Robert Elsmere
'The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise;
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.'
She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as she lay
weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory sense of growth, of
enrichment. In such moments of pain does a woman first begin to live?
Ah! why should it hurt so--this long-awaited birth of the soul?
BOOK III
THE SQUIRE
CHAPTER XIX
The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a date of
some importance in the lives of two or three persons. Rose was not
likely to forget it; Langham carried about with him the picture of the
great drawing-room, its stately light and shade, and its scattered
figures, through many a dismal subsequent hour; and to Robert it was the
beginning of a period of practical difficulties such as his fortunate
youth had never yet encountered.
His conjecture had hit the mark. The squire's sentiments towards him,
which had been on the whole friendly enough, with the exception of a
slight _nuance_ of contempt provoked in Mr. Wendover's mind by all forms
of the clerical calling, had been completely transformed in the course
of the afternoon before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report
of his agent. Henslowe, who knew certain sides of the squire's character
by heart, had taken Time by the forelock. For fourteen years before
Robert entered the parish he had been king of it. Mr. Preston, Robert's
predecessor, had never given him a moment's trouble. The agent had
developed a habit of drinking, had favoured his friends and spited his
enemies, and had allowed certain distant portions of the estate to go
finely to ruin, quite undisturbed by any sentimental meddling of the
priestly sort. Then the old rector had been gathered to the majority,
and this long-legged busybody had taken his place, a man, according to
the agent, as full of communistical notions as an egg is full of meat,
and always ready to poke his nose into other people's business. And as
all men like mastery, but especially Scotchmen, and as during even the
first few months of the new rector's tenure of office it became
tolerably evident to Henslowe that young Elsmere would soon become the
ruling force of the neighbourhood unless measures were taken to prevent
it, the agent, over his nocturnal drams, had taken sharp and cunning
counsel with himself concerning the young man.
The state of Mile End had been originally the result of indolence and
caprice on his part rather than of any set purpose of neglect. As soon,
however, as it was brought to his notice by Elsmere, who did it, to
begin with, in the friendliest way, it became a point of honour with
the agent to let the place go to the devil, nay, to hurry it there. For
some time notwithstanding, he avoided an open breach with the rector. He
met Elsmere's remonstrances by a more or less civil show of argument,
belied every now and then by the sarcasm of his coarse blue eye, and so
far the two men had kept outwardly on terms. Elsmere had reason to know
that on one or two occasions of difficulty in the parish Henslowe had
tried to do him a mischief. The attempts, however, had not greatly
succeeded, and their ill-success had probably excited in Elsmere a
confidence of ultimate victory which had tended to keep him cool in the
presence of Henslowe's hostility. But Henslowe had been all along merely
waiting for the squire. He had served the owner of the Murewell estate
for fourteen years, and if he did not know that owner's peculiarities by
this time, might he obtain certain warm corners in the next life to
which he was fond of consigning other people! It was not easy to cheat
the squire out of money, but it was quite easy to play upon his
ignorance of the details of English land management--ignorance
guaranteed by the learned habits of a lifetime--on his complete lack of
popular sympathy, and on the contempt felt by the disciple of Bismarck
and Mommsen for all forms of altruistic sentiment. The squire despised
priests. He hated philanthropic cants. Above all things he respected his
own leisure, and was abnormally, irritably sensitive as to any possible
inroads upon it.
All these things Henslowe knew, and all these things he utilised. He saw
the squire within forty-eight hours of his arrival at Murewell. His
fancy picture of Robert and his doings was introduced with adroitness,
and coloured with great skill, and he left the squire walking up and
down his library, chafing alternately at the monstrous fate which had
planted this sentimental agitator at his gates, and at the memory of his
own misplaced civilities towards the intruder. In the evening those
civilities were abundantly avenged, as we have seen.
Robert was much perplexed as to his next step. His heart was very sore.
The condition of Mile End--those gaunt-eyed women and wasted children,
all the sordid details of their unjust avoidable suffering weighed upon
his nerves perpetually. But he was conscious that this state of feeling
was one of tension, perhaps of exaggeration, and though it was
impossible he should let the matter alone, he was anxious to do nothing
rashly.
However, two days after the dinner-party he met Henslowe on the hill
leading up to the rectory. Robert would have passed the man with a
stiffening of his tall figure and the slightest possible salutation. But
the agent, just returned from a round wherein the bars of various local
inns had played a conspicuous part, was in a truculent mood and stopped
to speak. He took up the line of insolent condolence with the rector on
the impossibility of carrying his wishes with regard to Mile End into
effect. They had been laid before the squire, of course, but the squire
had his own ideas and wasn't just easy to manage.
'Seen him yet, sir?' Henslowe wound up jauntily, every line of his
flushed countenance, the full lips under the fair beard, and the light
prominent eyes, expressing a triumph he hardly cared to conceal.
'I have seen him, but I have not talked to him on this particular
matter,' said the rector quietly, though the red mounted in his cheek.
'You may, however, be very sure, Mr. Henslowe, that everything I know
about Mile End the squire shall know before long.'
'Oh, lor' bless me, sir!' cried Henslowe with a guffaw, 'it's all one to
me. And if the squire ain't satisfied with the way his work's done now,
why he can take you on as a second string, you know. You'd show us all,
I'll be bound, how to make the money fly.'
Then Robert's temper gave way, and he turned upon the half-drunken brute
before him with a few home-truths delivered with a rapier-like force
which for the moment staggered Henslowe, who turned from red to purple.
The rector, with some of those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which
we had glimpses in his talk with Langham, burning at his heart, felt the
man no better than a murderer, and as good as told him so. Then, without
giving him time to reply, Robert strode on, leaving Henslowe planted in
the pathway. But he was hardly up the hill before the agent, having
recovered himself by dint of copious expletives, was looking after him
with a grim chuckle. He knew his master, and he knew himself, and he
thought between them they would about manage to keep that young spark in
order.
Robert meanwhile went straight home into his study, and there fell upon
ink and paper. What was the good of protracting the matter any longer?
Something must and should be done for these people, if not one way, then
another.
So he wrote to the squire, showing the letter to Catherine when it was
done, lest there should be anything over-fierce in it. It was the simple
record of twelve months' experience told with dignity and strong
feeling. Henslowe was barely mentioned in it, and the chief burden of
the letter was to implore the squire to come and inspect certain
portions of his property with his own eyes. The rector would be at his
service any day or hour.
Husband and wife went anxiously through the document, softening here,
improving there, and then it was sent to the Hall. Robert waited
nervously through the day for an answer. In the evening, while he and
Catherine were in the footpath after dinner, watching a chilly autumnal
moonrise over the stubbles of the cornfield, the answer came.
'H'm,' said Robert dubiously as he opened it, holding it up to the
moonlight; 'can't be said to be lengthy.'
He and Catherine hurried into the house. Robert read the letter, and
handed it to her without a word.
After some curt references to one or two miscellaneous points raised in
the latter part of the rector's letter, the squire wound up as
follows:--
'As for the bulk of your communication, I am at a loss to
understand the vehemence of your remarks on the subject of my Mile
End property. My agent informed me shortly after my return home
that you had been concerning yourself greatly, and, as he
conceived, unnecessarily about the matter. Allow me to assure you
that I have full confidence in Mr. Henslowe, who has been in the
district for as many years as you have spent months in it, and
whose authority on points connected with the business management of
my estate naturally carries more weight with me, if you will permit
me to say so, than your own.--I am, sir, your obedient servant,
'ROGER WENDOVER.'
Catherine returned the letter to her husband with a look of dismay. He
was standing with his back to the chimney-piece, his hands thrust far
into his pockets, his upper lip quivering. In his happy expansive life
this was the sharpest personal rebuff that had ever happened to him. He
could not but smart under it.
'Not a word,' he said, tossing his hair back impetuously, as Catherine
stood opposite watching him--'not one single word about the miserable
people themselves! What kind of stuff can the man be made off?'
'Does he believe you?' asked Catherine, bewildered.
'If not, one must try and make him,' he said energetically, after a
moment's pause. 'To-morrow, Catherine, I go down to the Hall and see
him.'
She quietly acquiesced, and the following afternoon, first thing after
luncheon, she watched him go, her tender inspiring look dwelling with
him as he crossed the park, which was lying delicately wrapped in one of
the whitest of autumnal mists, the sun just playing through it with pale
invading shafts.
The butler looked at him with some doubtfulness. It was never safe to
admit visitors for the squire without orders. But he and Robert had
special relations. As the possessor of a bass voice worthy of his girth,
Vincent, under Robert's rule, had become the pillar of the choir, and it
was not easy for him to refuse the rector.
So Robert was led in, through the hall, and down the long passage to the
curtained door, which he knew so well.
'Mr. Elsmere, sir!'
There was a sudden hasty movement. Robert passed a magnificent lacquered
screen newly placed round the door, and found himself in the squire's
presence.
The squire had half risen from his seat in a capacious chair, with a
litter of books round it, and confronted his visitor with a look of
surprised annoyance. The figure of the rector, tall, thin, and youthful,
stood out against the delicate browns and whites of the book-lined
walls. The great room, so impressively bare when Robert and Langham had
last seen it, was now full of the signs of a busy man's constant
habitation. An odour of smoke pervaded it; the table in the window was
piled with books just unpacked, and the half-emptied case from which
they had been taken lay on the ground beside the squire's chair.
'I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,' said Robert, advancing