Robert Elsmere
Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who adored his
wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and thanked God every
morning that he was an Englishman, rode over to Mile End. Robert, who
had just been round the place with the inspector and was dead tired, had
only energy to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry,
leaving a cheque behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong
language, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled.
A few days later Mr. Wendover's crimes as a landowner, his agent's
brutality, young Elsmere's devotion, and the horrors of the Mile End
outbreak, were in everybody's mouths. The county was roused. The Radical
newspaper came out on the Saturday with a flaming article; Robert, much
to his annoyance, found himself the local hero; and money began to come
in to him freely.
On the Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene with an army of
workmen. A racy communication from the inspector had reached him two
days before, so had a copy of the _Churton Advertiser_. He had spent
Sunday in a drinking bout, turning over all possible plans of vengeance
and evasion. Towards the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt clever
Scotchwoman, who saw ruin before them, and had on occasion an even
sharper tongue than her husband, managed to capture the supplies of
brandy in the house and effectually conceal them. Then she waited for
the moment of collapse which came on towards morning, and with her hands
on her hips she poured into him a volley of home-truths which not even
Sir Harry Varley could have bettered. Henslowe's nerve gave way. He went
out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look for workmen.
Robert, standing on the step of a cottage, watched him give his orders,
and took vigilant note of their substance. They embodied the inspector's
directions, and the rector was satisfied. Henslowe was obliged to pass
him on his way to another group of houses. At first he affected not to
see the rector, then suddenly Elsmere was conscious that the man's
bloodshot eyes were on him. Such a look! If hate could have killed,
Elsmere would have fallen where he stood. Yet the man's hand
mechanically moved to his hat, as though the spell of his wife's
harangue were still potent over his shaking muscles.
Robert took no notice whatever of the salutation. He stood calmly
watching till Henslowe disappeared into the last house. Then he called
one of the agent's train, heard what was to be done, gave a sharp nod of
assent, and turned on his heel. So far so good: the servant had been
made to feel, but he wished it had been the master. Oh, those three
little emaciated creatures whose eyes he had closed, whose clammy hands
he had held to the last!--what reckoning should be asked for their
undeserved torments when the Great Account came to be made up?
Meanwhile not a sound apparently of all this reached the squire in the
sublime solitude of Murewell. A fortnight had passed. Henslowe had been
conquered, the county had rushed to Elsmere's help, and neither he nor
Mrs. Darcy had made a sign. Their life was so abnormal that it was
perfectly possible they had heard nothing. Elsmere wondered when they
_would_ hear.
The rector's chief help and support all through had been old Meyrick.
The parish doctor had been in bed with rheumatism when the epidemic
broke out, and Robert, feeling it a comfort to be rid of him, had thrown
the whole business into the hands of Meyrick and his son. This son was
nominally his father's junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young
and brilliant M.D. fresh from a great hospital, and his father was just
a poor old general practitioner, with the barest qualification, and only
forty years' experience to recommend him, it will easily be imagined
that the subordination was purely nominal. Indeed young Meyrick was fast
ousting his father in all directions, and the neighbourhood, which had
so far found itself unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene
without old Meyrick's assistance, was beginning to send notes to the
house in Churton High Street, whereon the superscription 'Dr. _Edward_
Meyrick' was underlined with ungrateful emphasis. The father took his
deposition very quietly. Only on Murewell Hall would he allow no
trespassing, and so long as his son left him undisturbed there, he took
his effacement in other quarters with perfect meekness.
Young Elsmere's behaviour to him, however, at a time when all the rest
of the Churton world was beginning to hold him cheap and let him see it,
had touched the old man's heart, and he was the rector's slave in this
Mile End business. Edward Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the
hamlet once a day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him. His
attainments, of course, were useful, but his cocksureness was
irritating, and his manner to his father abominable. The father, on the
other hand, came over in the shabby pony-cart he had driven for the last
forty years, and having himself no press of business, would spend hours
with the rector over the cases, giving them an infinity of patient
watching, and amusing Robert by the cautious hostility he would allow
himself every now and then towards his son's new-fangled devices.
At first Meyrick showed himself fidgety as to the squire. Had he been
seen, been heard from? He received Robert's sharp negatives with long
sighs, but Robert clearly saw that, like the rest of the world, he was
too much afraid of Mr. Wendover to go and beard him. Some months before,
as it happened, Elsmere had told him the story of his encounter with the
squire, and had been a good deal moved and surprised by the old man's
concern.
One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, when the
state of things in the hamlet was beginning decidedly to mend, Meyrick
arrived for his morning round, much preoccupied. He hurried his work a
little, and after it was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him.
'I have seen the squire, sir,' he said, turning on his companion with a
certain excitement.
Robert flushed.
'Have you?' he replied with his hands behind him, and a world of
expression in his sarcastic voice.
'You misjudge him! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere!' the old man said
tremulously. 'I told you he could know nothing of this business--and he
didn't! He has been in town part of the time, and down here--how is he
to know anything? He sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real
_bad_ fellow.'
'Don't abuse the man,' said Robert, looking up. 'It's not worth while,
when you can say your mind of the master.'
Old Meyrick sighed.
'Well,' said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and quivering, 'you
told him the story, I suppose? Seven deaths, is it, by now? Well, what
sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents'--and he
smiled--'produce?'
'He talked of sending money,' said Meyrick doubtfully; 'he said he would
have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr.
Elsmere, you think too hardly of the squire, that you do!'
They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to
discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be labouring under some
suppressed emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a
doctor of the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more
or less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve,
generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on
telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable and
ghastly story of the old squire's suicide. He described the heir's
summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its
horrors, and that mysterious condition of the squire for some months
afterwards, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the
Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor,
had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover's physical and mental
breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited
fatality which at that period of his life not even the squire's iron
will had been able wholly to conceal.
Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found
himself with some curiosity realising the squire from another man's
totally different point of view. Evidently Meyrick had seen him at such
moments as wring from the harshest nature whatever grains of tenderness,
of pity, or of natural human weakness may be in it. And it was clear,
too, that the squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling
a certain soothing influence in the _naivete_ and simplicity of the old
man's sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding
that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick's presence, such
as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in him since his earliest
youth.
And yet how childish the old man's whole mental image of the squire was
after all! What small account it made of the subtleties, the gnarled
intricacies and contradictions of such a character! Horror at his
father's end, and dread of a like fate for himself! Robert did not know
very much of the squire, but he knew enough to feel sure that this
confiding indulgent theory of Meyrick's was ludicrously far from the
mark as an adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover's later life.
Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resistance which his
companion's mind was opposing to his own. He dropped the wandering
narrative he was busy upon with a sigh.
'Ah well, I daresay it's hard, it's hard,' he said with patient
acquiescence in his voice, 'to believe a man can't help himself. I
daresay we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But if ever there
was a man sick in mind--for all his book-learning they talk about--and
sick in soul, that man is the squire.'
Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was a new dignity
about the simple old man. The old-fashioned deference, which had never
let him forget in speaking to Robert that he was speaking to a man of
family, and which showed itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions
which were a torment to his son, had given way to something still more
deeply ingrained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the spectacles
and the long straight hair--like the figure of a superannuated
schoolmaster--assumed, as he turned again to his younger companion,
something of authority, something almost of stateliness.
'Ah, Mr. Elsmere,' he said, laying his shrunk hand on the younger
man's sleeve and speaking with emotion, 'you're very good to the
poor. We're all proud of you--you and your good lady. But when
you were coming, and I heard tell all about you, I thought of
my poor squire, and I said to myself, "That young man'll be good
to _him_. The squire will make friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere
will have a good wife--and there'll be children born to him--and
the squire will take an interest--and--and--maybe----'"
The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently.
'And there was something in the way between you,' the speaker went on,
sighing. 'I daresay you were quite right--quite right. I can't judge.
Only there are ways of doing a thing. And it was a last chance; and now
its missed--it's missed. Ah! it's no good talking; he has a heart--he
has! Many's the kind thing he's done in old days for me and mine--I'll
never forget them! But all these last few years--oh, I know, I know. You
can't go and shut your heart up, and fly in the face of all the duties
the Lord laid on you, without losing yourself and setting the Lord
against you. But it is pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it's pitiful!'
It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine breath passing
through the wintry lane and through the shaking voice of the old man.