Robert Elsmere
encroach, to intermeddle with the mind's other furniture.
And the comparative instinct--that tool, _par excellence_, of modern
science--was at last fully awake, was growing fast, taking hold, now
here, now there.
'It is tolerably clear to me,' he said to himself suddenly one winter
afternoon, as he was trudging home alone from Mile End, 'that some day
or other I must set to work to bring a little order into one's notions
of the Old Testament. At present they are just a chaos!'
He walked on a while, struggling with the rainstorm which had overtaken
him, till again the mind's quick life took voice.
'But what matter? God in the beginning--God in the prophets--in Israel's
best life--God in Christ! How are any theories about the Pentateuch to
touch that?'
And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow with wind and rain, there
leapt a light, a softness indescribable.
But the vivider and the keener grew this new mental life of Elsmere's,
the more constant became his sense of soreness as to that foolish and
motiveless quarrel which divided him from the squire. Naturally he was
for ever being harassed and pulled up in his work by the mere loss of
the Murewell library. To have such a collection so close, and to be cut
off from it, was a state of things no student could help feeling
severely. But it was much more than that: it was the man he hankered
after; the man who was a master where he was a beginner; the man who had
given his life to learning, and was carrying all his vast accumulations
sombrely to the grave, unused, untransmitted.
'He might have given me his knowledge,' thought Elsmere sadly, 'and
I--I--would have been a son to him. Why is life so perverse?'
Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and its master as
though both had been surrounded by the thorn hedge of fairy tale. The
Hall had its visitors during these winter months, but the Elsmeres saw
nothing of them. Robert gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday
evening, as he passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the
chief of English science side by side with the most accomplished of
English critics.
'"There are good times in the world and I ain't in 'em!"' he said to
himself with a laugh and a shrug as he turned up the lane to the
rectory, and then, boy-like, was ashamed of himself, and greeted
Catherine with all the tenderer greeting.
Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure of having
seen the squire. Both were in the twilight, when, as the neighbourhood
declared, Mr. Wendover always walked, and both made a sharp impression
on the rector's nerves. In the heart of one of the loneliest commons of
the parish Robert, swinging along one November evening through the
scattered furze bushes, growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly
conscious of a cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head bent
forward coming towards him. It passed without recognition of any kind,
and for an instant Robert caught the long sharpened features and haughty
eyes of the squire.
At another time Robert was walking, far from home, along a bit of level
road. The pools in the ruts were just filmed with frost, and gleamed
under the sunset; the winter dusk was clear and chill. A horseman turned
into the road from a side lane. It was the squire again, alone. The
sharp sound of the approaching hoofs stirred Robert's pulse, and as they
passed each other the rector raised his hat. He thought his greeting was
acknowledged, but could not be quite sure. From the shelter of a group
of trees he stood a moment and looked after the retreating figure. It
and the horse showed dark against a wide sky barred by stormy reds and
purples. The wind whistled through the withered oaks; the long road with
its lines of glimmering pools seemed to stretch endlessly into the
sunset; and with every minute the night strode on. Age and loneliness
could have found no fitter setting. A shiver ran through Elsmere as he
stepped forward.
Undoubtedly the quarrel, helped by his work, and the perpetual presence
of that beautiful house commanding the whole country round it from its
plateau above the river, kept Elsmere specially in mind of the squire.
As before their first meeting, and in spite of it, he became more and
more imaginatively preoccupied with him. One of the signs of it was a
strong desire to read the squire's two famous books: one, _The Idols of
the Market-place_, an attack on English beliefs; the other, _Essays on
English Culture_, an attack on English ideals of education. He had never
come across them as it happened, and perhaps Newcome's denunciation had
some effect in inducing him for a time to refrain from reading them. But
in December he ordered them and waited their coming with impatience. He
said nothing of the order to Catherine; somehow there were by now two or
three portions of his work, two or three branches of his thought, which
had fallen out of their common discussion. After all she was not
literary, and with all their oneness of soul there could not be an
_identity_ of interests or pursuits.
The books arrived in the morning. (Oh, how dismally well, with what a
tightening of the heart, did Robert always remember that day in after
years!) He was much too busy to look at them, and went off to a meeting.
In the evening, coming home late from his night-school, he found
Catherine tired, sent her to bed, and went himself into his study to
put together some notes for a cottage lecture he was to give the
following day. The packet of books, unopened, lay on his writing-table.
He took off the wrapper, and in his eager way fell to reading the first
he touched.
It was the first volume of _The Idols of the Market-place_.
Ten or twelve years before, Mr. Wendover had launched this book into a
startled and protesting England. It had been the fruit of his first
renewal of contact with English life and English ideas after his return
from Berlin. Fresh from the speculative ferment of Germany and the far
profaner scepticism of France, he had returned to a society where the
first chapter of Genesis and the theory of verbal inspiration were still
regarded as valid and important counters on the board of thought. The
result had been this book. In it each stronghold of English popular
religion had been assailed in turn, at a time when English orthodoxy was
a far more formidable thing than it is now.
The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, Tradition, the
Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, the Eighteenth
Century, the Broad Church Movement, Anglican Theology--the squire had
his say about them all. And while the coolness and frankness of the
method sent a shock of indignation and horror through the religious
public, the subtle and caustic style, and the epigrams with which the
book was strewn, forced both the religious and irreligious public to
read, whether they would or no. A storm of controversy rose round the
volumes, and some of the keenest observers of English life had said at
the time, and maintained since, that the publication of the book had
made or marked an epoch.
Robert had lit on those pages in the Essay on the Gospels where the
squire fell to analysing the evidence for the Resurrection, following up
his analysis by an attempt at reconstructing the conditions out of which
the belief in 'the legend' arose. Robert began to read vaguely at first,
then to hurry on through page after page, still standing, seized at once
by the bizarre power of the style, the audacity and range of the
treatment.
Not a sound in the house. Outside, the tossing moaning December night;
inside, the faintly crackling fire, the standing figure. Suddenly it was
to Robert as though a cruel torturing hand were laid upon his inmost
being. His breath failed him; the book slipped out of his grasp; he sank
down upon his chair, his head in his hands. Oh, what a desolate
intolerable moment! Over the young idealist soul there swept a dry
destroying whirlwind of thought. Elements gathered from all
sources--from his own historical work, from the squire's book, from the
secret half-conscious recesses of the mind--entered into it, and as it
passed it seemed to scorch the heart.
He stayed bowed there a while, then he roused himself with a half-groan,
and hastily extinguishing his lamp he groped his way upstairs to his
wife's room. Catherine lay asleep. The child, lost among its white
coverings, slept too; there was a dim light over the bed, the books, the
pictures. Beside his wife's pillow was a table on which there lay open
her little Testament and the _Imitation_ her father had given her.
Elsmere sank down beside her, appalled by the contrast between this soft
religious peace and that black agony of doubt which still overshadowed
him. He knelt there, restraining his breath lest it should wake her,
wrestling piteously with himself, crying for pardon, for faith, feeling
himself utterly unworthy to touch even the dear hand that lay so near
him. But gradually the traditional forces of his life reasserted
themselves. The horror lifted. Prayer brought comfort and a passionate
healing self-abasement. 'Master, forgive--defend--purify,' cried the
aching heart. '_There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou,
O God!_'
He did not open the book again. Next morning he put it back into his
shelves. If there were any Christian who could affront such an
antagonist with a light heart, he felt with a shudder of memory it was
not he.
'I have neither learning nor experience enough--yet,' he said to himself
slowly as he moved away, 'of course it can be met, but _I_ must grow;
must think--first.'
And of that night's wrestle he said not a word to any living soul. He
did penance for it in the tenderest, most secret ways, but he shrank in
misery from the thought of revealing it even to Catherine.
CHAPTER XXI
Meanwhile the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and apparently
throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. Robert, as soon as
he found that radical measures were for the time hopeless, had applied
himself with redoubled energy to making the people use such palliatives
as were within their reach, and had preached boiled water and the
removal of filth till, as he declared to Catherine, his dreams were one
long sanitary nightmare. But he was not confiding enough to believe that
the people paid much heed, and he hoped more from a dry hard winter than
from any exertion either of his or theirs.
But, alas! with the end of November a season of furious rain set in.
Then Robert began to watch Mile End with anxiety, for so far every
outbreak of illness there had followed upon unusual damp. But the rains
passed, leaving behind them no worse results than the usual winter crop
of lung ailments and rheumatism, and he breathed again.
Christmas came and went, and with the end of December the wet weather
returned. Day after day rolling masses of south-west cloud came up from
the Atlantic and wrapped the whole country in rain, which reminded
Catherine of her Westmoreland rain more than any she had yet seen in the
South. Robert accused her of liking it for that reason, but she shook
her head with a sigh, declaring that it was 'nothing without the becks.'
One afternoon she was shutting the door of the school behind her, and
stepping out on the road skirting the green--the bedabbled wintry
green--when she saw Robert emerging from the Mile End lane. She crossed
over to him, wondering as she neared him that he seemed to take no
notice of her. He was striding along, his wideawake over his eyes, and
so absorbed that she had almost touched him before he saw her.
'Darling, is that you? Don't stop me, I am going to take the
pony-carriage in for Meyrick. I have just come back from that accursed