Robert Elsmere
hat in hand, while the squire hastily put down the German professor's
pipe he had just been enjoying, and coldly accepted his proffered
greeting. 'I should have preferred not to disturb you without an
appointment, but after your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal
explanation was necessary.'
The squire stiffly motioned towards a chair, which Robert took, and then
slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes fixed on the intruder.
Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but maintaining
in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, plunged at once into
business. He took the letter he had just received from the squire as a
text, made a good-humoured defence of his own proceedings, described his
attempt to move Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man
to the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about Henslowe
were in perfect temper, though by no means without an edge.
Then, having disposed of the more personal aspects of the matter, he
paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite him, more like a
bronzed mask at this moment than a human countenance. The squire,
however, gave him no help. He had received his remarks so far in perfect
silence, and seeing that there were more to come, he waited for them
with the same rigidity of look and attitude.
So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of
those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during the
preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary
condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors,
poisoned water--he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his
stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have
burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these
woes but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labour of
body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. But all
that he could hurl against the squire's feeling, as it were, he gathered
up, strangely conscious through it all of his own young persistent
yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it
lay chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of
intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so enriching.
But passion and reticence and hidden sympathy were alike lost upon the
squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had already risen restlessly from
his chair, and from the rug was glowering down on his unwelcome visitor.
Good heavens! had he come home to be lectured in his own library by this
fanatical slip of a parson? As for his stories, the squire barely took
the trouble to listen to them.
Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his hand into
other people's pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but it was
intolerable that his scholar's privacy should be at the mercy of one of
the tribe.
'Mr. Elsmere,' he broke out at last with contemptuous emphasis, 'I
imagine it would have been better--infinitely better--to have spared
both yourself and me the disagreeables of this interview. However, I am
not sorry we should understand each other. I have lived a life which is
at least double the length of yours in very tolerable peace and comfort.
The world has been good enough for me, and I for it, so far. I have been
master in my own estate, and intend to remain so. As for the new-fangled
ideas of a landowner's duty, with which your mind seems to be full'--the
scornful irritation of the tone was unmistakable--'I have never dabbled
in them, nor do I intend to begin now. I am like the rest of my kind; I
have no money to chuck away in building schemes, in order that the
rector of the parish may pose as the apostle of the agricultural
labourer. That, however, is neither here nor there. What is to the
purpose is, that my business affairs are in the hands of a business man,
deliberately chosen and approved by me, and that I have nothing to do
with them. Nothing at all!' he repeated with emphasis. 'It may seem to
you very shocking. You may regard it as the object in life of the
English landowner to inspect the pigstyes and amend the habits of the
English labourer. I don't quarrel with the conception, I only ask you
not to expect me to live up to it. I am a student first and foremost,
and desire to be left to my books. Mr. Henslowe is there on purpose to
protect my literary freedom. What he thinks desirable is good enough for
me, as I have already informed you. I am sorry for it if his methods do
not commend themselves to you. But I have yet to learn that the rector
of the parish has an ex-officio right to interfere between a landlord
and his tenants.'
Robert kept his temper with some difficulty. After a pause he said,
feeling desperately, however, that the suggestion was not likely to
improve matters,--
'If I were to take all the trouble and all the expense off your hands,
Mr. Wendover, would it be impossible for you to authorise me to make one
or two alterations most urgently necessary for the improvement of the
Mile End cottages?'
The squire burst into an angry laugh.
'I have never yet been in the habit, Mr. Elsmere, of doing my repairs by
public subscription. You ask a little too much from an old man's powers
of adaptation.'
Robert rose from his seat, his hand trembling as it rested on his
walking-stick.
'Mr. Wendover,' he said, speaking at last with a flash of answering
scorn in his young vibrating voice, 'what I think you cannot understand
is that at any moment a human creature may sicken and die, poisoned by
the state of your property, for which you--and nobody else--are
ultimately responsible.'
The squire shrugged his shoulders.
'So you say, Mr. Elsmere. If true, every person in such a condition has
a remedy in his own hands. I force no one to remain on my property.'
'The people who live there,' exclaimed Robert, 'have neither home nor
subsistence if they are driven out. Murewell is full--times bad--most of
the people old.'
'And eviction "a sentence of death," I suppose, 'interrupted the squire,
studying him with sarcastic eyes. 'Well, I have no belief in a
Gladstonian Ireland, still less in a Radical England. Supply and demand,
cause and effect, are enough for me. The Mile End cottages are out of
repair, Mr. Elsmere, so Mr. Henslowe tells me, because the site is
unsuitable, the type of cottage out of date. People live in them at
their peril; I don't pull them down, or rather'--correcting himself with
exasperating consistency--'Mr. Henslowe doesn't pull them down, because,
like other men, I suppose, he dislikes an outcry. But if the population
stays, it stays at its own risk. Now have I made myself plain?'
The two men eyed one another.
'Perfectly plain,' said Robert quietly. 'Allow me to remind you, Mr.
Wendover, that there are other matters than eviction capable of
provoking an outcry.'
'As you please,' said the other indifferently. 'I have no doubt I shall
find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, I daresay I shall
manage to put up with it. Society is made up of fanatics and the
creatures they hunt. If I am to be hunted, I shall be in good company.'
Robert stood hat in hand, tormented with a dozen crosscurrents of
feeling. He was forcibly struck with the blind and comparatively
motiveless pugnacity of the squire's conduct. There was an extravagance
in it which for the first time recalled to him old Meyrick's
lucubrations.
'I have done no good, I see, Mr. Wendover,' he said at last, slowly. 'I
wish I could have induced you to do an act of justice and mercy. I wish
I could have made you think more kindly of myself. I have failed in
both. It is useless to keep you any longer. Good-morning.'
He bowed. The squire also bent forward. At that moment Robert caught
sight beside his shoulder of an antique, standing on the mantelpiece,
which was a new addition to the room. It was a head of Medusa, and the
frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere's ruffled nerves with
extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol
of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the
heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man
before him was not the first victim he had known.
Possessed with the fancy the young man made his way into the hall.
Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of passionate regret: 'Shall
I ever see this again?' he asked himself. During the past twelve months
his pleasure in the great house had been much more than sensuous. Within
those walls his mind had grown, had reached to a fuller stature than
before, and a man loves, or should love, all that is associated with the
maturing of his best self.
He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadly. The magnificent pile,
grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist which enwrapped it, seemed
to look after him as he walked away, mutely wondering that he should
have allowed anything so trivial as a peasant's grievance to come
between him and its perfections.
* * * * *
In the wooded lane outside the rectory gate he overtook Catherine. He
gave her his report, and they walked on together arm-in-arm, a very
depressed pair.
'What shall you do next?' she asked him.
'Make out the law of the matter,' he said briefly.
'If you get over the inspector,' said Catherine anxiously, 'I am
tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.'
He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such
cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector's attention.
Catherine did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm.
But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first serious
practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself
distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have
harassed him by over advice.
So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him
with a sigh.
'Let it be a while,' he said, with a shake of his long frame. 'I shall
get morbid over it if I don't mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know
you have worries of your own, wifie.'
And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a boyish
tenderness.
'Yes,' said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. 'Robert,' she burst out
again, 'I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_ will
never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my
mind, is simply a changed creature.'
'_I_ don't see it,' said Robert doubtfully.
Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That
men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible!
'You have been studying the squire, sir--I have been studying Rose.'
Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of
change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose's
proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm's
length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of
Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those
stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married
life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that
there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had
struck him first reappear.
'Of course I feel myself to blame,' he said when she stopped. 'But how
could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I
owed him--I owe him--so much.'
'I know,' said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her
that that old debt had been more than effaced.
'You will have to send her to Berlin,' said Elsmere after a pause. 'You
must play off her music against this unlucky feeling. If it exists it is
your only chance.'