Robert Elsmere
Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves were all unsteady with music
and feeling, and the face looking down on him had grown pale.
'We make our own destiny,' she said impatiently. '_We_ choose. It is all
our own doing. Perhaps destiny begins things--friendship, for instance;
but afterwards it is absurd to talk of anything but ourselves. We keep
our friends, our chances, our--our joys,' she went on hurriedly, trying
desperately to generalise, 'or we throw them away wilfully, because we
choose.'
Their eyes were riveted on each other.
'Not wilfully,' he said under his breath. 'But--no matter. May I take
you at your word, Miss Leyburn? Wretched shirker that I am, whom even
Robert's charity despairs of: have I made a friend? Can I keep her?'
Extraordinary spell of the dark effeminate face--of its rare smile! The
girl forgot all pride, all discretion. 'Try,' she whispered, and as his
hand, stretching along the keyboard, instinctively felt for hers, for
one instant--and another, and another--she gave it to him.
* * * * *
'Albert, come here!' exclaimed Lady Charlotte, beckoning to her husband;
and Albert, though with a bad grace, obeyed. 'Just go and ask that girl
to come and talk to me, will you? Why on earth didn't you make friends
with her at dinner?'
The husband made some irritable answer, and the wife laughed.
'Just like you!' she said, with a good humour which seemed to him solely
caused by the fact of his non-success with the beauty at table. 'You
always expect to kill at the first stroke. I mean to take her in tow. Go
and bring her here.'
Mr. Wynnstay sauntered off with as much dignity as his stature was
capable of. He found Rose tying up her music at one end of the piano,
while Langham was preparing to shut up the keyboard.
There was something appeasing in the girl's handsomeness. Mr. Wynnstay
laid down his airs, paid her various compliments, and led her off to
Lady Charlotte.
Langham stood by the piano, lost in a kind of miserable dream. Mrs.
Darcy fluttered up to him.
'Oh, Mr. Langham, you play so _beautifully_! Do play a solo!'
He subsided on to the music-bench obediently. On any ordinary occasion
tortures could not have induced him to perform in a room full of
strangers. He had far too lively and fastidious a sense of the futility
of the amateur.
But he played--what, he knew not. Nobody listened but Mrs. Darcy, who
sat lost in an armchair a little way off, her tiny foot beating time.
Rose stopped talking, started, tried to listen. But Lady Charlotte had
had enough music, and so had Mr. Longstaffe, who was endeavouring to
joke himself into the good graces of the Duke of Sedbergh's sister. The
din of conversation rose at the challenge of the piano, and Langham was
soon overcrowded.
Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player's inward tumult was so
great, that what his hands did he hardly knew or cared. He felt himself
the greatest criminal unhung. Suddenly, through all that wilful mist of
epicurean feeling which had been enwrapping him, there had pierced a
sharp illumining beam from a girl's eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with
tenderness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing degeneracy of
every moral muscle led him to now? What! smile and talk, and smile--and
be a villain all the time? What! encroach on a young life, like some
creeping parasitic growth, taking all, able to give nothing in
return--not even one genuine spark of genuine passion? Go philandering
on till a child of nineteen shows you her warm impulsive heart, play on
her imagination, on her pity, safe all the while in the reflection that
by the next day you will be far away, and her task and yours will be
alike to forget! He shrinks from himself as one shrinks from a man
capable of injuring anything weak and helpless. To despise the world's
social code, and then to fall conspicuously below its simplest articles;
to aim at being pure intelligence, pure open-eyed rationality, and not
even to succeed in being a gentleman, as the poor commonplace world
understands it! Oh, to fall at her feet, and ask her pardon before
parting for ever! But no--no more posing; no more dramatising. How can
he get away most quietly--make least sign? The thought of that walk home
in the darkness fills him with a passion of irritable impatience.
* * * * *
'Look at that Romney, Mr. Elsmere; just look at it!' cried Dr. Meyrick
excitedly; 'did you ever see anything finer? There was one of those
London dealer fellows down here last summer offered the squire four
thousand pounds down on the nail for it.'
In this way Meyrick had been taking Robert round the drawing-room, doing
the honours of every stick and stone in it, his eyeglass in his eye, his
thin old face shining with pride over the Wendover possessions. And so
the two gradually neared the oriel where the squire and Mr. Bickerton
were standing.
Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation with the
squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve in him was still
tingling with anger, he had done his best to keep up indifferent talk on
local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly he was asking himself whether
he should ever sit at the squire's table and eat his bread again. It
seemed to him that they had had a brush which would be difficult to
forget. And as he sat there before the squire's wine, hot with righteous
heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord crowded upon
him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his
inferiors and bully his equals!
But as the minutes passed on, the rector had cooled down. The sweet,
placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. 'What, play your
cards so badly, give up the game so rashly, the very first round?
Nonsense! Patience and try again. There must be some cause in the
background. No need to be white-livered, but every need, in the case of
such a man as the squire, to take no hasty needless offence.'
So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick and he close to
the squire and his companion. The two men, as the rector approached,
were discussing some cases of common enclosure that had just taken place
in the neighbourhood. Robert listened a moment, then struck in.
Presently, when the chat dropped, he began to express to the squire his
pleasure in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, courtesy
itself, but without any trace of effusion.
'I believe,' he said at last, smiling, 'my father used to be allowed the
same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the way in which he clung
to Murewell.'
'I had never the honour of Mr. Edward Elsmere's acquaintance,' said the
squire frigidly. 'During the time of his occupation of the rectory I was
not in England.'
'I know. Do you still go much to Germany? Do you keep up your relations
with Berlin?'
'I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,' said the squire briefly, his
eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on the man who ventured to
question him about himself, uninvited. There was an awkward pause. Then
the squire turned again to Mr. Bickerton.
'Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm of last February
has brought down at the north-east corner of the park?'
Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the words
themselves. The squire had not yet addressed a single remark of any kind
about Murewell to _him_. There was a deliberate intention to exclude
implied in this appeal to the man who was not the man of the place, on
such a local point, which struck Robert very forcibly.
He walked away to where his wife was sitting.
'What time is it?' whispered Catherine, looking up at him.
'Time to go,' he returned, smiling, but she caught the discomposure in
his tone and look at once, and her wifely heart rose against the squire.
She got up, drawing herself together with a gesture that became her.
'Then let us go at once,' she said. 'Where is Rose?'
A minute later there was a general leave-taking. Oddly enough it found
the squire in the midst of a conversation with Langham. As though to
show more clearly that it was the rector personally who was in his black
books, Mr. Wendover had already devoted some cold attention to Catherine
both at and after dinner, and he had no sooner routed Robert than he
moved in his slouching away across from Mr. Bickerton to Langham. And
now, another man altogether, he was talking and laughing--describing
apparently a reception at the French Academy--the epigrams flying, the
harsh face all lit up, the thin bony fingers gesticulating freely.
The husband and wife exchanged glances as they stood waiting, while Lady
Charlotte, in her loudest voice, was commanding Rose to come and see her
in London any Thursday after the first of November. Robert was very
sore. Catherine passionately felt it, and forgetting everything but
him, longed to be out with him in the park comforting him.
'What an absurd fuss you have been making about that girl,' Wynnstay
exclaimed to his wife as the Elsmere party left the room, the squire
conducting Catherine with a chill politeness. 'And now, I suppose, you
will be having her up in town, and making some young fellow who ought to
know better fall in love with her. I am told the father was a
grammar-school headmaster. Why can't you leave people where they
belong?'
'I have already pointed out to you,' Lady Charlotte observed calmly,
'that the world has moved on since you were launched into it. I can't
keep up class-distinctions to please you; otherwise, no doubt, being the
devoted wife I am, I might try. However, my dear, we both have our
fancies. You collect Sevres china with or without a pedigree,' and she
coughed drily; 'I collect promising young women. On the whole, I think
my hobby is more beneficial to you than yours is profitable to me.'
Mr. Wynnstay was furious. Only a week before he had been childishly,
shamefully taken in by a Jew curiosity-dealer from Vienna, to his wife's
huge amusement. If looks could have crushed her, Lady Charlotte would
have been crushed. But she was far too substantial as she lay back in
her chair, one large foot crossed over the other, and, as her husband
very well knew, the better man of the two. He walked away, murmuring
under his moustache words that would hardly have borne publicity, while
Lady Charlotte, through her glasses, made a minute study of a little
French portrait hanging some two yards from her.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the Elsmere party were stepping out into the warm damp of the
night. The storm had died away, but a soft Scotch mist of rain filled
the air. Everything was dark, save for a few ghostly glimmerings through
the trees of the avenue; and there was a strong sweet smell of wet earth
and grass. Rose had drawn the hood of her waterproof over her head, and
her face gleamed an indistinct whiteness from its shelter. Oh this
leaping pulse--this bright glow of expectation! How had she made this
stupid blunder about his going? Oh, it was Catherine's mistake, of
course, at the beginning. But what matter? Here they were in the dark,
side by side, friends now, friends always. Catherine should not spoil
their last walk together. She felt a passionate trust that _he_ would
not allow it.
'Wifie!' exclaimed Robert, drawing her a little apart, 'do you know it
has just occurred to me that, as I was going through the park this
afternoon by the lower footpath, I crossed Henslowe coming away from the
house. Of course this is what has happened! _He_ has told his story
first. No doubt just before I met him he had been giving the squire a
full and particular account--_a la_ Henslowe--of my proceedings since I
came. Henslowe lays it on thick--paints with a will. The squire