Robert Elsmere
party, and a certain awe and strangeness which had developed in his
boys' minds towards him, during the last few weeks, passed away.
It was curious that in these days he would neither sit nor walk alone if
he could help it. Catherine or a stray parishioner was almost always
with him. All the while, vaguely, in the depths of consciousness, there
was the knowledge that behind this piece of quiet water on which his
life was now sailing, there lay storm and darkness, and that in front
loomed fresh possibilities of tempest. He knew, in a way, that it was a
treacherous peace which had overtaken him. And yet it was peace. The
pressure exerted by the will had temporarily given way, and the deepest
forces of the man's being had reasserted themselves. He could feel and
love and pray again; and Catherine, seeing the old glow in the eyes, the
old spring in the step, made the whole of life one thank-offering.
On the evening following that moment of reaction in the Murewell
library, Robert had written to the squire. His letter had been
practically a withdrawal from the correspondence.
'I find,' he wrote, 'that I have been spending too much time and energy
lately on these critical matters. It seems to me that my work as a
clergyman has suffered. Nor can I deny that your book and your letters
have been to me a source of great trouble of mind.
'My heart is where it was, but my head is often confused. Let
controversy rest a while. My wife says I want a holiday; I think so
myself, and we are off in three weeks; not, however, I hope, before we
have welcomed you home again, and got you to open the new Institute,
which is already dazzling the eyes of the village by its size and
splendour, and the white paint that Harris the builder has been
lavishing upon it.'
Ten days later, rather earlier than was expected, the squire and Mrs.
Darcy were at home again. Robert re-entered the great house the morning
after their arrival with a strange reluctance. Its glow and
magnificence, the warm perfumed air of the hall, brought back a sense of
old oppressions, and he walked down the passage to the library with a
sinking heart. There he found the squire busy as usual with one of those
fresh cargoes of books which always accompanied him on any homeward
journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more shrunken; more full of
force, of harsh epigram, of grim anecdote than ever. Robert sat on the
edge of the table laughing over his stories of French Orientalists, or
Roman cardinals, or modern Greek professors, enjoying the impartial
sarcasm which one of the greatest of _savants_ was always ready to pour
out upon his brethren of the craft.
The squire, however, was never genial for a moment during the interview.
He did not mention his book nor Elsmere's letter. But Elsmere suspected
in him a good deal of suppressed irritability; and, as after a while he
abruptly ceased to talk, the visit grew difficult.
The rector walked home feeling restless and depressed. The mind had
begun to work again. It was only by a great effort that he could turn
his thoughts from the squire, and all that the squire had meant to him
during the past year, and so woo back to himself 'the shy bird Peace.'
Mr. Wendover watched the door close behind him, and then went back to
his work with a gesture of impatience.
'Once a priest, always a priest. What a fool I was to forget it! You
think you make an impression on the mystic, and at the bottom there is
always something which defies you and common sense. "Two and two do not,
and shall not, make four,"' he said to himself, in a mincing voice of
angry sarcasm. '"It would give me too much pain that they should." Well,
and so I suppose what might have been a rational friendship will go by
the board like everything else. What can make the man shilly-shally in
this way? He is convinced already, as he knows--those later letters were
conclusive! His living, perhaps, and his work! Not for the money's
sake--there never was a more incredibly disinterested person born. But
his work? Well, who is to hinder his work? Will he be the first parson
in the Church of England who looks after the poor and holds his tongue?
If you can't speak your mind, it is something at any rate to possess
one--nine-tenths of the clergy being without the appendage. But
Elsmere--pshaw! he will go muddling on to the end of the chapter!'
The squire, indeed, was like a hunter whose prey escapes him at the very
moment of capture, and there grew on him a mocking aggressive mood which
Elsmere often found hard to bear.
One natural symptom of it was his renewed churlishness as to all local
matters. Elsmere one afternoon spent an hour in trying to persuade him
to open the new Institute.
'What on earth do you want me for?' inquired Mr. Wendover, standing
before the fire in the library, the Medusa head peering over his
shoulder. 'You know perfectly well that all the gentry about here--I
suppose you will have some of them--regard me as an old reprobate, and
the poor people, I imagine, as a kind of ogre. To me it doesn't matter a
twopenny damn--I apologise; it was the Duke of Wellington's favourite
standard of value--but I can't see what good it can do either you or the
village, under the circumstances, that I should stand on my head for the
popular edification.'
Elsmere, however, merely stood his ground, arguing and bantering, till
the squire grudgingly gave way. This time, after he departed, Mr.
Wendover, instead of going to his work, still stood gloomily ruminating
in front of the fire. His frowning eyes wandered round the great room
before him. For the first time he was conscious that now, as soon as the
charm of Elsmere's presence was withdrawn, his working hours were doubly
solitary; that his loneliness weighed upon him more; and that it
mattered to him appreciably whether that young man went or stayed. The
stirring of a new sensation, however,--unparalleled since the brief days
when even Roger Wendover had his friends and his attractions like other
men,--was soon lost in renewed chafing at Elsmere's absurdities. The
squire had been at first perfectly content--so he told himself--to limit
the field of their intercourse, and would have been content to go on
doing so. But Elsmere himself had invited freedom of speech between
them.
'I would have given him my best,' Mr. Wendover reflected impatiently. 'I
could have handed on to him all I shall never use, and he might use,
admirably. And now we might as well be on the terms we were to begin
with for all the good I get out of him, or he out of me. Clearly nothing
but cowardice! He cannot face the intellectual change, and he must, I
suppose, dread lest it should affect his work. Good God, what nonsense!
As if any one inquired what an English parson believed nowadays, so long
as he performs all the usual antics decently!'
And, meanwhile, it never occurred to the squire that Elsmere had a wife,
and a pious one. Catherine had been dropped out of his calculation as to
Elsmere's future, at a very early stage.
* * * * *
The following afternoon Robert, coming home from a round, found
Catherine out, and a note awaiting him from the Hall.
'Can you and Mrs. Elsmere come in to tea?' wrote the squire. 'Madame de
Netteville is here, and one or two others.'
Robert grumbled a good deal, looked for Catherine to devise an excuse
for him, could not find her, and at last reluctantly set out again
alone.
He was tired and his mood was heavy. As he trudged through the park he
never once noticed the soft sun-flooded distance, the shining loops of
the river, the feeding deer, or any of those natural witcheries to which
eye and sense were generally so responsive. The labourers going home,
the children--with aprons full of crab-apples, and lips dyed by the
first blackberries--who passed him, got but an absent smile or salute
from the rector. The interval of exaltation and recoil was over. The
ship of the mind was once more labouring in alien and dreary seas.
He roused himself to remember that he had been curious to see Madame de
Netteville. She was an old friend of the squire's, the holder of a
London salon, much more exquisite and select than anything Lady
Charlotte could show.
'She had the same thing in Paris before the war,' the squire explained.
'Renan gave me a card to her. An extraordinary woman. No particular
originality; but one of the best persons "to consult about ideas," like
Joubert's Madame de Beaumont, I ever saw. Receptiveness itself. A
beauty, too, or was one, and a bit of a sphinx, which adds to the
attraction. Mystery becomes a woman vastly. One suspects her of
adventures just enough to find her society doubly piquant.'
Vincent directed him to the upper terrace, whither tea had been taken.
This terrace, which was one of the features of Murewell, occupied the
top of the yew-clothed hill on which the library looked out. Evelyn
himself had planned it. Along its upper side ran one of the most
beautiful of old walls, broken by niches and statues, tapestried with
roses and honeysuckle, and opening in the centre to reveal Evelyn's
darling conceit of all--a semicircular space, holding a fountain, and
leading to a grotto. The grotto had been scooped out of the hill; it was
peopled with dim figures of fauns and nymphs who showed white amid its
moist greenery; and in front a marble Silence drooped over the fountain,
which held gold and silver fish in a singularly clear water. Outside ran
the long stretch of level turf, edged with a jewelled rim of flowers;
and as the hill fell steeply underneath, the terrace was like a high
green platform raised into air, in order that a Wendover might see his
domain, which from thence lay for miles spread out before him.
Here, beside the fountain, were gathered the squire, Mrs. Darcy, Madame
de Netteville, and two unknown men. One of them was introduced to
Elsmere as Mr. Spooner, and recognised by him as a Fellow of the Royal
Society, a famous mathematician, sceptic, _bon vivant_, and sayer of
good things. The other was a young Liberal Catholic, the author of a
remarkable collection of essays on mediaeval subjects in which the
squire, treating the man's opinions of course as of no account, had
instantly recognised the note of the true scholar. A pale, small, hectic
creature, possessed of that restless energy of mind which often goes
with the heightened temperature of consumption.
Robert took a seat by Madame de Netteville, whose appearance was
picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skilful mixture of black and creamy
yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly effective as her
manner. Her plumed hat shadowed a face which was no longer young in such
a way as to hide all the lines possible; while the half-light brought
admirably out the rich dark smoothness of the tints, the black lustre of
the eyes. A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert was
conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, which seemed
at first merely slow and languid, were in reality singularly full of
decision and purpose.
She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert felt that
she was studying him, and was not so much at his ease as usual, partly
owing to fatigue and mental worry.
She asked him little abrupt questions about the neighbourhood, his
parish, his work, in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct
aloofness, even _hauteur_. His answers, on the other hand, were often a
trifle reckless and offhand. He was in a mood to be impatient with a
_mondaine's_ languid inquiries into clerical work, and it seemed to him
the squire's description had been overdone.
'So you try to civilise your peasants,' she said at last. 'Does it
succeed--is it worth while?'