Robert Elsmere
'Mr. Elsmere,' said the nurse, a motherly body, looking at him with
friendly admonition, 'if you don't go home and rest you'll be ill too,
and I'd like to know who'll be the better for that?'
'How many deaths?' asked the squire abruptly, touching Elsmere's arm,
and so reminding Robert of his existence. 'Meyrick spoke of deaths.'
He stood near the door, but his eyes were fixed on the little bed, on
the half-swooning child.
'Seven,' said Robert, turning upon him. 'Five of diphtheria, two of
fever. That little one will go too.'
'Horrible!' said the squire under his breath, and then moved to the
door.
The two men went downstairs in perfect silence. Below, in the
convalescent room, the children were capable of smiles, and of quick
coquettish beckonings to the rector to come and make game with them as
usual. But he could only kiss his hand to them and escape, for there was
more to do.
He took the squire through all the remaining fever cases, and into
several of the worst cottages--Milsom's among them--and when it was all
over they emerged into the lane again, near the bridge. There was still
a crowd of children and women hanging about, watching eagerly for the
squire, whom many of them had never seen at all, and about whom various
myths had gradually formed themselves in the countryside. The squire
walked away from them hurriedly, followed by Robert, and again they
halted on the centre of the bridge. A horse led by a groom was being
walked up and down on a flat piece of road just beyond.
It was an awkward moment. Robert never forgot the thrill of it, or the
association of wintry sunshine streaming down upon a sparkling world of
ice and delicate woodland and foam-flecked river.
The squire turned towards him irresolutely; his sharply-cut wrinkled
lips opening and closing again. Then he held out his hand: 'Mr. Elsmere,
I did you a wrong--I did this place and its people a wrong. In my view,
regret for the past is useless. Much of what has occurred here is
plainly irreparable; I will think what can be done for the future. As
for my relation to you, it rests with you to say whether it can be
amended. I recognise that you have just cause of complaint.'
What invincible pride there was in the man's very surrender! But Elsmere
was not repelled by it. He knew that in their hour together the squire
had _felt_. His soul had lost its bitterness. The dead and their wrong
were with God.
He took the squire's outstretched hand, grasping it cordially, a pure
unworldly dignity in his whole look and bearing.
'Let us be friends, Mr. Wendover. It will be a great comfort to us--my
wife and me. Will you remember us both very kindly to Mrs. Darcy?'
Commonplace words, but words that made an epoch in the life of both. In
another minute the squire, on horseback, was trotting along the side
road leading to the Hall, and Robert was speeding home to Catherine as
fast as his long legs could carry him.
She was waiting for him on the steps, shading her eyes against the
unwonted sun. He kissed her with the spirits of a boy and told her all
his news.
Catherine listened bewildered, not knowing what to say or how all at
once to forgive, to join Robert in forgetting. But that strange
spiritual glow about him was not to be withstood. She threw her arms
about him at last with a half sob,--
'Oh, Robert--yes! Dear Robert--thank God!'
'Never think any more,' he said at last, leading her in from the little
hall, 'of what has been, only of what shall be! Oh, Catherine, give me
some tea; and never did I see anything so tempting as that armchair.'
He sank down into it, and when she put his breakfast beside him she saw
with a start that he was fast asleep. The wife stood and watched him,
the signs of fatigue round eyes and mouth, the placid expression, and
her face was soft with tenderness and joy. 'Of course--of course, even
that hard man must love him. Who could help it? My Robert!'
And so now in this disguise, now in that, the supreme hour of
Catherine's life stole on and on towards her.
CHAPTER XXII
As may be imagined, the _Churton Advertiser_ did not find its way to
Murewell. It was certainly no pressure of social disapproval that made
the squire go down to Mile End in that winter's dawn. The county might
talk, or the local press might harangue, till Doomsday, and Mr. Wendover
would either know nothing or care less.
Still his interview with Meyrick in the park after his return from a
week in town, whither he had gone to see some old Berlin friends, had
been a shock to him. A man may play the intelligent recluse, may refuse
to fit his life to his neighbours' notions as much as you please, and
still find death, especially death for which he has some responsibility,
as disturbing a fact as the rest of us.
He went home in much irritable discomfort. It seemed to him probably
that fortune need not have been so eager to put him in the wrong. To
relieve his mind he sent for Henslowe, and in an interview, the memory
of which sent a shiver through the agent to the end of his days, he let
it be seen that though it did not for the moment suit him to dismiss the
man who had brought this upon him, that man's reign in any true sense
was over.
But afterwards the squire was still restless. What was astir in him was
not so much pity or remorse as certain instincts of race which still
survived under the strange superstructure of manners he had built upon
them. It may be the part of a gentleman and a scholar to let the agent
whom you have interposed between yourself and a boorish peasantry have a
free hand; but, after all, the estate is yours, and to expose the rector
of the parish to all sorts of avoidable risks in the pursuit of his
official duty by reason of the gratuitous filth of your property, is an
act of doubtful breeding. The squire in his most rough-and-tumble days
at Berlin had always felt himself the grandee as well as the student. He
abhorred sentimentalism, but neither did he choose to cut an unseemly
figure in his own eyes.
After a night; therefore, less tranquil or less meditative than usual,
he rose early and sallied forth at one of those unusual hours he
generally chose for walking. The thing must be put right somehow, and at
once, with as little waste of time and energy as possible, and Henslowe
had shown himself not to be trusted; so telling a servant to follow him,
the squire had made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen
for years.
Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition of the rector.
The squire did not want to be impressed by the young man, did not want
to make friends with him. No doubt his devotion had served his own
purposes. Still Mr. Wendover was one of the subtlest living judges of
character when he pleased, and his enforced progress through these
hovels with Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him
with a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment.
'History would be inexplicable after all without the honest fanatic,' he
said to himself on the way home. 'I suppose I had forgotten it. There is
nothing like a dread of being bored for blunting your psychological
instinct.'
In the course of the day he sent off a letter to the rector intimating
in the very briefest, driest way that the cottages should be rebuilt on
a different site as soon as possible, and enclosing a liberal
contribution towards the expenses incurred in fighting the epidemic.
When the letter was gone he drew his books towards him with a sound
which was partly disgust, partly relief. This annoying business had
wretchedly interrupted him, and his concessions left him mainly
conscious of a strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh
interview with young Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology; let
him be content.
However, next morning after breakfast Mr. Wendover once more saw his
study door open to admit the tall figure of the rector. The note and
cheque had reached Robert late the night before, and, true to his
new-born determination to make the best of the squire, he had caught up
his wideawake at the first opportunity and walked off to the Hall to
acknowledge the gift in person. The interview opened as awkwardly as it
was possible, and with their former conversation on the same spot fresh
in their minds both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten minutes. The
squire was asking himself, indeed, impatiently, all the time, whether he
could possibly be forced in the future to put up with such an experience
again, and Robert found his host, if less sarcastic than before,
certainly as impenetrable as ever.
At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and then Robert, as
good luck would have it, turned his longing eyes on the squire's books,
especially on the latest volumes of a magnificent German
_Weltgeschichte_ lying near his elbow, which he had coveted for months
without being able to conquer his conscience sufficiently to become the
possessor of it. He took it up with an exclamation of delight, and a
quiet critical remark that exactly hit the value and scope of the book.
The squire's eyebrows went up, and the corners of his mouth slackened
visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to the amazement of Mrs. Darcy,
who was watching them from the drawing-room window, walked back to the
park gates together, and what Robert's nobility and beauty of character
would never have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the
service of the poor and the tormented under the squire's eyes, a chance
coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a moment.
The squire walked back to the house under a threatening sky, his
mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, his mind full of an
unwonted excitement.
The sentiment of long-past days--days in Berlin, in Paris, where
conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily
relief and reward of labour, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had
endeavoured to import the materials for them from the Continent, from
London. But as a matter of fact it was years since he had had any such
talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly
realised that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the
scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional
interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his _Fach_.
'Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes of
such a kind in this long-legged optimist?' The squire shrugged his
shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality to
combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought.
Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall.
Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and
this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! 'Why the deuce
couldn't he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!'
thought the squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had
wholly denied him the opportunity. 'And then the sending back of those
books: what a piece of idiocy!'
Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious
chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he
should just have fallen on the period of the later empire--of the
passage from the old world to the new, where the squire was a master.
The squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his
remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating
as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library,
ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an
unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made a
youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he