Robert Elsmere
defenceless creatures. But all the same, he could not get the thought of
the man's collapse and humiliation out of his mind. How at his age was
he to find other work, and how was he to endure life at Murewell without
his comfortable house, his smart gig, his easy command of spirits, and
the cringing of the farmers?
Tormented by the sordid misery of the situation almost as though it had
been his own, Elsmere ran down impulsively in the evening to the agent's
house. Could nothing be done to assure the man that he was not really
his enemy, and that anything the parson's influence and the parson's
money could do to help him to a more decent life, and work which offered
fewer temptations and less power over human beings, should be done?
It need hardly be said that the visit was a complete failure. Henslowe,
who was drinking hard, no sooner heard Elsmere's voice in the little
hall than he dashed open the door which separated them, and, in a
paroxysm of drunken rage, hurled at Elsmere all the venomous stuff he
had been garnering up for months against some such occasion. The vilest
abuse, the foulest charges--there was nothing that the maddened sot, now
fairly unmasked, denied himself. Elsmere, pale and erect, tried to make
himself heard. In vain. Henslowe was physically incapable of taking in a
word.
At last the agent, beside himself, made a rush, his three untidy
children, who had been hanging open-mouthed in the background, set up a
howl of terror, and his Scotch wife, more pinched and sour than ever,
who had been so far a gloomy spectator of the scene, interposed.
'Have doon wi' ye,' she said sullenly, putting out a long bony arm in
front of her husband, 'or I'll just lock oop that brandy where ye'll naw
find it if ye pull the house doon. Now, sir,' turning to Elsmere, 'would
ye jest be going? Ye mean it weel, I daur say, but ye've doon yer wark,
and ye maun leave it.'
And she motioned him out, not without a sombre dignity. Elsmere went
home crestfallen. The enthusiast is a good deal too apt to
under-estimate the stubbornness of moral fact, and these rebuffs have
their stern uses for character.
'They intend to go on living here, I am told,' Elsmere said, as he wound
up the story, 'and as Henslowe is still churchwarden, he may do us a
world of mischief yet. However, I think that wife will keep him in
order. No doubt vengeance would be sweet to her as to him, but she has a
shrewd eye, poor soul, to the squire's remittances. It is a wretched
business, and I don't take a man's hate easily, Catherine!--though it
may be a folly to say so.'
Catherine was irresponsive. The Old Testament element in her found a
lawful satisfaction in Henslowe's fall, and a wicked man's hatred,
according to her, mattered only to himself. The squire's conduct, on the
other hand, made her uneasily proud. To her, naturally, it simply meant
that he was falling under Robert's spell. So much the better for him,
but----
CHAPTER XXIV
That same afternoon Robert started on a walk to a distant farm, where
one of his Sunday-school boys lay recovering from rheumatic fever. The
rector had his pocket full of articles--a story-book in one, a puzzle
map in the other--destined for Master Carter's amusement. On the way he
was to pick up Mr. Wendover at the park gates.
It was a delicious April morning. A soft west wind blew through leaf and
grass--
'Driving sweet buds, like flocks, to feed in air.'
The spring was stirring everywhere, and Robert raced along, feeling in
every vein a life, an ebullience akin to that of nature. As he neared
the place of meeting it occurred to him that the squire had been
unusually busy lately, unusually silent and absent too on their walks.
What _was_ he always at work on? Robert had often inquired of him as to
the nature of those piles of proof and manuscript with which his table
was littered. The squire had never given any but the most general
answer, and had always changed the subject. There was an invincible
_personal_ reserve about him which, through all his walks and talks with
Elsmere, had never as yet broken down. He would talk of other men and
other men's labours by the hour, but not of his own. Elsmere reflected
on the fact, mingling with the reflection a certain humorous scorn of
his own constant openness and readiness to take counsel with the world.
'However, _his_ book isn't a mere excuse, as Langham's is,' Elsmere
inwardly remarked. 'Langham, in a certain sense, plays even with
learning; Mr. Wendover plays at nothing.'
By the way, he had a letter from Langham in his pocket much more
cheerful and human than usual. Let him look through it again.
Not a word, of course, of that National Gallery experience!--a
circumstance, however, which threw no light on it either way.
'I find myself a good deal reconciled to life by this migration of
mine,' wrote Langham. 'Now that my enforced duties to them are all done
with, my fellow-creatures seem to me much more decent fellows than
before. The great stir of London, in which, unless I please, I have no
part whatever, attracts me more than I could have thought possible. No
one in these noisy streets has any rightful claim upon me. I have cut
away at one stroke lectures, and Boards of Studies, and tutors'
meetings, and all the rest of the wearisome Oxford make-believe, and the
creature left behind feels lighter and nimbler than he has felt for
years. I go to concerts and theatres; I look at the people in the
streets; I even begin to take an outsider's interest in social
questions, in the puny dykes which well-meaning people are trying to
raise all round us against the encroaching, devastating labour-troubles
of the future. By dint of running away from life, I may end by cutting a
much more passable figure in it than before. Be consoled, my dear
Elsmere; reconsider your remonstrances.'
* * * * *
There, under the great cedar by the gate, stood Mr. Wendover. Illumined
as he was by the spring sunshine, he struck Elsmere as looking unusually
shrunken and old. And yet under the look of physical exhaustion there
was a new serenity, almost a peacefulness of expression, which gave the
whole man a different aspect.
'Don't take me far,' he said abruptly, as they started. 'I have not got
the energy for it. I have been over-working, and must go away.'
'I have been sure of it for some time,' said Elsmere warmly. 'You ought
to have a long rest. But mayn't I know, Mr. Wendover, before you take
it, what this great task is you have been toiling at? Remember, you have
never told me a word of it.
And Elsmere's smile had in it a touch of most friendly reproach. Fatigue
had left the scholar relaxed, comparatively defenceless. His sunk and
wrinkled eyes lit up with a smile, faint indeed, but of unwonted
softness.
'A task indeed,' he said with a sigh, 'the task of a lifetime. To-day I
finished the second third of it. Probably before the last section is
begun some interloping German will have stepped down before me; it is
the way of the race! But for the moment there is the satisfaction of
having come to an end of some sort--a natural halt, at any rate.'
Elsmere's eyes were still interrogative. 'Oh, well,' said the squire
hastily, 'it is a book I planned just after I took my doctor's degree at
Berlin. It struck me then as the great want of modern scholarship. It is
a History of Evidence, or rather, more strictly, "A History of
_Testimony_."'
Robert started. The library flashed into his mind, and Langham's figure
in the long gray coat sitting on the stool.
'A great subject,' he said slowly, 'a magnificent subject. How have you
conceived it, I wonder?'
'Simply from the standpoint of evolution, of development. The
philosophical value of the subject is enormous. You must have considered
it, of course; every historian must. But few people have any idea in
detail of the amount of light which the history of human witness in the
world, systematically carried through, throws on the history of the
human mind; that is to say, on the history of ideas.'
The squire paused, his keen scrutinising look dwelling on the face
beside him, as though to judge whether he were understood.
'Oh, true!' cried Elsmere; 'most true. Now I know what vague want it is
that has been haunting me for months----'
He stopped short, his look, aglow with all the young thinker's ardour,
fixed on the squire.
The squire received the outburst in silence--a somewhat ambiguous
silence.
'But go on,' said Elsmere; 'please go on.'
'Well, you remember,' said the squire slowly, 'that when Tractarianism
began I was for a time one of Newman's victims. Then, when Newman
departed, I went over body and bones to the Liberal reaction which
followed his going. In the first ardour of what seemed to me a release
from slavery I migrated to Berlin, in search of knowledge which there
was no getting in England, and there, with the taste of a dozen aimless
theological controversies still in my mouth, this idea first took hold
of me. It was simply this:--Could one through an exhaustive examination
of human records, helped by modern physiological and mental science, get
at the conditions, physical and mental, which govern the greater or
lesser correspondence between human witness and the fact it reports?'
'A giant's task!' cried Robert: 'hardly conceivable!'
The squire smiled slightly--the smile of a man who looks back with
indulgent half-melancholy satire on the rash ambitions of his youth.
'Naturally,' he resumed, 'I soon saw I must restrict myself to European
testimony, and that only up to the Renaissance. To do that, of course, I
had to dig into the East, to learn several Oriental languages--Sanskrit
among them. Hebrew I already knew. Then, when I had got my languages, I
began to work steadily through the whole mass of existing records,
sifting and comparing. It is thirty years since I started. Fifteen years
ago I finished the section dealing with classical antiquity--with India,
Persia, Egypt, and Judaea. To-day I have put the last strokes to a
History of Testimony from the Christian era down to the sixth
century--from Livy to Gregory of Tours, from Augustus to Justinian.'
Elsmere turned to him with wonder, with a movement of irrepressible
homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitary labour for one end, one cause!
In our hurried fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity, this power
of realising itself, strikes the imagination.
'And your two books?'
'Were a mere interlude,' replied the squire briefly. 'After the
completion of the first part of my work, there were certain deposits
left in me which it was a relief to get rid of, especially in connection
with my renewed impressions of England,' he added drily.
Elsmere was silent, thinking this then was the explanation of the
squire's minute and exhaustive knowledge of the early Christian
centuries, a knowledge into which--apart from certain forbidden
topics--he had himself dipped so freely. Suddenly, as he mused, there
awoke in the young man a new hunger, a new unmanageable impulse towards
frankness of speech. All his nascent intellectual powers were alive and
clamorous. For the moment his past reticences and timidities looked to
him absurd. The mind rebelled against the barriers it had been rearing
against itself. It rushed on to sweep them away, crying out that all
this shrinking from free discussion had been at bottom 'a mere treason
to faith.'
'Naturally, Mr. Wendover,' he said at last, and his tone had a
half-defiant, half-nervous energy, 'you have given your best attention
all these years to the Christian problems.'
'Naturally,' said the squire drily. Then, as his companion still seemed
to wait, keenly expectant, he resumed, with something cynical in the