Robert Elsmere
place; three cases of diphtheria in one house, Sharland's wife--and two
others down with fever.'
She made a horrified exclamation.
'It will spread,' he said gloomily, 'I know it will. I never saw the
children look such a ghastly crew before. Well, I must go for Meyrick
and a nurse, and we must isolate and make a fight for it.'
In a few days the diphtheria epidemic in the hamlet had reached terrible
proportions. There had been one death, others were expected, and soon
Robert in his brief hours at home could find no relief in anything, so
heavy was the oppression of the day's memories. At first Catherine for
the child's sake kept away; but the little Mary was weaned, had a good
Scotch nurse, was in every way thriving, and after a day or two
Catherine's craving to help, to be with Robert in his trouble, was too
strong to be withstood. But she dared not go backwards and forwards
between her baby and the diphtheritic children. So she bethought herself
of Mrs. Elsmere's servant, old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs.
Elsmere's cottage till a tenant could be found for it, and doing good
service meanwhile as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse
went over to the cottage. Catherine carried the child there, wrapped
close in maternal arms, and leaving her on old Martha's lap, went back
to Robert.
Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight with the
epidemic. At the climax of it there were about twenty children down with
it in different stages, and seven cases of fever. They had two hospital
nurses; one of the better cottages, turned into a sanatorium,
accommodated the worst cases under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine,
directed by them and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest,
he helping to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases
Sharland's wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it seemed
almost impossible she could weather through. But day after day passed,
and by dint of incessant nursing she still lived. A youth of twenty,
the main support of a mother and five or six younger children was also
desperately ill. Robert hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and the
boy's dog-like affection for the rector, struggling with his deathly
weakness, was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and
Ormuzd--the power of life struggling with the power of death.
It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband and wife as
though the few daily hours spent at the rectory were mere halts between
successive acts of battle with the plague-fiend--a more real and grim
Grendel of the Marshes--for the lives of children. Catherine could
always sleep in these intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very
soon could only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick's.
On all occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in him
of a certain lack of constitutional hardness which his mother knew very
well, but which his wife was only just beginning to recognise. However,
he laughed to scorn any attempt to restrain his constant goings and
comings, or those hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital
nurses were the first to admit, no one was so successful as the rector.
And when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, the worn
and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge warm at each heart of
those before him of how the rector not only talked but lived, carried
every word home.
This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, strangely
enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke through a tension
of brain which of late had become an oppression. And for both him and
Catherine these dark times had moments of intensest joy, points of white
light illuminating heaven and earth. There were cloudy nights--wet,
stormy January nights--when sometimes it happened to them to come back
both together from the hamlet, Robert carrying a lantern, Catherine
clothed in waterproof from head to foot, walking beside him, the rays
flashing now on her face, now on the wooded sides of the lane, while the
wind howled through the dark vault of branches overhead. And then, as
they talked or were silent, suddenly a sense of the intense blessedness
of this comradeship of theirs would rise like a flood in the man's
heart, and he would fling his free arm round her, forcing her to stand a
moment in the January night and storm while he said to her words of
passionate gratitude, of faith in an immortal union reaching beyond
change or death, lost in a kiss which was a sacrament. Then there were
the moments when they saw their child, held high in Martha's arms at the
window, and leaping towards her mother; the moments when one pallid
sickly being after another was pronounced out of danger; and by the help
of them the weeks passed away.
Nor were they left without help from outside. Lady Helen Varley no
sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Robert, on his way one
morning from one cottage to another, saw her pony-carriage in the lane.
He hastened up to her before she could dismount.
'No, Lady Helen, you mustn't come here,' he said to her peremptorily, as
she held out her hand.
'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his grandmother. Let me
just go through, at any rate, and see what I can send you.'
Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs and hers had
once described this little lady to Elsmere by a French sentence which
originally applied to the Duchesse de Choiseul. 'Une charmante petite
fee sortie d'un oeuf enchante!'--so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere
looked down upon her now, fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels
behind him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of
life. Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the production
of which even Worth had felt some pride; a little green velvet bonnet
perched on her fair hair; one tiny hand, ungloved, seemed ablaze with
diamonds; there were opals and diamonds somewhere at her throat,
gleaming among her sables. But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she
wore her high birth, her quaint irregular prettiness, or the one or two
brilliant gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. She loved
her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased her to wear them
in the morning, she wore them; and in five minutes she was capable of
making the sourest puritan forget to frown on her and them. To Robert
she always seemed the quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their
best. All her freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful.
At her freest and gayest there were things in her--restraints,
reticences, perceptions--which implied behind her generations of rich,
happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate all the more
delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. Robert was often
struck by the curious differences between her and Rose. Rose was far the
handsomer; she was at least as clever; and she had a strong imperious
will where Lady Helen had only impulses and sympathies and
_engouements_. But Rose belonged to the class which struggles, where
each individual depends on himself and knows it. Lady Helen had never
struggled for anything--all the best things of the world were hers so
easily that she hardly gave them a thought; or rather, what she had
gathered without pain she held so lightly, she dispensed so lavishly,
that men's eyes followed her, fluttering through life, with much the
same feeling as was struck from Clough's radical hero by the peerless
Lady Maria--
'Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness,
Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you;
Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous; only be lovely!'
'Uncaring,' however, little Lady Helen never was. If she was a fairy,
she was a fairy all heart, all frank foolish smiles and tears.
'No, Lady Helen--no,' Robert said again. 'This is no place for you, and
we are getting on capitally.'
She pouted a little.
'I believe you and Mrs. Elsmere are just killing yourselves all in a
corner, with no one to see,' she said indignantly. 'If you won't let me
see, I shall send Sir Harry. But who'--and her brown fawn's eyes ran
startled over the cottages before her--'who, Mr. Elsmere, does this
_dreadful_ place belong to?'
'Mr. Wendover,' said Robert shortly.
'Impossible!' she cried incredulously. 'Why, I wouldn't ask one of my
dogs to sleep there,' and she pointed to the nearest hovel, whereof the
walls were tottering outwards, the thatch was falling to pieces, and the
windows were mended with anything that came handy--rags, paper, or the
crown of an old hat.
'No, you would be ill advised,' said Robert, looking with a bitter
little smile at the sleek dachshund that sat blinking beside its
mistress.
'But what is the agent about?'
Then Robert told her the story, not mincing his words. Since the
epidemic had begun, all that sense of imaginative attraction which had
been reviving in him towards the squire had been simply blotted out by a
fierce heat of indignation. When he thought of Mr. Wendover now, he
thought of him as the man to whom in strict truth it was owing that
helpless children died in choking torture. All that agony of wrath and
pity he had gone through in the last ten days sprang to his lips now as
he talked to Lady Helen, and poured itself into his words.
'Old Meyrick and I have taken things into our own hands now,' he said at
last briefly. 'We have already made two cottages fairly habitable.
To-morrow the inspector comes. I told the people yesterday I wouldn't be
bound by my promise a day longer. He must put the screw on Henslowe, and
if Henslowe dawdles, why we shall just drain and repair and sink for a
well ourselves. I can find the money somehow. At present we get all our
water from one of the farms on the brow.'
'Money!' said Lady Helen impulsively, her looks warm with sympathy for
the pale harassed young rector. 'Sir Harry shall send you as much as you
want. And anything else--blankets--coals?'
Out came her note-book, and Robert was drawn into a list. Then, full of
joyfulness at being allowed to help, she gathered up her reins, she
nodded her pretty little head at him, and was just starting off her
ponies at full speed, equally eager 'to tell Harry' and to ransack
Churton for the stores required, when it occurred to her to pull up
again.
'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, does nothing but talk about
your sister-in-law. _Why_ did you keep her all to yourself? Is it kind,
is it neighbourly, to have such a wonder to stay with you and let nobody
share?'
'A wonder?' said Robert, amused. 'Rose plays the violin very well,
but----'
'As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective!' exclaimed Lady
Helen. 'My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in town next season if
you will all let her. I think she would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte
knows all the world and his wife. And if I'm there, and Miss Leyburn
will let me make friends with her, why, you know, _I_ can just protect
her a little from Aunt Charlotte!'
The little laughing face bent forward again; Robert, smiling, raised his
hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else Elsmere would have
thought all this effusion insincere or patronising. But Lady Helen was
the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only high-born woman he had
ever met who was really, and not only apparently, free from the
'nonsense of rank.' Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte's social
tolerance to be a mere varnish. But this little person, and her
favourite brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts of him, must always
have found life too romantic, too wildly and delightfully interesting
from top to bottom, to be measured by any but romantic standards.