Robert Elsmere
the instincts of the philosophical man of the world, who scorns the
notion of taking popular beliefs seriously, whether for protest or for
sympathy. But he was too weary to argue. The squire, however, rose
hastily and began to walk up and down in a gathering storm of
irritation. The triumph gained for his own side, the tribute to his
life's work, were at the moment absolutely indifferent to him. They were
effaced by something else much harder to analyse. Whatever it was, it
drove him to throw himself upon Robert's position with a perverse
bewildering bitterness.
'Why should you break up your life in this wanton way? Who, in God's
name, is injured if you keep your living? It is the business of the
thinker and the scholar to clear his mind of cobwebs. Granted. You have
done it. But it is also the business of the practical man to live! If I
had your altruist emotional temperament, I should not hesitate for a
moment. I should regard the historical expressions of an eternal
tendency in men as wholly indifferent to me. If I understand you aright,
you have flung away the sanctions of orthodoxy. There is no other in the
way. Treat words as they deserve. _You_'--and the speaker laid an
emphasis on the pronoun which for the life of him he could not help
making sarcastic--'_you_ will always have Gospel enough to preach.'
'I cannot,' Robert repeated quietly, unmoved by the taunt, if it was
one. 'I am in a different stage, I imagine, from you. Words--that is to
say, the specific Christian formulae--may be indifferent to you, though a
month or two ago I should hardly have guessed it; they are just now
anything but indifferent to me.'
The squire's brow grew darker. He took up the argument again, more
pugnaciously than ever. It was the strangest attempt ever made to gibe
and flout a wandering sheep back into the fold. Robert's resentment was
roused at last. The squire's temper seemed to him totally inexplicable,
his arguments contradictory, the conversation useless and irritating. He
got up to take his leave.
'What you are about to do, Elsmere,' the squire wound up with saturnine
emphasis, 'is a piece of _cowardice_! You will live bitterly to regret
the haste and the unreason of it.'
'There has been no haste,' exclaimed Robert in the low tone of
passionate emotion; 'I have not rooted up the most sacred growths of
life as a careless child devastates its garden. There are some things
which a man only does because he _must_.'
There was a pause. Robert held out his hand. The squire would hardly
touch it. Outwardly his mood was one of the strangest eccentricity and
anger; and as to what was beneath it, Elsmere's quick divination was
dulled by worry and fatigue. It only served him so far that at the door
he turned back, hat in hand, and said, looking lingeringly the while at
the solitary sombre figure, at the great library, with all its
suggestive and exquisite detail: 'If Monday is fine, Squire, will you
walk?'
The squire made no reply except by another question.
'Do you still keep to your Swiss plans for next week?' he asked sharply.
'Certainly. The plan, as it happens, is a Godsend. But there,' said
Robert, with a sigh, 'let me explain the details of this dismal business
to you on Monday. I have hardly the courage for it now.'
The curtain dropped behind him. Mr. Wendover stood a minute looking
after him; then, with some vehement expletive or other, walked up to
his writing-table, drew some folios that were lying on it towards him,
with hasty maladroit movements which sent his papers flying over the
floor, and plunged doggedly into work.
* * * * *
He and Mrs. Darcy dined alone. After dinner the squire leant against the
mantelpiece sipping his coffee, more gloomily silent than even his
sister had seen him for weeks. And, as always happened when he became
more difficult and morose, she became more childish. She was now wholly
absorbed with a little electric toy she had just bought for Mary
Elsmere, a number of infinitesimal little figures dancing fantastically
under the stimulus of an electric current, generated by the simplest
means. She hung over it absorbed, calling to her brother every now and
then, as though by sheer perversity, to come and look whenever the pink
or the blue _danseuse_ executed a more surprising somersault than usual.
He took not the smallest spoken notice of her, though his eyes followed
her contemptuously as she moved from window to window with her toy in
pursuit of the fading light.
'Oh, Roger,' she called presently, still throwing herself to this side
and that, to catch new views of her pith puppets, 'I have got something
to show you. You must admire them--you shall! I have been drawing them
all day, and they are nearly done. You remember what I told you once
about my "imps"? I have seen them all my life, since I was a child in
France with papa, and I have never been able to draw them till the last
few weeks. They are such dears--such darlings; every one will know them
when he sees them! There is the Chinese imp, the low smirking creature,
you know, that sits on the edge of your cup of tea; there is the
flipperty-flopperty creature that flies out at you when you open a
drawer; there is the twisty-twirly person that sits jeering on the edge
of your hat when it blows away from you; and'--her voice dropped--'that
_ugly_, _ugly_ thing I always see waiting for me on the top of a gate.
They have teased me all my life, and now at _last_ I have drawn them. If
they were to take offence to-morrow I should have them--the
beauties--all safe.'
She came towards him, her _bizarre_ little figure swaying from side to
side, her eyes glittering, her restless hands pulling at the lace round
her blanched head and face. The squire, his hands behind him, looked at
her frowning, an involuntary horror dawning on his dark countenance,
turned abruptly, and left the room.
* * * * *
Mr. Wendover worked till midnight; then, tired out, he turned to the bit
of fire to which, in spite of the oppressiveness of the weather, the
chilliness of age and nervous strain had led him to set a light. He sat
there for long, sunk in the blackest reverie. He was the only living
creature in the great library wing which spread around and above
him--the only waking creature in the whole vast pile of Murewell. The
silver lamps shone with a steady melancholy light on the chequered walls
of books. The silence was a silence that could be felt; and the gleaming
Artemis, the tortured frowning Medusa, were hardly stiller in their
frozen calm than the crouching figure of the squire.
So Elsmere was going! In a few weeks the rectory would be once more
tenanted by one of those nonentities the squire had either patronised or
scorned all his life. The park, the lanes, the room in which he sits,
will know that spare young figure, that animated voice, no more. The
outlet which had brought so much relief and stimulus to his own mental
powers is closed; the friendship on which he had unconsciously come to
depend so much is broken before it had well begun.
All sorts of strange thwarted instincts make themselves felt in the
squire. The wife he had once thought to marry, the children he might
have had, come to sit like ghosts with him beside the fire. He had
never, like Augustine, 'loved to love'; he had only loved to know. But
none of us escapes to the last the yearnings which make us men. The
squire becomes conscious that certain fibres he had thought long since
dead in him had been all the while twining themselves silently round the
disciple who had shown him in many respects such a filial consideration
and confidence. That young man might have become to him the son of his
old age, the one human being from whom, as weakness of mind and body
break him down, even his indomitable spirit might have accepted the
sweetness of human pity, the comfort of human help.
And it is his own hand which has done most to break the nascent
slowly-forming tie. He has bereft himself.
With what incredible recklessness had he been acting all these months!
It was the _levity_ of his own proceeding which stared him in the face.
His rough hand had closed on the delicate wings of a soul as a boy
crushes the butterfly he pursues. As Elsmere had stood looking back at
him from the library door, the suffering which spoke in every line of
that changed face had stirred a sudden troubled remorse in Roger
Wendover. It was mere justice that one result of that suffering should
be to leave himself forlorn.
He had been thinking and writing of religion, of the history of ideas,
all his life. Had he ever yet grasped the meaning of religion _to the
religious man_? _God_ and _faith_--what have these venerable ideas ever
mattered to him personally, except as the subjects of the most ingenious
analysis, the most delicate historical inductions? Not only sceptical to
the core, but constitutionally indifferent, the squire had always found
enough to make life amply worth living in the mere dissection of other
men's beliefs.
But to-night! The unexpected shock of feeling, mingled with the terrible
sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems to have
stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental habit. He
sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father's death, his own
black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing horror of his
sister's increasing weakness of brain. Life has been on the whole a
burden, though there has been a certain joy no doubt in the fierce
intellectual struggle of it. And to-night it seems so nearly over! A
cold prescience of death creeps over the squire as he sits in the
lamplit silence. His eye seems to be actually penetrating the eternal
vastness which lies about our life. He feels himself old, feeble, alone.
The awe, the terror which are at the root of all religions have fallen
even upon him at last.
The fire burns lower, the night wears on; outside, an airless, misty
moonlight lies over park and field. Hark! was that a sound upstairs, in
one of those silent empty rooms?
The squire half rises, one hand on his chair, his blanched face
strained, listening. Again! Is it a footstep or simply a delusion of the
ear? He rises, pushes aside the curtains into the inner library, where
the lamps have almost burnt away, creeps up the wooden stair, and into
the deserted upper story.
Why was that door into the end room--his father's room--open? He had
seen it closed that afternoon. No one had been there since. He stepped
nearer. Was that simply a gleam of moonlight on the polished
floor--confused lines of shadow thrown by the vine outside? And was that
sound nothing but the stirring of the rising wind of dawn against the
open casement window? Or----
'_My God!_'
The squire fled downstairs. He gained his chair again. He sat upright an
instant, impressing on himself, with sardonic vindictive force, some of
those truisms as to the action of mind on body, of brain-process on
sensation, which it had been part of his life's work to illustrate. The
philosopher had time to realise a shuddering fellowship of weakness with
his kind, to see himself as a helpless instance of an inexorable law,
before he fell back in his chair; a swoon, born of pitiful human
terror--terror of things unseen--creeping over heart and brain.
BOOK V
ROSE
CHAPTER XXXI
It was a November afternoon. London lay wrapped in rainy fog. The
atmosphere was such as only a Londoner can breathe with equanimity, and
the gloom was indescribable.
Meanwhile, in defiance of the Inferno outside, festal preparations were
being made in a little house on Campden Hill. Lamps were lit; in the
drawing-room chairs were pushed back; the piano was open, and a violin