of rescue into the jaws of the sixth century. Then
with a view to regaining the lead and opening another and more promising
vein, she asked him his opinion of Lady Selden's last novel, _Love in a
Marsh_; and when he confessed ignorance she paused a moment, fork in
hand, her small wrinkled face looking almost as bewildered as when,
three minutes before, her rashness had well-nigh brought her face to
face with Gregory of Tours as a topic of conversation.
But she was not daunted long. With little airs and bridlings infinitely
diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most beguiling confidence. She
could appreciate 'clever men,' she said, for she--she too--was literary.
Did Mr. Elsmere know--this in a hurried whisper, with sidelong glances
to see that Mr. Wynnstay was safely occupied with Rose, and the squire
with Lady Charlotte--that she had once _written a novel_?
Robert, who had been posted up in many things concerning the
neighbourhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most truly that he had.
Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over.
'Ah! but you haven't read it,' she said regretfully. 'It was when I was
Maid of Honour, you know. No Maid of Honour had ever written a novel
before. It was quite an event. Dear Prince Albert borrowed a copy of me
one night to read in bed--I have it still, with the page turned down
where he left off.' She hesitated. 'It was only in the second chapter,'
she said at last with a fine truthfulness, 'but you know he was so busy,
all the Queen's work to do, of course, besides his own--poor man!'
Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, with blushes
which made her more weird than ever, consented.
Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between Lady
Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as grateful for his
attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white nobody at a country
dinner-party ought to be, and was glad of the diversion afforded him by
some aggressive remark of his wife. He and she differed on three main
points--politics; the decoration of their London house, Mr. Wynnstay
being a lover of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris;
and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte, in the
pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the domestic
hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a name for any sort
of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity; and the
company in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seriously
soured a small irritable Conservative with more family pride than either
nerves or digestion.
During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched Elsmere,
cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burning within her, and
as soon as there was once more a general burst of talk, she pounced upon
him afresh. Would he like to know that after thirty years she had just
finished her _second_ novel, unbeknown to her brother--as she mentioned
him the little face darkened, took a strange bitterness--and it was just
about to be entrusted to the post and a publisher?
Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. Mrs. Darcy
expanded still more--could, in fact, have hugged him. But, just as she
was launching into the plot a thought, apparently a scruple of
conscience, struck her.
'Do you remember,' she began, looking at him a little darkly, askance,
'what I said about my hobbies the other day? Now, Mr. Elsmere, will you
tell me--don't mind me--don't be polite--have you ever heard people tell
stories of me? Have you ever, for instance, heard them call me
a--a--tuft-hunter?'
'Never!' said Robert heartily.
'They might,' she said, sighing. 'I _am_ a tuft-hunter. I can't help it.
And yet we _are_ a good family, you know. I suppose it was that year at
Court, and that horrid Warham afterwards. Twenty years in a cathedral
town--and a very _little_ cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham
Palace, and dear Lord Melbourne! Every year I came up to town to stay
with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn't been for
that I should have died--my husband knew I should. It was the world,
the flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn't be helped. But
now,' and she looked plaintively at her companion, as though challenging
him to a candid reply: 'You _would_ be more interesting, wouldn't you,
to tell the truth, if you had a handle to your name?'
'Immeasurably,' cried Robert, stifling his laughter with immense
difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh.
'Well, yes, you know. But it isn't right;' and again she sighed. 'And so
I have been writing this novel just for that. It is called--what do you
think?--"Mr. Jones." Mr. Jones is my hero--it's so good for me, you
know, to think about a Mr. Jones.'
She looked beamingly at him. 'It must be indeed! Have you endowed him
with every virtue?'
'Oh yes, and in the end, you know--' and she bent forward eagerly--'it
all comes right. His father didn't die in Brazil without children after
all, and the title----'
'What!' cried Robert, 'so he _wasn't_ Mr. Jones?'
Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious.
'Well, no,' she said guiltily, 'not just at the end. But it _really_
doesn't matter--not to the story.'
Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory as he could
make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But
just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed
to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their
little private eddy was effaced. The squire had been telling an
anecdote, and his clerical neighbours had been laughing at it.
'Ah!' cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a
chuckle, 'that was an Archbishop worth having!'
'A curious story,' said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it,
however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed
to Robert that the squire's keen eye, as he sat looking down the table,
with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed
upon himself.
'May we hear the story?' he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly
smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and
moved out of her ordinary quiet.
'It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,' said Mr. Wendover, in his
dry nasal voice. 'You probably know it, Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop
Heber's consecration to the See of Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop
to make a valedictory speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth
which followed the ceremony. "I have very little advice to give you as
to your future career," he said to the young bishop, "but all that
experience has given me I hand on to you. Place before your eyes two
precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other
is--_Put down enthusiasm!_"'
There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the squire's look as he
told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Robert. Robert divined in
a moment that the story had been re-told for his special benefit, and
that in some unexplained way the relations between him and the squire
were already biassed. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and
falling back into his place made no comment on the squire's anecdote.
Lady Charlotte's eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the
distant figure of the rector, with regard to whom she had been asking
Dr. Meyrick for particulars, quite unmindful of Catherine's
neighbourhood, turned back again towards the squire.