Robert Elsmere
'Yes, she must go to Berlin,' said Catherine slowly.
Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling breaking up
the delicate resolution of the face.
'I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened my world for
me!'
Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They were in the
woodpath. She crept inside her husband's arm and put up her face to him,
swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love.
The next day Robert walked over to the little market town of Churton,
saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of the place, and got
from him a complete account of the present state of the rural sanitary
law. The first step clearly was to move the sanitary inspector; if that
failed for any reason, then any _bona fide_ inhabitant had an appeal to
the local sanitary authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked
home pondering his information, and totally ignorant that Henslowe, who
was always at Churton on market-days, had been in the market-place at
the moment when the rector's tall figure had disappeared within Mr.
Dunstan's office-door. That door was unpleasantly known to the agent in
connection with some energetic measures for raising money he had been
lately under the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attracting
his eyes by means of the fascination that often attaches to disagreeable
objects.
In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing-room.
Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap and her eyes were
staring intently into a world whereof they only had the key. Suddenly
there was a ring at the bell. The servant came, and there were several
voices and a sound of much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading to
the study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped
with an exclamation.
His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old Milsom, more sallow
and palsied than ever. As he stood bent almost double, his old knotted
hand resting for support on the table beside him, everything in the
little hall seemed to shake with him. The other was Sharland, the
handsome father of the twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with
every imaginable delicacy since Robert's last visit to the hamlet. Even
his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature decay. The rolling
gipsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs dragged a little.
They had come to implore the rector to let Mile End alone. Henslowe had
been over there in the afternoon, and had given them all very plainly to
understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled any more they would be all turned
out at a week's notice to shift as they could. 'And if you don't find
Thurston Common nice lying this weather, with the winter coming on,
you'll know who to thank for it,' the agent had flung behind him as he
rode off.
Robert turned white. Rose, watching the little scene with listless eyes,
saw him towering over the group like an embodiment of wrath and pity.
'If they turn us out, sir,' said old Milsom, wistfully looking up at
Elsmere with blear eyes, 'there'll be nothing left but the House for us
old 'uns. Why, lor' bless you, sir, it's not so bad but we can make
shift.'
'You, Milsom!' cried Robert; 'and you've just all but lost your
grandchild! And you know your wife'll never be the same woman since that
bout of fever in the spring. And----'
His quick eyes ran over the old man's broken frame with a world of
indignant meaning in them.
'Ay, ay, sir,' said Milsom, unmoved. 'But if it isn't fevers, it's
summat else. I can make a shilling or two where I be, speshally in the
first part of the year, in the basket work, and my wife she goes
charring up at Mr. Carter's farm, and Mr. Dodson, him at the farther
farm, he do give us a bit sometimes. Ef you git us turned away it will
be a bad day's work for all on us, sir, you may take my word on it.'
'And my wife so ill, Mr. Elsmere,' said Sharland, 'and all those
childer! I can't walk three miles farther to my work, Mr. Elsmere, I
can't nohow. I haven't got the legs for it. Let un be, sir. We'll rub
along.'
Robert tried to argue the matter.
If they would but stand by him he would fight the matter through, and
they should not suffer, if he had to get up a public subscription, or
support them out of his own pocket all the winter. A bold front, and
Mr. Henslowe must give way. The law was on their side, and every
labourer in Surrey would be the better off for their refusal to be
housed like pigs and poisoned like vermin.
In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious endurance in the
poor against which the keenest reformer constantly throws himself in
vain. Elsmere was beaten. The two men got his word, and shuffled off
back to their pestilential hovels, a pathetic content beaming on each
face.
Catherine and Robert went back into the study. Rose heard her
brother-in-law's passionate sigh as the door swung behind them.
'Defeated!' she said to herself with a curious accent. 'Well, everybody
must have his turn. Robert has been too successful in his life, I
think.--You wretch!' she added, after a minute, laying her bright head
down on the book before her.
Next morning his wife found Elsmere after breakfast busily packing a
case of books in the study. They were books from the Hall library, which
so far had been for months the inseparable companions of his historical
work.
Catherine stood and watched him sadly.
'Must you, Robert?'
'I won't be beholden to that man for anything an hour longer than I can
help,' he answered her.
When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where she stood in
the open window.
'Things won't be as easy for us in the future, darling,' he said to her.
'A rector with both squire and agent against him is rather heavily
handicapped. We must make up our minds to that.'
'I have no great fear,' she said, looking at him proudly.
'Oh, well--nor I--perhaps,' he admitted, after a moment. 'We can hold
our own. But I wish--oh, I wish'--and he laid his hand on his wife's
shoulder--'I could have made friends with the squire.'
Catherine looked less responsive.
'As squire, Robert, or as Mr. Wendover?'
'As both, of course, but specially as Mr. Wendover.'
'We can do without his friendship,' she said with energy.
Robert gave a great stretch, as though to work off his regrets.
'Ah, but,' he said, half to himself, as his arms dropped, 'if you are
just filled with the hunger to _know_, the people who know as much as
the squire become very interesting to you!'
Catherine did not answer. But probably her heart went out once more in
protest against a knowledge that was to her but a form of revolt against
the awful powers of man's destiny.
'However, here go his books,' said Robert.
* * * * *
Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appearance, Mrs.
Leyburn all in a flutter concerning the event over which, in her own
opinion, she had come to preside. In her gentle fluid mind all
impressions were short-lived. She had forgotten how she had brought up
her own babies, but Mrs. Thornburgh, who had never had any, had filled
her full of nursery lore. She sat retailing a host of second-hand hints
and instructions to Catherine, who would every now and then lay her hand
smiling on her mother's knee, well pleased to see the flush of pleasure
on the pretty old face, and ready, in her patient filial way, to let
herself be experimented on to the utmost, if it did but make the poor
foolish thing happy.
Then came a night when every soul in the quiet rectory, even hot,
smarting Rose, was possessed by one thought through many terrible hours,
and one only--the thought of Catherine's safety. It was strange and
unexpected, but Catherine, the most normal and healthy of women, had a
hard struggle for her own life and her child's, and it was not till the
gray autumn morning, after a day and night which left a permanent mark
on Robert, that he was summoned at last, and with the sense of one
emerging from black gulfs of terror, received from his wife's languid
hand the tiny fingers of his firstborn.
The days that followed were full of emotion for these two people, who
were perhaps always over-serious, over-sensitive. They had no idea of
minimising the great common experiences of life. Both of them were
really simple, brought up in old-fashioned simple ways, easily touched,
responsive to all that high spiritual education which flows from the
familiar incidents of the human story, approached poetically and
passionately. As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife's room,
the occasional restless movements of the small brown head against her
breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country silence, he
felt all the deep familiar currents of human feeling sweeping through
him--love, reverence, thanksgiving--and all the walls of the soul, as it
were, expanding and enlarging as they passed.
Responsive creature that he was, the experience of these days was hardly
happiness. It went too deep; it brought him too poignantly near to all
that is most real and therefore most tragic in life.
Catherine's recovery also was slower than might have been expected,
considering her constitutional soundness, and for the first week, after
that faint moment of joy when her child was laid upon her arm, and she
saw her husband's quivering face above her, there was a kind of
depression hovering over her. Robert felt it, and felt too that all his
devotion could not soothe it away. At last she said to him one evening,
in the encroaching September twilight, speaking with a sudden hurrying
vehemence, wholly unlike herself, as though a barrier of reserve had
given way,--
'Robert I cannot put it out of my head. I cannot forget it, _the pain of
the world_!'
He shut the book he was reading, her hand in his, and bent over her with
questioning eyes.
'It seems,' she went on, with that difficulty which a strong nature
always feels in self-revelation, 'to take the joy even out of our
love--and the child. I feel ashamed almost that mere physical pain
should have laid such hold on me--and yet I can't get away from it. It's
not for myself,' and she smiled faintly at him. 'Comparatively I had so
little to bear! But I know now for the first time what physical pain may
mean--and I never knew before! I lie thinking, Robert, about all
creatures in pain--workmen crushed by machinery, or soldiers--or poor
things in hospitals--above all of women! Oh, when I get well, how I will
take care of the women here! What women must suffer even here in
out-of-the-way cottages--no doctor, no kind nursing, all blind agony and
struggle! And women in London in dens like those Mr. Newcome got into,
degraded, forsaken, ill-treated, the thought of the child only an extra
horror and burden! And the pain all the time so merciless, so cruel--no
escape! Oh, to give all one is, or ever can be, to comforting! And yet
the great sea of it one can never touch! It is a nightmare--I am weak
still, I suppose; I don't know myself; but I can see nothing but jarred,
tortured creatures everywhere. All my own joys and comforts seem to lift
me selfishly above the common lot.'
She stopped, her large gray-blue eyes dim with tears, trying once more
for that habitual self-restraint which physical weakness had shaken.
'You _are_ weak,' he said, caressing her, 'and that destroys for a time
the normal balance of things. It is true, darling, but we are not meant
to see it always so clearly. God knows we could not bear it if we did.'
'And to think,' she said, shuddering a little, 'that there are men and
women who in the face of it can still refuse Christ and the Cross, can
still say this life is all! How can they live--how dare they live?'