Robert Elsmere
done with Martha and his mother's cottage.
His mother? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable longing rose and
broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes. He had a strange
conviction that at this crisis of his life she of _all_ human beings
would have understood him best.
When would the squire know? He pictured the interview with him,
divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision, Mr.
Wendover's start of mingled triumph and impatience--triumph in the new
recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man to
look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly
renounced, or clerical pledges as more than a form of words. So
henceforth he was on the same side with the squire, held by an
indiscriminating world as bound to the same negations, the same
hostilities! The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral
repugnance. The squire and Edward Langham--they were the only sceptics
of whom he had ever had close and personal experience. And with all his
old affection for Langham, all his frank sense of pliancy in the
squire's hands, yet in this strait of life how he shrinks from them
both!--souls at war with life and man, without holiness, without
perfume!
Is it the law of things? 'Once loosen a man's _religio_, once fling away
the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made
him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.' How often he has
heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows
cold within him. What good man can ever contemplate with patience the
loss, not of friends or happiness, but of his best self? What shall it
profit a man, indeed, if he gain the whole world--the whole world of
knowledge and speculation--and _lose his own soul_?
And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward eye the
vision of an Oxford lecture room, of a short sturdy figure, of a great
brow over honest eyes, of words alive with moral passion, of thought
instinct with the beauty of holiness. Thank God for the saint in Henry
Grey! Thinking of it, Robert felt his own self-respect re-born.
Oh! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval! Even
though it was the depth of vacation, Grey was so closely connected with
the town, as distinguished from the university, life of Oxford, it might
be quite possible to find him at home. Elsmere suddenly determined to
find out at once if he could be seen.
And if so, he would go over to Oxford at once. _This_ should be the next
step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till afterwards. He felt
himself so dull, so weary, so resourceless. Grey should help and counsel
him, should send him back with a clearer brain--a quicker ingenuity of
love, better furnished against her pain and his own.
Then everything else was forgotten; and he thought of nothing but that
grisly moment of waking in the empty room, when still believing it
night, he had put out his hand for his wife, and with a superstitious
pang had felt himself alone. His heart torn with a hundred inarticulate
cries of memory and grief, he sat on beside the water, unconscious of
the passing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the
wood-pigeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash of a
kingfisher, at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the trees
opposite.
At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few heavy
drops of warm rain. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four o'clock.
He rose, stiff and cramped with sitting, and at the same instant he saw
beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of common a boy's figure,
which, after a step or two, he recognised as Ned Irwin.
'You here, Ned?' he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in him
reasserting itself at once. 'Why aren't you harvesting?'
'Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and Mr.
Carter's job don't begin till to-morrow. He's got a machine coming from
Witley, he hev, and they won't let him have it till Thursday, so I've
been out after things for the club.'
And opening the tin box strapped on his back, he showed the day's
capture of butterflies, and some belated birds' eggs, the plunder of a
bit of common where the turf for the winter's burning was just being
cut.
'Goatsucker, linnet, stonechat,' said the rector, fingering them. 'Well
done for August, Ned. If you haven't got anything better to do with
them, give them to that small boy of Mr. Carter's that's been ill so
long. He'd thank you for them, I know.'
The lad nodded with a guttural sound of assent. Then his new-born
scientific ardour seemed to struggle with his rustic costiveness of
speech.
'I've been just watching a queer creetur,' he said at last hurriedly; 'I
b'leeve he's that un.'
And he pulled out a well-thumbed handbook, and pointed to a cut of the
grasshopper warbler.
'Whereabouts?' asked Robert, wondering the while at his own start of
interest.
'In that bit of common t'other side the big pond,' said Ned, pointing,
his brick-red countenance kindling into suppressed excitement.
'Come and show me!' said the rector, and the two went off together. And
sure enough, after a little beating about, they heard the note which had
roused the lad's curiosity, the loud whirr of a creature that should
have been a grasshopper, and was not.
They stalked the bird a few yards, stooping and crouching, Robert's
eager hand on the boy's arm, whenever the clumsy rustic movements made
too much noise among the underwood. They watched it uttering its jarring
imitative note on bush after bush, just dropping to the ground as they
came near, and flitting a yard or two farther, but otherwise showing no
sign of alarm at their presence. Then suddenly the impulse which had
been leading him on died in the rector. He stood upright, with a long
sigh.
'I must go home, Ned,' he said abruptly. 'Where are you off to?'
'Please, sir, there's my sister at the cottage, her as married Jim, the
under-keeper. I be going there for my tea.'
'Come along, then, we can go together.'
They trudged along in silence; presently Robert turned on his companion.
'Ned, this natural history has been a fine thing for you, my lad; mind
you stick to it. That and good work will make a man of you. When I go
away----'
The boy started and stopped dead, his dumb animal eyes fixed on his
companion.
'You know I shall soon be going off on my holiday,' said Robert, smiling
faintly; adding hurriedly as the boy's face resumed its ordinary
expression: 'But some day, Ned, I shall go for good. I don't know
whether you've been depending on me--you and some of the others. I think
perhaps you have. If so, don't depend on me, Ned, any more! It must all
come to an end--everything must--_everything!_--except the struggle to
be a man in the world, and not a beast--to make one's heart clean and
soft, and not hard and vile. That is the _one_ thing that matters, and
lasts. Ah, never forget that, Ned! Never forget it!'
He stood still, towering over the slouching thick-set form beside him,
his pale intensity of look giving a rare dignity and beauty to the face
which owed so little of its attractiveness to comeliness of feature. He
had the makings of a true shepherd of men, and his mind as he spoke was
crossed by a hundred different currents of feeling--bitterness, pain,
and yearning unspeakable. No man could feel the wrench that lay before
him more than he.
Ned Irwin said not a word. His heavy lids were dropped over his deep-set
eye; he stood motionless, nervously fiddling with his butterfly
net--awkwardness, and, as it seemed, irresponsiveness, in his whole
attitude.
Robert gathered himself together.
'Well, good-night, my lad,' he said with a change of tone. 'Good luck to
you; be off to your tea!'
And he turned away, striding swiftly over the short burnt August grass
in the direction of the Murewell woods, which rose in a blue haze of
heat against the slumberous afternoon sky. He had not gone a hundred
yards before he heard a clattering after him. He stopped, and Ned came
up with him.
'They're heavy, them things,' said the boy, desperately blurting it out,
and pointing, with heaving chest and panting breath, to the rod and
basket. 'I am going that way, I can leave un at the rectory.'
Robert's eyes gleamed.
'They are no weight, Ned--'cause why? I've been lazy and caught no fish!
But there,'--after a moment's hesitation he slipped off the basket and
rod, and put them into the begrimed hands held out for them. 'Bring them
when you like; I don't know when I shall want them again. Thank you, and
God bless you!'
The boy was off with his booty in a second.
'Perhaps he'll like to think he did it for me, by and by,' said Robert
sadly to himself, moving on, a little moisture in the clear gray eye.
* * * * *
About three o'clock next day Robert was in Oxford. The night before he
had telegraphed to ask if Grey was at home. The reply had been--'Here
for a week on way north; come by all means.' Oh! that look of
Catherine's when he had told her of his plan, trying in vain to make it
look merely casual and ordinary.
'It is more than a year since I have set eyes on Grey, Catherine. And
the day's change would be a boon. I could stay the night at Merton, and
get home early next day.'
But as he turned a pleading look to her, he had been startled by the
sudden rigidity of face and form. Her silence had in it an intense,
almost a haughty, reproach, which she was too keenly hurt to put into
words.
He caught her by the arm, and drew her forcibly to him. There he made
her look into the eyes which were full of nothing but the most
passionate imploring affection.
'Have patience a little more, Catherine!' he just murmured. 'Oh, how I
have blessed you for silence! Only till I come back!'
'Till you come back,' she repeated slowly. 'I cannot bear it any longer,
Robert, that you should give others your confidence, and not me.'
He groaned and let her go. No--there should be but one day more of
silence, and that day was interposed for her sake. If Grey from his
calmer standpoint bade him wait and test himself, before taking any
irrevocable step, he would obey him. And if so, the worst pang of all
need not yet be inflicted on Catherine, though as to his state of mind
he would be perfectly open with her.
A few hours later his cab deposited him at the well-known door. It
seemed to him that he and the scorched plane-trees lining the sides of
the road were the only living things in the wide sun-beaten street.
Every house was shut up. Only the Greys' open windows, amid their
shuttered neighbours, had a friendly human air.
Yes; Mr. Grey was in, and expecting Mr. Elsmere. Robert climbed the dim
familiar staircase, his heart beating fast.
'Elsmere, this is a piece of good fortune!'
And the two men, after a grasp of the hand, stood fronting each other:
Mr. Grey, a light of pleasure on the rugged dark-complexioned face,
looking up at his taller and paler visitor.
But Robert could find nothing to say in return; and in an instant Mr.
Grey's quick eye detected the strained nervous emotion of the man before
him.
'Come and sit down, Elsmere--there, in the window, where we can talk.
One has to live on this east side of the house this weather.'
'In the first place,' said Mr. Grey, scrutinising him, as he returned to
his own book-littered corner of the window-seat. 'In the first place, my
dear fellow, I can't congratulate you on your appearance. I never saw a
man look in worse condition--to be up and about.'
'That's nothing!' said Robert almost impatiently. 'I want a holiday, I
believe. Grey!' and he looked nervously out over garden and apple-trees,
'I have come--very selfishly--to ask your advice; to throw a trouble