Robert Elsmere
receives me afterwards as the meddlesome pragmatical priest he
understands me to be; puts his foot down to begin with; and, _hinc illae
lacrymae_. It's as clear as daylight! I thought that man had an odd twist
of the lip as he passed me.'
'Then a disagreeable evening will be the worst of it,' said Catherine
proudly. 'I imagine, Robert, you can defend yourself against that bad
man?'
'He has got the start; he has no scruples; and it remains to be seen
whether the squire has a heart to appeal to,' replied the young rector
with sore reflectiveness. 'Oh, Catherine, have you ever thought, wifie,
what a business it will be for us if I _can't_ make friends with that
man? Here we are at his gates--all our people in his power; the
_comfort_, at any rate, of our social life depending on him. And what a
strange, unmanageable, inexplicable being!'
Elsmere sighed aloud. Like all quick imaginative natures he was easily
depressed, and the squire's sombre figure had for the moment darkened
his whole horizon. Catherine laid her cheek against his arm in the
darkness, consoling, remonstrating, every other thought lost in her
sympathy with Robert's worries. Langham and Rose slipped out of her
head; Elsmere's step had quickened, as it always did when he was
excited, and she kept up without thinking.
When Langham found the others had shot ahead in the darkness, and he and
his neighbour were _tete-a-tete_, despair seized him. But for once he
showed a sort of dreary presence of mind. Suddenly, while the girl
beside him was floating in a golden dream of feeling, he plunged with a
stiff deliberation born of his inner conflict into a discussion of the
German system of musical training. Rose, startled, made some vague and
flippant reply. Langham pursued the matter. He had some information
about it, it appeared, garnered up in his mind, which might perhaps some
day prove useful to her. A St. Anselm's undergraduate, one Dashwood, an
old pupil of his, had been lately at Berlin for six months, studying at
the Conservatorium. Not long ago, being anxious to become a
schoolmaster, he had written to Langham for a testimonial. His letter
had contained a full account of his musical life. Langham proceeded to
recapitulate it.
His careful and precise report of hours, fees, masters, and methods
lasted till they reached the park gate. He had the smallest powers of
social acting, and his role was dismally overdone. The girl beside him
could not know that he was really defending her from himself. His cold
altered manner merely seemed to her a sudden and marked withdrawal of
his petition for her friendship. No doubt she had received that petition
too effusively--and he wished there should be no mistake.
What a young smarting soul went through in that half-mile of listening
is better guessed than analysed. There are certain moments of shame,
which only women know, and which seem to sting and burn out of youth all
its natural sweet self-love. A woman may outlive them, but never forget
them. If she pass through one at nineteen her cheek will grow hot over
it at seventy. Her companion's measured tone, the flow of deliberate
speech which came from him, the nervous aloofness of his attitude--every
detail in that walk seemed to Rose's excited sense an insult.
As the park gate swung behind them she felt a sick longing for
Catherine's shelter. Then all the pride in her rushed to the rescue and
held that swooning dismay at the heart of her in check. And forthwith
she capped Langham's minute account of the scale-method of a famous
Berlin pianist by some witty stories of the latest London prodigy, a
child-violinist, incredibly gifted, dirty, and greedy, whom she had made
friends with in town. The girl's voice rang out sharp and hard under the
trees. Where, in fortune's name, were the lights of the rectory? Would
this nightmare never come to an end?
At the rectory gate was Catherine waiting for them, her whole soul one
repentant alarm.
'Mr. Langham, Robert has gone to the study; will you go and smoke with
him?'
'By all means. Good-night, then, Mrs. Elsmere.'
Catherine gave him her hand. Rose was trying hard to fit the lock of the
gate into the hasp, and had no hand free. Besides, he did not approach
her.
'Good-night!' she said to him over her shoulder.
'Oh, and Mr. Langham!' Catherine called after him as he strode away,
'will you settle with Robert about the carriage?'
He turned, made a sound of assent, and went on.
'When?' asked Rose lightly.
'For the nine o'clock train.'
'There should be a law against interfering with people's breakfast
hour,' said Rose; 'though, to be sure, a guest may as well get himself
gone early and be done with it. How you and Robert raced, Cathie! We did
our best to catch you up, but the pace was too good.'
Was there a wild taunt, a spice of malice in the girl's reckless voice?
Catherine could not see her in the darkness, but the sister felt a
sudden trouble invade her.
'Rose, darling, you are not tired?'
'Oh dear, no! Good-night, sleep well. What a goose Mrs. Darcy is!'
And, barely submitting to be kissed, Rose ran up the steps and upstairs.
Langham and Robert smoked till midnight. Langham for the first time gave
Elsmere an outline of his plans for the future, and Robert, filled with
dismay at this final breach with Oxford and human society, and the only
form of practical life possible to such a man, threw himself into
protests more and more vigorous and affectionate. Langham listened to
them at first with sombre silence, then with an impatience which
gradually reduced Robert to a sore puffing at his pipe. There was a long
space during which they sat together, the ashes of the little fire
Robert had made dropping on the hearth, and not a word on either side.
At last Elsmere could not bear it, and when midnight struck he sprang up
with an impatient shake of his long body, and Langham took the hint,
gave him a cold good-night, and went.
As the door shut upon him Robert dropped back into his chair, and sat
on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the fire. It seemed to
him the world was going crookedly. A day on which a man of singularly
open and responsive temper makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than ever
before to losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the
calendar, and, by way of aggravation, Robert Elsmere says to himself at
once that somehow or other there must be fault of his own in the matter.
Rose!--pshaw! Catherine little knows what stuff that cold intangible
soul is made of.
Meanwhile, Langham was standing heavily, looking out into the night. The
different elements in the mountain of discomfort that weighed upon him
were so many that the weary mind made no attempt to analyse them. He had
a sense of disgrace, of having stabbed something gentle that had leant
upon him, mingled with a strong intermittent feeling of unutterable
relief. Perhaps his keenest regret was that, after all, it had not been
love! He had offered himself up to a girl's just contempt, but he had no
recompense in the shape of a great addition to knowledge, to experience.
Save for a few doubtful moments at the beginning, when he had all but
surprised himself in something more poignant, what he had been conscious
of had been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of sentiment, a
subtle surrender to one exquisite aesthetic impression after another. And
these things in other relations the world had yielded him before.
'Am I sane?' he muttered to himself. 'Have I ever been sane? Probably
not. The disproportion between my motives and other men's is too great
to be normal. Well, at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long
after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still
be doing penance in the desert.'
He threw himself down beside the open window with a groan. An hour later
he lifted a face blanched and lined, and stretched out his hand with
avidity towards a book on the table. It was an obscure and difficult
Greek text, and he spent the greater part of the night over it,
rekindling in himself with feverish haste the embers of his one lasting
passion.
Meanwhile, in a room overhead, another last scene in this most futile of
dramas was passing. Rose, when she came in, had locked the door, torn
off her dress and her ornaments, and flung herself on the edge of the
bed, her hands on her knees, her shoulders drooping, a fierce red spot
on either cheek. There for an indefinite time she went through a torture
of self-scorn. The incidents of the week passed before her one by
one--her sallies, her defiances, her impulsive friendliness, the _elan_,
the happiness of the last two days, the self-abandonment of this
evening. Oh, intolerable--intolerable!
And all to end with the intimation that she had been behaving like a
forward child--had gone too far and must be admonished--made to feel
accordingly! The poisoned arrow pierced deeper and deeper into the
girl's shrinking pride. The very foundations of self-respect seemed
overthrown.
Suddenly her eye caught a dim and ghostly reflection of her own figure,
as she sat with locked hands on the edge of the bed, in a long glass
near, the only one of the kind which the rectory household possessed.
Rose sprang up, snatched at the candle, which was flickering in the air
of the open window, and stood erect before the glass, holding the candle
above her head.
What the light showed her was a slim form in a white dressing-gown, that
fell loosely about it; a rounded arm upstretched; a head, still crowned
with its jessamine wreath, from which the bright hair fell heavily over
shoulders and bosom; eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud
challenge at what they saw; two lips, 'indifferent red,' just open to
let the quick breath come through--all thrown into the wildest
chiaroscuro by the wavering candle flame.
Her challenge was answered. The fault was not there. Her arm dropped.
She put down the light.
'I _am_ handsome,' she said to herself, her mouth quivering childishly.
'I am. I may say it to myself.'
Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. Her room, on
the opposite side of the house from Langham's, looked over the
cornfields and the distance. The stubbles gleamed faintly; the dark
woods, the clouds teased by the rising wind, sent a moaning voice to
greet her.
'I hate him! I hate him!' she cried to the darkness, clenching her cold
little hand.
Then presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her head in the
bed-clothes. She was crying--angry stifled tears which had the hot
impatience of youth in them. It all seemed to her so untoward. This was
not the man she had dreamed of--the unknown of her inmost heart. _He_
had been young, ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye
flashing into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside
the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden mysteries behind it.
She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid this
paralysing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to peace--to
indifference. The poor child flies from her own half-understood
trouble; will none of it; murmurs again wildly--
'I hate him! I hate him! Cold-blooded--ungrateful--unkind!'
In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, enthral her inmost soul. The
charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, womanlike.
That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed
struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing there, trying
to recall what she had been a week before; the whirl of her London
visit, the ambitions with which it had filled her; the bewildering
many-coloured lights it had thrown upon life, the intoxicating sense of
artistic power. In vain.