Robert Elsmere
Beside the spirit looking out of those wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth,
its justest resentments, its most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh,
inexcusable.
'Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless you! Don't imagine I will
forget a word you have said to me.'
The rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a gentle smile
passed over Meyrick's ageing face, and they parted.
That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with John Allwood,
the youth of twenty whose case had been a severer tax on the powers of
the little nursing staff than perhaps any other. Mother and neighbours
were worn out, and it was difficult to spare a hospital nurse for long
together from the diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted
during the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the
nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept soundly on a bed
made up in the ground-floor room of the little sanatorium. Then at
twelve the nurse called him, and he went out, his eyes still heavy with
sleep, into a still frosty winter's night.
After so much rain, so much restlessness of wind and cloud, the silence
and the starry calm of it were infinitely welcome. The sharp cold air
cleared his brain and braced his nerves, and by the time he reached the
cottage whither he was bound, he was broad awake. He opened the door
softly, passed through the lower room, crowded with sleeping children,
climbed the narrow stairs as noiselessly as possible, and found himself
in a garret, faintly lit, a bed in one corner and a woman sitting beside
it. The woman glided away, the rector looked carefully at the table of
instructions hanging over the bed, assured himself that wine and milk
and beef essence and medicines were ready to his hand, put out his watch
on the wooden table near the bed, and sat him down to his task. The boy
was sleeping the sleep of weakness. Food was to be given every
half-hour, and in this perpetual impulse to the system lay his only
chance.
The rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could just read it by
the help of the dim light. But after a while, as the still hours passed
on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat thinking--endlessly thinking.
The young labourer lay motionless beside him, the lines of the long
emaciated frame showing through the bed-clothes. The night-light
flickered on the broken discoloured ceiling; every now and then a mouse
scratched in the plaster; the mother's heavy breathing came from the
next room; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried outside. Otherwise
deep silence, such silence as drives the soul back upon itself.
Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. The stern
judgments, the passionate condemnations which his nature housed so
painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul breathed an 'ampler aether, a
diviner air.' Oh! the mysteries of life and character, the subtle
inexhaustible claims of pity! The problems which hang upon our being
here; its mixture of elements; the pressure of its inexorable physical
environment; the relations of mind to body, of man's poor will to this
tangled tyrannous life--it was along these old, old lines his thought
went painfully groping; and always at intervals it came back to the
squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new soberness, a new
humility and patience entering in.
And yet it was not Meyrick's facts exactly that had brought this about.
Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit
of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had
declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him.
Then these thoughts led him on farther and farther from man to God, from
human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours
did Elsmere's hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint
sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and
strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its
source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt,
of bitter brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the
eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling awhile, and
then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering
faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine's hand. It
was she who led him through the shades; it was her voice murmuring in
his ear.
When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible waves into
the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but years of experience lay
between him and the beginnings of his watch.
'It is by these moments we should date our lives,' he murmured to
himself as he rose; 'they are the only real landmarks.'
It was eight o'clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him had come. The
results of the night for his charge were good: the strength had been
maintained, the pulse was firmer, the temperature lower. The boy,
throwing off his drowsiness, lay watching the rector's face as he talked
in an undertone to the nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb friendly
wistfulness. When Robert bent over him to say good-bye, this expression
brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, feeling at
last that there was a promise of life in his look and touch.
In another moment he had stepped out into the January morning. It was
clear and still as the night had been. In the east there was a pale
promise of sun; the reddish-brown trunks of the fir woods had just
caught it, and rose faintly glowing in endless vistas and colonnades one
behind the other. The flooded river itself rushed through the bridge as
full and turbid as before, but all the other water surfaces had gleaming
films of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, almost a festal air
under the touch of the frost, while on the side of the hill leading to
Murewell, tree rose above tree, the delicate network of their wintry
twigs and branches set against stretches of frost-whitened grass, till
finally they climbed into the pale all-completing blue. In a copse close
at hand there were woodcutters at work, and piles of gleaming laths
shining through the underwood. Robins hopped along the frosty road, and
as he walked on through the houses towards the bridge, Robert's quick
ear distinguished that most wintry of all sounds--the cry of a flock of
fieldfares passing overhead.
As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure upon it,
the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, leaning against
the stone parapet. With a start he recognised the squire.
He went up to him without an instant's slackening of his steady step.
The squire heard the sound of some one coming, turned, and saw the
rector.
'I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover,' said Robert, stopping and
holding out his hand. 'I meant to have come to talk to you about this
place this morning. I ought to have come before.'
He spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had parted the day
before. The squire touched his hand for an instant.
'You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,' he said, endeavouring to
speak with all his old hauteur, while his heavy lips twitched nervously,
'that, for one reason and another, I knew nothing of the epidemic here
till yesterday, when Meyrick told me.'
'I heard from Mr. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here now, Mr.
Wendover, and I am in no great hurry to get home, may I take you through
and show you the people?'
The squire at last looked at him straight--at the face worn and pale,
yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which something of the
solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed to be still lingering.
'Are you just come?' he said abruptly, 'or are you going back?'
'I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of the fever
cases. It's hard work for the nurses, and the relations sometimes,
without help.'
The squire moved on mechanically towards the village, and Robert moved
beside him.
'And Mrs. Elsmere?'
'Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to stay the night
when the diphtheria was at its worst; but there are only four anxious
cases left--the rest all convalescent.'
The squire said no more, and they turned into the lane, where the ice
lay thick in the deep ruts, and on either hand curls of smoke rose into
the clear cold sky. The squire looked about him with eyes which no
detail escaped. Robert, without a word of comment, pointed out this
feature and that, showed where Henslowe had begun repairs, where the new
well was to be, what the water supply had been till now, drew the
squire's attention to the roofs, the pigstyes, the drainage, or rather
complete absence of drainage, and all in the dry voice of some one going
through a catalogue. Word had already fled like wildfire through the
hamlet that the squire was there. Children and adults, a pale emaciated
crew, poured out into the wintry air to look. The squire knit his brows
with annoyance as the little crowd in the lane grew. Robert took no
notice.
Presently he pushed open the door of the house where he had spent the
night. In the kitchen a girl of sixteen was clearing away the various
nondescript heaps on which the family had slept, and was preparing
breakfast. The squire looked at the floor.
'I thought I understood from Henslowe,' he muttered, as though to
himself, 'that there were no mud floors left on the estate----'
'There are only three houses in Mile End without them,' said Robert,
catching what he said.
They went upstairs, and the mother stood open-eyed while the squire's
restless look gathered in the details of the room, the youth's face, as
he lay back on his pillows, whiter than they, exhausted and yet
refreshed by the sponging with vinegar and water which the mother had
just been administering to him; the bed, the gaps in the worm-eaten
boards, the spots in the roof where the plaster bulged inward, as though
a snake would bring it down; the coarse china shepherdesses on the
mantel-shelf, and the flowers which Catherine had put there the day
before. He asked a few questions, said an abrupt word or two to the
mother, and they tramped downstairs again and into the street. Then
Robert took him across to the little improvised hospital, saying to him
on the threshold, with a moment's hesitation,--
'As you know, for adults there is not much risk, but there is always
some risk----'
A peremptory movement of the squire's hand stopped him, and they went
in. In the downstairs room were half-a-dozen convalescents, pale,
shadowy creatures, four of them under ten, sitting up in their little
cots, each of them with a red flannel jacket drawn from Lady Helen's
stores, and enjoying the breakfast which a nurse in white cap and apron
had just brought them. Upstairs, in a room from which a lath-and-plaster
partition had been removed, and which had been adapted, warmed and
ventilated by various contrivances to which Robert and Meyrick had
devoted their practical minds, were the 'four anxious cases.' One of
them, a little creature of six, one of Sharland's black-eyed children,
was sitting up, supported by the nurse, and coughing its little life
away. As soon as he saw it, Robert's step quickened. He forgot the
squire altogether. He came and stood by the bedside, rigidly still, for
he could do nothing, but his whole soul absorbed in that horrible
struggle for air. How often he had seen it now, and never without the
same wild sense of revolt and protest! At last the hideous membrane was
loosened, the child got relief, and lay back white and corpse-like, but
with a pitiful momentary relaxation of the drawn lines on its little
brow. Robert stooped and kissed the damp tiny hand. The child's eyes
remained shut, but the fingers made a feeble effort to close on his.