Robert Elsmere
'But since then Rose has been taking me into society. Yesterday
afternoon, after I wrote to you, we went to see Rose's artistic
friends--the Piersons--with whom she was staying last summer, and to-day
we have even called on Lady Charlotte Wynnstay.
'As to Mrs. Pierson, I never saw such an odd bundle of ribbons and rags
and queer embroideries as she looked when we called. However, Rose says
that, for "an aesthete"--she despises them now herself--Mrs. Pierson has
wonderful taste, and that her wall-papers and her gowns, if I only
understood them, are not the least like those of other aesthetic persons,
but very _recherche_--which may be. She talked to Rose of nothing but
acting, especially of Madame Desforets. No one, according to her, has
anything to do with an actress's private life, or ought to take it into
account. But, Robert, dear,--an actress is a woman, and has a soul!
'Then Lady Charlotte,--you would have laughed at our _entree_.
'We found she was in town, and went on her "day," as she had asked Rose
to do. The room was rather dark--none of these London rooms seem to me
to have any light and air in them. The butler got our names wrong, and I
marched in first, more shy than I ever have been before in my life. Lady
Charlotte had two gentlemen with her. She evidently did not know me in
the least; she stood staring at me with her eyeglass on, and her cap so
crooked I could think of nothing but a wish to put it straight. Then
Rose followed, and in a few minutes it seemed to me as though it were
Rose who were hostess, talking to the two gentlemen and being kind to
Lady Charlotte. I am sure everybody in the room was amused by her
self-possession, Lady Charlotte included. The gentlemen stared at her a
great deal, and Lady Charlotte paid her one or two compliments on her
looks, which _I_ thought she would not have ventured to pay to any one
in her own circle.
'We stayed about half an hour. One of the gentlemen was, I believe, a
member of the Government, an under-secretary for something, but he and
Rose and Lady Charlotte talked again of nothing but musicians and
actors. It is strange that politicians should have time to know so much
of these things. The other gentleman reminded me of Hotspur's popinjay.
I think now I made out that he wrote for the newspapers, but at the
moment I should have felt it insulting to accuse him of anything so
humdrum as an occupation in life. He discovered somehow that I had an
interest in the Church, and he asked me, leaning back in his chair and
lisping, whether I really thought "the Church could still totter on a
while in the rural dithtricts." He was informed her condition was so
"vewy dethperate."
'Then I laughed outright, and found my tongue. Perhaps his next article
on the Church will have a few facts in it. I did my best to put some
into him. Rose at last looked round at me, astonished. But he did not
dislike me, I think. I was not impertinent to him, husband mine. If I
might have described just _one_ of your days to his high-and-mightiness!
There is no need to tell you, I think, whether I did or not.
'Then when we got up to go, Lady Charlotte asked Rose to stay with her.
Rose explained why she couldn't, and Lady Charlotte pitied her
dreadfully for having a family, and the under-secretary said that it was
one's first duty in life to trample on one's relations, and that he
hoped nothing would prevent his hearing her play some time later in the
year. Rose said very decidedly she should be in town for the winter.
Lady Charlotte said she would have an evening specially for her, and as
I said nothing, we got away at last.'
The letter of the following day recorded a little adventure:--
'I was much startled this morning. I had got Rose to come with me to the
National Gallery on our way to her dressmaker. We were standing before
Raphael's "Vigil of the Knight," when suddenly I saw Rose, who was
looking away towards the door into the long gallery, turn perfectly
white. I followed her eyes, and there, in the doorway, disappearing,--I
am almost certain,--was Mr. Langham! One cannot mistake his walk or his
profile. Before I could say a word Rose had walked away to another wall
of pictures, and when we joined again we did not speak of it. Did he see
us, I wonder, and purposely avoid us? Something made me think so.
'Oh, I wish I could believe she had forgotten him! I am certain she
would laugh me to angry scorn if I mentioned him; but there she sits by
the fire now, while I am writing, quite drooping and pale, because she
thinks I am not noticing. If she did but love me a little more! It must
be my fault, I know.
'Yes, as you say, Burwood may as well be shut up or let. My dear, dear
father!'
Robert could imagine the sigh with which Catherine had laid down her
pen. Dear tender soul, with all its old-world fidelities and pieties
pure and unimpaired! He raised the signature to his lips.
Next day Catherine came back to him. Robert had no words too opprobrious
for the widowed condition from which her return had rescued him. It
seemed to Catherine, however, that life had been very full and keen with
him since her departure! He lingered with her after supper, vowing that
his club boys might make what hay in the study they pleased; he was
going to tell her the news, whatever happened.
'I told you of my two dinners at the Hall? The first was just
_tete-a-tete_ with the squire--oh, and Mrs. Darcy, of course. I am
always forgetting her, poor little thing, which is most ungrateful of
me. A pathetic life that, Catherine. She seems to me, in her odd way,
perpetually hungering for affection, for praise. No doubt, if she got
them, she wouldn't know what to do with them. She would just touch and
leave them as she does everything. Her talk and she are both as light
and wandering as thistledown. But still, meanwhile, she hungers, and is
never satisfied. There seems to be something peculiarly antipathetic in
her to the squire. I can't make it out. He is sometimes quite brutal to
her when she is more inconsequent than usual. I often wonder she goes on
living with him.'
Catherine made some indignant comment.
'Yes,' said Robert, musing. 'Yes, it is bad.'
But Catherine thought his tone might have been more unqualified, and
marvelled again at the curious lenity of judgment he had always shown of
late towards Mr. Wendover. And all his judgments of himself and others
were generally so quick, so uncompromising!
'On the second occasion we had Freake and Dashwood,' naming two
well-known English antiquarians. 'Very learned, very jealous, and very
snuffy; altogether "too genuine," as poor mother used to say of those
old chairs we got for the dining-room. But afterwards when we were all
smoking in the library, the squire came out of his shell and talked. I
never heard him more brilliant!'
He paused a moment, his bright eyes looking far away from her, as though
fixed on the scene he was describing.
'Such a mind!' he said at last with a long breath, 'such a memory!
Catherine, my book has been making great strides since you left. With
Mr. Wendover to go to, all the problems are simplified. One is saved all
false starts, all beating about the bush. What a piece of luck it was
that put one down beside such a guide, such a living storehouse of
knowledge!'
He spoke in a glow of energy and enthusiasm. Catherine sat looking at
him wistfully, her gray eyes crossed by many varying shades of memory
and feeling.
At last his look met hers, and the animation of it softened at once,
grew gentle.
'Do you think I am making knowledge too much of a god just now, Madonna
mine?' he said, throwing himself down beside her. 'I have been full of
qualms myself. The squire excites one so, makes one feel as though
intellect--accumulation--were the whole of life. But I struggle against
it--I do. I go on, for instance, trying to make the squire do his social
duties--behave like "a human."'
Catherine could not help smiling at his tone.
'Well?' she inquired.
He shook his head ruefully.
'The squire is a tough customer--most men of sixty-seven with strong
wills are, I suppose. At any rate, he is like one of the Thurston
trout--sees through all my manoeuvres. But one piece of news will
astonish you, Catherine!' And he sprang up to deliver it with effect.
'Henslowe is dismissed.'
'Henslowe dismissed!' Catherine sat properly amazed while Robert told
the story.
The dismissal of Henslowe indeed represented the price which Mr.
Wendover had been so far willing to pay for Elsmere's society. Some
_quid pro quo_ there must be--that he was prepared to admit--considering
their relative positions as squire and parson. But, as Robert shrewdly
suspected, not one of his wiles so far had imposed on the master of
Murewell. He had his own sarcastic smiles over them, and over Elsmere's
pastoral _naivete_ in general. The evidences of the young rector's power
and popularity were, however, on the whole, pleasant to Mr. Wendover. If
Elsmere had his will with all the rest of the world, Mr. Wendover knew
perfectly well who it was that at the present moment had his will with
Elsmere. He had found a great piquancy in this shaping of a mind more
intellectually eager and pliant than any he had yet come across among
younger men; perpetual food too, for his sense of irony, in the
intellectual contradictions, wherein Elsmere's developing ideas and
information were now, according to the squire, involving him at every
turn.
'His religious foundations are gone already, if he did but know it,' Mr.
Wendover grimly remarked to himself one day about this time, 'but he
will take so long finding it out that the results are not worth
speculating on.'
Cynically assured, therefore, at bottom of his own power with this
ebullient nature, the squire was quite prepared to make external
concessions, or, as we have said, to pay his price. It annoyed him that
when Elsmere would press for allotment land, or a new institute, or a
better supply of water for the village, it was not open to him merely to
give _carte blanche_, and refer his petitioner to Henslowe. Robert's
opinion of Henslowe, and Henslowe's now more cautious but still
incessant hostility to the rector, were patent at last even to the
squire. The situation was worrying and wasted time. It must be changed.
So one morning he met Elsmere with a bundle of letters in his hand,
calmly informed him that Henslowe had been sent about his business, and
that it would be a kindness if Mr. Elsmere would do him the favour of
looking through some applications for the vacant post just received.
Elsmere, much taken by surprise, felt at first as it was natural for an
over-sensitive, over-scrupulous man to feel. His enemy had been given
into his hand, and instead of victory he could only realise that he had
brought a man to ruin.
'He has a wife and children,' he said quickly, looking at the squire.
'Of course I have pensioned him,' replied the squire impatiently;
'otherwise I imagine he would be hanging round our necks to the end of
the chapter.'
There was something in the careless indifference of the tone which sent
a shiver through Elsmere. After all, this man had served the squire for
fifteen years, and it was not Mr. Wendover who had much to complain of.
No one with a conscience could have held out a finger to keep Henslowe
in his post. But though Elsmere took the letters and promised to give
them his best attention, as soon as he got home he made himself
irrationally miserable over the matter. It was not his fault that, from
the moment of his arrival in the parish, Henslowe had made him the
target of a vulgar and embittered hostility, and so far as he had struck
out in return it had been for the protection of persecuted and