Robert Elsmere
yesterday. There is nothing particularly new in it, but it looked to me
well done.'
'Thank you,' said Robert, not, however, with any great heartiness, and
the squire moved away. They parted at the gate, Robert running down the
hill to the village as fast as his long legs could carry him.
'Sunday School--pshaw!' cried the squire, as he tramped homeward in the
opposite direction.
Next morning a huge packing-case arrived from the Hall, and Robert could
not forbear a little gloating over the treasures in it before he tore
himself away to pay his morning visit to Mile End. There everything was
improving; the poor Sharland child indeed had slipped away on the night
after the squire's visit, but the other bad cases in the diphtheria ward
were mending fast. John Allwood was gaining strength daily, and poor
Mary Sharland was feebly struggling back to a life which seemed hardly
worth so much effort to keep. Robert felt, with a welcome sense of
slackening strain, that the daily and hourly superintendence which he
and Catherine had been giving to the place might lawfully be relaxed,
that the nurses on the spot were now more than equal to their task, and
after having made his round he raced home again in order to secure an
hour with his books before luncheon.
The following day a note arrived, while they were at luncheon, in the
squire's angular precise handwriting. It contained a request that,
unless otherwise engaged, the rector would walk with Mr. Wendover that
afternoon.
Robert flung it across to Catherine.
'Let me see,' he said, deliberating, 'have I any engagement I must
keep?'
There was a sort of jealousy for his work within him contending with
this new fascination of the squire's company. But, honestly, there was
nothing in the way, and he went.
That walk was the first of many. The squire had no sooner convinced
himself that young Elsmere's society did in reality provide him with a
stimulus and recreation he had been too long without, than in his
imperious wilful way he began to possess himself of it as much as
possible. He never alluded to the trivial matters which had first
separated and then united them. He worked the better, he thought the
more clearly, for these talks and walks with Elsmere, and therefore
these talks and walks became an object with him. They supplied a
long-stifled want, the scholar's want of disciples, of some form of
investment for all that heaped-up capital of thought he had been
accumulating during a lifetime.
As for Robert, he soon felt himself so much under the spell of the
squire's strange and powerful personality that he was forced to make a
fight for it, lest this new claim should encroach upon the old ones. He
would walk when the squire liked, but three times out of four these
walks must be parish rounds, interrupted by descents into cottages and
chats in farmhouse parlours. The squire submitted. The neighbourhood
began to wonder over the strange spectacle of Mr. Wendover waiting
grimly in the winter dusk outside one of his own farmhouses while
Elsmere was inside, or patrolling a bit of lane till Elsmere should have
inquired after an invalid or beaten up a recruit for his confirmation
class, dogged the while by stealthy children, with fingers in their
mouths, who ran away in terror directly he turned.
Rumours of this new friendship spread. One day, on the bit of road
between the Hall and the rectory, Lady Helen behind her ponies whirled
past the two men, and her arch look at Elsmere said as plain as words,
'Oh, you young wonder! what hook has served you with this leviathan?'
On another occasion, close to Churton, a man in a cassock and cloak came
towards them. The squire put up his eyeglass.
'Humph!' he remarked; 'do you know this merryandrew, Elsmere?'
It was Newcome. As they passed, Robert with slightly heightened colour
gave him an affectionate nod and smile. Newcome's quick eye ran over the
companions, he responded stiffly, and his step grew more rapid. A week
or two later Robert noticed with a little prick of remorse that he had
seen nothing of Newcome for an age. If Newcome would not come to him, he
must go to Mottringham. He planned an expedition, but something happened
to prevent it.
And Catherine? Naturally this new and most unexpected relation of
Robert's to the man who had begun by insulting him was of considerable
importance to the wife. In the first place it broke up to some extent
the exquisite _tete-a-tete_ of their home life; it encroached often upon
time that had always been hers; it filled Robert's mind more and more
with matters in which she had no concern. All these things many wives
might have resented. Catherine Elsmere resented none of them. It is
probable, of course, that she had her natural moments of regret and
comparison, when love said to itself a little sorely and hungrily, 'It
is hard to be even a fraction less to him than I once was!' But if so,
these moments never betrayed themselves in word or act. Her tender
common sense, her sweet humility, made her recognise at once Robert's
need of intellectual comradeship, isolated as he was in this remote
rural district. She knew perfectly that a clergyman's life of perpetual
giving forth becomes morbid and unhealthy if there is not some
corresponding taking in.
If only it had not been Mr. Wendover! She marvelled over the fascination
Robert found in his dry cynical talk. She wondered that a Christian
pastor could ever forget Mr. Wendover's antecedents; that the man who
had nursed those sick children could forgive Mile End. All in all as
they were to each other, she felt for the first time that she often
understood her husband imperfectly. His mobility, his eagerness, were
sometimes now a perplexity, even a pain to her.
It must not be imagined, however, that Robert let himself drift into
this intellectual intimacy with one of the most distinguished of
anti-Christian thinkers without reflecting on its possible consequences.
The memory of that night of misery which _The Idols of the Market-place_
had inflicted on him was enough. He was no match in controversy for Mr.
Wendover, and he did not mean to attempt it.
One morning the squire unexpectedly plunged into an account of a German
monograph he had just received on the subject of the Johannine
authorship of the Fourth Gospel. It was almost the first occasion on
which he had touched what may strictly be called the _materiel_ of
orthodoxy in their discussions--at any rate directly. But the book was a
striking one, and in the interest of it he had clearly forgotten his
ground a little. Suddenly the man who was walking beside him interrupted
him.
'I think we ought to understand one another perhaps, Mr. Wendover,'
Robert said, speaking under a quick sense of oppression, but with his
usual dignity and bright courtesy. 'I know your opinions, of course,
from your books; you know what mine, as an honest man, must be, from the
position I hold. My conscience does not forbid me to discuss anything,
only--I am no match for you on points of scholarship, and I should just
like to say once for all, that to me, whatever else is true, the
religion of Christ is true. I am a Christian and a Christian minister.
Therefore, whenever we come to discuss what may be called Christian
evidence, I do it with reserves, which you would not have. I believe in
an Incarnation, a Resurrection, a Revelation. If there are literary
difficulties, I must want to smooth them away--you may want to make much
of them. We come to the matter from different points of view. You will
not quarrel with me for wanting to make it clear. It isn't as if we
differed slightly. We differ fundamentally--is it not so?'
The squire was walking beside him with bent shoulders, the lower lip
pushed forward, as was usual with him when he was considering a matter
with close attention, but did not mean to communicate his thoughts.
After a pause he said, with a faint inscrutable smile,--
'Your reminder is perfectly just. Naturally we all have our reserves.
Neither of us can be expected to stultify his own.'
And the talk went forward again, Robert joining in more buoyantly than
ever, perhaps because he had achieved a necessary but disagreeable thing
and got done with it.
In reality he had but been doing as the child does when it sets up its
sand-barrier against the tide.
CHAPTER XXIII
It was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending its golden
empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses
were breaking through the hazel roots and beginning to gleam along the
edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End
the birches rose like green clouds against the browns and purples of the
still leafless oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and building.
Every day Robert was on the look-out for the swallows, or listening for
the first notes of the nightingale amid the bare spring coverts.
But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it might have
been, for Catherine was away. Mrs. Leyburn, who was to have come south
to them in February, was attacked by bronchitis instead at Burwood and
forbidden to move, even to a warmer climate. In March, Catherine,
feeling restless and anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that
Agnes should have all the nursing and responsibility, tore herself from
her man and her baby, and went north to Whindale for a fortnight,
leaving Robert forlorn.
Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for a few days on
her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. Robert's opinion was that all
women, even St. Elizabeths, have somewhere rooted in them an inordinate
partiality for shopping; otherwise why should that operation take four
or five mortal days? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up the
whole of London in twelve hours! However, Catherine lingered, and as her
purchases were made, Robert crossly supposed it must be all Rose's
fault. He believed that Rose spent a great deal too much on dress.
Catherine's letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, she said,
had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, and playing, she
supposed, magnificently. At any rate, the letters which followed her in
shoals from Berlin flattered her to the skies, and during the three
months preceding her return Joachim himself had taken her as a pupil and
given her unusual attention.
'And now, of course,' wrote Catherine, 'she is desperately disappointed
that mamma and Agnes cannot join her in town, as she had hoped. She does
her best, I know, poor child, to conceal it and to feel as she ought
about mamma, but I can see that the idea of an indefinite time at
Burwood is intolerable to her. As to Berlin, I think she has enjoyed it,
but she talks very scornfully of German _Schwaermerei_ and German women,
and she tells the oddest stories of her professors. With one or two of
them she seems to have been in a state of war from the beginning; but
some of them, my dear Robert, I am persuaded were just simply in love
with her!
'I don't--no, I never _shall_ believe, that independent exciting
student's life is good for a girl. But I never say so to Rose. When she
forgets to be irritable and to feel that the world is going against her,
she is often very sweet to me, and I can't bear there should be any
conflict.'
His next day's letter contained the following:--
'Are you properly amused, sir, at your wife's performances in town? Our
three concerts you have heard all about. I still can't get over them. I
go about haunted by the _seriousness_, the life-and-death interest
people throw into music. It is astonishing! And outside, as we got into
our hansom, such sights and sounds!--such starved fierce-looking men,
such ghastly women!